40. PART 3 - DREAM'S END - 1

Leigh Neuage webpage

Part Three should never have been written, as it painfully reflects how your Saturn at 27 degrees Libra, aligning with my ascendant at the same degree and sign, foreshadowed the profound impact your life would have on mine. This section exists only as a testament to the tragedy that struck us, and without it, our lives would have been entirely different.

Leigh goes to Sydney August 16, 2003

Life was going so wonderful. I was sitting at my desk at the University of South Australia, Magill Campus. In two-days we were flying back to the States. I had a full teaching schedule at the Russell Sage College, Troy, New York. An all-girls university at the time I was teaching; now I believe they are co-ed – meaning they will take anyone. I was to teach a course called “Speech and Interpersonal Communication”; whatever that was

.

Damn! I had only taught at the State University of Albany the year before, and basically, I was a ten-grade drop out in 1965 with lots of earned degrees in Australia between 44 & 60 years old and limited teaching experience, but I felt I could do anything. I had taught some classes as part of my PhD program at the University of South Australia but basically, I had little idea of what I was doing.

Back at my desk, I was completing my PhD. It took two more years before I received my degree due to all the mishaps in my life but at the time I was close to being finished, soon to be Dr Terrell Neuage – groovy 1960s drop out making good late in life.

Narda was meeting me at univ so we could go home and finish packing for our trip back to New York.

I went outside to meet her; she put her arms around me and said, “Leigh is dead”.

The rest of the story is below in the four or five sections of Part 3.

I didn’t even know Leigh was in Australia. Two days earlier I saw he was at the Dodgers in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

We got the next flight from Adelaide to Sydney. Narda did everything. I could barely move.

I will come back to this in the funeral section.

Leigh 's last photo - on his camera

Writing in Sacha’s apartment, Melbourne, Tuesday, 19 July 2005, six months since I have written anything. The last time I wrote, early January of this year, I was on a boat on the Murray River with Narda and her sons. When we got back to Round Lake, New York we got so completely involved with our renovations that any thought of continuing this was given away.

Melbourne has always meant more to me than it could possibly live up to in my world. When I first thought of leaving Lesia, a week after arriving in Adelaide, June 1980, I went to the Adelaide Public Library and began ‘researching’ where to live. I did not want to go back to the States because I did not really have a place to go to and I did not know what state, let alone what city, I would want to

start over in if I did go back. I had shipped my few belongings to Lesia’s house and they were still in route to Australia. I did not want to give up seeing Sacha and being a part of his growth. The naturally occurring sequencing in my brain, not really a singularity as in the theory of everything Terrell and how and where it should manifest but a ‘this is the only path’ surfaced in my ‘investigation’ of what to do. Melbourne seemed the likely choice. After one week in Adelaide I had concluded that it was one of the worst places to live in the world. I did not like the Australian accent, the trends of the moment, though now, twenty-five years later, I have no idea what they were, just that I did not like them, and I did not like the city of Adelaide. I felt like I was on an uncultured island (Adelaide) with the nearest island of culture, Melbourne, about a thousand kilometres away, and Sydney twice the distance beyond Melbourne. It was worse than living in the midst of Iowa.

Day of Leigh ’s funeral

On any other occasion we may have felt like we looked – happy – but we are all in grief –
I read Melbourne newspapers, books on the city and surrounding areas and decided that I would move with Sacha (this was before Leigh was born), and set up a tofu factory in the Dandenong Ranges outside of Melbourne. I plotted and dreamt and thought about it month after month then year after year and when Leigh came along and I was divorced and the tofu business was growing I plotted and dreamt and thought about it a lot more but for all the reasons in the world it never happened. The first time I came to Melbourne I was a student at Deakin University. It was 1993 and I barely had enough money to go. I took the overnighter for $30 and sat up all night on the hard seat and attended the first of the weekend workshops an hour after I got into Melbourne. That night I found a very seedy and cheap hotel for $20 and the next day I attended the Sunday workshops and in the evening sat on the cheap hard seat back to Adelaide. The next time I went to Melbourne was in April 1995 with Sacha and Leigh for my BA graduation and we took the day bus to Ballarat and the train to Melbourne from Ballarat and stayed at a youth hostel going the next day to Geelong for my graduation.

