In 1948 according to the mother assigned him for this lifetime, it was in the midst of cultural upheaval, riches and possibilities beyond the dreams of kings for millennia in the past. This mother claimed he had enjoyed those entitlements in other lives, but he had no such recollections and was hard pressed to manage the life he had, despite any advantage or entitlement of class.

An obstetrician had given the baby a desultory slap on the bottom and passed him to a nurse who immediately placed him in a bassinet in a room with other newborns. Later that day the mother had roused from her barbiturate haze and rang for a nurse. She announced that the baby was coming now and the nurse informed her she’d delivered a son several hours ago. She would tell the story this way for years.

Not long after the birth the mother contracted with a woman in Canada asking for an astrological chart to be drawn, seeking a determination and distillation of the wisdom to be had from the psychics, sages and wise men, what was to be the life design of this child? And so she was rewarded with a text declaiming all she wished to know.

In part the report read: The subject has a chart of such tremendous scope that one wonders how all of it can be crowded into one lifetime. In spite of a very high emotional tendency, there are all the mechanisms necessary to keep it within good and useful bounds. Pluto in conjunction with the Moon gives a brilliant, mystical, impulsive and ingenious temperament which makes him take many chances which he usually wins because he has calculated the risks.

He has a very powerful and unique teaching gift-for lack of a better word, one might say it is an “affectionate” teaching gift, - always demonstrative and frank, always a student, and always interested in relating the parts to the whole. Art, Science, Philosophy, etc. are connected fields to him, and the gates to these fields are open to him. There is every indication that in seeking the riddle of life, and the answer to it, he carries the ball a full lap toward the goal.

The baby was destined to be obsessed with beauty as well as the cold truths and realities that surrounded him despite the passions and prejudices of his superiors; he was to find passion among many aspects of life and to not know wise men or renown until late in life. From the time he was a small child he had known spirits as a secret he would not share despite the fascinations of the mother assigned for this lifetime. She was always keen to know of anything that might have been learned from beyond the great unknown.

In the hills above the town, which sat near the ocean, and home to a large university, there were gardens where deer wandered freely. Among the gardens were many cats, skunks and possums along with all manner of other small furry creatures. The cats moved like shadows that wandered freely between the homes and made note of goings on that others did not observe. It was in this world that the fox ruled his domain and though the other creatures gave him wide berth, he gave them no trouble for he had more important matters of concern.

The Siamese cats that lived next door to each other three in a row eventually would gather to trade stories about their respective domiciles and laconically recount the foibles and idiosyncrasies of those who lived there and fed them.

They would gather at the gold fish pond that was in one of the larger gardens and gaze at the lily pads and dragon flies that hovered there on a summer afternoon, there they would recount which lonely widow was drinking herself into a fog nightly and which professor known for brilliant rhetoric all but beat his children into submission, demanding perfect grades without cease.

They traveled, he was with the mother and sister and they were in the air and on the land, sea and on the land once more to find themselves in Egypt of the Pharaohs in our modern times, cacophonous, odoriferous and exotic; and so unlike what he had known that he was distracted for a time.

He didn't know then how much he missed the father, the best he could hope to have, sympathetic, whimsical, creative and original, curious and vulnerable, a man of talents, passions, and love but with as many honest wounds and fears as the soul reported on herein. It would be many years before he could see clearly how at times he had out of necessity idealized the father, but they would always understand each other more clearly than anyone else.

The ship was Greek with a passenger list laden with Greek nationals, heading home for a visit from their new homes in The States. They were laden with the luxuries of the west, clock radios, percolators and sanitary napkins. They had been at sea several days adjusting to the second class cabin lower in the ship. The dining room had two bottles of wine on each table and the red was called Retsina. At night, after the crew had cleaned up there would be parties, boisterous and musical with bouzoukis and dancing and singing. They sat on the sidelines and watched in delight, the spectacle of the cultural pride being displayed so unselfconsciously. It would imprint in his mind for the rest of his life.

And for some unknown reason the ships bursar needed to see her travel documents a few days out at sea. She presented what she had, passports, vaccination records and by strange chance an impressive letter of introduction from the governor of the fabled State of California.

She had come by this in a curious manner, through a friend, a psychic, who was friends with the governor’s wife. It also turned out that the sisters of the Mayor of San Francisco were on board and magically they were relocated to a first class cabin with a private shower. Now you could look out the port hole while showering and look at the ocean instead of the dull green water below. And of course now they ate in the first class dining room and could attend the first class party, but there was a surprise. The parties were hideously dull, tuxedoed men and gowned women sipping champagne and no visible sign of life or culture. They returned to the parties on the lower deck after that.

