The following is the original letter I sent to my old friend Diana Mullin Taylor when she asked me what my life had been like since high school.
I left a lot of things out and simplified how some of the things came about, but it contains the most prevalent memories.
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HMMM, let me just hit some highlights, it’s been a long eventful life.
You might remember, during my junior year of High School my Mom kicked me out of the house. I stayed off and on with friends and with my ex-step dad Red Melton, and worked at McDonalds.
I was planning to join the Air Force when I graduated, but circumstances led me to drop out of school that summer and enlist. Big Bill and I went down to the recruiters office together, but his ASVAB scores weren’t high enough to get in the Air Force. We then went to the Army Recruiter and his scores were too low for them too, so we went to the Marines. They were willing to take him, but they didn’t have a medical program, and I wanted to work in the medical field, so he joined the Marines and I joined the Army to be a combat medic (91b).
I spent my first enlistment as a medic, and I re-enlisted as a MLRS crew member.(I wanted to stay a medic, but Uncle Sam said he needed people with good security clearances to work with the then new MLRS system. (You can see it in action at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brkrybAm8f4&NR=1 )
As a kid I always used to get these god awful pains in my left hip and down my leg. Mom would always tell me it was growing pains, so I thought everybody hurt like that.
In my second enlistment I injured my back, and found out the reason the vertebra I had injured had been weak was because I had a type of Spina Bifida, a birth defect.
I was shocked, but things starting making sense.
I had hunted, hiked, Wrestled, done gymnastics, Boxed, even jumped out of planes, with a birth defect that often cripples it’s victims. I was both tough and lucky, tough (or stubborn) enough to do the things I loved to do, and lucky it hadn’t caught up with me before that. Of course now I know that pain was sciatica..
My 2nd enlistment lasted less than 2 years.
During that 2nd enlistment I joined a group that re-enacts the middle ages called the S.C.A. (The Society For Creative Anachronisms at http://www.sca.org )
While at a S.C.A. event I met the love of my life, Laura.
When I got out of the Army the 2nd time my Mom was living just south of where I was stationed (Fort Stewart Georgia) in Jacksonville Florida, so I moved to Jacksonville.
Laura lived in Florida too and we would see each other at S.C.A . events. We became good friends, and I chased her for nearly five years before she took me seriously and married me. (She got a laugh from me putting it that way, she’s reading over my shoulder..)
I was too stubborn to apply for disability so I would work whatever type of job I could find until my health would eventually go downhill for a while and I would be jobless again.
As a result I learned to pick up skills quickly, and worked my diverse jobs over the years including semi-truck driver, nurses aid (I had to quit that one because I couldn’t deal with the old folks I befriended dieing), construction, concrete monument maker, vacuum cleaner salesman (rainbow), silversmith, mechanic, and jeweler.
Laura was out of work, and eventually we were reduced to living out of our car.
Both of us were adventurous, so we decided if we had to live out of our car we might as well live on the road. We were like leaves in the wind, traveling all over Florida and getting work where ever I could find it.
Eventually we fell in with the Rainbow People ( http://www.welcomehome.org/rainbow/index.html ), and lived on a commune called Yonder’s Farm near Macon Georgia for around a year. Eventually we made our way to Hot Springs Arkansas and I found work here designing jewelry at a live in co-op. I had been doing that for a few months when my Grandad died.
I never met my father, but my Grandad was one of the brightest lights in my life. I idolized and adored him. I always said if I grew up to be half the man my Grandad was I would be a good person. He taught me many things, one of the foremost was a love of animals and nature. (I still cry every time I think of him, I miss him so much!!)
When he died I was so torn up by it that I couldn’t think straight, let alone work and I lost my job and our place to live 2 days later.
The wilds have always been my refuge, so Laura and I went to one of the mountains I used to dig crystals on. I dug crystals all day and cried all night for a week. After the first week we were badly in need of a shower so we went into town, rented a hotel room and enjoyed civilization overnight and went back up the mountain the next day. At the end of the next week I was breaking down camp, getting ready to go back into town and clean up again when a NDN medicine man walked into my camp and told me Great Spirit had sent him up the mountain to get me. He was camped at a nearby lake, and we moved our camp to there too. (Not as nice as a hotel room, but at least we could clean up.)
I had studied with a medicine man for a while when I was living in Florida (I don’t know if you remember, but I’m mixed blood, Irish and Cherokee), and this man (Greg Beaverpipe) wanted me to help him build a sweat lodge for a man from his tribe who lived a few miles away from the mountain Greg had found me on.
We had some long talks as he counseled me in my grief, and I helped him build the lodge and helped to run the first few ceremonies as he taught the local man how to do things.
