OK, I just wanna go on a rant completely unrelated to anything else. Things have been a little heavy on the blog here lately, so I'm going to skirt another edge for a moment and talk about one of life's mosquitos - an everyday issue that matters little but irritates just the same.

Who on earth invented scented underarm deodorant?

Personally, I want my armpits to do three things: not grow hair, not sweat and not smell. Not smell AT ALL. Armpits should be perfectly neutral on the whole smell thing. That's why I buy perfume and body spray. Fragrance should come from my pulse points, not my pits. What marketing whiz decided scented deodorant was a fine fricking idea? By its very name, deodorant should not have any smell!

Another thing about this stuff: Why is it so hard for them to make deodorant that doesn't leave white marks on your clothes? Some companies have done it; why can't they all?? Do the stain remover folks pay select companies NOT to make their deodorants invisible? What kind of crazy scheme is going on here exactly? Certainly, perfume manufacturers were not invited to the party.

I am somewhat happy with this product, Secret clear gel, because it is, as promised, clear. So far, it's left no white smudges on my black, navy or otherwise dark tops. But I had no choice about the smell. Either the Unscented was sold out, or Secret opted not to make such a ridiculous product. Who, after all, would want unscented deodorant when you could have what I now have: Vanilla Sparkle.

Now, my clothes are unmarked, but I smell like vanilla. Had I known how very strong Vanilla Sparkle was, I would not have purchased it. But my other options seemed no less desirable. I could have been Tropical Sparkle or Berry Sparkle. Vanilla seemed safe, neutral, even blah. It's vanilla, for God's sake. But not this stuff - it's overwhelmingly sweet and strong. Would that my perfumes lasted as long as Vanilla Sparkle Clear Gel Secret.

There's even a graphic of an ice cream cone on it. Does a 42-year-old woman really want to smell like an ice cream cone? Or a berry? Or a coconut? Does even a 16-year-old woman want this? The only women I can think of who want to smell like ice cream haven't yet developed sweat glands; they're racking up single digit birthdays and biting their tongues as they struggle to print their first names with soft-edged pencils.

Most of the time, I wear no fragrance at all, and on those days, that is my aim. I want to smell like nothing. I'd like to think I naturally emit a delightful fragrance of my own, but let's not kid ourselves. We're humans. Without deodorant, we stink. Even with deodorant, the odds of us smelling lovely are slim (let's not forget breath, feet and, well, other areas that are not naturally minty smelling).

So, how about a deodorant called Inoffensive Woman? When will we see that on the shelf? Or if that's not jazzy enough, Nature Girl. And please don't go adding any pine or earthy scents, thinking this will make DO even more attractive to the neutral-scent-seeking woman. Oh, and definitely don't go for patchouli.

No offense to anyone patchouli fans who may be reading this, but from my nose's point of view, only in the drug-crazed 60s and 70s could that "unique" odor have possibly been considered alluring. If you're in my vicinity and wearing it, please stand back a bit - but not so far that I can't reach the pipe you're extending in my direction.

Back to you manufacturing types: Follow the age-old KISS rule: Keep it simple, Stupid. Produce every underarm product with exactly the same basic, timeless name that I believe almost all of us scour the shelves for every time we're forced to buy deodorant: Unscented.

Brad's services have come and gone. I feel healed by it, but feel flashes of guilt in the wake of it all. Why is my grief not deeper? Why is it not lingering? When will it rear its ugly head again? And what if it never does? I know there is no right way to grieve, yet I feel my loss should be tearing me apart, as it is some of my friends.

Two friends flew into DIA and stayed here last Friday night. The three of us - two of whom had never met before - stayed up late, drinking wine, talking about Brad, sharing our disbelief that this had happened to one so beautiful and vital. It seemed to me the three of us felt immediately comfortable with one another. Our friendship with Brad, and our shared loss, bound us immediately.

Stephanie said she had letters he'd penned to her years ago saved at her home in California. She e-mailed last week to say she'd re-read them, and they reassured her that Brad did indeed have a good life.

Kimberly, however, had been visiting him three times a week before he died, leaning on him as she worked through domestic pain. Likewise with Shauna.

Brad had been propping up two of my friends, and I hadn't even known. Kimberly feels lost, still overwhelmed by her personal problems and without the rock Brad had become for her.

I worry about both of these women, delicate souls from the start, who are trying to move on with their lives. One dealing with the unknown and likely eternal "what ifs," along with the loss of support and friendship. The other whose loss is coupled with intense personal struggle.

I want to be there for them now. But I can't be from this distance. And I can never take Brad's place.

I worry, too, about Mark, the photographer who worked with him at the paper for years. Someone said last weekend that the Brad and Mark years were the paper's golden ones. I felt privileged that I had been there during those years.

But Mark suffered the loss of a girlfriend, the shocking and bizarre loss of his job, and a transfer that took him to Aspen. Aspen, he said, is not his home. Frisco, home of the Summit Daily and the cabin he still owns, is where his heart resides. Mark is quiet. His emotions stay, for the most part, underground. Brad, he said, was his brother. I wonder where his grief will go, how he will let it out, if it will stay inside and eat that gentle man to pieces.

As for me, I'm doing better than I'd have thought with it all. I was so shaky before the service I couldn't look at Brad's photos, more than a dozen of which were on display at the amphitheater in which his service was held. I tried to sign the guest book and only got as far as my name and address. The pen simply ceased to function when I tried to write in the comments section, where people had written messages to Brad.

Stephanie, Kimberly and I held onto one another during the service. We laughed as Shauna spoke, doing a perfect impression of Brad's monotone voice. We cried when she said that through all this confusion, all she wanted to do was talk to Brad about it. We cried still more when she made a personal vow to the blue sky above that she would be a better friend in the future, as he had always been. Tears rolled when Mark, normally so shy, gave a heart-rending speech and said, as he walked off stage, "I'll see you again someday, my brother."

Then somehow, after it was over, I felt calm and steady. And have felt mostly that way since.

In keeping with everyone's resolve to be better friends and stay in touch, I have reached out to some old Summit Daily friends this week. In the space of only a few days, I have seen five of them. A surprising amount of us live in the Denver metro area. Jeff, a mid-90s co-worker, and I met for a drink downtown Wednesday. Kristin, my former editor, invited me to her baby shower yesterday, where I saw three other old friends. Andy and I, after putting it off for weeks, finally will meet for that drink midway between our suburban homes.

I really hope we can all keep this up. It could be that Brad's death has the strange effect of re-igniting these old friendships that have been missing in my life (perhaps all our lives) so long and somehow assuaging the loneliness. It makes me feel guilty just writing that, however.

Somehow the most heartbreaking thing of all came Tuesday. Kimberly called to say she was in the Summit Daily parking lot at and about to go in for the first time without Brad.

"I don't think I can do this without crying. Can you talk me through it?" she asked, and she burst into gut-wrenching sobs.

My eyes, which had been tearless for days, welled. My chest ached as her pain sped across the satellite signal and wrapped itself around me. "You're breaking my heart," I told her.

I told her to cry, to run for Martha, who had been there for more than a dozen years and knew Brad almost as well as she did. These people, all of whom loved him, too, will understand, I said. She broke down, she told me later, and it was, she said, just fine.

So now, I move on, without as much sorrow as I think I should feel.

Certainly, it has residual, even strangely comical, effect.

When I arrived home last Sunday night, I tossed my packet of daily pills by the sink - my antidepressant, my mood stabilizer, my multi-vitamins, calcium and acne treatment. As well as my herbal sleeping pills, which I failed to notice were still mixed among them.

The next morning, I swallowed them all and got ready to make the 45-minute drive to my boss' home.

I stood to leave and felt overcome by dizziness. It was, I swore, a variety of dizziness I'd never felt before, extending from my head to my toes and leaving nothing between untouched. My brain did not want my limbs to move. My brain wanted only to lay my body down. I felt, or perhaps imagined, my left arm tingling.

I'm dying, I thought. I'm having a heart attack and I'm going to die here in my bedroom. I'm going where Brad has gone, only 10 days later. Why couldn't I have died at the same time, I thought. It would have been so much more convenient for everyone. How many of these people will return for my funeral; surely, only a handful. And who will find me? How long will I lay here?

Somehow, I convinced myself that rather than laying down, I should head for the office.

If I die on the highway and have an accident, I thought, at least I'll be found immediately. Hopefully, I won't take anyone else with me. Hopefully, I'll just drive off the edge and pass away at the steering wheel. Someone will stop. They'll grab my cell phone and begin notifying everyone.

But I did not die. Instead, I drove to work fighting the urge to nod off. Nausea set in. My head began to throb.

Slowly, I started to think I might not be dying after all.

My boss was concerned. She fed me crackers and hot tea. She asked if I needed to go home.

"No, no," I reassured her, feeling brave in the face of this potentially terrible illness. "I'll be OK."

An hour later, I felt dramatically improved. Only then did my brain recover enough to think back on my morning's dose, to remember it had seemed like an unusually tough swallow, to realize my Valerian pills had been nestled in among all the others.

I did not admit this to my boss.

I was not dying. But neither did I feel as Brad wrote that he did in a letter he penned to a friend several years ago. He was in a tent far from civilization in the middle of a frenetic lightning storm. If he were struck that night and died, he wrote, he would be content. He had lived a good life, seen many places, loved many people. Brad survived the lightning storm and lived many more good years. This letter, I think, comforts his family and friends deeply.

But I don't share Brad's sentiments. Only in the last few years do I think I've begun the process of giving to others, of becoming less selfish and feeling that I can make a difference.

I want to see my son through every fascinating phase of his life, to be the best influence I can be and continue to help form this amazing young person into the fine adult I already know he will be. He needs me, this child. Even if I felt ready to go, he is not ready to lose his mother.

There are a million places I want to see, and experiences I want to have. I want to share my life with a man, perhaps a man with children. Have I lived alone too long? Am I too spoiled by my own good child to take on someone else's? Perhaps. Yet nature beckons me toward that lifestyle; it's a yearning that begs to be satisfied. I want to be a better friend, a better sibling, a better daughter, a better mom. I want to take more chances. Damnit, I want to try that Indoor Skydiving thing down by the mall. What the heck is that anyway?