We never were able to move to Melbourne because ‘the mother’ would not allow us and in fact she had a court order stating we had to live in South Australia then eventually she took out a court order saying that the children and I had to live in Adelaide (we had previously lived about an hour from Adelaide in Mount Compass and Victor Harbor, Port Elliot, Middleton – actually we moved ten times in ten years). Then my Melbourne distributor of my tofu products went bankrupt owning me more than ten-thousand dollars which was the beginning of the downfall of my ‘well thought out and “planned”’ global domination of the bean-curd production and tofu-product manufacturing foray that barely seemed to grow beyond the wishful thinking stage. (A stupid sidenote is that after about forty-five years of drinking soymilk and eating tofu a month ago in July 2015 I stopped all soy products on the advice of Sacha’s girlfriend. Apparently, it has some accumulated side effects. For decades I have had a constant cough and that seems to have let up. I do not feel any better but then I take some 18 pills a day plus my weekly interferon injection trying to keep my useless life moving forward toward the moment when my ashes get tossed into the wind. Yippee! ).

Nevertheless, we never moved to Melbourne as a family. Sacha moved there a few years ago and Leigh was last there in 2003 before going to spring training with the Dodgers. Leigh received ‘Channel 7 Australian Junior Sports Star of the year’ award in Melbourne the same year, 2003, that Lleyton Hewitt received Senior Sports Star of the year due to his being the number one tennis player in the world. Now Lleyton is getting married to Bec Cartwright in Sydney in two days and I will be off to put some flowers where Leigh died two years ago in Sydney on August 16, 2003.

Leigh was on the 2004 Olympic Australian Team to play in Athens

I have been to Melbourne several times the past few years. Last Christmas I spent with Sacha and Georgia and the summer before (winter in Australia) Narda and I visited Sacha when he was living with Monica and we visited the year before too. Now Sacha has his nice apartment overlooking Melbourne and I have a couple of houses in New York and I will graduate in several weeks collecting a PhD (August 2005). We all change of course and so do most cities (not Albany, New York or Adelaide, South Australia though, those are the only cities I have been in over the past several years, worldwide, that is not dotted with cranes. Beijing, Melbourne, Hamburg, Amsterdam and other cities have lots of buildings going up. Not to mention where we lived in China for the past three years which has just gone nuts with building. A blog I was writing, though it became lost in cyberspace and on a crashed computer was titled ‘Albany to Adelaide to Albany’ why I would live in the two cities of the world that have no progress which of course I equate progress to cranes putting up buildings – maybe there is some deep metaphysical spiritual thingy happening that has slipped by my materialistic and worldly sight. Maybe the fact that I have lost the blog is significant. I like to think my changes are in league with cities like Melbourne (voted year after year ‘most liveable city in the world’). Maybe so. Maybe no.

Figure 274 InnerTalk
What Do Our Customers Say?
http://www.innertalk.com/testimonials-all.html  

"I recently purchased an InnerTalk Baseball tape. My batting skills have increased quite a lot since using it."
- Leigh Neuage, (age 12), Australia.

[As of 29 April 2015 the testimonial above from Leigh is still on their website – almost 12 years after my asking them to take it off. Leigh sent it to them in 1995 when he was 12. Obviously I got him the tape as I use to buy these until after too much money spent and no results I stopped.]

Years later, 2003, Leigh had a tape made up for him. I have the emails back and forth at http://leigh.neuage.info/MSN-email/InnerTalk%20-%20june%204th.htm where Leigh is requesting a special tape and which he eventually paid for it.

