Dancing Barefoot

Last night I played in front of "people" for the first time in about twenty years. When I did it then, I sucked. That was a Street Magazine party, organized as a talent show. I made up some Devo-ish thing about art school people. They were an easy target. People dug it, and some guy asked me to play his cafe. I had one song I was good at at, and a handful of others that sucked. I declined.

Last night Revel and I did Dancing Barefoot in front of maybe 125 people at the Nickelsville Benefit. Then I did a fast, hard Have Mercy, which I managed not to tremendously fuck up (I'm prone to forgetting lyrics), and closed with a loose and hammy I Like Pink.

It was cool to have a sound guy giving me some reverb and making it sound nice. I've gotten very comfortable in front of audiences as a speaker, but performing as an artist is different. You're much more exposed. You kind of have to let go for it to work. When it works, you feel very high and very focused. I do, anyway.

Doing Dancing Barefoot in a christian setting brought out more of its god stuff for us. It's about intense love, connection, ecstasy, God, the universe, redemption. The big stuff.

The version posted here is hot. Revel and I did four takes on this song today, thinking that maybe after more practice and new strings on the guitar we'd get something good. None were better than the first, done at 9 am the morning after we learned it. I added a little reverb and a lead track tonight, and, well, it's pretty damn good. Really. Put on some headphones and listen.

The Street Years: Part Three

The Davis Square Street Magazine house was a second story apartment in a house where the landlord, Larry, lived downstairs with his wife. She was nice enough, but Larry was a boozer. He soon decided, given the traffic through our apartment, that we must be dealing drugs. It was a tense relationship.

Every few months or so we'd get an issue together. Between Jon's manic-depression and perfectionism, our poverty, and my own chronic distraction, it's a wonder we published at all. Every once in a while though, a truck would come, and we'd get ink all over our fingers as we carried the precious bundles upstairs.

The times of no money continued. I remember standing near a Burger King in the Northeastern University student union. A volunteer was driving me around to drop papers at the distribution points. I was starving. Literally. I smelled the greasy food and longed for a dollar to buy french fries. I read Knut Hamsun's Hunger that year, and knew just how he must have felt.

I would later come to think of this as my boiled potatoes and shoplifted cheese period. Jon was the thief. I'd lost my nerve for that sort of thing by thirteen. He specialized in string cheese and cigarettes, reserving most of his actual money for 12-packs of Rolling Rock. At least we kept the rent paid.

I lived upstairs in a roughly finished attic room across the stairwell from our photographer David, who converted a closet into a darkroom. Jon was downstairs with two of my friends that I knew from college. Doug and Claudia were Central America activists and ran a teeny non-profit called the Student Central America Network. I was hired to run their phone bank.

This was, without question, the most pathetic fund raising operation in the history of half-assed non-profits. We'd cold call from the phonebook, and anyone unfortunate enough to pick up would be treated to an "update." This would begin with the latest atrocity of that blood-soaked time and end with an earnest plea to support student organizing to change U.S. foreign policy.

It's amazing that anyone ever gave us anything. A strong night would bring in around $100. Doug weaved and dodged every time I asked to get paid. The three of us would sometimes visit Al Sais, a friend of Doug's in Cambridge, who would cook a nice dinner and get us high. By this point, eating a real meal was a rare treat.

During one especially desperate week, where I had no money even for bus tokens, Al wrote each of us a check for $100. Mine bounced.

Al Sais would later be fired from his long time job as book keeper for the Central America Solidarity Association in Cambridge. It turned out that at least some of the much discussed string of "FBI break ins" that plagued Old Cambridge Baptist Church during the sanctuary movement were really just Al covering his tracks.

Doug eventually skipped out on his rent and we confiscated his guitar and amp in retaliation. Jon got good at surfer licks, and could slay me every time with his cover of Sargent Barry Sadler's Ballad of the Green Berets. The irony thing was very in.

By then, my focus was turning more and more toward homelessness. It was 1988, and Bennett and Harrison's The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America offered a framework for understanding the incredible growth in visible poverty that occurred over that decade. Homelessness in American cities had tripled or quadrupled, and a politicized grassroots movement had arisen along with a still nascent sheltering industry.

