I was refreshing myself on the names of some of the Dammert residents. I forgot one lady's name. Crikey. I want to call her Loretta but that's not right. I know Loretta. And I know this woman whose name I forgot. She's also an OG, been here since the beginning. Speaks to me sometimes. She has once or twice asked me, "Are you one of mine?" Lorraine? No, not quite. I sat in the Bird Room one time and listened to her try to get a few other ladies interested in making a K-Mart run. "The prices are very reasonable," she said. "It's just down the road." Actually, there did used to be a K-Mart just down the road.

More than once this woman has insisted that I must be in school. "So you're in school, then?" she'd say. And I'd say no, I'm past that. "Really?" she would say, raising an eyebrow, giving me a very skeptical look. She is the only person who has ever labeled me as being "successful." And she has told me that I "look good." Early on she stopped me and asked me, "Do you know who I am?" I said no. "Well, you will," she said, "and watch out because they'll try to get you in on one of their schemes." Now I cannot remember her name and that vexes me.*

The storms of life. An excellent Randy Travis album. And a way to describe what the last few years have felt like. I know I've got it pretty good. But I'm still just a tumbleweed. Driftwood. A passing satellite. Whatever that was that flew over us at camp on the last night outside Tijuana, a chunk of space junk falling out of orbit. Smoking, burning, succumbing to gravity, soon to be wreckage...