My road trip will take me to Las Vegas, where my best friend and I often had nothing but dumb and delirious fun.  It will be the first time I am in Las Vegas and will not gamble.  Every time I think about that, I want to curl up in a miserable self-pitying little ball.  I'm giving a reading, signing and teaching for a friend of mine.  He'll watch my back.  There are plenty of GA meetings in Las Vegas.  And still, every time I think about settling in for sleep at my friend's house, a short drive from glittering old downtown Las Vegas, I want to curl up in a.......

I'll leave Vegas intact - I know that.  I'll write about that cellular knowledge in a later Basement Medicine post.  I'll head south and east to Flagstaff, Arizona, the mountain town that was once beloved to me for seventeen of the twenty-two years I lived there.  In the last five years I was there, I lost my three best friends; my beyond beloved scrap and wallboard cabin on the edge of a Ponderosa forest; my teaching career to attrition in writing conferences and book festivals; the man I had believed to be the love of my life; the ability to move without pain; and the town to a metastatic influx of people who owned second and third homes and seemed to want to turn Flagstaff into the city from which they were so eagerly escaping.  My gambling was part of some of the losses.  Immutable changes in America and the Southwest were an even greater part.

I visited Flagstaff a year ago.  It was like romancing a corpse.  I did my best, but everywhere I walked and looked (except toward the Sacred Mountains north of town), I came back again and again to being a "stranger in a stranger land."*  The new landlord had let my cabin fall into ruin. One of my best friends and I had come through a hard separation to a new and deeper friendship, but my other two dearest friends were gone from our connection. I found myself taking solace only in a cluster of seven pines which had been my emotional shelter for years - and in the sight of the mountains.

I woke this morning about 5:30 convinced the stroke I've been expecting for fifty years had finally come - yet again.  I made myself lie quiet, slowed my breathing, did all the good stuff I learned in Basement Medical school (as in Bob Dylan, "Johnny's in the basement mixing up the medicine..."); talked to myself with soothing affirmations and finally turned it all over - hey, if I was dying, I was dying, might as well get in the good graces of the Big Whatever.

Two hours later, I got up.  I had to go to the part-time day job and  needed to write a column for the local weekly.   I let the cats out, made de-caf and said the mantra:  for the furthering of all sentient beings and the protection of earth, air and water.  The words were interwoven with a far less enlightened series of ruminations.  They all began with What if?  Feel free to fill in your own What If?s.  I finished the meditation, drank the de-caf and sat down at the computer.  My grand-son and I are writing a serial story.  He'd sent a chunk.  I picked up where he had left off and sent it back to him.  The What if?s began to fade.  I packed my lunch and left for work.

It's 8:17 as I finish this post.  I didn't die today.  I didn't suffer a stroke that left me wordless- clearly!  At around 7:15, I stood on a bridge over the Deschutes River.  I felt peaceful and more than a little joyous.  I'd found a walking route that took me over two bridges.  Maybe you understand the pleasure of standing on a bridge watching twilight water flow beneath you.  Four geese ate young grass on the river bank.  I watched.  The first two began to talk.  They stretched out their dark necks and cried out.  The lead goose walked to the riverbank.  A second followed.  Their movements were identical.  With one last cry, the lead goose took off under the bridge, the second following.  They came up from under the bridge, rose a few feet in the air and arrowed upriver.  The third and fourth geese discussed something for a few minutes. Then they waddled to the riverbank and took off - not under the bridge, but directly overhead, so close I could see the fine shadings of their belly feathers in the fading light.

The geese were kin to the muddy cows.  But, that is for a later story and they were my Basement Medicine for today.  Taken as needed.  No side effects.  And I learned, as I seem to have to learn again and again, that when I am facing separation, I am always afraid - never on the surface, but deep down where a terrified child longs for someone to bring her home.

*Note:  Stranger in a stranger land is from Radio V-I-E-T-N-A-M by musician, Nathan Bell.