They would fly away,

Like a bird through an open door

Would ride on the wind,

All the way home,

To a sunlit, peaceful shore.

If hearts had wings,

They would fill the night

Like the stars fill a city sky.

To remind us all

Of the loved ones gone.

And the souls that never can die.

If hearts had wings,

They would rise straight up,

Past the buildings, past the sky.

All the way home

To the arms of God.

If hearts had wings to fly.

They would fly all the way home

To the arms of God.

If hearts had wings to fly.

Right, professor?

Math facts aside – hopefully so far aside they will slide off the edge of the Earth to be eaten by sea monsters – here’s the thing: I don’t remember 59 Christmases.

My yule memories are scattered across Pennsylvania, New York State, Washington DC, Virginia, Missouri and Kansas. They are spotty, and I no longer trust them to be real. For the most part, I can’t match my memories to any particular year.

But I have this theory. Yes. It’s another theory. Shut up.

I figure I remember the seemingly unimportant for a reason. I just don’t know what the reason is. There is some unseen and unknown value in my memories of the Lionel trail set that lurched haltingly around a little circle of track, and some reason I don’t remember anything else I got that year, or what year it was.

So, a few fluttering snowflakes of memory which must be important for some reason:

I remember my father’s olive green work pants sticking from under a tree. He was lying on his side in the snow, his upper third under the needles of an evergreen as he sawed his way though the trunk with a hacksaw, because one of his boys didn’t put his wood saw back where it belonged.

My mom was a single stand tinsel hanger. She endlessly told us that it would make the tree look more even. She told us this as we pitched tinsel on in clumps. We felt we were going the extra mile by taking the tinsel out of the box first.

My mom cared about how the tree looked, unlike her children, who were more concerned with what was under it.

My dad may have been the one who felled the tree and dragged it home, but it was Mom who decided which was the good side and would face the living room proper, and which was the bad side, and would shameface the wall.

Years later I remembered that while trying to come up with just one more joke for the greeting cards I write for a living.

“It’s Christmas,” the cover of the card reads, “so remember: Bad side to the wall.”

Inside the card says, “That would be your butt.”

Thanks, Mom.

Christmas morning we woke our parents at 4 a.m., because that was as long as we could stand lying awake waiting. The house would be igloo cold, since my dad wouldn’t have had time to get up an hour before the rest of us to start the wood stove.

The seven of us – Mom, Dad, my two older sisters, my two younger brothers, and me – would shiver around our tree, ripping paper off packages like lions tearing into a brightly colored gazelle.

Toys were from “Mom and Dad.” The boxes marked “From Santa” usually contained new double-knee jeans, or socks or underwear. Santa got us the things we needed, but our parents got us what we wanted.

It was all over by about 4:20. Dad would start preparing the turkey for its six-hour bake-a-thon, my sisters would go try on new clothes and the boys would play with toys. After about half an hour, we’d wrap in blankets on the couch, trying to stay awake long enough for TV programming to sign on for the day.

Eventually, my teen-age years came along and mugged our family holidays.

The Christmas I was 16, I was the lead singer in a rock and roll band based in another town. Christmas Eve there was a band party at somebody’s house and, since those of us who didn’t live there had to serve our time with our families for Christmas, it was decided we would all re-group and continue the party the following evening.

I had recently taken out a judge’s mailbox with my father’s 1965 Plymouth Belvedere, and lost my license as a result. So it was that I called my parents from the party, and they drove 45 minutes on a bitter cold Christmas Eve to pick me up. One of my friends – let’s call him Jackson, shall we? – was going to catch a ride home with us. A girl at the party looked at him twice, and he changed his mind. Instead he gave me a guitar he’d purchased as a last-minute gift for one of his brothers, and instructed me to tell his parents he was sick and wouldn’t be home for Christmas, except maybe in his dreams.

I slipped to their front door, and when his mom answered, I said the first thing that came to my mind.

“Jackson won’t be home. He’s sick. He has cancer.”

An enormous snowstorm whistled in that Christmas Eve, and we woke to a blizzard screaming through the countryside like Jimi Hendrix off “Electric Ladyland.” After opening gifts and demolishing a turkey, I informed my dad that I would need a ride back to the town where he’d picked me up the evening before.

It was always nice to make my dad laugh out loud.

“The snow is drifting, it’s close to zero and there’s a football game on TV.”

My father apparently didn’t grasp that I was 16, and spending Christmas at home with my family would kill me.

One of my Christmas gifts that year was a cool pair of suede cowboy boots, and I slipped them on over straight-leg jeans. I put on my green corduroy, fleece-lined jacket, pulled a stocking cap over my Beatle hair, and headed out the door. If I couldn’t get a ride, I’d hitchhike. Done it dozens of times.

My parents let me go, since they assumed I’d feel the wind slice through to my marrow, realize I wasn’t Perry at the North Pole, and return to the bosom of my family.

What they didn’t count on was that my new girlfriend was going to be at the party with the guys from the band. It was her bosom that was on my mind. Not that I would have done anything about it. Still, one never knew. Holiday miracles happened.

So I bent my head into the evil wind and started up the blacktop road. It was about two miles to the main road, and I usually just walked that part. By the time I reached the top of the hill I was the temperature of an uncooked TV dinner, and the wind was trying to peel back the protective covering on my cherry crisp face. My eyes were watering, and the water was forming little icicles down my cheeks. As I walked through drifts in the road, I made an unpleasant discovery. In wet snow, suede cowboy boots turn into socks.

After 10 minutes, I could no longer feel my toes. It’s not something I usually do. Still, it’s nice to be able to.

A car came towards me, stopped next to me, and the window came down.

“Billy, you’ll freeze out here. What are you doing?”

It was my sister, on her way to my parents’ house.

“Gotta get to Wellsboro today,” I stammered through lips that no longer moved.

Even though she was married and moved away, my sister was still a teenager herself. She understood.

“Well, come on back to the house and warm up. I’ll take you later.”

My boots were packed full of snow, and it took both of my brothers to pull them off my wet, pink feet.

There was another bitter cold, Pennsylvania winter. It was Christmas Eve, several years prior to the suede boot incident. The wind was sneaking in through cracks around windows and doors, and the huge old coal furnace in the living room seemed to be fighting a losing battle. We all huddled as close to it as we could through the evening.

