Other cards have also been found, each different and from somewhere else. On them is often written encouragement for overcoming caffeine addiction, overcoming a race with no end. They are left around for the wayward commuter of these parts, like a mini self-help book, if one could only find a moment to take a walk in the forest. The latest one was a plain white card with, “BARE HANDED SALES” between a pair of asterisks. Each subsequent line started with an asterisk but did not end in one. One line had no asterisks at all. The asterisk is a sort of ambiguous symbol, use it how you like, it is literally a pictographs, meaning little star in ancient Greek. The card continues with ” *BUYING & SELLING SERVICE & HELP! “, ” *Bay-Area, California, & Coast!” , “~~~ Call: Anytime! ~~~ ” , “* Please-Phone: ###-###-#### “. I met the author of these cards years before about a pile of second-hand semi-antique fire bricks, referred to me by my friend who had seen an ad online. The bricks were collected from various job sites over the hill, hauled over one load at a time in a small blue sedan. When I found them, the bricks were pilled in a gigantic pyramidal heap in a back yard, and they seemed at home there, behind a house made with other bricks, laid down there years before by a local, known by some as Limey.

Limey was a regular on my street growing up. Nearly every morning before school I would see him heading downtown, walking there from the whimsical fairy-like house where he lived. Past our house he went, to the bar, or to wherever else he needed to go. He always carried his coffee cup in the mornings, held in tight and tucked against his chest as he walked, filled with coffee or whatever else he needed in the cold mornings to warm his beanie-capped head. Though I think he might have been in recovery from the sauce, so in that case the brew would have been berries alone. He was in one way the purpose for the fairy house, it was known as an informal shelter for the old whiskey tooth and locals who in other places might have been left to the street. Though his byname might have other origins, his use of lime mortar as a stonemason in this mountain valley is at least a good coincidence. It was the same lime used to surface Mayan pyramids to make them white, and Limey used it in his mortar to lay red brick, often ornamented with an abalone shell, collected from the shore, or maybe the flesh of which he was paid in. This was long before the abalone fishery was closed indefinitely, a mollusc once easily found and collected by hand in the rocky intertidal, just a short trip to the coast. This shell was his characteristic motif, still seen adorning brick chimney in these redwood mountains.

So there I was, behind a house built by Limey, sifting the conical pile for double-length fire bricks, the ‘kind you can’t find anymore’. A brick collector I had become myself, and a stonemason of sorts soon enough. When I gave away my paper money for bricks, we shook hands, bare handed.

The next time we talked I was working on a small sailboat I had acquired and brought across the golden gate. It was heading back with me to the mountains to mend its rotten core. Riding high on the big red bridge I had no clue the VW bug tire on the trailer was rotten in its own way, only a husk remained on the rim by the time I took my final mile into town. One warm afternoon as I was working on the boat he was passing by and said to me – “There are two magical moments when owning a boat. When you get it….. and when you get rid of it”.