L.O. from Montana

L.O. was a rancher from Montana and he let everybody at the clinic know it.

A tall, sturdy man with silver hair, he spoke with a Western accent at length about his history of wrangling horses and his penchant for marijuana.

He had the ability to digress the tributary of a group conversation to some allegory about a stallion he’d shown in a rodeo, or about how the Great Plains of Montana looked at dusk and his theory about God’s ceaseless and unwavering beauty.

L.O. was a gas during group therapy and at AA and NA meetings. Often chiming in with some nugget of wisdom he’d procured throughout his life.

We’d smoke cigarettes together under the canopy on the main square of the campus, a whole group around him while he’d tell us his stories.

L.O. still shows up to alumni meetings and the whole crowd roars when they see him.

It was only later, much later, after he’d left that I’d remembered that David Lynch had also hailed from Montana.