Pahoehoe!

Family Newsletter

2012-01-17T13:07:00.006-06:00

Dear Friends,

I dropped the ball on mailing cards and gifts this year so I felt the need to send a family letter. Working holiday retail hours was so time/energy consuming that I only managed to put up a tree two days before Christmas and did not attend a single advent service. Next year I will be better prepared! I am working at Woodcraft. It’s minimum wage with no benefits but the discount is substantial. I don’t believe I could afford my woodworking hobby without it. It’s been an adventure. I lost part of my little finger when two co-workers dropped a 300 pound piece of maple on it! This year I made pens and bottle stoppers. Next year I am making small tables and pepper mills.

Wilson graduated from Northern Arizona and he is singing these days..... “Just Desi and meeeeeeee and baby makes threeeee....”. A baby girl is due April 16th! They moved back to San Antonio and stayed with me a few months. It was so nice. They are now renting the house in which we raised the girls. Wilson ran the Rock and Roll Half-Marathon. I’m impressed. He works at the JW Marryott Hill Country Resort. Desiree is a music therapist in public school and offers the occasional piano lesson.

Danielle is a junior at Arizona State. She is on the dean’s list and recently changed her major from Global Health to Mathematics. She’s too smart to be related to me! She has a boy friend, Marlus.

Roxanne graduated from Brigham Young in dance. She and Sam have been hiking and climbing in Utah. He is a graphic designer and won a statewide honor, the Copper Ingot. Roxanne is teaching dance in public school. They started an online business on Etsy. They glean second hand shops around the country for vintage designer clothes and resell them. Sam is the photographer and Rox knows fashion. By the time you get this letter they will have moved to New York City to accept a job.

I couldn’t be more blessed. My New Year’s wishes for you....someone to wonder where you are, peace from making the complicated simple, and sleep through the night.

Love,

Steve/Steven/Daddy (Kozmo sez “meow”)

“He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.” - Socrates

A place for everything.....

2011-10-07T21:56:00.006-05:00

Posters, photos, maps, etc. covered every inch of wall and ceiling. Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night offered it’s beauty and soul. The life sized space walking astronaut on the ceiling gave visitors a welcoming wave. The eight foot tall geologic map of Texas pulled a “WOW!” from their lips. A ten foot banner signed by 150 students wished me a happy 40^th. The questions to a thousand answers, large and small, were stapled to the wall behind the drill press or band saw. “See, here is Berwick-Upon-Tweed, from where the first DeBord sailed to America in 1685.” “Remember the tiny moons of Jupiter y'all saw last week in my telescope? Well, here is a Voyager photo of Io spewing sulfur volcanoes.” Quotes from favorite artists and scientists graced the smaller spaces along with National Geographic photos of the likes of Machu Picchu and Easter Island. Scallops of red chili pepper lights hung from the ceiling while random Christmas ornaments formed constellations if you stood in exactly the right spot. Reggae music soothed and WAR extolled their funk. Under the lid of the box holding precision instruments was a postcard of a beautiful woman from New Orleans, gold threads in her bangs, playing the saxophone in lingerie and high heels. The tools were both powerful and peaceful. Visitors made their own ball point pen out of exotic hardwood....spinning smoothly on the lathe. They could not believe they had done it themselves. The girls staged plays for the neighbors, rode their skates, created chalk masterpieces, and hammered nails in scrap wood while I worked on projects. Once I came out of the house to find a pizza delivery boy standing in the middle of it all, mouth wide open, cold pizza in his hand. I’m a little surprised myself by the whole scene. I am a bit of a minimalist who does not collect or exhibit. Most of all I prefer anonymity. I don’t even put bumper stickers on my car. Maybe that space was an entrance to a bigger place that never ended. Maybe the peg board with a home for each tool was a comfort. Anyway, you would have adored the place.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. - James Thurber

The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do. - Galileo Galilei

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night. - Margaret Mead, anthropologist (1901-1978)

Wow!

2011-06-21T23:58:00.005-05:00

My daughter Roxanne and son-in-law Sam have created the most amazing vintage clothing shop on Etsy. You must see it...... http://www.etsy.com/shop/roxandsam

Another daughter Desiree and son-in-law Wilson are going gangbusters on eBay. I feel inspired.

Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents' pots and pans, the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum. ~Susan Sontag   

Santa Rosa

2011-02-17T00:37:00.009-06:00

The scene of many a Saturday afternoon triple matinee of black and white flickers with stars that had already faded.....horror movies with Vincent Price and Bela Lugosi, westerns with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Tarzan movies with Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan.....movies and cartoons for 25 cents. Saturday night movies had John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence or Elvis Presley and Ann Margaret in Viva Las Vegas or Sean Connery as James Bond in Gold Finger. Charm's Big Pops for a nickel, not that we ever got one. They had these seats on the end of every other row that two people could sit in together. A couple of times we stopped on the way home at an ice cream parlor called Rettigs's Heap-O-Cream. They had a flavor that was vanilla with the chocolate syrup already inside. Imagine that.

Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before. - Steven Wright

Three Questions

2011-02-16T22:51:00.029-06:00

I listened to the lyrics of a song tonight and it took me to task in a most inconvenient way.

I sailed a wild, wild sea

climbed a tall, tall mountain

I met a old, old man
beneath a weeping willow tree
He said now if you got some questions
go and lay them at my feet
but my time here is brief
so you'll have to pick just three

And I said
What do you do with the pieces of a broken heart
and how can a man like me remain in the light
and if life is really as short as they say
then why is the night so long
and then the sun went down
and he sang for me this song

See I once was a young fool like you
afraid to do the things
that I knew I had to do
So I played an escapade just like you
I played an escapade just like you
I sailed a wild, wild sea
climbed up a tall, tall mountain
I met an old, old man
he sat beneath a sapling tree
He said now if you got some questions
go and lay them at my feet
but my time here is brief
so you'll have to pick just three

Chinese Translation

M. Ward

It's like the day I took my divorce papers to the courthouse. I went alone very early and the courtroom was empty save for the judge. I don't even remember if it was a man or woman. I placed the papers on the bench.....papers I had stressed over, cried over, and detailed the future of my children.....gave up every nickel I could find as if money was any kind of solution. The judge never looked up or read the words. He/she pounded the top page with a stamp and said, "Drop it in that cardboard box by the door on your way out." Thirteen words and it was done. I was not special. I was just another. My children in a cardboard box.

