Rain Man

(Author's note: Sometimes you just gotta go there.)

As always, exhaustively unedited.

Let's face it. There is one highway the wannabe genealogist must never go down. 

It's that genealogical highway headed way out past Rabbit Hole, South Dakota, or past Rumor, West Virginia, or Gossip, Indiana. You might be thinking you got the Big Time chops to navigate those pot holes out around Burnt Court House, Oklahoma, but trust me, you don't. As the wannabe genealogist you've been warned about all of these places and road signs before. Heck, you've already been to Dead End, Michigan looking for great grandpa a couple of times before. You already know that most of those genealogical maps you picked up along the way likely came out of the Way-Back-Machine or some Rootsweb page that told you Prince Harry shops at the same Wal-Mart you do. 

Yeah, you were warned and you know those warnings to be true.

Still, you like to put the top down and burn some genealogical gas sometimes. 

After all, you gotta look, right? 

All those BIG family trees you passed along the genealogical highway- you figure they can't all just be unpaved dirt roads to Big Lies, Montana. Somebody has had to have posted a sign to Family Truth, Arizona, or stumbled upon it, and maybe just forgotten to tell you (or anybody) that you might just not run out of gas before you actually get there. You know, to get you there to that proverbial Ancestral Bridge over the railroad tracks of your own private Who's Who Highway of Kansas and Idaho!

But hey, indulge me here for a moment. 

Close yours eyes just for a wee bit, and you fire up those genealogical engines - and your wonder of what's out there anyway. Even if we figure out that it turns out to be nothing more than just another map of Bullhooey, Tennessee, or Wrong Way City, Delaware, it's worth taking a chance to see. 

                                                      *************

Now, I've spent way too much of my "genealogical currency," agency, nerve, verve, or gas, looking for the usual b.s.. I mean who doesn't want all those acclaimed willy-nilly things that make one a Swiftie or a relative of Millard Filmore. How could you not? But late last week, after being prompted by Cousin Dan to listen to a series of podcats on the nature of consciousness, and, from there, being directed to or reminded of a certain man by the name of "Kim Peek," I was, well,  "genealogically" hooked again. 

           

Above: Laurence Kim Peek - "Rain Man"

As you might expect, I did not immediately recognize the name "Kim Peek" (or his full name Laurence Kim Peek). However, as I listened to the podcast, and realized that they were discussing the real world attributes of the man who was Rain Man, well, I had to know more. The wannabe genealogist in me began to suck in way too many exhaust fumes from the genealogical highway- and all of a sudden I was genealogically crusin' in a 1948 Buick Roadmaster - because if you're gonna go on a genealogical cruise, well, the cruiser has got to make sense.

You got a better idea? Whatever.

I'm not sure exactly what I was looking for - okay, that's a lie. I wanted that connection.

I wanted that connection to Rain Man. Hell, I wanted it probably more than I wanted to be considered a dang Swiftie by extention. And it was there. It was there, sitting unverified a couple of times over at the railroad tracks of Family Trees City and a not far outside of Incest Forks, Vermont. I was good with that, and well, I probably should have simply moved on. I mean, really, it was (and is) good enough to known that a wee-wee-tiny-tiny bit o' "Rain Man blood" flows through my geriatric and well clogged arteries. 

But you have to know that would never be enough. 

After all, I did work on that Short-Bus for one heck of a lot of years. LOL.

       

Above: Image courtesy of https://www.facebook.com/groups/1689914071397493/user/100076281457960/

Yeah, it wasn't enough. 

As I cruised in the '48 Buick though I saw what I was looking for. 

Yep, there it was - my kinsman - my goal - John Howland of the Mayflower - right there in Rain Man's family tree and with the Old Boat itself tied up at the docs along side the highway at "Just Maybe Baby," Massachusetts. 

Now I have been to the town of "Just Maybe Baby" before. Hell, I think I interned there more than once - but could it be that "Laurence Kim Peek" the actual Rain Man and little old moi shared a common Mayflower ancestor via John Howland? 

    

Winner, winner, chicken dinner - or is it Just Maybe Baby?

I'd already researched my own family lines to Grandpa John and nauseum. Could I prove Rain Man's?

I couldn't help but wonder, why nobody has looked at this before. This lack of attention to a fairly prominent cultural icon didn't make sense. Had Peek's possible Mayflower ancestry slipped through the cracks? At this point, I honestly don't know the answer. So I have decided to set out here what I do know, or what me and a 1948 Buick Roadmaster convertible might discover about any possible connection from MP John Howland to Kim Peek. 

It is significant enough (I feel) that it warrants further study - but a further study that is for me, at least for now, in a place called Outer Limits, Utah. (You get my drift.)

Okay, here goes:

Now I don't wanna bore you with a bunch of unncessary old hand written genealogical road maps on paper napkins. So I figured I'll take a short cut over the new information highway and see if I can't explain what I'm talking about a different way. 

In other words, the first generations from Mayflower passenger John Howland to Laurence Kim "Rain Man" Peek start to shape up like this:

It's all well and good, right? 

Yeah, I know. It usually is until some pesky genealogical road closure in Western New York that causes you to slide right off the pedigree pavement where you land in a swamp of missing records, and baptismal receipts. LOL.