Afterwards he asked me to carry a message from him to a medicine man in Colorado, and I was hurting enough inside to try and run from my pain so we headed west.
When we left Hot Springs Laura and I had some of the jewelry I had made, a car trunk full of quartz crystals, a full tank of gas in our old Delta 88, and $20.
It was a wonderful and moving trip. We got to see the Dinosaur Footprint National Park, Pikes Peak, and many more absolutely beautiful places. I remember there was one campground with a creek running through it, and the bottom of the creek looked like it was lined with gold dust because of all the mica in the sand.
There was another campground right on top of the continental divide called The Angel of Shavano.
It was totally primitive camping, but it had a trout stream and a beaver pond, and a prairie dog town.
We would wake up in the morning and a mist would lay over the little valley, and wild Deer and Elk would just walk right through camp. It was so enchanting we spent a week there just enjoying the beauty.
We spent money when we had to, but tried to barter crystals and jewelry when we could. We were able to barter for lodging (at the Dinosaur Footprint National I traded them a quartz cluster for their museum in return for camping and access), gas (most notably at the last chance gas station in the Oklahoma panhandle, just outside the little painted desert), and dried/canned food.
Between barter and my woodland survival skills we wanted for nothing while we were traveling.
When we had left Hot Springs we couldn’t even find out destination (Hotchkiss Colorado) on the map. The town was so small it wasn’t even listed..
We had headed west and navigated by intuition and faith.
By the time we found out where it was we were less than 50 miles away from it.
We arrived with $20, a mostly full tank of gas, and lots of crystals.
The medicine man I was sent to meet was out of town, so we camped until we found a small 1 room building to live in just outside of town.
Eventually the medicine man came back and we delivered the message. While in Colorado, I had the most powerful spiritual experience of my life when I was caught in a flash flood in the high desert. (But that’s a story unto it’s self.)
While in Colorado I also finally applied for disability, and it came through in about 3 months. I took the money I first received and bought an old truck and a small camping trailer. It wasn’t big, but no matter what we would have a roof over our head. After living out of a car off and on for a few years it was a measure of security.
We stayed until winter, and then headed back to Hot Springs.
When we arrived in Hot Springs I rented a place to put my camper trailer from a friend.
We had lived there for nearly 2 years when Laura left me.
I was devastated, and I didn’t understand why she would just leave me without any warning.. The only things in my life that hit me as hard was when my uncle and cousin were murdered and when Grandad died.
I went off the deep end of depression for a while, but after several months I started to pull myself together.
One day the city sent someone out to my trailer to tell me that my trailer wasn’t big enough to live in and that I was homeless. I certainly didn’t consider myself homeless. I had lived in much less comfortable circumstances, but they forced me to move out of my cozy little trailer and into town.
I ended up living in an “efficiency” apt. in town.
It wasn’t as nice as my trailer had been, and didn’t really have any more useful room.
A couple of years later I was visiting my Mom for the holidays when my little step-sister introduced me to the internet. It wasn’t common yet, but my step-dad Dave is a collage professor and needed access for his job.
I took to computers and the internet like a duck to water. Within 24 hours I was teaching them things!
I had been trying to help make ends meet by designing and selling silver jewelry, and the internet looked like a great way to do business, so I talked to my folks and they said they would get me a computer if I would go back to school.
When I got home I contacted vocational re-hab and they sent me to a private self-paced computer school.
I went through the courses so fast my teachers head was spinning. I took 3 months worth of self paced classes in a few weeks.
After finishing and graduating from that school I still hadn’t learned how to design websites (although I was starting to figure it out for myself), and decided to go to the local community college.
I went there for a year, but health problems came up again, and I dropped out.
A couple of years later my health took another turn for the worse and I moved to Florida where my folks could keep an eye out for me and make sure I was able to get to doctors appointments.
That was Jan 2001.
I woke the morning of 9/11 to the same horrors the rest of our great nation suffered that day. I got angry that someone had attacked our home. I cried for the people I watched die,. I was moved beyond measure by the bravery of the firemen and rescue people trying to save as many lives as they could. I was stuck to the T.V. all day..
That night as I lay sleeping in my recliner I had a stroke.
I woke up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t feel my body, and I could hear something scraping back and forth against my ear. I realized that I was having a seizure. When it stopped I was too tired to move. I lay there until morning when my Mom checked on me and took me to the doctor.
It was a very dark place in my life.
My hands shook so bad I couldn’t even use a fork or spoon, so I would eat sandwiches and other “out of hand” foods to try and keep my problems from being too obvious. (The only one I was fooling was myself.) I was having several seizures a day, and my long term memory seemed to be totally disconnected.