Briefly some of the correspondence went like this:

Hello again,
In a nature an Ocean soundtrack the cost is $500 and you can send me your credit card details (in two emails dividing your credit card number and providing the expiration date in one of the emails) for security or phone it in to our office (1-800-964-3551).  You can figure that the least expensive any other technology will cost is around $1500 and if Eldon were to do a complete profile as he has for others, it could run $5000 and upwards.
Thanks, Alan

From: "Leigh Neuage"
> Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 00:21:51 -0400
> To: "Alan -"
> Subject: Re: your question
> ok.
> so now will you come about to a final cost? I think just nature sounds is fine. Do you think it's possible to give me an idea of what the price difference between the technologies may be? And what you mean by 'and then some'...what is the best available??
> Let me know how to pay once you have a final cost
> thanks

There is a longish email from InnerTalk folks regarding costs - $500 an hour for their time plus other costs…

Leigh writes in June 2003 that he is ready to go ahead.

..

From: "Leigh Neuage"
>>> Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2003 11:05:35 -0400
>>> To:
>>> Subject: Re: your question
>>> Hello.
>>> I think I would like to go ahead with a custom program, but I have a few questions…

I sent the following letter to InnerTalk – which is still going strong online at http://www.innertalk.com/.

“No matter how many times I ask that the reference to my son, Leigh Neuage (age 12, Australia) be removed from your webpage your company refuses to do so.  Under the heading ‘baseball’ would you remove the above quote? Why not put the truth on your site that within a few weeks of paying more than $500 as a teenager Leigh decided to end his life by going off of a 15-story hotel balcony.

Leigh played Single A baseball for the Dodgers. He believed that these fool hearted tapes could actually help him with skill enhancements and thereby was hustled into paying $500 to have a tape especially made for him. The tape is now at a crime lab to see what was actually on the tape and I have asked that his name be taken off of your website many times but to no avail. You should be ashamed to run a business like you do filled with promises that produce such results. A cassette tape for $500 you have to be joking.”
Letter to Eldon Taylor of InnerTalk written October 2013
 

InnerTalk tape for Leigh

Sunday, September 21, 2003 8:33 AM Round Lake , New York

I am beginning to write again. Maybe this is a good a thing to do. It has been five weeks since I wrote last and it seems like another life ago – it was another life ago as I will never be quite the same again. Of course, at some point I will go back to writing my story from the beginning, continuing where I was at back at page 25. In actual fact I had not gotten very far with the story. This is too bad because I will now be constantly influenced by ‘the change’ in the telling of this story. And when this is one day completed and read this last section will explain all that went before it in a different light even though I am writing this part long before I continue with where I was at on August 15th at 8.30 pm.

I was going to write this story all the way through from beginning to end in a chronological – this is how I got to where I was at the time of leaving Australia in August 2002. It was going to be written for two readers. Sacha and Leigh. After all I have written a 150,000-word thesis for two readers – my two examiners, so why not write the history of how not only me, but also my two sons, got to where they are by August 2002? Not where we are at physically but where we are at in our mind, in our life, in our creative experience of how to best adapt ourselves to the 21st century as travellers on this planet. I wanted to explore the various spiritual and psychological steps that made me realise that we are creative beings and where we are now at is the sum total of not only every thought and action we have had this life time but every thought and action we have had in other lifetimes and other dimensions. From being in the Holy Order of Mans, from listening to many thousands of hours of subliminal tapes and studying astrology and metaphysics for forty years and with meditation and reading and thinking and listening to gurus of every possible world-view to my own writing and creative thinking I was sure I was close to being the realized individual that was master of my domain.

It is this sum-total experience that I was writing about to pass on to you two boys: Sacha and Leigh.

There was no doubt or question ever in my mind that you two would outlive me. Not just outlive me in years – which is expected, no parent should be left to outlive his or her children but to outlive me in experience, vision, consciousness and understanding. My father has been left to outlive everyone and he just does not want to be on this planet any longer, he has past 98 and is still going strong. But I knew that you two would outlive me in life too. You would have more profound thoughts more incredible experiences be more evolved and go to places in your consciousness that I did not even know existed. You may even compare some of your life to mine or see how I helped you get to some plateau or develop a thought beyond what us mere mortals who go before you are able to think.

