You can’t have my army cot.

You can’t have my army cot. Its my couch, and when I don’t have a bed, when I am also living out of a duffel bag, it is my bed. My grandfather was a colonel in the army. (Isn’t it funny that we don’t spell it “Kernel”?) The cot was his cot, his bed and his mode of transportation after an injury n duty in china. He got drunk and drove a Jeep from a bridge, jumping from the jeep at the last minute. Drunken leaps from moving automobiles apparently run in my family. They carried him on that cot until he recovered. He was a statistician, so his job was not impaired by the injury. The Chinese would run him from the casinos at gunpoint, because of his statistical skills. Me, I can’t even multiply. I’m much more like my dad.

My father kept the hat that was part of my grandfather’s military uniform. The hat would rest on the plastic skeleton that had been used by the university’s medical department. That skeleton, along with the hat, became “Colonial Bones”, which was a model for many of my father’s drawing courses. My father is an art professor. He raised me after my mother left.

And so, I grew up to become the guy who has an army cot for a couch. If you’re looking for a couch, well, I don’t have one. Its a cot.