Boston's Kip Tiernan was running around quoting Walter Bruggeman, talking liberation theology, and asking qui bono? "Situations of cultural acceptance breed accommodating complacency," she would say. A bag lady doll went on the market and Kip went ballistic. I found this irresistible.

A few years before, a chapter of the Union of the Homeless was founded in Boston. While there were a few radicals running around acting like this was a real organization, it was clear that there wasn't much there. The happening place was First Church Cambridge, where Jim Stewart and Stuart Guernsey were leading the direct action revolution.

Jim was a cynical divinity school grad who dressed in black, wore James Joyce glasses, and read Adorno and Horkheimer. He was a CD junkie, and ran a small shelter in the church basement. Guernsey was a soft-spoken southern minister who'd somehow come north to run another small shelter in Dorchester. They acted as Northeast lieutenants for Mitch Snyder, and would regularly go on some sort of extreme fast in solidarity with their hero.

Around them were a mixture of politicized homeless people, church folk, and shelter line staff who were down for the revolution. I found myself in the First Church function room more and more often, drawn in by the drama and the people. At the conclusion of every meeting, Guernsey would offer a little benediction. After awhile, Jim took pity and gave me a job doing overnights.

The summer of 1988 brought the CCNV's "Take off the Boards" demonstrations. Mitch Snyder had a genius for mobilizing coordinated direct-action events that kept homelessness in the papers and turned up the heat for action. Take off the Boards was a week of housing takeovers in cities throughout the east coast. There was a boarded up house in Boston's South End that Jim and Stuart chose as a target. A group of around 60 met up at Boston's City Hall for a brief rally, and marched toward our destination.

"What do we want?"
"Housing"
"When do we want it!"
"NOW!!"

This chant would be good for at least another 20 years. My favorite variation would come at the 1989 Housing Now! march more than a year later. My Boston affinity group came up with "Hey you's guys! How's about a house!"

Much better.

Only a few leaders actually knew where the house was. We came to a stop at a boarded-up Victorian, and a half dozen guys raced up the steps with crowbars to pry at the plywood. An advance contingent was to have taken care of this. They were there and inside, but hadn't managed to loosen the nails.

Within a minute there were about ten cop cars on the street and a couple of horses. These were Boston cops. They don't fuck around.

The plywood came off just as the police swarmed the house. The crowd lost it as cops started throwing bodies down the stairs. No one was prepared for a police riot, and things escalated within seconds to full-on pandemonium, which only made the police more aggressive. They pushed us back to the street, and then to the sidewalk on the other side.

I was stalking back and forth on the street and sidewalk, alternately screaming chants and yelling at cops. I saw one near by catch another's eye, point to me, and say, "him." They closed in.

For me, nothing brings on hyper-focus and a sense of calm like the prospect of getting my ass kicked. I locked eyes with the lead cop, raised my hands loosely over my shoulders, and slowly backed away.

Suddenly, they turned and ran. My scrawny hippy ass was saved by dumb luck and distraction.

The media had arrived, and several cameras were trained on a police horse as it trotted straight down a crowded sidewalk to bowl over a septuagenarian former nun. The cops seemed to know this was the end. The de-escalation was immediate. An ambulance arrived, and she was taken away for treatment of minor injuries. A few arrests were made, but most of us just huddled for awhile in small groups and walked away.

The story played the same way in nearly all of the media. Peaceful protest turns violent. The violence was blamed on the cops, and the TV stations found their footage of the horse running over the old lady irresistible.

This, I decided, was the revolution I was looking for. I'd found my people.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two
The Street Years: Part Three

The Street Years: Part Two

Street Magazine was the place where my new life began to come together. Al Nidle coaxed us into his world with visions of building Street into the next Rolling Stone, and we were happy to suspend judgment and come along for the ride. We lived on no money on the first floor of an Alston-Brighton rental house. Every one of us, in our own way, was crazy, although I was probably the sanest of the lot. A lonely old lady lived upstairs, and light brown patches spread across our ceiling from the urine of a hundred cats. Most nights, you could hear her moan and cry.

