This is true; it just happened. It occurred to me that it would make a book. I write about it because it's intense.

I was in the ER with a 7-year-old girl, cute as a button, and it occurred to me that this time we shared was very important, more perhaps to her than to me, so I got off my phone (I had forgotten my glasses anyway) and just talked to her, or participated in whatever she was doing. She had become violent, had almost killed her twin sister, and was waiting to be placed somewhere and sent away. Yet she was a beautiful young girl, on her best behavior with me, and one side of her, that occupied most of her life, she was as cute as only 7-year-olds can be.

Outside the ER room there was actually a guard, 24/7. This was lucky because at one point I was on my phone and she just darted out. The guard followed her to the bathroom and she used it, but it could have been more than that. This girl was known to just run away and had done it several times.

One notable thing about the time we shared was her love of numbers. She impressed me by doing math problems; granted, she'd just type them in to the computer and report what it said, but she knew the numbers, liked what she was doing, and always got it right. She was proud of her own success and of course I praised her a lot. When I lent her my phone, she found the sudoku app right away; that's because it has nine numbers on its little app icon. She opened it up and I taught her how to do a sudoku. Way over her head, yes, but it was notable because she was fascinated even when it was clearly too complex.

Another time she started dancing. She put a song on her ipad and just sang and danced to it. The orderlies outside the door couldn't help but smile on their way past. She had a lively spirit. Cha cha now y'all! At this point I was feeling very seventy, while she was clearly seven. I just watched and enjoyed it.

I worried about the hospital crushing her spirit. Of course it will be hard on her. I also repeated to myself, as a mantra, it's not her fault that she couldn't control her anger, or her spirit, that she would hit and scratch and run away and try to strangle her sister. They would see their mother, who loves them, and who told them she wanted them back. But they weren't coming back, and that made them angry. They'd go back to us, or to someone else, and that just didn't go over too well. And the one twin could figure it out, and could handle it; this is the way it is. You get a new home, and you make the best of it. But this second twin, she couldn't control herself. She'd hit, scratch, run away, refuse to go anywhere, resist, do violence.

I tried not to let the tragedy overwhelm me while I was there with her. I could look at her and get very depressed: poor girl, she'll have trouble where she's going; or, I could just live in the moment, be with her, be someone she knew on her path, someone who liked math and encouraged her, or who just liked her. I chose the second, obviously. Even when I argued that we are seventy, we can't handle this, I couldn't help just loving her for who she was. She's a precious soul.

Her twin, in the end, is probably better off without her. Together they find what they have in common: seven-year-old exuberance, and run with it. Together they are clearly too much for us and bad things result. Perhaps if we were younger, more on top of it, they would never have gotten close enough to each other to do anything to get her in trouble. As it happened, she almost killed her sister right in front of the social worker. We didn't have to argue for intervention. It was inevitable from that point on.

I remember the sterile feeling of an ER room. I am grateful every time I'm in there and it's not about me. Next time, I keep thinking, it will be about me. I watch the orderlies and wonder if they will be as competent when it comes to dealing with whatever breakdown I'll have, whenever it happens, which I'm sure will be soon enough. They come in pairs, delivering a heart-measuring service, or oxygen, or whatever they do. Ultimately a placement arrived and two ambulance drivers came to gather her up and take her to a place in the city.

One was a man, the other was a woman. The woman was pretty good at making her feel that it would all be ok. Nevertheless they strapped her to a kind of gurney so they could wheel her into the ambulance and take her on their way. This was their job and they knew what they were doing. She was ok with it. She knew this was coming and that it was inevitable. My wife was on the phone at that point and we told her together that she would be ok and that she'd been very good, and that we loved her. What else can you do? We love her yet we're sending her off to a hospital where she'll be alone but with other kids like her, who can't control themselves, or whose anger is just too strong sometimes. In a way, it was kind of like a milestone in her life, when she went this direction, and certain things will never be the same again. It fills me with apprehension, and a little dread, and a little sorrow of mourning for a childhood gone in the wrong direction.

