Here is a recipe that tastes much better it sounds.  Yes it's Cajun!  Remember that New Orleans is a melting pot.  There are many people of German heritage there, and Irish, African, etc. - I could go on but you know what I mean:

2           pounds squash

1           small chopped onion

3           tablespoons butter

1/4 lb    ground sausage

             cracker crumbs

             water

In a skillet mix squash, chopped onion, sausage and a small amount of water.  Cook until squash and onion are tender.  Brown sausage and then combine with squash and onions.  Season to taste with salt and pepper, and then transfer to 1 quart greased casserole.  Cover with cracker crumbs and cook at 350 degrees in oven until brown.  Enjoy.

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March is trying to go out like a lion.  Cells all over Oklahoma.

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Some people search for ghosts while others spend their lives trying to avoid them.  I am one of the latter because I know that spirits are all only too real and with us everyday.  Yes, there is every manner of transient being among us - ghosts, demons, angels and kindred spirits.  Anyone that doubts this is obviously not paying attention.

I have lived in my house for eleven years.  The man that Anne and I bought it from committed suicide three days after he sold it to us.  No, not here in the house, but not far away.  Anne died about six months later.  These are just two spirits that I know are connected to the house.

I have told this story before but I feel it bears retelling.  Anne died in March but we’d had one last Christmas together.  She had graduated from law school late in her life and had only practiced for four years before her death.  She had met three young women and one young man that she called her law daughters and law son.  Anne and I never had children of our own.  That last Christmas, all four law children spent several days with us.  They bought Anne a stuffed frog that had a button on its foot.  When you squeezed the button, the stuffed animal would croak out "Jingle Bells."  I left the frog sitting on the living room mantle and forgot about it.

The following Christmas Eve, I was standing in front of the mantle, staring at the frog when it began croaking "Jingle Bells." I was standing ten feet away and never touched the button.  The next morning, Christmas Day, the radio on the night stand next to my bed suddenly began playing.  I was groggy and can't remember much but I think Brenda Lee was the singer and she was wishing me a very happy Christmas Day.  I had never used the awake by music function on the radio.  It came on by itself.

I remember when I was a child, I was always afraid there was a monster under my bed, or in the attic.  Not any more.  I know I am surrounded by spirits but they are the benevolent variety and they wish me no harm.  My pug Princess barks at them at night when they stir around the house.  Animals, it seems, are more attuned to the supernatural.  She usually falls back to sleep quickly, as even she realizes that she is in no danger.

Some people spend their lives searching for ghosts.  They’ll never find them because they obviously haven’t a clue.

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There is a scene in my novel A Gathering of Diamonds where the protagonist, Tom Logan is deep in the Ouachita Mountains in search of his brother's missing journal.  He and teenage guide Mary Ann Stewart have spent the day, trekking steep paths and exploring caves, crevasses and mine shafts.  Taking a potty break, Tom ventures off the trail for a little privacy and finds himself surrounded by rattlesnakes.  The scene is fictional but, like a good fiction, has a basis in fact.

I attended geologic summer field camp in northern Arkansas, the terrain there similar to the Ouachita Mountains, but more eroded and less angular.  Joe Martinez, my mapping partner, asked me to climb a fairly steep slope to see if I could find the contact between two geologic formations.  Boulders, slumping down the hill, covered much of my path up the slope, along with lots of gravel that had sloughed off the slowly moving boulders.  I moved uphill quickly, my thoughts focused on locating a color change in the rock.  Finally I found it.

"I got it, Martinez," I yelled down the hill.  I didn't hear his answer as I used a marker to pinpoint the location on my topographic map.

I had found the contact just as a wall of rock halted my progress.  I didn't need to go any further because what I sought was right before my eyes.  What I felt at that moment was the elation of discovery.  When I turned back toward the valley, my euphoria turned to immediate dread.

I was on a flat plain of rock, standing amid a wad of snakes that stretched at least five feet in all directions.  The inert reptiles were huge, some thicker than my thighs.  When I saw a head protruding from the mass, I knew they were rattlers.  I had apparently walked across them in my zeal to find the outcrop contact (I know! It must seem like I'm making this up but every word is true.)