What it all boils down to is, I cannot write the words that Brad wrote in that tent. How many of us can?

Last eve, Robby and I were kicking a rock across a parking lot and I noticed it would have been a perfect skipping stone. Out of the blue, I remembered skipping rocks with Brad at a pond while we were en route to some story, and Brad trying to teach me the proper wrist flick. I never did get it.

The memory did not pain me, as I thought it should. It was only a thought of a pleasant sunny day with Brad, one of many nice times we'd shared. Those moments were never over-the-top - Brad was a man of moderation in all things - but never anything less than nice. They simply were.

And so, I guess, is that memory. It was not a knife to my heart, which - thank to the forces-that-be - continues to beat strongly. It was a gentle reminder of a dear and now-departed friend that, thankfully I believe, did not fill me with yearning, regret or angst about my own mortality.

It simply was.

Brad - Part I

Billy Joel said only the good die young. It makes for a good song but is far from true. It does, seem, however, that so many who die young are truly good.

So it is with my friend, Brad. Brad died at about 8:30 Sunday morning on an operating table at the Summit County hospital.

Brad was a 12-year photographer at the Summit Daily News. He started there a month before I did and we worked together for 9 years. We were friends from the start and still in regular contact with one another until the day he died. He was 42.

Brad had hosted a dinner party that evening, as he did so often and so well.

I had traveled to Summit County that day to douse my Denver loneliness with the company of old friends. "Come by," Brad said. "Shauna's here. She'd love to see you." But somehow, we crossed wires. Perhaps it was a phone call one of us thought the other had promised to make. I never made it there.

As usual, he had invited two of his guests, including Shauna, also a former SDN reporter, to spend the night in his four-bedroom home. Brad loved company but also did not want anyone who might be drunk to drive home after one of his parties. He promised he'd be right up the stairs after them, but instead opted to sit in the ground-level hot tub, three stories below his condo. At about midnight, he walked back up the stairs. Authorities believe it was the combination of alcohol, an extremely hot hot tub and the exertion of climbing three floors that made him dizzy. But somehow, standing at the landing outside his door, he somehow flipped over the thigh-high railing and fell to the grass three stories down.

He broke tree branches on the way down.

Shauna says she heard a thump about midnight. The kind of sound that gave her "a bad feeling." But her friend convinced her it was nothing, and so, she fell asleep again. Shauna, always a keenly sensitive woman, cannot forgive herself.

The authorities say he never regained full consciousness. While I'd like to believe this is true, I cannot. He tried to pull himself back up the three flights of stairs, but got no further than the second landing. Friends who went to the scene said there was blood and an indentation in the grass where he landed, more blood leading up the stairs.

A neighbor heard moaning outside his door. He ignored it for a while, believing someone was having sex outside. Finally, he called out and asked if everything was alright.

"Fell," Brad said.

"Where are you?"

"Staircase."

Two hours had passed by then.

Brad answered paramedics' questions, but apparently did not know his name.

At 2:30 a.m., he arrived at the hospital. He had sustained massive pelvic trauma and a head injury. He was too critical to fly to Denver.

Shauna, pacing the waiting room, said she looked in and thought, "Why are Brad's feet black?"

At 8:30 a.m., they pronounced him dead.

At 9:30, perplexed about our missed connection of the night before, I called Brad, hoping we could meet for coffee before I left town.

The voice that answered was unfamiliar.

"You're looking for Brad? Are you one of his friends?"

He stumbled as he went on. "This is Jim Morgan. I'm publisher of the Summit Daily News. I have Brad's phone because he was in an accident last night."

I felt the blood drain from my face. I waited for him to tell me what hospital he was in.

"He passed away." He was silent, waiting for me to say something, but I could not speak.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't know how else to tell you."

Later, I would realize what a horrible job he had that day, but then I could only think, "You're a liar."

No one that young is supposed to die. But Brad, in particular, was not supposed to die. Brad was adventurous, an admirable athlete, a world traveler, a great cook with an appreciation for fine wine and good beer. He celebrated life. He drank. But he was never reckless.

No drunken Brad tales ever circulated Summit County. (I'm quite sure the same cannot be said of me.)

He was the very definition of mellow, speaking so slowly at times that the rest of us on staff made affectionate fun of him. We could all imitate one another with some success, but "the Brad" was distinctive, more easily done than some. He spoke slowly, in part, because he was so thoughtful, his words so carefully considered.

In a ski resort community populated by risk-takers and outdoor lovers, I can think of at least a dozen other friends whose premature deaths would have saddened, but not surprised me.

Not Brad. As one friend wrote in an e-mail today, "There was always going to be another time to see Brad."

You knew that because Brad always was and always would be a friend. His door would always swing wide for you.

But my friend Laura, with whom I was staying, called the coroner. We both knew her; this is a small county in which the locals - always outnumbered by the tourists who play there year-round - keep a tight circle. She confirmed that it was true. She - like everyone else - knew Brad.

"She was shaken," Laura said. "I've never heard her like that before."

The phone lines and cell signals began to burn. The calls crossed the county, the state, the country and oceans.

I called my former editor Alex, thinking he must already know. He did not. Alex called Mark, who for years had worked with Brad as co-SDN photographers and considered Brad his brother. Mark had just told Gay and John. Alex called the editor. I called Abby in Aspen, who had just heard from Mark and said she was driving over. But first, she would go to the Aspen Times office to tell Dan, who jumped in his car as well. I called Andy in Denver, who jumped in his car and headed for the mountains. I called Lu, who told me I was a liar. Lu called Martha. Martha stopped Christy, who had planned to have dinner with Brad that night, as she rode down the bike path. I met my ever-smiling friend Dave for a late coffee, as planned, and for once, the smile fell from his face. He dropped his head in his hands and rubbed his eyes. Someone called a river rafting office in central Colorado. They pulled Reid, this summer a rafting guide but a years-long reporter and fellow photographer, off the river to tell him. He headed toward Summit County.

Where we were all going was not clear. But we were headed for what had all been home to us once, where we had all met Brad. We were also headed, I think, for one another.

Later, word spread that Mark was hosting a gathering at his cabin that evening. About 20 of us current and former staff members congregated there. People from "generations" of the Summit Daily News, some of whom had never worked together. We all knew one another by name, however, mostly through Brad.

Because of Brad, we were all family. The Summit Daily is a small mountain resort newspaper with a daily press count of about 10,000 papers. It circulates much further because of its resort location. It is 17 years old, which made Brad, me and a few others of us among the longest-standing of its employees. It was an upstart that took out a well-established community paper, so the bond among the staff was tight from the beginning. For years, I tried to get a foot in the door there.

And for those 9 years following, no matter how much I came to dislike the long winters, high cost of living and other things about the county, I never lost my love of the job or the Summit Daily.

Every day that I worked at the Gazette, I carried my Summit Daily mug with me, a shield against the negative emotions that permeated that newsroom. Perhaps even more so because of that experience, as well as the loneliness of my new city, I felt Sunday the depth of the bond that glued all 17 years of us together. Brad was the constant among us, the friend to us all. Even those he didn't particularly like thought he was their friend.

Friends come and friends go, but Brad would never fall away. This I knew. As did so many others. The letters and comments posted since his death tell the story: "Brad kept in touch with me years after I left the Daily." "Brad called me just the other day." "Brad remembered my birthday when no one else did."

For a while Sunday night, we all mingled in loose knots of three or four people. Then John, one of the paper's original staff members, called for us to form a circle around the campfire. "Since we're here for Brad, I think we should go around and tell some stories about Brad."

Most of us, we discovered, had spent a moment that day searching for the beauty Brad captured through his photographer's lens, the loveliness he found in the most ordinary of things. I had driven by his house and seen a smattering of wildly colored flowers. Brad would have taken a picture of that, I thought. In fact, he probably already had. Alex took a bike ride with his wife and son after he heard the news. He looked at everything around him with new appreciation. Others said they'd done the same. All of us, trying to see the world through Brad's eyes.

Someone brought up the old-school equipment he used to heli, tele and Alpine ski. Others recalled golfing, camping and long-distance hiking with him. Lacking the outdoor adventurer's spirit, these were entire areas of his life I never knew.

Someone else mentioned women and the entire group burst into laughter. Brad had always wanted to marry and have children, but somehow, he had yet to find the right woman. He dated, and dated a lot. Young, old, locals, tourists, friends past and present - but never co-workers. But despite Brad's reputation as a ladies' man, we all knew that Brad genuinely loved women. He did not use a single one. He respected them all. He liked them all, which was why so many stayed his friend after the relationships ended.

He also photographed them, often without attire. "Damn, there have got to be some nervous women out there wondering what's gonna happen to those negatives," Reid said.

We lapsed into silence. I looked around the circle, at all the lovely faces of friends past and present. Their expressions were caught in the glow from the flames. Some were smiling. Some wiped away tears. Others stared without expression into the fire. It was a moment of sad but extraordinary beauty, I thought, that needed to be photographed.

"Son of a bitch could cook!" John said. Again, a round of laughter.

"Did you ever taste his curry?" someone asked.

"God, that was hot stuff. He said he made it mild but no way was that mild," Christy said.

Everyone began throwing out the names of their favorite Brad dishes.

Someone circulated a bottle of scotch. Someone else passed a pipe. Silence fell again. Someone sniffled. Someone else sobbed as quietly as they possibly could.

I told the story of the Christmas Eve before last, when my friend April and I - both childless and uncertain what to do with our holiday - had come to Summit County and spent the evening at Brad's house. He cooked us an exotic dinner, on this night some kind of English stew with the bones still in it. We talked late into the night, Brad sprawled across the ledge along his fireplace.

"April's thong was showing," I said, inducing a round of laughter. Everyone knew almost exactly how the tale would go.

"Brad was in heaven," Reid said.

Brad had harassed April lightly throughout the evening. "I'd sure like to see the rest of that thong, April," he'd said. April was not interested, but Brad, accustomed to the power of his charms, believed she was. The next day, he'd called me and said, "Janie, I just didn't want to send you home along. But you tell April she and that thong are welcome here anytime." He had e-mailed me about it for months.

