Bear Trap

I wasn't feeling to bright one August 2007 morning. Like a character in a long-ago childrens story half remembered, I was leaving the hospital an older but not a particularly wiser bear. The smart thing to do, I thought, would be to hibernate until spring. Bears slept for months at a time in their caves, why couldn't I? Of course bears didn't have to get up to urinate, and they probably didn't have nightmares unless they were scared of mice. No, that was elephants. Bears probably had nightmares about men. Between mice and men, we could no doubt scare the crap out of anybody. I didn't plan to have any nightmares, however. As Warren Zevon once recommended: "I'll sleep when I'm dead." If I wasn't careful explained my doctor' that could be sooner than later.

The cab driver smiled and shut the door, reassuringly. It was a bit like driving off with the extraterrestrial crew of a UFO, and it wasn't courage that enabled me to go home that day. It was rather a rather heady mix of stubborness and maybe something else, I thought: a little thing called emptiness. The plexiglass partition was not only up between me and the driver, it was up between myself and the rest of the world

From the direction of the sun we were headed East toward my house that was located not far off Old Route 66. Amarillo has many old great neighborhoods and they were passing by through the windows of the taxi like so many stops along the railroad tracks of my life.