Sunday, January 12 2004 Round Lake , New York

Without warning it all changed, your life, my life, perhaps even the fabric of the universe, changed forever. I am no longer writing this story to the two of you so that on one special day, perhaps a leisurely summer afternoon on a tropical beach to read a short history of our lives and why we are the way we are. The reason for writing now seems to have a big question mark over it. But in the midst of a second thought – those thoughts that come after the first thought – I find that I must continue to write to the two of you. The questions still remain. Why would I continue to keep writing when perhaps it would be best just to give it up? This urge inside – why is it? Emotional mental diarrhoea with no way to be stopped. What would happen if anyone else read what I wrote besides my two children? Why would they? Why would anyone care that the way I was and the way I raised you would have such ramifications as they did. But whatever happens with this writing whether I complete it or not now it is for a very small audience. I am just writing this for myself. To look at my life and try to figure how I got from one spot to another. A travelogue not of my soul not of my locations not of my mind but a travelogue of a planet spinning out of control through the galaxy. Well of course that does not make any sense and I am just writing this because I must.

I must see if I really do make any sense if my life makes sense. I must see if my life is the same as others I must find if there is a pattern a path. I am hoping to discover that events lead one to the next and if they did not then we would be somewhere else, and no matter how ridiculous that sounds if I can find how and why each event lead to the next then I may be able to gain control and instead of trying to predict the future I will be able to create the future which is the end result of everything I have tried to learn to do. I am not one of ‘those people’ who wants to share their life with the world thinking that there is merit in the life I lived. I do not want to be on any of those budget talk shows that air so frequently in the States. Why would anyone want to make public their life I have no idea and furthermore why anyone would lower their beingness by going onto a daytime talk show and discussing their personal life mystifies me even more. I watch some of those shows sometimes and I am just amazed how people will lower themselves just to be on television. I enjoy being a non-social creature who keeps my private life to myself. I do not want to make public those changes I talked about in the beginning of this story, who would care? Don’t we all go through these things?

• Getting married a couple of times,
• discovering I have a couple of incurable diseases,
• sweating out a PhD,
• having children,
• getting divorced,
• family deaths: my mother, my mother, my brother, my son, my father
• becoming an Australian citizen,
• failing the draft to go into the armed forces to fight in Viet Nam and therefore not receiving a purple heart for bravery,
• finding my blood-sister,
• beginning university when I was in my forties,
• starting to make WebPages in 1995,
• being adopted at age three,
• being told I was adopted,
• getting saved at a Billy Graham revival in Madison Square Garden at age seven,
• exposing myself during a track meet
• failing the same algebra, French and science subject in years 9, 10, 11
• demolishing cars and other accidents,
• becoming a self-proclaimed tofu king of Australia
• being bankrupt
• flying around the world 14 times in 12 years
• living for years in China
• doing picture-poems,
• joining a cult-religious order,
• LSD,
• going to prison,
• girlfriends,
• sex the first time,
• the only censorship and opposition to anything I ever wrote – Shenendehowa Central School, age 14 grade seven, for writing ‘there is no god and I am Him’ for which I was sent home and had many prayers said by my parents for my soul which had obviously gone to shit,
• meeting my blood-brother when I was 56…

And these events/experiences/trials have all been minor to a greater or a lesser degree though some verge on to major changes but only two have changed me without warning without ceremony without my permission. The first being my track meeting without a jock which changed my direction in life from a physical way and,
The second was August 16th, 2003, which changed me from my core of whoever it was I was to whomever I am to become.

