The year was somewhere in the early 80’s and I worked in a little nursing home in Hico Texas… Gary Stewart’s song Whisky trip will be playing softly in the back ground of this little tale of my life and times… It seemed that Gary Stewart was a big favorite of mine back then, as well as now…..I mentioned where I worked because there was a girl there that I use to be friends with and for the life of me I can’t remember her name!… She had been my partner at work…. We worked together, drank together (on occasion) and I had been to her house MANY times! And I still can’t remember her name! I recalled this memory because my son called me last week and asked me how I came to name him Chase. The first thought that came to my head and the first thing I said was…. “Those dumb asses at the hospital  messed up on your birth certificate!… They forgot to put a “V” in your middle name!”…. At which he replied… “ How many times you got to tell me that?…. I want to know about my first name….. How come you named me Chase?”….. I asked “why” at which he replied…. “ Mom, why can’t you ever get right to the point and just tell me the answer? How come you make me suffer?” As I look back on that I think that maybe I do stretch out the answer to things….. But I had no intent on making someone suffer because of it!……CINDY!…. THAT’S HER NAME!…. No maybe not….. Anyway, She is the reason my son has his name… a few years before he was even thought of… Her father had been in Vietnam… his best buddy’s name had been Chase…. They had went over together but her father had come home alone…. Out of respect and out of the love he had for his friend, he named his first son Chase. Little Chase grew to be about 4 years old before he told his father he wanted to be called Daniel from now on… Daniel was his middle name and that’s what his mother called him and that’s what he would like his father to call him…. I listened to her story thinking …. “ When I have a son I think I will name him Chase… I like that name…” And so I did…. My answer to my son though was this…. “ You got your name from a dead soldier”…. I wished I could have told him that that soldier had been his father… then maybe he would have been proud to never have met him…I met my son’s father while I worked in a machine shop. My job had been to drill little holes into these small little barrels that were some part for an oil rig…. I would put the little barrel in a clamp that would close down on it and then a little drill would come down and drill the hole… then the clamp would come open and I would take a sharpened three sided file and scrape off the medal burr that the drill bit caused….. It was that knife that turned out to be my down fall at that job… well, that knife and some raging hormones… My son’s dad and I had been dating for about 3 months before I found out I was the other woman… Really I was the other girlfriend… He had found himself a high school sweetheart in the 10^th grade and hadn’t wanted to let her go…. I lived across the street from the abortion clinic and went over and got the free rabbit test they offered…. I was stunned and shocked… I kept it a secret for about a month before I told him one day while we were standing in the tool shop…. I had just sharpened that de burr knife and was holding it as I told him the news…. He’s reply was this…. “ OH MY GOD! I just asked my girlfriend to marry me!”… He wasn’t talking about me…. Rage and something I had never felt before came over me and I raised that knife up. His hand lay flat against the top of the wood half door as his other one shielded his eyes from me as if he were ashamed to look me in my face…. As I aimed the knife for the center of his hand and brought it down he still had NO idea what was fixing to befall him… Just as the knife reached his hand he looked up and jerked his hand back…. But not quick enough… blood didn’t shoot out like you might have thought… no it sort of leaked really fast around his hand and spread out on the wood…. The tip of the knife had caught him just between and under his first two knuckles… and lodged into the wood as well… He was screaming and my boss came running… I let go of the knife and needless to say he told everyone it was an accident… My boss knew better… he called me into his office and said he didn’t know what was going on but he wasn’t going to have any of that shit around his place of business… and I was terminated… The boss was his brother-in-law!… His sister’s husband!… He told everyone it was an accident so he wouldn’t have to tell the whole sorted truth about his self!… Of course I never would tell my son that I did that… I read later in life that changes in a woman’s body could make her do such a thing… It sure did me that one time so long ago….