Stuttering and faltering, like a Middling City car engine mid-January, my memory caught up with a recent past happening, at this weekend's CT wedding.

This morning, as I was reading the required readings for grad school, and with my brain looking for a hale escape strategy, I recalled one of the weekend's most interesting conversations - a primo blend of fiction (via Yours Truly) and a man named Obediah (the non-fictive part of the blend).

I thought of his full name, something biblical, and how he introduced himself as Obie. Over a dozen years ago I met this guy who was then a kid in tow with his hippie parents working where I was working in Maine - at my third month of summer camp art teaching, at Samantha Smith Peace Camp after my usual art teaching gig for Summer Camp, Inc.

Obie then was a lanky teen with wild hair. Today he's a full-bodied guy but with more tamed hair, and a tiny wife.

He told me and some random gay male wedding guests a hilarious (well, we made it hilarious) tale about his do-gooder hippie mom who was at one point a Black Panther (is this possible) and how she dragged her brood off to the local prison to visit a woman incarcerated for life, a woman who killed (or possibly did not kill) her lezbo lover. The lezbo lover was beheaded and a gang of teens and 20-somethings somehow, the story gets a little convoluted here, pointed fingers at this woman. Who swears, I think the story goes, but then again I had had a heap of white wines (replete with sulfites), that she is INNOCENT.

Before the tiny wife joined our tell-tale circle I told the group that I, too, had been incarcerated before, for killing a man. Actually, I called it circumstantial homicide. Is there such a thing. I said I killed a man, but it was not my fault. They asked my method and I replied that it happened with a pair of shoelaces. In some confusing twists and turns of happenstance the man had bent over to do something with shoelaces and somehow I had caused his untimely death as I knocked into him, perhaps somewhat with purpose, resulting in his falling into oncoming traffic. Circumstantial homicide.

When the tiny wife joined our circle she was being caught up on the story that her hubbie was telling and then one of the gay men said She (pointing at Yours Truly) killed a man. I said That's right, I am a former convicted felon. The gay man, Tommy, chimed in But you were a juvie, you were only in for how long. The tiny wife's eyes widened unbelievably and, revelling in the feeling that those who have been rehabbed but yet still encounter the suspicious eyes of others, I went along with it, basically, to fuck with her and her suspicions, preconceptions of a Criminal, rehabbed or not, and her tidy littleness.

So now I think I have to contact the B&G (the groom, I delightedly found out, is a Bonesman) to see how to contact post-hippie-mommed Obie and say Hey, I met you way back when in the woods of Maine.

Maine Love.