Brad kept in touch with old friends like no one I've ever known. He'd called me twice in the previous 10 days to tell me small news snippets he thought I'd like to know: that the former mayor of Dillon had died, and a few days later that a mutual friend had lung cancer. I joked lightly with him after the second sad pronouncement. "Next time you call, it had better be with some good news."

"I know, Janie," he said. "It's crazy lately, isn't it?"

During our years as co-workers, we took many long road trips on assignments. We talked about everything. Nothing was forbidden. Never did I feel I should hide anything from Brad. He listened in silence when I told him about my nervous breakdown, reassuring me I was solid as a rock and all the better for it. He offered advice on men, always encouraging me to date more, to relax, to not take it all so seriously. Yet, he was fiercely protective of me. With the exception of Iain, Brad found the men I dated lacking. "Janie, I just don't think he's good enough for you," he'd repeatedly conclude.

Brad had always planned to release a photography book of naked pregnant women, and during my pregnancy, he begged me repeatedly to allow him to take my picture. I would have trusted Brad without question to take the picture, and to be gentlemanly about it. I knew the images would be beautiful and tasteful. But I could not bring myself to do it; it was my own insecurities, not my insecurity about Brad.

"Brad," I'd joked. "It's not that I wouldn't do it. It's just I'd have to be drunk to do it, and I can't do that when I'm pregnant."

Brad was enamored with Robby, carrying him around the newsroom on his hip when he was not yet a toddler. Almost all the framed photographs I have of Robby as a baby and young child were taken by Brad. He is everywhere in my home; sadly, he is always behind the lens. Today, I found exactly two pictures of Brad (both with women). Such a tiny representation for a man who played such a large part in my life.

The last time I saw him, about six months ago, he'd organized a reunion for me at his home. Mark came from Aspen, Reid, Shauna and several others from Vail and Summit. I felt privileged, as always, to be invited to Brad's home, even more so that he had gathered a group for me. We ate something exotic, perhaps it was even curry, drank good wine, reminisced and talked late into the evening.

He hugged me at his door when the night ended. "We miss you here, Janie," he said. "I miss you."

I miss you, too, Bradford.

E-mails are flying like crazy these last few days, from people I haven't heard from in years, from some I've even forgotten. All say the same thing: Not Brad. He was my friend.

My friends express to me the way I feel: Guilt that we are looking forward to seeing one another.

We are reconnecting in the saddest of ways, though I can't help but think Brad would approve of the people he's bringing back together, the friendships he is likely renewing.

The services are Saturday. I can only imagine how massive the turnout will be.

I can't help but think, too, that if there is such a thing as heaven, Brad is witnessing our sorrow. If that were true, I know he was there last night with me in the kitchen. I could almost hear his mellow voice, saying, "Don't cry, Janie."

Loneliness seems to be the topic of the week.

Before we begin, allow me to apologize. This entry follows no logical chronological order, in short, because there are several moments that tie into it, but only one possible ending. And hell, it's my blog. I can do what I want.

I'm feeling loneliness keenly these days, working at home all day and knowing no one yet to call on at night for some after-hours fun time. Robby left yesterday, two days earlier than usual, and I face a long stretch without him. I came home last night without him and felt his absence more keenly than I have since my ex and I first separated. Then, coming home alone to the sight of his toys still scattered on the floor conjured up a heartache so great I sometimes thought it would split me in two.

My son is my buddy, and I realize that's dangerous in a way. In our new world, as both of us struggle to meet people, we're becoming increasingly reliant on one another for our social fixes. Long term, this just won't do.

The boy he met the first week we were here has seemingly disappeared, and though we see other boys walking the complex as we drive through in our car, these mysterious figures live in buildings far removed from ours. We met a group of about five of them once, while walking to the upper pool. Two were straddling bikes, one was clutching a basketball. They said they "just hung out" all day and that Robby was welcome to hang out, too. So, lest I sound cruel and unrealistic in the following graphs, realize these are not complete strangers with which I'm asking him to attempt friendships.

This week, I found what I hope is an ingenious way to be sure Robby makes new friends. It's called bribery. I offered him a weekly allowance: $1 for doing his small list of chores (cleaning the cat box, feeding the dog, making his bed), and $5 if he makes two rounds of the complex daily on his bike - searching for friends. If the search is fruitless, fine. But if he finds some, he must stop, talk and make an effort.

For a moment, Robby actually balked at the idea, ready to accept the meager dollar rather than talk to strangers. Quickly, I sweetened the pot, our soured it, depending on your point of view. "OK, $1, your chores, no TV, no games. $5, your chores, friends, games, TV. Which is it?"

Still he pondered it with great seriousness. But finally, he bit. In his one day here this week, he had no luck. I even demanded proof of his forays, evidence that he's not just cruised the streets but gotten off his bike and searched for them in likely places. "Bring me a cookie from the clubhouse," I told him.

He returned 15 minutes later with a broken cookie, offering it to me from the sweaty palm in which it had been clenched. "Awesome!" I said, then, "But I don't want the cookie." He looked baffled, then ate it himself.

My son is an initially shy child, often too quiet for my comfort. He has a busy, questioning brain and I know thoughts run wild inside him. I am always trying to figure out how to tap into this part of him. Sometimes he opens up to my inquiries, often he shrugs or ignores me. Monday, I threw out a random question. "Do you ever think about what it will be like to be grown up?"

"I think it will be lonely," he said.

I reminded him that college would likely not be a lonely experience, but he shook his head. "Not then. After. When I'm on my own."

I told him about all the different ways people can share lives; as roommates, friends and family members. I threw in a cautionary reminder that he should never marry because he's lonely, maybe more for myself than him. I told him that as an only child, he had an advantage over other children who never know what it's like to be alone until they reach adulthood. He acknowledged that sometimes, he actually likes to be alone.

"Do you think I'm lonely when you're not here?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "I think it must be boring."

At this point in my life, he's more on the mark than I'd like. But thinking back over the years, I know this is an anomaly, that I have rarely felt completely alone or bored.

There are times, however, that he'll never know about, when it seems overwhelming. Moments, particularly in the dead of night, when I wake thinking, "I'm 39 ... 40 ... 41 ... 42 ... and I'm unmarried, uncommitted, essentially alone. How soon before no one wants me? How soon before time runs out? How soon before it's too late and I'm alone for good?"

That's when I get up, have a shot or two or hard liquor, and render myself unconscious. Even if I can still hear the voices, their speech is now slurred and what the hell they're saying I don't know.

In the light of day, it never seems so bad - unless I'm hungover.

It is not the 1960s, where a single woman at 40 was doomed to spinsterhood. (Besides, I'm divorced. I can't be a spinster.) People divorce and remarry at any age, and marriage is no longer the only acceptable lifestyle choice. Even old ladies can date someone forever or simply live with them sans commitment and not be blackballed by their families and compadres. Besides which, as marriages go and divorces come, the prospect pool is always changing and never ending.

I question, too, how much greener the grass is over there. I've heard more than one shocking, unsolicited confession from married women who seem nonplussed at the idea that I'd like to remarry someday. "Really? If something happened to him, I wouldn't marry again. No way."

Typically, this is some soccer mom who knows she'll never see me again after the season. Typically, too, her wished-for-dead ex is standing five feet away making guttural man sounds as he urges his son on to bloodshed.

We all, it seems, make tradeoffs for the lifestyles we choose. I pondered it while Ally and I explored one of Denver's biggest parks tonight, a city park so big I got lost in it. OK, maybe not so big; I get lost with extraordinary ease, particularly when I'm gaping at muscular soccer players, roller bladers, cyclists, joggers, fellow walkers, other dogs and beautifully twisted gnarled trees.

I'd decided spur-of-the-moment to make the 20-minute drive to the park. There was no one to tell me not to. No one to scold me for staying alone there until dusk.

But there was also no one waiting for me when I opened the apartment door. And no one, I thought, to tell anyone where I was if something happened. No one could describe what I'd been wearing. No one would even know when I'd left or how long I'd been gone. No one was waiting with a warm hug, or a cold beer or to say, "I was worried about you."

The headlines would be depressing. I would be a Jane Doe until someone noticed the stink coming from my apartment. Not from me, mind you, but from my beloved George, who would die of starvation. Or until I missed the Monday Evercare conference call. Whichever came first.

But you can't change these situations overnight, and you certainly can't change them sitting at home on your lonely ass.

Perhaps it was Robby's and my discussion that lit a fire under me. Yesterday, after several days of wondering why I so loved my new home and my new jobs yet still felt so bereft (my word of the month), I got proactive. I searched the Net for business networking groups, found one, subscribed and marked their next event (bowling, blech!) in my Daytimer.

Feeling damn near saintly, I e-mailed the local DBSA chapter to volunteer my services and was shocked when they replied they were not in need of any facilitators. I would be kept on file. This scenario, I swear, had never occurred to me. I was momentarily stumped, and disappointed - to whom could I offer my philanthropic efforts now? I was even, one could say, a little bereft (ca-ching!) But then I got back to searching.

I decided to attend a Sunday afternoon workshop at the local library entitled, "My manuscript's done. Now what?" (So what if I don't have a manuscript? These are writers; I want to meet writers. I will think of something fabulous and intriguing between now and then).

I also forced myself to get up this morning, pack up my laptop and venture out to a coffee shop. I purused USA Today. I read an entire story about Lebanon and Hezbollah and felt I had climbed perhaps an inch out of the deep news hole in which I've allowed myself to fall post-journalism. A retired cop struck up a conversation with me about my iBook, then apologized for taking so much of my time. I resisted the thought of clutching his pant leg to keep him from leaving, much less telling him that making social contact was precisely the reason I was there.

I reviewed files, took notes and looked generally businesslike. The canned music, staff chatter and soft conversations of the people around comforted to a degree I hadn't anticipated. I'm optimistic again, about this working from home, thanks in large part to my son.