But things really do look pretty good between Rain Man and John Howland until you get here:

As you can see, you have just pulled that '48 Buick Roadmaster up to the "Tilt-a-whirl" at the traveling genealogical carnival of clowns. Couldn't nobody write this sh*t down?

"Rain Main" Kim Peek's Mayflower line to John Howland is pretty much fine up until this point. But when we get here, that is to Generation 7 we see that for Rain Man's ancestor, the lovely and talented Aseneth (Hurlbut) Dustin, that the record of who her parents were is, well, long overdue for a Smog Certificate. 

Yeah, the records get slim here. 

In fact, the "go to" book, The Hurlbut Genealogy finds out dear Aseneth (Hurlbut) Dustin not listed among the children of the people reputed to be her parents at all. Aseneth is supposed to be the daughter of Jesse Hurlbut and Polly Taft/Teft. 

But she "ain't there." In fact, our dear gal Aseneth isn't in the Hurbut genealogy at all.

Now we know she "was there" - we know Aseneth Hurlbut was married to Bechias Dustin. Indeed, the genealogy on down from Aseneth and Bechias to Rain Man is pretty easy peasy. Not to get ahead of myself, but it sort of looks like this:

The trouble with all of this, is that (for the most part) ALL we have to go on for Rain Man's Generation 7 is this:

Yep, this is an LDS family group sheet from the 1950s - but it is based off one from the 1890s.

It was put together by a cousin of Rain Man's, a lady by the name of Vilda (Dustin) Kunz. 

While there is quite a bit of information about the Dustin family itself, notably Aseneth's husband Bechias Dustin, there's not much else for Aseneth herself.

  

Above: The Hurlbut Genealogy (1888) - where Aseneth is missing from this geneartion's children on the next page (pages 157-158)

As you can see from this FGS, (created just a few short years after that 1948 Buick Roadmaster), the genealogically inclined Vilda (Dustin) Kunz listed Aseneth's parents shown as Jesse Hurlbut and Polly Taft - the same people and family listed in the Hurbut genealogy - where Aseneth is not listed as their daughter at all.

Above: The Duston-Dustin Genealogy (1953)

So what gives? At this point it's hard to tell.

We end up in a tug-o-war. 

With no original vital records found thus far, The (1888) Hurbut Genealogy takes on the look of "the authority" for the family and all things on "Hurlbut Drive."  Vilda's family sheets become "an interesting aside;" they don't carry the weight that one might think they should. Vilda's information from the 1950s becomes immediately suspect. Where did Vilda get the information from? Did she copy it from a previously false record? 

   

                                        Above: Vilda (Dustin) Kunz (1891-1986)

I'm not here to malign Vilda. 

In fact, I think she was probably ensconced someplace in some pre-cursor of a 1960s Granite Mountain in Salt Lake when she wrote all the information about Aseneth's family down on the Family Group Sheet, and that likely, The (1888)  Hurlbut Genealogy, well, that they just missed Aseneth when they turned that genealogical corner too fast and skidded off the genealogical highway.

Still, as I researched this portion of Rain Man's lines I could see that there is yet a GREAT DEAL hidden away in that Granite Mountain in SLC that could lead to more information about Rain Man's ancestor Aseneth (Hurlbut) Dustin. (I only hope that if some of you LDS folks read this you'll take pity on me and tell your Grand Pubas to release more records.)

                   

Really, what the heck are they hiding them for?

In the mean time, the discussion of Rain Man's family tree and that of any possible ties to the Mayflower may seem suspect - but are they?

Some may argue that Rain Man's connection to MP John Howland was a "copy and paste" moment in someone's family tree trying to link people that don't truly connect- inserting an "unrelated" Aseneth (Hurlbut) Dustin into Jesse Hurlbut and Polly (Taft) Hurlbut's family so as to "procure" that Mayflower connection. Some will say that folks may have seen it to as an opportunity to link Rain Man to the Mayflower. 

Hey, I'm all for it - arguging the evil ways of bad genealogy as the root carburator driving the Ghost in the Machine. BUT there are a couple of issues with that argument.

Vilda's family group sheets were made circa 1955 - and off of 1890s LDS worksheets.

Laurence Kim "Rain Man" Peek was 4 years old in '55.

Actor Dustin Hoffman would not make the name of "Rain Man" a household name until 1988. In 1955, Vilda (Dustin) Kunz had no way of knowing anything about either of them - and Vilda died in 1986 two years before anyone ever parked their antique Roadmasters at the Drive-In movies.

Did Vilda have some other motivation for linking her own family lines to the Mayflower? 

Was she part of some nefarious LDS 1950s sewing circle motor club that wanted to make sure her line was preserved? I'd say yes - but with a reservation. I believe Vilda used the information she had at the time. It was good information to Vilda. It was true to her. I don't believe she falsely portrayed her ancestors "Aseneth Hurbut" and "Bechias Dustin" or their ancestoes as anything but hers.

I think that like "Rain Man" she knew what she was talking about.

And while we may not see it just now, it seems for me, it's time to park the Roadmaster at the corner of "Truth and Vine Streets."

