I Will Have to Lie

I drove a Jeep CJ 7 all the time.  It was all I had, rain or shine.  I was something, I thought.  I was tough.  People knew it, knew the dog, knew me, the longhaired fellow with the crazy Alsatian-Husky that would run beside the Jeep through the neighborhood streets like something from a dream, like a demon.  Wiley.  That was the dog's name.  I'd picked her up by accident at the end of a long run as the sun was about to set.  Just before the homestretch as I passed the junior high school, she ran out of the bushes and shadowed, me.  She looked terrible. Awful.  I couldn't tell if she was a young dog starving or an old one dying.  When I got home, she lay on the back deck and waited.  What could I do?  I hadn't any dog food, of course, so I mixed up some milk and eggs in a bowl, and she lapped it up and waited for more.  And that was it.  I had a dog.

She and I became the best of pals for seventeen years.  And she loved my wife.  When that was over, she was mine again, as she had always been.

But that is not the tale I want to tell here tonight.  I will try to tell you some narrative about something that was a profound incident in my life, but it will come out in fragments, garbled and worse.  And I will have to lie to you, too, for otherwise I will reveal too much.  And so I must apologize to the Prodigal Girl in advance, because this is not how I ever imagined telling the tale.

En media res.

It was the day that the divorce was to be finalized, really.  I was delivering a big check in order to keep the house that we lived in before she decided to leave.  It was her idea, the house, but it was my money, or so I thought, but her lawyer had other ideas that the state seemed to agree with, so I was driving to a legal office to deliver a check and have my wife sign over the home to me.

I had not seen her for many months as the divorce went on for about a year.  There seemed to be no particular hurry.  By now, I had fallen in love with someone else who was already gone.  I will explain all that later.  But this day, dressed in my newest hip clothing and listening to my newest found music, I drove in the Jeep and listened to this song.

There had not been any music like this for a very long time (see this).  And now there was and driving in an open Jeep to finalize my divorce, it hit me in the heart, and I found myself stopped at a red light weeping like a little boy.  But it was not my wife I was thinking about.  Nope.  Maybe I should back up and tell you the tale.