the colorful characters of my hometown

My dad collected the oddest of friends. Some guy came to our house once, high on something, and had od'ed. He passed out in our yard and the ambulance came. He lived.

Then there was crazy William who everyone in Town remembers. He was homeless, and my dad and I would bring him food in the winter, because living in a snowy forest with no shelter sucks, and food makes it a bit better. Crazy William was one of the tinfoil hat kind of guys, always talking about "them" and how the tin foil blocked out their communications. No joke. He also had a huge machete knife sword thing with Jesus engraved on it. Call me the crazy one, but isn't Jesus kind of the antithesis of huge sharp weapons? He also told my mom to tell the neighbor to cut down the trees in his yard, because they housed government ninjas.

Then there were the Marks. Crazy Mark and One-Legged Mark. Both were nuts, but you had to differentiate them somehow, and one was just plain crazy, the other, crazy and missing a leg. Crazy Mark also claimed tinfoil and shiny things blocked out or frightened "them". We had to hide our mirrors, tinfoil, and good silverware when he visited or he'd steal or try and barter for it. Which makes me wonder, what is up with crazies and tinfoil? And one-legged Mark, to my recall, was a nice guy.

My mom was making some recipe once, where you mix cream of whatever soup with tuna and cheese and wrap the goo with frozen croissant dough and bake, with a cream of whatever dipping sauce. Sounds gross, but they were like sh1t on a shingle meets tuna melt in a handy handheld pocket version. With a little white trash mixed in. My mom 6565`recently was thinking about the recipe and couldn't find it; googling5`5ish cakes" does not do you well. We called them fish cakes because one-legged Mark was over for dinner, perplexed and initially disgusted by my moms "f%ing fish cakes", which set the family into the giggles. Fish cakes. We envisioned pink frosted salmon cakes and chocolate cod cream pie. So anyways...today my mom calls me because for years, she had forgotten it was one legged Mark who had named my mom's concoction. It was one of those things where something is at the tip of your tonguecand suddenly you remember it. So hubby and I are driving and a call comes through blue tooth. "It was one legged Mark, he named them fish cakes," my hubby looks at me like OMG your mom is nuts so I chime in, "oh I remember him! How did he lose his leg." And my mom explains he was a bassist in "Metallica or something" and lost his leg in a motorcycle wreck, got addicted to pain killers, and because the crazy one legged Mark. I then kind of giggled because we would know if one-legged Mark had dropped by for a visit when we were not there, because you'd see the path to our home, mud or snow covered, with one line of footprints and one line of ski-pole poky prints. See one-legged Mark did not have a real prosthetic but some home made one, or at least a home made foot (hey he could have lost the prosthetic foot and not the leg, right?) So he had the bottom of a ski pole for a foot. He said it gave good traction in the winter. Again, no joke.

So I HAD to google this one legged Mark guy. Know what? One legged Mark, bass player Mark loses leg, or a myriad of related combinations did not beget what I wanted. Seriously ,there are billions of web pages and none about one legged Mark? So here's to you, one-legged Mark.