I tried to yell but my voice was locked deep in my throat.  Finally, I managed a squeaky call for help but Martinez was too far away to hear and there's nothing that he could have done anyway.  My heart was about to pound out of my chest as I searched my mind for a solution to my problem.  My back was pasted against the vertical wall of rock behind me.  The only way past the snakes was over them, a path I wasn’t prepared to take, even if I could have persuaded my legs to move.

I finally caught my breath and grabbed a loose rock from the wall behind me.  When I tossed it on the snakes, they didn't even move.  The next rock did the trick, causing the snakes to begin slithering away in all directions, providing a path of escape, one that I quickly took down the hill.  When I reached a large flat rock, I collapsed on my butt, refusing to move until my heart rate finally returned to normal.

The lethargic reptiles were sunning on the ledge, using sunlight to raise their temperatures - the reason that I didn't suffer the death of a thousand bites.  Still, it was lucky that I was young or I would probably have had a heart attack.

Unlike Tom Logan, I still don't have a terrible fear of snakes but I have had an experience or two that gave me the insight to describe a person that does.

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There are several old hotels in Eureka Springs.  The Crescent was built in 1886 and is on the hill overlooking the valley where the main part of Eureka lies.  Eureka has many mineral springs and they are known for their medicinal powers.  The Crescent Hotel has had many incarnations and it is haunted according to many sources.  I have stayed at the Crescent Hotel several times but unlike the New Orleans Hotel, I have never seen a ghost there.  Ghosts aside, I did have a particularly memorable trip that involved the Crescent Hotel.

During the oil boom I had a girl friend named Gayle.  Friends of ours, Carol and David, decided to join us one weekend on a camping trip to northwest Arkansas.  Carol, Gayle and I worked at Texas Oil and Gas and David was an oil and gas lease broker.  We left Oklahoma City after work on Friday in David's car and drove to a large lake east of Fayetteville, Arkansas.  It was dark when we arrived and we had all been drinking.  As we were trying to raise the tent, Gayle slipped and fell down the sloping terrain.  She grabbed her leg in pain.

"Are you okay?" I asked, finding her in the dark with my lantern.

"It hurts but I think I'll be okay," she said.

Carol and David had joined us by this time and we all commiserated with her pain.  "There's probably an emergency room in Fayetteville," David offered.

"I'll be all right," she said.

We soon realized the temperature inside the tent was almost unbearable and the mosquitoes outside it on a rampage.  "Let's go into Eureka Springs and find a room," Carol suggested.

None of us needed much convincing.  We drove to Eureka and found a room at the Crescent Hotel.  There is a bar on the third floor.  After taking our bags to the room, we hurriedly retreated to the bar for drinks.  There is a scenic deck outside the bar from where you can see downtown Eureka, and in all directions for many miles.  There was also a band playing.  Gayle wasn't a big drinker but she slugged two vodka tonics in a matter of what seemed like minutes.  The night was moody and rich with sound - perfect for imbibing a little too much alcohol.  The rest of us followed her lead.

The next day we toured the scenic spa town.  Gayle kept favoring her leg and looking like a whipped puppy, so we decided to head back to Oklahoma City early.  After David and Carol dropped us off at my apartment, I took Gayle to the Baptist Hospital Emergency Room.  An x-ray showed that she had a broken leg.  The doctor's set the break and thankfully gave her pain medication.

Gayle was quite a trooper and her leg healed well.  We didn't see any ghosts on that trip but maybe it was because we were all in such an alcoholic haze that we wouldn't have known it if we had.

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Tracks of a raccoon on the bank of a creek in Logan County, Oklahoma.

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In my book A Gathering of Diamonds there is a scene where Tom Logan and Mary Ann Stewart crawl into a dilapidated Arkansas mine shaft in search of Logan’s missing brother’s journal.  Tom Logan is a Vietnam vet facing recurrent nightmares caused by his tour of duty.  One of the experiences that haunt him was being lowered by rope into a dark pit filled with viperous snakes.  Saddled by his claustrophobic paranoia, the muddy trip into the old mine doesn’t go well.

