The first stop on my journey was in Alexandria, Virginia.  My crazy Cuban friend Marisella recently moved there to be with her new husband Dick.  She brought our little girlie Millie with her.  Mari is adjusting well to the move.  She is over the initial shock of moving to suburban D.C. and the nervous breakdown that followed.  I'm sure the many hours in therapy were a big help.  Millie adjusted much more quickly.  After all one mailman or UPS person is as good as another to bark at, although she did take to nipping at strange men.   Girlie had no problem remembering me.  I helped raise her from a puppy, no bigger than my foot.  She sat in my lap and licked my hand for an hour straight.   

Dick, Girlie, and Mari

Mari is a writer. She has a number of part-time jobs too.  She works in a vintage clothing shop, probably to get first shot at the new merchandise as much as for the extra cash.  She'll start teaching a class at Georgetown this semester and she does volunteer work.  But her best part-time job is being a translator for the sheriff's department.  She translates for "The Shoplifting Offenders Course" for the Spanish speakers who are caught shoplifting.  I thought people just stole things because they didn't want to pay for them, but that's not true.  There are all these psychological reasons that people shoplift.  Marisella attends these workshops at the Comfort Inn in Leesburg, which are for mostly first-time offenders, and explains all these things to them in their native tongue.   There are other translators there too- French, Arabic, Vietnamese, whatever language they need to educate the current group of offenders.  Dick just retired from his job as an analysis at a major Washington think tank. I bought a blue shirt printed with cowboys riding on giant hares while in Leesburg at the second hand shop that supports battered women.   It only cost me a buck and a half.

NORTH AND SOUTH OF THE BORDER

The last time that I saw Gena was briefly in 1987.  I was passing through New York on my way back from Togo, West Africa, where I was building schools in the Peace Corps.  Gena had just got her first construction management job and was living in Brooklyn.  I crashed at her place. We watched the New York Marathon not far from her apartment as it passed through Clinton Hill.  Then we disappeared from each other's lives.  I got an e-mail from her 16 years later last September.  She found my e-dress on my website, www.johnsbighead.com.   Little to my knowledge she had moved to New Jersey after leaving New York and had been looking for me for years.  I was no where to be found.  She called some D'Agostinos in the phone book and I think talked to some of my relatives. But they kept quiet about my whereabouts. I was out in the mid-west.   

When we finally connected by e-mail she told me that she was living on an organic farm in North Carolina. In my head I pictured some exotic Buddhist commune, but it turned out to be a nice little family run farm.  Someplace her boys could experience nature.  Gena raises goats, makes goat cheese, and has chickens that lay white, brown, light blue and olive green eggs.  I think she feeds them organic paint.

One chilly night Gena collected some chickens and ducks from the barn and Guinea fowl from their pens and we loaded them into a cage on the back of a trailer to take to the processing plant the next day.   She passed them to her husband and me as they dangled upside-down by their feet in her grip.   They didn't flap their wings or nothing.  They just hung there as we carried them by their feet over to the cage and tossed them in.  The goats have a better life. They get milked regularly and lots of attention.  They are very friendly, almost like pets.  They don't get eaten. The chickens and fowl get processed and vacuum packed.

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