Cairo was a wonder, he'd later learn of a report of his time spent in ancient London, The source, was full of shadows, so often he could not discern hope from wish or intuition from fear, dread and confusion over what was prudent and who or what he should trust.

The woman he knew as the mother swept them through the streets and market places, making notes , taking photographs, concerned much with the lives she'd lived before and lost within the passion to know again, the truth about which queen she might have been, in which dynasty she might have reigned and who her lovers might have been. They saw tombs and monuments, the awesome face and pendulous mouth of Akenaton hovering in the air, carved in stone, perched, a fragment from another time, a memory in a museum. They wandered in a trance down the corridors in the cave of of The Serapeum with the colossal sarcophagi of Apis The Sacred Bull. They made their way to Upper Egypt to the Temple of Karnak and the tomb of Tutankhamen. She’d heard a rumor that a passage way may exist between the great pyramid at Giza and the Sphinx, having been told by one of her guides in this lifetime that his father had reported to him such things about ages past in Egypt, Atlantis and written in the Akashic Records, privileged information only accessed by those possessed of the sight.

They stayed in the pensione of an Italian family from Alexandria who took kindly to them and made them one of their own. They sat at a long table covered with white cloths seated with other guests, served by dark skinned men wearing white galabyas wearing a red fez on their heads. The mother, always at the head, the sister and he faced each other and he looked with longing curiosity at an elderly English gentleman named Archibald Cameron Creswell who was a relic of the time when England had influenced Egypt, an authority on Islamic architecture and though the boy knew nothing of that he was fascinated with his Englishness, formality and an imagined kindliness. The man gave him a partial box of chocolates as a gift and allowed his photograph to be taken by the mother of the boy.

In the dusty streets meat hung from hooks in front of butchers shops, painted purple with potassium permanganate to ward off flies, they wandered in villages through the Nile delta, rode camels and horses in the desert near the pyramids sometimes at night. They ate baklava, Turkish Delight. Tahini, halava and ayeesh baladi, he thought the best bread in the world. They saw barefoot children and adults alike with trachoma wearing rags and an ancient water moving machine called Archimedes Screw. Sometimes the mother would take the boy for a haircut in a shop with a continuous sheet of water running over the front window to keep it cool inside. Later they would go to the English language bookstore and he and the sister would pick out something to share. The sister would finish whatever it was in a day and he would take a week to read it through, but then they’d have something to talk about together.

This mother was taking notes, an assignment from the ambassador from Egypt to their country on another continent and on a coast in a distant time zone. She made friends with a woman who he later wondered if for all he knew was a secret operative for the government, an American woman, raised in India with an English accent and stationed by the Navy to the Embassy in Garden City, near where they stayed in Cairo. How could he know then what kind of fury she would inspire in him a decade or more later?

They had not been in Cairo long when it occurred to the boy that there would not be Thanksgiving celebrated and no Christmas or carols as he knew the holiday, only the lesser celebration of the Coptic people who celebrated on the twelfth day of Christmas. He thought of On the Twelfth Day of Christmas my true love gave to me… He didn’t really mind. It was just different.

Another, a professor they met there, who later came to their town to teach at the University brought with him what his mother called a catamite, but to the boy he looked for all the world like a youngish man with green eye shadow. Another woman, an American ex-patriot, paralyzed on one side played the piano with one hand and was carried in a sedan chair by servants to sit in the shade of trees by her villa near the pyramids at Giza, and she too sought authority from the lands beyond the twilight.

A man with very dark skin befriended them, he stayed at the same pensione and was in the United Nations military force, they were attending to some disturbance in Gaza at the time. He was from India and he adored the family of three that he saw. He was desperate to lavish affection on the children and they were not so sure how they felt. The mother pitied him because he’d shown her a photograph of himself with his family when he was growing up and he was the only one with skin that was so dark. This kind of information always confused the boy as it seemed so unrelated to the world he experienced.