As publisher, Al was the guy who held the vision, opened the mail, and sold the ads. He was a grandiose narcissist with charisma to spare, and colored in each of the first 2,000 copies with crayon to complete the cover design. Al refused to work, and reserved the right to make his living off of our irregularly published magazine. He had a wife and an infant daughter who would visit occasionally, but was too self-absorbed to be of much use to them.

His forty-something friend David lived in a closet off of Al's living room-office-bedroom. David had a photographic memory, and could quote many of the books he'd read verbatim, but had trouble organizing his thoughts. I came to think of our conversations as intellectual pinball. While David had no formal role in the publication, he more or less functioned as Al's aide-de-camp. With his night-time dish washing job, he was the only one of us with regular work.

Jon was someone I quickly came to regard as an authentic genius. His bedroom was our production center and he'd painted a completely accurate nude self-portrait on his door. At twenty-two or so, he was a wildly prolific cartoonist, an amateur musician, and a talented graphic artist whose idea was to completely redesign each issue of the magazine so that it would never get stale. Jon drank too much and would disappear behind his door for days at a time. His creative jags, too, would go on for largely sleepless days on end. Jon temped a bit, but mostly spent his time working as an artist. A starving artist.

His bi-polar and anorexic mother Collete lived in a small bedroom just off of the tiny kitchen. She had yellowish hair, sunken eyes, and a quick wit, and would go in and out of psychotic episodes. My wife and I spent a lot of time encouraging Collette to eat, and making sure there were food bank groceries in the cupboard so that she might starve a bit less quickly.

Mine was the other room in the front of the house, which might have once been the master bedroom. I had a mattress on the floor and a chair, and kept the few clothes and other things that I had in a couple of boxes. I also still had the guitar that I'd bought in the Air Force, and we all played it. While none of us were any good, Jon had the most talent, and could do a dead on knock off of Devo's Mongoloid. I worked nights as a proof-reader at Stone & Webster, a huge engineering firm located near South Station. This paid better than other temp jobs I'd had, but I only got about twenty hours a week.

The second month we were there, Al took everybody's rent money and spent the $600 on a used Mac Plus without asking. This, with its two megs of RAM and 20 MB hard drive, was our only computer. Up til then, we'd been producing Street by sneaking into the Harvard computer lab. They rarely checked IDs and didn't seem to care if we were students or not. Since we still didn't own a printer, this was where we'd run the pages when we went to press.

After that, I don't think we ever paid rent again.

There was serious discussion of staging a break in of a downtown office that we knew of to steal their state of the art Mac IIci computers and laser printers. The plan involved explosions and flares to distract the police while the rest of us stealthily made off with the goods. Fortunately, we all got cold feet when it came time to actually make the heist.

We were working on our second issue together when, on October 19, 1987, the Dow lost $500 billion in a single day to add up to the biggest stock market crash in history. Our cover became a soup line with Jon's caricatures of various Boston personalities dressed in rags. "We're having a Great Depression" the tag line read.

There was a tent city in Cambridge in a big empty lot near the Necco candy factory on Mass Ave. I'd go there to hang out and got to know a few of the homeless leaders. There was always some sort of a high drama crisis unfolding. I tried to be helpful, but they didn't have much use for me. I was there as press, and did what I could to tell their story.

We saw ourselves as the gonzo documentarians of the impoverished urban lunatic fringe, and were well-positioned personally to understand the subject. Al had this vision of Cambridge as the Haight-Ashbury of the East Coast, but two decades later, and with homeless people instead of flower children.

Jon went to work developing an ad kit for Al, and various other bits of marketing paraphernalia. We had tons of heart, and Al and Jon fed each other's mania, but we didn't have the first idea, really, of what we were doing. Our Ché stickers, for example, invoked the signature likeness and read "Ché led a revolution and never sent a piece of junk mail. We're running a Magazine the same way."

The name of our publication was nowhere in there to be found. As far as we were concerned, branding was something that happened to cows and horses in Montana.

Eventually, an eviction notice was posted on the front door. We studied it carefully. The language was makeshift and it seemed to have been run off on someone's personal printer. If it didn't come from the Sheriff, we decided, we weren't all that worried. By now, it was January. The gas heat was shut off, but the electricity and water, which regularly froze in our bathroom sink, remained. I started spending the colder nights at Carolyn's place out in Jamaica Plain.

