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Storm wasn't as bad as predicted. Assuming that it's over. Maybe six inches of snow in all. Up to the Meezer's neck so that when she tried to leave the house this morning, she couldn't make her way through the white stuff. Ten minutes after I let her out, I heard her crying on the front porch and let her back in. She is very pissed off now. Somehow believes the snow is my fault. I suppose that's the kind of bad PR God has to put up with all the time.
I thought some more about the fateful ski expedition last night. And what came after the ski expedition. Details are all in one of my old paper diaries, rotting away in a storage facility somewhere in California.
My three companions were Ann H_______ and the Z________ brothers, Joe and Dan. Ann was tremendously interesting to me because she had more will power than any other human being I'd ever met in my entire life. She and Joe were doctors; Dan was kind of a fuckup. I was in nursing school.
It was on this trip that Joe decided to marry Ann. Good little Catholic Detroit girl that Ann was, despite the counterculture veneer, this was something Ann had been working toward for a long time.
It was also on this ill-fated trip that I first came nose to nose with a really unfortunate tendency of mine: I can't tell other people what to do. I can suggest courses of action – usually as jokes, oddly enough – but I can't stipulate courses of action. Even when I'm absolutely right, which actually is a great deal of the time. It's like some kind of magic curse.
When the snow began to fall out of nowhere, I said to Joe – de facto expedition leader – "The Ahwahnee does killer Irish coffees. We should turn back now."
"Patty wants to wimp!" he laughed. "We're like an hour away from Ostrander and the ski hut! At most! It would take three hours to get back!"
"Not so long," I said. "We've skied that part of the trail before. We'll recognize it. But we're not going to recognize the parts coming up –"
"Stop whining," Joe said. He said it good-humoredly, but yes, he used the word "whine."
Did I mention Joe was macho? Joe was very, very macho.
For a couple of years after we got lost in the snow, we would meet up regularly on January 4th the anniversary of our rescue. We had a nickname for the whole experience, but I can't remember it now. Ann and Joe got married. Ann had a baby. Then Ann went through premature menopause. She desperately wanted another baby. She kind of went nutty, wanting another baby.
Joe began to fuck around. He was extremely good looking, and he was a surgeon.
Ann succeeded in having her second baby – I told you she had more concentrated will power than any other human being I've ever met, before or since. She literally willed herself to conceive. Joe supplied the sperm, of course.
Joe at that point was supplying the sperm to a great many other ladies in the Corte Madeira suburb where he and Ann lived. One of them, a nurse Joe was involved with, decided to commit suicide in an extremely novel way. She stole some fentanyl from the narcotics box, hooked herself up to an IV, went into a bathroom behind the nurse's lounge, laid down on the floor and died.
Did she leave a note? I can't remember. In my fictionalized version of the incident, of course she leaves a note. Not sure, though, exactly what that note should say.
The incident destroyed Ann and Joe's marriage. It didn't destroy Joe's career – which kind of argues against the note leaving, now that I think of it – but it certainly curtailed Joe's ambitions dramatically.
Ann and Joe subsequently divorced. Ann never remarried. I don't know if Joe remarried. I'm FB friends with Ann, but not with Joe. Joe and Ann still hang out together all the time – I suppose they're kind of like me and Ben – and I see FB photos of them from time to time. Amazing – Ann looks almost exactly the way she looked in the 1970s and the 1980s, and Joe looks unrecognizable. Very buff and slender -- he was always a physical fitness nut – but a complete stranger.