I walked outside onto the courthouse steps bathed in blinding sunlight. Being a teacher I was rarely on a downtown street during a work day with the sun high in the sky and busy people bumping shoulders. I was used to seeing city streets dark and semi-deserted. My first thought was, "Now what?" Actually, the what was done but the how was a huge mystery. I felt I would fall down the steps if I didn't get out of the way. Up to this point I couldn't take a step. Now I had taken the biggest step of all and was suddenly lost.

Well, that was then and this is now. But the "escapade" I played for many years had been selfish and shameful. How could I have been arrested for so long by something that is universal to everyone? I still don't know the "how" but I have a better perspective of the "what".

Live your imagination, not your history. - Stephen Covey

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night. - Margaret Mead

100 years ago today....

2011-01-01T01:06:00.008-06:00

(click on photo to enlarge)

In 1880 my great grandfather, Gottlieb Schultz, sailed from Germany, landed in Indianola Texas, and set up his forge in Yoakum as the blacksmith and carriage maker. Ernestine gave him four children....Herbert, Walter, Olga, and Edna. In 1911 fireworks were illegal in most towns so on New Year's Day Herbert was showing his pals how to "shoot anvils" in his dad's shop. Place an anvil on a stump, place an iron piston ring on the flat surface, fill the ring with black powder, and place a second anvil on top of the ring. The last step was to touch a red hot poker to the iron ring setting off the powder. The force required to lift the anvil was deafening. To be on the safe side the boys had found a knot hole in the wall from which they could extend the hot poker from outside the building. The iron ring was not up to the task and split. It traveled through the wooden wall and into Herbert's belly. They carried him to the smithy's office. In those days, the best you could do with a gut shot was sit by his side until he died.....which he did several hours later.

He was making these spurs at the time. He planned to set a silver dime on each of the four buttons (the round metal post that holds the spur to the the leather strap). Somehow the spurs made it to his cousin who gave them to me as he was dying in 1969. On a lark, I considered wearing them at a rodeo in Manor TX in 1976. Fortunately I didn't. My draw, a bull named Fat Albert, would have eaten them as he did me. Everyone will tell you I am NOT a collector but this unfinished piece of American folk art deserves a home.

Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity. ~Henry Van Dyke

The Prodigal Baby Head.

2010-12-31T23:39:00.018-06:00

(click on photo to enlarge)

When the girls were small we spent many afternoons at the neighborhood pool. One day, in the midst of splashy fun, I stepped on something and reached down with my hand. The girls were very curious and huddled around. Up came a disembodied baby's head greeted by girly squeals. Little did I know that moment would take on a life of it's own. It became a family joke over the years.....like spotting a horror video at the store sporting a photo of a pile of baby heads that looked identical to our pool discovery.

Anywayzzzz......lately I heard the baby head was still around, being passed like a white elephant. Today I was taking a photo of my advent wreath when I noticed a mangled pine cone on top....the very one I had purposely placed on the bottom. When I lifted the errant cone I was greeted by an old friend. Yikes! For a moment I thought El Niño had finally arrived, wrapped in swaddling pine cones.

Twenty years later it still freaks me out and makes me laugh at the same time. Did I ever tell you I love my daughters?

"The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings. And why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. Calloh, Callay no work today! We're cabbages and Kings!. . . .Oh, uhhh, oysters, come and walk with us. The day is warm and bright! A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, would be a sheer delight!" "Yes, and should we get hungry on the way, we'll stop and uh... have a bite!"

p.s. Danielle later pondered on who might be passing around the headless doll body every Christmas.

Khartoum....Khartoooooummmm.....

2010-09-29T16:32:00.009-05:00

We had our first cool front Sunday and the high was only eighty. I opened all the windows and Kozmo Kitty found a new "playmate". He cornered a tiny baby squirrel who was screaming his head off. He didn't chatter like an adult. He shrieked like a bird. I shooed the cat away and let the baby go back up a tree. Thirty minutes later he was back down the tree giving the cat some squirrelly 'tude. Okay, dumb-ass, you're on your own now.

It's been two days and they are still at it with the mother squirrel on a tree branch clucking like a tommy gun. She won't come down, Kozmo follows the little menace around in a crouch, and the pint sized rodent keeps yelling, "I ain't no bandleader!" Kozmo likes to sleep on my bed so I hope I don't find any souvenirs in the sheets...... ......ahhh....ahhhhh......AAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

If you didn't see The Godfather and you're still trying to make sense of this.....fahgettaboutit!

What do you think this is, the army where you shoot 'em from a mile away? You gotta get up close like this and bada-BING! you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit. - Sonny Corleone

Make it decaf and hold the sprinkles.

2010-09-14T18:12:00.008-05:00

Does Bud "Blockhead" Adams realize how many more fans his team would have if he had not changed the name? There are diehards all over America who follow their favs no matter where they go. I had hoped to fall in with the Houston Texans but....that name....and that logo.....and those colors are soooo generic.....an attempt to make the team a regional draw.....and anything wrapped in red, white, and blue will sell these days. Ugh! What happened to football mascots and colors that don't match? If I told you there were angry dirty cattle loose it could mean anything. But if I told you there was an angry grimy rough neck coming your way you would know that means trouble. Someday Google or Apple will bring an NFL team to Silicon Valley and call them the Mt. View Lattes whose colors are forest green and brown, and their logo will be the recycle sign.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. - Charles Mingus

Does No Mean No?

2010-08-24T09:31:00.016-05:00

The words persistence and perseverance do not mean the same thing. Persistence is repeating the same actions expecting different results. For the most part this only works in cases of chance or chaos. But perseverance means working your way through a problem....doing different things to get different results.

Kernels of truth I heard today.