Yet my last emotion is mostly just tiredness. I've had three sons in hospitals like this one, at points where I didn't know what else to do, where the hospital was the only place for them, where, if you can't control your life spinning out of control, you have to spin it right into a hospital where drugs are going to calm it down for you. And nobody especially likes those drugs, but they are what we have to deal with this. I couldn't at that point argue for anything better, and that was true for my other kids too. The memories of those experiences in those hospital environments are still burned hard into my mind's walls. Boys get off into their own minds about who they are and sometimes it's just a little too far from reality and what are the rest of us to do? Everyone has their own opinion about the value of the hospital but believe me I wouldn't be there for any of these cases if I really knew a choice, or was able to carry it out.

When they had carried her out, it was easy enough for me to just stand up, grab our things, and walk right out, back to my car. I made a comment to an information guy about finding a newspaper with brackets in it, but he agreed with me: you can't find newspapers these days; he wouldn't even know where to tell me to look. Last night, St. Patrick's Day, the hospital had been full, with what one guy called "amateurs," people who didn't know how to drink in excess; now, in the morning, it was much more empty, but the orderlies were still able to dance a little, Cha cha now y'all, in the midst of their duties. Just another day at work, getting people back on their feet and back on their way. Up on the road, I saw the ambulance as it turned onto the ramp on the interstate. It had no windows except in front. I sent my prayers through the ambulance walls. We'll see her again, and she'll be a little different.

This is a true story, to the best of my knowledge. I'm not always certain about the way my ancestors felt, but it's clear what they did, so I explore the possible reasons.

When the Civil War ended my great-great grandfather came back to Warren, Illinois, and was offered a job as literary editor of a newspaper. Warren is in the far northwest corner of the state, not far from Galena, which was the county seat of Jo Daviess County. Galena was larger, was on the river, and was considered more metropolitan. Warren was new; it had sprung up because of some local mines (across the border in Wisconsin), the possibility of a railroad coming through, and a rapid influx of settlers.

From the point of view of the newspaper, it was called The Independent, but James Walker (Leverett), my great-great grandfather, and the editor, Herst Gann, changed it to The Sentinel immediately. It is hard to glean through old issues to find the reason but perhaps it could be found with better searching. Given my guesses, I would say that the county was predominantly Republican (pro-Lincoln), not independent; the war was over and moving forward in a congregationalist spirit, it was more important to them to have the image of calling out than the image of straddling a fence.

Herst Gann was a journalist from way back. In those days that meant having every word paid for by somebody. One could make money in journalism if one could sell lots of papers and if a paper was widely distributed and demonstrably well-read. He was fine with having a literary editor but anything literary had to be well read as well. Of course one could clearly see that people were more interested in reading about local murders than reading fine poetry. Only one out of a hundred will read a poem or care about it even today; back then, in a frontier mining town like Warren the proportion wasn't much better.

That fundamental tension ran all the way through journalism in 1866 and even went straight back to Europe. On the one hand, typesetting and the printing press made it possible to make a newspaper and distribute it to hundreds, if not thousands. People bought them up and took them home and read them, soaking up the local news and opinions about national events so that they would be better informed when discussing them. They were proud of their literacy and conscious that literacy was the foundation of their democracy. Being informed voters was important to them.

As literary editor James Walker was able to both bring fine literature (written by others) to the people of the raucus mining town of Warren, and try his hand at it himself. The editor did not always sign every piece, but noticed whether people talked about it, or whether it had any effect. Herst Gann, his partner, was most shrewd at this. Both were tasked with keeping the advertising revenue coming in; they didn't rely so much on classifieds in those days, but rather went straight to the local businesses and held extended conversations in which they touted their literary goals (what service did they provide for the community?) and explained why that business would want to be associated with them. Gann was an expert at this as well. Literary is fine, he would say, as long as it fits in with our overall strategy for growth and financial survival.