The longer they stayed, the less the child cared if they ever left again for he was insulated and distracted from the pain left behind. His world was here now and he'd all but forgotten his grandmother or his cat and the unusual house in the town that he called home. But they must leave and he and the sister cried with sorrow on the slow train to Alexandria and he only cared that he might see the father again however briefly. One more ship was not a novelty anymore and there would still be another yet. And after the ship a train from Naples to Rome where they wandered among ruins for days and took another train to Florence where the mother wanted to stay in a special pensione she had read about in a book by EM Forster. There they wandered among the palaces and tombs of the Medici and in the galleries filled with famous art and of course the David of Michelangelo. And then another train to London and finally after days the last ship, The famous luxury liner The Queen Mary, but in third class a bargain with a swimming pool on the choppy seas of the north Atlantic in April. Later he thought it eerie that it had been the same route, company and time of year the Titanic had gone down.

He didn't know how he remembered but he did that he had waded in a tide pool near rocky beaches and taken a few small steps and fell face first into the cold sea water and cried his heart out with shock and fear. He did not have far to fall for he was not yet three but the father swept him up into his arms and took his wet shirt off and gave him his own striped blue and white tee shirt to wear and he was happy and smiled again. This was the time for him to bask in the sacred field of affection and patience that would carry him far into times of unexpected trials.

Not long after this time they were living in a small apartment near the university on whose lawns and glades he played like they were his own. The sister wore glasses, long braids and braces on her teeth, voraciously consuming one book after another and his head was filled with story book dreams and music.

He loved little more than to play with his wooden train set and wind up the Victrola phonograph the father gave to him to play one little record after the next, prancing alone, his head filled with Skip to My Lu, Lavender Blue, Hey dilly dilly and Old Mac Donald, Three Blind Mice and The Big Rock Candy Mountain.

How was he to know then that the ominous mountain made of candy was but a lure for little boys like him to be taken by vagrant men to the hobo camps and there to be their slaves for begging, cooking and whatever those men desired?

This was then an almost bucolic time for them in the town called Berkeley and nestled between the waters of San Francisco Bay and the hills that rose behind the town had then an unimaginable future of upheaval and change, but then didn’t everyone? Their street was lined with Sycamore trees with big leaves and at times he dreamed he was so small he could float on one in the rainwater that ran in the gutter between the sidewalk and the street and have adventures by himself.

There were so many worlds then, so many faces hovered in the child's field of view and yet he did not know what they represented then, for he was only consumed with his wooden blocks the toy train and the moon that rose over the hills above the Radiation Laboratory, it's lights on all night up on the hill where they were inventing bombs. His mother had him sing 'I see the moon and the moon sees me, the moon sees the one I long to see...' and say his prayers 'Our father who art in heaven', but the only father that mattered to him was the one that sat him on his lap and let him watch while he drew pictures in a book of blank pages.

Sometimes while alone the boy would explore the neighborhood and play in the creek that ran out of the hills and down under some of the streets before disappearing into a concrete tunnel beneath an apartment building. As he did at other times in the park and with friends he would make little dams and route the water into pools of his creation. The summer he was four (or was it five?) he ventured into the tunnel alone to see where it would lead. There seemed to be sufficient light as periodically he would pass by the bottom of a grating covered drain from a street corner which gave enough illumination for him to see by. The tunnel ran on and on gently downhill and presently he realized he was beneath a manhole cover in the middle of an intersection with many cars passing over head. He climbed up the ladder to see what he could and peeking through the ventilation holes in the metal plate could see that he was in fact in the middle of the down town business district. He found it thrilling to have discovered this space entirely on his own and he kept the secret as his own. Quickly he returned to the place he had entered and resumed playing on the lawn in front of the apartment building.

When still in diapers but standing he’d hummed the melodies of composers the parents played on large black disks on a phonograph and they praised him. Later when they were alone the mother would curse him for not being the one he was supposed to be, and swear that she was glad she had banished that man forever and bolts of hatred lightening came from her eyes and shot him through the heart and he did not know why.

In those years he and the sister were close as small children in stressful circumstance might be and they had games together and sang together and he looked up to her adoringly, being the younger sibling who wanted only to please.

He did not know that it was not safe there, that with the mother’s charms and ways, the sister and her cold eyes behind glasses who barely tolerated his inquisitive longing to belong, to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was loved. And in his naïveté and ignorance he happily played whatever game she suggested and they made little bowls of plasticine clay and put dabs of the ground green salad the mother made and placed them on the window sill for the fairies. In time the boy would come to understand that he had to protect his own world from assault and ridicule but it would be a long and emotionally expensive education.

He played with another little boy and they were barely three feet tall and wanted to play on the lawn across the busy street. No one was watching and they ran across and played on the velvety grass in front of the house where the boisterous college boys sang and shouted and parked their loud cars. Those older boys were scary and noisy at times but part of the fabric of this college town world, as much as milk men and their trucks and the ice man that came every other day to deliver blocks of ice and give a lonely child a piece as big as a cake to suck on when the weather was hot.