If a husband strikes a wife, that is not a clue that something might go wrong, it is a clue that something IS wrong. This is no time for persistence.

Why do some abused people so easily forgive their abuser? A person controls another by paying them lots of attention. The kind of person who can be easily controlled needs/wants lots of attention. If they get it, they aren't going to easily give it up even if part of that attention is abusive.

Society mistakenly thinks that when a man says no that is the end of it but when a woman says no that is the beginning of negotiation.

Sometimes the abuser says no in order to gain control of the victim's emotions.

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over. - Edna St. Vincent Milay

Four down, twenty two to go.

2010-08-23T02:08:00.011-05:00

Today I turned on the boob tube in the middle of a breaking "news" story from Hollywood.....Jennifer Aniston used the R word. Would her career be ruined? Would her new movie tank because of a possible boycott? I watched this story for a full five minutes and couldn't figure out what the R word was. They never once referred to the context of it's use. I had to go online and Google comments from trolls on message boards to find out the word was "retarded". Oh geez....or should I say "G word".

First of all, I never let a student get away with saying "F you" thinking that a code letter made it cleaner. Secondly, I can see the value in not using words offensive to the public but I never agreed with the ditching of a word just because it's overuse (and abuse) had changed it into something considered offensive. That just means that every ten years we need new monikers for everything that bullies use for ammunition. I have epilepsy and I have heard the fellow afflicted bristle at terms like epileptic (My affliction does not define me!), fit (It's a seizure. I'm not having a hissy fit!), and so on. However, I am all for attaching a social stigma to words that were INVENTED for the purpose of abuse....such as the N word. But that brings us back to the original problem. Now there is the R word to go along with the N word, the F word, and the C word....and I know you know which one that is. That only leaves twenty two letters and I doubt we will find rampant abuse among letters like Z, Q, U, and the like. What are we going to do when we run out of code letters?

As an epilogue, I am reminded of an incident thirty years ago when the R word was part of the English language and only abused by a creepy minority. In the days before campus security, an Anchor Hocking salesman sneaked into the teacher's lounge to ply his wares and invoked the name of our home economics teacher as his reference. We all turned to look at this teacher because she was sitting right next to me. She simply replied, "Liar." We all turned back to look at the busted salesman. Without missing a beat, he said, "Well, is anyone here the retarded teacher?" Cast stones if you wish but we burst out laughing and everyone one of us raised our hand. Not only was his grammar a mess but we all had to admit to feeling a little retarded after a long day of teaching. I'm sure he would have said "special ed" teacher if he had known the lingo or maybe he should have just said the "R teacher".

That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. - William Shakespeare

Recipe for.....whatever!

2010-08-14T15:19:00.006-05:00

Did you ever make barbecue sauce and it tasted blah and you kept putting in more stuff and it just tasted different and weird and you kept adding a dash of this and that and you were running out of space in your little sauce pot and you knew you would end up with a quart of liquid crap and finally there was room for one more pinch of whatever and then.....OMG!.....WORLD'S BEST SAUCE EVER!!!....on my first try. This will be my signature sauce for life......secret herbs and spices. All my friends will be impressed. I will be a guest on famous TV shows. Wait a minute.....what's in this sauce? Amateur!

The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. - Thomas Henry Huxley

Happy Children

2010-08-13T10:43:00.012-05:00

I saw the most wonderful thing last night. Thirty middle schoolers came into the Whataburger ....the girls wearing dresses and the boys wearing long sleeve white shirts and ties. They talked incessantly...no cell phones, ipods, ear buds, or texting.....totally engaged with each other. No shouting or cussing or "look at me" behavior. The best part of all....they were happy...no slouching, pouting, sour looks. None of them spoke English so the words blended into a generic chatter and the scene became very visual in nature. A lady watching them started tearing up. I asked if she was OK and she simply said, "They're so happy."

Happy children. How wonderful.

Blue Skies

2010-07-27T09:57:00.003-05:00

Blue skies,

Smiling at me.

Nothing but blue skies,

Do I see.

Taste this.

2010-07-12T09:36:00.011-05:00

Why won't Jelly Belly put their Mango Chili flavor into the stores? And when are they going to make bacon flavored? They already have snot, puss, booger, and scab. Stupid kids!

Middle age: When you're sitting at home on Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you. ~ Ogden Nash

.....and they were all laid in the same coop.

2010-07-12T08:40:00.004-05:00

I know......the colors are reversible.......but this just happened to be my experience today.

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. - Anne Lamott

Some of us make soup!

2010-06-24T16:36:00.007-05:00

For years I have cooked certain dessert recipes that call for cream and didn't worry about it. I give most of my cookies away and dessert is a rare thing anyway. But over the years I have added soup recipes that call for it. Nothing more shocking than to find out you've gone into grocery stores for years memorizing nutrition labels but somehow one ingredient slipped through the cracks. I drink only skim milk and it is fat free. Whole milk has 8 grams per cup. That is more than a third of what I'm allowed each day. Today I looked at heavy cream and found it has eighty, that's eight zero, grams per cup! Those industry turds list a serving of cream as a tablespoon. They pretend like we are all buying it for our coffee. Some of us make soup. And the worst part is that I don't give soup to the neighbors. It all ends up inside me. Oh crap! Did someone say cholesterol?

Whenever someone says, "I'm not book smart, I'm street smart." All I hear is, "I'm not real smart, I'm imaginary smart." - unknown

A most confusing legacy.

2010-06-10T10:09:00.014-05:00

Texas only has one star. We do not consider ourselves part of the South. Even during the Civil War we made lousy Confederates. Our history books don't mention the execution of Hill Country abolitionists who refused to enlist. So at first I paid little attention to the now popular move to erase names like Jefferson Davis from our institutions. But as time passed motives became more clear. I'm sure if there were any schools in Germany named for Adolph Hitler it made sense to find a better name. But Jeff Davis? Just how far DO you go to erase history and when do we simply call it political currency.

