The Sojourner *Daniel's Steinbeck Lost*

*Daniel's Steinbeck Lost*, is Volume 1 of The Sojourner Series. It introduces Deja', a mythical grey female terrier, a companion of the various protagonists, male and female, as they appear, interact, disappear, and return over time, distance, and circumstance. Deja' is, perhaps, a curious echo of Holmes' Doctor Watson. Although each episode stands alone, it is nevertheless a part of Deja's journey. On occasion, it may seem that she has a dual existence, but, it is merely an illusion in the space-time continuum of the reader's twisted psychic. Daniel was born on a small dirt-poor farm in western Kansas on July 24, 1917. His mother became pregnant when his father, who was serving as a Marine on a U.S. Navy destroyer, came home on leave the previous year. He was the older brother of a fifteen-year old classmate friend of his mother. One thing led to another, and when his leave was over, his father returned to the war, to never return, his destroyer sunk by the Germans in an engagement in mid-Atlantic. Unknown at the time, Daniel's mother was pregnant with Daniel. It appears she never told the father, and chose to keep the child born on her parents' farm. As a consequence, his mother having never married, Daniel grew up on her parents' farm, which she later inherited, without the father he had never seen. A rather common occurrence during wartime. Oddly enough, in his youth, Daniel was never allowed to have a pet. Even a mutt-dog, which he wanted in the worst way. Very unusual in the rurals of the farm-country Midwest, then, and even now. By his teachers, Daniel was thought of as being somewhat of an introvert. Although he never was very outgoing, through the passing years of his youth he increasingly turned inward. He was an only child, his mother being a bit 'on the homely side', and had little opportunity otherwise, rarely leaving the farm to go into town, and visitors only came to the farm occasionally, and then only to see her father. When her parents died, both in the same year (it was rumored, by what few neighbors there were, that they must have died from mutual boredom), that settled it. Daniel was now the only person in his mother's life, and he the only one in hers.