The night of our "growing up" discussion, Robby and I took our usual walk, cat and dog in tow, to the new and largely undeveloped strip mall behind the apartment complex. We've found a quiet corner on the side of the building where Ally and George can stalk rabbits, Robby can skateboard and I can practice yoga. Or rather, tipping over, since post-yoga classes, I seem to have lost the minimal balancing abilities it took me two years to gain.

"Let's talk about something," Robby said. "We always talk when we're here."

"What did we talk about last night?" I asked.

"Nintendo," he said.

"Really? I thought we talked about girls."

"We did. A little. Mostly, we talked about Nintendo."

So we chatted, about what I can't recall. Probably because it was Nintendo, which makes my mind go as blank as Robby's face when he plays the thing.

When we got home, Robby flopped on the living room carpet. He ignored the TV.

"Let's talk," he said.

"What about?"

"I don't know. Let's just talk."

I realized I had hit a vein with the grown-up question. My child, for these few hours, thought talking to me was the best thing in the world. I wondered how to preserve the moment. But all I knew I could do was relish it while it lasted.

So I laid on the carpet next to him and we talked. Maybe it was about getting George an ID tag. Maybe it was about the way the wind blew the blinds. Maybe it was about the new skateboard move he was learning. Again, I can't recall. I recall only laying there together, his blonde hair fanned out from his beautiful face as he smiled up at me.

I ended our conversation by announcing it was bed time. Our usual routine consisted of me washing my face, then coming into Robby's room and laying with him on his bed for a while, quietly unwinding before I slipped away to my own bed.

This time, when I opened the bathroom door, I sensed a presence in the room. Actually, I heard him release a very small fart.

"Can I sleep here? Please??" Robby already had wriggled under my comforter.

I feigned annoyance. Truthfully, it was a rare, and usually very special occasion on which I allowed him to sleep in my bed. The night before Christmas, his birthday, the day we washed the car, etc. He was growing up, and it was time to put those childhood things away.

"What's the reason?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "I just want to."

But I knew the reason. We had talked much more today than usual, and were for the moment locked together in a contented connection.

"Alright," I said. "But just tonight. Don't ask me again."

He burrowed down further in the bed and released a contended grunt. Or so I heard it. I refused to believe it was another fart.

I crawled in on my side and turned off the bedside lamp.

The sheets rustled, and I felt the bottom of his small foot touch my calf. This was not atypical, but this time, he offered up an explanation.

"I just sleep better," he said, "when I'm touching someone."

Friendship, Part II

I begged my editor for another day. This was a sensitive story. I wanted time to think about and figure out the best way to approach it.

"No," he said. "You've got 20 minutes. Write it."

Fortunately, no matter how much I protest, deadline writing is often my best.

I wrote thinking about what I so admired about this family. They did not attempt to cram their beliefs down anyone's throats, saying, "Our way is the right, and only, way." They said instead, "These are our beliefs. We know the world may think we're crazy. We ask only for your respect."

Somehow, I think this came across.

The next morning, the phone began to ring with callers praising the story. E-mails poured in, among them a letter to the editor submitted by Zion's grandparents. They were all grateful, they said, for the way in which they'd been portrayed.

I met Paul, the toddler's father, the next day when I went by the house to pick up a picture of his son. I was struck by them both; Paul's startling blue eyes and fierce bear hug, and the photo of his astoundingly beautiful son who had his father's bright eyes and a round face framed by ringlets of blonde hair. I took it in my hands and felt he had given me a gift, a tiny piece of his heartbreak. Ever the journalist, I knew the readers' hearts also would ache when they saw the child's picture.

Once the Summit Daily broke the story, newspapers and media nationwide descended on the family's home. Paul called my editor.

"Do we have to speak to them?" he said. "We don't want to. We don't want to talk to any reporter but Jane."

The media then began calling me. The local radio station asked to interview me. I said no. A co-worker suggested I call the National Enquirer. He assured me I could get at least $1,000 for the story. He offered to make the call for me; he had friends there, he said. He was flabbergasted when I said no. Suffice to say Andy and I never were good friends.

Instead, the other media ran wire versions of my stories.

The family kept their toddler's body in their home for more than two weeks. During that time, I met his mother. She answered the door when I returned the photo. I was struck by her as I'd been by the entire family. Even in grief, she was pretty. I saw a grieving woman with frosted blonde hair, wide, green eyes and a wide mouth that I knew, when lifted in a smile, transformed her into someone remarkably beautiful. Her smile that day was weak, her hug firm.

I wrote the final story almost three weeks after the boy died. The family buried his small body somewhere in Colorado Springs, with the support and blessings of a church with whom they felt connected.

With that, I thought, the story and my connection to the Jungcks also was buried.

I moved to Colorado Springs and on with what I thought was the pinnacle of my career, putting even such extraordinary stories as theirs in my mental file folders.

I knew the experience had changed me, and I would never forget Paul's words: That we as humans can't begin to contemplate all that God can do.

It is precisely how I feel. While the Jungcks find this truth in Christianity, it fit just as well with my own sense of the divine and the only religion - Unitarianism - I've found that seems generous enough in its definitions to make me feel comfortable. Some may say it's the coward's way out, religion in the most general, vague sense. But for whatever reason - the twists and turns of my religious upbringing, my parent's sad marriage, my early traumas or simply my own logic - I can't wrap my arms around any one truth.

Regardless of all that, I temporarily forgot the Juncks. My life was going forward and they, I thought, were part of my past.

I was then, as I am now, a stranger in a new city. So the last thing I expected was to hear my name in the neighborhood Albertson's. I turned to see a man with startling blue eyes, a boy of about Robby's age at his side.

"It's Paul," he said.

I felt no click of recognition.

"Our son died, and you wrote about it," he said.

We hugged, struggled for words and settled on the politeness of strangers.

The family had moved to Colorado Springs to join the church that seemed to most closely match their beliefs, the very church that I came to associate with all that was wrong with Colorado Springs. A church whose leader, a close friend of President Bush's, believes gays are immoral and hellbound, that a woman's right to choose is not a choice at all, that marriage is worthy of preservation at all costs. It symbolized every reason, and in its extremism even more, I had turned away from traditional religion.

But a connection had been made months ago between this family and I. It pulled us together across our differences.

Paul's wife, Valerie and I, met a week or later at the neighborhood library. She suggested we go hiking. I agreed, sensing it would be a disaster.

It was, instead, the beginning of a friendship. Valerie believes God guides our every decision, and plays a part in all that happens to us. He took her son for a reason. I believe the opposite, that we are given all the tools we need to make our own way. That we are largely responsible for the twists and turns of our own lives. That sometimes, bad things just happen. Perhaps I am the sadder for believing I am the wiser.

But Valerie has a torrid past, a long spell of disbelief and rebellion, an affair with a married minister and sometimes still questions the God she believed in. She is kind, admittedly sometimes confused, human, accepting and loving. She is a woman, just like me.

Just before I moved, we took a long walk together. She talked about the kind of church she wanted, one she had yet to find: It welcome people of all varieties. Tattooed, rebellious and loud along with quiet, calm and conservative. She railed against a church from which they'd been encouraged to leave for singing too loud. Faith, she said, should be shouted to the rooftops if the spirit so moved you.

I thought that we were not so far apart. I didn't ask her how gays fit in to this church; I liked her vision and didn't want to risk blighting it. I liked knowing that we were, in many more ways than not, kindred spirits. I wanted to leave our friendship on the hopeful note we struck there, on top of a mountain overlooking Colorado Springs - the city I'd come to resent so for the hatred its most vocal residents seemed to me to perpetuate.

Valerie and I still e-mail. She told me that after years of fear and hesitancy, she and Paul had decided to adopt. They gave their hearts to a 2-year-old from an abusive home. Their hearts broke when the foster family adopted her instead. She's scared now, she told me, to open up again. In her last e-mail, I heard her determination and optimism ring through again. What she really wanted, she said, was a boy. It was time, she said, way past time in fact, to be pragmatic.

My response to her was, strangely, less pragmatic. I told her there is a child out there, waiting for her, and he's lucky beyond all compare. This, I know, is true.

I realize I need to finish the last post, but it's a weighty topic and for now, I want to flit away to something lighter.

Yesterday, I was offered another job. In short, a better, more lucrative job that allows me to continue the retail marketing post I already have. It's also an opportunity for me to more directly help others, working for a senior health care company that specializes in providing benefits to the low-income, disadvantaged population.

"This gets you more of that social services aspect you said you want in your life," Vickie, the program director, says.

The call comes out of the blue while I am making dinner for the African. My kitchen counters are pockmarked with dirty pots, pans and utensils. Onions, mushrooms and garlic sizzle softly on the back burner. Pasta simmers on another. I am blending with a hand mixer a combination of sweetened condensed milk and some powder that promises to yield cheesecake.

Bowling for Soup rumbles from the stereo. I sing along and drink white wine. The glass is sticky and blotched with traces of syrupy milk.

I turn to discover my dog has vomited on the virgin white carpet. Twice. She is eating it. I keep singing and pretend not to notice.

When the call comes, I am startled to hear that it is Vickie, for whom I have been working on a contract basis through an East Coast marketing company, and flabbergasted by her offer to contract with me directly. "You come up with some figures for me. I don't know what range you're thinking, but I know you're worth a lot. I don't know if I can afford you, but let's talk and see."

After a year-and-a-half of feeling useless at my job, and a lifetime of being underpaid, her words almost provoke laughter. Instead, I say, "Yes, I'll give that some thought. Let me get back to you."

I hang up and stand there, a cream cheese-covered spatula in one hand, a wine glass in the other, staring unseeing out the sliding glass door. Truthfully, I don't yet quite understand what has just happened.

A few minutes later, I open the door to Roger, who is smiling and more handsome than I remember. He kisses me, and with the sexiest accent that has ever hovered an inch above my ear says, "How are you? It's good to see you."

It is lately as though my life is a Disney movie. With a PG-plus rating.

I can't see them, but I think they're out there - a no-nonsense director and a cast whose members I mistake as regular folks in my life.

I hear him faintly in the background of these recent days.

"OK folks, start the fans for the cool breeze.