We didn’t heat the upstairs of our old house, and even though we knew we had to go to bed in order to get Christmas gifts the next morning, we were finding it tough to steel ourselves for the cold run up the cold stairs to cold rooms and colder beds.

Somebody got an idea. How about if the kids brought their mattresses down to the living room and we all slept around the fire?

And my parents said OK.

We stood wobbly mattresses on their sides and pushed them down the steep wooden staircase. They were arranged like life rafts around the coal furnace. My mom said that in order to keep any of us from getting up in the night and bumping into the furnace door, she would sleep out there too. Where my dad’s mattress went, my dad went also. The whole family wound up on the floor on Christmas Eve.

I had my usual November-to-March bad cold, so I was experimenting with closing one nostril at a time to see if I could breath through the other. Rustling on mattresses died down. Giggling and talking stopped. The coal stove rumbled and popped.

My family fell asleep together.

That’s tied with another memory of mine for the title of Favorite Holiday Memory.

It was the first Christmas my son Aaron was with us. He was only about two weeks old, so we bundled him carefully and drove to my wife’s parents’ home, where we always spent the holidays.

My wife’s family open their gifts on Christmas Eve, and most of the gifts were for Baby Aaron, who slept through the festivities. I have it on film if you’d like to see it, along with pretty much everything else Aaron did his first year.

Afterwards we put Aaron down in his portable crib, and I volunteered to sleep on the couch so his mom could get a very rare good night’s sleep.

The boy stirred about 3 a.m., ready for a Christmas meal, so I prepared a bottle as quietly as I could, and sat in the glider with him in my arms.

Mama’s milk made him happy, and the rocking made me sleepy. The living room was strange in shadows, with Christmas tree lights flickering in the corner. I hummed “Yellow Submarine.”

There was nobody in the whole world except me and my son.

Heavenly peace.

My uncle’s little brother had about 50 head of milk cows. He owned the rest of the cows, too, but cow counters seem mostly interested in the heads. Those 50 sad-eyed cows were pretty lackadaisical, except in two areas. They wanted to be fed, and they wanted to be relieved of their milk twice a day.

Farmers can’t take time off, then, unless they find pinch-milkers. Otherwise the cows would explode all over the inside of the barn, making a big mess, and farmers’ wives hate messes.

My dad, a telephone repairman fighting the good fight to keep five kids in Oreos and milk, was always looking for a few extra bucks. So he milked my Uncle Duke’s herd when my uncle was unavailable. By osmosis, then, he found himself doing the same for my uncle’s little brother a couple of times a year.

I generally rode along for the evening’s work. It was a treat to have my dad to myself for awhile, and to feel like we were equals there in front of the big yellow telephone repairman’s truck. And the farm was a fun place, full of beams and fields and climbing trees. A slight added incentive was Dawn, the farmer’s daughter. She was my age, and we played kid games while my dad worked very hard.

On this trip, late in the hot July right after I turned 12, I stepped a P.F. Flyer off the truck’s running board and into the dust, and there was Dawn to greet me.

I noticed two things different about her right away, and they were both under her shirt.

“Hi, Benny,” she said.

“Um, hi,” I said to the shirt.

My dad noticed me noticing and half-grinned.

“Milk, Ben?”

“Huh?” I answered, startled.

“You gonna help me milk?”

When I didn’t answer, he headed towards the barn.

“You kids behave.”

I took that to mean he didn’t want us to set any fields on fire or throw rocks at the mailbox.

Dawn and I walked to the hayloft area of the barn, while my dad headed towards the bottom floor where the milking stalls were. She was walking in front, and I sort of noticed that she had hips now, and they moved in her blue jean cut-offs rolled just above the knees with a jerky, bumping motion as she heel-steeped in bare feet.

Like always before, we pretended to be circus high wire performers on the barn beams. I decided I’d be a pirate after that, and used a fake sword to make her walk the barn-beam plank, then jumped laughing alongside her into the haypile ocean below.

We fell side-by-side and she rolled towards me, landing with her side pressed to my side. I smelled hairspray, and through the open armhole of her sleeveless, plaid shirt I could see the white cotton of a training bra.

I looked away lest my eyes spontaneously combust, and saw her watching me look.

Maybe she stayed pressed to my side a few seconds longer than she needed to. Maybe I just wished it and made it so.

Later we went into the farm kitchen to drink red Kool-Aid.

“Hey,” she said. “Have you heard that song, “Beans in Your Ears?”

“Sure.” I started to sing it.

“That’s a neat song.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, although I didn’t agree.

“I got that record.”

Pause. Sip.

“Wanna hear it?”

“OK,” I lied.

“OK, but the record player’s in my bedroom. So you can’t tell my folks you were in my bedroom, OK?”

“’K.”

I figured they didn’t want her to have friends in her room because they’d get it messy or break something valuable. Fine with me if we didn’t tell. I didn’t tell my folks half what I did.

I sat on the floor next to her twin bed with pink blankets, and looked through her 45s. It was mostly girl music. Leslie Gore. The Supremes. No Beatles. Dumb girl.

We were facing each other cross-legged on her floor, listening to how grown-ups have beans in their ears, when a car door slammed outside the open window.

“Oh no! That’s my mom!”

We hurried from the room and she quickly shut the door. We were walking out the screen door when we ran into her mother.

What were you kids doing?” her mom asked, and her tone seemed, I don’t know, different.

“Nothing,” Dawn answered. She was telling the truth, but it sounded like a lie.

About then my dad walked up.

“Everything OK here, Benny?”

Darned if he didn’t have the same weird edge in his voice.

And I thought, is everybody going nuts around here, or what?

When we started this book together, I mentioned that I didn’t know what it would be about. You probably thought I was kidding.

Jokes on you, huh?

To review: As I wrote for the sheer joy of seeing my thoughts become words, cackling like Gene Wilder bringing Peter Boyle to life, I found myself writing about a variety of disconnected things.

Let’s see, there was camping, and bison, and Las Vegas, and pancakes and Katherine the guitar.

Stone soup. The nothing isn’t connected to the anything. Totally random.

Maybe.

