Excerpt fromThe Kristin Book (©1987)

Bob

There was a time of many friends and Friday night parties and good loud music.  Cars would be scattered about the front yard beneath the myriad stars of the clear Colorado sky.  Janis Joplin had not been dead for very long.

Once, during one of those early spring nights, Bob and Kristin took the first of countless imagined voyages across mountains and prairies, oceans and galaxies.

Bob, the motorcycle man with motorcycle arms; Bob, the surreptitious stalker of defaulted automobiles; and, Kristin, the dinky little kid, walked outside.  Kristin and her buddy, Bob the repo-man, headed out together to clear themselves a moment from the sound and clutter of a fine party.  Time passed and, when Carol and I went outside with a friend who was departing our spirited gathering, we heard the familiar sound of the unfettered laughter of our child.  It was coming from one of the ugliest cars in America which was parked just beyond the edge of light—facing the expanse of a dark open field and its connected sky  A disjointed compilation of random body parts in rainbow array, aimed arrow-straight at all the universe.

We stood in the shadows near the car just in time to hear Kristin return her spacecraft from Pluto and head her jeep up the Alcan Highway for the slopes of Denali.

“Look out for that moose!” shouted Bob.

 

The veldt of Africa, the glistening Antarctic ice, the spiraling wonder of the deep night sky. For years my gentle friend Bob has ridden shotgun and navigator through the billion miles of Kristin’s dreams. (For her ninth birthday, he showed up in a block-long Lincoln Continental limousine—a big black monster of an elegant automobile, that he had freshly stolen from the misspent use of a foundered debtor. What moments we all had riding around Greeley like oil people or drug dealers in black-glassed anonymity with Kristin feeling so very special.)