Mount Shasta: A couple of days ago, Adrienne (recovering from her deadly Komodo Kitty infection) and I were sitting at our dining room table. This table overlooks a shallow bay window above our front yard, which lies above the streetcorner.

The house diagonally across the corner — what my mother called “Catty-Corner” — has a couple with two children and a springy young black lab who was galloping wildly up the street, prancing like a playful pony. In their window, we could still just see their eight-foot Christmas tree, harvested up on the mountain, and still lit up.

“You know,” Adrienne said. “I’ve been wondering what it would be like to be their kid.”

She saw my surprised expression, and went on.

“I know that sounds wierd,” she said, “to be my age, and wonder what it would be like to be their kid, when they’re younger than us. But I do.” She had a faraway, wistful look on her face. “I think it would be nice. To have a house like that, and that dog, and those parents, and live in this place.”

I said nothing. Sure enough, she went on.

“I guess I’ve been feeling lonely,” she said, “and I’ve been missing our life back in Marin.”

“What?” I said, because this place is lots nicer than where we lived before. She nodded.

“Well, I don’t miss the life we had,” she said. “I miss the life we didn’t have. The life like my millionaire clients who lived in mansions in Ross, with pool men and gardeners, and vacations in Italy.”

I gazed at her in stupification.

“Yep,” she said. “I miss that life, there in Marin, that life which we never had.”

The odd thing was, I knew exactly what she meant.

Mount Shasta Milestone: Today, her majesty my darling and I ran around a bit, just for fun.

In the later afternoon, we drove through a snowstorm to McCloud (scenic mill town around the side of the mountain) to visit her mailbox there. We returned to Mando’s for spicy enchiladas de camarones (shrimp). We browsed the great cowboy art at Mount Shasta Gallery. But earlier, at lunchtime, something happened.

At the new Stage Door Cabaret and Cafe, we tried the chili and soup and cornbread. (Absolutely great!) And while Adrienne sat and I waited by the ordering counter, I struck up a conversation with Doug York, a local promoter who’s producing and acting in a Murder Mystery called “Murder on the Rails” tonight, up the road in Montague at the Corner Cafe.

And then, as we were souping and cornbreading, our neighbors Roy and Ashley came in, finding seats across the room, and they waved.

We waved back.

That was the magic moment.

For this was the first time we’ve been out, and we came across someone we knew. Oh, of course we know tradespeople. And Roy and Ashley we see in the driveway all the time.

But this was the first time we’ve seen people that we know, at the same place as us.

This may seem like a little thing. And it is.

But there it is.

Maybe we’re part of this place. We know people.

From The Onion: “If someone you know is too drunk to drive, demand that he let you have his car keys. If he refuses, pull out a gun and demand the car keys again. This also works with people who are not drunk, and whom you do not know.”

Want more handy tips? Visit The Onion’s Tips Section.

Japan, Long Ago: One of the younger monks climbed up the mountain for two days, and when he was admitted to the presence of the master, he asked, “O Master, please tell me, what is Fate?”

The master contemplated for a time, and then said, “It is that which gives meaning to the Beasts of Burden. It is that which Man must bear upon his back. It is that which drives the urgency of the cities and causes men to build roads and highways, and upon them inns and roadhouses.”

The young monk thought a minute and said, “Oh. So that is Fate.” The master looked up, startled.

“Fate? Fate did you say?” said the master. “I’m sorry. I thought you said Freight.”

“Oh?” said the young monk. “Well, I wanted to know what Freight was, too.”

Dallas, 1965: First it was in Denton. The girls, Paula and Pretty Patty, had a house near Paul Miner’s second house. I used to visit, and smoke, and draw pictures, and spent the night with Pretty Patty. One night I became convinced that a small sculpture might take wing, and fly around her apartment.

I don’t remember those days with perfect clarity.

But Stephanie showed up. Actually her name was Patricia W., but she called herself Stephanie Barbacaine, and perhaps it fit better. Billy Bucher warned me. Some friend of his had got messed up, he said, by this Stephanie.

She had this peculiar, repeating behavior.

If she had trouble with a guy, she’d go find his best friend, and she’d sleep with the friend. I have no clue why. But if I recall aright from those dim days, Billy’s best friend had trouble with Stephanie Barbacaine, and she was making a play for Billy.

As I recall, it didn’t work. Billy wasn’t interested, or shook free somehow. And somehow, I got selected as Billy’s friend. This entanglement with Stephanie Barbacaine caused some major upsets with Pretty Patty, my girlfriend.

Those were confusing days. I was working nights, schooling days, smoking a lot, carousing way too much, and things were breaking down for me.

I do not recall exactly how it happened, but after explosions and conflagrations, Pretty Patty had a new apartment in Dallas, set back on a deep lawn beneath huge trees on the boulevard across from Southern Methodist University. I was working night shift at the armored car company in Dallas, counting hundreds of thousands of dollars through the night. And somehow it became too much trouble to drive the Morgan back to my cool apartment in Denton, so I gave it up, moving in with Patty Cake.

For a few days it went well.

We smoked a bit, and went on a decopage kick, decorating coffee cans, making wacko greeting cards, and such. Then one afternoon, Stephanie Barbacaine showed up at the door, with my friend Lefevre in tow.

I cannot imagine what the woman said, to explain their presence, but she said something, and was invited in. Soon Lefevre drew me aside. “Who the hell is this woman?” he asked.