By then, we at Street Magazine central were beginning to hate each other. It became clear to Jon and I that what little money the paper raised was going directly to Al, who treated the paper's bank account as if it were his own. We'd spend hours working out decisions between ourselves, and then Al would just do whatever he liked. Slowly, Jon and I moved toward a coup.

The name, we found, wasn't trademarked. There was nothing to prevent us, the editor and art director, from ousting the publisher altogether. I was the primary architect. We plotted in bars and coffee shops, kept our plans to ourselves, and saved the money from our jobs to make first and last month's rent in a new place. Once we located a second floor walk-up near Somerville's Davis Square, we swung into action.

One sparkling blue day in February, while Jon and I were both at work and Al was out of the house, Carolyn and Collette put the Mac Plus in its little carrying case, stuck it in the car trunk, and drove away from the Alston-Brighton apartment for good. Jon and I broke the news to Al. He was off the masthead. His warlock friend Daemon put a curse on us. For all I know, it worked.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

The Road to Street

By the mid-eighties, my transformation into a full-blown student radical was complete. In my junior year, I parleyed my new typesetting skills into starting a monthly leftist newspaper called critical times. Despite our objections to capitalism, an Urban Planning grad student who worked at Amherst's radical bookstore sold enough ads to pay the printer. About a half dozen of us from the Radical Student Union wrote and collectively edited the articles. Each issue, I'd write a little introductory statement that commented on the issues of the day. After six years of Reagan, we were all half-crazed.

I remember standing on the second floor balcony of the Student Union Building, just outside of the RSU, watching the stack of our first issue that sat on the floor below. Occasionally, someone would wander over and pick one up. Each time, I considered it a blow for freedom.

It was almost noon, on January 28, 1986. A crowd gathered in front of the television that was always on in the lobby. The space shuttle Challenger had blown out into a fat plume of white smoke and shrapnel etched across a brilliant blue sky. The image played again and again.

In my crowd, however, the Challenger disaster paled when compared to the multiple crises for which we all felt personally responsible. The contra war and the counter-insurgency in El Salvador led the list. Most of my friends had been to Central America on various language school junkets, and their sense of outrage at what they'd seen was deep and raw.

I was far too poor for lefty tourism. Tuition was paid by student loans and Pell Grants and whatever other assistance I could scrape together, and I lived on the 15-20 hours a week I worked at the communications office typesetting materials for student organizations. Summers, I worked writing summaries of evaluations for the student published course guide. This was a great job in that it paid full-time and didn't require me to actually show up. So long as the work got done, that was all that mattered. I was a fast writer.

To say I lived frugally was an understatement. I ate sparingly, rode a bike or walked for transportation, lived collectively, and spent most of my money on books. I'd go on long rides through the rolling hills of Belchertown almost daily. There was a series of girlfriends, but, needless to say, none of these expected me to have money. They were another window into the world of the middle-class. I learned to fit in.

Kathleen, in my sophomore year, took me to her parent's house in Newton for Christmas. They lived in a modern A-frame with a 30 foot living room ceiling. It was my first introduction to a world of relative affluence. Her father, a blustery but witty academic, was unlike anyone I had ever met. Her brother went to art school, and was every inch the type. I felt shy and inferior and said little.

Later on, there were others. I dated several girls from Smith who were attracted to the working-class bad boy from UMass. One took me to their dining hall, and I was astonished by the white linen and crystal and their quaint ritual of tapping a fork to the rim of a wine glass when announcements were made.

I somehow managed to maintain around a 3.0 or so while engaged in a whirlwind of student activism. The highpoint was the takeover of the Whitmore Administration Building. The student government types were protesting a proposed tuition hike, and the student radicals wanted divestment from South Africa. We formed a coalition, stormed the Presidents office, and refused to leave.

They left us there. For nearly a week. Chancellor Joe Duffy — a self-proclaimed Marxist with a perma-grin affixed to his face — even brought us hamburgers from McDonalds. We scoffed at this blatant attempt at cooptation as we greedily gobbled them down.