"Now, cue the guy. That's it, Roger, you're on.

"The phone - ring it now. Vickie, make the offer.

"And you, open the door for her at the grocery store and smile.

"Now, dim the lights. Bring up the stellar sunset."

And there am I, the unwitting protagonist, answering the phone, staring in awe at the sunset, kissing the leading man.

These flawless phases in life can't last, I know. Enjoy it while you can; the phrase becomes a mantra.

Roger's visit is the icing on it all. Last week, I volleyed back and called him. This time, I reached him live, and when he heard my name - I swear - his voice lit up. He asked to see me immediately and was disappointed to learn it would be a week before my schedule allowed it.

Finally, it is here.

We have a fabulous evening. We eat, we linger on the patio and drink wine, and sit alone in the hot tub. We talk, a lot, about his youth in South Africa, our jobs, our children and our families. I sense no secrets, no hints of a troubled past, not even of emotional trauma. Nothing but niceness laced with a surety that doesn't extend to arrogance. I search hopefully for flaws - something to which I can point as sound reason for a future rejection - and came up empty handed. It's the third date, damnit. Something sure as hell should have come out by now.

Instead, I see only more remarkable features. If the man was a car, I'd have fallen for the clean lines, the powerful build, and the fact that it looks as fine from the front as the back. I'd have driven him off the lot, deeply, happily in debt.

He gets out of the hot tub, and I note the perfect V that forms from his waist to his broad shoulders. I think my jaw has come unhinged; surely, his back is burning. He turns to offer his hand to me. Cue the towel dropped carelessly around his neck. Flash the rakish grin.

How did I get so lucky?

But then I feel the seeds of a potentially large problem plant themselves inside me. They are small for now, but they're already wrapping sturdy roots around my core, and I know from past history that they grow with feverish speed and have weedlike tenacity. It starts as a twist in my heart at something he says, the way he tilts his head, a turn of a phrase, the simple fact that he listens to me so attentively, that he hears me so well, that he smiles so often.

I am tipping.

Where is the weed killer for my all-too-fertile heart?

When he leaves, things between us are again left vague. I resolve to keep them that way. I decide to push back from what I want the most, to be cool and safe. (I hear you laughing. But pay attention; the director is shushing you.)

Perhaps I should look at it all through a different, wider lens. The truth, if I only see it as such, is this:

Vickie's right. I am worth a lot. It's those before her who under-valued me. It's the jobs I chose to take, the famously low-paying career I optimistically began 20 years ago, that led me to believe I was worth less than I am.

It seems Roger is an unexpected and precious find. But so, I know, am I. And I dare not be so dazzled by these initial impressions that I lose sight of that. In the end, I believe it's him who's really the lucky one.

That aside, the beer-drinking guy with the Weimaraner is out there somewhere, too. And the cool evening breeze has been cued up. Ally needs a walk. I grab her leash, forgo the beer and we step out into the summer evening. The next act is about to begin.

Friendship, Part I

We are all surrounded by fascinating people, people whose stories deserve to be told. I'd like to introduce you to one of who is part of my world. This is the story of an unusual friendship, forged from tragedy. A friendship that crossed boundaries I would have thought bridgeless.

When I was a reporter at the Summit newspaper, we got word of a very strange story. A 2-year-old had died suddenly in a Silverthorne house. His parents, both charismatic Christians, were praying for their dead son's resurrection. His corpse was in their living room, where friends and family had gathered to pray with them.

This is the kind of story that we cynical, gallows-humored journalists live for. A tragic story turned bizarre, and bizarre to the level of national interest. My heart both plunged and leapt, plunged for the horror of a child's death and leapt at the thought of how far this story could go. Silverthorne was among my beats, so it unquestionably was my story.

I called the police officer who was on duty that day and he refused to give me the family's name. They deserved their privacy, he said. I agreed, but told him I also had a job to do. I told him, too, I would file a Freedom of Information Act request if he refused, reminding him the deceased's name was public. Reluctantly, he gave me the name.

The newsroom jokes started almost immediately. I joined in. In fact, I lobbed some of the best of them.

Then I heard details that stilled my tongue.

It was a wintry Sunday morning. The boy's mom was fixing breakfast in the kitchen and took a break to play tag with her sons, 2 and 8. The three of them chased one another around the living room, laughing. Whether the 2-year-old grabbed the filing cabinet or it gave in to gravity's pull on its top-heavy drawers is unclear. But the filing cabinet fell on the happy toddler. He died instantly.

As his mother later told me, "One minute he was there. The next, he was gone."

Robby was 6 when this story broke. I tried to imagine what she saw, to understand how completely and permanently her life changed in that second, how surreal the scene must have been.

I had the family's phone number and was ready to conduct the interview. But as the one-liners continued to fly all around me, I grabbed my notebook, went upstairs to the conference room, and closed the door behind me.

My heart was in my mouth as I dialed. Interviewing a grieving family seemed in poor taste to me in any circumstance. Calling to interview a grieving family because their method of doing so seemed freakish felt like not just an intrusion, but a kick in the gut to these people and their beliefs in their worst, most vulnerable hour. I did not expect them to speak to me.

The father answered the phone and greeted me warmly when I identified myself. Before I could offer my condolences, he said, "Aren't you the reporter who wrote that series about depression?"

Paul was a therapist, he said. "Those stories were wonderful," he said, mentioning the county commissioner with chronic depression who had been central to the story. "People in those kinds of positions should talk more about depression instead of hiding it. It would help so many others. Thanks for writing it."

I felt the first threads of a bond forming across the telephone wires. Paul had taken me completely by surprise and warmed my heart with a few well-chosen words. This kindness while he grieved his child.

Paul talked about his son's death with a candor that surprised me. He admitted their approach might seem strange to others, particularly since the child had already been embalmed. But God has resurrected people from the dead before, even in modern times, he said, and it could happen again if He willed it so. He knew this beyond the shadow of a doubt.

"Nothing happens if we don't ask," he told me.

In either case, the family's faith was unshakable, Paul said.

"If we think in our little pea brains we can understand it all and it has to make sense, we'll never understand that God's ways are higher than ours," he said.

I felt his belief, and somehow, I understood it. While it was not my way of thinking, who was to say he was wrong? And who was to mock this family's form of grieving? I wondered what I would do in the wake of such a loss, how fiercely I might cling to the idea of a second chance, how desperately a parent's fingers might clutch the hands of hope.

Suddenly, he spoke again. "You're not quoting me on this, are you?"

I stammered, and felt my face flush. "Well, that's what I hoped to do," I said. "That is why I called."

Paul was silent.

"I don't know if we want that," he said. "Can I ask my wife how she feels and call you back?"

I agreed.

I walked back downstairs feeling changed. The incredible situation that had moments before seemed laughable had been turned on its head for me. I felt a deep respect and admiration for this family and the strength of their faith, a confidence so strong they shrugged off the knowledge that others would feel sorry or laugh at them as though it were a pesky fly. The task at their hands was far more important.

I tried to relate this to the rest of the staff and while I struggled for words to explain it, some sense of it must have come through because the jokes stopped. The tone of the conversation changed. We spoke of strange, unexplained, seemingly miraculous stories we had heard, about death and children and loss.

Later, two co-workers told me the story changed them in ways they found hard to explain. It touched us all, a rare occurrence among jaded reporters.

Paul called back within half an hour. "OK, we've agreed it's all on the record," he said. "We're leaving it in your hands."

In the past couple of days, it's crept up over me - this feeling of calm and softly, almost audibly humming happiness. Whatever funk has held me down for the last couple of years - the same low-grade depression that prompted me to start this blog - seems finally to be floating away.

I am self employed. I am not falling on my financial ass, or fearful that the bottom will someday crash out from under me and send me reeling. I am learning new things, am back on my road bike after years of leaving it in storage and ignoring the news that was part of my everyday life for so long.

In fact, I have not read a newspaper in more than a month and when I do a quick CNN check, see all that I've missed. There is increasing unrest in the Middle East, and gas prices are soaring. I check the date to be sure this is a current issue.

I still have no friends yet within this complex. My son is impatient for me. "Mom, you need to meet someone!" I can't explain to him that it's different for adults than kids. We can't just walk up and ask, "Wanna jump in the pool with me?" and race them to the edge. I also can't explain very easily that I'm starting to strike up the casual conversations that eventually lead to adult friendships. I am much more anxious for him to make friends.

Besides, two of the friends I treasure most are in the metropolitan area. More are just down I-25, and just up I-70. I'm in the center of the circle now, further from some but closer, overall, to them all. The rest will come in time.

A single mom, her teenaged daughter and son see me walking Ally down the sidewalk. "Hey!" the mother shouts. "Where's Robby?" Her 9-year-old son, whom we met at the pool a few days earlier, peers beyond me hopefully.

This makes me happy. Someone already wants to know his whereabouts. Someone knows his name and not mine.

Robby is with his father on this particular day, however, and can't accept their invitation.

"You tell him he's welcome at our place any time," she says, smiling brightly. I see a potential friend in her face.

As my spirit lifts, I notice something else happening to me. Thoughts that have turned inward for so long start to angle in a new direction. To places outside myself. Maybe unhappy hearts have to focus first on healing themselves before they can be much good to others.

I think about that CD I've been meaning for months to burn for my sister - one of those no-reason-at-all gifts I wanted to surprise her with. The liner notes say it has a guaranteed smile effect. I write it down on my to-do list. (And hope she does not read this before then).

I think about the friend I willfully lost late last year and for the first time, genuinely hope she's doing well.

And the friend who just learned the baby she and her husband had hoped to adopt has instead been adopted by the foster parents, this news coming four years after the death of her 2-year-old son. What on earth can I do for this kind woman whose mother's heart, so ready to embrace a child, has been broken yet again?

I think about some of the other gentle and battered souls who came to the bipolar support groups in Colorado Springs. It's time, I know, to get back into volunteering with DBSA.

I think that I have not felt so quietly happy in longer than I can remember.

Poor working conditions infiltrate every aspect of your life, I've read, no matter how much you believe you close the door on it all at the end of the day. I pshawed this, but now I know it's true. What's making me happy goes beyond that, but it starts with shrugging off that surprisingly heavy burden, and all else radiates from it.