Alcohol was a huge issue in the post-Civil War frontier towns. Now that there was peace, and life was getting back to normal, people were able to focus on the enormous damage alcohol had done to fronntier families, especially the women, as it ran rampant in the mining camps and frontier farms. A prohibition movement began to take shape. James Walker's older friend, an ardent teetotaller named Joel Webster Parker, was familiar with the mining camps of southwest Wisconsin, having sold supplies up there for years. He said the hops industry was moving west into southwest Wisconsin and should be stopped in its tracks, since the making of breweries would be the downfall of civilization. Those who know Wisconsin today will agree that he had a point. At the time, though, it was just an argument unfolding in the Warren Sentinel and other local newspapers.

James Walker enjoyed going to Galena, hobnobbing with local important people, getting to know business people in both Warren and Galena. He watched as his literary attempts for the most part went underappreciated or unappreciated; it was, after all, a mining town. This job would be week after week of hoping someone somewhere would read and enjoy something he wrote. Someone besides his wife and kids.

The literary argument against the newspapers was that the newspapers were prostitutes, writing more and more about what people wanted to read, caring less and less about fine literature. One might as well write one's own book, if one wanted fine literature, and stay away from the brothel newspapers. In a world where someone owns everything you say, how can you call that fine literature? Newspapers were becoming commonplace; the United States was entering the era of newspapers; more and more people were reading them. But what was happening to fine literature? It was moving to the bottom, or to the back, not fully paid for, barely read, not holding a candle to news about the local murder. Get used to being undervalued, even squeezed out when column inches are in short supply. Who reads poetry anyway? Every day you're the bastard stepchild that doesn't really belong here, but gets squeezed in on slow days when there's nothing else to say, As things. heat up there are fewer and fewer of those days. If you write poetry or literature, you're better off publishing it yourself and then nobody will buy it, and you'll starve.

James Walker gave up journalism and moved to southwest Wisconsin with Joel Webster Parker, who was able to start a merchandise store in the town of Hillsboro and employ him running teams and supplying it. Up there a brewery moved in and burned down within two years; this caused James Walker to decide that the town had unwholesome influences for his kids, and to move them up to a farm in the center of the state near Black River Falls. He would farm up there for about ten years, isolated. He would never write again, as far as I know.

The Sentinel is still around today, but newspapers are in a way different form than they were in in the late 1800's. They are like advertising inserts; most people just use them for their paper value, as for example checking their oil. Back then, if one didn't read them, one used them in the outhouse. Nowadays, we rarely even use them to check the oil.

Today all the social media titans, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos, sit at the president's side. They own the information associated with your shadow; when you click "shoe" they send a signal to each other and each of your accounts is inundated with shoe advertisements. This information has combined to make them the richest men in the world, capable of buying TikTok or determining what kind of information TikTok is able to give the Chinese. What can you do besides say "no thanks?" We rely on social media to keep track of family and old friends, to tell them what we're up to, to "check in," as it were, so that they know we're still alive and thinking. I have all my books on Amazon; there is no other game in town. But I feel like my great-great grandfather, like moving to a farm out in the middle of nowhere, and living out my days free of everything except minimal contact with the outside world. Not sure that would be possible for me. Worth thinking about, though.

Sunrise over Coralville

I woke up this morning in a motel on First Avenue, Coralville and got to watch the sun rise in the hills on the Iowa River just to the east, looking back toward Iowa City. It so happens that sometime in the 1970's I was employed delivering newspapers to motels in Coralville and Iowa City, so it was a kind of coming home to me, only in this motel there is not a newspaper to be seen.

Back then, people would read them. They would drop quarters into a machine and take a newspaper out, then read it to find the daily news. These days I open up google news and read my news from a variety of sources, whatever google news links to, all free. The different organizations pester me (I actually prefer The Guardian, but don't pay for any of them), but I stay under the radar and just take what I need. It's partly because in those days I was used to all news being free to me as an employee.

