When Steve Fromholz and his wife passed in a raft on the Rio Grande, he boasted about his success in marriage. "I married my best friend," he said.
I appreciate where he was coming from, for I lived with my best friend a half year or less and look back not with regret so much for the brevity but with awe at being served a full glass of wine.
I think Jenny (not her real name) brought pure fun in the door. That's why I welcomed her where no other had come.
I was forty-seven, she thirty-seven. Age never mattered. Oh, maybe she had an extra-playful touch with Chico, my proud Boston terrier, and maybe she had extra spunk as a mate, but she never indicated I was pulling her down.
It became a failing, but for once I didn't mention my mental health. I had changed doctors in order to receive lithium for what he was first to call my illness, manic depression. He said I would most likely not be hospitalized again. I looked to a future with Jenny without worry.
In our getting to know you dance, she sent a wave of chatty, sometimes witty, letters: "Carl, I can't get my mind off you today-you're turning into an addiction! But maybe if I write my feelings down, I won't call you so often.
"By the way are you planning to publish your journal this summer after you get in shape at the Y!! Oh, did I remind you never to let me tell you what to do???
"Hey, you're fun to be with, and to talk to. Thanks for being such a good friend-so soon."
After that I poured the coals on our favorite pursuit, adventure travel. The result was frenetic but not manic, not at the start anyway.
We went first to Kingston Hot Springs, the place upriver where Big Bend residents go to get away from it all. The ranch road out of Marfa was a spectacular drop through the towering white bloom of yuccas to the "hideaway," and for a few dollars we soaked in a hot spring in our room.
The next "event" was also my idea, a loop through the Old South with thirty-seven miles of backpacking from the trailhead of the Appalachian Trail in Georgia. It treated us to a first love, crimson sunsets silhouetting the ranks of small mountains, not at all like the behemoths out West. Water played a sonata-from the waterfall at the trailhead to the small trailside springs for drinking water. Orange and yellow wild azaleas flourished.
After that Jenny took off on her own for a long-planned adventure solo. She would camp for three months in the West as a single woman traveling alone. Bundles of letters arrived as she in free reign and wild abandon pitched her tent from Arkansas to Wyoming.
Her only gruff words had been over that tent. I had put a dirty boot inside, and she fussed about the housekeeping. On her own she didn't have that worry. And on her own she found a cowboy with a horse blanket. Like age, that didn't matter with us. We held tolerance in an open relation most holy.
She didn't mention the cowboy in her letters, nor for a while when she returned. But when he didn't write, she let me know her hurt.
Jenny came home to chaos. I had finished remodeling my condo, which she thought too crowded with furniture. But we took off for New England for the fall foliage with me manic. I shiver at my lunacy. On the north end of the Appalachian Trail, I tried to climb a rock face with a backpack in a blinding snowstorm. In the tavern that night, I joked that we had gone end to end on the trail in the same year.
The delusions were raking my mind. Jenny and I were no longer in unison. I wouldn't, for instance, give her the keys to the rental car in New England. Somehow, we made it back. The outdoors and a similar faith were no longer ties that bound. Sex flew my cage, contrary to a notion that in mania sex is manna.
I don't know if I asked her to leave or she left on her own. I hardly noticed her moving out. She did take me to Huntsville to see my new doctor, who at my insistence wrote a note to my employer saying I could work. I handed it to my supervisor who said he had done me a disservice.
Then I took off. The trigger was June's (not her real name) return of a bag of toys at the office that I had given her daughter. I thought someone was going to kill her and me, so I ran-all the way to California-in a watershed psychotic collapse.
The truckers on the long haul out Interstate 10 drove marvelous lighted rigs. Lights fueled my mania. I had seen Christmas lights dance in a starry night outside my Fort Worth hotel on a previous trip. This go-around Chico was in the car, and we made it almost nonstop to Los Angeles. When we entered downtown, the smog was terrible and I called a newsman friend. When he didn't answer, I left a message saying he was failing in his responsibility to clean the air. Then I bought Chico a hot dog at a mall and carried him through hordes of street people back to the car.
We headed toward home, until I decided to check into a tennis resort outside Santa Fe. The pro accepted my challenge, and the lodge a piece of roadside art. Yes, wacky. In town I paced in a park where I thought the new capitol of the nation would be. Then I continued onward to the shambles at home.
Jenny had, of course, moved out but she did not move on. She stayed my friend through two more psychotic episodes within the year, and for four wobbly years after that. In the course of that time she moved to Sacramento.
Chico was another matter.
The California bust was his last great adventure. In a later mania I parked in a dark driveway one night, exhausted. I rolled out on the ground clutching mine and Jenny's little friend and then let go. He headed, his dark coat blending in the night, for a drainage ditch. I lost sight and I lost him.
I don't remember my former housemate having much to say about the loss, probably out of kindness. However, later, when Chica Tres jumped out of a cardboard box full of pups and into my arms for keeps, she reprimanded me. "It's not fair to the animal," she said.
In case you've missed them, links to the introduction and Chapters 1 through 5
http://bigbendtimes.blogspot.com/2014/03/journey-to-edge-of-texas-editors-note.html
http://bigbendtimes.blogspot.com/2014/03/journey-to-edge-of-texas-chapter-1.html
http://bigbendtimes.blogspot.com/2014/03/journey-to-edge-of-texas-chapter-2.html
http://bigbendtimes.blogspot.com/2014/03/journey-to-edge-of-texas-memoir-of-love.html
http://bigbendtimes.blogspot.com/2014/03/journey-to-edge-of-texas-memoir-by.html
http://bigbendtimes.blogspot.com/2014/03/journey-to-edge-of-texas-chapter-5-girl.html
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