For the first time in my life I felt like I was beat. I was ready to just curl up and die.
The only bright point in my life was my baby nephew Cody. He had been born Oct. 2000. I couldn’t hold him after my stroke because I was so shaky and weak I was afraid I might drop him.
He was so tiny… I shed tears of joy the first time I held him, my baby brothers little son.. I’ve never had any children of my own, and my Mom was overjoyed to be a “Granny”.
By the time Cody was 2 my seizures had finally slacked off, my long term memory was starting to come back, and my shaking had died down to a fairly manageable level, so I decided it was time to start having a social life again.
I started going to S.C.A. events again (I had been a member for nearly 20 years at that point), and going out to the the local bars. I couldn’t drink so I would drink coke.
I soon met a girl named Lisa.
Lisa was a single mother of 2 girls who had just gotten out of a bad marriage. We hit it off well and they soon moved in with me.
I loved having kids in the house. Raising children was something painfully missing in my life.
The oldest girl, Sarah Belle, was 3 years old and the younger girl Lena Boo was a 9 month old baby at the time.
Lisa and I were together for several months, but it was a bounce-back relationship for her, and like most romances of that type it didn’t last.
I was upset, but I realized that I loved the kids more than her. I’m afraid that I still hadn’t totally gotten over my ex-wife Laura leaving me years before.
I remained friends with Lisa and tried to be there for the kids. They were over often, and the kids though of my Mom as Granny just like my nephew did.
Eventually I got homesick for Hot Springs, and decided to return home. Lisa had always told me that if I moved to Hot Springs her and the girls would move here too. But she didn’t follow through.
Lisa had grown up in Buffalo New York, and had been molested by her father and brothers growing up.
She had gotten married and left New York to get away from them.
Shortly after I came back to Hot Springs her father tracked her down and called her. He told her that he and her brothers had all “gotten right with God”, and talked her into moving back to Buffalo.
The reality was that they had gotten mixed up with some kind of “christian” cult.
They convinced her to cut all contact with anyone not in their “church”. All the members live at the church, and everything is very strict. They even have to take showers because baths are “sinful”.
My little Lena Boo (who was 4 by now) called up my Mom one time crying because they told her that her Granny was going to hell!!!
It breaks my heart, but I no longer have contact with Lisa and the kids. I’m still angry at Lisa for taking them into such a bad situation, but I dearly miss the kids… They may not have been mine biologically, but they were my children in my heart.
A few years after I moved back to Hot Springs I received a surprise phone call. It was my long lost love Laura.
She had re-married (and divorced), and found out life with me wasn’t so bad after all. She started talking about moving back to Hot Springs someday. Neither one of us had ever gotten over the other. We talked daily, and soon ended up in a long distance relationship.
We re-married late that year, and have been back together for 2 1/2 years now. I can’t imagine growing old with anyone else.
Last Feb. I was at an SCA event fighting in a rapier tournament (I’ve always loved martial arts but with the shape I was in all I could do anymore was fencing), when I lost my breath and collapsed.
I was taken to the hospital where I was admitted and treated for pneumonia over a few days. I hadn’t been feeling well for several weeks, but thought it was just my COPD acting up.(I was a smoker for over 20 years.) In fact I had fought in and won a tournament the weekend before.
When they discharged me I was told to contact a cardiologist and have a stress test done. I followed directions, but before it was time for my appointment I started having angina and breathlessness.
I was admitted to the hospital again, my doctor performed an angioplasty and placed a stent in my Right Coronary Artery. (It had been 85% blocked, and had an aneurism forming.) I recovered for a couple of months, and was about to start getting back to my life when it happened again.
My doctor went back into my heart and found the stent had become 70% clogged with scar tissue.
He cleaned it out again and sent me home to recover.
Last month I started having problems again. My feet started swelling (pitting edema), and I started having chest pain again.
My doctor told me that I was close to congestive heart failure and put me on water pills to pull all the swelling from my feet heart and lungs.
I was feeling better until last week when I started having heart palpitations, and difficulty breathing.
I was put back in the hospital. They ran test and found out that the water pills had washed out most of the potassium in my body, which was causing my heart to go into arrhythmia.
They gave be mega-doses of potassium to save my life and went back into my heart. Everything seems to be Ok now, and I am recovering well.
I hope to return to my normal life sometime this year.
Whew!! I didn’t expect this letter to be so long. This is the first time I have written all of this down.
Please realize that this is just a bare outline of the life I have led since high-school, and I have left many things out.
Thanks for taking the time to read all of this!!
Mike
