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Show ^ RFVER wrote, "I had just turned nineteen and when a man becomes nineteen he needs something more than slow California beach town days to keep him going, he needs something he can sink his soul into, and the Mississippi looked to be pretty soul-trying.. .1 had a vague but intense desire to escape from the California scene with its crazy lack of a past and its mad mixing of present and future.. .1 thought that if I went back into the heartlands, back to the places that time and progress and money had passed over in the great stampede west, perhaps there I might find a place of the past, and I figured I'd be more comfortable in such a place than in the smog-strangled paved-over anthill California future/present." The idea inspired me and through the spring and summer I worked to make the fantasy a reality. I was nineteen years old and I was seeing visions. I was hot. In May I managed to win the heart of my childhood sweetheart, Rosie, at long last. It had taken years and years of trying and that glorious spring I won through. I had known Rosie for more than half my life and still have vivid memories of her as a child. We met in the third grade. After school we'd walk the empty yellow California hills (now trailer parks and subdivisions), finding a vast variety of natural and man-made wonders; bugs, birds, caves, cacti, flowers, prickly pears, old wagons and abandoned farm machinery, articles and wonders that lay on the forsaken black earth liftce remnants of another age. She had bright blue eyes, sun-browned skin, a wide, infectious smile, a glory of golden hair that I remember best done up in braids-a vision of beauty and innocence. I fell very much in love with her at the time (eight years old and in love: I wish I could remember the feeling) and stayed that way for fourteen years. -44- |