The line, at least for now, anecdotally, holds.

☮

What about Claude?

OR "AUNT MARY LIED"

  

                          Above: Claude's wife Kate, left.

(Author's note: What if you knew an ancestor had fibbed? Would you rat them out a hundred years later?)

As always, unapologetically, unedited. Oh, and my hyperlinks suck. Just sayin'.

Every great detective story needs a document that lies to your face and dares you to notice. This one even comes with an affidavit.

In September 1922, Mary (Hotchkiss) Trotter Leonard of Woodward County, Oklahoma sat down in front of a notary public and swore, under oath, to a version of her own family that was one sister short. Her sister Mattie had died the previous December in Detroit. Mattie had no husband and no children, so Wayne County needed a sworn list of heirs before it would release her estate. Mary supplied one- herself. 

Of the four children born to her parents Abner and Sarah Hotchkiss, she said: George, died in infancy; Harriet, “died about twenty years ago and without issue;” and Mattie, was, of course , newly deceased.

 And further, that Mary herself was, “the only living relative and sole heir.”

   

            

Above: Did she start to tell the truth and change her mind?

Three of those four sentences hold up fine. The fourth one is the reason this post exists.

Harriet Hotchkiss did not die in 1902. Harriet Hotchkiss died in February 1921,¹ on Mackinac Island, roughly nineteen years after her sister Mary's paperwork supposedly buried her and about ten months before Mattie actually died. 

Harriet also did not die “without issue.” Harriet had a son. His name was Claude Hough, he lived a few doors down from Harriet on the same small island. He was a guy who built things for a living, and he is the same informant who walked into the registrar’s office and reported his own mother’s death.²

 

Somewhere, a Detroit probate clerk in 1922 processed an affidavit from Oklahoma that a Mackinac Island carpenter could have corrected on the spot, if anyone had thought to ask him. Nobody asked him. Anyone who might have known chose not to. This post asks him (and the rest of us) to do so now, one hundred and five years late, by reading his mother’s paper trail instead.

Chapter One: Harriet Refuses to Stay Buried on Schedule

Every mystery needs a suspect who won’t cooperate with the official story, and Harriet Hotchkiss turns out to be a spectacularly uncooperative corpse for a woman who was supposedly two decades before actually being one.

Harriet was born to Abner Hotchkiss and Sarah Brown, the same parents named for all three sisters, and certainly in Mary’s own affidavit, so there is no ambiguity about which family we are in. About 1873, Harriet married a man named Robert Hough. The couple had a son, Claude, born around 1876, and by the 1880 census the three of them were living together in Bay County, Michigan, with Dad Robert working as a farm laborer and Harriet keeping house.³ 

So far, an ordinary nineteenth-century household.

Then the marriage to Robert Hough appears to have ended, because by 1898 our gal Harriet is using her maiden name again. That year, Harriet Hotchkiss married a soldier named Patrick Kerrigan on Mackinac Island, and on the marriage register she named her own parents: Abner Hotchkiss and Sarah Brown.⁴ 

This single line of ink is the hinge of the whole investigation. It ties the Bay County housewife directly back to the Lapeer County farm daughter, in Harriet’s own words, recorded by a county clerk who had no reason to make it up.

By 1910, Harriet Hotchkiss Kerrigan had been married to Patrick for twelve years and was living on Mackinac Island with exactly one child born and one child living, according to the census taker who knocked on her door that April.⁵ Keep that number in your pocket. 

It comes back.

Patrick Kerrigan died sometime before 1920, because the 1920 census finds Harriet running her own household, sixty-five years old, listed as the “keeper” of a rooming house.⁶ A widow running a business on a tourist island is not the profile of a woman who quietly disappeared eighteen years earlier. Meanwhile, a few households over on the next census page, a "Claude Hough" - Harriet's son - turns up as a forty-three-year-old carpenter with a wife named Katherine.⁶ Mother and son, both alive, both accounted for, both a short walk from each other, in a year when her sister Mary’s affidavit had already declared our gal Harriet as dead and childless for nearly two decades.

Say what???

Claude Hough was still on Mackinac Island in 1930, still a carpenter, by then running his own contracting business.⁷ This is not a man who vanished. This is a man who kept a steady address for over half a century while his aunt, four hundred miles away in Oklahoma, told a notary he did not exist.

Chapter Two: The Death Certificate Solves Its Own Case

Every good mystery has a moment where the detective stops guessing and finds the one document that ends the argument. Here it is.

   

Harriet Hotchkiss Kerrigan died of pneumonia on February 15, 1921, at age sixty-five years, eleven months, and four days.⁸ The attending physician, a Dr. J. F. Darby of St. Ignace, noted on the certificate that he “did not see patient but "prescribed over the telephone,” which tells you a great deal about rural medicine in 1921 and nothing at all about whether Harriet was really dead, which she now unfortunately was. 

The certificate lists her father’s surname correctly as Hotchkiss.

And the informant, the person who stood at the counter and answered the clerk’s questions about Harriet’s life and death, was - you guessed it, her son: Claude Hough.

Harriet: Not without issue. "The issue" himself had signed the paperwork.

