I pull into a filling station before dawn. It’s a true filling station, with a tiny service garage, tires and maps for sale. At least I want to believe maps are for sale. And pressure gauges, too! No convenience store selling nachos, energy drinks or Lotto tickets.

Aaron works the morning shift and commutes 40 miles along Highway 101 to open the filling station at 6:00 a.m. Aaron wears a smart uniform right out of the heyday of filling stations. The era where you bought milk, collected Green Stamps and purchased a Christmas album if you patronized Texaco during the holiday season. Yeah, an oil conglomerate used to be a record producer and distributor. My mother still plays her two albums. I still listen to them on cassettes I made 35 years ago.

I’m here at 6:22. I always get out of my car and greet Aaron, my 50-something gas man. He fills up my tank and washes my windows with a smile. We talk about the weather and strange people wandering up and down 101 that he daily encounters at the station and always engages in conversation, if that’s possible, which sometimes is not for these people.

Standing near the pump, I stretch a bit, throw away some trash. Some light is starting to show in the sky. Aaron says it’s going to be a beautiful day.

I hear a howl in the distance, a human howl. The howling transforms into screaming. An unseen man somewhere nearby in the darkness, presumably on 101 is screaming something angry and unintelligible.

The screaming moves closer to the filling station. I look at Aaron. He answers me before I can ask the question,

“That’s John.”

“What’s going on with him?”

Aaron hesitates for a moment, sighs then launches into John’s story and it goes something like this:

John’s mother had recently died. He lived with her in a low-income, elderly, housing complex and had served as her caregiver. Now that she was gone, he was going to be kicked out and become homeless. He didn’t have a job and wasn’t employable due to mental health issues. A short while ago, he started to lose it and was now walking the streets in the early morning, screaming. He often walked into the filling station and Aaron always made time to talk to him and listen. John told Aaron he was considering suicide and Aaron talked him out of it. But John was getting more and more delusional and distraught and, well, that’s where the story ends.

It ended right up to the moment Aaron puts the nozzle back into the pump and John walks past the station screaming and gesticulating. I look at him but can’t discern a face. He is just a mass in a big coat.

I say goodbye to Aaron and tell him to keep up his good work. I tell myself the same. There is so much good work all around us to be done.

It’s 91 degrees. It’s lunchtime and I’m sitting in the shade outside a generic office complex with a Tudor facade complete with turrets watching two goats lounging inside a fenced lot.

One goat is brown, the other white.

I just threw a pear to the brown one. He gets up from under his shade tree and sniffs at the pear but ignores it. He must prefer the dozens of wild apples on the ground. The other day I saw him munch one off a branch. Wild. I clapped.

Actually the goats have two fenced lots to lounge around. They also have an old RV that serves as their goat shack. I’m not kidding! The goats’ owners must have gutted the RV and rigged it up for goat occupancy at night. Goats living in an RV. It’s an arresting image and surely one I’ll use in a piece of writing. Like this one.

I’m watching the goats as I contemplate making an important decision about my future. I believe I am allowing myself to be distracted from a large creative endeavor that I need to initiate. It’s been a dream for over 25 years.

Lunchtime is nearly over. But I have a few more minutes left to watch goats. They are a pleasant and calming sight. I wish I knew their names. I might have to name them.

(A chapter from a memoir I started years ago about my time teaching in Turkey in 1992. I often think about that experience and the incredible people I met in that strange job. Maybe one day I will finish the book. Recently, the subject of this piece contacted me and it has been wonderful to reconnect with her. Oh, what a time we had together.)

Her Gold

Mila’s brown fingers untie the knot of the braided purple cord. She pours out the contents of a black velvet pouch and tiny yellow pebbles tumble across the kitchen table of her Istanbul apartment.

A light snow falls beyond the window. It barely defeats the soot from the city’s millions of coal-fired furnaces.

What’s happening here?

“I’m going to sell my gold so I can travel with you,” she says. “I’ve been saving these for a long time.”

My Turkish girlfriend just told me she wants to sell her life savings, gold nuggets, her only hedge against insidious triple-digit inflation, so she can afford to accompany me on my trip. I’ll leave in two weeks after I quit my teaching job, tour her country’s Aegean and Mediterranean coastlines for two weeks, then catch a ferry to Israel. And from there, somehow make it back to Oregon.

We never discussed her going with me although I did roll out a map and describe my proposed journey after we had sex in her bathtub.

Outside of a museum and jewelry I would never wear or buy, I’ve never seen gold before. It looks rougher than I ever imagined. These nuggets have dark folds and stained ridges. But they shine too, though a different kind of sparkle.

I look at her and touch the nuggets. Then I palm them. For a moment, I don’t know what to say.

“Mila, are you sure? It’s going to be incredibly cold.”

She stands up from the table and comes over to kiss me. I’ve still got the gold in my hand.

“I want to go with you and show you Turkey. The real Turkey.”

Three days later, I helped her pick out a backpack.

Four weeks later, that frigid morning on the dock, the palm trees stood at attention. My ferry idled, ready to depart. Mila and I said goodbye and I kissed her deeply while Muslim men and women glared. I told her I loved her and I did.

I didn’t ask Mila to marry me. If I had, I would have seen my question float toward her in the cold air and her response float back to me. I think I might have swallowed it.

As I drove a remote stretch of Highway 101, rain fell. Dusk was coming on. For over 50 miles, I’d followed a fancy orange vehicle, an SUV of some type. The driver kept a steady pace and it was just us for miles and miles. On the radio, a documentary about the legendary SF band Moby Grape played and I learned of their extraordinary story and heard psychedelic rock songs by them I’d never previously knew existed. They went well with rain.

The orange vehicle slowed down. I slowed down and shut off the radio. In the distance I saw a vague figure in the middle of the oncoming lane…it was…it was…the shape of a coyote. I’ve had some coyote moments in recent months and I relished another one.

The orange vehicle pulled over to the shoulder and stopped. I stopped well behind it, in the middle of the road. No one was behind me. The figure kept trotting down the middle of the oncoming lane. Coyotes don’t do that. They scoot across.

It was a dog, a large dog with big floppy ears. As it came nearer I recognized it as a bloodhound. I could see it was wearing a collar and tags and appeared to have an arrow protruding from its neck.

What in the name of God? Here we go again, I thought, dog rescue time. They never really come at opportune moments. That’s why their called rescues and this one was going to require considerable effort. What exactly do you do with a bloodhound with an arrow in its neck and it’s a late Sunday afternoon and it’s raining and you are in the middle of nowhere?

The driver side door to the orange vehicle opened and a man emerged, a younger man, pretty hipster looking in attire. The bloodhound went toward him. The man coaxed the dog closer to the vehicle. The bloodhound stepped into the car and barely squeezed inside.

I was utterly confused, dumbfounded. It seemed as if the dog and man already knew each other, but that was impossible. The entire incident seemed more like a dream, hallucination or poem, one that was unfolding 20 yards in front of me. I accelerated my car forward and passed the orange vehicle at a slow speed because I wanted a look inside at the bloodhound. I had to!

The windows were tinted. I could see nothing. Nevertheless, I knew I had just witnessed a spectral rescue of a wounded bloodhound in rain, one I would never forget, and one I would also never fathom.

I turned on the radio. Moby Grape was still doing their thing, and I headed down the road.