The complex here pulses with life. I fall asleep, windows wide open, to the sound of air conditioning units on the building across from ours. I wake to the sounds of I-25 and small planes jetting out of Centennial Airport. I can tell what time it is by the volume from the traffic. To some, all these sounds would be troublesome. To me, it is soothing.

At midnight on Saturday, walking my dog with a beer in hand, I run into three other people walking their dogs - one of them also casually sipping his own beer. We greet one another like old friends. People are becoming familiar to me by their dogs - the big guy with the two Chihuahuas, the tall, good-looking man with the Weimeraner, the friendly lady with the peppy mixed breed, the father with the pair of black standard poodles, the half dozen folks with golden retrievers - harder to distinguish but becoming individuals as well.

At 9 p.m. on Sunday night, a dozen people are in the pool area, more than half of them 20-somethings having an impromptu hot-tub party. Another trio plays sand volleyball in the court just behind the pool. From my window, I can see a mother with a child on her lap, their two heads bent over a book. I see another woman putting away laundry. A man is sitting on his patio, legs outstretched and resting on the top rail of the short fence that surrounds it, eating a bowl of ice cream.

Life. Is. Everywhere.

And it is sweet.

Today, I rollerbladed for the first time, held hands with my new boss and fought off a pair of coyotes who aimed to have George for dinner.

My boss is a cheerful woman about my age who works and plays hard. She is happily married to her college sweetheart, who works downtown. Not only does she need help with her burgeoning home-based marketing business, I believe she is lonely. So, too - the new kid in town - am I. This promises to make for an interesting relationship.

For blog purposes, since I haven't asked permission to use her name, I will call her Jenny.

We had a concentrated, but good day of work and at the end - since I'd complained that I knew no one and had no plans - she suggested we go rollerblading. I told her this would be amusing for her, excruciatingly painful and humiliating for me. Particularly since I was wearing a mini skirt. But she insisted I try. She found a pair of blades for me and we loaded into her Jeep and drove to the trail head.

I sat on the grass, facing away from the street, to strap the shoes on. There was no way to do it without the skirt hiking up to obscene levels. By facing away, I felt I was saving the traveling public, perhaps preventing a horrid crash.

I surprised myself when I actually stood up, and did not immediately go crashing to the ground. I surprised myself further when I rolled down the trail. The speed began to build - from 1/32 miles per hour to 1/16. Terrified, I flung myself off the trail and onto the grass. I stumbled, but stayed upright.

All of this was normal, Jenny said. I was doing wonderfully.

We continued on at a snail's pace, she coaching me with remarkable patience, blading confidently backward so she could observe my progress. After hurling myself into the grass several more times, I made it down the hill that no biker would even have noticed was there. Then, we came to an equally tiny uphill. My boss rolled up it slowly, gracefully. I simply stopped. Like the wheels of a car stuck in snow, my feet shuffled back and forth. But I went nowhere.

She turned around. "What is that you're doing?"

"This is for your amusement," I said. "I could go if I wanted to."

Jenny held out her hand. "I'm not gay, take it," she said. And she pulled me up the little upgrade onto more level ground. She instructed me to push out, one by one, with my feet. This produced forward motion, which was actually pretty cool. We rolled hand in hand for no more than a minute, underneath massive trees, past a flood-swollen stream, me in my mini-skirt, she in practical, smart khaki pants. I wished for a camera.

The whole experience went far better than I'd expected.

"What else haven't you done?" she asked when we returned safely to the car. "You ever golfed?"

"Mini," I said. "That's it."

"That's no good," she said. "Next Friday, if you don't have anywhere you have to go, I'm taking you out on the golf course."

Next Friday, I predict, someone will get clocked in the head with a golf club. I only hope I do it to myself.

By the time I got home, the sun was progressing speedily west. I decided it was time to put George to the test. I packed him under my arm, tucked Ally's leash into my free hand and led us all to the wide, open, rolling field behind our complex.

There, I set him down, leash-less and harness-free. My fear had never been so much that he'd run away, as that he would freak out in our strange, new setting, perhaps bolt out of sight and get lost. Even more so, that in an area so much more dog- and people-concentrated, someone - human or dog - would stake their claim on him.

I held my breath as he looked around his new environs, cautiously looking back over one shoulder toward the Jack Russll terrier and his master disappearing behind us in the distance, then over to the weeds blowing in the wind on all other sides. He dropped to the dusty path and rolled in the dirt. His eyes had a wild glint in them.

Satisfied, he did what he's always done - trotted along after me and Ally like a little dog. George hadn't been free in 10 days. The joy was obvious in his every move. He sometimes raced ahead of us in excitement, then dropped again to give himself a dirt bath, careened off into the field, then veered back onto the trail with us. I got caught up in his feline joy and sprinted along with him for a few yards. He seemed to know it was a playful race and added a burst of speed to jet past me.

And then, I saw them - two gray shadows zipping silently toward us in the dusk. It was a pair of coyotes.

I grabbed George so fast I scared him.

Ally ran toward the coyotes, and they circled around her. They appeared to be playing, darting in and out on all sides of her. She growled, yipped and whirled in an attempt to keep them both in her sights.

I did not fear for her life - she outweighed the two of them together - but I did fear for her heels.

Coyotes, I've been told, seek to render large prey helpless by tearing the Achilles heel. This seemed clearly their approach to Ally. I watched as one pranced in front of her, keeping her eyes forward, while the other dove in behind her tail and nipped its teeth at her back legs, narrowly missing its mark. I could almost admire their technique if it hadn't been my dog they were plotting against.

We had seen coyotes many times before when we hiked in a forested park near our Colorado Springs home. But there, they had only occasionally shadowed us from the bushes and never had emerged into the open, much less given chase. This was open prairie, without a tree in sight, and apparently, the rules were different here.

My dog is about 75 pounds of black, silky hair and muscle. She is loyal. Other dogs excepting, she is gentle. She is beautiful. But I've never been sure that she's overly smart.

Perhaps her reaction was the same as any other dog's would have been. She charged the coyotes over and over. When she ignored them, they hung back, seemingly bored. But Ally couldn't resist and back she'd return to them for another feral dance.

I could do nothing to stop their freakish game with Ally, for George had seen them, too. His little body tensed. His claws emerged from their pads. He moaned and twisted, trying to escape my clutches so he could flee the coyotes.

This wasn't an option. Smart as he was, I knew he wouldn't get far. In my mind, I had a sudden vision of George running across the field and a coyote floating ghostlike up behind him, then plucking him up from the ground into its mouth.

I held onto him fiercely, even as his claws dug into me with equal fierceness. He didn't scratch. He sought purchase, his claws making tiny punctures in my arms. He tried to climb up the side of my neck, my shoulder, my arms, anywhere.

I yelled at the coyotes, adding to the confusion. I lunged forward toward them. This made them retreat, but only for a few seconds, and whenever I stepped closer to them, George writhed maniacally. I couldn't bend to pick up rocks to throw at the coyotes; my arms were too full of orange tabby.

The pair of them continued circling us for at least five minutes - an eternity when you're clutching an animal rigid with terror and watching helplessly as your other pet grows weary and confused by the games only wild animals know.

We crossed up high on the ridge, next to the golf course where three men on riding mowers worked. This did the trick. The coyotes faded back.

George wiggled again to get down, but still I refused.

Ten minutes later, when we were safely back on the complex grounds, I placed him gently on the sod. He shook himself off, looked over both his shoulders, then resumed his business-like trot a few yards behind us.

We are home safe now. I can hear someone's stereo thumping from another apartment somewhere on this floor. I note that the parking lot is less than half full. It's a hot July Friday night - people are out celebrating.

And while I'm as anxious as ever to make friends and be out on the town with them, I've had my own Friday night walk on the wild side. For now, that will have to be enough.

P.S.

The cart escalator is just OK.

Yes, I went back Saturday evening. Robby spent a double overnight at his cousin's house. The apartment came together amazingly well - and quickly.

Then I got suddenly, achingly lonely, realizing I'd spent 36 hours completely alone. Two solid days of rain didn't help.

In this fit of social isolation, I called the African. After three weeks, I'd firmly decided he was a waste of time - no matter how fine a waste. But making contact seemed a good idea on a dreary, lonely day. So I prepared a witty line. I would wish him a happy belated Canada Day, since he's from there and all. I prepared to leave it on his voice mail - a saucy, hey-how's-it-goin', devil-may-care kind of a thing. No invitation to call, just something to make him smile - and then, of course, call.

I rehearsed it in my head, not just the words but the flippant tone.

Not only did he not answer, it didn't even go to voicemail. Instead, the worst thing possible happened. The message alerted me that his mail box was full and unable to take new messages. I cursed this, realizing my caller ID would show up with no reason for the call. That could appear desperate, or something. Damn.

So ... I went back to that super Target. Yes, I needed dog food, cat food, etc., but I went in part because I just wanted to get out. How sad is that?

I even wore a nice shirt and casual heels, thinking I might stop in at this little sports pub next door. But I chickened out; I've
never been good at the single female out-alone thing. I think the bartender secretly snickers when you look around and say, "Well, where could she be? Something must have happened! You might as well give me another; I just know she'll be here soon."

I contented myself instead with a two-minute exchange with the Target checker, a nice lady who seemed to think I was amusing. Even though I checked out near the elevator (and close to my car), I pushed my cart to the opposite end of the store so I could use that cart escalator. Very cool, but still in all, not the stuff of which smashing Saturday nights are made.

I am anxious to make friends. I'm surrounded by 700 units of people, and I know no one - the bank clerk doesn't count. I know it takes time but patience has never been my strongest suit.

Robby came back today and it was like a mini party. We ate ice cream and watched movies. We took a walk in the relentless rain. Ally chased rabbits and Robby skateboarded. We decorated his bathroom. We went - again - to the super Target, bought shower curtain rings and put the tiny package in a cart so we could launch it down the escalator. Robby was ecstatic.

I was horrified - a couple of the checkers smiled at me in recognition.