I was also in Vietnam but luckily I was never lowered into a pit of viperous snakes, although I did hear a similar story and believe that it is true.  I have, however, crawled into many old mine shafts in Arkansas and I can attest to feeling much of the claustrophobic paranoia that Tom Logan experienced.

I entered the mines while working on my master’s thesis in southwest Arkansas.  I was looking for veins of antimony ore in order to piece together the geologic history of the area.  Exploring a hundred-year-old mine is dangerous and something I would never risk again.  Still, like Tom and Mary Ann’s journey into darkness, the need to know often exceeds the danger of discovery.

Here is a short excerpt from A Gathering of Diamonds and the trip into the mine:

       The entrance to the mine was barely four feet high and the crowning timber had fallen, partially blocking the opening.  Red filigree fern cloaked the collapsed entrance making it impossible to see more than ten feet into its mouth.  I nudged a rock with my foot.

       "You shouldn't go in there.  Too dangerous."

       Mary Ann continued attaching the lantern to the metal clamp on the front of her cap.  She added carbide and water from her canteen before screwing the cap back on.  When she finished, she wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked at me.

       "This is carbide.  When you add water, it gives off acetylene gas.  You coming with me?"

       "Are you serious?"

       "As a heart attack.  Well?"

     "You're really crazy."

       Mary Ann read something in my expression that told her more than my reply.

       "It's all right if you're scared.  Many people are scared of holes in the ground.  You stay here.  I'll look."

       She removed a ball of twine from her pack and said, "I'll tie this at the entrance and unwind it as I go.  Unless it breaks, it'll keep me from getting lost."

       My heart had begun to thump above the sound of thunder and my throbbing temples signaled an approaching migraine.  Moisture, along with rainwater, dripped from my forehead.  I shrugged and frowned at the angry clouds, blinking away water from my eyes.

       "I'm going with you," I said.

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I discovered the little resort town of Eureka Springs while at the University of Arkansas.  My then wife Gail and I would drive over once a month, or so, and continued to visit even after we moved to Oklahoma.  My first marriage ended but not my fascination with Eureka Springs.  My love and fascination continues and I have made the trip many times since my first visit.

My second wife Anne also loved Eureka Springs and she and I went there many times during our marriage, the last time about a year and a half before to her untimely death.  She was sick during the trip but at the time we had no idea how serious was her cough and persistent lung infection.  Of all of our Eureka visits, one stands out in my memory, and for a reason I would never have anticipated.

Anne and I were close friends with Gary and Carroll.  They also liked Eureka Springs so a trip was not a hard thing to coordinate. Cheryl, a friend of ours, accompanied us on the excursion.  Gary's brother Roger and his wife Patty joined us the following day.

We had rooms at the New Orleans, a hotel in downtown Eureka built in 1892.  Although we didn't know it, the hotel was in financial disarray during our visit.  The two elevators in the three-storied hotel weren't operational and we had to use the stairs to reach our rooms.  Supposedly, a contractor had fallen into an open shaft, and there was talk that his death may have been self-inflicted because of a love affair gone sour.  There was also talk that the ghost of the contractor might still haunt the hotel.

The owners at the time had a large Maine Coon cat named Cajun.  The friendly cat usually napped on the front desk during the day and prowled the hallways and guest rooms at night.  Anne, Gary, Carroll and I were all cat people and were instantly taken by the beautiful feline.

We had a great time, shopping, dining and sight seeing, but something strange and unexplainable happened our last night in town.  It was late, almost midnight.  Anne and I were lying in bed, reading when we heard something scratching on the door.

"It's Cajun," Anne said.  "Let him in for a minute."

I got out of bed and padded toward the door, expecting to see Cajun when I cracked the door.  Instead, I stared down at bare carpet and no kitty.  Then I heard a noise down the hallway.  Dressed only in my pajamas and house shoes, I hurried out the door toward the stairwell.

