6

6. Queenie

There are no beech trees in Beech Grove.

When Professor Alexander Dhunwhit of the UCR Department of Agriculture saw the little ad I placed in the campus paper for the Third Annual Beech Grove Art Festival, he drove all the way down to Beech Grove to study the beech trees . . . because there shouldn’t have been any beech trees there. He traipsed through the foothills for hours before running into my mother down by the creek. Eddie proudly told him that her son was a student at UCR, that he should look me up when he got back to Riverside, that I was the scholarly one in the village, and that I might be able to shed some light on the subject. I couldn’t, but he could.

“Dhhewnit,” he said, between puffs on his cherry scented pipe. “It’s not Duhoonw’hit, nor Donut. Dhhewnit.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I hadn’t even tried to say his name, addressing him only as Professor, but apparently he felt it necessary to perform his name ritual.

‘‘Young man,” Professor Alexander Dhunwhit said, ‘‘don’t you think it’s a bit presumptuous of your little village to call itself Beech Grove when, in fact, you have no beech trees?”

“It was already named when my grandfather..”

‘“The beech family of trees, Fagus of the family Fagacae, is native to the northeastern portion of the United States. “These trees require cold, damp weather, loam soil, north-facing slopes. Good heavens, man, even in the foothills there, you’re a desert. Surely you don’t…”

‘‘But I …”

“Surely you wouldn’t expect a tree of this variety to survive there?”

“I don’t expect anything,” I pleaded.

‘‘But you did, didn’t you? I found traces out there of poor, decaying beeches, someone tried to grow beech trees there forty or fifty years ago, but they only lived three or four years. Didn’t they?”

“I’m only twenty years old, sir.”

“People should research these things better, before they go off planting trees where they can’t survive,” the Professor concluded, then walked out.

There are no beech trees in Beech Grove.

“That’s stupid,” my wife, Elizabeth said when we moved to Beech Grove.

It was to be the subject of our first big fight, our first annual big fight.

It is often said that we remember the good things from our past, that we protect our fragile psyches by forgetting the painful things. 1 think that applies to those times or situations which one has escaped. If you’re still caught up in something, you can easily remember the bad.

What stands out in my mind about our first seven years of marriage are the annual arguments. Not unlike Carl’s idea of “only one spanking,” Elizabeth and I developed the idea of “only one fight”—one really big brouhaha, once a year—and for some reason, always in June. Maybe it’s because that’s when we held our first annual. Maybe it’s because Mom’s birthday is in June. Or maybe because the festival is in June. Anyway, our annual big fight is always in June.

Our first one was about the lack of beech trees in Beech Grove.

Elizabeth and I were married during our senior year at UCR. We were married at the Chapel of the White Bells in Las Vegas, Nevada, and we have yet to he forgiven by either of our families, We’d only known each other for a couple of months; in fact, we met the week I got back to school from Leonard’s ash-scattering. I had been assigned to do a piece for the paper on the college’s string quartet, in which Elizabeth was the viola.

Elizabeth was, is, clean—freshly scrubbed, pink checked, makeup free, Southern California clean. She has shiny, sandy brown hair, which she usually wears in a ponytail or a single, large braid. She does things to her hair, alternately, with vinegar or lemon juice. She also puts raw egg white on her face and lets it dry to a slick, pulling finish. She bathes even though we have a shower. She bathes in herbs and other fragrant things. She does Yoga exercises. And she meditates.

We fell in love. And we got married, initially with the idea that she would continue her music studies and that I would go to work for the Riverside Press.

Then, Hugh got the bright idea, and talked the rest of the town into it, that Beech Grove should have its own little newspaper, that the town should subsidize the aforementioned paper if necessary, and that Matthew Russell, me, should be the editor. Well, who the hell wants to be a gofer on a large paper when you could be the editor of your own paper?

Elizabeth “Queenie” Russell, née Mann, didn’t know what she was getting into by marrying a boy from a village of only 162 adults and 47 children, and then moving there with him. I didn’t tell her, either. I probably even lied to her.

I took a crash course in printing from a friend who owned a shop, then bought a truckload of equipment with the town’s money. And then moved home with my new wife.

There are no beech trees in Beech Grove,

“That’s stupid,” Elizabeth said.

“They died,” I defended.

“I didn’t mean it’s stupid that there are no beech trees, that’s to be expected out here, I meant that it’s stupid to call the place Beech Grove, given the fact that there aren’t any.