So a few citizens with no connection to a local African American school got on the bandwagon. The school district, mostly Hispanic and African American, decided they couldn't have the name Davis on an older middle school. The African American neighborhood and its former students fought the change and lost. With respect to where I live and the color of my skin I didn't have a dog in the fight. But my mind immediately went to the old saying "Those that don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Years earlier, declining numbers forced them to merge a Hispanic school with an African American school and they came up with a ridiculous compromise....keep the African American name (Wheatley) and the Hispanic mascot. Twenty years later, after pressure from the Hispanic population, the name was switched back but not the mascot. Now the African American community has no living memories of their school. Well, at least it began as a compromise, even if the majority got their way in the end.

Back to the "doomed to repeat it" part of this. In spite of their track record for compromises, they decided to keep the name of Davis Middle School but change it to someone named Davis who is more respectable than the president of the Confederacy. They chose S.J. Davis, a distinguished African American with 30 years of leadership in the community. So on the big day a reporter asked one smiling eleven year old if he knew for whom his school was named. Yes, he replied, my mama told me it was Sammy Davis, Jr. Great sound bite for the five o'clock news. At this point the question finally forms in the collective public mind...what does the S.J. stand for? He was known as Stoney to everyone. Stoney.....as in Stonewall Jackson....the great Confederate general whose image is carved on Stone Mountain Georgia along with that of President Davis and General Lee. Well, it didn't erase all our history but it's a start.

A tie ball game is like kissing your sister. - Darrell Royal

Newlyweds

2010-05-03T09:56:00.005-05:00

I love thee - I love thee, 

'Tis all that I can say 

It is my vision in the night, 

My dreaming in the day. ~ Thomas Hood

Behind the Curve

2010-04-28T12:45:00.011-05:00

The Cozy still shows first run movies, changing them every Thursday. It has been part of the Von Minden Hotel at least as far back as the 20’s. In the 70's, before each feature, it still showed ancient hand painted slides that advertised businesses. The slides were so old they had one digit phone numbers. My dad said the lady selling tickets and popcorn was the same person from the 1920's! It resembled an old high school auditorium. The wooden seats were in line so you had to spread your knees when you sat down to keep from hitting the seat in front of you. Sometimes we would drive from the country into Schulenburg on Saturday nights. One weekend Danny and Joey went with us to the country and saw a movie. The place was always empty and deathly quiet before the movie. Someone knocked over an empty glass coke bottle and it rolled on the concrete floor all the way down to the front....slowly colliding with every seat on the way. (roll roll roll tink!.....quiet….roll roll roll tink!) We never laughed so hard in our lives….trying to hold it in….blowing snot bubbles.

More often we went to Halletsville and the Cole…an old but more traditional theater with a lobby and a balcony. One night we went to see The Way We Were and I looked at the ticket window tag board and said to my dad, “Hey, let’s sit in the balcony! The prices are cheaper.” He shut me up so fast you would have thought I just cursed the Queen of England. Later he explained that there were still traditions in small towns concerning race. One of them was the theater. Blacks sat in the balcony and got cheaper tickets. It was not required…it’s just the way it was. Whites did not sit in the big gazebo on the courthouse lawn….only elderly black men. Of course, my dad always explained away his prejudice. He failed to mention that at one time African Americans were not allowed into the theater at all. He opened with African Americans being poorer so they were charged a lower price. (His reasoning for their poverty would be an essay I'm not sure I could write.) I wondered why you couldn’t see the remains of things like separate water fountains and restrooms. Later it dawned on me that those just amounted to an outhouse and a water barrel. I was raised in the city and did experience segregation but was not aware at this different pace in change. My dad believed that everyone on both sides of the color line wanted it that way. Of course, he never asked anyone what they wanted.

Segregation and bigotry are despicable but they need to be understood. Many people would say this kind of essay is nothing more than a white man framing it as an academic subject. Well, I say to them, understanding my dad’s generation and choosing not to justify their actions is how peace is approached. The self-righteous who want us to wear blinders and delete offensive words from history are no more justified than he was.

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness. - James Thurber

....he would know what to do.

2010-04-25T14:45:00.025-05:00

While visiting Debbie in Colorado, Sandy and I went into town. Debbie was on the back patio with the girls spreading peanut butter and birdseed on pine cones to hang in the trees when a bird flew into a large picture window. In the midst of trying to figure out how to help it, one of the girls said, "I wish Daddy was here. He would know what to do." Later, out of ear shot of the others and in her usual mean way, my sister carried on about the silly myth called Dad. I said that’s how it works. If a dad respects his small children and pays personal attention to their condition they will think he is the universe. As time goes on they will discover he is not perfect but the humility, love, and respect was not an act. And if he trusts and respects them then they can trust and respect themselves. Debbie attempted to dismiss that bit of parental insight as vanity on my part so I asked her what they did with the bird. She said everyone worried and stressed until it got up and flew away....nature took care of itself; Daddy had nothing to do with it. I told her that is exactly what I would have done except we would have stressed less because Dad has proven trustworthy in the past. The children witnessing this near death experience were just as much a part of nature as was the bird. We ended in disagreement....she stating that each person is an island that should be enlightened, always do as it pleases, and never depend on the others......a very strange cocktail that, in my opinion, might be proposed by someone feeling a shade superior. I believe we should strive for a balance between independent thought and the safety of confidence in others that have earned our trust.

Wisdom and deep intelligence require an honest appreciation of mystery. – Thomas Moore

Humility, that low, sweet root, from which all heavenly virtues shoot. – Thomas Moore

Dancing at weddings.

2010-04-21T21:25:00.018-05:00

This is the song my daughters chose for their daddy dance at their weddings. This is my all-time favorite song ever. I love how the chorus is a play on words for each verse. There is a lot of romance in this ditty. Click on this link and sing along! No joke.....really......do it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FKLJg5P12s&feature=related

Miles and Miles of Texas

I was born in Louisiana, down on the old bayou.

Raised on shrimp and catfish, and Mammy’s good gumbo.

Got that ramblin’ fever, said good-bye to ma and pa.

Crossed that old Red River, and this is what I saw.

chorus

I saw miles and miles of Texas, all the stars up in the sky.

I saw miles and miles of Texas, gonna live there till I die.

Rode up into Cowtown, the cradle of the West.