The old Victorian-style hotel was dimly lit and sound buffered by the porous wooden walls.  As I gazed over the banister, expecting to see Cajun walking down the stairs, I saw something quite unexpected - a smoky cloud, lit by an ephemeral, pulsating light.  My own unexpected reaction was to call out.

"Hey!" I said.

The specter halted, flashed a brief phosphorescence and then disappeared.

"Who was it?" Anne asked when I returned to the room.

I had no answer.

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During the last oil boom, my friend Andy and I both liked motorcycles a lot.  One gorgeous spring weekend we decided to trailer our bikes to Fort Smith, Arkansas, spend the night and then ride up Highway 23 to Eureka Springs.  My wife Anne and his girlfriend Cathy would drive the car and trailer and meet us there.

We were both into racing-style bikes.  I had a pocket-rocket, a 1000 cc Suzuki.  Andy had inherited lots of money and owned nineteen motorcycles.  The one he took that particular weekend was a special racing Laverda that he had imported from Italy.  It was Ferrari red and looked like something out of Star Wars.

Even though taking Highway 23, known locally as the Pig Trail, to Eureka was quite a bit further than the route the girls intended to take, we planned to beat them there and be waiting at the first available tavern, swilling beer when they got there.  It didn’t quite work out that way.

Highway 23 traverses the heart of the Ozarks and is one of the most scenic roads in all of Arkansas.  The road is hilly and narrow with long sweeping curves mixed with hairpins that almost come around and meet themselves, all the while bordering a dangerous precipice, often on both sides of the pavement.  And there are lots of trees to get in the way if you happen to careen off the blacktop.

My bike was fast, a Katana as I remember, but it was still in the early days of street bikes that emulated full-blown racers and kind of clunky around corners.  Andy’s bike had no such problem.  His expensive Laverda was a real racing bike converted to street use.  The first part of our journey I spent watching him disappear around distant sweepers, always far ahead of me.  When I finally caught up to him, he was standing beside his cycle on the side of the road.  Oh, and did I mention that Andy had a custom-made, bright red leather racing suit that made him look like Captain America?

A transducer (hell! I don’t know) or some other exotic electrical part was malfunctioning, causing the Laverda’s engine to die.  Andy tapped and wiggled it, finally getting fire to the engine.  It wasn’t a permanent fix as we had to stop several more times down the road.  We finally decided to take an excursion through Fayetteville and see if we could find a replacement part to fix the problem.

We finally managed to drag into Fayetteville.  Yes, there were motorcycle shops there but none had the three dollar component needed to repair the Laverda.  Someone at one of the shops directed us to a local junk shop where the owner, a cycling enthusiast himself, found a well-used part that somehow worked with the Laverda’s electronics.

There were no cell phones during the early eighties and no way to call Anne and Cathy to tell them about our problems.  With Andy’s cycle repaired, we raced the remaining distance to Eureka Springs.  Eureka is a scenic village in north central Arkansas.  It has one street that makes a large circle through the town built directly into the surrounding bluffs.  Many of the buildings are tri-level, having ground entrances on all three stories.  We quickly located Andy's car and bike trailer at a rustic biker bar on the edge of Eureka.

It was five in the afternoon when we joined Anne and Cathy in the dark bar, swilling beer and playing pool with some of the locals.  They were already deeply into their cups and none too happy about us showing up three hours late.  A group of our friends joined us a while later and we were all laughing, enjoying the situation.  Everyone except Andy.  He wasn’t at all pleased as we ribbed him unmercifully about his twenty-five thousand dollar imported Italian racer’s electrical problems

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Here’s a pic from the “Cities of the Dead” in New Orleans.

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Being from Louisiana, I was twenty-six before I ever went snow skiing for the first time.  I had such a horrible time that I was twenty-eight before I went again, this time with my second wife Anne.  Anne's roommate, Cathy, asked us to join herself and her boyfriend John on a ski trip to Red River, New Mexico.  They were going in an RV with a group of other people.  Anne convinced me that we would have a great time so I reluctantly agreed to participate.  Anne had a surprise coming when we met the group at the RV.