“Bullshit, Queenie, you’re just . .

“Don’t call me Queenie!”

“All right. Bullshit, Elizabeth, you’re just criticizing because you didn’t want to move to my home town.”

“But I did move here, didn’t it?”

“Yeah. And look at you: you’ve been pouting since we got here.”

“It’s only been three days!”

‘‘Three days is a long time not to go to someone’s house.”

“Whose house?”

‘‘My mother’s!” I shouted.

“I have been unpacking.”

“For three days?”

“Yes, for three days! You cart me off without any notice whatsoever, and . .”

“A week’s notice.”

“...with no notice, so I had to just throw everything together. You move me into a house that hadn’t been cleaned in ten years. You run off to your print shop and . .”

‘‘It happens to he the town newspaper!”

“It also happens to be the town print shop. You happen to be the town printer.”

“And editor!”

“And I happen to be left alone to do all the cleaning, all the arranging, all the unpacking, all the—I don’t have time to run over for coffee and idle chitchat with your mother or anybody else!”

‘‘Why don’t you ask Eddie to help you?”

“I’m sure Eddie has enough to do without my asking her to do our housework for us. What with her reading group, her Volunteer Fire Department, her parents group at the school, her ...her tending bar…her…”

“Why’d you say it like that?”

“What?”

“Tending bar.”

“I didn’t say it like anything. It was just part of the goddamn list!”

It went downhill from there. We started name-calling and accusing, and wound up not speaking for two days.

The first week, Elizabeth wouldn’t go to the Sunday Service, saying she still had too much to do. She didn’t meet us at Mom and Dad’s for dinner either. Eddie told me to stop worrying about it, and to stop nagging Elizabeth about it.

The following week, Eddie sent a note to Elizabeth, telling her that she was going to read something on the coming Sunday she thought Elizabeth would really enjoy. If Elizabeth had the time, Eddie said in the note, “I would especially like you to hear it.”

What Eddie read to us on Sunday morning, including Elizabeth, was an excerpt from an interview with Pablo Casals in which he talked about an artist’s commitment to the community, as well as to Art. Eddie concluded her presentation by saying how fortunate Beech Grove was to have an accomplished musician living among us and perhaps, after Elizabeth got settled in, she’d be able to find the time to play for us.

We all, including Elizabeth, took the long way home—over the hill and through the woods—to Mom and Dad’s house, where we had coffee and cookies, followed by beer with pretzels, then feasted on fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, green beans, corn, assorted pickles and olives, homemade dinner rolls, two kinds of pie, and then coffee on the veranda. Elizabeth helped Eddie with the dishes and they talked about Pablo Casals, while Carl, Donny and I carried out our ritual on the porch.

It was, unfortunately, not the total breakthrough I had hoped for. Sunday Service and dinner at Mom’s remained Elizabeth’s only involvement that year. :\nd no amount of encouragement could get her to play her viola for the town. She wouldn’t even play for me. She played in the den, alone, while I was at work. She seemed to resent everything and everybody. She finally even stopped playing for herself in the den. She stopped working on the quartet pieces she had been composing for years. She became my devoted wife, my completely dependent wife.

Carl’s father, Big Don, died of a heart attack that winter. Dad took it very hard: He stopped wearing his hearing aid altogether, rather than just turning it down or off; he gave in to his arthritis, after ignoring it all those years. Ginny took it even harder. She seemed to be eating, but she kept losing weight. In four months, she melted away, from the happy, round, soft, chubby gramma I used to cuddle into, to sad skin and bones. In six months, she joined Big Don at the Crestview Cemetery in Escondido. Their urns shared a nook in the Crestview Columbarium. Elizabeth thought it was beautiful, and somehow romantic, that a person could pine away for a lost love. I thought it was a waste of a human being. I thought, and said so, that when a person ceases to be an individual, there is nothing there for someone else to love.

I told Elizabeth that it was boredom that was causing her to be too dependent on me, that I didn’t need a Dig dinner every night of the week, that I didn’t want my lunch brought to me at work every day, that it wasn’t necessary to iron my T-shirts, and that I couldn’t stand her following me around everywhere like a goddamn lost puppy dog! It was our second annual big fight, which ended much like the first: name-calling, accusation, and then two or three days of silence.

