Colleen and Pooch and I were in Mazatlan, Mexico in my '64 Chevy Wagon that I bought for $200 after a year without a car, because one day a flash hit me to get a car for no apparent reason and when a week later I was asked if I could meet right away for an interview an hour south of where I was I could say yes because of that car that gleamed on a hill next to an unassuming working class home when I first saw it. 

I remember Grandpa's Chevy wagon that smelled of sawdust and oil with his well-worn tools in the back when he picked me up for weekends that were my portal to his life that at times was as broken as his English. He escaped the czar, alone as a teen, in hopes of the cushy life I had fled with the adventure that he didn't want but I craved. And what I didn't realize was that while my parents painted my life as a dignified impressionistic watercolor, Grandpa Ben blasted through my veins and splattered the canvas in bright red.

  Once, Colleen and I were hitching on a small remote road on the west coast of Ireland when an old station wagon crept toward us with two horses clomping behind in slo-mo and the driver stopped and asked in an hypnotic brogue if we would watch his horses for him so we said sure and there we were on the side of the road with two horses and neither of us remembers what happened next so we both blame it on the Leprechauns.

Mazatlan was hot and we camped along the water where Pooch faced off with some rats under a waterfront restaurant that was on stilts and mucky underneath with trash and I was concerned that he might get bit and hurt, but I mostly just let him figure stuff out and kept that philosophy with to our kids though I can't say Colleen did the same.

Now she and I were a month or so into our first date and it wasn't exactly the original plan to be in Mazatlan since we started out going to New Jersey but in Boise I remembered that I hated the east coast in the summer so we decided to head south instead, and we found out at the border that we were supposed to have papers for Pooch's but the border guy told us where to find a vet to pay $5 to get papers that said Pooch had the shots that he didn't.

We camped on the beach and played gin rummy in shade during the heat of the day and came out as nocturnal creatures just before the sunsets that we envisioned boiling the water.

I wanted to keep heading south, and more Mexican magic like the drooling hitchhiker that had lead us to a town of trance-like people that all seemed to be tripping and gave us a waterfront palapa to stay, but I felt called to look for a full-time teaching position, which wasn't the first or last time two voices in my head were going different directions and the responsible one won, so we headed north. 

We drove toward Washington State where it suddenly was not automatic that Colleen and I were together and she needed to finish college since she had dropped out to live in Seattle the same time I went to teach on Orcas after the interview an hour south which caused me to quit my dishwasher job, and it was from Orcas I sent postcards to three friends asking if they wanted to go to my friend Liza's wedding in New Jersey and Colleen was the only one that said yes.

A school superintendent in central Oregon told me after an interview I wouldn't get a job anywhere within two hundred miles unless I cut my pony tail, which I spent a long time thinking about before Colleen finally cut it, rather than give a barber the satisfaction of doing that cause back then barbers and us were on opposite sides of a cultural divide that's hard to imagine now.

No job seemed in the cards in spite of a bunch of interviews in places so far off the beaten path as to be a different planet from the suburban Philadelphia area where I grew up, where it would have been radical to move to the far suburbs or to marry someone not Jewish.

I was packing for a ten-day backpack even though I had no idea what I would do next but I could always do what I did when I got the dishwasher job which was to make a deal with myself to fast until I got a job, a strategy that had worked since I got a job on the first day. My Dishwashers Got Soul sign hung proudly over my station, while five hours a day at $1.88 an hour bought me an apartment from which Pooch and I walked to work and he was always back there, having crossed a busy street himself, in the evening when I came home with leftovers from other people for him. I was proud when the boss said, "You've been a good dishwasher," the day that I quit to take the teaching job that I drove my new old Chev to the interview for.

Then I got a phone call from Ted Filer, principal of an elementary school on the Yakama Indian Reservation in a town of five hundred who were a third Yakama, a third Hispanic, and a third white. He offered me a fifth grade teaching position and asked if I could I start in two days. By then I was used to packing everything in the Chev on short notice, like after the dishwasher job, when I started to teach the next day on Orcas Island at a private school that was run by a psychic that never once told me what to do or observed me teaching in my classroom during the several months I spent finishing the school year teaching there. 

So I accepted the position and packed up to live in a small town in the middle of nowhere with no idea where I would live but when I got there Ted told me to see Jack Robbins who lived a half mile away and I ended up renting his small house with an otherworldly peach tree in the back-yard and a chain link fence around it that's only purpose was to keep the wild horses from chomping on the irrigated green grass inside.