When he was alone and listening to music the spirits would descend into his soul without bidding and he found himself with trusted friends.

There were bells that chimed the hour and bells in the morning and evening that sounded glorious music that could be heard across the hills and through the trees when the air was still. He heard those bells deep inside long after, when he was most troubled or lost and the fox was unable to reach him, the bells would sound lullaby for him and he would thank the gods he’d been born to hear them ring. In later years he would run into a girl he knew slightly who was musical and she would invite him to come up in the tower with her while she played the carillon, pumping with wooden levers attached to cables that moved the bells and the clanging of the massive bronze bells striking each note, that could sometimes be heard for miles across the hills shrouded with trees and fog. It was so extraordinary, hearing a piece of Bach, a Christmas carol in December, a song popular long ago and much more that he could not put it into so many words the sense of enchantment that he felt.

From the time he had been smallest the child had spirits within, a secret world of his own that instinctively he must not share. When alone these musical guardians of his heart would spontaneously descend and at these times he felt he was not alone but with his most trusted friends. He could not recall the time when first they came to him and he knew that they were not the same spirits that the mother sought to suborn in her readings of the ascended masters esoteric teachings.

They came to him and brought him joy out of the air around, flowing to his mind from a guitar, something by Stephen Foster or a record of Tex Ritter or Burl Ives. Later it would be an oboe d’amore or a tinkling music box like hammerklavier and the effervescent rococo sparkling notes would take him ecstatically dancing on the summer seaside beaches of his mind, pirouetting and prancing in the sunshine unselfconscious and exuberant with delight in the California sunshine. This was a California not yet seen as a place to be obsessed over with a resentful curiosity, a home of fools and genius to be derided, despised, adored and envied, but in this world only a lovely gentle Mediterranean like land of soft fogs and wonderful food and wine. It had not quite become discovered on the national banquette of dream time fads and notoriety. It was more naïve and conservative than it’s eventual mythology might imply.

On another day he impulsively told the mother, “I hope I don’t go out in the street and get hit by a car today”. And she’d replied, “I hope you don’t too, because if you do I will spank your bare bottom.” And then he’d gone out to play. And on that strange day he and his playmate had the idea to play on that lawn again and being that they were alone they ran from between parked cars and as the other boy reached the far curb he saw the car coming up hard and fast and he was paralyzed with fear and numb with shock and breathless. The father later said the man told him he flew ten feet and landed on his head. He guessed it hurt because he remembered how he cried and when he did there were people and an ambulance and forever after the mother said, he could not be badly hurt because when she heard him cry, from upstairs in the back where the apartment was, while she consulted her Tarot cards and Ouiga Board for instructions from beyond, she knew he could not be badly hurt to cry so loud, and so she would tell the story for years to come.

They said he was lucky to escape with just a black eye and a lump on the head and he was dressed as as an Indian with war paint for Halloween that year. It would be decades before he could understand the horrors inflicted on those he played at in a child’s game called Cowboys and Indians, a game but a remnant of the imagined romance of a west that existed only in movies and he didn’t even know that yet.

For a long time after this the father kept him near, in his studio and had him sit very still while he drew or painted him sometimes clothed and sometimes nude, like the women he hired to come and pose for him from The Models Guild. Within those studios was a heaven to the child, filled with the fragrances of oil paint, linseed oil and turpentine and the pot bellied stove that smelled of coal and the safe warmth and love of a father.

He was past sixteen when he took the bus three thousand miles, to spend nearly two weeks with the father, seeing him for the first time in four years. The grandmother on the fathers side had paid his passage to visit since the mother was disinclined. Descending the bus he saw the father from above with dark curly hair now turning salt and pepper gray, his trademark mustache, lanky build and sparkling eyes. His clothes were stained with paint, patched sometimes whimsically in odd colors and where ever he was the boy felt safe and at home with the father, and he was OK for a little while. That winter visit he bought him a corduroy suit in the Norfolk style at a store on Union Square near Fourteenth Street, his suit just like the dads but paler a light brown color of a fawn contrasted with the father’s which was the color of dark chocolates.