Or maybe all of the memories of a long-gone youth and all of the adventures in a muddled present were really stories about the same thing.

Maybe they were all about the struggle.

I used to sing “Darlin’ Be Home Soon” by John Sebastian when I performed at colleges and bars. For quite awhile I sang the line “…and now, a quarter of my life is nearly past…” just the way John wrote it. Then I changed it to “…a quarter of my life has surely passed…” then to “…long-since passed…”

Now I have arrived at “…now that half my life is surely passed…” and am heading for “…three-quarters of my life…”

That, I think, is what this book is about.

People of my generation are notorious over-thinkers, and I over-think that we’re taking a long, nervous time trying to figure out how to get older without getting old. I know that I struggle with the idea that I am no longer the carefree pseudo-hippie I once was. I’m past being a grown-up now, and I don’t know what to do about it.

So I write about it. I search for meaning in the mundane, to make some sense out of life before the basketball rolls under the oncoming truck.

I look for life lessons, and here’s one I got from this book: I like being this age. It’s nice to step out of the spotlight that is youth, to wear what’s comfortable instead of what’s fashionable, to not be embarrassed about an iPod full of British Invasion pop songs. I hope some of that joy is in these pages.

I always like meeting the new hires at my workplace. They are young, and talented and enthusiastic, and they fill the joint with the energy and possibilities of their youth.

And I wouldn’t be that age again for all the peach pies in Georgia.

I loved youth when I was young, but I can’t tell you how relieved I am to be rid of it. I don’t have a choice, I know, but if I did I would choose to get older rather than younger.

A quarter century ago I wouldn’t have believed I would ever say that, let alone mean it.

Something else I learned: I love writing about this stuff.

The final theory I will share in this book is my belief that every life is darned interesting, including mine. And I am just conceited enough to think that my generation – the ones who came of age in the nutsy 1960s and are trying to figure out how to live in the goofy 21^st century – have some of the most interesting life stories around. We are partying like it’s 1969, and that sort of celebration deserves to be documented. Somebody ought to make some notes about what it’s like to be one of us, sailing towards the purple haze at the edge of the world.

I’ll take that job.

If I were 13, I would write it in a blog. Alas, I am 54, and not a blogger. I fear loss of eyesight and hairy palms, and I love the thought of ink on paper. So I’ll keep writing these books, and if nobody ever reads them they’ll hopefully be fun for my family to find after I’m gone.

I leave you, then, with one of my favorite bits of wisdom: In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, John Denver and Linda Ellerbee, “So it goes.”

Unless you prefer the Jethro Bodine version: “So it gozinta.”

See you next book.

One way I do this is by using my lunch hour at work to visit the company fitness center. I try to do this five days a week. Occasionally I succeed.

Today, though, my wife and I spent the lunch hour at my son’s school. It was their annual week-before-Thanksgiving-Thanksgiving lunch. I ate turkey, mashed potatoes and ice cream, all washed down with the traditional Thanksgiving strawberry milk. All of this is food I never eat, unless it’s a special occasion or I feel like it.

So I didn’t get to work out today. To make up for that and all the forbidden food, I spent half an hour on the treadmill we keep at home down in the Beatle Room for just such occasions.

As I trod the mill, I remoted my way through the 60-odd channels we pull in on the little TV we keep down there.

In the previous sentence, you should emphasize the word “odd.”

On one, a man and a woman from some alien species were selling a machine that they guaranteed would make you just as thin and hard as they were.

A sincere young man was saying something important to a lovely young woman in a room furnished only with a sofa. I don’t know what he was saying, since it was in Spanish, which I no hablo.

Bill Clinton was on the all-news channel, opening his new library in the rain. Hillary was there, too, not running for president.

I watched a few minutes of “Joey” who is no “Friends” of mine.

The Classic Movie Channel was living up to its name with the scene where Claudette Colbert wears Clark Gable’s bathrobe as she waits in line for a shower.

Eventually I flipped all the way to Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The skit featured an interview with a character named Harry “Snapper” Organ.

And so, class, we see that Monty Python were famous not only for their wit and inventiveness, but for their complete lack of shame. A valuable lesson for us all.

As I write this, my wife and son are upstairs watching the big TV, which gets even more channels. The one they’re watching right now is showing a man who is undergoing multiple tattoos and surgeries to make himself look like a tiger.

My son takes all of these channels for granted, as a natural part of life. I know better.

When I was his age, we got three channels on the big, brown box in the corner of our big, beige living room. Sort of.

One channel came in pretty well, unless the wind blew, which caused the channel to deconstruct into a grainy snowscene in which you could barely make out moving forms.

The second channel was pretty much always a grainy snowscene in which you could barely make out moving forms, unless the wind blew, when the picture vanished completely into a blizzard.

The third channel was always a blizzard.

Most of the time we watched the channel that came in clearly. The second channel we watched only if there was a show we really needed to see. I didn’t worry much about the mysterious third channel, until the mid-1960s.

The kids I went to junior high with were always talking about the latest thing we had seen on TV, or the next thing we were going to see. I was by that time hopelessly lost to rock and roll, which I could watch on Sunday evenings on the Ed Sullivan Show. Then Hullabaloo came along, on the channel we could sort of watch. Sonny and Cher singing, “I Got You, Babe”; the Luvin’ Spoonful believing in magic; Gary Lewis singing “This Diamond Ring,” then pretending not to be mortified when his dad Jerry sang his latest pop record; the Detergents doing “Leader of the Laundromat.” I got to see all of those.

What I didn’t get to see was “Shindig,” in which the Shindogs weekly disappeared into the snow of our third channel.

I lived with that, until the week the Stones were to roll on as guests.

Drastic action was called for.

The antenna which pulled the pictures out of the air and into our TV was on the peak of the roof of our big, old, pink house. On fortunate nights, it was possible to clear the picture to a watchable state by adjusting that antenna until it pointed in exactly the right direction. There was no way to know on any given night which direction that would be, other than trial and error.

I was the oldest boy, so it was my job to climb to the top of the house. It was a job I truly loved. I always stood straight up on the sharply tilted roof, walking like Sky King on the wings of his plane. At the peak, I took just a second in the biting wind to admire the little green valley where we lived. Then I rested one hand on the chimney, carefully, so as not to dislodge any loose bricks, and reached up to grab the rusty center pipe of the antenna that has half-again as tall as I was.

