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There’s a Yoga retreat at lovely Sugar Beach Hotel on Playa Pan de Azucar, Potrero, Costa Rica. There’s large circular pavilion, probably 50 feet across, where the 15 or so yogettes? position and absorb twice a day while listening to the crashing of waves.

At other times they go on hikes, tours, maybe even zip lining. In the evenings, they sit at a long table in the dining area and, after a short verbal prayer, share a meal.

Yesterday, while they were gone during the day, Susan jumped rope for an hour in the pavilion, then worked out for another. That’s her meditation. I imagined her energy waves lingering in the space, surprising and enervating the quiet contemplation of students when they returned for their evening session.

I’d come up early to the cafe to work on my computer in the morning. Two of the Yogettes were already at the table where WiFi is best. A waiter turned on the local music that fills the cafe.

“At least I brought my headphones,” said one, a thin man maybe in his 50’s, about average for the group.

After one minute, the other, a small dark-haired woman with a prominent profile replied “I’m going to the lobby. I can’t stand this music.”

“Me too,” said the first, and they gathered up their things and left, which let me go over to my favorite chair to work and tap my feet to rhythms I enjoy.

I was at the computer trying to find a something important we’d left behind, it doesn’t matter what. Once again, the generous and efficient personnel of this hotel stepped up.

Sven, Operations Manager,  said a few things to Melissa, a new employee working at his side. She was instantly on the computer, located the item, and started making calls. In a half hour, they found what I needed in Liberia, clarified the ability for it to be picked up, gave me a map.

I am Driver. I was ready for some alone time and took off in the little Daihatsu Bego. All 1,000 ccs of raw power, grabby brakes, bad balance and a tendency to put its nose down and swap ends when it hits rough pavement, kind of like it doesn’t want to see what’s coming next. But I had the windows down and the warm wind rushing through and I was on a mission.

One lane bridges have to be timed just right to get over without waiting for oncoming traffic. Horses on the side of the road are usually staked down, goats and sheep are not. Bicyclists may have one or two kids standing on the frame while the largest kid pedals. And huge trucks and buses don’t necessarily stay in their lane when coming at you, or when you’re passing, because they don’t have to.

On the other hand, while police standing in the road will stop you to see a license or passport, I didn’t see any radar guns. I made it to Liberia in an hour when I was told it would take longer. I don’t tell anyone here why that was possible.

Back at the hotel, after a more leisurely trip that included a gas and grocery store stop (we never covered how to say “Thank you card” in third grade Spanish), I got back to the hotel. I thanked the staff again for doing what I could not do on the phone.

“Thank you so much for doing this,” said Susan.

“You would have done the same for me,” I replied.

“I would have done it for anyone at this hotel, but could not ask for myself,” she said.

“That’s why I didn’t give you a choice,” I said. “Besides, I got to go for a drive. It was really all about me.” Praise makes me uncomfortable. She and I are so much alike.

This morning I went to the lobby to ask Sven, the Operations Manager, what time we needed to check out.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Check out is noon, but you may stay until one, one thirty. Whatever you need.”

We talked for a minute about his work as an operations manager for a farm in the highlands of Costa Rica where ferns for export were planted in the shade under a reforestation project, how he’d been in charge of building a 30 hectare (75 acres) botanical garden, his opinion of various free trade coffee efforts.

We were interrupted by the same small, dark haired Yogette from the U.S. who didn’t like the music the morning before.

“Seven a.m.”  she said. “Driver?”

“Yes?” asked Sven, confused.

“He’s not here.”

Sven looked at the clock on his computer.

“It’s not seven yet…?”

“Maybe you could give him a call, just to be sure…?” It was said as a question but was clearly a command.

“I can do that, certainly,” said Sven, and he reached for the phone. I let him get back to work.

It’s time to leave Sugar Beach. Susan will cry a little; she becomes attached to good people easily, and those here have done so very much for us. But it’s time to move on. We have one more stop we’ll make someplace else in exquisite Costa Rica with its calm, sophisticated, and generous people. Pura Vida.

I love the GPS on my phone, my Link, except when it’s wrong.

