Cervantes wrote his masterpiece in the dying days of the age of chivalry, making fun of knights who were seeking to save damsels in distress, fight implacable foes and ride around with a faithful squire doing good deeds.

The Don's heart was in the right place, but he was often a little off center. For instance, his horse, which he thought of as a great stallion, sagged; his helmet was a borrowed barber's basin; and the army at which he launched an attack was a row of windmills.

Don Quixote, of course, didn't see any of these things as they actually were. He saw them as he would like to see them, and it got him in a lot of trouble.

It's that way with D. He's usually on the minority side of any argument. He likes, as another friend says, to back the latest losing cause and he relishes being thought of as peculiar. So, naturally, he is. Even his children on occasion get exasperated with him, although since they have known him longer than most folks, they tend to be tolerant.

I find D. a little like Don Quixote—odd, but somehow lovable. Even though you know he is slightly cracked and that he is about to take off on another tangent, you tend to want to wish him well. It is not so much that he is fanatic (although he can be), it's that he stands for what he stands for with such faith.

Cervantes' novel, of course, is about more than the dying days of the age of chivalry. It pokes fun at a way of living that had survived beyond its usefulness ... if indeed, it had really ever had any.

It's inspired many copycats, me among them.

Years ago I started my own version of the Don, calling him instead of Quixote, Don Quicksalt, in part because Quixote is hard to spell. In my novel, the Don appeared one day at a bicycle shop in San Diego intent on buying its most expensive bike.

There he meets his soon-to-be faithful squire, a descendant of one of California's first governors, Sam Pico. Pico is married to a Mexican-American named Angela. The Don talks them into riding north with him to the Oregon border. Riding north on a bicycle in California is not generally a good idea. Usually the prevailing wind comes from the north, which makes bike riding twice as hard, but, of course, the Don would want to do that.

Soon they set out, Angie driving the following Volkswagen van in case of trouble, Sam and the Don pedaling away. They meet Dulcinia, the fair maiden, in a McDonald's, where she is frying hamburgers. They also run across a band of bikers who try to do them in. They escape when Dulcinia bangs the gang leader on the head with the French fryer.

Various adventures follow as they struggle northward, not the least of them tilting at the windmills in Tehachapi Pass. They rout the bikers and finally, near the middle of the state, Don Quicksalt's real person and mission are revealed. He's really a Basque sheepherder from Jarbridge, Nev. (one of the Silver State's more remote spots), and he is out to raise the Basque flag over the capitol in Sacramento and proclaim California once more a Spanish or maybe better yet a Basque possession.

Of course, he doesn't. As with the real Don Quixote, reality sets in, and he and Sam are arrested, but he finally manages to get back to Jarbridge with Dulcinia, who presumably will stand by him and his sheep through the rest of their lives together.

I started this story, but, sorry to say, I've never finished it. In true quixotic fashion I managed to lose the hard copy of the 20,000 or so words I had finished. They're also on a computer disk, but, alas, it is an old single-sided Macintosh disk that is so old no present-day computer can read it. Talk about lost causes ...

When I think about it, I am always reminded of my friend D., and I feel a little more sympathetic to oddballs, especially since I really wasn't qualified to be one.

I tend to think reality wins out in the end and that fantasy only works in the hands of a few. No Basque would ever claim California for Spain, that's for sure. Basques don't really think of themselves as Spanish, but as a separate entity, a unique people.

And perhaps because very few others can either speak or understand their language—like Finnish, it's different than most other European languages—not a lot of folks really understand those who like to be alone with sheep for long periods of time.

So my story never came to anything.

But then consider: if you'd proposed a couple of years ago that California would be ruled over by an Austrian weightlifter turned actor and then millionaire, who married into the family of a former Democratic president and became a Republican, you'd have been laughed out of town.

Now that's really a quixotic story.