Hell-Betty and I were walking down from Penelope Pennyworth’s Photographs, where she works, to the Washoe Club to meet her brother Bert the Hurt for a beer. We were chatting about our day, paying little mind to the visitors that filled the wood boardwalk.

As we passed the open doorway to the Silver Queen Hotel, a Latino man of about thirty came flying down the narrow staircase, nearly running the both of us down. It wasn’t like he meant to — he was just in a hurry and didn’t have the time to think that perhaps two or more people might be crossing in front of the door during his sudden escape.

Out of the doorway, he practically flew, chattering in his native tongue. His eyes were wide with surprise and fright behind his yellow lensed glasses.

“You would think he saw a ghost or something,” my friend quipped.

Hell-Betty and I laughed, knowing he probably did because we both witnessed that peculiar look before.

From Reno’s Radio Row and the Studios of EASY 104.1…

Sitting in the back of Virginia City’s Union Brewery Saloon by myself, I watched a man and woman enter with their dog and take a seat at the bar. Carol Sisco took their order as their pit bull sat down facing me.

Every once in a while, the dog would prance his front paws and thump his tail as if he wanted me to pet him. I remained seated, watching and grinning at the young and excitable pupperz.

At one point, the man got up and walked toward me. I thought nothing of it, as the bathrooms are along the wall to the right, from where I was sipping my beer.

He stopped and demanded, “Stop smiling at my wife!”

“Sir, I was smiling at your dog,” I responded with a deadpan face., “I never smile at humans.”

Without saying anything else, he returned to his spot at the bar and let the dog off its lead so it could come down and visit with me. The pitty and I had a wonderful conversation without speaking a single word.

My Cousin Elmo says, “Doctor Jill went up the hill to get her fake diploma then came home to find old Joe in an ice cream coma.”

A few years back, Tonya Ramos and her late husband, Rich Irvin, reached out to me through social media to say ‘hello’ after I wrote my first spiritual encounter in Six-Mile Canyon. The couple wanted to visit Virginia City and that place.

Near the beginning of 2022, Rich passed away, leaving Tonya a widow. Then on May 17, Tonya’s mom, Page Ramos, entered the afterlife, only a few days before her 79th birthday.

Both people’s deaths left me sad, but because I’ve known Page all of my life, her’s hit me the hardest. There was even a time when I thought the Ramos and Olivera families (my mother’s maiden name) were cousins.

My mom used to refer to Tonya’s father, Tony Ramos (yes, she is named after him, and you’d best learn to say her name with a ‘tony’ in it) as family, as did my grandfather Joaquin Luis Olivera (whose name I bear as my second, third and fourth.) Page politely disabused me of the notion.

Last night I learned that Page had passed, and because of this, I fell asleep with a deep sadness in my soul. The feelings precipitated a dream where I was sitting in the back of a long hall, a cathedral if you will, where God was speaking, and being interrupted by two women giggling and laughing. It was Page and her mother, Theral Hammond (Tonya’s grandmother, a woman known for her jazz and honky-tonk style of piano playing.)

Then, I heard God ask, “Am I going to have to separate you two, again?”

I woke myself up, laughing.

My Cousin Elmo says, “We are a sad generation with happy pictures.”

Running late Friday morning, still needing to deliver the Dayton Valley Dispatch to the farther reaches of Lyon County, I was merrily speeding along U.S. 50, coming to the hill that drops into Stagecoach, when I saw it. That ‘it’ was a bright, silvery figure running across the sagebrush-strewn landscape.

Stepping hard on my old truck’s brakes, I swerved off the road and stopped. I fumbled for my cellphone, wanting to take a video of it, but because of my unsafe maneuver, it had fallen and slipped under the passenger seat. Instead, I sat there and watched as it raced behind a bush, squatted down, and vanished.

At first, I thought that maybe I saw a dust devil that had picked up a piece of aluminum foil or some metal flashing used in roofing construction. Then I looked around me, finding two other vehicles had stopped, and each driver was out of the car and truck, looking in the same direction I had been looking.

Getting out of my truck, I looked in the direction of the silver thing and found it nowhere. Then I looked again at the two who had also seen what I had.

The expressions on their faces were of disbelief, and I could tell neither one wanted to compare notes as each was quick to get in their vehicle and drive away. I sat there another 20 minutes or so, hoping to see it again.

Such an odd thing to happen in the middle of the day, on a busy highway, and only three person’s taking notice. Wishing my phone hadn’t gone under the seat.

My Cousin Elmo says, “Counting to ten only makes it premeditated.”

caught in the rat race
asphalt mazes everywhere
smith and jones and cheese