Chapter Three: Three Sisters and a Great Deal of Michigan Between Them

A weaker post would end there, wave the death certificate around, and call Mary a liar. This one is going to slow down, because the more interesting question is not whether Mary’s affidavit was wrong. It plainly was. 

The interesting question is how a sister could be that wrong about her own sister.

Start with the money, because money is always a good place to start. In September of that same year, most likely 1922 though the final digit of the year is trimmed off the surviving copy,⁹ the Public Administrator of Wayne County handed Mary a receipt for $279.45, marked “in full of the residue in the estate of Mattie Hotchkiss, deceased,” case number 91893.⁹ Probate math is not complicated. An estate residue splits by the number of heirs on record. One heir gets the whole amount. This does not prove Mary lied for the money. It does mean the affidavit was never just a family remembrance. It was a legal instrument, doing legal work, in a system built to trust a sworn sister's statement rather than send an investigator to Mackinac Island to check.

Ah, that pesky Claude!

Now look at what these three sisters were actually doing with each other in the decades before that affidavit, because the answer is: not much. Between 1876 and roughly 1881, each of Abner Hotchkiss’s three surviving daughters sold off her own inherited slice of his Burlington Township farm, in three separate deeds, to two different buyers, and three different addresses.¹⁰ Harriet Hough signed hers from Lapeer County. Mary Trotter signed hers from Edwards County, Kansas. Martha “Mattie” Hotchkiss assigned hers to a buyer from Onondaga County, New York. 

Three sisters, one farm, and not one shred of paper showing they coordinated any of it with each other.

That is not what a close family’s paperwork looks like.

That is what three people look like when they are already becoming strangers, one land sale at a time, without ever needing to have a falling out about it.

Chapter Four: The Actual Twist

Here is the twist this genealogical mystery has been building toward, and it is not a twist about villainy. It is a twist about distance.

An affidavit like Mary’s does not legally require firsthand knowledge. Courts have always accepted “I always understood it to be so” as a stand-in for “I personally confirmed it yesterday.” A woman who last saw her sister as a young bride in the 1870s, who received no further word, and who eventually assumed that decades of silence meant the worst, is not necessarily lying. She may simply be wrong in the specific way people get wrong about relatives they have not spoken to in forty years. Estrangement does not announce itself with a slammed door and a witness list. It accumulates quietly, one unanswered decade at a time, until a sister can swear a solemn oath about a death that happened nineteen years and one entire marriage later than she thought, and mean every word of it.

Aside from Mary, nobody alive can tell you what Mary actually believed the day she signed that affidavit. This post cannot adjudicate her state of mind, and neither, charitably, could the Public Administrator of Wayne County. 

He had a sworn statement and a probate deadline. That is what the law asked for.

What the law did not ask for, and what a hundred and five years of dust and a lot of patient zooming into scanned documents can finally supply, is the correction: Harriet (Hotchkiss) (Hough) Kerrigan lived a full life. She raised a son. She buried at least one husband, remarried, and ran a business on Mackinac Island into her sixties. When she finally died, her son was the one who told the world about it, in writing, with his own name on the form.

Whatever Mary believed in Woodward County, Oklahoma, Harriet was somebody’s mother. Claude Hough made sure of that on paper in 1921, a full century before this post got around to the reading and or the retelling of it all.

Yes, indeed. What about Claude?

Zoom-zoom.