For those several hours, I forgot I had no friends here yet. After all, my best little buddy was already with me.

It is raining and I am unpacking.

Ally is laying next to me. This is not pleasant because she has had a small skunk encounter. Shampoo and tomato paste - the best I could come up with - has not worked and I'm hoping it will just fade away. Meanwhile, well, she's even funkier than usual.

Robby is about 10 minutes away at his first cousin's (my ex's brother's ex-wife -- follow that?!) house. He spent the night there last eve, reacquainting himself with the 12-year-old boy he's seen all too rarely over the years. I love this connection for him, as well as the re-connection he's making with my ex's mother and brother - both 15 minutes away. We have spotted several 10-year-old-ish boys wandering our apartment complex. Robby is still mustering up the courage to speak to them. I love this potential connection, too.

I explore the complex with Ally by my side - a little farther from my side than normal - and without turning my head to actually look and acknowledge, I notice lots of small pick-ups with single male drivers passing by. There are no women in the passenger seats and the music typically is blaring. These most certainly must be bachelors. I love this potential connection as well.

I have felt frustrated and discontent - with my closet a post-move receptacle for everything that goes nowhere else and artwork leaning against every wall - until today. Today, I clear the cluttered pathway into the walk-in closet - my first! - hang clothes, organize my shoes and find a hidden spot for the litter box. Somehow, that clears my brain for the real work of making our pretty little apartment home.

Suddenly, I look around and it all falls into place. I can't move quickly enough to pound nails and hang art.

And as each piece finds its new resting place, my discontent fades further. Slowly, color begins to splash every room. Venice, Klimt, the dancing martinis and the cartoony black cat in a field of pink-and-yellow flowers slide home on the walls, making our new space familiar and warm.

I take a break to find the closest liquor and grocery stores, and stumble upon a PetCo where I spend an embarrassing sum of money on a cat harness and leash for George. Both are laughably thin. Both also are bright blue with reflective, silver/white tiny paw prints traveling their lengths.

My car turns toward home, and then I see it in my rear-view mirror - the familiar red target on the side of a building. I take a U-turn at the next intersection and head back. The Target sits up on a hill, glowing down so that sharp-eyed interstate travelers and mall shoppers can see it. It is monstrous. Not just a Super Target but a mega Super Target. It has its own parking garage, with an underground level. Inside, I see escalators leading down to the subterranean parking area. One of the escalators is bizarrely wide. A sign reads, "Carts only." I stare, feeling like a country bumpkin in a brand new world.

The checker tells me this is the largest Target ever built. The biggest Target ever - a mile from my home! I feel like I've just gotten a peek at heaven.

This area of south Denver is recently developed, and everything is so new it practically sparkles. Even the bank is unlike anything I've seen before. Bank clerks don't stand behind a long, formal counter, but at thin counters with only a pedestal support below. It has a futuristic feel. I half expect to see clerks dressed like Jane Jetson.

The clerk who waits on me is young, blonde and cute. I ask for a cashier's check to be made out to the apartment complex.

"That's where I live!" she says. She tells me she loves it there, and answers my rapid-fire questions enthusiastically. We are so deep in conversation that she makes a $3 error on the check, and I have to return later for a replacement.

Robby stands in the lobby, waiting. We walk out together and he looks up at me - not nearly the distance it so recently was. "You know what I was thinking when you were in there? I was thinking you guys are gonna be friends."

"Yes, but Robby, she's so much younger than me," I said.

"So?" he says, with a wisdom that momentarily surpasses mine.

Robby and I are adjusting well. Even George is coming along, but at a snail's pace. We tried to walk him with his new get-up last night. It was a painful process. He tried to squeeze his shoulders through it, laid down, stood up, all the while lashing his tail. Sometimes he started trotting down the sidewalk with us, a model of proper behavior. Then he stopped dead in his tracks and started the whole rebellion over again. This will take time.

Life for us all feels so much different than it did a week ago. To me, the newspaper seems a world away and when I think of it - which is surprisingly rare - it feels like a bad dream. For now, the world is bright with possibility.

As we drove away from Colorado Springs Wednesday, the moving van in our rear-view mirror, Boston's "Long Time" came on the radio.

"This could be our farewell song, Robby," I say. He ignores me, but I hope he is listening to the lyrics.

(And since black-and-white printed lyrics don't resonate like the song, I hope you will call up the tune and put music to them. Close your eyes and maybe you can be right there with me and Robby, but in the back, which unfortunately puts you next to the funky dog.)

It's been such a long time
I think I should be goin', yeah
And time doesn't wait for me, it keeps on rollin'
Sail on, on a distant highway
I've got to keep on chasin' a dream
I've gotta be on my way
Wish there was something I could say.

Well I'm takin' my time, I'm just movin' on
You'll forget about me after I've been gone
And I take what I find, I don't want no more
It's just outside of your front door.

I try to sing along, but emotion chokes my throat closed.

I see Pikes Peak disappearing over my left shoulder. But I bring my eyes back to the road, which is taking us swiftly north.

It is taking us home.

Packing up a home is not a job. It's a process.

It's raining and I'm packing, eating Cheetos and drinking apple juice. My progress is slow because I'm reminiscing, weeding through a box of old letters and newspaper articles from my long career in journalism. I've parted with many an old item. I've saved more than I should.

Here's a sample of what I've found so far:

• A Hawaiian angel pin with a gorgeous pink-and-blue flower pattern across its little robed body. I can't remember who went to Hawaii and brought this back for me. It's perfectly useless. I don't wear pins and it will continue to sit in a drawer where no one sees it. But the colorful pattern makes me feel happy and somehow hopeful. Saved.

• At least a dozen sealed condoms in every color of the rainbow, including a black-labeled, apparently extraordinary Kama Sutra condom, plus a four-pack that promises a quartet of fruity flavors. Do these things go bad? Even after five years? I think not. Saved.

• A ticket to a Colorado Rockies April 19, 2001 baseball game, with the name "Iain" scrawled in my hand across the bottom. A card that accompanied a dozen roses sent by Iain from Seattle in on Valentine's Day 2001. "I love you, and miss you. Can't wait to see you again!" My throat aches. Both saved. (I know, I know, but not just yet.)

• A Denver Post front page with my bylined story above the fold. Saved.

• An old checkbook with an entry for Gail Meinster, the court advocate in our custody battle who wasn't supposed to take sides but who became my friend anyway. Tossed.

• A Hallmark envelope thick with a letter bearing the return address of "Alisa Nelson," a once-dear friend who broke our friendship with a slap to my face in a Galveston, Texas park. The story is long, and years later, I'm not so sure I was right in what I said to provoke that slap. Far too late for second thoughts. Tossed, not re-read.

• A container of peppermint-flavored "Dick Tarts", a present for my 40th birthday. Tossed. (Sorry, April)

• A copy of a wedding certificate, sealing my marriage to Zach on ... July 9? How could that be? For years, I've thought it was July 24. I wonder just what July 24 really is. I forget to check the year but am quite sure it was 1993. But it's entirely likely I'm wrong on that, too. Tossed.

• A newspaper clipping of a Christmas Summit Daily News staff photo taken almost 10 years ago. I'm holding a baby Robby. Even though most of us were in our early 30s, everyone looks ridiculously young to me, all with open, optimistic, watch-out-world smiles and nary a gray hair. Saved.

• Two letters sent around 1990 from my friend Lane to my then-new home in Dillon, She was on the hunt for a new job and had just met Bill, now her husband of several years. She refers repeatedly to Z-Man, my ex, and the Nookster, the Alaskan Malamute we later, tearfully, put to sleep in the wake of two vicious attacks on other dogs. We are still good friends, but oh, do I see in her flowing cursive how our lives have changed. Saved.

• A copy of the entertainment section I created for Summit Newspapers, with a cover story called "The Best Part of a Man." A massive, smooth male chest is spread across the cover. The layout inside includes photos of another man's chest (this one hairy), shoulders and eyes, It's a story in which I surveyed women about their favorite things about men - including characteristics like sensitivity. I cannot believe the paper allowed this. I cannot believe I wrote it. The winner, by the way: chest. Saved.

• A mini travel blow dryer with extra, European outlet connections from a 2000 trip to Italy. Connections, tossed (it's not that I won't go back; I just haven't blown dry my hair in years). Blow dryer - damn cute - saved. (I didn't say these decisions would be logical, did I?)

• A decade-old interview and photo of me in the Summit papers' company newsletter on my coverage of a murder trial, a rare happening in mountain resort communities. My final quote was this: "I'm in journalism for life. I know I'll never be rich, but this is my passion."

Tossed.

It appears I need to take a lesson in speech and dialect. Or perhaps geography. Or maybe just a course on exotic men.

A month ago, I met a very good-looking male type, with a ridiculously sexy accent. Even though he told me clearly where he was from, I fixed him in my mind as a native of another continent entirely. Honestly, I plopped him mentally down in the one that sounds the sexiest to me - Australia.

But first, let's go back to the point at which we met. As you may recall from the way-back bipolar posting, I can be just the tiniest bit impulsive. Particularly when I'm happy.

Is it my bipolarism, or is it me? I suspect it's a combination of the two. Regardless, I like this aspect of myself. Except when it gets me into trouble. Which is most of the time.

Anyway, on Memorial Day Weekend, I was happy. That Friday, I had been offered my new job and signed a lease on a new apartment. Saturday, I blazed up to my former mountain home and a barbecue hosted by a longtime friend. We ate, drank and talked until the sunset, and then adjourned to a nearby bar.

By that time, I felt downright celebratory. In other words, very buzzed. So when a good-looking man sat down beside me, I did what any woman would do. Or, at least, what this woman would do. I made a smart-ass comment to him. I wish I could tell you what it was, but I know only that it must have been something divinely entertaining because he smiled and cocked his head at me in interest.

I liked the way he tilted his head. It made me think about kissing him.

The bar was loud and after a few failed attempts to hear one another, he summoned me outside. I happily followed, a gamboling puppy with its tongue hanging out.

We sat on the broad, wooden front steps on this old country bar, and considered one another further. Somewhere in there, he mentioned that he was foreign.