One of the couples on the trip was Gary and Carroll.  Carroll is a geologist and was Anne's best friend in grade school.  Gary, her husband, later became an Oklahoma County deputy sheriff but was a bookstore owner at the time.  Go figure!  In addition, there were two more geologists, Doug and his wife Mary, and Ken and his wife Cassie.  Altogether, there were five geologists and their significant others on the trip - a sure recipe for impending disaster.

John is no longer with us but he was one of the most intelligent persons that I have ever known.  He was tall, at least six-foot-six, and he liked his liquor.  At two in the morning, as we descended into the Red River Ski Resort, the roads turned deadly icy.  Luckily, John was wide awake and drove us into the resort without mishap.  Anne and I were awake, holding on for dear live as the RV slid from one side of the road to the other, coming dangerously close to the precipice more times than I care to remember.

The sun was coming up over the mountains as we arrived.  We soon learned that our reservations had become slightly screwed up.  The ten of us ended up staying in a single large room with a single bathroom.  When Anne informed the very German innkeeper that our bathwater was "tepid" we all proceeded to get an earful.

"If you don't like it, you vill get out," she told us, her thick accent informing us she meant business.

The ski trip went mostly without incident, except for my badly dislocated thumb that I got when I had a disastrous meeting with an unexpected mogul.  Oh, and I managed to drive about eighty miles in the wrong direction on the way home after being awakened at a gas station late at night to take my turn at the wheel.

We all grew close and Gary, Ken and Doug became the core of the softball team that I organized that weekend, John volunteering mostly to be a spectator.  The following year I really learned how to ski well, not sobering up for seven days - but that's another story.

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My wife Anne, like myself, was a boxing fan.  When she was alive we often hosted fight parties for many championship boxing events.  There was always lots of beer and our friend Ray, immortalized in my story Chicken Fries would always bring brownies.

Dave, my buddy who sold me my first motorcycle would bring his famous sausage balls.  Later, when times were tight, just Anne, Dave and I would get together for a fight.  One fighter we never missed was Mike Tyson.

Tyson, at the time, was still young and going through opponents like an Oklahoma tornado.  When he was scheduled to fight a no-name boxer, Buster Douglas, no one wanted to watch the likely one-round event except the three of us.

I don’t remember much about the evening, or the fight, except that Buster Douglas connected with Tyson’s jaw and knocked him clean out.  I also remember Dave’s sausage balls.  This week, Dave was kind enough to send me his sausage ball recipe.  Here it is and I hope that you enjoy them as much as I did.

Basic:

3 cups biscuit mix (Bisquick or similar type mix)

1 lb. bulk sausage

½ lb. grated Cheddar cheese

Combine the sausage and cheese first, then add the Bisquick mix until the mixture will hold together, mix thoroughly with hands (or spoon, easier with hands), mixing is easier if the sausage is warmed slightly in a microwave first.  The amount of Bisquick mix used to hold the whole thing together will change as you change the type of sausage used.  Now, form mixture into balls (about a ping-pong ball size), a perfect ball shape is not important, in fact it is better if formed into odd shaped imperfect balls.  You can freeze you balls for baking later or bake now.  I like to bake now and freeze for heating later in microwave.

Place balls on non-greased bake/cookie sheet and bake in over at 350 degrees for 15 minutes, but check after 12 minutes.

That is the basic recipe, now for the Cajun version:

Cajun Version - Sausage Balls

3 cups biscuit mix (Bisquick or similar type mix)

1 lb. bulk sausage  (sausage can be any type you like, as long as it can be broken up and mixed with the other ingredients, I sometimes use hot sausage)

½ lb. grated Cheddar cheese  (extra sharp cheddar cheese is the best to use)

From now on, you are on your own to add what ever floats your boat, some of my favorites are:

1 nice sized onion - chopped

Several cloves of garlic - chopped

I have been known to put several drops of Tabasco sauce on each ball before cooking.  It leaves a very nice red color on each ball and adds a good kick.  Note:  If while mixing, you are having drinks, or whatever, the Tabasco sauce goes on the Sausage Balls, enough said.

