I'm going to meet a friend in the park on Saturday. There's a park a few miles east of here where I often go to get away for a little while. Most days at noon, in fact, if I don't have a lunch date, I'm probably on my way to Bay Area Park. It's so restful to cruise around the lake and sojourn with the squirrels and birds and snakes and bugs and yes, even the stray human animal from time to time.

One day about three years ago I was cruising around the park, as usual. The Dream was just kinda idling along, you know, in second gear, chugga chugga chugga, when I saw a man walking toward me along the side of the road, carrying a child in his arms. They were coming from the direction of the duck pond, his long brown hair flipping about his eyes and mouth as it caught the breeze. The slow, easy saunter reminded me of Lightnin. As they got closer, I could see the man had a big smile on his face. Suddenly it dawned on me ... Jesus, it WAS Lightnin. Right here in the park. My heart leapt into my throat. I hadn't seen him in a long time, not since Terry's funeral. I knew that he had remarried and had a baby daughter. This must be her. She'd be about 14 months old by now.

I wasn't sure if I was ready for this. Losing him had ripped the heart right out of me. Even though it had been four years since the day I asked him to leave, it was still hard for me to be without him. My heart ached when he crossed my mind and my life felt empty still. I didn't know if I was ready to see permanent, tangible evidence that our love was really in the past.

I married Lightnin when he was inmate #300428 in the Huntsville Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections. At the time he got in trouble with the law he was playing drums in a rhythm and blues band. That was how I knew him. We used to follow the band around wherever they worked because there just wasn't another R&B band like 'em anywhere. They had that rhythm. The kind that makes you want to move when you hear it. Makes you want to shake your booty. It was him, of course, who gave it that soul. Anyway, I started writing to him in the joint, and then visiting him every two weeks on visitation day, and one thing led to another. We were married on April Fool's 1982. We figured that was an appropriate day.

After he was sprung from "school" and back in society, it was hard for him to adjust for many reasons. For one thing, according to the conditions of his parole, he wasn't allowed to be in any establishment that served liquor. He had a history of alcohol abuse and was supposed to attend AA meetings. Yet here he was, a drummer who makes his living in the beer joints. He'd never done anything else. His parole officer was cool enough to let him try it and gave him a special dispensation. But it was going to be up to me, the parole officer said, to see that any craziness which erupted didn't get out of hand.

For a long time I worked at my day job all day and roadied for the band at night. It was exhausting. Many nights I found myself outside in the parking lot, stretched across the console of the Tangerine Dream with a gear shift lever in my back, trying to catch a little shuteye while the band worked. Weirdness abounded. The Shames started to get pretty popular in the greater Houston area and we were working more upscale clubs all the time. Upscale clubs are the ones in the artsy-fartsy section of town where "names" appear from time to time and where the groupies are all high-dollar chicks with large vials of cocaine in their teensy black evening bags.

We played a lot of biker bars, too, where the cocaine was stashed in leather boot tops but it was just as deadly, and once in a while it was accompanied by something stronger. Wet t-shirt contests always turned into full-fledged strip shows. Fights had a way of breaking out with no warning, and then there was always the good old TABC. The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. Man, those guys could completely destroy an evening by their simple appearance on the scene. The band, of course, was always drinking even though it's a violation for performers to drink alcohol on stage here in Texas. It's one of those rules that every establishment ignores. So there was Lightnin, Parolee and Drummer Extraordinaire, fogging down the Johnny Walker Black with the TABC in the audience.

After a while I realized that I couldn't keep up the pace any longer. I had to give up one job or the other. Since my day gig was the one that paid the bills, that's the one I chose to keep. We couldn't depend on his work for much of an income. By the time you deducted travel expenses and the liquor tab, you didn't have a lot left. Turning in my drum key, however, was the beginning of the end.

For a long time I'd known he was unhappy. I was beginning to look like just another jailer to him. I knew he wanted to be free. It was easy to tell by the way he acted. Every now and then I'd take the bull by the horns and just ask him. "Do you want to be free, Lightnin? Cause we can work it out if you do." No, no, not no but HELL NO was always his answer. But I could tell he was lying through his teeth. Just couldn't bring himself to say it for some reason. Instead, he simply stayed out later, came home drunker, told bigger and better lies, and waited for me to act. So I did. I finally had to admit to myself that the marriage was over. He crawled through the door one Wednesday morning at 0600, as I was on my way to work, and threw his drumsticks at me. That did it. I asked him to leave.

He didn't even look back, of course. Not once. He moved in with one of his cocaine connections and spiraled downward from there. I worked at my job and tried to repair the enormous hole in my soul caused by his leaving. I let him go his way and I went mine. We didn't see one another for a long time because I didn't want it. He'd call and I'd let the phone roll to the recorder. He'd come by to see me and I wouldn't answer the door. It wasn't that I didn't love him ... no, I loved him far too much. I loved him so much that I couldn't bear the pain of seeing him.

Then Terry died, which brought us back together for one day, forging a new beginning. Although I was still hurting deeply from our breakup, Terry's death made me realize how silly it was to maintain silence with someone I loved. I told Lightnin on the day of the funeral, while we were working on that bottle of Bacardi 151, that I really did want to be his friend. I just needed a little time to come to grips with it. We both passed out happy in the knowledge that friendship might indeed survive.

Months passed. He eventually picked himself up out of the gutter and got straight. Decided that not even he could stand living with a coke-head. Started going to AA like he should have done all those years before. Like I'd prayed that he would. Met a pretty little schoolteacher who thought he'd hung the moon and said she wanted to have his babies. And so she did. Here was the proof of that, walking toward me in the park. Lightnin and Annie.

The Dream rolled to a stop right beside them. I lowered the window all the way, shoving the gearshift into "Park". "Hi there," Lightnin said, "I want you to meet Annie." Annie's sweet little face looked at me, so like her daddy's in every way. I reached out and took her tiny hand in my own. "Hi, Annie," I said. "I'm Youngblood. Are you and your daddy having fun?" She pursed her rosebud lips and stretched her little arms wide, beckoning for me to take her. Lightnin passed her through the window. She lay down on me, her chest on my chest, and wrapped her baby arms tightly around my neck. Then she snuggled her little head, fitting it perfectly under my chin, and just lay there, giving me little squeezes.

I have never felt so overwhelmed with love. A love so pure, so innocent, so trusting. A love so totally all-encompassing. I looked up at Lightnin with tears in my eyes. He was crying, too. "She loves you," he said, his voice breaking with emotion. The tears flowed uncontrollably down my cheeks then, as I had feared they would when I first saw him. But to my vast surprise, they were tears of joy. Not sadness, as I had feared, but joy. Joy and love divine simply emanated from this tiny being whose aura blended so well with my own that I could not even tell where my body ended and hers began.

It was in that moment that the answer I had sought throughout the last four years of loneliness and pain finally came to me. I knew then, without a doubt, why the gods had required me to let him go.