Just ask any cowboy; he’ll tell you it’s the best.

Met a Texas beauty, got friendly with her pa.

Looked into her deep blue eyes, and this is what I saw.

chorus

Started tamin’ broncos, made every rodeo.

Till I met a rough one, his name was Devil Joe.

Grabbed hold of the bridle, to ride this old outlaw.

Threw me from the saddle, and this is what I saw.

chorus

Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance. - Oscar Wilde

Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat. ~ Ben Hecht

kisses are a better fate than wisdom. ~ e.e. cummings

A letter dated 6-29-2008.

2010-04-21T04:50:00.008-05:00

Today was your grandfather's birthday (Steve Jr.). He would have been 87. His grandfather (George Washington DeBord) was a farmer who fought in the Civil War, a war that had many names back then. His dad (Steve Sr.) was the superintendent of the school district. His mother (Olga) was the daughter of the Yoakum blacksmith and carriage maker (Gotleib Schultz). When he was a toddler his dad accidentally backed the Model T over him and broke his arm. He graduated from the high school in Schulenburg when he was 15. He hitchhiked to Austin and finished his degree at UT when he was 19. His dad gave him $40 a month for school which put his dad into debt. Jobs were so scarce during the depression that he would not let his son work to earn money. It was a common practice among serious minds because they believed that men with families should get the jobs to feed their children. During and after WWII he was a merchant seaman (engineer) for about 8 years until he got married (Jewel Creed). I was his last child (I think). He was a petroleum engineer for about 18 years, a stock broker for two years, and petroleum engineer again for about 15 more years. In 1969 he inherited a hundred acres from his second cousin. That was the straw that broke our family's back.

No matter how flat you make the pancake there are still two sides. – Dr. Phil

It is wiser to lead than to push, to request than to demand, to suggest than to insist, to inspire than to compel, to motivate than to manipulate. - William Arthur Ward

Thunder and Lightning!

2010-04-19T20:56:00.017-05:00

This week Kozmo, my kitty, heard thunder for the first time. He was pacing and crying like a baby to go outside so out he went. A few minutes later came the loudest, closest clap of thunder/lightning I had heard in a decade. The long drought had made me forget what it sounded like. There on the patio was Kozmo walking upright on his hind feet....legs, body, and neck stretched to the max, eyes like saucers, mouth wide open, and front paws straight overhead. It was almost as if the static electricity that caused the lightning was pulling him away from the Earth. He didn't ask to go outside the rest of the day.

It reminded me of the first time Desiree heard lightning. She spent her first three years in the San Francisco Bay area and frankly I can't ever remember seeing a thunderstorm there. Her skin and flesh went one way while her skeleton went the other. You could almost hear bones and teeth arguing with each other like marbles in a can. The look on her face was priceless. Welcome to Texas, Desilu!

Can an atheist get insurance against acts of God? - unknown

But, they’re high in protein…or….melts in your hand, not in your mouth.

2010-04-18T11:23:00.005-05:00

Danielle’s relationship with bugs was a bit complicated. When she became old enough to walk she often had at least one hand in a tiny fist. (see photo above) It usually contained a single M&M in a sad state of meltdown...colors running everywhere. Outside the treasure sometimes turned out to be several pill bugs curled up in their signature pose. Then one day I discovered the M&M’s and the pill bugs had the same function...portable snacks! She was toting treats for later. From then on she just wasn’t allowed to make a fist. Years later we were retelling the story and having a good laugh when her sisters told me about their favorite form of sibling torture….just the kind of thing parents are afraid to hear. They would save up roly poly bugs and fill Danielle’s pockets. When the bugs came crawling out, Danielle would run in circles in a mild panic. I wonder why she just didn’t eat them.

The Methodists

2010-04-18T03:58:00.002-05:00

The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, was born in Lincolnshire, England in 1703. He became an Anglican priest, and later joined a religious study group. The group was nicknamed the Methodists because of their emphasis on methodical rules of living. They prayed, and they fasted according to strict schedules.

In 1735, John Wesley came to this country. He was the priest in a settlement in Georgia, but they didn't care for his preaching and they ran him out of town. He went back to England and traveled around the backcountry on horseback, preaching to all the ordinary people he came across, through England and Scotland and Ireland, preaching 42,000 sermons along the way. Later they would call this a circuit rider.

He was always a member of the Anglican Church. His only idea was to create small groups within the Anglican Church to meet for prayer and Bible study. But when Methodist missionaries traveled to the United States, their ideas took hold. Their followers considered themselves members of a new church and they appointed their own bishops and ministers and created their own laws, separate from those of the Church of England.

The Methodist Church became the church of many colonists on the frontier, and by 1850, the Methodist Church was the biggest denomination in the United States. A convert needed only to believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and was everyone's personal savior. Methodists believed that all other questions about Christianity were up for discussion.

Methodists established colleges, hospitals, childcare facilities, retirement homes – more than any other Protestant denomination. William Booth, who founded the Salvation Army, was a Methodist. Methodists started Goodwill Industries in 1902. They started the Temperance movement. A Methodist founded the YMCA. They were a big part of the abolitionist movement and the anti-segregation movement.

Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford Hayes, William McKinley, and President George W. Bush were all Methodists, as well as Barry Goldwater, Walter Mondale, George McGovern, and Hillary Clinton. This short list, containing the most liberal and conservative politicians in our history, shows how diverse the membership is......anywayzzz, now you know.

That's coming out of your allowance.

2010-04-18T03:12:00.008-05:00

Recently I have posted some things written by others even though that was not my original intent for this blog. Today I was telling someone about what it was like to be the caboose on the birth order train and I got to thinking about my own three children. Then I remembered an internet forward I had saved on the subject and felt compelled to share it. It is very humorous if not entirely accurate.

BIRTH ORDER OF CHILDREN

The Announcement

1st baby: You begin wearing maternity clothes as soon as your OB/GYN confirms your pregnancy.
2nd baby: You wear your regular clothes for as long as possible.
3rd baby: Your maternity clothes ARE your regular clothes.