It has taken me to a road called “Monkey Trail” for the last 15 kilometers of the trip. The books warn against taking Monkey Trail. One kilometer in, the trail fords a creek of depth I can’t judge. I back up and turn around.

A petulant navigator, GPS nags and sulks when I say that it was wrong, and keeps trying to send me down unmarked roads. I finally mute the volume. I begin to use a paper map for guidance.

GPS stares at me. “I thought you said you’d ended communication with her,” it says, and because I had no charger, or out of spite, it goes completely blank and silent.

That’s a good thing. Map and I continue on together. She is in the hand that also holds the wheel. I now look at and read signs, and figure out names of villages that present a fork in the road.

I have to decide if I’ve gone too far or not far enough to arrive at the next decision. Map suggests, never demands. The sky is partly cloudy.The ocean is iridescent blue under clear sky, is a muddy color where it reflects the white, gray and orange clouds of the descending afternoon.

Slowly, scale begins to come into focus, and what I see on Map in my fingers represents what I see on the ground. This left turn must dead end at that peninsula. The headland emerging from the jungle canopy ahead must have a way around.

Pacific Ocean claws at quartz-ribboned cliff face. Rocks recently fallen are chewed into pebbles by waves. Cacti and palms hang precariously over the edge, soon to fall. Erosion seems to be destruction, but the ocean was pushed back once by the land, this is simply the cycle, summer to winter, night to day.

We arrive at our destination just as I began to doubt. GPS Link is dead on the seat. I put it in my pocket. I leave Map there where I can reach for it, once loved and still a good friend, with shared experience, to turn to when lost.

Susan looked at the corner by the bedroom door.

“What’s that?!” she said, an edge in her voice. “Is it a bug or a door stop?” She wasn’t wearing her glasses.

“It’s just the door stop,” I said, looking over to the corner where the black rubber bumper of the stainless steel stop did look a little dark and ominous.

At least, that’s what I thought she had seen as we were pulling our things together in Playa Hermosa for the late checkout and ride to our next stop in Costa Rica.

It’s not like there wasn’t reason to think bugs might be the size of golf balls. Across the street from the Tree House where we’d stayed the night before, a red and black tarantula lunged at the small stick being used to tempt her from a tea-cup-sized burrow in a bank cut for the road.

On the night-time walk that followed the tarantula tease, we saw sleeping toucans, and a green pit viper poised to strike at some unsuspecting rodent.

Koki, our guide, said the snake would first stretch to the ground, then pull itself back into the semi-coiled “S” that we saw hanging. The snake had pits in its head that sensed heat, he said, that told the snake when to strike, and the snake couldn’t strike too short, or too long, so it calibrated the distance before hand.

The victim would scamper away after being hit, but the snake would be able to follow with it’s sense of smell detecting the odor of its own venom. When the animal was dead, or incapacitated, serpent would arrive to its meal. The viper didn’t need to eat often, so it could afford to be patient, hanging from the branch, semi coiled. Koki said he’d seen snakes hanging in the same position from the same branch, for weeks at a time.

The Tree House hotel was a series of elegant cabins of varnished wood and glass perched in the canopy of the Costa Rican rain forest.

At first Susan wasn’t sure she would want to do the zip lines, but after the first one, she was all smiles as we flew from tree to tree, one line itself 800 meters long. We’d walked the the trails the day before, we climbed vines and huge trunks trellised with roots descending from parasitic plants high above to nourishment on the forest floor.

We were a couple of kids, the rain forest in Costa Rica not  unlike the Oregon woods where I grew up. Susan told me she’d broken both bones in her left wrist when she jumped out of a tree to get away from a spider as a 12-year-old tomboy in New Mexico.

We did everything we could in the two days we had in the rain forest, then on the third, it was time to move on. We caught a ride to Playa Hermosa along the north coast, to a hotel on the beach where the food and weather were perfect.

I ran for miles on the sand then read and outlined the conclusion of the book “Butterflies” while Susan jumped rope and worked out in the room. Eventually it was time to pack up and head to our next stop, Playa El Joba. Susan sat on the floor, as she often does, amid bags and and clothes, reorganizing her packs. I had all my stuff spread out on the bed.