Then mix and bake as above.

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They say that life goes on.  Yes it’s true.  Shortly after the passing of my wife, I headed north to Garfield County where I had a well drilling.  My heart was sad but it felt good to be away from the sterile hospital walls I had haunted for the past fourteen months.  I spotted the derrick ten miles before I actually reached it on the flat Oklahoma plain.

We’d had a drilling break earlier in the day and I had called a drill-stem test for the elusive 1^st Wilcox Sand zone that we had encountered.  They were pulling the pipe as I drove up on the location.  Bill met me as I drove up on location.

Bill was the crusty completion man for the company to whom I had sold the prospect – the best completion man in the business, I’d been told.  He didn’t seem so crusty when he greeted me.

“Steve told me your wife just passed away.”

“Last week,” I said.

Bill slapped me on the back.  “Hang in there, Pardner.  It’ll all get better.”

It was a glorious early spring day, a slight nip still in the air.  We stood in the doghouse, fifteen feet off the ground, watching as the roughnecks yanked stand after stand of drill pipe.  The diesel engine groaned every time it pulled the heavy steel pipe toward the crow’s nest.

“I was about your age when my first wife died,” Bill finally said.

“You had a wife that died?” I asked, suddenly interested.

“She had cancer, just like your wife.”

The sun was beginning to set and the roughnecks had most of the pipe out of the hole and still no show.  I was beginning to get discouraged but Bill said, “We’re going to get oil on this test.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

Bill pointed at the swarm of flies, by now almost covering the rig floor.  “They smell it,” he said.  “It’s coming.”

The next stand of pipe the roughnecks pulled proved him correct.  Black gold poured onto the rig floor when they broke the joint between the two stands.  We were four stands off bottom, every stand filled with oil.

“How long did it take for you to get over the death of your wife?” I asked as the last stand of pipe was pulled from the hole.

“Never,” he said, “But it gets easier with every passing year.  I’m remarried now. Oil wives have to be understanding and my wife is the best person in the world.  Someday soon you’ll find some one too.”

“But why us, Bill?”

“Unless they die in a car or plane crash, every couple, sooner or later, will have to face what we’ve already faced.  You might say we’ve got a leg up.”

We sat pipe on the well with high hopes.  The 1^st Wilcox Sand, it turned out, was depleted and we came up the hole to another zone that made a commercial, although marginal well.  I thought of this story today as oil topped $110 a barrel for the first time ever.

Ninety percent of all the wells in the United States are classified as stripper wells, capable of producing less than ten barrels of oil or ten MCFG per day.  Most of the majors left the country a decade or more ago.  What are left are mostly mom and pop oil companies drilling a few wells every year for the dregs of the keg.

Don’t hate the oil industry.  For every billionaire like Boone Pickens there are a thousand Bills out there, and two thousand roughnecks toiling from dawn till dusk, often seven days every week.  If it wasn’t for them, oil would already be $200 a barrel.

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Some years ago, I was visiting Tulsa on business.  Tulsa is a gorgeous city in northeast Oklahoma.  A large river winds through it and it was one of the first cities in America that had walking, jogging and biking trails.  On a whim, I decided to return to Oklahoma City along a different path.

It was mid March, much like today in Oklahoma, and there was still a nip in the air left over from a recent snow storm.  Most of the snow had melted and now there was a warm breeze blowing in from the south as I followed the rural highway toward the little town of Red Rock.

Despite the recent snow, trees and flowers were beginning to bloom on both sides of the road.  Northeast Oklahoma is almost in the western foothills of the Ozarks, the terrain rolling and large boulders often appearing in the tiny streambeds that dissect the rolling terrain.

Red Rock is a small town, nay, a tiny town, I learned as I took an excursion off the highway.  Then I saw something quite out of the ordinary.  It was a very large building surrounded by acres of parking lots, filled with tour buses with licenses from all the surrounding states.

"They're here to play Indian bingo," a local told me.  "They give away thousands of dollars every week."

