Tweet.

Somehow, I remember this as the definitive picture of Linda in the late 60's. Its hard to tell if she closed her eyes as I snapped the shot, but it really doesn't matter. One of our three black Siamese-mix cats is lurking lower left, soaking up a little winter sun. I don't remember the names of all the cats, but they were really cool, two males and a female, all "fixed." Claude was probably my favorite, he would ride around the house draped across my shoulders. Well, maybe it was Greg that did that. Later a big white male adopted us, Sydney. Cat hair everywhere. I rigged an exhaust fan in a closet with the cat box so sanitation was tolerable.

We had a sulfur-breasted toucan for a long time. I can tell you what to do if you are walking through a doorway just as a big bird is flying the other way. You stand still and the bird will tuck in his wings and miss you by inches. If you move, the bird can't correct fast enough and you may collide, which neither of you really want. The toucan and the cats? During the day no sane cat would mess with an aggressive bird with a sharp, six-inch bill. The toucan was boss as long as the lights were on. At night, when the bird couldn't see, we had to keep him locked up because the cats were always out for nocturnal revenge.

Tweet. I think she got that nickname in high school because she had a parakeet. Only the really old friends called her that. A lot of them are dead now. Bobby Mareck, gentle soul, became Dr. Mareck before he went. Jimmy Lambert had ALS so he's probably gone. His brother Bobby, that beautiful butterfly? I don't know. Did the Nadolsky brothers survive? Tommy moved to SF sometime before we learned about AIDS, so I think he's gone. Alvin was cranky enough to have survived, but I don't know. Early on, the remains of one of Tweet's high-school classmates turned up in a burned-out house a few miles away, smack freak. I never met him. Lots of craziness in those days. Greg, who lived with us for a while, finally moved in with his mother. We were fellow college classmates, scholarship and honors program dropouts. Robert Barth, who I grew up with, is an incredibly bright guy, but pretty dysfunctional too. Lots of bright people somehow jumped the track. Charles Mintzlaff, a college roommate, got his masters in English, spent a year in Africa, came back and went through a machinist apprenticeship. He's still cutting metal, for all I know. I think he finds machining a lot more satisfying, but he sure got there by a circuitous route. Strange careers, mine too. I can see other faces, their names just escape me.

I have concluded that the psycho-pharmaceutical revolution we experienced in the 60's was not the one we needed.

Tweet and I had the toucan for maybe eight years. It turned out he needed both of us, though. When we broke up, the bird died within a few months.