“That really IS something!” she said, leaping to her feet. I walked over as she pulled her bags back, and about 24 inches from where she had been sitting, a black scorpion the size of my thumb sat facing the room.

I got a glass from the counter and put it over the scorpion before it could scuttle off and disappear, then a card from the desk to slide under the glass so our stinging roommate could be put outside on the sunlit deck for a few camera shots, then off the deck he went, back to the vegetation below our second floor room.

In a week (!) I leave again for the rainforest of Costa Rica. It will be a different trip than last March, when I wandered alone from place to place with no itinerary.

This trip, Susan and I will land in San Jose and head north to Monteverde for a couple of days for monkeys and jungle, then to the coast for a week or so seeking warmth and sand (sun if we’re lucky), then someplace else for a week. We’ll see when we get there.

I hope to wrap up the first draft of “Butterflies” while I’m there, and get that off to an agent who has shown interest. The book has changed direction so many times it’s hard to know what will evolve as it approaches its conclusion. I like that part of the process, when the work decides what it’s going to be and makes me serve its purpose.

My life feels a little like that too, now, for a variety of reasons.

And that’s a good thing.

Jessica’s book, “Exposed,” is on a special promotion from the publisher. The Kindle edition is free.

I don’t know for how long. One more day or two, I think.

As I write this, and it changes hourly, “Exposed” is ranked #1,548 of all books that are currently free in the Kindle store, #46 in the Erotica category, and #6 in the subcategory of Erotic Suspense.

This bodes well.

If you’d like to get a copy for your Kindle or your computer, now would be a great time to do so. Free to you, helps the book.

Someone I’m very close to has just released a new book. It’s available on Amazon, here.

“Exposed” by Jessica Love is classified as erotic fiction, but it’s more than that. Jessica has a wry, different view on sexuality, commentary on the roles of men and women in and out of the bedroom, a few erotic scenes in a public setting (her favorite), and she tells a pretty good story set in Seattle.

“Exposed” even has a few words about racing, and golf, and relates those to sex. I have no idea where she got her information. I don’t play golf.

It’s a fascinating thing when the “muse” takes over a project; When what an author intends to write often becomes something very different through the act of creation. The author of “Exposed” said the final book is very different that what was originally intended. I can relate.

As characters come alive within a story, they begin to dictate their own actions. Some have abilities they pursue that may be different from the author’s; some have tastes that may be quite different as well. This “coming alive” is more than an author looking for human sensations, and then words to describe those sensations.

Maybe it’s just a version of crazy. I don’t know.

Some early reviews of Jessica’s book on Amazon have been very favorable:

“This was an AMAZING read! I absolutely loved it! It’s not one of those romantic romance novels at all. Yes, there’s sex, a bit of bdsm… but for the most part it feels like a memoir. I am very surprised on how much i enjoyed it.”

and: ” The author had an intricate combination of mystery, romance, angst and and some suspense as it follows the leading lady- Jessica Love- through her life and eventually marriage.”

It’s a really short book, but I know Jessica and I know a fair amount of effort went into it. The cost is less than large cup of coffee and a muffin. If this genre is your thing, I think you’ll enjoy it.

Mother’s Day

Sam lay down after wrapping his arm in a towel and his belt around that. In 10 minutes, he was asleep. In 10 minutes more, I had bandaged the arm and walked back down to the patio, and was relieved that Tina was still there.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. Sorry about that. I get these spells and I black out. Did I say anything weird?”

I asked the question to prompt the discussion I knew she wanted to have.

“Say anything?” she laughed nervously. “No, not much. You just shoved a fork into your arm.” She pointed at the spots of blood leaking through my shirt.

“Oh, yeah. That happens. Thought I was past that point. Those points. Sharp points, as it were.” I smiled at my own bad joke, trying to turn the seriousness aside with humor. She wasn’t really buying it, but was too smart to pry.

“Was it something I said?” she asked.

“Just that part about leaving things behind. That probably was part of it. That’s hard. Really hard. I’m sorry you have to go through that.”

