More rain today off and on. It feels as if I never fully woke up today. The grass needs cutting and the effects of the storm still linger the plastic lawn chairs are tumbled about and Dots toys are scattered like the leaves. My shoes are wet up to the ankles just walking to my office. Maybe it’s just projection on my part but the world seems tired today. I probably should get some exercise.
Yesterday I got caught up in the Jessica Baggen’s case and spent some time talking to lawyers and investigators running down information. I rewrote my blog entry from yesterday this morning with some more things from my information. I was peripherally involved with that case. I was taking care of young Finn Straley and writing my third book when she was murdered. But I consulted with Galen Paine and Susan Phillips on the case. Gaylen gave me a dollar as is the tradition in these circumstances to later be able to argue that I was officially working for her in case some one from the State of AK tried to subpoena me to testify about anything she or her staff may have told me. This is part of what makes Galen so good. She worries.
The porch of my office.
I had been working for the PDA when Richard walked himself in to the police station for questioning. I was standing with the lawyer who had done some word for Richard that weeks. Richard had even talked with the lawyer about how his friends had been teasing him about how he had might have killed Jessica when he was drunk. This is something that his friends did. Richard drank hard and when he woke up they would say that he had stolen money or fish from them or their boss, and they would get Richard to pay it back, because he was that kind of guy. He would pay them the money. They usually spent it on booze they all drank together so it wasn’t technically stealing from him. Anyway on the day he walked into the police station, the lawyer tried to yell at him to come back. He was yelling at him over the shoulders of the big cops walking him back, “Come talk with me Rich. You don’t have to talk with them. Let me talk with you first.” One of the cops came and threw us both out saying we didn’t represent him and he hadn’t asked for a lawyer. We had no bussiness there. Richard had told them, “I need your help, my friends say I might have hurt that girl and I’ve been having bad dreams.” And from then his life was irrevocably changed.
The whole thing is sad. Jessica was young and vivacious. I didn’t know her because she was a good girl from a good family. She had no need of my help. I knew her uncle. I had played in a band with him. He played lead guitar. Rocky Reifenstuhl played drums, I played rhythm guitar. Her uncle only played Rolling Stones Hits. Rocky and I thought he played them too slow, He said, “No man. If you play them any faster, they loose all their balls!” His name was Louie. He was a good guy. Rocky was a funny guy too, later he went on and became a super bicycle and endurance athlete. I just knew him as a fun guy to play with. Rocky died of heart disease from situations involving his training for athletic events. He was extreme. Louie had been married to a woman who later married the harmonica player that I play with on Sundays. The lawyer I was standing next to went on to represent Steven Branch for rape, who later turned out to be the rapest/murderer of Jessica Baggan, “that girl” who Richard Bingham was concerned he may have hurt when he was drunk, and was going into talk to the police about and the lawyer was trying to stop.
I only mention this because the connections between us all are all so dense and complex. We notice this in a small town. Sometimes the connections are marked by happy associations, like yesterday when bringing Dot out of the vet from getting this big growth taken off the side of her head, we ran into Finn’s first and second grade teacher. That association was happy, I was hauling Dot in my arms. She was bleeding from the drain that is still in the side of her face and she was pretty dopy. Jan was setting up a pad she could lay on, and we got her settled. Jan and Finns old teacher began talking about the news and how Finn was doing and when I got back with Dot’s special post op food and medication they were talking about their health: Parkinson’s and the teacher’s inoperable brain tumor. Jesus.
I stayed up most of the night with Dot. She kept bleeding and she was loopy from the drugs. It was a big mass on her face and they don’t know what it was yet. They sent it out to be tested. But she was wearing the cone of pride and she hated that. When I first put it on she sat down and wouldn’t move. I mean she wouldn’t move a micron. She wouldn’t come to me or run away from me. I was worried that if it started raining the damn cone would just fill up with rain and she would drown. Anyway she finally banged around and went inside. But I kept taking her out even if she didn’t have to pee because all night long she would get up and knock to cone into furniture. Jan was sound asleep upstairs and would call down to Dot in her sleep, and it was incomprehensible, but pretty comic, talking to Dot knocking into things and talking to Jan who was sound asleep. When I did get Dot out and then she would freeze up again. The cone statue. Weird.
This is why I am tired. But as I stood looking at our yard I think as I often do of all the intertwining roots in the garden. The trees to the grass and the berries to the rhododendron, the dandelions and the buttercups. Now of course I could go to the “All things are interconnected” favorite noble truth of the Buddah, but today I was wishing I could see some different color coding. Surely there is a connection of life flowing into each plant, lets color those green, but isn’t there somehow, life flowing out of them? Lets color those connections red.
I stood on my porch today imagining that: interconnections of red and green. Maybe that’s a more accurate understanding of universal interconnectedness? Love of our memories of Finn as a second grader, and our tumors and Parkinson’s. The vivacious girl, and her death, the death of her killer and the history of good memories that he must have left for his family before this news blotted those good memories out. Good Bad, Love and it’s opposite… surely more complicated than mere hate. As I said I’m tired. But today I want to understand something more than just the old battle of light and darkness. Why do the innocent suffer so needlessly and why do all the answers ring so hollow today?
Maybe it’s just rest I want. Maybe I just need to take Dot for a short walk and we will both drink some cold clear water. Not think too much.
Dog bowl filled with rain
there is just a simple love
surrounding us all.
jhs
Here is a recording of me reading from Let Dogs Be Dogs:
