“But let me live definite, shock by shock” – how I adore William Stafford’s writing, his books about writing, as well as Lewis & Clark College, where my parents met and my father fixed the school’s cars in the motorpool garage below the manor house where my mother lived on the third floor, near where William Stafford’s son Kim would run the writing program in the little building with the dovecote on top. I went to LC during the time William Stafford taught there, but was thoroughly otherwise occupied jettisoning myself from my family in hopes of arriving shiny new on a shell maybe, unparented, self-created and awesomely original (with no effort whatever, beyond what it took to hitchhike down the Oregon coast with a near-stranger.)