Sam doesn’t know why he dug the fork into his arm, and won’t when he wakes. He just reacts when the pain gets to where he can’t stand it anymore. He self destructs. He simply doesn’t want to be.

It wasn’t Tina’s word’s, certainly, and not what happened that is so painful. It’s that he can’t go back and fix it. That he is doomed forever to dance on knife blades of remorse. That’s why he can’t remember. That’s what he wants to leave behind with suicide.

Sam doesn’t know, but I remember the day so clearly. I don’t know how old Abby was, but my image of her is at age nine or ten. I was on my way to pick up Abby at grade school. It was uncharacteristically hot for Seattle, and had been a wet Spring and it was humid as the sun pulled moisture from the earth.

I was on time, though I’d had to break off work in the middle of a painting that was going pretty well. That’s frustrating, because the muse doesn’t always return. Sometimes good work is lost because of interruption. Bt the alarm went off and I left the studio because I didn’t like being late picking up Abby.

When I got to the round-about at school where parents were parked and waiting, kids were streaming out the front door. Young boys tore around, yelling, some mock fighting, others playing keep away, blowing off energy pent up by hours inside. Some girls were nearly as rowdy at that ambisexual age, while others were more reserved, beginning to take on roles of womanhood.

Abby finally appeared and I groaned, because I could tell by her posture and pace that she wasn’t happy. And when Abby wasn’t happy, she didn’t want anything in her world to be happy.

“Hi, Butterfly,” I said when she got in the car.

“Hi,” I got in the soft, drawn-out sad voice.

“What’s the matter, Sweetheart?”

“Nothing.”

“Something must be the matter, You seem quite sad.”

She had been working at the edges of a large paper bag, so I asked her what was inside.

“A Mother’s Day present.”

“Really? Let me see it,” I said.

She pulled out a clay bowl of some sort, typical child art.

“That’s beautiful. What is it?” I asked. Mistake.

“It’s a candle holder!” she said, irritated I didn’t know..

“Oh, I see. The candle goes in there.” I hoped seeming stupid would cover for my gaffe. I also hoped that the SUV in front of me would pick up their child so I could get out of the tightly bunched line of cars.

“It’s beautiful. So why so sad?”

“I want a mother like the other kids have,” she said, which of course cut me deeply. She said it while looking out at the front of the school. I wasn’t the only dad picking up kids, but mostly it was women in their 30s, laughing and gossiping with each other as their children ran about.

“You do have a mother like the other kids have. She just works, so I pick you up from school.”

“It’s not the same thing,” she said.

I let my own hurt feelings mingle with Abby’s. They distiled into a toxic cloud inside the car, even with the windows open.

“Well, then you can give me the mother’s day present.” I laughed, but my laugh was bitter. She didn’t think it was funny at all. I got a frown.

“There’s nothing I can do about it,” I added, somewhat dismissively. Abby would just have to cope, just as I was coping, and Sarah was coping. Becky was a lawyer and had a heavy case load and was already making more money than I did, which added a bit of humiliation, a condiment for my meal of self-doubt.

“You could get a real job so mom could stay home,” Abby said.

Double blow: You don’t have a real job. I would rather have mom. I walled up.

“Sweetie, I have a job, and even if I had a different one, your mom is doing what she wants to do.”

I knew it was cruel as soon as I said it. We were free of the school traffic at last and slogging through the afternoon crush of a Friday. I bit my lip and tried to fix it.

“Sweetheart, your mom loves you every bit as much as other moms love their kids. It’s no different.”

“It’s not the same,” Abby said, looking out the window.

“Let me see your candle holder again,” I said, hoping praise might bring her around.

“I don’t want to.”

“Please?”

She reluctantly pulled her sculpture from the paper bag.

“You did a very nice job with that. I think it will throw light out of those holes onto the wall and will be just beautiful. Your mom will love it,” I said.

“I don’t like it anymore,” said Abby.

“Why? It’s beautiful.”

“It’s not the color I wanted. I wanted it to be the same color as the jewelry box on her dresser. It’s too dark.”