“Ready!”

From the lawn below, my sister hollered, “OK! Turn it!”

“Are you turning it yet?” shouted my little brother through the open window. His job was to watch the TV screen for changes and relay the information to my older sister on the lawn.

“Are you turning it yet?” My sister relayed.

“Keep your pants on!”

I turned the antenna, the cold metal rough against my puny hands.

“How’s that?”

“How’s that?” my sister yelled into the house.

“Are you turning it yet?” shouted my little brother.

Then, before my sister could answer, “Better! Hold it!”

Too late. I had already turned it past the sweet spot.

“No, back! Back!”

`I turned the antenna back an inch.

“Better…better…”

“And my sister relayed the message through cupped hands.

“Better!”

Then, my brother. “Nope! Gone again! You had it…”

I thought it might help to lift the antenna out and re-seat it. I took hold of the pole with both hands and hefted my entire skinny form against it. Of course a wind came up, and of course the pole began to fall. With a Mighty Mousian effort, I kept it from falling and stood, panting and panicked, with the precious bringer of TV leaning against the chimney. With all my remaining strength, I lifted it in mid-air to put it back in the hole where it belonged. Gravity and inertia tag-teamed me, and the antenna and I tipped down the roof slope towards our doom.

Tiny, sparkly bits tore loose from the shingles and bounced down and off the edge of the roof. I was fairly certain I would soon be joining them.

Again I heaved against the antenna. We locked immobile for a few long seconds, like equally matched arm wrestlers. I knew the odds were about equal that I would be able to force the antenna back into its hole, or that I would drop it off the edge of the roof.

And from far below, my sister yelled, “Perfect! Don’t move!”

For a kid, each has benefits. The country has scenery and solitude, but that can get boring after awhile. The city kid has a world of opportunity at his or her fingertips, but may never see the stars through the glare of carbon monoxide reflected off the haze of a street lamp.

Kids adapt pretty well to either place.

There is one thing, though, that makes me lean towards the country. There aren’t many climbable trees in the city.

Every kid should have a tree.

Mine was a winter pear tree that stood craggy and tolerant in the front yard of my house, just up a little hill that fell to the blacktop road. It was one of a pair of pear trees, each standing guard over a corner of the front of the house. In the special way kids judge these things, the tree closer to the mailbox just seemed friendlier than the other one, so I adopted it.

When most people think of pears, they picture a delicious white slash of fruit, poised serenely on a lettuce leaf next to some cottage cheese. I hate to spoil illusions, but that isn’t what grows on a winter pear tree.

The pears on my tree were hard and green even at their ripest. The weren’t good for much of anything except attracting bees, and being hacked to spitting slivers with the lawnmower after they fell to the ground.

I learned young to climb to a branch which attached to the tree at an angle making it a most comfortable seat. Up in that tree I was king of the world.

While the pears weren’t much good for food, they made wonderful weapons. My two brothers and I would stage breathless battles, crouched behind the tree, hiding just over the hill the tree faced, perhaps even hiding in the tree itself.

“You’re dead!” we’d holler as we pulled the stem from the pear with our teeth and tossed it like a hand grenade.

We had one cousin who was, to put it politely, enthusiastic. It was he who first realized the possibility of Pear as Projectile. My brother and I threw pears to frighten each other. Out cousin’s intent was to kill if possible, to maim at the least.

Anyone who’s ever been hit with a hard-packed snowball – a weapon our cousin also favored – could imagine the pain of being caught by a speeding pear.

Suffice to say that along with the joy of victory or the despair of defeat, we would end battles with this particular cousin with a series of pear-shaped red welts on our backs, chests and butts.

Boys will be boys, if they survive.

My tree got even with me for that sort of abuse on the day before my sixth grade class was to take a field trip to an airport, a bakery and an amusement park. I was sitting on my branch, daydreaming, when my mother called to me from the house. Like every Zorro movie I had ever seen, I swung heroically from the branch, let go too soon, and broke my left arm.

“You stay out of that tree from now on,” my mother admonished. Which I did, for about a week.

As the years went by, the tree grew smaller, until my branch was no longer comfortable. The folks who bought the house after we lived there cut it down, along with its twin on the other side of the lawn.

Last time I drove by, the yard looked empty and sad.

It’s always been that way.

When I was a kid, and school and family and girls and hormones and life got to be too much to stand, I would tromp off across the field and into the woods. Before long I would be whistling and daydreaming and chasing imaginary villains up the sides of fallen birch trees.

I don’t know why I love the woods. I’m not particularly what you’d call an outdoorsman. My father waited his whole life for me to share his love of hunting and fishing. I never did.

A good hundred dollar an hour psychologist could probably explain it. Something about how I want to hide from open spaces where the world might examine my motives and hold me to my promises, and how I want to be surrounded and cocooned and returned to the womb, and how I’d rather deal with the inanimate forest than with all-too-animate humanity.

I just think I like trees.

So I was excited about returning to Yellowstone.

At the same time I was worried that it wouldn’t be exciting enough for Aaron, who is used to coral reef diving and roller coaster riding and ocean swimming.

Likewise his mom, who loves fancy hotels and nice restaurants and beaches and cruise ships.

Around Day 3 they agreed with each other that the Yellowstone for Families program we were part of was the best family vacation we’d ever had.

**

On my trip to Yellowstone 10 years ago, we all wanted to see a bear. We scanned horizons and forests and fields without end, searching for dark fur. Finally, on a day when the group split into two smaller groups, the group I wasn’t in saw a bear.

So I know how rare sightings are.

One day, before our guide led us through a wooded trail, she took a container out of her backpack.

“All the kids need to stay behind me today,” she said. “I have to go first, because I’ve got the bear spray.”

“How nice,” I thought. “Just before the bear devours us, we can perfume him.”

Turns out that it’s just pepper spray, like in Chicago in ’68. I guess if it works on rampaging hippies, it’ll work on a grizzly.

She also told us that if we came to a hill on the trail and couldn’t see what was beyond the slope, we all had to make noise to scare away any bears that might be comin’ over the mountain to, you know, see what they could see.