First thing I did was hang Tibetan Prayer Flags on the back porch and try to keep my head from spinning from suddenly living in a desert for the first time, unnerved by seeing further than I ever had before, while feeling a deep oneness with a path I could never have remotely imagined as a kid; so I decided to get stoned on the back porch that night without the slightest idea how crazy that was since everyone knew everything about everyone in a town that small. 

My westward hitchhiking adventure had drawn me to the green wetness of the coast and I sat in a brown barren world that flipped my reality in a way not nearly as extreme as Grandpa's must have been when he got plopped down alone in Philly and spoke a different language or my dad not figuring out that he didn't speak English until his first day of school.

I was the only teacher that lived in town and Jack, my neighbor and landlord laughed when I walked the half mile to school rather than drive since he had no clue that striding in my cowboy boots past Elmer's Trading Post and the Wagon Wheel Cafe with Pooch at my side was magical.

Jack and I caught a wild horse once because they technically belonged to people and he wanted to catch his and check that it was healthy before setting it free again and saying, "These horses ain't sick like them worm-bellied nags over on the coast." He ran the defiant stallion up a narrow dirt trail with fences on both sides, where I stood by a corral gate with my heart racing because that horse was a tornado, and I swung the gate open suddenly at just the right time so the horse had nowhere to go but into the corral.

My life in the town of White Swan was an adventure in slowness. My ship was looking for a port but I was in the desert. Thursday evenings I felt support from some and darts shooting from the eyes of others that were understandably skeptical as I tried to learn Native American drumming in hope of knowing something about the culture of the kids I was teaching, trusty dog Pooch always by my side. 

Years later I went to a healing gathering in Eastern Washington where a hummingbird buzzed into the center of a Sufi circle and I saw my first chiropractic treatment as a foreshadow of my soon to be career. I left Pooch in the rural home that Colleen and I shared with more dogs than people and screamed at the gods in rage when I returned and could almost smell smoke from a neighbor's shotgun that had chickens, not knowing that Pooch's exit was perfectly timed to free me to pursue the directive that later needed a tipi vision-quest back on Orcas Island to reveal itself to me.

Pooch was my first dog and I got him as a curly tailed Norwegian Elkhound puppy even though my landlord had a no pets policy and I was surprised when he kicked all of us out and one of my roommates moved into a house where she later asked her roommate Colleen if she wanted to go for a walk to meet her friend Harvey.

Pooch and I hitched all over the country together and when we got a ride I'd point and he'd jump to that spot. Once in Missouri I was freezing in a dark field at 3 am, fingers too cold to light my tiny stove, and two women gave us a ride because, "We saw your dog and figured you were okay." In East St. Louis, late at night, some inner city kids who gave us a ride veered off the freeway and onto the mean streets and I signaled Pooch by a touch to be on alert, which he always was anyhow, before they turned back onto the freeway after messing with my mind and telling me "that was a shortcut" and in Virginia, Pooch peed on my backpack to mark his territory after we chanced upon a random party near the end of that same trip.

When Colleen and I built our home of twenty-four years in the field where we used to pick blackberries, our nearest neighbors on three sides were horses that chomped on the same stinging nettles that I tried so hard to not touch on the land where the last ice age had its southern terminus thousands of years ago.

After my year on the Reservation I moved back to the west coast and in with Colleen until she moved into a shack without running water or electricity on San Juan Island and I pitched my vision-quest tipi on Orcas Island before we moved to Portland together and some bum on the street told us in a surreal voice to get married while we were on a three day fast and we listened.

I dream that Grandpa is sawing a plank in an empty field amidst wisps of drifting fog. Colleen's Grammie, who came to America as the young bride of an older man from Ireland, is nearby with a red-checkered apron and sugar daddies in her pocket. She puts down her beer and with a kind knowing toothless smile, looks skeptically at Grandpa. Once she tried to sort out our relationship by asking Colleen, "Are ye doin' his laundry?"

Grandpa is focused on the plank and doesn't notice her. Grammie wonders where her Tim is, feels uncomfortable, alone in a field with a Jewish carpenter, though she says the rosary to one every day. 

Dark clouds and rain roll in and Grandpa begrudgingly puts his tools in the Chev and notices Grammie. He looks away, but then looks hard at her and is about to speak when a white horse with a curly-tailed dog at his side appear in the distance through wisps of fog. Together they start running toward him.