Within a day, due largely to the media attention we received, the South Africa issue became the driving force behind the protest. It was during this occupation — as I ran around with a bullhorn by day and xeroxed thousands of leaflets by night on the University's copy machines — that learned I was a leader. As mainstream liberals and student radicals sat in an enormous circle in the lobby at night and worked out strategy by consensus, I was often able to bring the sides together. I found people listened to me, and nodded agreement when I spoke. This was a new experience.

The Whitmore occupation ended in a compromise that allowed us to claim victory. As we marched out together, I was a different person from the kid who had entered several days before. I was an organizer, and knew what I wanted to do with my life.

The rest of my time at UMass sped by. In my junior year, I moved from the house on Main street to another group house in a more rural part of Amherst. Our collective had allowed a lip stick lesbian couple to move in, and their mainstream tastes in radio and television were more than I could handle. My new housemates were two deadheads and a biology grad student with a biking obsession. They were, in comparison to the leftists on Main Street, close to normal.

There were several more arrests over South Africa, nuclear disarmament, and Central America, but by the time the big CIA-off Campus campaign came around in 1986-87, with Abbie Hoffman and Amy Carter drawing the world's media to UMass, I'd pulled back from the RSU to focus on just doing the newspaper. For the past several years, I'd neglected my coursework in favor of full-time student radicalism, and for my last year I thought I'd actually try and learn something.

This was a little like leaving a cult. My circle of RSU friends, even though I still led the critical times collective, felt betrayed by my withdrawal. It was a frenzied year of activism, with high-profile arrests and a media trial in Northampton, and they couldn't understand why I sat it out. I was still figuring out who I was, and in pulling back, I think, sought a bit more balance and maybe a little more authenticity.

It was during this time that I met Carolyn, who in time would become my wife. We had known each other to say hello for several years. She was involved in Peacemakers, an anti-nuclear group who's main program seemed to consist of driving to Groton, CT, to get arrested at each new Trident submarine launch, and moved in different but overlapping circles from my own. We were both in a class on the Spanish Civil War that was taught at Smith and Hampshire, and she had a car. She drove, and we began talking.

In the fall of my senior year, I moved again from the rural group house to an even more normal student apartment near campus and across the street from several sororities. By the time Carolyn graduated in December of '86, we were spending a lot of time together. I had one semester left, and with Carolyn out of school, my own attendance became extremely spotty.

When I was less than a month from graduation, it dawned that flunking one course might mean not getting my degree. I crammed for three weeks, passed everything, and graduated. For years after, I would have a recurring dream about flunking out of college because I was unable to find my classes.

South African poet and revolutionary Dennis Brutus spoke at the commencement. We leafleted attendees with pro-divestment fliers designed to look like programs. I sat in the bleachers for the ceremony.

I lived in a cheap room at a Boston University frat house that summer while Carolyn toured Europe on no money with a friend. Everything I owned fit easily into her car. We drove to Boston during a thunderstorm, and spent a few days together at her Dad's house in Westford before we said goodbye until the end of August. By the time she returned, I had found my way to Street Magazine, and a new chapter was beginning.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

The Legend of Mister Butch

I first heard that Mister Butch died when I was at the street paper conference in Portland last weekend. He was fifty-six, and perhaps the most famous homeless person in Boston. I didn't know him well when I was there, although Street Magazine, the first paper I edited after college, did a story on him in 1987. With his wild dreds, crazy guitar, and ad-libbed street poetry, he was irresistible to us.

It's not every homeless guy who has an entry on Wikipedia.

He bought a scooter, and apparently everyone who knew him was worried about it. On July 12, he drove the thing into a pole at 50 mph and was killed. When he died, 1,000 people came to his funeral parade in Alston-Brighton. A friend sent me the above clip from that.

It's something to look at when I need a reminder that people are good.

The clip inspired me to see what else I could find, and it turns out that Mister Butch had no shortage of documentarians on You Tube. I love the two-part Sleeping with Mister Butch documentary because it's about caring for someone — even when they're a pain in the ass — just because it's the right thing to do. We can all learn something about love and community from the tattooed woman.

