I sure liked your post.  It helped us Cyclebazers to get to know you a little better.  Like you, I remember being poor.  Unlike you, I've never lived in a place with no plumbing, nor owned a six bedroom house, but I feel privileged to own the little split-level house The Feeshko and I have lived in for the last 32 years.  I'd like to paint it orange or some other exciting color, but I don't think The Feeshko would go for it.  Someday I hope to be hosted in Casa de Mango with you and Boof and the others.

No offense to you and Mark Bingham, but I think "I" am the luckiest person on earth.

You and The Feeshko are welcome at Casa de Mango anytime. 

And you know what? I've never had money but I've never ever been poor. My mom sewed all of our clothes and we looked great, my parents worked their asses off and we were fed and warm and safe and loved. The year in the no-running-water-outside-privy house was a caretaker's position in the lower Yaak, in a gorgeous little cabin overlooking Pine Creek with elk, moose, deer, owls. It had a wood cookstove, a hand pump well across the creek, hippie neighbors stopping in. I was 20 years old and it was one of the best years of my life! 

"We in Life Lucky", as the infamous bedspread in one of our funky Lao guesthouses had printed all over it. No kidding.

in one of my earlier lives I doubled as Mr Miyage for the neighbor Dojo I established, AKA the Round the Block Club.  This recently rediscovered image is from about 1959-60, soon after our family returned from West Virginia where I spent most of my childhood in its Capitol Charleston, living down the street from dad’s mother, Grandma Anderson.

We moved east when I was 3, and my first certain memory is of arriving in Charleston on the train.  We moved back to dad’s home to be close to Grandma Anderson, his only surviving parent since childhood.  This 17 year-old mamma’s boy enlisted the navy when he turned 17, and when he turned 20 he married his first and only love, his 20-year old Arthur Murray dance teacher, a divorcee with two kids. They had been married 76 years and still ballroom dancing not long before she passed away at the age of 98.

It took Gramma Anderson some adjusting to her son marrying a divorcee with two kids back in Appalachia 75 years ago.

Dad loved the outdoors.  I thought he knew every tree and bird in the eastern hardwood forests and hepassed his childhood love on to me.  He framed some of Audubon’s prints on my gabled pinewood upstairs bedroom, which Elizabeth and I shared, sleeping on pullout beds that slid back into the wall during the day.  I loved to slide back in under the eaves with the floor covered with ceiling insulation and stare at the dark, in a space larger than the  5x10 storage unit that holds most of Rocky and my remaining possessions.

My most cherished remaining possession from my childhood? 

That’s enough about that life.  You probably don’t need to know about the Luna moth on the screen door or the blue -lined skink from a cemetery in the northern panhandle or the garter snake ollection or the ant farms or the cicada ranch I kept by stuffing empty husks into the crevices of the angled. Corner of our small brick house, or ….

My next two most favorite current possessions?  The recently returned Roddy & the Raven, loved in that order:

One of my favorite photos taken as an adult?

Oh, and the bike?  It’s taken awhile to realize that’s my first bike: a 1957 Schwinn with  an internal Sturmey-Archer hub that I could disassemble, repair and rebuild.  I can’t recall now, but I probably bought it with my early morning paper route income and money I made selling fresh picked pints and quarts of blackberries I sold door to door to the neightbors.

The bike I probably rode on my first overnight, a 200 mile wild-camp ride from Seattle to NE Washington when I was 14.

I'm still amazed at your story of riding to Dry Lakes State Park at the age of 14, or 15 or whatever it was.  When I rode to Dry Lakes on one of my tours, I only pedaled about 40 miles to get there, but I got a cool picture of a praying mantis crawling out of my helmet. 

I wish I had Audobon's classic book.  My most treasured book is "Ulysses."  I don't know if it's a FIRST edition, but it's a pretty old edition.  I've had it for about forty years, and try as I may, I've never been able to read it straight through.  I love the words, but it's hard to follow the whole story.  Also, it's a little smaller than my foot.

I had that book too!  Same cover, same non-first edition, same impenetrability.  I did better with Dubliners.

And a praying mantis a,  why is he poking thr duck in the eye though?