When she reached a blind spot on the trail and did the bear clap, the kids would yell and whistle. I believe Aaron was yelling, “Here, bear! Here, bear!”

I usually just hollered, “Bear!” Later I realized this could have been misinterpreted to mean that I’d actually seen a bear.

At one point our guide, in addition to being deep in the woods, was deep in conversation with my wife. One of the kids yelled, “Look!”

Right in front of us, a dozen yards away, completely blocking our trail was a huge, brown…

Bison.

I had never seen our guide lose her composure but, when she saw that a bison was that close to us, she leapt back and shouted, “Holy…” and followed it with a one-word description of what bears do in the woods.

We cut a wide circle around the bison.

So, still, no bear.

Before we got to Yellowstone, my son wrote a wish list of all the animals he wanted to see.

I prepared the speech I would give at the end of our trip about why he hadn’t seen a bear. I would explain how rare they are, and how they try not to come around people, and how we were making too much noise anyway, and how they probably smelled us coming a mile away.

We were driving to one of the restaurants in the park one late afternoon and I was writing this story in my head, when my wife screamed.

“Bear!! Bear!! Bear!!”

My son and I were both shouting, “Where? Where? Where?”

“Back up! Back up!”

We were just able to see the bear heading off into the woods. In spite of the fact that it was walking quite rapidly away from us, in spite of the fact that we were in a car and the bear wasn’t, it was frightening. I thought moose were impressive until I saw that bear bottom lumbering off into the woods. Not until he was swallowed completely by the forest did any of us remember to breathe again.

Since we were on the way to dinner, we were without cameras, of course.

Waiting in line for our table at the restaurant, my wife and son were excitedly telling complete strangers that we had seen a bear. They smiled, and told us how great that was for Aaron, but in their eyes you could see the bruin envy. This only made the experience cooler.

As we stood talking about it, my son pointed out the glass front door and hollered, “There he is again!”

The same bear had circled around and was sauntering across the front porch of the restaurant.

Immediately everyone in line except me ran out the front door and around the corner to watch the bear. It acted for all the world like none of us was there. That bear had an agenda and, as long as none of us got in the way, none of us mattered.

I used the opportunity to sneak to the head of the line waiting for tables.

In the end, my son saw everything on his wish list except a wolf. He’s already making plans for how he’ll see one of those the next time we come to Yellowstone.

Next time.

Cool.

If you’re going to have a place set aside for people to see nature in its natural state, you are immediately faced with a choice. Do you make it easy for people to see stuff, or do you make it possible for nature to run wild without human intervention?

Yellowstone has chosen nature.

There is a viewing area at Hayden Valley, where herds of domesticated humans stand at an overlook, overlooking through department store binoculars, an old uncle’s old hunting scope, or magnifying instruments that may well have cost more than my car.

You can stand there well into the chilly evening, and be rewarded with the sights of bison and elk and the very occasional coyote. Usually the animals will be some distance away, and they will be doing exactly what animals do. Maybe that will be interesting. Maybe not.

The animal-seekers arrive as strangers, but rapidly become comrades. They begin to share possibly true stories about the Grizzly they saw that morning when, darn the luck, that didn’t have a camera. Often there will be long debates among the strangers about whether the spot moving a couple of miles across the valley is a bear or a wolf, the twin holy grails of sightings in Yellowstone. Usually agreement is reached that they are just spots.

I met a nice young couple from France there. They had come all the way to Yellowstone to stand among the hopeful hill-scanners.

Go to just about any zoo in the country, and you will be able to walk within yards of bear and wolves. Go to Yellowstone, one of the most famous nature preserves in the world, and the odds are that you won’t see either.

They are there, back in the woods, living as close to wild as they can. But you won’t see them.

Our group waited a long time one afternoon, near a bog by the road where a freshly killed antelope lay rotting in the water. We were waiting in the hope that a wolf would come to dine before birds picked the bones clean.

Eventually we drove wolflessly on.

You might stumble on a bear deep on a backcountry trail in Yellowstone. A folk-art looking rough wood sign would have warned you of the possibility at the trailhead. But if you are one of the unfortunate ones who riles a bear in the woods, it won’t be chained to anything, or tame, or drugged, or behind bars or triple-thick glass. You’re the visitor here, pal, and if you resemble a bear hors d’ourve, too bad for you.

We were in the park almost five days, and I never saw a wire fence. If you come to Yellowstone, you’re expected to bring common sense with you.

You should know better than to walk into one of the steaming springs, hot enough to boil the flesh off your bones.

If you feel like it, you can walk right up to the edge of Yellowstone Canyon and choose between spitting and leaping in. It’s your call.

If you’re a big enough idiot, you can sidle up to a bison and perhaps have your picture taken before it takes a notion to head butt you into intensive care.

Nature is beautiful, but it ain’t pretty.

Huge sections of the park were burned out a few years ago, and the beautiful forested vistas you expect to see are sometimes stubby hills, as though Mother Nature hadn’t gotten around to shave her legs after a long weekend.

We had an exceptional guide during our week there, and one day she patiently explained to us why Yellowstone usually lets forest fires burn, and why it’s good for the land, and why, in its own way, it’s just as beautiful as the lush, old growth forest.

But I think she just told us that because so many tourists before us had seemed disappointed by the scarred hills and valleys.

We were stuck in a long line of cars one day, waiting while a herd of bison cogitated over whether to cross the road, or just stand in it blocking traffic a while longer, and she told us about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone. She spoke lovingly of each wolf, identifying each by number. And she told us how one wolf got old, got sick, and was found one day, dead. She and my wife Carolyn both cried when she told the story. Through it all, she made it clear that even if authorities at the park could have done something to stop that wolf from dying, they wouldn’t have. That would have been against nature, and it would have been wrong.

Nature, when left alone, knows exactly what she’s doing.

In the cold, beautiful Yellowstone Lake, there used to be more Cutthroat Trout than you could imagine. You could watch them swim through the ethereal waters. When they would spawn in the fall, bears would lumber down off the hills and grow fat on them.

Then somebody with a fishing pole and a dream decided to stock the lake with another, bigger breed of trout.