But that time, the days of silence were productive. Elizabeth took up painting. She had dabbled, as they say of amateur artists, in college and was almost as good as most of the local artists and better than some, so it wasn’t too difficult to encourage her once she actually sat down with paints and easel.

Elizabeth devoted herself to her painting. The only big meal I got was on Sundays at Mom’s. I got to eat Hugh’s hamburgers for lunch every day. And I wore wrinkled T-shirts. We started getting along a lot better. Elizabeth even helped out with the Art Festival that next spring and she sold her first painting, the one called “Red Ball Under a Beech Tree.” We made love twice that night. Ars longa, vita brevis, I always say.

And that pretty much became our established routine. I put out my little eight-page “Clarion” every week, doing odd printing jobs from time to time. Elizabeth painted and worked on the festival. And we had our annual fights.

One year was supposedly about Art, but was really about the damn cat she had adopted and had allowed to use my closet to have her kittens in.

“We are all one,” she said.

“What?”

“We are all one,” said Elizabeth again.

“I know that!” said I, shouting. “But what the hell does that have to do with letting the fucking cat whelp in amongst my shoes?!”

“Dogs whelp,” she said, ‘‘Foal then!”

‘‘Horses.”

“What then?”

‘‘I don’t know.”

“I thought you were the goddamn expert!”

“What difference does it make?” she asked.

‘‘You started it,” I said.

‘‘All I said was ‘We are all one,’” she said.

“Okay, okay, he said, calmly, trying to restore logic and order to their conversation. Would you care to expand on that theme, relating it—directly, if possible—to our discussion of the littering process in my clothing storage room?”

“Cute, Mattie. Very cute.”

“Thank you. Ready when you are.”

‘‘Given that God, or the Absolute, if you prefer, is everything and everything is God—you will give that?”

“Yes.”

“And space is part of everything?”

“Okay.”

“And we, meaning you and I, are part of that everything?”

‘‘Go on.”

“And cats and kittens and shoes and closets?”

“Elizabeth.”

“And cats and kittens and shoes and closets?”

“Yes. Tentatively.”

“No tentatively,”

“I want to hear the punch line before I commit to anything.”

“There’s no punch line,” Elizabeth said. “Just simply that if we’re all here under the same auspices, then we all . . . then everything has the right to be what it is, and where it is.”

“You’re mixing Eastern mysticism with Western logic,” I said.

‘‘I am not. What if I am?”

“They’re not compatible.”

“They are.”

“According to you, if a bear walked into this house right now, we’d have to let him move in with us.”

‘‘Him?”

“Her! It! Who cares?! Answer the question!”

“There are no bears around here to come walking or moving in,”

‘‘A bobcat then! You’re being evasive!”

“And you’re trying to sidetrack me! As usual!”

‘‘I’m only repeating your logic!”

“We have the right to protect ourselves!”

‘‘Not bad,”

“Thanks.”

“Okay then, I have the right to protect my closet from invading cats.”

‘‘You’re impossible!”

“And they’re going out!”

“You better not hurt those kittens!”

‘‘I won’t!”

“I hope she scratches you!”

She did.

Another year, the pretext for our fight was communism, but the focus seemed to be on Beech Grove’s unique structure and the fact that newcomers couldn’t vote for the first five years and, thus, weren’t able to get their own pet projects adopted at the town meetings. Leonard had left his property, the town of Beech Grove, in trust to the established citizens, with restrictions on newcomers, which some newcomers resented. Elizabeth’s biggest complaint was that a hundred hours a year of community service was one of the requirements for being an established citizen, and you have to put those hours in even during the probationary five years. She also bitched that the donation of a painting to he sold at the festival was worth only twenty credits, And that one could only satisfy half the required credits with donations. There was no way around it, she was going to have to go out and get involved in the community if she wanted to take part in the town meetings. That fight lasted at least three days, followed by the mandatory days of silence,

One of our biggies was about healthy eating habits, especially my lack of, but what it got down to was that she preferred bran muffins and I preferred blueberry. The actual screaming part came when I said something about health nuts being neurotically preoccupied with excretory elimination.

Year before last, the argument started over the cat’s litter box, progressed to just which one of us it was who was taking the other for granted in bed, then wound up on my “Christmas Spirit” editorial, for which I was given the Southern California Press Association for Excellence in Journalism, in the small newspaper category.

“You were gloating,” she had said,

“Gloating? It was a…it expressed the essence of human kindness. It was touching.”