I went down to this little hut down by the river which they used as a bundling house; that's what we called it. We would unload a truck at about 2 30 in the morning, and remove the wire ropes that secured them. We would then count out the bundles we needed and turn them, secure them, and put them in our truck. I had an old Suburban that was given to me to use by the boss. It had like 200,000 miles and was entirely reliable, and held lots of papers, which was especially useful on Sunday when we were doing major volume.

So these bundles, which resembled logs, would be marked by number and I'd know which one to throw on which curb, when I got way out to the suburbs in Coralville. But then on the way back, after cruising all those empty, dark, deserted streets out in the suburbs, I'd come back along First Avenue and hit all the motels. At the motels I had one of two missions; I'd either hand a specified number of newspapers to the clerk, or I'd put a slug in the machine, open it up, remove all of yesterday's papers, and put a specified number of papers in it instead. The old papers I'd bring back to the bundling house to use to wrap bundles. Or, of course, I was free to just keep one. I could take home as many of yesterday's papers as I wanted to. And I sometimes did, since I'd read the opinions or do the puzzles in the back.

It was a solitary kind of job. The other bundlers were friendly but difficult to be around - the guy next to me chewed tobacco and at three in the morning I found this kind of repulsive. But he was friendly to me; so were the people in the motels. The guy that showed me the route, the tobacco chewer, got way out into the Coralville suburbs and went the wrong way on streets, etc. and said that at 3 in the morning nobody cared and they all knew who he was and why he was doing it. It was essentially so you could maneuver around to where dropping the bundle was easier, and you didn't have to get out of the Suburban to do it. Sure enough a policeman saw us and did nothing. I was impressed and did the same when I got the route.

But one night I was out there breaking the law, maneuvering the car so I could drop the bundle, and I made some kind of mistake which caused me to run over this curb. It was rather dramatic but it was just a mistake and I could do nothing but keep on going and doing what I was doing, going the wrong way. A policeman saw it and pulled me over.

I explained to him that I was a bundle dropper and that I went the wrong way because it was 3 30 in the morning and I figured it was ok in the abandoned streets as they were. Surprisingly he said he knew all about that and in fact he'd been watching me do that for a long time; he knew the last guy but didn't know me. He was just pulling me over to make sure I was ok, because the curb-jumping was kind of uncharacteristic and at this time of night there were a lot of drunks out here doing basically the same thing. I had to laugh at that. I think he was kind of doing it just to meet me and get a scan on my general personality, like he'd feel better watching me break the law routinely if he knew who I was.

Some of the guys would get paper routes when their driving was over, so that they'd do bundle dropping 2 30-5 30 and then paper route 5 30-7. This added together made almost an income you could live on but it was a gruelling schedule. I got a school bus driving job and would work 7-8 and then again 2 30-3 30 - you can see easily that this made it hard to sleep any time except after 3 30. It was odd sleeping then and I was often interrupted, especially if I wanted to do anything else. Messing with my sleep schedule proved to be a serious error but that's another story.

Once the Pope came to Iowa and his story was all over the front page. This was important because, in making a log out of a stack of papers, your eye would fall on the same word or words repeatedly as those words came around the fold of the paper.

I'm working on a possible story for a volume on mental illness, with a theme "echoes." Well I have echoes all over the place. I have a little too much familiarity with mental illness.

Turns out the year I stopped in on my schizophrenic aunt was the same year my friend's son killed himself and his girlfriend, and a dog, thus upsetting everyone, all the survivors, all of Iowa, but particularly her, because he was her only child, and years later she'd die with dementia, and no id, and no one to care for her.

Is dementia like schizophrenia? My mom had a kind of dementia - in the end she didn't even know who we were. Here she'd raised me for many years, spent hour upon hour watching me, then what? Her mind just doesn't recognize? And then there was my aunt. She didn't recognize me either, but she'd never really seen me - but I could also tell, upon talking to her, that she just didn't do well with all real connections. Like knowing that I was her brother's son, or that my daughter wasn't my wife. She was in a good mood but pretty out of it, and it was scary.