The bigger lake trout are doing just fine, thank you very much. They’re also killing the Cutthroat Trout, which are now endangered in the park. The bigger trout spawn in deeper water, and at the wrong time of year to be of any use to the hungry bears. The situation has deteriorated to the point where, if you catch a Cutthroat Trout, it’s illegal to keep it, and if you catch one of the big Lake Trout, it’s illegal to throw it back.

Nature, when left alone, knows exactly what she’s doing.

My family loves Disney World. I consider the park designers there to be absolute wizards at recreating nature and history and fantasy. I love vacationing there.

So it was an odd thought I had one evening in the shadowing dusk, looking across a wooded valley in Yellowstone.

“Disney couldn’t do this,” I thought.

They’d make it too perfect.

I wrote that a little more than 10 years ago, while sitting on the banks of a churgling little river in Yellowstone National Park.

Hallmark was sending artists out there for a week to paint wildlife and landscapes. OK, they weren’t actually painting the wildlife. That would have been rude. Yellow stones are one thing, yellow bison quite another.

I did, however, get to watch the great Mike Willard sit on the banks of a river, patient as time, until a chipmunk walked up and posed for him. If you’re lucky, you’ve received one of Mike’s wildlife calendars as a gift.

That was an aside. I’m going back to the main story now.

The Yellowstone trip was for artists, and no writers were supposed to go. The artists decided to open a spot for one. I made a quick brass ring grab for it.

My son was an infant then, and the nine days I was away was my longest separation from him up to that time. I thought about him a lot while I was away, and decided I would come back to Yellowstone one day and bring him with me. That’s why his mom and I are with him now, in mid-air somewhere between Kansas City and Denver.

But here’s the good part: The trip was my son’s idea.

The plan for this summer’s too-expensive-but-worth-it vacation had been for Aaron and his mom to return to Roatan in Honduras. We went there for a week last summer. Aaron and Carolyn scuba-dived. We have a picture of Aaron underwater, peeking under a coral shelf. When I asked him later what he was doing when the picture was taken, he said, “Looking for a shark.” He wasn’t kidding.

I’m not quite that fearless. Since I’m still trying to stare down a lifelong fear of deep water, I settled for snorkeling above schools of synchronized blue tan, all the while wearing the wimp-out inflatable vest. It was all wet and good, but when Aaron’s junior scuba club chose to go back again this year, I decided I’d already snorted enough saltwater, thank you very much. Him mom would take him, and I would stay home and write my goofy little stories and funny little songs instead.

That was the plan, until Aaron suggested the family go to Yellowstone, and I tried not to grin like a gassy baby.

After a few hours alternating between threatening and cajoling the computer, I eventually booked three flights on Frontier Airlines.

Immediately, one-liners about why they would name an airline “Frontier” began tumbling through my head like Weebles. It’s one of the bi-products of what I do for a living.

“The first-class seats are the ones closest to the campfire.”

“Then they brought complimentary sarsaparillas and little bags of salt pork and beans.”

“The flight attendant turned out to be a toothless, bearded guy named Gabby.”

Leave me now, oh spirit of Jack Carter.

Actually, the planes are quite nice. No peanuts, but the boy is quite enjoying the little TVs in the back of the head rests. And the attendants have all their teeth. And some other interesting things. Pillows, for instance.

**

I’m changing tense now. Try to remain calm.

My plan was to write 1,000 words or so every day during our five-day visit to Yellowstone. Sometimes I’m so cute with my little plans. It has now been – well, a little while, let’s say – since I wrote what you just read. I’m back at home writing this from memory while sitting down in the Beatle Room watching a Red Skeleton movie on TV.

About my memory…

We flew into Salt Lake City, rented a car and drove north to Jackson Hole, a town I’ve always thought would make a good name for a TV secret agent.

“Call Jackson Hole! He’ll get to the bottom of things!”

Course, I’ve also always thought they should make a movie called “Journey to the Center of Uranus.” So don’t go by me.

My memories of my visit 10 years ago are scattered and sketchy, but every now and then one is clear as a Yellowstone lake. The artists and I went to Cody, Wyoming one night. At the park in the town square, there are huge arches on each corner made completely of elk horns twisted together like extension cords in a bag. I could see clearly in my mind’s eye the row of rough wood tourist shops leading away from the square. It was so vivid.

So imagine my surprise when I found the square in Jackson Hole.

I could have sworn on a stack of original Capital Beatle Albums that it was in Cody.

So, anyway, that might be a good thing to keep in mind while you’re reading these essays. Some of my Cody stories actually take place in Jackson Hole.

**

We ate at a restaurant that serves Buffalo. The meat, not the town.

For many years now I’ve been street-fighting with the cholesterol gang. I try to keep up on the latest dirt, or healthy food that tastes like dirt. I was delighted recently, for example, when I could have olive oil again.

(Must…not…tell…Popeye…joke…)

Anyway, I read somewhere one time that buffalo was better for folks like me than beef. I’ve pretty much given up steaks in favor of chicken and fish, but I thought it might be nice to find something somewhere in between. Buffalo is supposed to be lower in fat than cows with their four sets of love handles.

So I was going to order a buffalo steak. But then I started remembering how the bison looked during my visit 10 years before. They are huge, shaggy animals, majestic in their innocent dullness. They seem gentle and harmless, except when they gore tourists who consider them props for gag photos. My point is, I’m not sure they deserve to be eaten by the likes of me.

And no, I’m not one of those.

I’m not a vegetarian, although I have no bone to pick with them.

When I was a kid, we raised pigs. I’ve watched the pink, hairless little squint-eyed porkers nuzzling for a spot at Mama Sow’s milk bar. I’ve cradles piglets and named them and chased them around the barn. Then I’ve watched them grow into fine, fat hogs, seen them butchered and enjoyed their chops for dinner.

There should be a fast food drive-thru dedicated to me, for all the burgers I downed before I put them down for good. I live in the city of barbecue, and I’ve sampled more than my share.

I understand that, for the most part, people eat animals and not vice versa.

So I thought I’d try the buffalo steak.

“Are we ready to order?”

The moment of truth arrived, and I heard myself say, “I’ll have the pork, please.”

Now I know it doesn’t make a bit of difference. Bison will still be farm-raised and served up to tourists. The bison steak I didn’t eat went to someone else that same evening.

