What does Jack have to say after his disappearance?

I will try to pick up Jack wherever he is and have a conversation with him:
JACK: I will do my best to reply. I feel I owe everyone an apology in the complex for how much I upset people in my last months there.
GERRY: Thank you, Jack. But where are you now?
JACK: In a better place, but don't try to come here, Gerry, before your time. Take good care of yourself and try to live as long as you can. I know you got notice from your doctor today to have a cat scan but don't be scared of that. Just get it checked out. How I wish I had heeded this advice. You are a good communicator. Have no doubts about that. I tried to be but fell short for reasons that have to do with the distant past I was not able to change enough. My pattern of horrific drinking was one thing I wish I could have changed.
GERRY: I am worried about Doc. He is getting more fragile. He is not communicating with anyone except me.
JACK: I know, and I am sure that has to do with his distant past, too. He is doing better than you think though, because he takes an interest in doing these videos and that is communication of a sort. I have been watching them. I know I was too snotty about your stuff to watch many of your videos there. Thank you for the poem you wrote about me. It made me feel that I was missed.
GERRY: How do you like my sister LaRae.
JACK: She has been very kind to me when I have seen her. I hang out in the Westward Ho still. I have a lot of friends here who have passed
GERRY: I hated to think you had died. I hoped somebody took you home and sobered you up and you are still alive somewhere.
JACK: If they did I would still be in touch with you, Gerry, via the Internet. I have decided to utilize my knowledge of the Internet a lot better now just to stay on the up and up and be doing things. I had a hell of a drug habit to break of painkillers. So I must do everything I can to distance myself from substance abuse no matter where I am.
GERRY: That's true. Things couldn't have gotten much worse for you. You were at death's door for weeks.
JACK: I know. There are rehabs wherever you go. I am in a rehab now to stay sober and straight. This time I will not turn away from any opportunity to talk to people and know them better. I knew that love of people was the key to my spiritual growth, but I made a feeble effort to do it too many times.
GERRY: What shall I tell Mercedes who was in a bad wreck the week she was supposed to bring your stuff back? She got a head injury. I hate to talk to her because she was so upset about you.
JACK: Please try to convey to her my thanks for trying to help me. I apologize for anything I said about her the last time I ever spoke to you. I was just trying to blow smoke in people's eyes because I was waiting around to see if I could catch my drug supplier.
GERRY: I know you were out of your mind. She is too fragile right now to hear anything negative. I will never tell her that. You need to send her healing thoughts because she has always loved you.
JACK: I have been a spoiled man. I would try to get people to love me and then I was not properly grateful and thankful when they did love me. You on the other hand shared your concerns about me with Mercedes. You could have been too jealous to do that since you loved me, too.
GERRY: I always thought you belonged to the world, Jack. You have the potential to be a great healer.
JACK: Heal thyself is the healer's first motto. I did not try hard enough to do that.
GERRY: Mercedes is trying to become a healer. She was telling me how much energy it took from her when people were too negative.
JACK: Negativity sucks up energy. I was negative so many months, I feel sick when I look back on my last troubled days there. I hope I will never sink that low again in my spiritual development. I have received a great blessing here, Gerry. I have been forgiven for my sins. I have been blessed by angels.
GERRY: I am sure you have, Jack.
JACK: I was lifted up by angels and healed.
GERRY: That moves me so much, Jack, I must stop. Thank you for telling me this. Good-night.