“Abby, you don’t necessarily want things to match perfectly. Some variation in shade of the same color is what you want. They compliment rather than copy each other.”

I didn’t realize in the moment how tone-deaf I’d become. But Abby, as always, was about to show me.

“I am sure your mother will love it. She has to, because she’s your mother and she loves you.”

“No she won’t. It’s too dark. It’s ugly. I hate it,” Abby said, and threw the clay candle holder out the window of the car. In the rear view mirror, I saw it shatter against a concrete bridge abutment over the river than ran through town, down to the sea.

“Abby!” I said, partly in shock at the permanence of her act, unsure whether to say something about pedestrian safety, littering, or give her words about finding something else for her mom. But I didn’t say anything else. What else could I say?

What could I possibly say to a little girl who was sobbing uncontrollably in the car next to me, sobbing because I was the one sitting there and not the mother she loved?

It was misting when the bus crossed over the central spine of Isla Mariposas. As soon as the bus got over the top, farms became jungle, lushly dense and dark; houses turned to shanties on stilts; smells went from floral to fecal; music grew louder and more rhythmic. Mist at the mountain top turned to a hard rain.

Along side the road, a young boy picked up a banana leaf, at least as long as he was tall, and held it over his head to keep dry. When the weather here changes, find a shelter if there is one, and if not, find a leaf.

Or maybe just get wet, while waiting for the rain to stop, waiting for the sun to come out once again.

It’s tough to see a car on its top. It’s worse when medics have a driver on the ground.

But we were told Earnest was all right. By the time I got back to the pits, he’d already been seen up and walking around his car. They probably put him on the ground as part of protocol.

There was some controversy about that when Big Mac, who was maybe the fastest of any of us until the wreck that put him out of racing, balled up his car at the end of the front straight.

Some said they allowed him to take his helmet off and shouldn’t have, that he was moved and moving way too soon. I don’t know, I’m not qualified to vote on that one. That was a car just like the one Earnest flipped yesterday. A car just like mine, now that I think about it, except I don’t have a top.

Earnest went off a few yards from where Canuck went up the hill into the blackberries in July after a piece of his suspension broke. I don’t know and don’t know if anybody will know what happened to Earnest. The day before I told him what a great job he was doing, how well he was driving. His times were getting very good. But it’s not just about going fast.

Some say he was on old, old rubber. He had a flat in an earlier race, and someone said he patched the tire. That’s the thing. This sport takes a lot of time or a lot of money, and sometimes both. Some of us have to do what we can to make ends meet, but sometimes there aren’t any shortcuts.

There’s no shortcut to seat time, either, and Earnest doesn’t have a lot of it. He’s got  a car that can bite if you make a mistake. But stuff happens. Look at Canuck going into the blackberries in July, and he’s better than any of the rest of us.

Swede, who had built most of the car for Earnest, went over to check on him, and probably to check if anything he had built broke and caused the wreck. Earnest gave  gave him a big hug. And Earnest is a really big guy, so it was a really big hug.

“I was on my top and the cage held,” is what Earnest told him. Swede was pretty happy about that, too. The cage didn’t budge. Earnest was still really tall.

Ceegar’s mechanic, OCD, felt pretty bad when Ceegar’s mirror came off in Spokane at the beginning of the season. Merlin doesn’t just change out broken pieces, or pieces that look like they’re about to break, he changes out pieces that were installed at the same time as other pieces that look like they maybe once thought about breaking. Shade Tree’s the same way. They don’t really compromise when it counts.

They know what could happen if they miss something. Which is one reason why we look to them to do what they do. They are the kind of people who work really hard to make it right. Stayslate (Beater’s mechanic), Swede, Thrasher, OCD, Merlin, Shade Tree. These guys don’t just handle wrenches, they know what’s at stake.

Honestly? I don’t know if they would still be able to do it if something they built broke and there was a really bad outcome.

They can’t protect us drivers from ourselves, though, and if Earnest went out on bad tires, then he paid a pretty damn high price for the few hundred dollars saved.

I say this while I run tires I’ve run hard since I bought them to race at Road America last July.

