The book’s storylines had been in the making for years, but serious effort to bring them together began in earnest around September-October 2022. The goal was to complete a short story collection and publish it within a year. Well, it was two years, and it evolved into a novel.

The ‘seed’ that started the book ‘Saguaro En Troupé: Story Time’ was in 1971 when I spent the summer at my grandparents’ house in Upstate New York. During that summer, I often explored their surrounding woods. One day, I stumbled upon the remains of an old rundown wooden building, electric wire spools, and discarded clam shells scattered in various locations within a fixed boundary along a small stream. The place hadn’t seen use for many years, and woods reclaimed most everything. 

I was told the area was once known as Foley’s Grove. I came across an old rotting piano sitting alone and half-buried near what was left of the building. It was a strange discovery in the overgrown woods of upstate NY, but the memory stuck.

Recently, my cousins, who lived nearby this place as kids, informed me that Foley’s Grove was a piece of cleared-open land that was likely once part of a much larger tract of land, possibly a large farm. During the 1940s and 1950s, the grotto-grove became famous for hosting ‘clambake weekends’. During these events, nearly 100 cars would arrive, carrying adults seeking beer, clams, music, and dancing, typically polka, inside the building, which explains the presence of the piano. There was also an intriguing incident in the 1960s when a new car salesman with a prospective customer took a brand-new GTO for a test drive to the Grove for some reason. The car was observed soon after speeding onto the paved road, leaving the salesman behind. The only other recollection is that it had no hubcaps.

The title of the book was developed much later. After taking a Lit course in college, an early attempt at writing something was tentatively titled ‘The Desert’, as I missed my tromping grounds in the Navy (too much water). It was more of a short novella than anything else (I even created a cover containing saguaro cacti, rocks, snakes, etc.) Feedback on the draft was “I liked the ending.”: a nice way of saying, “I’m glad that’s over!” Later, after studying physics, I was introduced to entropy, and combining that with all the saguaros on the original cover led to part of the book’s title—a initial play on words (but it also became a topic I became increasingly obsessed with). Since the book was originally a collection of short stories, the name STORY TIME came to be. It so happened that Lawrence W. Lee, whom I’d known for many a year, created a painting with the same name. Putting the two together thus resulted in the book’s title (and the cover melded to the story nicely).

The character’s name, GreyDevil, has an interesting story behind it. In the early ‘70s, I once backpacked on the south-facing side of the Santa Catalina mountains north of Tucson at around 7000 feet (2133m). One day, I briefly glimpsed what appeared to be a sizeable whiteish-grey dog, or perhaps a wolf, interested in the group I was with. I’ve seen many coyotes in my day. So it wasn’t one of those. It quickly vanished in the pines but reappeared several times over the next two days. Later, I identified the animal as a Mexican Wolf (or Mexican Gray Wolf) with quite a devilish knack for keeping tabs on us, only showing itself just enough to keep me on edge. So, Grey and Devil came together. It was initially GrayDevil, but I later reserved the word ‘gray’ for only the color.

I also mention Lake Chapala in Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico, both in the “About the Author” page of the book and within it. Here is the info. My parents yanked my sister and me out of elementary school for 1+ years. They sold the house, bought a VW van (with a sunroof), and went down to Mexico until the money ran out. After getting tired of sandy beaches month after month, we rented a place at an abandoned gold mill on the shore of Lake Chapala. The living conditions were not great - the place was infested with fleas and had a wood-burning stove, fireplace, and an icebox in the kitchen. The mill, located between two ‘apartments’, was contaminated with mercury but was great fun for my sister and me to play with.

Our landlord, known to us as Zara (and others, I learned later, as ‘La Rusa’ or ‘Khyva St. Albans’), had been a professional ballerina. When we lived there, she was in her mid-seventies and would visit us on her white horse at least once or twice weekly to share stories (Once, I rode her horse, and it took me out into the lake and wouldn’t move. I had to swim back to shore, and the horse then followed). Her stories varied, but one that stood out was about former tenants, who she thought were crazy, including a couple of well-known counterculture figures from the United States in the 1960s (many pieces of broken glass labware in the other adjoining apartment to the mill attested to this), with at least one of the former tenants on the run from the authorities, she said. There was also a twenty-something guy named Jim T. who lived on the property in a separate apartment without a country. He had dress shirts with his name in the material and liked to play gin rummy. Maybe he’s still there.

At the time, Ajijic was a charming place with many expatriates and locals. Women were often seen hand scrubbing clothes on the cobblestone street that led to the lake beside the mill house. Every morning, two men on donkeys would come by: one with firewood, the other with tortillas. I don’t recall where the blocks of ice came from. It was a transformative year. When we departed on the trip, Nixon was president, but when we returned to the United States, he was no longer in office, and we hadn’t heard about it. The beautiful lake served as the backdrop for the attraction in the book ‘YEE-KAYS’, was fittingly ‘CLOSED FOREVER’. 

To be continued...