‘‘A country boy goes off to college in the big city and holds an umbrella over some little old lady’s head. Very touching. Who wouldn’t?”

“A lot of people! That was the whole point of the goddamn editorial! A lot of people wouldn’t!”

“Oh really, Mattie.”

“Don’t call me Mattie, Queenie!”

Then more name-calling, as usual. Then accusations. Then the silence.

Last year’s fight was our best ever. It was about Josh—straight out, with no pretext. Josh had stayed up in Riverside after college. He was a therapist and exercise instructor at one of those health clubs. Then when Beech Grove’s spa director retired after some forty-odd years, Hugh got the bright idea, and talked the rest of the town into it, that Josh should be our new spa director. He accepted.

Josh moved into the hotel, hut spent most of his free time at our house. He played pool with Dad and me when Dad’s spirits were high enough for him to ignore his arthritis, He helped me with the paper when things were slow at the spa.

Josh hadn’t changed a lot since we were kids together, racing from one end of Beech Grove to the other. Physically, he was even more strikingly handsome and powerful. Emotionally, he was still tense, his temper always in the ready position, but usually under control As an adult, I haven’t been able to help him as much as I used to. I can’t run, swim, spar, wrestle or play one-on-one the way I could as a teenager—and I wasn’t all that hot back then. And bleach is now packaged in plastic bottles. Donny’s a good competitor for Josh, as is Pat’s son, J .D. They give Josh a good run, so he gets to let off his steam with them. And I get my rest.

Josh actually was happy to be back in Beech Grove, despite his years of dissatisfaction with our little town. He said he had missed the peace, even if the pace was too slow. He made friends, easily, with the newcomers who had moved to the village during his absence. He renewed relations with old friends. He put a great deal of effort into improving the spa facilities and services. To my mind, his best improvement was the addition of massages: Swedish for general relaxation and for toning the muscles; and Shiatsu for relief of illness-causing tension and fatigue. Besides, Josh was generous with his talents: he gave me massages when I allowed the tension to build up into neck and backaches,

“I wish you wouldn’t let him do that,” Elizabeth said.

“I don’t let him do anything. I ask him to.”

“You shouldn’t ask him.”

“You won’t do it.”

‘‘You said I don’t do it well.”

‘‘You don’t.”

‘‘You shouldn’t be naked with him.”

“I wear a towel, for chrissake!”

‘‘Lot of good that does.”

‘‘I don’t even get a hard-on.”

‘‘It’s still bound to he tempting for him.”

‘‘Thanks for the compliment, but I’m afraid what you mean is that it might be tempting for me.”

‘‘That isn’t what I said.”

‘‘I know what you said, darling, but I learned a long time ago that what you say and what you mean are not always the same thing. I wish to God I hadn’t told you about our little experience.”

“Experiences.”

‘‘If I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t give a damn about the stupid massages.”

“He’s still a homosexual, whether you ever made it with him or not. And you shouldn’t be lying on a table naked with his hands all over you.”

‘‘Shit! I told you there’s nothing to be jealous about! He’s a goddamn professional!”

“I’m not jealous! You just go ahead and get your massages. If you prefer his touch to mine, I guess there’s nothing I can do about it!”

“I do not prefer his touch to yours! And it’s not a touch! It’s a push. It’s a k-need! There’s no fucking! There are no blowjobs! No mutual masturbation! No nothing!”

“No M & M’s?” she started to howl.

(Elizabeth has always made sport of the fact that I used to call myself Matthew and Mark, and her first pet name for me, back in college, was M & M: he melts in your mouth, not in your hand. And, in another of my sharing moments, I had told her that we used to call mutual masturbation, M & M’s. It became one of her all-time favorite private jokes.)

“No M & M’s,” I laughed.

“Melt in your mouth, not in your hand!” she added.

‘‘Prove it!” I dared. She did. But then, I couldn’t leave well enough alone.

“Could you lighten up your grip a little?” I asked.

‘‘Whata you mean, ‘lighten up’?”

“You know, just barely touch it with your fingers.”

“Oh, you mean the way Josh does it! Sure!”

She got a vice grip on my cock and yanked it down between my legs. I screamed. We didn’t speak for at least a week on that one.

One thing about our big annual fights, though, is that when we finally get back together, we do that up big, too,

After the beech tree fight, we mauled each other under a sycamore up in the hills on the way back from the Sunday Service. We lagged behind the others as we all walked home that day, telling them that Elizabeth had broken her sandal. We were an hour late for dinner. It took me ten minutes to rip that strap off her sandal, and two dollars to get it fixed. But it was worth it.