All this is pretty serious stuff and I didn’t mean to get into it like that, but hey, I am who I am. I tried to explain that to a woman once, and the conversation didn’t go well. She told me, women marry men thinking they’ll change them, men marry women thinking they’ll never change. She was much wiser than me, and that’s probably why she’s not still around.

I confirmed with Ceegar that he set three personal best times this weekend in Seattle. It was perfect for racing. Air temps were cool, and cars just love that. Rains had washed the track clean, so tires stuck in every session. And though there weren’t enough cars out there, those that were ran well.

For several years I’ve wanted to get another 1:29:plus in Seattle. It happened this weekend in a race I didn’t win, but took second, again. In fact, that’s probably why it did happen. I’m always faster when I’m playing chase.

All the laps and races start to blend together now, especially since last night’s drive home was brutal, after waking up at 4 a.m. yesterday morning and not getting back to Middleofnowhere, Oregon until close to midnight. Up again this morning at 4 a.m., again. Tired and wired.

But what I do remember is that when I did wake up yesterday, I was trying to figure out how to get in front of Ceegar.

I finally distilled it down to “Shift sooner, brake later, go faster.”

Yeah, I know. Simplistic. But sometimes you need simple to break bad habits, especially if you tend to overthink things. So I was shifting sooner, and in that session, tried to shift into fourth before Turn Nine instead of after, and several times, right in front of the crowd, I either went into second, or couldn’t get it into gear at all. But not every lap, and I put down one really fast one.

But I didn’t win. Later, Ceegar asked me “what happened to you in nine? All of a sudden you disappeared?” I confessed I missed a shift. So he teased, ”Third is up and to the right.”

“I thought that’s where fifth is,” I said, looking confused, then put my hand over my mouth and acted as though I’d blown it completely. Ceegar and other drivers standing there hooted. You see, we’re only supposed to have four speeds forward. Four is all I have, too, I was trying to make a joke.

But it wasn’t a long time after that when OCD, Ceegar’s mechanic, was looking in my car and saw my four speed knob.

“How do you know where fifth gear is?” he asked, or something like that.

So after my pretend gaff, and maybe it’s entirely unrelated, Ceegar’s car went into the trailer. They changed the rear end gears, I could smell the gear lube from 20 feet away. They went a little taller, I think, maybe to match what they might of thought would be a fifth gear overdrive in my car. I don’t know. I’m just making it up at this point.

At lunch time, I got to take Thor, who works pregrid, out on the track for a ride. Came back in and took Jakester’s dad out for a couple of laps, then the Jakester. “Awesome,” they said. I used the sessions to work on my line.

Ceegar was on the pole, again, for the first race in the afternoon. I jumped him, again and went through the gears quickly. I didn’t wind the engine out but kept it right in the middle of where it loves to make power.

Shift sooner.

By the time we came to Turn 2, I had just enough on him, three-quarters of a car length he’d say later, that I slowly eased over to the left, squeezing him back as I took over the racing line.

“I thought I’d put my nose in there to see if I could intimidate you into giving it up,” he said. No, not today.

Down the hill into Turn 3A, I waited, and waited, to come off the gas, then hit the brakes hard and downshifted into first.

Brake Later.

Squirting out of Turn 3B, I hurtled down the back straight, shifted sooner and used what I’d seen Ceegar do in previous races: I didn’t slow down much through the tricky Turn 5 (where Earnest would later land on his top)  but danced through, and when I could, I put the accelerator to the floor.

Go faster.

Coming out of Turn 8, foot to the floor, I would shift into third, foot to the floor, slight lift over the bump so I wouldn’t spin the tires when she got light, let her gather up, foot to the floor, fourth gear, foot to the floor, thread the needle between the dirt and wall at Turn 10, don’t lift, over the hump at Turn 1, wait, wait wait, brake and downshift, hold smooth, foot to the floor.

Ceegar got smaller and smaller in my mirror. It was so very sweet.

After the race, Jakester put the other old Road America Tires on Yellow Jacket. We refueled. Checked the oil. We sat.