He was taken to a small restaurant serving only dairy products where they ate corkscrew noodles and cottage cheese and sat on stools at the counter drinking celery soda, later the father and his new wife took him to a place in a cellar where they had things to drink and there was a machine, a sort of juke box one might say, that showed a movie of people singing the song, and he danced with his step mother shyly. He wandered the streets and browsed the book stores, longing to be able to go to clubs and hear music that to him was already legendary and he wished that he lived there too. And then he went on the bus three thousand miles back home reading an adult magazine but only for the stories.

The father’s new wife was unfailingly kind to him and he appreciated her. Being still mostly a child in his mind despite all he had already seen and known he did not always think to express himself as graciously as he might, but in time he learned as all children must.

This woman, acting as his mother, was not to be trifled with and she knew how to get what she wanted, she could make a sudden move that could send him, spinning off with just a haughty glare, emotionally blinded into the weeds at the edge of her mind, which sometimes seemed to him the same as the edge of the world over which he might fall. Sometimes what she wanted was more than his world could bear but he did not know that then.

He needed the fox to keep him going in the town where he was born and when he traveled the fox stayed home and took care of the gardens, kept the cats in check and tried to make sure the dark Queen did not get out of hand.

His small childhood role was filled idyllically with frequent visits to the children's room at the Public Library. The shelves of his sister shared bedroom were filled with picture books with names like Madeline and Curious George, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, , New Worlds For Nellie, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Beezus and Ramona, and of course always and forever Good Night Moon.

There was a rhythm orchestra in kindergarten where the teacher played selections from Hayden’s Surprise Symphony on the piano and the music class before that even and his sister played the cello and he started the violin when he was eight because he loved a children's story about Hayden learning the violin. He could play by ear by the time he was ten but got lazy about reading notes and by junior high they wouldn't let him play in the orchestra any more, he had to quit and no one seemed to care.

He didn’t know that decades would pass before he would pick up the instrument again and learn to play by ear again, and then he’d have acquired a vast repertoire of vernacular melodies and songs but first he’d have to buy instruments for children that he loved.

One day when he was twelve the mother directed him to the library that he loved, to get a book on masks and encouraged him to begin to make his own. As he was not yet thirteen he complied thinking it would be an interesting experiment. So he began with the ones he knew best, Comedy and Tragedy as the Greeks had passed down. And then a witch, the father he longed for and more came until he was satiated for a while but the seed was planted and now the fox pricked up his ears for something new was going on.

Books were the work of lesser gods in their world and there were book filled shelves flanking the fireplace and in upstairs rooms as well. When he was very small the mother and father at different times worked in libraries and bookstores and while there the mother fell in love with a book and her love affair with the book took up more room inside her than there was space to include the father, and really the boy as well, but he didn't know that then. The book, banned by the Catholic Church the mother said with amusement, was called There Is a River about a psychic and she was so consumed she wrote a letter to the publisher and the author Tom, himself answered.

Tom came to visit them one day, while they lived in the apartment, he came with his friend Hugh who had been his roommate at college and Tom had written the book about Hugh's father, Edgar, known then as the sleeping prophet and a famous psychic. It was because of these people that he later found himself in Egypt, and other worlds. When they came and visited they took a picture of him sitting there, on Tom’s lap, where he sat in his wheel chair and his sister sat next to them. The child thought Tom was a very nice man, but he was little more than four at the time.

The parents bought an old green car with a convertible top that had been made before the war and there were times when if they stopped too fast the passenger door would fly open and the drivers learned to always reach their arm across the passenger to make sure they didn’t also get away. There were no seat belts in those days.

Before the road became so uneven the father took him places to see things he liked and things he thought the child might like. On an outing far across the city, to almost it seemed the end of the world he knew they went to a park with a museum to look at paintings and suits of armor and then to a building steep as stairs rambling down a cliff. Outside the foggy ocean crashed, gulls screamed and sea lions roared. Inside were curios, strange little coin operated machines and glass cases with peculiar objects. An amusement park made of tooth picks, a machine that played a violin and best of all the house hold furniture of the famous circus act Tom Thumb, as diminutive almost as a dolls. There was no end to the fascinations to be found here, machines that showed huge rolls of cards in quick succession emulating movement amongst the images, and even an Egyptian mummy. Already that was not so strange to him for the mother had shown him those and much more in books. What mattered more than anything beyond anything at all was just being shown something amusing or beautiful to be shared with a patience and love that never failed to delight

The father took him to the movies to see the French comedian Jacques Tati and he laughed so much and so loud that other people turned around to see who was having such a good time. After that sometimes he’d walk like the comic to amuse himself. Alone sometimes he’d make himself laugh recalling the comic movements and interactions he recalled from movies he’d seen.

