Cap can't go. Ginger can.

Cap was my 75-pound Great Pyrenees mix who was born stray in my barn and who logged thousands of miles of highway and love with me -around 100 miles every day for years.

At the end of October, I was writing this gofundme aimed at finishing a book about Mississippi music and musicians- when he suddenly died.
His death stopped and turned my world upside down and I put the book on hold -and then decided I would instead make Cap part of the story. It is still a book about Mississippi music and musicians.

The book is part of All Roots South, an organization to promote music education in public schools in Mississippi.  This book I am finishing is called What Would PigPen Do and follows the GratefulDead-spawn Dead & Company on tour, with some others like Springsteen, X, Widespread Panic, Ray Wylie Hubbard, north Mississippi blues and more thrown in. The book/tour starts when Ginger and I went to see Dead & Company in New Orleans in 2018 and follows the tour in the summer coast-to-coast. She joined me in the middle, but did not sleep in Greyhound stations like I did when she wasn't with me. Along the way, I've interviewed not just musicians but music lovers working in record stores, bookstores and locally-owned restaurants, bars and music venues about Mississippi musicians. It seems everyone has a least one they can talk about, plus I want to spotlight such places in each city I'm in. 

This book, called What Would PigPen Do? was scheduled to end at Madison Square Garden on Halloween. Cap was going with me. When he died I decided the thing to do is make him part of the book by visiting animal shelters while I was on the road and writing about them in the same way I was record stores and such. 

But, it was a dark time and I could not get it together. There will have to be another book and tour sometime in 2020 that includes animal shelters.  Losing Cap just knocked the hell out out of me. Ginger and I went to Memphis two days after he died to see the new Springsteen movie, Western Stars, and I don't even remember it. It was a damned bad time. 

I would not have had Cap were it not for Ginger. When he and his 12 siblings were born stray, the dog pound told me they would take them all and ship them to New Hampshire. Ginger insisted Cap be separated from the others because he was the runt and she worried he was going to be killed by the bigger pups. 

So, he stayed with us and then just stayed. The day he died was horrible, a bright Mississippi afternoon stained dark with tears. 

That was followed by one bad day after another, and then the day came that I jokingly told Ginger Dead & Company was playing San Francisco December 30th and 31st and that we should go in Bertha, my cargo van, and sell my book Dear Tonda and her famous pimento cheese sandwiches in the parking lot of the shows. To my stunned disbelief, she said yes. 

I told her: "You understand what we're doing? This is to finish the What Would PigPen Do? book."

"Okay," she said.

"We'll sell books like I did on the 2018 tour and we'll sell your famous pimento cheese sandwiches."

"Okay," she said. 

"We'll sleep in the van," I told her.

"Ummm..." she said. 

That's okay. I still cannot believe my luck that she is willing to drive withme to California to finish this book and sell pimento cheese sandwiches in a parking lot. 

I'm so thrilled, I'm even going to let her teach me to dance on this trip -and I'll come back to Mississippi and do it in front of people (and I mean something different from what I've done at Dead shows for decades). 

This is gofundme, but you get something for your money: my current and future books.

The gofundme is mostly for fuel and motels. Yes, I know I could sleep in the van and if Cap were with me, we would. But Ginger will be with me and she wants a motel room. I'm fine with a room if she's in it. I calculated the fuel on the high end at 4,600 miles at $3 per gallon and, especially with Ginger with me, I have to do some safety things like a couple of new tires.

I got away with taking 17-year-old Ginger over state lines in 1985 in my jalopy Volkswagen, but I gotta be more responsible these days. 

The $2100 is needed Tuesday, December 24th.

Any amount can be donated, but:

$10 gets you an e-book of the 8th edition of Dear Tonda, my 300+ page anthology of essays and columns that have been published over the last 30+ years -it’s mostly hitch-hiking stories).

$25 gets you the paperback edition, hand-delivered or mailed anywhere in the United States.

$45 gets it mailed to you anywhere in the world. The 8th edition will be available in late January, or I can mail you the 7th edition right away (but you really rather have the 8th edition). 

These prices are the same for What Would PigPen Do (which is shaping up to be a love story, and I don't mean of music...). That book will probably not be available until March at the earliest. 

A book of the same nature in memory of Cap will be researched and written in 2020. 

Any donation amount whatsoever is appreciated. 

All Roots South also promotes the establishment in Oxford of a Mississippi Music and Musicians Museum to honor the Mississippians and the genre and to serve as a perpetual fundraiser for the music departments of public schools in Mississippi. Students who have a developed music background perform better in math, science and other subjects.

And they all need a dog, too.