In the mean time, Ceegar’s Mustang disappeared back into his mobil shop. Again I smelled the sulfurous stench of gear lube. I figured they were going to shorter gears this time, to get a jump on me out of the hole.

Thing is, in a fight, your opponent always gets a vote. And in this case, I was on the pole. That meant I could stuff the ballot box.

When the pace car left the field and we were on our way to the green flag, Ceegar started to accelerate. He was nearly a half car length in front of me, where he should not have been, before he saw that I was going slow. Real slow. He had to slow down to match position. Real slow.

I’d figured if he went to real short gears, I wanted him to be in first gear and low rpm when we got the green flag. His car has so much juice that he can’t stab the throttle in first or he’ll just smoke the tires. He would have to ease into it, or bog it in second.

Green flag. Yellow jacket hooked up her (yes, much fatter) tires. Ceegar fishtailed trying to get that screaming orange monster to put power to the pavement. I was first to Turn 2. And I was ready to fly. But when I next look in my mirrors, it was Beater behind me. And the next lap around, Ceegar was off to the side of the track in Turn 3B, and he was standing in the turn worker station.

A half mile ahead, Earnest is upside down, hanging from the straps. They are waving Double Yellow Flags, white flags.

I slow down, way down, to bunch up the field. They next lap around, they have Earnest out on the ground, making sure he’s okay. This race is done. But Earnest is okay, and they bring his broken ride in on the trailer.

Ceegar dropped out on that first lap because the battery cable to his starter motor shorted out on a header. You could see the burnt black plastic insulation. I don’t know if it was the result of last minute work or had been trying to burn through the whole weekend and finally found ground. But he pulled over rather than lose the car.

So the last race really wasn’t. That’s okay. No one was hurt, and I can’t remember a better weekend of racing. Others have said the same thing.

I think Ceegar goes to Sears Point in a week or two. Canuck is headed to Texas to a big race down there. Cowboy is done for the season, and so am I. Jakester has football and a girlfriend and school work. His coach told guys on the team to get girlfriends who play sports so they won’t complain (or feel lonely) when they have to practice. Jakester’s girl plays soccer.

Merlin is already busy, busy. He isn’t just an artisan and a magic maker, he is a principled perfectionist. So he’s told clients and potential clients they need to take a number, and probably by next month, if they want anything done over winter. There’s only so much time, and even Merlin can’t change that.

I’m thinking of giving him some work to do. I think I’ll have Shade Tree pull my motor in a week or so, and then I’ll run it back up to Seattle, and let Merlin wave his wand.

Because next year, Canuck will have the big car out, Beater will be back with his evil looking ’69 that wrecked in Portland, Ceegar and OCD never stop improving, and who knows what Cowboy is cooking up way, way out there on the prairie.

So I have to do something over the winter, if I want to keep up. Because no matter how much there is, and how well you do, there’s always something left to be done if you want to play with these guys, the way we play. You can’t stop or you’ll get left behind.

Besides, getting better and going faster and playing harder isn’t something you do just once and go home. There’s always more, and it’s never enough.

Three times today, I came in second. Didn’t win a single race. That doesn’t happen all that often.

It also may have been the best day of racing I’ve ever had.

I show up on Friday and get set up. Get signed in. First three or four people I run into ask the same question: “Where’s Jake?”

“Homecoming dance,” I say.

Knowledgable nods. “But, it’s a race weekend,” say a couple of diehards, as if there’s nothing more important, but we all know there is.

Qualifying was a bust. I had brand new brake pads. They had to be bedded in, and the tires had to get hot. And you, know, I had to get used to how it feels to be wrapped up in Yellow Jacket again. It’s been a month, my body forgets. I think of other things.

I waited for all the slower cars to get good and far ahead. To put down a good lap, I needed room.

Just as I hit the go switch, black flags came out. A Camaro  left huge skids marks just past the fastest turn on the course, and was off on the side. As they say, that was that.

So I started about tenth or twelfth in the first race of the day. It took some work, but  I moved up to third and was closing on Beater. I got him at the top of the hill going into Turn 8. I made my move, was going around him on the outside,  and … he disappeared.

