For Laura Hanley, wherever this may find her

Spring, 1980 I was twenty years old, working at a frame shop in downtown Dallas. I lived alone in a trailer, in a field beside a freeway. I was saving my money to go to art school in Philadelphia in the fall. Through a friend of a friend, I met Laura Hanley. Laura had just come home from Brown University. She was a thin girl of medium height, with short, wavy brown hair. I never had a photo of her, but she looked like astronomer Bethany Cobb. Laura had a quiet grace. She’d studied at the Providence Zen Center so I talked to her about the ideas I’d gotten from Alan Watts. I developed a huge crush on Laura instantly, and plotted to see her as often as I could. One spring day before the awful heat, I went to White Rock Lake with my usual gang of friends. Laura arrived with a handsome, bearded young man, and I didn’t know if he was her boyfriend or not. She wore a summer shift, printed with Van Gogh drawings. I went crazy inside wit