After the bran-versus-blueberry fight, we made it on the kitchen floor, smeared head to toe in batter.

One time, we locked ourselves in the bedroom for three days and scared the hell out of everybody. Actually, Donny did the scaring by planting the idea in people’s minds that maybe we had made a suicide pact. I made Donny repair the door they hashed in when they came to save us.

After the Josh fight, we used up every bottle of baby oil and skin lotion in the house during a marathon, mutual massage, which also included a half-bottle of polyunsaturated, cholesterol-free, safflower oil. We also had to replace the mattress afterwards.

That was also the fight and making-up session, which inspired Elizabeth’s contribution to the festival. In addition to the Founders’ Day Program and Art Festival, Elizabeth thought we should have a Summer Solstice Music and Dance celebration to boost the sagging attendance. The idea came to her during the safflower oil. The connection was beyond my comprehension, but she said it made perfect sense to her:

Something to do with lard and flutes,

Then she disappeared into her studio for what seemed like two days.

‘‘Working on a new painting?” I asked when she finally emerged.

“Meditating,” she said.

Elizabeth had been into meditation as long as I had known her, but that was the first time she’d ever done a marathon meditate.

“For two days?”

‘‘I had a lot to accomplish and it wasn’t two days. This solstice thing presents a lot of problems.”

“So you were conjuring up solutions in meditation?”

‘‘No. Results.”

“This I gotta hear,” I said.

“Not if you’re going to take that attitude.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. I am interested,”

“I’ve been reading about creative visualization and how it can change so-called reality.”

‘‘So-called?”

“You know, the idea that material substance is only a shadow, that the physical world is dependent on our perception of it.’’

“Yeah, okay.”

“Well, the idea is that objective reality is produced through imagination, that nothing in this world exists that did not first exist in imagination. Imagining creates reality.”

“Certainly a bold thought.”

“It’s like nothing really being solid and colors being only the way light hits the eye …and relativity.”

“Equally abstract, anyway.”

“But you do admit reality is questionable.”

‘‘Yes.”

“What you have to do, then, is imagine yourself already to be living in the reality you desire.”

“Daydreaming.”

“No, more concentrated. It has to be concentrated. It has to be stable. You have to believe you’ve already achieved the result you wanted, to live in it. Plus you must have the meditative contact with your inner self, our inner self. The Absolute, Imagination.”

“That’s why you locked yourself up then.”

‘‘Yes, to concentrate, meditate on the image. Now I have to live as though the results were already true. I accept the fact that I already have everything I need for the Solstice Celebration. So I do have everything.”

There wasn’t enough money in the festival budget to buy the musical instruments and costumes Elizabeth wanted. There wasn’t even enough money to buy the materials to make them, so Elizabeth got it into her head that Amelia should donate the money out of the nest egg Leonard had left her. Elizabeth, armed with her new faith, spent four days and nights in Amelia’s living room, listening to fond memories and family stories. They were suddenly the best of friends. On the fourth day, Elizabeth emerged from Amelia’s house with all the money she needed. Elizabeth called it the power of Human Imagination. I called it blackmail.

Elizabeth also got it into her head that little brother, Donny, should lead the opening dance ceremony—as Pan,

“He’ll never do it,” I told her.

“Why not?”

“Mainly because you’re married to me and he hates my guts.”

“Well, he doesn’t hate my guts,” Elizabeth said. “And I don’t think he hates you either. Just last Sunday, he…”

“Donny tolerates us because he is under orders to, or else. Mom will not have her Sundays disrupted with petty squabbles. Haven’t you noticed that Sundays are the only time he sees or talks to us?”

“That may be the only time he talks to you, dear. He talks to me all the time.”

“When?” I asked.

‘‘While you’re at work, mostly.”

“He comes here?”

“Yes. He’s, uh, been helping me with…around the house.”

“Doing what?”

‘‘Oh, it’s a surprise.”

“What kind of surprise?”

“You’ll see when it’s…when I get ...you’ll see.”

‘‘Well, you’ll be very lucky if he sticks it out. He never finishes anything he starts. He’s worked for damn near everyone in this town, but never for more than two or three weeks. Years ago, he started working with Dad on those miniature cedar chests they sell at the festival, and he is yet to finish one on his own. All he wants is to have that goddamn noisy music blaring in his ears And enough alcohol and probably dope, knowing him, to keep reality out of his life. He’s useless, Queenie, and he won’t do it for you!”