Preparing for the Birth:

1st baby: You practice your breathing religiously.
2nd baby: You don't bother because you remember that last time, breathing didn't do a thing.
3rd baby: You ask for an epidural in your eighth month.

The Layette:

1st baby: You pre-wash newborn's clothes, color-coordinate them, and fold them neatly in the baby's little bureau.
2nd baby: You check to make sure that the clothes are clean and discard only the ones with the darkest stains.
3rd baby: Boys can wear pink, can't they?

Worries:

1st baby: At the first sign of distress--a whimper, a frown--you pick up the baby.
2nd baby: You pick the baby up when her wails threaten to wake your firstborn.
3rd baby: You teach your three-year-old how to rewind the mechanical swing.

Pacifier:

1st baby: If the pacifier falls on the floor, you put it away until you can go home and wash and boil it.
2nd baby: When the pacifier falls on the floor, you squirt it off with some juice from the baby's bottle.
3rd baby: You wipe it off on your shirt and pop it back in.

Diapering:

1st baby: You change your baby's diapers every hour, whether they need it or not.
2nd baby: You change their diaper every two to three hours, if needed.
3rd baby: You try to change their diaper before others start to complain about the smell or you see it sagging to their knees.

Activities:

1st baby: You take your infant to Baby Gymnastics, Baby Swing, and Baby Story Hour.
2nd baby: You take your infant to Baby Gymnastics.
3rd baby: You take your infant to the supermarket and the dry cleaner.

Going Out:

1st baby: The first time you leave your baby with a sitter, you call home five times.
2nd baby: Just before you walk out the door, you remember to leave a number where you can be reached.
3rd baby: You leave instructions for the sitter to call only if she sees blood.

At Home:

1st baby: You spend a good bit of every day just gazing at the baby.
2nd baby: You spend a bit of everyday watching to be sure your older child isn't squeezing, poking, or hitting the baby.

3rd baby: You spend a little bit of every day hiding from the children.

Swallowing Coins:

1st child: When first child swallows a coin, you rush the child to the hospital and demand x-rays.
2nd child: When second child swallows a coin, you call your doctor's nurse and wait for the coin to pass.
3rd child: When third child swallows a coin, you tell them "That's coming out of your allowance."

I want my royalties.

2010-04-15T01:09:00.007-05:00

A while back Jerry Seinfeld's wife was on Oprah describing her new book. You take steamed vegetables and hide them in food. She proceeded to describe my own children’s’ culinary history in detail. You can puree any unsalted vegetables and use it for baby food. Roxanne fell for that in the summer of '88. You can shred zucchini or carrots and put it in muffins. The girls fell for that in '90. You can puree pumpkin or sweet potato and put that in food. The girls fell for that in '91. You can substitute applesauce for fats in baked goods. The girls fell for that in ’93. You can puree steamed white parsnips and mix it with mashed potatoes. The girls have been falling for that since '02. The only new thing I learned is that you can dip chicken chunks in puree of any vegetable and fry them into chicken nuggets. I'm not sure the girls would have fallen for green or orange chicken nuggets. The only surprise is how Oprah went on and on about how unique, new, and clever it all was. Of course, I doubt her guests get anything free from the Godmother of entertainment so her interest is their interest...thus all the "free" promotion. That's why I get nervous every time I see a politician on her show....that always belongs to the same party...yikes! Anywayzzz, I want some royalties from that book. Ha ha.

Today I saw one of Oprah’s spinoffs, Dr. Oz. His wife wrote a book on how to keep the American family together. They should talk to each other, spend one night a week together at home doing things, go to church together, etc. Now, correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t she describing the Latter Day Saints? I am Methodist, my children are Mormons, and we did all these things for 20 years. Is America really in such sad shape that we need to pay money for these “secrets”? I repeat myself….I want my royalties.

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. - Charles Mingus

Is you is or is you ain't my baby?

2010-04-15T00:49:00.001-05:00

My choices are less about the reality around me and more about an internal value system which doesn't always make sense. Introverts can be a challenge to love. When I bought my home I surprised my realtor. That internal system, running for years, somehow already knew the where, the when, the how much, etc. I only looked at two houses a couple of blocks apart on the same day and chose one. Yes there is a price to pay for this but I can't help it.

Small decisions, on the other hand, have fewer functions and each takes on a greater importance. A kitchen knife only does one thing so it better do it well. If it does a lousy job every time I pick it up then I’m going to replace it. I can visualize the poor employee watching me in a store security camera while I'm looking at air fresheners. "He's narrowed it down to two smells...is he EVER going to choose? For heaven's sake just pick one!"

I do my worrying before I choose and not afterwards. My friends think it's the opposite because I do evaluate the hell out of my choices and I'm somewhat verbal. They think it's regret...no matter how much I tell them it's not. When I cook for someone they have to hear about the things that need correcting. It’s very annoying to them.

I have learned not to regret personal choices that didn't work out but that is a different topic in itself.

Anywayzzz...I'm offering you two quotes....but you have to choose one. Ha ha.

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare. - Japanese proverb

Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness. – James Thurber

That really really doesn't sound like James Thurber but you get what you get on the internet.

Like Riding a Bicycle

2010-04-08T01:32:00.001-05:00

Like Riding a Bicycle
by George Bilgere

I would like to write a poem
About how my father taught me
To ride a bicycle one soft twilight,
A poem in which he was tired
And I was scared, unable to disbelieve
In gravity and believe in him,
As the fireflies were coming out
And only enough light remained
For one more run, his big hand at the small
Of my back, pulling away like the gantry
At a missile launch, and this time, this time
I wobbled into flight, caught a balance
I would never lose, and pulled away
From him as he eased, laughing, to a stop,
A poem in which I said that even today
As I make some perilous adult launch,
Like pulling away from my wife
Into the fragile new balance of our life
Apart, I can still feel that steadying hand,
Still hear that strong voice telling me
To embrace the sweet fall forward
Into the future's blue
Equilibrium. But,

Of course, he was drunk that night,
Still wearing his white shirt
And tie from the office, the air around us
Sick with scotch, and the challenge
Was keeping his own balance
As he coaxed his bulk into a trot
Beside me in the hot night, sweat
Soaking his armpits, the eternal flame
Of his cigarette flaring as he gasped
And I fell, again and again, entangled
In my gleaming Schwinn, until
He swore and stomped off
Into the house to continue
Working with my mother
On their own divorce, their balance
Long gone and the hard ground already
Rising up to smite them
While I stayed outside in the dark,
Still falling, until at last I wobbled
Into the frail, upright delight
Of feeling sorry for myself, riding
Alone down the neighborhood's
Black street like the lonely western hero
I still catch myself in the act
Of performing.