I always thought that a killer - like the son in the above story - is almost mentally ill by definition. Like if you thought actually killing someone would be good for anyone ever for any reason, there must be something wrong with your thinking. In that case he seemed to take the life of a woman who had rejected him, so, my guess is that it wasn't a double suicide, it was a murder suicide. But on the other hand maybe people are making that part up about her rejecting him, or, maybe everyone has it wrong in general. I try to make up or find reasons why maybe he wasn't mentally ill. But things are looking bad for him, in my book, if her family says she'd rejected him. And her son - he left that son out in the truck, locked out of the house - when he did it. Who could do something like that? He must have known the kid was out there.

That year I visited my aunt was a flood year in Iowa. So, while this kid killing his ex-girlfriend, and leaving her son out in the truck, and I was visiting my aunt (I swear, not far apart in time, mid-May), it was raining, day after day, all through Iowa. As I left my aunt's house, I'll never forget - I didn't quite know my way out of town (Des Moines), but I passed over a bridge, and the water was rising very badly under it. It was scary. It was like it would envelop us all.

And it almost did, in many parts of Iowa. One friend of mine had to go way around every time she came from home to work, and I think this was a Cedar-Rapids-Iowa-City commute. One of those major roads was shut down all summer because of those endless rains.

To me, there's your echoes. They've had what, three hundred-year floods in ten years in Iowa? The water's rising under the bridge, and everyone up here on dry land is beginning to feel it.

I don't know about that story - not sure I can tie all this together. It may be a little too slippery, or even a little to real, and believe me these people I've mentioned are all real. It is quite scary being on that edge of sanity, and by the way my kids are suffering right now and I have no idea what to do to keep them from going over the cliff.

Some action is going to be required here. The wter is rising.

After a little more research I got some basic facts about the story in the below post, which is still somewhat wild, book-worthy, but now a little clearer.

One aspect of it is that my friend, the new-age woman whose only son committed murder-suicide, was already planning to move to New Mexico when it happened. She did not, as I'd surmised, go there to get away from mean Iowans. But if she was already planning to go, and he was steadily working in a place in town (Cedar Rapids) - then it would be possible for her to blame herself partly for his demise. After all, he was losing his mother, and then his girlfriend, who had apparently rejected him. She was coming to his house to pick up furniture, and had actually brought her son, thinking she'd be safe if that son was with her. Wrong.

What made him snap, kill her, kill the dog, and kill himself? I have a hard time blaming psilicybin mushrooms, though I think they've been mentioned as part of it. Mushrooms alone wouldn't make you violent. Or maybe they would. So there's a mystery there, where did that violence in him come from? Not her, I'm sure.

The other real reason has to do with the book. The author went on to be a professional writer in the big leagues, as if having the right degrees was pushing her in that direction from the start. This was one of her early works and was personal; she'd known the guy and considered him like a father, sympathetic as I am, wanting to show that something, maybe Iowa itself, drove him to it. Well I also saw him in his better days, as a sweet innocent kid, and I can still say that whenever someone goes over the edge there's always a dozen people who can't believe such a mild-mannered gentle spirit could do such a thing. We all could do such a thing, if pushed just the right way, and who knows what else was in his life that we didn't know about? I still haven't located his father, for example, don't know a thing about him.

Back to her book. She knew him as a kind of father figure, was sympathetic, went and talked to the boy (that he had locked out of the house when he did it), and the book was panned. Some very important people thought it was garbage and said so. Now I don't even ask people like that what they think of my books, because I already know what they'll say. But to her, it was a blow. She had to do better next time. She had to even eliminate all evidence of her previous failure. That's my explanation.

There's no one deliberately hiding information about what happened; it's findable though it's not easy to find it. I don't see a coverup or suppression of news articles, just news articles that are hard to find and getting harder to find every day. And I think my conclusions are right if only in a general way about her book and why I can't just read it. As a writer I consider taking on personal situations (like this one - I met the kid) - and that's a hazard of doing it. I could write a book about a writer, I think - that might be somewhat wild - but these things have to go somewhere. If it doesn't go to a grisly murder-suicide or to the mother's sad and pitiful demise, where does it go? Make the writer fictional and let it go where I take it, I suppose. Or let her just be successful, still alive, left alone, but haunted, as the rest of us are.