Catching up with my fascinating friend Mercedes

Mercedes called yesterday. The last time I heard from her she said she was going on a cruise many months ago. I did not know what happened to her and was almost to conclude she had found a life on the cruiseship circuit maybe singing? She said she had been in an automobile accident which injured her to the point she could not use her right arm. She said Barnes and Noble the bookstore where she has worked for many yers had been extremely good to her, and she was just about ready to go back to work after considerable time healing. She also said she had bought a house in foreclosure between a Barnes and Noble store on Camelback and downtown, so that puts her a lot closer to the Westward Ho.
I became fond of Mercedes when she was volunteering to work in the computer lab possibly 8 or 9 years ago. She always showed up each week and took an interest in many residents. We were grateful she always came to our karaoke parties because she could sing. She always added a lot to the party when she was there.
In fact I am hoping to invite my son Gary over along with Mercedes to a karaoke party in my apartment and I will film them singing! She sang with Raymond a couple of times when he came to our Westward Ho karaoke parties. Those were the days. Pierre was a great fan of karaoke parties and he was pushng them. He sang with Mercedes, too.
In fact, the last time I saw Mercedes Raymond and I spent more than hour trying to find her house and the party she was giving. Raymond would not give up. We finally found it by the sounds of a band playing. I will post some photos of the party, so you can see what a great time everybody was having. Mercedes had a live band and lots of singing and some great food.

Raymond and Meredes with friends flanking them at the party


Mercedes singing with the band to her party


But now Mercedes is becoming a healer, which is why she called. She has learned someething called pranic healing and she has sessions every Thursday night in Scottsdale where she leads. Maybe when my sister Linda comes we can go as I know Linda will be very interested because she needs healing. Linda took healing classes at her spiritualist church. I have always thought she had healing hands, like my grandfather who was a chiropracter. Anyway Mercedes was looking into the possibility of doing sessions here at the Westward Ho, but I told her I doubted if the manager would permit it, as they have had a lot of trouble with the desires of many different people to hold all kinds of services here. So they finally wouldn't let any groups have services including those who had been having them for years. If not, Mercedes said she will look for a spot downtown where a room can be secured for such, possibly in an alternative church. I think that is where her session of pranic healing is being held.
I am very interested in what she is doing because it involves telepathic healing as well. She says that they have been experiencing great success with sending healing vibrations to people who may not even know they are the subjects. I am sure many in blogland would be interested in any kind of healing as long as it worked.
When Mercedes came to take me out to lunch for my birthday, the day I took the header photo, she had been studying something about angels in our midst. I was fascinated with that, too, which I will have to talk to her about in more detail when I see her again.
Mercedes has had a fascinating life. She is of Irish descent and she went back to Ireland to college at Trinity. Mercede's father was a wealthy owner of a piano store in Baltimore I think. She was the youngest of a large family. Her parents died and the estate went into probate for many years. In fact I think it still is with many conflicts among the heirs So how do you beat that for interesting, an Irish heiress from Baltimore who went to Trinity, married an Englishman, divorced him and came out to Arizona to live, which is where we met her. I will be looking forward to our next encounter.

I have been lost in the past in a wonderfully lyrical poetic novel set in Sonora, Mexico, written by Luis Alberto Urrea

I have been revisiting some of my experiences living for 20 years in the Mexican part of town where I met many people who remind me of the characters in this novel, "The Hummingbird's Daughter". This novel is the essence of the Mexican experience, including a poor girl who becomes a saint. She is raped and murdered, is prepared for burial, but just as her services are about to commence, she opens her eyes and sits up. She has indeed been dead for five days but because of her psychic gifts and great healing powers she is given the gift of resurrection. She tells the astounded people around her she was being returned to heal and to bear witness.
Since she was born of a very poor mother who was murdered when she was very young, she relates to the poor, but her father, a rich landowner, has made it a habit to seduce all the beautiful poor girls he sees, and he eventually discovers that she is his illegitimate daughter, has a good inheritence of his intelligence as well as the gifts of healing and second sight from her mother. She has for example insisted on being taught to read as a very young child. Eventually she becomes the most important person in his life because she understands him, and he tries to save her when she is slated for death for inciting the natives gathering in the thousands to worship her as a saint.
But the dictator realizes he cannot kill her or the people might rise up and turn against him, so he exiles her and Tomas, her father, to the United States. Tomas leaves his ranches to his sons, legitimate and otherwise, and goes to join another exiled revolutionary friend in the U.S., who taught his daughter to read. He is putting out an underground newspaper for which Teresita has written articles defending the rights of the poor. On the way some of Teresita's militant following line a canyon to kill her guards and rescue her but she has the train slow down and commands all her followers not to fire a shot, and out of respect, they desist and she and her father go on to a new life in the States.