We were driving into New Orleans for an evening, intending to try some jambalaya and then head out to a club to dance. I was driving my 1968 Chevrolet Impala with New York plates. My friend from Mississippi was in the front seat, and Kinthissa, dressed to dance and looking beautiful (as always), was napping in the back seat, leaning up against my guitar. I had long hair and was wearing a cowboy hat. It was at the height of the Vietnam conflict. On a lonely stretch outside of New Orleans a police cruiser approached from behind and pulled us over on the side of the road. My friend turned to me and said: "Oh sh-t, I didn't tell you I have drugs in a newspaper in the trunk. This is serious - in Louisiana it could be hard-time." As I sat there in stunned silence and open-mouthed, an officer with a flashlight emerged, shined it in my face and said, "Ok Jesse James get out of the car with your hands up." I did so. He placed me with my hands against the car, and patted me down. The officer secured my license and registration and started to return to his squad car. At that point, Kinthissa emerged from the back seat and asked the officer if she could speak to him for a moment, not really asking permission but talking to him as he returned to his squad car. They engaged in animated conversation in what seemed like an eternity to me but was probably no more than a few minutes. Then Kinthissa got back in the car, handed me my license and registration and told me to follow the squad car. I asked her what she meant, and why I would follow the squad car. She told me just to do what she said. I asked her where we were going. She said, and I am pretty sure these were her words: "To eat some authentic jambalaya." Stupefied, I followed her instructions. In ten minutes the officer waved to her from his window, she waved back, and we were at a restaurant by the side of the road that we never would have found without following the squad car, sitting down to eat some authentic jambalaya.

What did she say to him anyway? I am not really sure. Under my persistent questioning, she said that, among other things, she told him my father was a World War II veteran and was stationed for a while at Barksdale Air Force base in Louisiana, and how much she loved the town in Mississippi she had visited a while back.

And how did she know that about my father? I had never mentioned it to her. The only possibility is that she elicited it from my father when she met him, not a small feat since like most veterans he didn't often talk about the war. This remains a bit of a mystery, but what is not a mystery is that Kinthissa saved my hide that day. It took courage to step out of the car in those circumstances during the Vietnam conflict, and cool under fire to diffuse the situation like she did. Kinthissa inspired me and set an example for me with her courage in the face of life's vicissitudes, including her own illness.

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