---

The Evidence Locker

1. Michigan, Certificate of Death, Harriett Kerrigan, registered no. 1, Mackinac County, city of Mackinac Island, date of death 15 Feb. 1921. Age 65 yrs., 11 mos., 4 days. Father’s surname given as Hotchkiss. Informant Claude Hough, Mackinac Island, Mich. (Repository/collection citation to be supplied from the original digital image source.) ↩
2. Death certificate of Harriett Kerrigan, cited above, field 14 (“Informant”). ↩
3. 1880 U.S. census, Hampton, Bay County, Michigan. Enumerated 26 June 1880 by Joseph Leighton. Dwelling 364, family 396. Robert A. Hough, 39, farm laborer. Harriet, 24, wife. Claude E., 5, son. (Repository/collection citation to be supplied.) ↩
4. Michigan, Return of Marriages, Mackinac County, quarter ending 30 June 1898, record no. 701. Patrick Kerrigan, of Mackinac Island, and Harriet Hotchkiss, of Bay City. Parents given as Abner Hotchkiss and Sarah Brown. License 16 May 1898, married 1 June 1898, Mackinac Island, Rev. J. Miller (Catholic Church) officiating. (Repository/collection citation to be supplied.) Note: the bride’s birthplace is given here as New York, which does not match other records placing her birth in Michigan. Unresolved. ↩
5. 1910 U.S. census, Mackinac Island city, Mackinac County, Michigan. Enumerated 30 April 1910 by Lew Chapman. Sheet 4B, dwelling 84, family 87. Patrick Kerrigan, head, 64, married 16 years. Harriet, wife, 60, married 16 years, second marriage, 1 child born, 1 living. (Repository/collection citation to be supplied.) ↩
6. 1920 U.S. census, Mackinac Island city, Mackinac County, Michigan. Enumerated 10 and 13 March 1920 by Ruth E. Bourisau. Sheet 1A, dwelling 5, family 14: Claude Hough, head, 43, carpenter, wife Katherine. Sheet 1B, dwelling 17, family 63: Harriett Kerrigan, head, widowed, 65, “keeper,” rooming house. (Repository/collection citation to be supplied.) ↩
7. 1930 U.S. census, Mackinac Island city, Mackinac County, Michigan. Enumerated 24 April 1930 by Glen E. Lyman. Sheet 1A, dwelling 80-81, family 39. Claude Hough, head, carpenter/contractor, wife Katherine. (Repository/collection citation to be supplied.) ↩
8. Death certificate of Harriett Kerrigan, cited above, fields 10 and 16-17. Father’s surname Hotchkiss. Cause of death pneumonia, attending physician J. F. Darby, St. Ignace, Michigan, “did not see patient but prescribed over the telephone.” ↩
9. Receipt, Mary (B.) Leonard to Henry S. Sweeny, Public Administrator, Woodward, Oklahoma, dated September 7, 192_ (final digit illegible or cropped in the surviving copy, most probably 1922 based on the probate timeline). $279.45, “in full of the residue in the estate of Mattie Hotchkiss, deceased, as per the final account of Administrator, duly filed in Probate Court of Wayne County, case #91893.” Image as supplied. Repository unknown. ↩
10. Lapeer County, Michigan, Register of Deeds, quitclaim deeds. Harriet M. Hough to Isburn Spencer, dated 10 Mar. 1871, recorded 1876 (image 119 of 655, “Lapeer, Michigan, United States records,” FamilySearch, Image Group Number 008310143). Mary Trotter (formerly Mary Hotchkiss) to Amos Jackson, dated 4 Jan. 1881, recorded 21 Jan. 1881 (image 495 of 593, FamilySearch, Image Group Number 008310247). Martha Hotchkiss to Amos Jackson, dated 26 June 1881 or 1882, recorded 13 Jan. 1881 or 1882 (image 490 of 593, FamilySearch, Image Group Number 008310247). All three convey undivided interests in the same sixty-acre parcel in Burlington Township, Section 25, Town 10 North, Range 11 East, inherited from Abner Hotchkiss. ↩

             

 The Death of Mattie Hotchkiss

                    And "Tigers in the Tank"      

Above: 59 East Ferry Street, Detroit, Michigan - today

(Author's note: "Batter up!")

As always, edited like a foul ball.

Hey all, I'm not going to keep you a long time here. Sometimes though, as I make my way through the family trees and the lives that connect to us to each other, remarkable (or at least for me) things sometimes fall out of those very same trees. 

This one felt worth mentioning.

It's a given: We all have these unexpected and unusual connections to "people, places, and things," that often seem to come out of nowhere. Such was the case this week as I researched through the lineage of my cousin Dan to Susannah North Martin of Salem 1692 repute. It was (is) a lineage that had me stop at one very important point along the way, and that point was at the Death of Mattie Hotchkiss - a Susannah North Martin descendant. Indeed, it was Mattie's passing and the intestate probate search for her next of kin that helped me piece "the North line" together.

Yes, Mattie helped us out - via her sister Mary (Hotchkiss) (Trotter) Leonard, who was Dan's biological great-great-grandmother.

              

Long story short, Mattie Hotchkiss was a maiden aunt, Mary's spinster sister who worked her whole life as a cook and maid in the homes of other people. No children, or husband, and no shame there, on the surface Mattie's life appears to have been kind of a lonely one. As I "tripped" through the census records I could see her, always the "maid" or the cook" or listed as the "domestic" among those records.

As I looked at the records though, a rather nondescript thing stood out. 

The address where Mattie worked. (Duh, Jeff...)

59 East Ferry Street, Detroit, Michigan

It was an address and a household that "Aunt Mattie" served at from at least 1900 through 1910. That's kind of a long time- so I got to wondering about "that address" and about the people associated with it. I got to wondering about the house itself.

Just who were the people Aunt Mattie worked for?

The 1900 census record says that Mattie worked in the household of some guy name Sam Angus.

So who the heck is "Samuel F. Angus?"

At least in the first instance, it didn't take long to find out. 

   

She worked for this guy:

Above: 1908 Obituary for Samuel Angus

Okay, so the name S.F. Angus and all his accomplishments didn't mean that much to me either - but check out that address in his obituary:

"59 East Ferry Ave, Detroit, Michigan"

The same place in the census - and the same place where Mattie lived and worked.

With Sam Angus, owner of the Detroit Tigers.

                

Okay, so I know it isn't like some big deal or some huge genealogical find. But dang, it's a frickn' jewel of life in the past. It tells me that even in the most humble and seemingly unnoticeable of lives that we attempt to learn and study- that there are incredible details of something pretty darn cool that can simply go unnoticed.

There Aunt Mattie was, maybe scrubbing floors and cooking meals at 59 East Ferry Street - but she was also in the thick of 1902 Detroit Tigers baseball fever!