I included the final clip, because it shows him with his guitar. He first became a street celebrity in the 70s, playing chords on his open tuned electric guitar with one finger. Sometimes, attitude is everything.

Sleeping With Mister Butch (Part One)


Sleeping With Mister Butch (Part Two)


Mister Butch on Guitar

Rumors of Oz's Death are Greatly Exaggerated

Am I really going to write about my cat? He does such interesting things! What a rascal! Little Ozzy. Ozzy-wozzy-wozzy-wozzy!

Yesterday morning I thought he was dead, and I was so happy. Oz is 19. I've been impatiently waiting for him to die for years. My wife found our small black cat at a Boston pet shelter in 1988. This was when she had an apartment in Jamaica Plain, and I lived in poverty in Somerville, editing Street Magazine and occasionally temping for money.

I now think of this as my boiled potatoes and shoplifted cheese period.

Carolyn chose him because he was throwing himself against the walls of his cage when she visited the animal shelter. He seemed unusually desperate for adoption.

As it turns out, he was just stupid.

Oz is one of those pathetic animals who was removed from his mother too early and never recovered. If you pet him, he'll immediately start kneading your legs with his claws. Or he'll climb until he can rub his little cat breath teeth along your ears. Some people might be into this, but I'm not. It's sweet, but really annoying.

We have compatibility issues. We're just looking for very different levels of intimacy.

Whatever patience we once had for Oz pretty much dried up once we had twins to deal with. Our good cat died two years ago, leaving Oz bereft and needier than ever. It was a downward spiral. He has become an annoying presence that requires feeding and frequent litter changes. The love is gone.

The day before he'd peed on our bed again. That was twice this week. We're getting really sick of washing the comforters. We put a litter box in our bedroom, but it didn't interest him. Carolyn was nearing the end of her patience. I was ready to kill him by around the fifth time, but my wife, she's a Quaker, and has more respect for life than I.

But this time, even she was done. Oz is old, frail, and senile. I said I'd investigate the logistics of legitimately offing the cat.

I should say that our children love him, and abusively stalk him every chance they get. They're four. He used to outrun them, but he's slowed down and they've sped up.

His new found popularity has been a big lifestyle change for him. He reluctantly lets himself be petted, usually because he's been pinned to the ground. We intervene on his behalf when we can.

Another of his endearing traits is his habit of waiting outside our bedroom in the morning and filling the air with piercing cries as we awake. This generally wakes the girls.

But this morning, there was no Oz. His litter, which was just changed was unused. He was gone.

Carolyn greeted me as I awoke with the news. Oz is dead. We have to find his body before it starts to smell. She had to get going. I dressed the girls, made their lunches, and made a determined search before getting them off to day care. No luck.

At work, I told everyone the good news. The fucking cat was finally dead! Hallelujah!

I asked advice on whether I should discuss death with the girls, or just never speak of him again. My co-workers sensibly suggested I go the more direct route. Adam even suggested that I enlist the girls in the search for the body. Brilliant.

"Now Twin A, B? Remember Oz? He's gone now, and he's not coming back. And somewhere in this house is his dead body, and we need to find it before he begins to smell. The first girl to find a dead cat gets a chocolate chip. Ready? Go!"

I told Adam that this is why his kid will need therapy.

I left work at four to go look for my dead cat. I looked everywhere. I cleaned out closets. I searched underneath furniture with a flashlight. I pulled the washer and dryer out and I looked behind the water heater. I looked through cabinets and drawers and on shelves. I was running out of options.

Carolyn got hamburgers for dinner so we could continue the search without interruption. As the girls ate their grilled cheeses, they started talking about how they'd been up petting Ozzy last night while we were asleep. Then, apparently, Twin A roared, and Oz ran away. Then there was something about playing in the backyard.

We looked at each other.

Carolyn went out back and found the cat underneath the shed. He was hungry, but perfectly OK.

Twins A&B had gotten up sometime after I went to bed at midnight, played with the cat, opened the back door and frolicked for awhile in the yard, and then put themselves back to bed, where we found them this morning sleeping like a pair of angels.

Now, after the happy reunion, it just seems wrong to have him killed. That must have only been number seven or eight.