And yet, having said all this,
I must also say that this summer evening
Is very beautiful, and I am older
Than my father ever was
As I coast the Pacific shoreline
On my old bike, the gears clicking
Like years, the wind
Touching me for the first time, it seems,
In a very long time,
With soft urgency all over.

Grandpa Putting Salt on His Ice Cream

2010-04-08T01:30:00.002-05:00

Grandpa Putting Salt on His Ice Cream by Jay Leeming

He would hold the salt shaker
in his right hand, and tap the end
over the dark chocolate.
"It enhances the flavor," he would say.
He had more ice cream in his life
than his ancestors ever did, and more butter,
and more milk, and more eggs.
And when these things filled his veins
and pulled him down,
when the barn of his heart caught fire,
it was those ancestors that his eyes
rolled back to see;
strong Norwegian brothers
driving their cows out of the fields
towards the market and the city,
towards railroads and electric lights,
towards world wars and cameras,
towards his body, his thoughts
and his life.

Aria

2010-04-08T01:20:00.003-05:00

Aria by George Bilgere

Jussi Bjoerling, that soaring tenor,
Was pulled down from the air.
My father pulled off to the shoulder

And closed his eyes. Nessun Dorma,
It might have been,
or Cielo e Mar.

Hotter than Hades in the car
But I knew enough by then
To shut up. Even my sisters
For once stopped their idiot fidgeting.

Somewhere that summer, Bjoerling
Was dying of booze.
My father had lost a lung. No more
Singing forever.

Through the bridal veil
Of a cigarette, my mother
Stared hard down the highway,
Waiting for it to be over.

The Silken Tent

2010-04-08T01:14:00.002-05:00

The Silken Tent by Robert Frost
A Witness Tree 1942

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

THE Bomb.

2010-04-06T18:56:00.020-05:00

At first I didn't understand. If the atom bomb could destroy everything then why did we prepare for it? Every Friday at noon we performed something called a "civil defense drill". We kids called it the "air raid sirene" because it employed the same horn they used in WWII for air raids. There was a very tall wooden pole at the community center with an enormous yellow megaphone on top that rotated 360 degrees and let out a wail you could hear for miles in all directions. Wail is the right word. As it turned toward you the high frequency of sound waves would produce the sound of a locomotive bearing down on you. Then as it turned away the pitch dropped as it would when the train passes you by. An early lesson in Doppler's Effect. As soon as we heard it we marched into the hallway, sat with our backs to the lockers, knees up, heads down, and hands on the back of our necks. Then one day I saw children from the mid-west on the television news, doing similar "tornado drills" under their desks. Maybe we used the hallway because tornados couldn't get you under the desk but The Bomb could.

No one ever told us that the drill was not to protect you from the bomb landing on your roof. It was to save you from the shock waves of an explosion just a few miles away. I had to learn this by becoming a science teacher. Fifty years later comedians still make use of that misunderstanding. I also wonder if the Russians ever considered Friday at noon a made to order moment of attack. "No General....I'm sure you are mistaken about the Russians attacking. That alarm always goes off on Friday's at noon."

A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure. – Lee Segall

.....and a little child shall lead them.

2010-03-24T12:23:00.012-05:00

My daughter's husband complimented her in a way for which we should all wish. He recognized a kindness in her that a self-centered person would never have noticed. He continually discovers unique qualities and tells us about them. He is a keeper.

I have to admit to something that I don't think parents are supposed to be thinking. Whenever I hear kind words about her it usually reminds me of something we did when she was little. I say "not supposed to" because that hijacks the compliment about her as an individual. But when he described the care with which she replaces items found on the grocery store floor, no matter how many isles they have traveled, it reminded me of her childhood.....in that old HEB with those narrow isles....in the days when everyone passed on the right. We picked things up from the floor and put them back. If we found frozen peas thawing on top of the dry pasta we would say that was not nice of someone and Desi would return the peas to the freezer isle. I was always fearful of crossing the line between encouraging her to be a considerate soul and appearing a critical cranky control freak. When Wilson, a person she met as an adult, describes such a quality....I get my answer. All a parent can do is be their self and either it rubs off or it doesn't. Some of it is up to the inner self of the child. Desilu was born a good person and all I had to do was toe the line. If you do that every single waking moment then good children not only become good adults, sometimes they make adults good.

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
and the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.

Isaiah 11:6

No Business for Old Men

2010-03-20T13:47:00.008-05:00

In "No Country for Old Men" an aging sheriff following a psychotic killer is feeling overwhelmed. He is no longer able to make the world a safe place for his constituents. A friend tells him "....you can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity." I took that to mean that change is inevitable. Sometimes we can direct that change but the tide of social evolution will not be stemmed even by your most noble efforts. To believe otherwise is pure vanity.

This bit of wisdom came from an impoverished disabled man living in the desert...gunned down in the line of duty. He was not bitter about his fate because in the midst of his attempts to shape the world sometimes shit happens. When asked if he held a grudge against the man that shot him he said, "Well, all the time ya spend trying to get back what's been took from ya, more is going out the door. After a while you just have to get a tourniquet on it."