            

So I guess the moral to the story here is that even the most humble of lives there is something to be found that is totally remarkable! It may seem incidental (and indeed it no doubt is) that Aunt Mattie lived and worked here.. and while her memory and life may have faded into the back pages of time, I thought it was worthwhile to take note of her. 

And while I can't be certain of it, Aunt Mattie likely shook hands with some of the greatest baseball players of yesteryear - players like Ty Cobb. 

And all of this hidden in the address for an old house.

 I am no sports aficiando, but that, in my book, is pretty dang cool.

               

Rest in peace, Aunt Mattie.

☮

 The Holy Ghost

(Author's note: Sometimes the only way to begin a story is at its end.)

I.

There simply were no better directions.

I had little more than a room number at "The Woodlake" — an aging mid-century Goliath of a 'gasthaus' set along the potholes of an out-of-the-way frontage road. Still, the past seemed to be calling me. I pulled the car around to the hotel's backside, circumnavigating its wings and reading through its well-obscured numbers. Even by then, the numbers had become faded; all were bearing witness to the hotel's general atmosphere of an obedient decline.

My car seemed to hesitate. What exactly are we doing here, boss? In the short distance, a train wailed as if it understood my confusion. It was hard to believe it had already been so many years since those days at Swig Hall, or indeed since he'd couch-surfed his way through my life in that room along The Alameda.

I opened the door and stepped out of the maraschino colored Dodge 600 to look around. The elocution of mid-80s tech surreptitiously warned me, "Your door is ajar..." Indeed, so was my mind. It was late afternoon, and the weather had turned clammy. The ambiance of The Woodlake Inn's "rooms for every budget" made it feel even more so. Locating the wing where I suspected his room was, I stopped. Feeling overloaded, I felt sick to my stomach and short of breath. Christ, I really need to get back to work. How much will have changed?

A gritty wind blew above the hotel's rooflines. Fronds of Jurassic palms obscured layers of peeling paint that conspired to hide the view of his and other room numbers. Hazy light overshadowed two sets of stairs that zig-zagged both ends of the building's barge rafters leaving me with that you're about to go "Through the looking-glass" feel to it all.

Getting my shit together, I quickly realized that they were only focal points. They were just points of light to search for him by and for that silly room number. My mind kept pulling me back in time. No, Jeff, this isn't Pipestage. No, you aren't trying to make your way out of Winterland.

You're just in the parking lot of some dumbass freeway hotel in Sacramento. Get a grip dumbass.

Eventually, and about mid-way across the second-floor balustrade, I heard him, and I heard the music.

"Everywhere is freaks and hairies

Dykes and fairies, tell me where is sanity

Tax the rich, feed the poor

'Til there are no rich no more

I'd love to change the world

But I don't know what to do

So I'll leave it up to you..."

Even through the music, the boom of his voice was unmistakable. Then I remembered his laugh. It was a laugh that sucked up all the air around him; it resonated across the chipped stucco and echoed against the neo-preen runway. I followed that laugh to where the lesser of the Jurassic fronds had hidden his 'missing' room. The electro-plated numbers showed his digits; all were engraved, and fastened to the door by some long ago and forgotten process. A slouching bag of litter stood guard outside the door. It greeted me; a pizza carton, milkshakes, and an empty box of Huggies were all getting ready to blow away with the next gritty wind. The odor of Sensi or Skunk weed wafted from the cracks around the door and surrounded that scattered litter. Maybe it was a good thing that the gritty wind wasn't so far away. Indeed, all these things seem to cling to the old hotel's very pores. Was I sure about this?

Knocking on the door, the vacuum of his laughter greeted me. An ambush of smoke flew past us escaping over the balustrade and into the arena of the parking lot below. From the corner of my eye, I saw the door to my latest get-away car glisten angrily in the afternoon heat. The 600 seemed to say: What exactly are we doing here, boss? The auto dealer's license plate now obscured by one of the Jurassic fronds. Turning inward I smiled, each of us reaching out to take the other's hand to bring us together in the embrace of old friends. Hey, maybe it hadn't been so long since Santa Clara U. after all.

He ushered me into his den. An additional collection of food and litter was blended in with assorted "travel" odds and ends. Worn carpet and unmade beds swam around me, and I could see a child's toys scattered near the bathroom door. A sturdy toddler with a half-baked runny nose sped past me clutching a soggy stuffed animal of nondescript identity. The child appeared to be a boy, but looking back now I can't really say. The child was clean enough, but too quiet, quick, and vacant in his stares. There was a gurgle in his breathing. How could he breathe in this room anyway?

Half-reposed on the bed was (I guess) the little boy's mother. Let's Make a Deal was spinning dollars in staticky color on a small TV nearby. She peered up at me with the half-lidded eyes of someone who spends more time with the bong than in reading any Dr. Spock. There was a vague odor of soiled diapers, but none seemed to reveal themselves among the room's debris. I may have imagined it anyway; the smell of weed and of yesterday morning's leftover pizza confused my nose. Still, it was good to see him, and the woman on the bed was polite enough as he introduced me to her and her son.