Lots of switches are close together in a race car, we’re moving hands and feet. He hit the stop switch.

When the checker came down, Ceegar was in traffic up ahead, but I couldn’t get close before it was over.

I gave rides to workers at lunch. They were standing in line, and Yellow Jacket draws smiles. But I also had to change tires. And Fuel up. There was one more ride I had to give.

And let’s face it, Jakester wasn’t there to do all that, and to keep me on time.

By the time I got to pre-grid, it was past the five minute warning. So they slotted me right at the end of the pack. Which meant, again, I got to drive through the field. I caught Beater again, this time, his oil pan was leaking. I was closing on Ceegar, but ran out of race.

It was a bone-head mistake obviously, but I love driving through the pack. It’s exciting, it’s a dance, and everybody today was on their toes, everyone worked with their mirrors, no one didn’t know I was coming.

For the final, I was early on pre-grid. Everything was in it’s place, Ceegar and I were on the front row. We took off, and I jumped ahead for about 200 yards, but Ceegar braked late and shot by me going into the long sweeping left of Turn 2.

“Didn’t think I’d do that didja?” he asked with a smile when it was over.

For the next 108 corners over 22 miles, we tangled. There were times I thought I would feel the nudge of tire contact, or we’d swap paint. He’d get some distance on me, I’d close the gap. I tried to go by him on the outside, inside, upside and down side.

We came upon traffic going close to 160 mph. I followed him through, neither of us lifted. A silver BMW stayed out as Ceegar blew by him, but had no clue I was there, or he thought he’d run his line, whatever. I may have sucked the top coat of paint off his passenger door, I was told. I figured he’d hear me coming. It’s not like Yellow Jacket is subtle.

They said I had a puff of smoke coming from a tire on the the main straight. That was just my driving shoe, as I tried to pedal harder. They should see the sparks as Ceegar bottoms out coming into Turn five, or the way his left front tire hangs 8 inches above the pavement coming out, the way he spins tires going up the hill after Turn Six.

He’s so good in that set, it’s just great fun watching him. I had to finally tell myself to stop watching him drive, and start driving my own car through there, or he’d be out of sight.

I tried to take Ceegar on the outside of eight to the inside of nine, but that’s no damn place to pass. I bobbled, got sideways in a way I always worry about Falcon, too much gravel and too much wall, but somehow how I gathered it up, and went after Ceegar again.

I didn’t catch him, and I took another second.

We were surrounded by people as soon as it ended. They sputterd as they tried to say how exciting it was. Ceegar came over and told me it was the best race of his life. I think it was  the best race of mine. More than one person said it was the best race they’d ever seen.

Less than a quarter of a second separated us at the finish line after all those miles. There are very few drivers I trust enough to run with that close.

Beater was in the stands while his car was being repaired. “That was, that was an amazing exhibition,” he said.

See some of it here. I didn’t have time to edit before uploading, so there’s a lot set up and unecessary footage. I’d start at about minute 6:30.

The middle of that race can be seen here. Again, no time to edit. I haven’t even watched it, and probably used up my share of the hotel’s bandwidth trying to get it up before I had to check out. Thank you, Comfort Inn of Auburn, Washington.

In all three races, I posted a time in the 1:30s. I’ve gone faster, but never posted three in a row like that before. Ceegar turned the fastest time of his life in that Mustang. I think maybe he had his two fastest races, ever, maybe three.

Someone asked if I was disappointed, being the “first loser.”

“I don’t look at it like that,” was all I could say. Yellow Jacket was balanced and tuned. She gave me everything I asked for; her needs for what I had to do flowed back through the steering wheel and my car seat, what I wanted to do flowed to her through accelerator and brake. We were indistinguishable.

Some would say it’s silly to anthropomorphize a car like that. Yeah. Okay. Whatever. We’ll argue that point after they’ve sat in that seat and danced with my girl. No, that’s not an invitation.

I was finally “driving.” Really driving. When it feels that good, it has all the sensuality of a tango, and the thrill of a knife fight. It was good. So very good. Tomorrow, this season will be over, at least for me. What a way to close it out.