There was a third grade teacher who had sheets of paper with purple words on them, mimeographed words of songs and they sang This Land is Your Land and Home on the Range, Down in the Valley and Shenandoah and he was in love with that music for evermore. At Christmas would be a pageant with the children performing in tableau scenes from the story about Jesus and of course they sang all the carols too and all the parents came to watch. It was a long time before he understood how many were not included in these traditions and why.

At home they’d always have a tree, one that almost touched the ceiling, and they’d take days to trim the tree with ornaments and lights and visit the mother’s parents who still lived in the little house where she had grown up down on the flatlands to the west. The boy noticed the lights on the grandparent’s tree had electrical cords covered in green cloth and that the lights looked like flames. That grandmother told him that when she was his age the tree would not appear until Christmas morning and would be covered with ornaments and paper chains and little clip on holders with lighted candles in them and it was an enchantment beyond all expectation to her.

At Easter they’d gather at the little bungalow where the grandparents remained and the grandfather would crush colored chalk and dust the blooms of Cala lilies with it to give them pastel tones not seen in nature. In the middle of the afternoon there would be a big meal with a freshly roasted ham and vegetables, black olives in a cut glass dish, tomato aspic and for dessert grandma’s special coffee flavored Spanish Cream.

Memories of comforts in the past, his grandparent’s house smelling of soap, the snug little bungalow his mother had come from in the flat lands of the town. He adored hearing them tell him of their lives when they were young and the world was a different world than he knew, one without electricity or automobiles or radio.

At Grandma’s house there was a dresser with a mirror and bedside tables that matched in the bedroom, and centered on the dresser top was a piece of lace and on top was an old box covered in pale yellow celluloid with the image of a man and woman fashionably dressed as on a promenade in the eighteenth century. In the box were things like a needle holder carved out of bone, carved to resemble a parasol, the top threaded to unscrew. There was a two and a half dollar gold piece given on her wedding day. In front of the box was arrayed a grooming set with matching Bakelite handles, a comb and brush, nail file, shoe horn and a button hook for lacing up now obsolete high button shoes. Down the back stairs was a cupboard with stoneware crocks Grandpa had used to make apricot brandy. Under the shelves of the Fiesta ware dishes he had mounted little wheels with hooks around the edges for cups to hang and revolve away from the front. Sitting with Grandpa at the kitchen table eating a doughnut in the morning was a treat never found at home.

Spending nights there because the mother “wanted a break” he would sleep in a big bed and waken in the morning to his grandmother setting a fire in the trash burner of the stove that looked like a wood fired range but which really ran on gas. She would make oatmeal in an enameled double boiler that was white with red trim and it would be as smooth and creamy as a milkshake, but warm and soothing with brown sugar and milk. When he was sick she made flax seed tea with lemon and honey and the cure for hiccups was a teaspoon full of white sugar. When her housework was done and she could sit down with her grandchild for a while she would lead him to the upright piano and they would sing the songs of her childhood, heart songs, parlor ballads and hymns. He never stopped appreciating that he had once lived in a world with such people, uncomplicated and loving.

He could not recall the first sprite to come to him and though it was not as those he read about in his mother’s books regarding the great psychics and masters, his spirits were friends there to raise him up and protect him from self annihilation in response to the tests of this lifetime.

No matter how hard he tried, he thought he didn't seem to do his best very well and for decades on end he was hard pressed to ever feel good or sure about himself. He struggled and tried, later he found sex, he found drugs and if he wouldn't get caught he'd steal, sometimes to do it because he didn't know why he was in need of excitement to fill an emptiness that he didn't even know was there. Like the man with no peripheral vision he was blind to that part of his field of view.

He had tried and tried and nothing he did seemed to please anyone. He worked, driving a taxi for over half a decade straight without a vacation or a break other than weekends, slaving to finish a college degree, feeding more children than he had planned for, trying to please a wife and be expected to have something left over for himself. He didn't even know he was entitled to that much for himself.

Was it the ghost of Rimbaud that laughed and lurked and whispered sarcastically, reminding him of his failures and for his sins from the sixteenth or was it seventeenth century? He still had debts to pay, money for sure, but he was never allowed to forget the past life debt that he must pay to the one who bewitched him and set him on his reckless course, stumbling on hot coals, spinning off kilter, confused and frequently foundering on the rocky shores of his life.

