Finding Darth Vader in the Corn

So in August, two years later, after going to IU and getting married and going to Utah State and getting divorced and coming back to Bloomington and dropping out of school, I decided to go see him. I must have had his address. I had no car. The Studebaker I had driven back from Utah had died upon arrival and I sold it to a guy who wanted it for parts. I was trying to save some money, because I wanted to travel, so I didn't have transportation. So I hitchhiked over and was wandering toward his address in downtown Paris, Illinois when he spotted me and picked me up. He took me to his apartment and introduced me to his new wife. We had dinner. He took me over to visit my Great Grandmother and my Great Aunt who were living in town in an old house. My Great Grandmother was 97 and bedridden and partially deaf and partially blind. The Aunt (who was my Grandfather's sister) had taken care of her mother her whole life and never married and never worked. They hired folks to sharecrop their half of the family land- that was enough to live on I guess.

The conversation was about how my dead grandmother (my father's mother) was a dope head and the ruin of my grandfather- an interesting perception. The said grandfather was a drunk and suicidal off and on throughout his life.

Anyway, I spent the night with them rather than at my father's. The nightmares were relentless and non-stop most of the night. He was coming up the stairs, he was in the room with the gun drawn. He shot and killed me and I was dead.

In the morning, he came and got me and we went to breakfast and I got to see the old Glen I knew from my childhood. He sat at the window watching his car, he tried to sell a cemetery plot (is breakfast a good time to approach people about their final resting place?) and didn't really talk to anyone.

Then he was going to drive me back over, since I had to be back at work the next day. On the way back, we really talked. He told me about the people that had been following him for years and he could show me the windshield with the bullet hole that he had kept for proof. And how they were watching him all the time, because after all he had been Army Intelligence and there are some secrets that never go away. And how it was important to check into people's backgrounds because the spies might have got to them the way they had gotten to my mother and he knew for years that they were paying her to try to kill him and he had to be on his toes all the time and my older brother who fell from the tree had been pushed and he was still trying to find the man that had climbed up there and killed his oldest. And what was the name of the girl I was seeing again and where were her family? I started making up fake names at this point.

He was convinced the his father hadn't really set his own body shop on fire and had tried to blow his own brains out. It was those people that had been after him. And of course they finally got him fired from Eli Lilly.

On and on. I just listened in those days and nodded my head. People would tell me amazing things. Generally, I wasn't very judgmental. He let me out at my boarding house. And he promised to come over to see me and wanted me to come visit again.

My brother, who was older and married with a couple of kids, had already told him not to come around any more, he didn't want him around his kids. My sister refused to see him.

I didn't see him again until San Francisco. I ran into a friend from the hometown on Bourbon Street out of the blue, and he said ole Glen showed up looking for me and was told I had left town. He looked disappointed I was told.