I’ll keep eating chickens and pigs and fish, and I won’t regret a bite.

But I’ve decided not to be part of adding yet another animal to the food chain. Enough already.

**

The next day we spotted our first big game, and no, I’m not going to do Groucho’s joke from “Animal Crackers.” Rent the video.

On the road from Jackson Hole to Yellowstone, we spotted a moose, knee-deep in a pond by the side of the narrow, blacktop road. The moose was somehow balancing his body on spindly legs, his huge moose mouth munching contentedly on wet grass, his antlers threatening to throw his narrow head off balance at any moment.

He looked like an animal designed by committee.

I stole a glance at my son, and saw that he was staring with the same big-eyed wonder I felt when I saw my first moose in the wild.

On my trip to Jackson Hole a decade ago, I took an afternoon to hike the seven miles from the top of Rendezvous Mountain back down to the hotel. As I descended, the temperature rose, and it was turning into a beautiful afternoon. I would walk until I got tired, then sit on a rock for awhile. After a few hearty pulls on my water bottle, I’d take out my harmonica and send a few poorly played tunes down the valley. Eventually, the water took its toll, and I walked off the trail into the woods to return it to nature from whence it had come.

When it came time that I could look up, I thought I saw a big blob of something brown moving around off in the woods. I looked closer, and saw the moose. In pictures and on TV, I always thought moose looked a little goofy. I found myself really hoping this guy didn’t know that. There was nothing goofy about him. His massive chest expanded as he took in air, and when he let it out, he thundered a snort. I figured he could carve his initials in my chest with his hooves, then beat me to death with his antlers.

My plan was to back away slowly before the moose spotted me. As I put the plan into action, he glanced casually at me, stared for a thousand years or so, then returned just as casually to his munching.

I back-crept to the path, then edged down the hill on shaky legs.

It was a stunning experience.

And now, 10 years after, my son was seeing his first moose. If I know him, he was most likely trying to figure out how to coax it out of the water and into the rental car, so he could bring it back to Kansas as a pet. My wife meanwhile was taking several of the photos she takes so well, probably wondering how she could get the moose to turn slightly to the left, look directly into the camera and smile.

And me, I was keeping my eyes open for flying squirrels and spies with uncertain European accents.

And remembering my first moose.

Katherine is injured again. Broken neck.

Once again I’ll loosen her strings and pack her gently away for a trip back east, to the Ovation guitar factory in Connecticut, where I’m hoping her 32-year old warranty will cover the cost of a neck re-set.

I noticed this most recent injury one Sunday evening at a bluegrass Christmas sing at my church. I was with the amazing Karla and her amazing upright bass; her fiancé Jimmy, a man who never met a stringed instrument he couldn’t spin into gold; Mark, a brilliant banjo player who spent the evening playing brilliant mandolin; his wife Mary, who harmonizes with him in music and in life; and my pal Eric, a guitar strummer who also happens to be the pastor at my church.

We were trying our best to bend traditional Christmas songs into bluegrass rhythms. I was about to launch into an up-tempo version of “Away in a Manger,” swinging that lovely sweet lullaby like a cradle in a mountain storm, when I noticed that Katherine’s action was quite a bit higher than usual. I was having to push down hard on the strings, like I used to on the Sears and Roebuck special I learned to play on after my mom bought it during a Loretta Lynn phase when I was a teenager.

Katherine’s strings usually lay close to her long, slim, smooth neck, so I knew something was amiss. Sure enough, on closer inspection I noticed that the neck of the guitar was coming loose where it attaches to the space-age fiberglass body that fuels the Martin lovers of the world to smug superiority.

At this point, I should stop to clear up a misconception.

You think I play bluegrass.

Nope.

I can play just barely enough guitar to accompany myself on the folksongs I’ve written off and on for the past 35 or so years. I have never actually been a guitar player. I am more of a guy who sings little songs and, oh yeah, plays a little guitar so my voice isn’t out there on the edge of the cliff all by itself.

I never really listened to bluegrass all that much, the way I’m sure Karla and Jimmy and Mark must have. My people back in Pennsylvania were big country music fans when I was a kid, though. While I pretended to hate it when I was a long-haired rock and roller, it still seeped into the ground around the roots I was growing. My mom’s favorites were Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, George Jones and Loretta Lynn, and I knew most of their songs whether I wanted to or not.

But above them all, my mom loved Johnny Cash. She loved him five feet high and risin’, and she used to sing “Don’t take your guns to town, Bill,” to me when I was a little boy.

So, by the time my beloved Beatles covered a Buck Owens song on Ed Sullivan, and Bob Dylan cryptically let it be known how much he admired Johnny Cash, their music was part of me. I went deep into Hank Williams on my own, and found him to be possibly the best American folksong writer ever.

And when I decided to trade the drums for a guitar, quit trying to copy the Beatles and start copying John Prine instead, it was natural for me to incorporate country music into my – you should pardon the expression – style.

But I never played bluegrass. Really learned to admire the pickers who could. Used to love the theme song to “The Beverly Hillbillies.” But I couldn’t play it. Didn’t have the karate chops, as Jethro would say.

It was at Hallmark that I heard about the Thursday bluegrass lunch sessions. A bunch of card-producin’ pickers gets together once a week to play for an hour, outside in the summer, indoors when the weather turns and fingers go numb. They love the music, and they come together to love it as a group. I go along sometimes, and strum G, C and D. I will sometimes sing what I think are harmonies. Occasionally I’m right.

In the wide open, porch floor shakin’ good time way of the purveyors of sweet bluegrass jam, they welcome me. Nobody cares that I don’t take flat-picking breaks. My picks are just as flat as anybody else’s, but that’s where the similarity between me and an actual bluegrass flat-picker ends.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. Katherine.

I picked her smooth, blond body from a row of new guitars in a little music shop in Corning, New York, in the fall of 1973. I had been singing at colleges and coffeehouses and bars for a couple of years and, while I loved my black Harmony Sovereign, I knew it was time to upgrade. I wanted an acoustic guitar I could plug into an amp, and the Ovation was perfect.

Plus, I could picture myself pausing between songs to balance her on her bottom and say to the few who weren’t drunk, ignoring me, or both, “Look. Finally got a standing Ovation.”

