Imagine being in your early twenties and getting to know a brilliant woman, who knows more about the deserts in the world (from editing 5 massive books about them ) than anyone else alive!
On top of that, she was an elegant dresser with a disarming smile and drove around in one of the last turquoise flip top Studebakers ever built that she kept in mint condition.
Patricia Paylore is the name of that grand gal I worked with at the Office of Arid Lands who edited my first Desert writing.
Heroes of mine, fifty years older than me, would come in and say hi to her, lamented that she rebuffed their proposals to date or marry before World War II.
She was not only smart and well read but wise. I hope each of us either meets someone like that ir becomes one ourselves. Not clever but wise.
And then there is Dale Pendall, one of the last Beat Poets who kindly accepted my suite of pens about Diana if the Dunes a woman hermit from the 29s in his Journal of Back Country Writing called KUKSU. I met him through Gary Snyder, and tenet him a quarter century later in Santa Cruz, when he had become an ethnobotanist and world expert on Absinthe.
That’s how paths recross and enrich our lives. Great editor as well as a great poet and historian of hallucinogens.