"I'm not hearing it," I said. "Keep talking."

He cocked his head at me again, then laughed and shook it. "Well, what would you like me to say? Let's see ...," he continued.

He could have stopped at the word "say," because I heard it loud and clear on "what." But I let him go on. And on. Because the accent was music, and I was spellbound.

I was, however, not entirely happy about this. I do not like a man to immediately get such a grip on me. Besides which, a guy with a weapon so powerful surely had used it on many hapless women before me. I refused to be just another of his many victims.

At length, he stopped and looked at me again. "Believe me now?" he asked.

"Yes," I said. "Damn you."

"Damn me?"

"You and that accent," I said, feigning annoyance.

"And why's that?" he asked, leaning in close to me.

I stared back at him silently, trying to hold back what would have been a huge smile. Instead of telling him what he already knew, it suddenly seemed - in my buzzed condition - a far better idea to take action.

"I'd just like to know," I said, "how it would be."

And I kissed him. I hadn't kissed a man in 14 months. I hadn't kissed a good-looking man in more than two years. I had never kissed an Australian. And as I later discovered, I never did.

"Well," he said afterward. "How was it?" He was smiling, his teeth gleaming white in the dim lighting.

I shrugged. No way in hell did I want him to know it was just as delightful as everything else about him. "It was OK."

He laughed loudly. "You are unbelievable!" He studied me, and I believe he saw clearly through my thin shell.

"I think we just might have something here," he said, the "here" coming out with a charming, soft "ya" sound on the end. The accent - definitely Australian. I knew it. "Do you?"

I nodded, keeping my tone nonchalant. "I think we might."

"But let's just see," he said. "It's my turn."

And this kiss was, I would say, slightly better than OK.

He asked for my phone number. But I thought that's all he would be - a handsome stranger brushing by me on a drunken night.

But the next morning, before my car reached the Front Range flatlands, he called, asking when he could see me again. With the new job, vacation and moving, I told him I'd be hard to catch for the next month. Nevertheless, he convinced me to carve out a weeknight for him two weeks later.

Roger invited me to dinner at his house. Two nights before, he called to give me his apartment number, "A".

"A for Australia," I chirped.

There was a beat of hesitation on the other end of the line. "Yeah," he said.

I arrived sober and, consequently, nervous. I also showed up dressed for summer, forgetting the mountain weather is no slave to any calendar. Just for fun, it sometimes drops down a snowstorm on the 4th of July, which makes viewing fireworks a most unusual challenge. A bit of frost in early June? How quickly I had forgotten that this was more likely than not.

After Roger teased me good and well about my outfit, he fixed me with another look that said he wasn't done.

"Just where do you think it is that I'm from?"

I began to feel embarrassment rushing forward. "Um, obviously not where you're really from?"

"South Africa, not Australia," he said, grinning and watching for my reaction. "Don't you remember?"

In fact, I did not. Not even foggily. I blushed furiously, wondering if I should tell him I'd already nicknamed him "The Aussie" to one of my friends.

"The African" just didn't have the same ring. Wouldn't everyone envision a black, tribal sort with a bone through his nose? Perhaps wearing a loin cloth? (Which, really, didn't seem like a bad idea at all.) But the rest? Frankly, the whole Africa thing just didn't fit his image.

Besides which, the only thing I think of when I hear South Africa is "apartheid." Not exactly endearing. Say "Australia," however, and bouncing through my head go kangaroos and condensation-beaded cans of Fosters.

I would try just to forget this unpleasant "Africa" revelation. He was Joeys and beer, not racism and bloodshed. That was all there was to it.

Despite this shock, we had a very nice evening. Not only could he flirt and kiss and look fabulous in jeans and a T-shirt, he also could cook. Damn him again.

Nevertheless, I don't know if I'll see the African again. He reminds me almost painfully of my last boyfriend, and seems, like him, content with a lifestyle that involves little responsibility. In all that he told me about his history, I could not find evidence of a single serious relationship.

Perhaps I'm on the defensive, for surely, people don't reveal all on a second meeting. Regardless, things between us were left vague, more so on my part than his. The ball's in my court, and I don't know what I want to do with it.

I had lunch with a friend last week and told her about the African and my continental confusion. She was intrigued by my description of him.

"Something about guys with those kinds of accents," she said. "Isn't it funny how they're all good looking?

"I mean, if guys from Alabama all looked like that, would we start to think a Southern accent is attractive? And if he had a Southern drawl, would you have found him attractive at all?"

I think she has a valid point. Fair or not, a Southern twang would have taken a severe toll on the African's aesthetic appeal.

Between the accent and the face, Roger was born to charm; perhaps that explains the apparent lack of serious relationships.

Even if we don't go out again, I might just call him. But I'll do it during the day, when I know he's at work. That way, I can listen to the sweet, seductive music of his voice message - again and again. Or as Roger would say, "a-gain and a-gain."

Damn him.

Last night, I awoke to the sound of three pairs of paws in my bedroom. I fumbled for the light and saw George and Ally in pursuit of a blur of brown fur. It was a baby bunny, who proceeded to wedge himself between the wall and a leg of my night stand and flatten his small self as much as possible. He could not, however, still his sides, which heaved from his panicked flight. George stood over him, purring happily.

(OK, OK, so I didn't actually hear the bunny's paws, but it sounds better, now doesn't it?)

He had caught the little fellow and brought it, no doubt with great pride, through the window I've been leaving cracked open for him these summer nights. I'm guessing he dumped it in the bedroom so I could see and appreciate the prize he'd brought to me.

The bunny, aside from having a wet neck, was fine. I threw on my robe, and ran outside, across the parking lot and through the wet grass to a bush under which I placed the baby. When I returned, George was walking from room to room in confusion.

George is a hunter, and as a former farm girl who's often witnessed the circle of life, I'm fine with that. Most summer mornings, I open the back door to find a bunny leg, a few tufts of fur and, if I'm really lucky, intestines. Usually, it's a young rabbit. Sometimes, it's a full-sized rabbit. Occasionally, it's a bird, and my neighbor said she once saw him trotting proudly homeward with a snake dangling from his mouth.

None of these are endangered species. In fact, we're over run with rabbits here. The live ones are another story, however. I have heard their piteous and painful death squeals, and it is a truly heart-wrenching sound. If I catch sight of George before the kill, I happily free them.

Hunting and hanging outside is what makes George's summers glorious. Even in winter, he valiantly braves the elements, but not for long. After half an hour or so, he's at the back door. We spy him looking in at us through the glass, mouth opening and closing in a soundless plea to rejoin us. An hour or so later, he asks if he can give it another try. And so it goes until spring warms the world again.

I'm worried about George, and how he'll take our move. I'm more worried about George than Robby.

You see, we're moving into a third-floor apartment in a 700-unit complex. George has been an indoor/outdoor cat his entire life, first roaming the half-acre lot on which we lived in the mountains, and then here. During our three years in this townhouse complex, he has made friends with all the neighbors. I hear them occasionally, through my open window. "Hi Georgie!" Dianne will say. "How's the hunting been?" A couple weeks ago, I saw Jeff open his screen door at the sight of George standing on his patio. "Hey George, you wanna come in?" George declined.

He also suffers from an identity crisis of which he is unaware. George was raised with our dog and isn't sure what he really is. You may recall from a previous posting that he goes with the dog and I on nightly walks, sometimes very long ones, in rain, sun, dark of night, and snow.

For all George knows, he's mailman. Perhaps a dog. It's even possible he's a cat. I prefer to think catdog. But I think it's this confusion that makes him such an adventurous spirit; the dog goes for a walk, I'll go, too. She chases the ball? Here I come! Regardless of the activity, he refuses to be left behind.

Although our covenants here prohibit pets from roaming alone, George is such a happy spirit no one minds his frequent, independent forays. He lifts his tail flagpole straight at the sight of a human, and offers his head for a stroke, purring at high volume all the while. He is, for all intents and purposes, the townhomes' mascot.

But I don't see how his idyllic lifestyle can continue. And this makes me sad and concerned for him.

In such a large complex, I think he'll be just another cat, not the special little fellow he is here. Someone may very well grab him by his jaunty tail and try to keep him as their own. Aside from that, our new apartment does not have an outside entrance, but access through a hallway. Even if he got to know the area and the location of our unit, how could he get back in? I doubt I would hear his "I'm home! Let me in now!" cries.

Yet I can't imagine making George an indoor cat entirely. It's not just that he'll scratch my furniture to bits, or meow incessantly to be freed. He'll be sad, frustrated and confused. He'll tilt his orange head up, meeting my eyes, and give me that trusting, please-let-me-out look he has perfected so well over the years. And I will shake my head 'no' and turn away.

I want to let him sunbathe on the patio, and in fact make that his primary room. Yet I'm worried he'll see the ground below, and jump from the third floor to earth. He just might survive, but that's not a chance I want to take.

I wonder if George will be content simply with going for walks with Ally, Robby and me, or if, frustrated by his regular confinement and a deep instinctual urge to hunt, he'll bolt and wander back toward our building when he's darn good and ready. Maybe, I'll have to restrain his wild spirit with a leash.

You may say I've created my own monster, that he should never have been an outdoor cat in the first place. But if you saw him leap with manic energy high up into a tree, roll over and over in a patch of dust, or daintily sniff the flowers on a blooming bush, you'd understand why I allowed him such a lifestyle. And to revert again to my childhood, our farm cats knew no other way; it seems only natural to me that a cat spend most of its life outdoors.

That's ideal. This change is a reality I didn't foresee.

A friend who well knows my concerns offered to take George. This is a friend who has only taken a shine to two cats in her life: George and her sister's cat, Moe. I know she would care for him very well, but I drew in my breath in a shocked gasp when she offered. The thought of losing my Georgie, even to a dear friend, was horrifying to me. Aside from that, I don't believe he'd stay. I think he'd come back here, where we will no longer be, searching for his dog and his humans.

Robby will make new friends. Ally will be fine; it's me who will have to adjust to actually walking her down three flights of stairs outside every morning and night.

But just what will become of our Georgie?