There was a time when he danced in the tide on a summer beach, filled with love for life and holding an instrument and singing to himself, a girl later reminded him of what he'd forgotten, he'd had moments of ecstasy, but they were past now and lost between the looming terrors of the imagined demands he must answer. The master that he was never allowed to forget held the keys to his damaged and lacking soul felt embarrassingly near and smirking with observations. The fox was always watching, trying to deflect the worst, making sure he didn’t fall. Sometimes he thought the boy felt his presence, but more often he saw he was distracted.

Later on a nearby seaside town was the site for the psychic’s conventions. The mother sent him for his own good she said. Instead he met a girl years younger and they played at sex amongst the sand dunes and beach grasses and smoked hashish and joked about the only reason they were there were the obsessions of a mother.

For the years of his childhood the conventions had been held at a hotel in the big city down town, the man he had known since early childhood was always kind if not condescending, asking him if he'd forgiven himself yet. He didn't know what he had done to forgive himself for and was confused so he said yes. As a child he would accompany the mother every year and wait patiently while she attended lectures, workshops and meetings and he'd talk to the psychics and clairvoyants, the seekers and the damned who came to find salvation that they had not yet found within their own searching souls.

He browsed and looked at books on dreams and crystals, Atlantis, reincarnation and book after book about the different aspects of the readings of the psychics and especially the great ones. He always dressed fastidiously the mother later said. He quietly absorbed what he saw and read and did not ask questions.

During his earlier childhood the father taught painting and drawing at the art school in the Spanish cloister buildings that nestled into a hill in the city. That building smelled of wonderful mysteries, which for him were very similar to the smells in his father’s studio. The boy felt delight at the privilege of being in adult company and being told he was precocious for his vocabulary at his age though he was not sure what that really meant. The father also taught nights at the Adult School where he was admired for what he did and he was a kind and gentle man, when he wasn't raging within himself, cursed and crushed before he'd started by his own demonic internal tormentor, a nattering man who never stopped talking, who didn't want his children to prosper beyond him, who wouldn't pay for higher education, who carved wood and won prizes, and was jealous of his children, his own father, a strangely tense and anxious man.

The father’s parents came to visit and being now a father himself now he wanted to share his work and brought them to his studio and his father refused to come inside. Brow beat by his nagging wife he sullenly entered and sat in silence and stared at the floor while the art was displayed in his son’s studio one by one but only his mother saw.

Not long after being hit by the car the mother met a woman near where they lived whose husband had once been famous for mapping the San Andreas fault among other deeds and had just died and left her with a boy a little younger than her own. It was said her husband had once been near as important as the Chancellor of the University where he taught. He had left her with three houses and a fortune. The widow’s name was Isabel and she liked this couple and their children and offered to sell them a house in a way they could afford and the mother said yes, but much of the needed cash had come as a loan from the fathers family and would not be repaid until decades later she had to all but beg.

In the twilight of the kitchen of his grandparents modest house where the mother had grown up he could see from the window the fires in the distance of the garbage dump as they burned the refuse every night. There was a vacant lot to the west of the little house that sat empty for years, affording them a view. Later the father told him a story that whenever the mother’s father saw men survey the lot to plan for the construction of a house he would stroll out and in his most genteel southern accent ask if they were planning to build. When they said yes, he would invariably say how sad he was that they wouldn't get to be neighbors as he had just sold his house to colored people. No house went up for decades. Finally one day not long before he died at the Veterans home a house was built and an African American family moved in that had won it in a contest. After his grandfathers death they treated his grandmother with the kind of generosity and kindness that only well bred people muster. It was from here that the mother had lusted to live in a house up in the hills and to look down on where she had come from.

With the move into the new house came an aura of grand entitlement with the mother throwing parties for her relatives and friends, and in a storm of hubris initiated special prayer meetings that were linked to her obsessions with reincarnation. In later years such interests became fads with more acceptance but in this time and her perverse relationship to the great psychics son and his biographer, her interests in the subject ran almost as deep as her concerns about appearing to be a nice lady that gave dinner parties.

Some women had bridge groups and some men played poker. She played at reincarnation and an illusive Search For God that would never have any resolution or bring any piece. For her it was only another accessory to demonstrate her cultural, intellectual and spiritual superiority. He obsessions meant nothing the the other members of the family other than being an intrusion into their routines.