I am now the other me. Perhaps I am not the me I came to this planet to be. When I look at the current me and the other me, I as well as anyone who saw me before and sees me now, easily notes the similarities. They are all there. Same height, same unruly, needing to be cut hairstyle, mustache, brown eyes, same office, though a bit neater now days, same accent (which some in Australia think is Irish, Narda says I definitely sound like a yank though not of any specific dialect or place but whatever it is mixed and crossed with from living in so many places it is the same. I even wear the same clothes as I use to. But behind the body mask is someone else. A pretender to the me I was. I no longer think of myself as Saint Terrell – which I had for decades written onto WebPages and other landmark places. Some outward behaviour is noticeable. The chair of the communication department at the State University at Albany has noted that I no longer ‘bounce’. She said that I use to bounce into her office and that I was full of energy. I have the same amount of energy – isn’t that a law of physics or something? The Law of Conservation of Energy is and always has been true, E=mc2 the energy in me is not destroyed it is just transformed.

‘We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed -- in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet…’

If it says that in the Bible (1 Corinthians 15:50-52) then it must be true. Of course I have read conflicting reports in other media and just because it is in print it is not necessarily true. I am just using the energy differently. I have internalized it. I move a bit slower, don’t laugh or smile as much and given the opportunity I will stay clear of as many humans as possible. Overall, I know how to act, granted no one has asked me to be in a major motion movie or even in a Broadway play or for that matter in any sort of performance from a stupid television sitcom – which they all are – to even the most remote smallish play. The only stage I have ever been on was in High School whilst being a trombone player in the Shenendehowa school band. But there was little acting done except when we were in concert I would pretend I was playing and not actually blow because I made so many mistakes that I thought the band leader would stop the concert and yell at me to leave the stage which would have been right up there in the world of humiliation with my track meet. I am a Leo I was born to act and the little I get to do is to perform as a professor in front of a class of students. I perform all the time now – acting like the me who I once was but who I will never be again.

Saturday morning happened and I should have known about it prior to it happening. But with all my intuition and training of spiritual connectedness with my loved ones I had no warning, no thoughts at all, actually

I was asleep at 5.30 am Saturday the 16th of August.

‘We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed -- in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet…

’

If I were to think about my sons I would have thought that Sacha was asleep in Melbourne and Leigh would be doing something with his baseball in the early afternoon in Florida or in Georgia or in some other southern city. Since before my days in the Holy Order of MANS I believed I was intuitive, I could know about something whether I was a part of it or not. I did not have any specific events to prove I could know someone close to me was going through something. I just knew I would know. I use to think I knew about girlfriends I was with – whether they were with someone else. I think I have been wrong every time though.  I would first have thoughts then almost visions of a girlfriend kissing or fucking someone and the more I would think about it the more I would become upset. The one common denominator was that I always thought I was right. I have ended several relationships because I was “intuitively” suspicious that the object of my affection was giving their affection to someone else. Of course this should not matter because as humans we all should be free to kiss or fondle or whatever we desire with whomever we wish as long as there is a mutual agreement. Whether we are conditioned by society to be jealous or it is a territorial old-brain instinctive thing from the early days of conscious humans is anyone’s guess. Animals get jealous when attention is diverted to another animal so it is logical that humans are jealous by nature/instinct. I have always wanted to be free of possessiveness and jealousies but I haven’t. 

My children are different. I use to know when they were ill even if I was nowhere around. I had a parental instinctive survival mechanism that was triggered whenever there was anything that was going too far astray.

I was keeping a distant loose track of Leigh’s baseball. I was an active electronic follower of his career. I was not a lurker trying to pursue Leigh in every corner of the Internet. I was a run-of-the-net-Google-searcher, but I had temporarily lost track of where he was.

Search engines had been my passion for a decade. How could I get to the top of search engines? I studied them for years and I managed to have some triumphs. There was a time when I could type in “poetry” and be listed as the first entrance of several million on altavista.com and on google.com as well as Australian Poets and several other headings. I am still the first on these search engines for my risqué story about Maslin’s Beach. Just putting in the word Maslin’s would list me first. Of course in the search world of 2015 my Maslin’s Beach story is nowhere to be found. Now I have lost interest and many search engines want money to get WebPages listed. There was a time when I had more than three-thousand Webpages and they were all listed. Currently (April 29, 2015) for Leigh Neuage there are 2,790 pages in the Google Search Engine and 13,500 for Terrell Neuage. This all took a turn for the worse at one point.