This is an absolutely true story and I hope I don't make anyone mad. It's told entirely from my own perspective. There's a rich kind of book in here.

In 1976--1977 I became close friends with a woman commonly called "the purple lady" because almost everythig she wore was a shade of purple though there was some pink in there. She was New Age before New Age became a thing, and that pretty much defined her. She gave tarot readings and often talked about our fates and destinies and such things like there was a power she was in touch with that she could so easily share.

She was of the non-violent variety, in her very nature - I never really heard her say anything bad about anyone. She didn't seem to have any enemies and most people knew her and liked her.

Around that time I met her son, who was a kid maybe ten or older, a soft-spoken kid, nice. I got a brief explanation that he didn't live with her, but presumably with his father, but they seemed to get along fine, and they were happy to see each other when he arrived. It seems I was discouraged from asking too much about his father or whatever divorce precipitated their separation. I have since concluded that maybe his father was a dark and mysterious character because the kid would have been entirely sweet if she had more to do with it. But sometimes those small towns around Iowa create very controlling families and maybe that one was unable to let go of that kid when she became new-agey and needed to drift off and find her way. That's as good an explanation as any.

I left the village for many years and heard only traces of what had happened: there was a fire, the kid was involved in a tragedy; she moved off to Taos never to return. Though I too was living in New Mexico I never looked her up. She had renounced Iowa entirely.

It turns out the kid was involved in a murder-suicide in which he killed his girlfriend and a dog. This story gets stranger now with every step. It is not clear where this happened because I simply cannot find a trace of it in any newspaper. I've got names, date (May 1993), some details, but not some important ones like where.

Stranger yet, a very good writer wrote a book about it (called An Iowa Murder), but took it off the market and it appears to be the only account of it even though it's admittedly subjective. The author, as a girl, knew him and couldn't believe he would do such a thing. That's kind of how I feel, except I have even less to go on when it comes to finding the truth.

Perhaps I have the place wrong, or one of their names; I seem to get entire dead ends when I go looking. One newspaper article mentioned it at the end, almost an afterthought, as if it was in this tiny town (Vinton), but too obscure to notice.

He could have grown up there - family there, etc., and very easily had a double life, one with his dad in a small town, one with his mom in the village with the tarot readings. One can imagine that people were cruel to her after the murder and that's what caused her to move to Taos, ok, I'll buy that. Iowa can be cruel that way although I must say, if he had a dark side it didn't come from her. In Taos she was an icon, quite famous, but had no one, and when things got bad there was no one around to look out for her, until one of my old friends' daughters came around and took are of her until her death quite recently. That's when I started looking into this murder-suicide. And this book that was written about it, apparently.

In the time I knew her she didn't want to talk about her marriage (if she had one) or her son, or the hard parts of being split up. She wasn't even that tuned in to mothering although she got along just fine with the kid and he seemed to have what he needed. After I left the village, there was a fire, in which she saved some of her fellow residents but at the expense of all her possessions including lots of purple clothes. And after that, the son moved into the village to be near her and know her better. He didn't stay, though, the murder-suicide was not in the village. Not sure where it was, but it wasn't there.

The details of the killing are horrible, of course. How could a person do that? Drugs, is one answer. and it's possible.

She died in bad shape a couple of months ago. Dementia, and not taking care of herself, and having no place to go, and apparently it was sad, though there was a very nice service for her after she died. None of the above was really her fault, in my figuring, because it seems to me she was probably forced to leave for one reason or another and not allowed to take the kid with her. That's just how I read it. The kid was never able to restore the bond that was cut when she was forced to leave him. Of course that's speculation. Why would she never tell us more?

People have these stories. You never know it by looking at their lost, confused faces later in life. But things happen, and we never forget, we just sometimes fail to record them well. There is no record, no record, of this one. Why, I have no idea.

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