I answered, but in fact, I’m not sure I knew then or know now. She was merry enough, attractive, thin, stylish, with frizzy hair, round eyes and a mocking, urbane manner. She’d been raised in an orphanage to the north of Dallas. She’d told me of her first trip to downtown Dallas, with the other children, on a bus trip to see a movie.

“I’d got all dressed up,” she said, “and as I stepped down from that school bus onto the sidewalk outside the movie theatre, I thought everyone would be watching me, and thinking how nice she looks! I thought the sidewalks were filled with people who’d come downtown to see me. And I was so proud, because I was all dressed up. So I just held my head up, and stepped down from that bus, and marched very prettily into the theatre.”

She’d once had a job modelling shoes, and I’d heard her describe herself as “a model.” She was pretty enough to be a model, I suppose, and she had a lot of shoes. She dressed more “grown-up” than most women, and she knew how to captivate a man, that’s for sure. She was a woman careening through life, inventing herself from whole cloth daily.

She and Lefevre spent the night, sleeping upon a pallet on the floor, which was kind of awkward, especially in the middle of the night, due to various noises. So, after Lefevre departed back to Wichita Falls, it’s not too surprising that Pretty Patty blew up one last time, saying she just couldn’t put up with it. And somehow I found myself living with Stephanie Barbacaine, in a white apartment on the fourth floor of an Art Deco building in the north of town.

It was at this time that I began to go nutty, spending countless hours trying to work out a budget. Now, budgeting is certainly a wise thing to do, but not the way I did it.

I was trying to calculate exactly how much I’d need, and so was dividing the cost of a movie over thirty days in the month, and creating elaborate calculations that had to be revised almost moment to moment. I wasn’t sleeping much at all. We went to a movie — Karen Black in “Lord Love a Duck” — and, walking out, I couldn’t remember much of anything about the movie we’d just seen.

Stephanie Barbacaine had a funny way about her, too. We were getting ready to go somewhere. A movie, the grocery store, dinner, I don’t recall, but I remember her sitting at her dressing table, with the lights all around the mirror, and doing her makeup. I was antsy to go, and kept nudging her.

Finally she said, “I’m a girl. I have makeup. I’m not a boy.” Which shut me up suddenly. After a while of silence, she said, “You’re worried that maybe you’re gay, right?”

Well, that hadn’t been in my mind, but it sure gave me something to think about. And life around her was like that. My mind was everywhere, and generally going to hell with the speed of an arrow. Somewhere along the line I moved out. I got a room in a boarding house, but stayed there only one night because it was too wierd.

I found a tiny apartment on my own but flipped out trying to cook spaghetti. The directions just seemed too complicated. The tiniest things in life were speeding up. So fast, so fast.

I made a blunder. There was an accident. I found myself in a hospital. That night, on the phone with Stephanie Barbacaine, she told me what she was wearing, and what was underneath all that; it was one of those calls. One thing led to another, and further adventures ensued, up and down, but somehow, somewhere in this smoke and confusion, with a sound like clanging bells I lost track of Stephanie Barbacaine.

Gone.

Mercy Medical Center, Mount Shasta: I mean, bad kitty! Bad cat! It happened like this …

Adrienne was taking care of a kitty for some friends. The kitty’s name is Kitty, which is odd because when my brother David was a child, he also had a kitty named Kitty. That’s some kind of coincidence!

So as to prevent cat conflagration, we kept Kitty out of the house, which means he’s been batching it with me in my office, and hanging out in the garage.

The trouble started when he escaped a few nights ago.

He scooted under the deck. I failed to check immediately, and apparently he ran out into the driveway. He comes when Adrienne calls him, so I asked her to. She failed to find him beneath the deck, but found him in the street and picked him up.

She was about to place him back into my office, but she didn’t see our own cat Percy sitting there. When she began to put Kitty down, he figured that she was feeding him to Percy, and he freaked out and bit her very badly.

She came with tears from the pain. We tried to make it bleed more to get any germs out, and put band-aids on it. The next morning, however, it was badly swollen, so we resolved to visit the 5pm drop-in clinic, because it was getting worse instead of better.

They sent her to the emergency room, where she got an intraveinous drip with antibiotics, and some more to take, and we went home.

And it got far worse.

On her follow-up the next afternoon, they admitted her to the hospital, and an orthopedic surgeon inserted some thin tubes to get bacteria-killers down into her fingers, so she was very uncomfortable with a lot of tubes in and out.

Other than childbirth, she’s never been in a hospital, but she got to spend Christmas Eve there for her first visit. Running a high fever and dopey from morphine, she dozed fitfully through the night.

I told her that it wasn’t so much a family Christmas that had turned surreal, but rather that she was having an adventure, and that for her first visit to the hospital, she’d already made arrangements for her daughters to come and visit.

She was starting to feel better, and had finally dropped the fever this morning, but this afternoon when her daughter Layla arrived and we went to see her, she’d had a bad relapse, with raging fever, lots of pain and nausea.

I feel so sorry for her, though I’m grateful that our town has such a nice hospital with skill folk working there. Everyone has been very nice to her.

In the meantime, our traditional Family Christmas Dinner of Chinese Food will be held without her.

Bummer.

A poor man visited the well-to-do Judge and Mayor of their village, and asked to borrow the Mayor’s donkey. The Mayor frowned.

“I’m so sorry,” said the Mayor. “I’ve loaned my donkey to my nephew Thomas.”

Just then the donkey, out behind the house, brayed loudly, and the poor man looked up.

“But I hear the donkey outside!” he said.

“Who are you going to believe?” asked the Mayor. “Me, or my donkey?”