“You’re ranting.”

“He pisses me off!”

“On the other hand, Donny is a sensitive and introspective person. He has the most penetrating blue eyes I’ve ever seen. He is a terrific dancer, And he is a gorgeous hunk naked. He’s perfect for Pan.”

“How do you know what he looks like naked?”

“Well, in swim trunks, anyway.”

“That’s better. Is your Pan going to be naked?”

“Not entirely. I thought I’d glue hair on his legs.”

“What about the part between the legs? Don’t you think you’d better glue something there?”

‘‘I’ll think of something.”

Donny refused when Elizabeth asked him to lead the dance, and she let it slide for a while. Then they went swimming one afternoon up at the top of the creek and she came back with a star for her pageant. If I hadn’t been absolutely positive Donny was gay, I would’ve accused her of doing something. At that, I’m not totally convinced she didn’t.

They rehearsed, in private, at Amelia’s. No one saw or heard anything until the opening day of the festival, the summer solstice.

Aelia made the Founder’s Day speech, a yearly tribute to Grampa Leonard and his great generosity. Then Eddie offered a few words about the quality of the art that year. Then Elizabeth took over.

We were on the big lawn that lies between the hotel entrance and the shops across the way. First, the children’s choir danced out onto the grass, each in some sort of spring-like costume, each with an authentic early musical instrument. They sang a medieval chant, then sat on the lawn in a large circle and began to play. The music was eerie. It had a “tribal” quality to it: ritual dances, songs to the gods. The kids seemed to he really getting into it, and they played very well, I thought.

The audience, which was of a fairly good size that year, didn’t know what to think at first. There was a general restlessness, squirming, then the rhythmic patterns of the music began to cast their spell. It was time for Pan.

A flute called from behind the three oaks at the far end of the lawn. Donny leapt out from behind the trees. We all stared in fascination as he danced—no, ran—in leaping strides around the perimeter of the great lawn. He was incredible. There were two small horns jutting out of his tousled hair. His tanned body was gleaming with sweat. There was long, white and brown animal hair flowing down from his naked groin and ass, with shorter and darker hair continuing on down to his feet. And Elizabeth had done something to his eyes so that you could see the blue in them even when he was on the far side of the lawn. He leapt, skipped, cart-wheeled and somersaulted as he weaved in and out of the seated musicians, serenading them with his panpipe.

The finale came in the center of the musicians’ circle. Donny let the panpipe hang from the leather thong around his neck, and he began to spin, first with his arms outstretched, then raising them slowly and gracefully over his head, still turning a dizzying speed. The musicians, the children, jumped to their feet. They played louder and faster. Donny began a steady low moan which increased both in volume and pitch with each successive spin. The kids blew harder, hit their drums harder, and began to scream with Donny, The audience was stomping and clapping to the repetitive heat of the primitive drums.

Suddenly, Donny stopped dead still. The music stopped simultaneously. The clapping stopped. Donny stood there for a moment, his eyes cast skyward. Sweat was streaming down his body, matting the hair on his loins, He jumped straight up in the air, let out a frightening scream at the top of his lungs, and then fell to the ground. The kids piled on him, screaming, with arms and legs flailing. I started to run out there to rescue him, but Elizabeth grabbed my arm.

The frenzy stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The children got to their feet and made a circle around Donny. The circle opened and Donny strutted out to greet his audience, his arms stretched high and wide to the gods, his body covered in hundreds of flower petals.

The crowd applauded wildly, whistling and yelling bravos! to Donny. Dozens of them ran out onto the lawn to congratulate the performers.

My adrenaline was pumping like mad, a real high. I kissed Elizabeth, then Amelia, and ran into the crowd to find Donny,

He was down on his hands and knees being kissed by a little girl who wanted one of his little flowers. When she turned away, I reached under Donny’s arms from the back and pulled him to his feet. I turned him around. He looked a bit confused by the ear-to-ear smile I was wearing, but he did return the smile. I threw my arms around him, kissed him on the mouth, then just held on.

“I love you!” I shouted, as my excitement, my strange high, reached still another peak.

‘‘I don’t know’ what you’re on,” Donny said, ‘‘but I like it.”

I kissed him again.

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