That morning in the Daily Oklahoman, OKC's newspaper, I had read about an old man that had disappeared in a snowstorm. As best as I can tell, he was never found.  That gorgeous morning, driving from Tulsa through Red Rock, I concocted a story about that old man to set it straight, at least in my own mind.

Why did he run away from home?  How did he survive?  Who might he have met along the way?  What was he searching for and what did he ultimately find?  I answered all these questions in my book Prairie Sunset and to this day, when I re-read it, the story still feels as real to me as that wonderful drive that I took from Tulsa to OKC that day, many years ago, just off the beaten path.

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My Grandson Braden has red hair, just like my brother Jack had when he was the same age.  Last night, we took my Dad to Bennigan's.  He is eight-eight and loves children.  Since Braden has red hair, just like he and my Brother had, he has taken a particular shine to the lad.  Last night, my daughter-in-law Taffy asked if we were Irish.  Well, my Dad's grandfather was named O'Rear, about as Irish as you can get.  It made me think about my other grandparents and my Grandfather Pittman.

Grandpa Pitt had some Irish blood but was probably more English.  One thing is sure, he liked potatoes as much as any Irishman.  He and Grandma Pitt lived in a tiny wood-framed house that sat about a foot off the ground on cinder blocks.  Grandpa Pitt always raised potatoes under the house and never failed to have a good crop.  When I was quite young, I asked him how he got under the house to harvest the potatoes.

"Well, boy," he answered in his best deadpan voice.  "It's all in how you do it.  I plant them all in a straight line, toward the center of the house.  When I dig out the first spud, the rest roll into the basket after it."

Grandpa never cracked a smile but even at my very young age, I knew that he was pulling my leg.  My Dad's side of the family was definitely Irish.  I'm not sure about my Mom's but I can positively say that my Grandpa Pitt must have kissed the Blarney Stone some time during his life because he could tell a story as well as any Irishman I've ever met.

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I recently wrote about Dave, my friend from whom I bought my first motorcycle.  He read the story and emailed me.  Dave, now living near Baton Rouge, was my best friend when I worked at Texas Oil and Gas.  The rock and roll world of the last oil boom was hell on marriages, including mine and Dave's.  Both freshly divorced, we became running buddies and Dave's email reminded me of one of our adventures.

Between us, Dave and I knew practically every female that worked in downtown Oklahoma City.  One night, we were talked into escorting six gorgeous oil and gas secretaries to see an Elvis impersonator.  Three of the ladies were crazy about the recently departed Elvis.  The band, backup singers and Elvis impersonator sounded exactly like Elvis - well, if you'd had a few drinks and were sexually excited because of being the center of attention of six adoring ladies.

The concert was entertaining, further enhanced when one young lady in particular began hitting on me, another on Dave.  When we returned to my apartment, Dave and five of the ladies departed while Cyndi (not her real name) came inside with me for a nightcap.  Hell, it was two in the morning!  We both had our intentions and for the moment I assumed that they were the same.

We were sitting on the floor in front of a fire that I had hastily built in the fireplace and  we were groping around on the rug like a couple of boa constrictors in heat when the phone rang.  I have waited to say that Cyndi was the girlfriend of a close friend of mine, Mike (not his real name).  Mike was married, Cyndi only his girlfriend, and it is safe to say that he had no intentions of ever marrying her.  Cyndi and I were both single.

"Have you seen Cyndi?" he asked, she's not at her apartment.

"Maybe," I said, our legs encircled and my hand under her blouse, still clamped on her right breast.

I began to smell a setup when he asked, "Is she at your place?"  Cyndi, I suddenly sensed, had used me to make Mike jealous.  Still very much engulfed in the throes of extreme passion, I said, "She was here but she just left.  I think she’s on her way back to her apartment.  You need to go home," I told her after hanging up the phone and zipping up my pants."

"Are you sure about this?" she asked, standing and adjusting her own clothing.

"There's nothing I would like better than spending the night with you but I think we would both regret it."