Leigh and I made Webpages since January 1995. We use to spend hours at Flinders University in Adelaide when the only online computers were in the library and at that time they had a room with five computers that were connected to the Internet. We learned how to make WebPages using the geocities and the angelfire’s templates. Eventually we learnt how to write html code and designed our pages from code only. We spent one day from early evening until the library closed at 11 PM just learing how to make tables in code. We had quite a struggle learning how to get information in boxes and to get our borders the thickness we wanted and the text to be the size, colour and style that would suit what we were doing. Now of course it is not necessary to know HTML and a WebPages can be made in Word or any other editing package. Those early pages have been deleted many years ago and the earliest one I have that Leigh did was when he wrote up a listed biography in mid-1998 at the age of fifteen of what he had done with his baseball so far and some of his interests - http://www.neuage.org/leigh_neuage.htm. Now I have taught students as low as grade three, about nine years old, how to make webpages and youtube videos but in 1998 it was all very new. We made hundreds of pages but in March 2001 he wrote me a letter asking that I delete any websites of him.

He had started his career with the LA Dodgers as a rookie at Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Florida and he was concerned that lots of websites with him on them would not be good for his life as a baseball player. I have no idea how any of the pages we made or that I made of many baseball teams that he had been on would reflect poorly on the Dodgers but someone had told him at Dodgertown that the Dodgers did not like a lot of pages about one of their prospects. Because Leigh was just beginning he was fearful of doing anything wrong. I spent several days deleting as many WebPages as I could but many sites I could not delete as I had lost the passwords into the sites that they were on. For whatever reason this seemed to aggravate Leigh and we had little communication after that. In April of 2001, two months after he signed and went to the States I went to Vero Beach to say hi. Whatever happened then I am not sure but we missed seeing each other. I stayed nearby in Orlando, Florida for three days and we even emailed one another. I said I would come the next day as I had missed seeing him and he said they would be away the next day playing in another town. I had said I would come to visit but he was not interested so I went to Cape Canaveral and looked at the International Space Station that was being built. I then went to Clifton Park, New York to see my father for a week and did the 24-hour trip back to Australia wondering why I had ever gone to the States for a couple of weeks to begin with.  I followed Leigh’s career the best I could during the rest of 2001 but because he was in a rookie league there were no stats put on the Internet. I would read the Vero Beach News Online sites every day in hopes to see something of him. I would put his name in their search only to get back;

Search results for "neuage"

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Leigh stopped in to visit where we lived together on Tenterton Avenue in Christies Beach one Saturday afternoon in September 2001.
Narda was with me and we were not yet married. I introduced her to Leigh. Those few moments were the only time Narda and Leigh were in the same space. I have been with Narda for fifteen years now and I was with Leigh for less than 20 years. That moment in 2001 was a transfer of whom I had spent an important part of my life with to whom I would spend the rest of my life with. There was a hand over of shared lives though of course at the time I would be unaware of anything more than a passing moment’s passing.
Leigh was a dying-star passing my world. Narda would be the star of my future giving life to my world.
He asked if I liked Florida and my only response was that I would have liked to have seen him. He collected a couple of trophies and some cloths and I said to come back any time and that the door was always open for him. It would be close on to two years before I would see him again. Two years does not seem like long but I was used to seeing Leigh so often, from the time I helped deliverer him on July 06 1983 until I took him to the airport at the end of February 2001 to fly to Florida to join the Dodgers I had never been without him nearby except for when he was at a baseball tournament for a couple of weeks. And when he was away we would be emailing back and forth frequently. I thought 2001 would be my worse year in my relationship with Leigh starting with my going to Sydney in January and watching him pitch and he did not seem happy to see me to our failed meeting in Florida in April to our brief encounter in September. There had been a high point in February when Leigh signed his contract with the dodgers and we did have a good February as Leigh prepared to begin his new career. There was no other communication for those months between us and I felt our lives were drifting apart with little either of us could do.

