I was telling the soldier about my grandmother the other night… Henry’s wife. She was only married to him a short time, he just couldn’t hold her. She was much younger than him and he held no ill will towards her even though she left him alone with the baby (my mother), 2 1/2 at the time.

Anyway, you can get a load of her here (Henry’s Wife). The soldier said he knew the feeling (can’t hold on to her) and I admit I am a lot like her even though I only met her once in my life. She moved from the desert to Boston where she sent pictures for decades, every single one of them, pure drama. She’s always be dressed to the nines and posed with her hands in the air on some street corner with a skyscraper backdrop. She had to stage this stuff… the photographer would have to be across the street for example, this was obvious from the pictures. A few days later the soldier was sitting on the bed tying Army knots.

“Is that what you’re going to do when we’re in the old folks home? Sit around tying knots.”

“No, I’m not going to do this in the old folks home.”

“Well then what? What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’ll find something. What about you, P? I know what you’ll be doing.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, I’ll be talkin’ to the guys there and they’ll say, where is your wife, P? And I’ll say, she’s out there,” he said pointing at the window. ‘She out there posing in front of buildings like this.” He raised his arms in the air like a model. “Is she crazy, they’ll ask. Well, yeah she is. But I love her so I better go out there and get her…”

“What kind of knot is that anyway?”

“Prussic. This is a prussic knot, P.”

“Oh, well it’s amaaaaaaaaazing. That is some hell of a kind of knot you’ve got there.”