When I was five or six, my mother gave me a Golden Book about dinosaurs for Christmas. I clearly remember disappearing into those pages while sitting in a patch of sunlight on the rug in front of the tree beside the fireplace. When I got sober at thirty-eight and the eggshell around my addiction and sorry choices collapsed, dinosaurs once again called out to me. In the beginning it was just toys, a Godzilla lighter gushing flames from his mouth, a pair of glow in the dark stegosaurus. But it was while walking through the dinosaur rooms at the Natural History Museum and reconciling with my wounded inner child that I became an adult; by the time I'd seen the whole exhibit, I felt safe and grown up. Afterwards, I went to the souvenir shop and found the same Golden Book I had read by the tree that Christmas. We, my invisible inner child self and I, bought the book, then walked through Central Park and promptly went into Bergdorf's for a bottle of Chanel #5. It was 1990, and suddenly dinosaurs were everywhere, all my friends were giving them to me. I went into the hospital during that time and when I left ten days later, I needed a shopping bag for all the dinosaurs I’d acquired. I must have been a funny sight, a predatory blonde with an IV and two catheter bags in bed with an army of little monsters to protect her.

In college, I saw FANTASIA in London with my mother. Each seat in the theater had an ashtray on the armrest. A joint was being passed down our row, the English stranger to my right handed it to me. I took a hit, and then without thinking, offered it to my mother. She took a long drag and passed it back to me. There are dinosaurs in FANTASIA, fabulous ones in fact, and nymphs and fairies to tell the story of my demons and redemption for me. I think this may go back to another incarnation, my Irish tinker roots perhaps. I feel the pull of a caravan wagon, I also feel the tug of a tepee and following the buffalo; I was born at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which is where Geronimo died when he was imprisoned there with his tribe, so maybe I picked up one of their souls. But I feel those pioneers venturing west too; if not the wife or child of an Apache.

Humor me, how many pairs of feet have I walked on? A buxom wench slopping grog and servicing drunks against a wall behind the stables who died in childbirth or drowned in a bog unnoticed only to return and die again of famine or political violence. Then it might have been on to the States as a Shaker or Quaker or a missionary nun; another hard life of service. I could have been on the Trail of Tears, or a white woman on a wagon train who ended up as a little scrap of blonde scalp on some Indian's belt; which would justify my coming back Native American. Those Wild West saloon girls call my name, too; I was there. I can smell it, the sweat and smoke and dust, the sum of my parts. A warrior whore now wrinkled and old in her shapeless black clothes suits me nicely.