For that "glitch in the matrix" thing going around
In 1972, she ran away from home. She was gone for several months, and when she got home my grandmother started shaking her and screaming about how someone had told her my mother had no shoes and my grandmother was sure it meant my mom was dead.
She finally calms down, and they piece it together: my grandmother had gotten a phone call from someone who breathed two or three times, said âCathyâs in bare feet,â and hung up. Except thatâs not what they saidâmy grandmother had written the date in on her calendar, and on that date my mother was in Bare Feet, Arizona. She knew definitively that she was in Bare Feet because on that date she called home to talk to my grandfather, who told her Uncle Jim had diedââgot himself shotââand that she had missed the funeral. Ready for the glitch in the matrix part? Here we go:
âMy grandfather had no recollection of the conversationâwhich would have been a strange conversation indeed, since Uncle Jim was still alive and, in fact, didnât die until 2009, eight years after my grandfather. However, my mom did miss the funeral, thanks to a delayed flight. Cause of death? Supposedly, it was suicide, but there were enough indications for the family to believe that was a pile of horseshit, not least that shooting himself in the head with the rifle indicated wouldâve been near-impossible.
âMy mom was going by the name Patricia Danko when she was on the runâshe had a fake ID and everything. She hadnât called herself âCathyâ since leaving home and nobody knew she was traveling under an alias.
âAccording to my mom, she never gave a name for herselfâeither Patricia or Cathyâwhen she was in Bare Feet, and she wouldâve had no reason to. Bare Feet had maybe a hundred people in it, and they were just stopping for food and gas.
âThis isnât just an account from my motherâmy dad was with her at the time, and he remembers both the phone call and the truckstop.
But thatâs not the weirdest nor the creepiest part, which is this:
âIâve been trying for three years to find Bare Feet, Arizonaâon the Internet, on old maps, by talking to old Arizona cowboys, and there was never a Bare Feet, Arizona. My mom convinced my dad to drive âthrough Bare Feetâ on the way back from Texas in 2013 and there was no town anywhere along the highway, not even the abandoned bones of one. Iâve looked for Bare Feet, Barefeet, Bear Feet, Bare Feat, Bare Foot, Barefoot, and Bear Foot. None of these exist.
My mother stopped in a town that doesnât exist, ate in a restaurant that never was, made a phone call that could not have happened and was apparently answered by a ghost from 40 years in the future, and later that night someone called my grandmother from a number that turned up on her phone bill only as a pay phone in Arizona to say that single sentence, âCathyâs in Bare Feet.â