After the usual vagrant pleasantries, and after asking him who what and "where are you bound to and for," and of course after declining the standard issue bong hit, we began to compare life's notes. After all, I had to go to work. He told me "they" were off "chasing the dead." (Well that's what DeadHeads do forever isn't it?) He explained his plan again, and about how he would soon be "petitioning the government for the use of an aircraft carrier." After all, he had a right to use one, didn't he? He explained how they'd then be making arrangements with Jerry Garcia to have "those grateful ones" play their music on an aircraft carrier as they sailed off to Egypt and the Great Pyramids.

Really? So the dream from ten years ago was still the same? No adjustments to the fantasy other than the new wayward lady and her kid in tow?

We walked outside. That nearby train whistled again as he pointed out past the Jurassic palms toward his car. There in the parking lot, the headlights of the 600 looked up at me impatiently. Hey boss, you do realize that I'm late for my wash and wax? Are we gonna be here all day? In my race to get there, I hadn't noticed the bright blue and very ancient Benz parked right next to the 600. The Benz seemed to grin lugubriously up at us; it had a tired countenance as if to say I'm almost dead too.

Maybe it was the general look on my face. I mean, it was 1985, and well, admittedly that 600 there in the parking lot was just a gaudy, faux, and wicked beast. But I guess his fervor for the sagging old Benz didn't hit me where it was supposed to anymore. Looking back, I should have feigned more happiness for him — and selfishly I didn't. I am an utter ass some days. At that moment, whatever there was between us — whatever there had been back in the day, well, it just sort of crashed.

I didn't care about chasing some past glory. I wanted new and shiny things.

Hell, I wanted fast food version of family life in the suburbs. I wanted lawnmowers, barbecues, and picking out pre-schools. I wanted Back to the Future, Huey Lewis songs, and at the very least only a very gently used DeLorean. After all, I was in the process of developing a decent 80s style "cocaine habit on credit." I sure as hell didn't want to be off-chasing dancing bears to Egypt and back.

It had been ten years. Maybe the university life of "Swig Hall" and "The Alameda Residence" were already becoming just the stuff of old campfire stories.

Maybe they were only the stuff of holy ghost stories if you will.

And so it was done.

II.

It's probably not right to tell a story in reverse. I mean, common sense tells you that you're supposed to start at the beginning, and you know, tell about how it all happened and 'bring it all on home' to some sort of a close. I can't do that this time. You see, the story about him kind of starts where it ends, at The Woodlake, and nigh on Ten Years After Old Swig Hall.

But here goes anyway...

We'd been misfits together. And yes, he was odd. Odd in that way that made a lot of folks around him feel vaguely uncomfortable — and they were never exactly sure why. He was odd in the way that folks in tie-dyed t-shirts might make folks in three-piece suits cringe, or the way too much Grateful Dead brouhaha might make a bunch of freshman Catholics run for cover as his voice boomed through the corridors of Old Swig Hall. He was odd in one of those "look the other way folks" ways when he might have tried to wander in barefoot to Benson for dinner. He just didn't fit in well.

I suppose I liked all of this about him. Believe me, though, I wasn't immune to being embarrassed for him or because of him from time to time. Like I had any right at all to feel that way? Not. You see, even with all his oddities and or his peculiarities, he was so wonderfully honest, so mysteriously transparent in who he was and how he dealt with life. And while I lacked his distinct verve, I too was also a misfit. (Nah, say it isn't so!) So I couldn't help but be drawn to him, or at the very least feel compelled to his company. Like meets like.

"Once a fool had a good part in the play

If it's so would I still be here today

It's quite peculiar in a funny sort of way

They think it's very funny everything I say

Get a load of him, he's so insane

You better get your coat dear

It looks like rain, yeah..."

He wasn't afraid to be different. (And I of course always shuddered in fear of such a thing.) He even left once; going all the way to a Buddhist monastery at Mt. Shasta to work and find his inner peace. How could I not be drawn to that? Nobody I knew ever went past the doorsteps of the Mission Church. He wasn't afraid to drive a huge beat-up and absurdly vintage gun metal-colored Sedan De Ville convertible to let his freak flag fly. It was, after all to him, still a Cadillac. For him, true quality was intrinsic like virtue. It never lived on the surface of anything even despite appearances. How could I not respect him for being truer to himself than I could ever be?

By then though he'd traded the aging Cadillac for the beat-up Benz. Definitely not me.

After all, I liked new and shiny, fake stuff.

Well, you know — nice stuff?

Then there were the drugs. Why does it always have to be about the Goddamn drugs? At first, it was just all that Columbian Gold and the "whatnot hits of acid" and then of course toward the last years at Santa Clara U., the cocaine. If I'd had any reservations about him I surely set them aside as I became dependent on him for my latest fix of the blow. And in truth, he saw that I rarely suffered for that next line.

He'd always say, Give me a good reason why we should do a line...

Hmmm....tough one. Not.

After all, I really liked cocaine.

Duh.

Still, we were there for each other, sautéing mushrooms over a glass of Cabernet and eating the magic ones in between a line or two. I truly did like that laugh of his. It was amazing. And then, of course, there was the music. You see, that was "the truest beauty" about him — the truest beauty of his soul. He knew that music was the great unifier; the most excellent means to bring people together. He was a burgeoning promoter of the muses. I guess he knew that I was lacking here. Because of this, I guess he felt it incumbent upon himself to teach me those lyrical values.

