We're leading off with a photo this time. Here's Linda in Douglas, Wyoming, standing in front of the big jackalope sculpture in a park in the town center. The jackalope was created in the 1930s by a pair of taxidermist brothers in Douglas. They got home late from a roadkill expedition and tossed everything into their storeroom. The next day, they saw a pair of horns lying next to a jackrabbit and thought, "What the hell--let's combine them." Voila! The jackalope.
We didn't hear about jackalopes until about five years ago. That winter, Linda had a pair of surgeries on her legs, called femoral bypasses. They did the right leg first, and during the six-week wait before they did her left leg, we watched a compilation of Pixar short films. One of them, titled "Boundin',"was about a lamb who was vainly proud of his fine coat and would do joyous dances to celebrate his beauty. One day, a hand reached out and grabbed his leg, and off-screen he went. Shortly, he was bounced into a puddle, completely shorn for the first time. He was mortified and slinked back under cover, until a "great American jackalope" passed by, saw him, and said, "Hey, kid, why the mope?"
The lamb detailed his nightmare shearing and said the other animals were mocking him. The jackalope, "the sage of the sage," assured him that he could do something better than dancing. "You can bound," said the jackalope, and showed him how to bounce his feet off the ground and float twenty or thirty feet above the ground. Thus enabled, the lamb was in his glory again. In the spring, he held out his left leg for the people who would sheer him, but he didn't care. He could bound.
The story seemed perfectly in synch with what Linda was going through, having had one leg ripped open (48 stitches' worth) and about to have the other one done. I was her jackalope, helping her maintain a perfect attitude, and as we watched "Boundin'" before leaving for the hospital for the second femoral bypass, she held out her left leg, knowing she would re-bound from the surgery. Ever since then, we have watched "Boundin'" any time Linda is about to endure some medical procedure and indignity, and it cements her determination to overcome all obstacles.
Only a month ago, I discovered that Douglas is the "jackalope capital," and when it turned out that Linda would get dialysis in Casper, only 50 miles from Douglas, we had to make a pilgrimage there. Here is a photo of two "great American jackalopes" to commemorate the visit:
From Douglas, we headed south to visit friends in Firestone, Colorado (about 20 miles from Boulder). Linda hadn't met Tim and Julie before, since they had been living in Australia for a year when Linda and I met in 2002. The connection between all the facts in the previous is the second of the "two tales" I mentioned in the title. And it's a good one.
I've known Tim for close to 30 years, since he moved to Las Vegas. In 1997, having learned the hard way that most women (like most men) in Las Vegas are crazy, he went looking for his true love on the internet. Over Thanksgiving weekend, he made contact with a woman named Julie from Darwin, Australia. They hit it off immediately, to the extent that the day after Christmas, Julie flew to Las Vegas to meet him, having quit her job and sold everything. They were married about six weeks later, and this year celebrated their 15th anniversary. Late in 2001, they moved to Australia, where his Microsoft expertise was in great demand and he worked for a number of years for the government, becoming a dual citizen along the way.
From the first time I visited them in Las Vegas, I could tell they were one of the coolest couples I knew. I thought, "Jeez, if Tim could find his soulmate halfway across the world, I should be able to find someone." Thus inspired, I did find my soulmate a few years later on the internet. We celebrate our seventh anniversary a week from today. Meanwhile, Tim and Julie moved back to "the states" earlier this year, so they had to be part of this trip. We arrived early yesterday afternoon and had a great day with them--they're as cool together and as much fun to be with as they were the last time I saw them--and we'll spend today here as well before heading to Cheyenne tomorrow for dialysis and the first day of this trip spent with people we also visited on last year's trip.
[NOTE: Thanks to help from Tim, I was able to post photos on some of the earlier blogs. If you look at the blogs titled "Wonders in Wyoming" and "More Wyoming Wonders," you will see some great photos which I had previously been able to post only on Facebook. I'll try to fill in the photos for the rest of the blogs today.]
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