Transferred from Gulf Coast

As detailed above under 2002, in August 2002, Narda and I headed for Albany, New York. Leigh had been transferred to the Albany Waves during the summer of 2002. The only way I knew this was by tracking the Los Angeles Dodgers Internet page.

It was an interesting fact though of course it made perfectly clear sense, in my world-view of synchronicity that Leigh had been transferred to the Albany Single A division of the Los Angeles Dodgers in the summer of 2002 at the same time as Narda and I were off to Albany New York. We were in the same named city in different states advancing our careers.

Leigh started off well at his new home and pitched a couple of games including one in which he struck out 11 batters which at the time was a record for the club – it was tied the next week by another player but for a moment Leigh had the most strike outs in a game. It was a good start to moving up a division. Leigh moved up because someone was put on the disabled list and Leigh took his place. The nature of sports is the feeding off of another player’s misery to go up a notch.  

I was going to go to watch a game with Leigh pitching during 2003. I kept the schedule on my wall of when and where the teams were playing but the months came and went and just like during the 2002 season I had every intention of going to visit Leigh at some point. When Narda and I planned out our round-the-world trip the year before we had put in Miami as a stop on the way back to Australia in June 2003. At the time Leigh was with the South Georgia Waves and not in Florida as I thought he would be when we made up our trip in July of 2002. A primary reason for writing all this down is to keep track of where I was when. Since we have left the 1900s I am unable to get it sorted in my mind dates as clearly as I once could. And adding the mixture of winter in New York when it is summer in Australia and night is day and the day is the day before I have just lost track of the whole bloody thing. Nonetheless planning a trip a year in advance is an unpredictable thing to do when one has had a life as unpredictable as mine. I had missed seeing Leigh for 2002 and I was determined that I would see him in 2003.

I had seen Sacha twice in 2002. He had come to see us in Adelaide for a few days during which time I was always trying to feed him. I had years of parenting still left in me and I had not had anyone to do it on. Narda and I had stayed in Melbourne with Sacha and his girlfriend of the day, Monica, and her six-foot snake that she danced in clubs with. Narda was insecure about the snake and pushed a large chair against the cage door at night. The only thing that had gone wrong with the snake was when Monica was dancing with it one night and it began to constrict around her neck. Sacha pried it off, thinking he would have to kill it but it just turned out that the snake was hungry. When they bought it they were told they only needed to feed the snake every month but it turns out that the snake needed feeding every two weeks and was hungry and Monica’s neck was warm.

NEXT - 40. PART 3 - DREAM'S END - II - Australian 'Idol' shocked by death

Leigh Neuage webpage

Leigh Neuage first homepage which he made at age 15. 1998 This is here in memory of Leigh Neuage

Leigh Neuage on Facebook - obviously not - I made this page for him on Facebook in 2003 and for decades people have visited this/his page to comment on their love for him

Videos of/about Leigh Neuage

Leigh Neuage Memorial Sydney 2008
Leigh Neuage pitching -1 South Georgia Waves 2003 - workout one week before death

Leigh Neuage ballparks pitched in - 22 videos

Leigh Neuage memorial Christmas 2006

List of many webpages mostly of teams Leigh played on

Leigh Neuage ashes are 1/3 holding up my computer screen, 1/3 Sacha Neuage has on a shelf in his house in Melbourne, 1/3 his mum put in this grave in Adelaide

Leigh Neuage

Leigh Sebastian Kenneth Neuage

• Bats Right, Throws Right
• Height 6' 4", Weight 210 lb.

• Born July 6, 1983 in Adelaide, South Australia Australia
• Died August 16, 2003 in Sydney, New South Wales Australia

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