Summer 1976
Texas Prison Farm
As a newcomer you really stick out on the Hoe Squad with your gleaming white uniform and pale skin. The old hands have worn and red dirt stained uniforms that reflect the time and wear that mark their years in the field. Faces worn by the Texas sun and spirits broken by the relentless weight of “doing time”.
I am still a revolutionary in my spirit. Neither broken nor repentant, having fought the Law and lost, I resign myself to simply paying the price that the State says I owe. It is a foolish attitude that will not survive the cruelty of the coming years – but I do not know that yet.
It is water that occupies most of my thought process. In the morning we get a water break and after so long in the county jails my body is screaming for water. When the break finally comes, the old man who is too crippled to work in the fields anymore, goes to the wood wagon being pulled by the tractor and brings us the bucket. It is a single bucket with a dipper. The bucket is filled with ice cold water – the finest beverage your mind can imagine.
You drink by seniority – old hands down to the “new thangs” that have just been dropped into hell like aliens from another planet. It is an old metal dipper that stays cold itself even after your drink is finished; it tastes of decades of well water - the taste of the farm and of the closeness to the land that will soon mark your entire existence.
Summer 2012
Spent a wonderful evening on the porch with my lady sipping Courvoisier and smoking the old half of what was once a nice Rothschild Maduro before I left it outside for a few days A bit crumbly but nice.
Her husband died last year and there are a lot of things need to be serviced, repaired or replaced. It has been cathartic for me. We had been friends for a long time and there was always that spark between us, but now that a year has passed since she became a widow – we have moved to a far different relationship.
Some nights we spend at her beautiful home up on the hillside overlooking the city and sometimes we stay in town at my townhouse with the great view of the mountains at sunset. Not a bad life. We both feel a bit blessed right now, and just a little apprehensive about hoping it doesn’t end. You know the feeling – when things get just a little too perfect you begin to worry that it might go away.
Perhaps this time it may not.
We are both at an age where the wind is fairly consistent. She is retired except for the occasional gig as an expert witness in a civil suit – and I am at the end of a long and fairly successful career. A pretty good fit.
It improves your reputation, I am discovering, when you are accompanied by a beautiful and elegant woman. I have not always had the greatest taste in women so it is strange to be complimented so often when out on the town.
Elegant I suppose is the correct word for her countenance. For an old cowboy, I seem to have stepped a little out of my league.
I rather enjoy the elevated air.
But there is something odd happening to time. It continues to slow down. A recurrent phenomenon that allows me to make good decisions and be patient in all things – but it is worrisome. Scenes from my past keep slipping into the present. Why do scenes from my past slowly roll by in my mind like some old newsreel? Not vague thoughts but detailed and fully fleshed vignettes of both the important and the mundane.
I will grant you that I am the sum total of all the rather unbelievable events that bring me to this keyboard – however, I do not care to relive them.
Yet I do.