The mother was not without good qualities or abilities, she loved and knew literature and about food she was particularly progressive. She shopped daily for fresh fruits and vegetables, made fresh juices and her own yogurt and bread, used brown rice and whole wheat flour. They’d visit the health food store that looked like a pharmacy with staff all dressed in white to sell you minerals and vitamins. She loved gardening as had her own mother and took pride in the flowers she grew. About these things she excelled.

The new house had a unique personality all of its own. Built on an earthquake fault by the famous seismologist to be earthquake and fireproof too, the solid masonry made it cool inside and the walls were tile and the ceilings cement that had been poured into forms of deeply grained wood. Pat’s father had built this last house when he was almost ninety years old.

After moving to the new house and Pat was now and forever his best friend they played as happily and innocently together as two little boys ever could. They roamed the gardens and empty lots of the not quite built up hills, they played at Cowboys and Indians, watched the Mickey Mouse Club and he tried to not be jealous when Pat's mother took him to Disneyland the year it opened. When they returned from Egypt Pat had a new stepfather, an affable and uncouth man and it was not long before they moved to a ranch near the mountains and he didn't see him as much.

The father worked hard to make the back yard beautiful and converted the garage into his painting studio, installing skylights and windows but before long it was all futile. There were fights between the parents as far back as he could recall and by the time they moved into the new house they intensified. There was yelling and things were broken. The father said they lived above their means, if not their social station in life. The latter was more important to the mother than the father. She had every intention of giving dinner parties with nice china and silverware, of inviting gracious people who held erudite conversations and would not think about her growing up in the flat lands amongst working people who spoke with accents and smelled of garlic. She was ashamed that her father whose grammar was homespun and listened to hillbilly music from his long ago horse farm in Kentucky. She dreamed of being a royal queen with mystical and magic powers in Egypt long ago. No one else cared.

In the moments when it seemed there was nothing wrong the family would go across the bridge to the nearly fabled city that sparkled like jewels at night and smelled like roasting coffee and spices when you arrived by day and they would eat in Chinatown, in a restaurant in a basement with old tables with marble tops.. They ate soup with porcelain spoons and the father taught the boy to eat with chopsticks by the time he was five. When company came from out of town they’d go to restaurants near where the fishing boats docked and eat sourdough bread until the food was served.

By the middle of the decade the days of marriage for these two were numbered and it was decided to drive from coast to coast across the country and show their children important historical sites and wonders. The family drove an old two door Chrysler east in the summer heat, the great cross country family road trip of the fifties but the plans of the two adults were different. The father intended to spend time in New York City and go to museums, galleries, the theater and visit with his sister fresh from music school and now living the sophisticated, cultured and intellectual life with her husband, an arranger and composer of music for radio jingles.

The mother intended to visit the metaphysical bookstore and to spend her time at the headquarters for the great psychics. The boy crossed the continent in the back seat of the old Chrysler reading comic books and singing with his sister but they weren't given any options and they spent the summer with the spiritual people and got sunburned on the beach until it was time for the father to rejoin them and embark upon the long drive home.

The following year was tense between the two adults. The sister hid in books and climbed trees to read, walked down the street reading, and hid behind the couch when there was company and read and read and the boy just tried to get along with everyone and was told he talked too much and got in the way.

Moving into the new house the goal had been for each to have their own bedroom and a fireplace in the living room for them all. For the next eight years he slept in the hallway outside the two bedrooms and nothing was ever said because he had no choice.

Before the now inevitable divorce they took the children out to dinner and a show but separately. The mother and sister saw the touring original cast of the new Broadway hit musical and the dad and he went to the movies. The mother and sister never stopped talking about the amazing show they'd seen. Of course they later saw the movie he had seen and he still felt left out.

At the end of the summer the father had a show to sell as many of his paintings as he could during the summer Art Fair in the street, and the boy hung around and played with Chinese kids his age and sat at the bar they said had come on a sailing ship from all the way around The Horn drinking a soft drink with the dad and stared at a person wearing a man’s suit who he was certain was a woman.

Then, what seemed sudden to the child, the father packed up a car, loaded all the paintings he could carry and said good bye and the child's world came to a screeching wrenching sudden turn but no one warned him and when he noticed he had to keep it to himself because everyone else was busy.

Left behind to gather dust and become as derelict and left behind as the child himself felt, were paintings, easels, tools and materials. The detritus and flotsam he could not take with him in his semi-forced exodus mingled with escape, his desperate and confused overly reactive dash from what later looking back the child could never blame him. He said he would have left too, if he could but he didn't know that then. They later both agreed it would have been better for both had he not gone so far away.