In 1997 I went on a picnic with a new woman in my life.  We drove for several hours, stopping at a state park by a bay connected to one of the Great Lakes.  We spread a blanket on leaves recently fallen and ate and drank.  Quiet over everything.  A town across the bay gave off that silent look even large conglomerations of people and structures have when viewed from far enough away that a loud noise from over there would've come after seeing the sound's cause.
     We kissed, longer than ever before.  A strange buzz came from our left, faint, but getting louder.  The trees' foliage and bushes blocked our view of the wavering sound's direction.  It got louder--obviously some kind of vehicle's engine.  The sound's pitch rose and fell, rose and fell.  It became quite loud and we still couldn't see it.  Then, a man in a baseball cap, tee shirt, and jeans appeared, riding a three-wheeled ATV, two wheels (left and front) in the water, the third on the soggy bank.  He was tilted down to his left as he rode slowly by, not seeing us.  We laughed at the unexpected weirdness of it.  What was he doing?  I suggested he was traveling along the edges of the bays, inlets, and shorelines of the Great Lakes.  For all we knew he'd been on this journey for years.
     What else happened in 1997?
     In January of that year came a brief but disorienting depression characterized by restlessness that felt like winged insects trapped inside my clothes.  I felt helpless.  A friend, after I'd called her several times, told me I needed to get a grip.  The worst of it lasted only two days, and then it lifted during an evening.  I selected a book I hadn't read from one of my shelves and began reading Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima.  His elegant prose, albeit translated into English, melted the remnants of a depression that later seemed like a dream.
     Later in 1997 I moved in with the woman from the picnic.  We lived together until 2002.  Our first place was the ground floor of what had originally been a stable, remodeled in odd ways into a very small house.  Past the living/dining room a set of three stairs led to a narrow kitchen.  To the kitchen's left, two more steps up opened on a tiny bathroom with sink, toilet, and a refrigerator-sized shower stall I couldn't stand upright in.
     Above us, an even smaller apartment held a man in his forties who got up late at night to work.  My girlfriend disliked him on sight.  One night, as usual, around two in the morning, his alarm clock blared above our bedroom, but he wasn't home to switch it off.  The grating full volume beep went on and on.  My girlfriend got up, put on her slippers, found a flashlight, and went outside.  The alarm stopped.  She got back into bed, saying she'd switched off his power.  This peculiar shack of a house had a power box for the upper level on the outside near our front door.  Our power switches were inside.
     The next day our neighbor told my girlfriend his power had gone out.  Did ours go out, too?
     "Yes," she lied.  "It did."
     In 1997 we hadn't heard of Britney Spears and didn't know Brad Pitt would leave Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie.  The name Kardashian was associated only with one of O.J. Simpson's lawyers.  We had never heard of Monica Lewinsky or Osama bin Laden.  Electronic information exchange, by today's standards, was primitive.  In The Net, released just two years earlier, it was amazing that Sandra Bullock could order a pizza online.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a new show.  The man on the ATV, half in the water, half on land, did various things in private and public in 1997.  People screwed and got stoned, drank and caused car accidents.  Earth continued to rotate--it's amazing how it just keeps rotating.  Princess Diana died horribly in a car crash, her last moments gawked at and photographed by paparazzi who should still all be identified, rounded up, and shot.
     A typical year.

                                                                             Vic Neptune