Of course, for him, there was only ever one true school of thought when it came to music. The only school there ever could be. The School of the Dead.

Countless overly stoned Days on the Green ensued. Many trips followed to Winterland on acid that often became required sojourning. He made certain we were there at the Coliseum when "Jagger turned 40." I simply must be schooled he said. In later years, he even began to stretch his musical prowess by organizing live rock concerts in the Santa Cruz mountains which he always implored me to or indeed insisted that I attend. Still, always in the end, his religion was the Dead.

It was always about those "grateful ones."

Maybe I just didn't get it?

After all, I was late for my wash and wax.

III.

I should have known that things were changing that Spring when I came home to him sleeping in my front yard. While my new wife was accepting and tolerant of my Dead Heading friend, looking back now, I wonder if maybe I wasn't. It was after all our brand new home, and the thought of front yard vagrancy in the suburbs didn't feed my everyday dreams. Hell, I had a baby. Hell, I had a 600 that warned me when my door was ajar. Did I really need to worry about commandeering that aircraft carrier to Egypt?

By 1985, I just couldn't see my way to any more dancing bears.

IV.

I spun away out of that parking lot at the Woodlake Inn. The 600 nagged its warnings about low fuel over Simple Minds as I hit the frontage road. Jesus boss, what was that all about? You've got a sales meeting in an hour ya know. It wasn't that it hadn't gone well. I liked seeing him. I liked "remembering when" through a bit of his skunk weed haze. I mean we were still the same old friends from Benson and Swig Hall. We were still the same misfits. Weren't we? Yet there had been a tone of anarchy in him this time. Was it despondency? I really couldn't tell. He seemed to rebel against even the slightest mention of anything conventional or anything (God forgive me) "normal." The turbo in the 600 seemed to kick in as I merged onto the freeway at Arden Fair. Let's get the heck outta Dodge it seemed to say.

I guess I'd never really gotten that he was an anarchist before.

I didn't realize he'd always been one.

I guess I'd forgotten I wasn't one.

You know friendship is a funny thing. It can evaporate on you, and it will certainly starve when climates change. It wasn't like I didn't look for him in the years that followed. Yet he vanished that day with that somewhat sad-looking vintage Benz and the Mod Podge family he'd put together to help chase his dreams of music, dope, and more Days on the Green.

"Slow change may pull us apart

When the light gets into your heart, baby

Don't you, forget about me

Don't, don't, don't, don't

Don't you, forget about me..."

By 1991 there were only rumors about him and nothing more. I had heard less than anything since that day at The Woodlake Inn. Some said he'd been in Sing Sing prison in New York State. Some said they'd seen him at a convenience mart in San Luis Obispo in the middle of an angry exchange with a woman and a child. Stupid me. I wondered if that old sad Benz had had to listen to all that "angry exchange" or if it had been left behind in the prisoner's parking lot at Sing Sing. None of it made sense. In the distance, the only thing I could hear was the hum of an old 600, its warning voice silent now as it too drove away.

It didn't make sense.

He wasn't an angry man.

He was a good man, a music man, and a man who recycled and repurposed things before anyone else ever knew what recycling was all about.

Hell, I'd never recycled anything before.

I guess that like the rest of us, he was a blend of many things. In terms of ancestry, he always seemed a bit conflicted. Can I even say that anymore? The product of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, I suppose that this blend of cultures forced him into being a certain outcast in each. His mother's family was old Santa Barbara and had been an important one there for many years. And who'd have thought it so — but one of his ancestors was a man named Richard Warren who came over on the Mayflower.

I wonder if the Grateful Dead ever played on that boat.

Maybe all of this forced him to seek out anarchy as a resolution to it all. God knows the drugs didn't help.

Last year, his mother passed away at nearly 100 years old. I sent a card to him at her last address to offer my condolences, but as with the last thirty-five or odd many years, there was no answer from him. I'd reached out to his mother once before, looking for him, but at the time she had no answers either. She had no idea where he was. Like any mother, she was worried for her son. I think she answered my inquiry about him in the hope that I might be able to tell her if her son was simply "okay."

I wasn't able to help her.

He was only a Holy Ghost out of Old Swig Hall.

There is word that he has stayed in touch with some from those Halcyon Days at Santa Clara U.

A mutual friend of ours, an artist in Canada, and also a brilliant college professor friend who taught at Berkeley now keep his confidence. They honor his absolute request for utter anonymity and privacy. They are good to him and they respect his need to be somehow off the grid and incommunicado with the likes of me and an old 600. As for myself and well, as for the rest of us out of Old Swig Hall, we are all out of that dancing bear loop.

I hope before "all of this" is over that I will get a chance to ask him why — to know just what I did that I needed to be so very ghosted. He was my friend. Were our growing differences just too much for him to withstand? Had I been too much of a condescending asshat? I sure hope not — though not to go all Occam's Razor on it — no doubt I was. I'm sorry for that.

In the end, nobody ever said Keep on truckin' wasn't gonna hurt.

☮