Cyndi must have agreed because she was gone in less than fifteen minutes, leaving me to contemplate my unexpected predicament.  After all these years Mike is still my friend, as is Cyndi, although their relationship ended years ago.  I never made it with Cyndi but later I had a little fling with Sandy, one of the other girls that Dave and I took to the concert.  How did Dave do that night?  I never asked and he never volunteered the story.

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Today is the fifteenth of the month, mid march, a day the Romans referred to as the Ides.  In Shakespeare's play, Julius Caesar, Caesar met his doom on March 15.  Today's date caused me to think about my own Ides of March that happened ten years ago.  This time ten years ago, my second wife Anne had nine days of life remaining.  Suffering from lung cancer, she was in intense pain.  She didn't have long left on this earth and everyone seemed to know it except me.

In 1998, the Ides was on a Sunday.  I called Anne's doctor, trying to get her in to see someone.  It was no use.  Her doctors had already given up on her and she was a non-entity.  Anne wasn't a non-entity with me.  When I got an associate doctor on the phone, I resorted to begging.

"Please, isn't there something you can do?  I need some help here."

"Come by the office and I will give you a prescription for a painkiller," the doctor told me.  I left Anne alone for an hour while I retrieved the prescription.  "This is Oxycontin," he told me.  "It's the most powerful painkiller that I have."

I hurried home and gave Anne a pill.  It seemed to help and soon she felt good enough that she asked me to draw her bath.  Our bathtub is large and deep.  When I took her clothes off and got her into the tub, she asked me to join her.

"I am so sorry that I am putting you through all of this," she said.

"There's no place on the face of the earth that I would rather be," I said.

Anne was on constant oxygen, but the following day she was in good spirits and breathing on her own.  She had a smile on her gorgeous face and I breathed a deep sigh of relief for the first time in many days.

"It's March Madness," I said, referring to the big year-end basketball tournament.  "And the first Formula 1 race of the year.  Whatever you do, you can't get too sick this weekend or you'll spoil everything for me."

I was kidding but I'll never forget how selfish those words now sound.  Shortly, Anne's condition grew worse.  I reluctantly compare myself to Caesar.  On his way to the forum he encountered the seer that had told him to beware the Ides of march, and he said, "The Ides of March has come."

The seer answered, "Yes, the Ides of March has come, but it has not passed."

Anne lasted another several days but that day, on her back on an ER table, she looked at me, and without speaking a word, she bade goodbye with her eyes.

No one before or since has ever penned a tragedy like Shakespeare.  Knowing my own pain, I can only imagine what he must have encountered during the Ides of March of his life.

Having fallen into bankruptcy at the end of the last oil boom, Anne and I traveled to cities all over the United States, looking for a bank to lend us the money to bail us out of the situation.  We didn't find a bank.  Like many oil companies, they were also going out of business right and left.  There were so many houses foreclosed in Oklahoma City that the FDIC had to open an office here.  Soon, they had a thousand employees working in the city.

We weren't the only Oklahoma oil company in trouble.  Everyone was in trouble!  Our banking leads exhausted, we began looking for a "white knight" investor, someone that would inject some much needed capitol into the company.  Harold knew such a person in New Orleans so we headed south to make our pitch.

Harold got us booked at the Monteleone Hotel, a wonderful place on Royal, just a block from Bourbon Street.  He'd invited his new girlfriend as his latest marriage was already in the dumpster.  Harold wasn't good with relationships.  The next day after checking in, we took a taxi down Bourbon Street.

Mr. X lived in a million dollar shotgun house on the end of Bourbon Street.  A shotgun house, built in the 1700s, is so named because if you unloaded a shotgun at the front door, the load would exit the back door.  There isn't much to a shotgun house but because of their locations, they are worth millions of dollars - yes, even after Katrina.

Harold introduced us to Mr. X, a friendly man with dark Cajun hair and eyes and a long black moustache.  He had a man servant that I will call Hay-sus.  Hay-sus couldn't speak English but he knew how to mix drinks.  Mr. X started talking and we all began drinking, pretty much all day long.  Mr. X had apparently been ruined by a one-time banker friend (surprise, surprise!) and they were now bitter enemies.

We never really got a chance to