So I bought her – around $300, I think – took her home and named her after Katherine Hepburn.

We’ve been thought some stuff, Katherine and I.

Our first regular gigs were at Wet Goods, a college-town beer and wine bar, also in Corning, New York. It was there that her wood first soaked in the cigarette smoke that filled the bar like Blue Ridge Mountain fog. I played four hours on the nights I sang there, and it used up every song I knew, and several I only sort-of knew. Between sets I went from table to table with a basket and an embarrassed grin, and the kids at those tables stopped drinking and flirting just long enough to drop in some loose change. My pay for those four hours ranged from a high of 50 bucks on blessed nights, to a low of less than 10 many other nights.

When I started Cornell, I was stunned at how hard the schoolwork was. It seemed like between my studies, my job in the library and my folk-singing gigs at bars and fraternity houses, I could barely keep up. I decided that the only way I could hope to get through with my spirit intact was to take on a major personal project that would be hard and take a lot of time. So Katherine and I wrote a series of songs about the life of Christ from the Book of Matthew. Eventually we went from church to church performing it for congregations who wondered when I was going to finish so they could get home and start the meatloaf.

I also played guitar at a house church where the preacher’s name – Jack Parr and I kid you not – was Noah. It was there that one of the little kids ran into my guitar as it leaned against a wall. The guitar fell to the floor with the sick ring of a crash test dummy flying through a windshield.

Katherine was fine. It wasn’t the last time she fell.

One night I sang at a bar in Washington, D.C., where I lived for three years after college. I was at a place called Rocky Raccoon’s in Georgetown, where I sang sometimes as an opening act. I opened the guitar case and, to my horror, the lid fell right off. I managed to jerry-rig it back together. Turned out it was an omen. While I was singing, the buttonhole on my guitar strap came undone, and the guitar crashed to the wooden stage.

And again, she was OK. Katherine is nothing if not sturdy.

She’s been tossed not-so-gently into vans, Jeeps, buses, trucks and planes. Her neck has run into microphone stands, doorjambs and walls. We’ve played together in muddy fields, in the rain, in rooms full of rowdy drunk frat boys and their equally drunken dates, and on the front steps of the Community of Hope Church of the Nazarene in the heart of Washington D.C.’s inner-city.

Indeed, it was the guitar that helped me feel like I belonged at Community of Hope.

As a child of the sixties, I was cursed with a brand of racism unique to my generation. I felt that black people had been so abused by white people for so long in America that they must be angry about it. So I figured their natural tendency would be to get even with white society, and me in particular. I know I would have felt that way.

I couldn’t imagine that the folks trying to survive on Belmont Street would want me around. It was on that street that Community of Hope was located, in a crumbling, mostly-abandoned apartment building that was slowly being rehabilitated.

The first time some friends took me to church there, I swore I would never go back.

The second time I went, somebody told them I was a struggling folk-singer. OK, so it was me who told them.

The third time I went I stood in front of the small congregation that was about equally divided between black folks from the neighborhood, and white folks from the suburbs.

I stared down at Katherine, and wondered what in the world we were doing there.

I rang a G chord, and began to sing a country song called “The Baptism of Jesse Taylor.” By the first, “Jesus gained a soul and Satan lost a good right arm,” everything was all right. They were nodding, smiling, clapping, accepting.

I attended church and sang songs there for the rest of the time I lived in Washington.

Like most ladies with long and interesting lives, Katherine shows some signs of her years.

I was playing her one night on a sofa in our former house, right after we got JJ, our Labrador retriever pup. I was really caught up in a song I was trying to write, so it wasn’t until I paused that I noticed that JJ had been happily gnawing away on the end of my guitar at the tip of the neck, where the tuning pegs are. It’s been chewed up ever since. There is also an inch-long gash of unremembered origin on the body, deep enough to stand a guitar pick on edge. A protective strip of rubber on the back of the body to protect against belt buckle scratches has long since disappeared.

So, after all that, her worst injury to date occurred while she was sleeping. I’d been away on vacation a week or so, and when I opened the case, I saw that the tension of the strings had ripped the bridge – the part where the bottom ends of the strings attach to the front of the guitar – off the body. A section of the top of the guitar had peeled back like warped linoleum.

I felt like I’d been kicked. Panic took me, and I looked away to keep from being sick.

For the first time in over 20 years, my guitar was unplayable.

I was happy to learn that they weren’t kidding when they said “Lifetime Warranty.” Katherine came back after a month as good as new.

A few years ago I was fortunate enough to get a sabbatical grant from my employers at Hallmark. I used the time to write a book of essays about turning 50. I finished the project with a public reading, during which I played a few original songs. One of the pieces I wrote spoke of “the guitar I’ve owned for more than 25 years.”

The reading/singing went OK, and I was driving home afterwards with my head still back there on stage, listening to applause. My cell phone rang. It was my wife.

“Bill, where’s your guitar?”

“What do you mean? It’s in the back seat.”

“Better take a look.”

I had also been thinking about the performance when I loaded the Jeep to come home. I had driven away and left my guitar sitting right in the middle of the Hallmark parking garage.

I sank into the Jeep seat. So this was how it would end for Katherine and me. I hoped that some guitar lover had stolen her, and that she hadn’t been run down and shattered by some well-meaning Hallmarker who was just antsy to get home.

“Somebody named Oliver called from Hallmark,” my wife continued. “He found it and put it in your booth.”

Oliver is the artist who signs his artwork “Revilo.” He loves good music, and has loaned me some incredible stuff to listen to over the years. He and his wife Sylvia – a Hallmark writer – saw my guitar abandoned in the middle of the garage, and saved her and my butt at the same time.

And now, the broken neck.

After more than 30 years of faithful service, I suppose I could just let Katherine retire. I could put her away safe and snug in the case, until the day I hand her down to my son.

But there are nights. There are nights when I sit alone on the couch down in the Beatle Room and hold that guitar in my lap, and when I wrap my hand around the neck and feel my fingers on the strings, everything is exactly right, and the world is as it should be but too often isn’t.

One day I will put Katherine away, and go buy a fancy new guitar to replace her.

One day.

But not yet, old girl. Not yet.