y name is Doug Fairchild, and I'm an artist. It took me a long time to realize that, but it's a fact, and goes a long way toward explaining why I tend not to wear a tie. The beret is another story. People say "Oh, of course you

Billy ~ Wet after A Swim in The American River

wear a beret. You're an artist." But that isn't it. I bought my first beret in Germany in 1953, because a girl thought I'd look dashing in it. I kept it after she was gone, because it keeps my head warm, my hair out of my face and doesn't get in the way of the camera dark cloth. But the hair has gotten thin and cameras no longer require a dark cloth. Still, it makes me look dashing.

That's my pal Billy on the left. Billy is a Brittany Spaniel and my friend. We have come a long way together, since the day in 1981 when I met two little boys in front of Albertson's Grocery in Paradise, California, and one of them said "Would you like to have a nice puppy, mister?" I looked at Billy, and Billy looked at me with his warm brown eyes and said "They're throwing me out. I don't know what I'm going to do. If you take me I promise I'll be good." I did, he was, and we have been together ever since.

We've been through some great adventures together. We have swum the wide rivers and climbed the tall peaks. Billy wasn't scared of the Devil himself. He may have been a '49er in a past life, because he was always diving down and bringing up large rocks, as if still looking for that big nugget. Once, on the North Fork of the American River, not far from where the Gold Rush began, a current sucked himunder and held him down. I found him trying to walk upstream along the bottom and brought him up. He was more careful after that.

Later on, we both caught Lyme Disease from the ticks up there in the canyons. The doctors at Kaiser told me there wasn't any Lyme Disease in California. Billy's Vet threw up his hands and said he didn't know what it was. After a year of suffering, with Billy nearly gone and in such pain I thought I'd have to put him to sleep, I found a physician who had kept up with his education. He said it sounded like Lyme, and one of his colleagues had found Lyme infected ticks in Tilden Park in Berkeley, and besides, the blood test had a 30% error factor. So since I had all the classic symptoms he didn't need another test. He just treated me for it with heavy duty antibiotics.