"Jerry Dale" Bonus Content

Jerry Dale’s Bottomless Lakes Adventure is very much inspired by truth about my mother—just as Kinfolk and a Yellow Meat Watermelon was very much inspired by truth about my father. I’ve said this many times before—in my heart, we were the Eternal Three.

I was the littlest of equals in our trio, and I’m the one left here in this ol’ world to tell stories.

The 5th of April marked a year. Along with so many things I can hardly bear is the idea that after 12:07am on the 5th of April, I will never again be able to say, “A year ago, Mama and I…” did anything. Mama’s love was bottomless. The depth of my loss is bottomless.

Just as the cowboys who discovered the nine cenotes that became the Bottomless Lakes tried to “get to the bottom of them”—discern their depths—and never were able to—I’ve never been able to find a bottom or limit to the depth of my mother’s love for me. For others, too. Those she loved had bottomless love from her. She was tiny in stature and immense in heart and capacity for love and loyalty and devotion.

While she was here with me, we did almost everything that we had the resources, time, energy and IMAGINATION to do together. So many things. And toward the end of her life, what we did most vigorously was write. I say “We.” I mean “We.” Mama insisted I had to write. For years, before I had any idea what it was going to add up to—if anything—I did kind of write random stuff. But 15 years ago, my writing started to take some shape, and it was with her presence that I was able to do it. Every word, every thought that came from my mind through my fingers as keystrokes, I then read aloud to her. And only after it had all gone into her ears and through her mind could I call it done—could I even do it.

So now. Well, now I’m telling the stories she empowered me to write.

If you’ve followed Corvairs and Horny Toads, you know that Jerry Dale and Ike and Priscilla Gibson are mostly modeled after me and my parents, Dick and Billy Jo.

Most of my stories are purely fictional with kernels of truth—but some, like Jerry Dale’s Bottomless Lakes Adventure, hew very closely to truth about Mama and her family.

Mama’s senior high school trip was to the Bottomless Lakes. She was deathly afraid of water. The incidents that happened with the windmill pond, the “marcel” portraits, working at the drugstore, her wedding, hers and Daddy’s first new home, and the four sisters coming there to live with us in that small house with the bottomless capacity for love—all true.

Mama saw to it that we were all taken care of. Daddy saw to it, too. Together. And together, they gave me a foundation of love and devotion that has lasted my lifetime.

My mother. Mama was a bottomless fount of love that I drink from everyday.