In a message dated 1/6/00 4:28:06 PM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

> And hey Ken ol bud, doesn't the old Cornell library have them?

Hilary,

If it does then I don't remember. If I was not looking in a book then I was
usually in another sort of daze and had no inkling of ever needing to know
anything other than the stone.

Back then, one day in the early 70's, I was sitting on a stone wall in
College Town soaking up the rays & this guy came over w/ a rusty Maxwell
House coffee can bumming for cash. We got to talking. His story was that he
had been driving his Volvo to his dentist in NC to get a cap fixed when he
picked up this hitchiker who pulled a 9 mm & forced him to drive to Ithaca,
whereupon my new friend was dumped. It being the weekend, or somesuch, he was
not able to get cash to go home (no ATM's then, and I also know the guy who
invented the ATM by the way if you want to believe anything), so he was
making the best of it. Said he was a welder and went on about all this arcane
aluminum welding stuff for the aerospace industry. He also said he was a poet
and had published books of children's poems, which he recited a few. Here I
am the long haired, long bearded stoneman who can think of nothing but
building fireplaces, busting rocks all day with a sledge and getting drunk on
hard cider, dropping strange chemicals or tooting my way to bliss and
oblivion. At one point my friend he pointed across the street at some
Victorian buildings and told me that someday I would be going around telling
people what was wrong w/ them. I thought he was full of crap. He also
promised that when he got back home, in exchange for the generosity of my
five buck contribution, he would fly up in his plane and take me up to his
hunting camp in Maine for Moose hunting. I don't know what that was about.
The next morning when I told all this to Marshall Pruitt, my 62 yr old
stonemason mentor, he thought the guy was full of crap. At least we were in
agreement. Well, I never got to Maine for Moose hunting, though I been there
on my own for other recreations. I've always thought of the encounter as one
of those epiphany like meetings w/ an angel.

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