I left the teaching profession very early....drowning in a sea of untested theories dispensed by the inexperienced. I could clearly see what was being done and could articulate evidence why it was a bad idea. I firmly believed it was not a case of "old dogs can't learn new tricks". But, if that's true, how was I so deftly elbowed aside with fifteen years left in my career. I stuck with my gut and retired. For a year now I have feared it was a matter of everyone else going the wrong direction and me not wanting my fingerprints on the impending train wreck. How bodaciously vane can you get?!? I never regretted the decision but still hoped for some kind of epiphany to help me feel better. I have the Cohen brothers to thank for that. My vanity did not lie in the details of our new education system....it lay in the flawed notion that armed with the truth I could stem the tide until theorists came to their senses. I just wish their mistakes weren't so large that I felt the need to let go so soon. But....that's okay. Some principles weren't meant to be compromised.

Entropy is not what it used to be. - unknown

Maybe the older you grow and the less easy it is to put thought into action, maybe that's why it gets all locked up in your head and becomes a burden. - Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

I should call him Swiffer.

2010-02-15T01:07:00.008-06:00

He has a name now....Kozmo. I guess it could be spelled Cozmo, Kosmo, Cosmo, Kosmeaux, Cosmeaux, Kozmeaux, or Cozmeaux. He hasn't told me yet. I put a collar on him for the first time. He hates it! He spent the first half of the day rolling around like a syphilitic squirrel and the second half of the day licking dust bunnies from his fur. He was like a cross between a Swiffer mop and a robot vacuum. A couple of more kitties like him and I can stop doing the floors.

The Art of Not Keeping Score

2010-02-12T07:46:00.013-06:00

An art teacher at Churchill High School sent me an email asking if I taught science at Spring Branch Junior High. That would have been Houston in 1980. He was a shy country kind of boy who talked to me like he wanted my attention. One day he came in with a painting of a sea shell he made in art class. He jokingly asked if I wanted to buy his piece and I asked how much. Surprised, he randomly chose $10. I offered $5. He was beside himself. You would have thought I handed him the key to the candy store instead of buying his first piece of art. I was very young and didn't know how to make a kid's day. The truth is, we had no art at the time and not much money either. I actually stuck it in an old frame and we used it for a number of years.

You never know.....

.....how your actions/words affect children in your path.

.....when you will run head on into your past and the fruits of your labor.

.....how many words you will be proud of and how many you will have to eat.

.....how long it might be until you are safe from these questions.

Encounters like these make it easier to imagine that you could make a mistake and ruin a kid. Of course, that's not possible. Most of the kids who remember you came out OK. The ones that blame you are so busy blaming everyone that your face blends in with the crowd. It’s a real treat when someone remembers you from another century in another town and you're both doing the same thing for a living for the same employer in the same school your own children attend. Many of our teachers work with former students but it rarely happens to me since I am not from San Antonio. A while back I was checking out at the grocery store and a cashier only four years younger than I (with a grandchild in middle school old enough to be my student) recognized me from 1979 in Austin. It wasn't my name and certainly it wasn't my face...it was my one blue eye and one brown eye. Ha!

There are thousands of former students out there.....like Karmic meteors going around and coming around. Every now and then one of them bursts into my space. I never know if it will be a beautiful memory or an ugly reminder. Anyone that has stayed in teaching this long has learned not to keep score.

Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds. - George Eliot

Things I learned from rescuing a kitten.

2010-02-08T21:09:00.011-06:00

There is nothing like waking up an hour early with tiny paws walking on your face, thinking awwww he loves me, only to discover he just came from the litter box.

You have to "child proof" the entire house one pen/paper/waste basket/plastic bag at a time.

No amount of shooing will get him out of your hair but pick up a camera and he magically disappears.

Buy him a toy and he will play with the bag it came in. Give him a bag and he will only stare at it.

The volume of poop coming out is five times greater than the volume of food going in.

If he is awake when you empty the litter box he will take a dump in at least two different rooms during those three minutes.

That will be the only time during the week that he is not in the same room you are.

Some kittens never ever meow....not even once.

If you are reading it, he is standing on it.

He will break an important heirloom.

Money may buy a fine dog but only kindness will make him wag his tail. - Lyle Brown

The Most Interesting Question Ever

2009-12-09T20:31:00.013-06:00

Were you ever impelled to answer a question that just didn't have a good answer? That's when it's time to put yourself in the shoes of the inquisitor.

When I enlisted in the Navy they wanted me in electronics. I was interested in submarines or cryptology but these vacancies required shipping out immediately. The wait for aviation was an entire year but given that Sandy was pregnant and we had a house to sell I really didn't have much choice. I learned some interesting differences concerning the screening process. Submariners in the nuclear fleet mostly went under the waves as they left port and never surfaced, even for several months, until they returned. If the enemy got their hands on you it would be most likely because you were already dead. Aviation electronics personnel on P-3's were similar because we flew over open ocean, did not wear parachutes, and lived on secure military bases. But many cryptology techs had a different concern. They were often stationed in countries like Greece, Italy, and Turkey where even government officials were occasionally snatched off the street. The odds of this were slim but there might be added precautions such as growing facial hair and wearing civilian clothing. But the really fascinating tidbit was a sample question from the screening process....."If you were kidnapped for information and every relative and person you know was paraded in front of you with a gun to their head who would you give up national secrets for?" My immediate answer was, "My wife and children." He said, "Is that all?" I said yes. It was only hypothetical but I figured that answer was not what they were looking for. To my surprise it was the perfect answer. Anyone outside of spouse, parents, or children would get you tossed. If I had said mom or dad, I would get relegated to the "maybe" bin, which is the same as getting tossed, unless only one parent was alive and they were my next of kin. Even if your grandparents raised you they were still out. If I had NOT mentioned my spouse and children I would be eliminated for being a psycho. And if I had still given the perfect answer but taken a few seconds to make the list I would be relegated to the "maybes". They preferred people that did not have to think about it. 'Tis better to have the correct answer in your gut than in your head.

I asked the fellow, "What if I had given the perfect answer on this test and later the event really DID happen putting my wife and child in peril. What would the Navy want, hope, or expect me to do?" His response....."Sorry, that question doesn't have an answer." I thought he was just avoiding the question until I had spent a few years in the fleet with the constant training and discipline even during times when it didn't make sense. He was just saying that he could only control the selection process. After that, it was up to me and there was no answer that was always going to be correct.

I know it was all hypothetical and maybe they were being dramatic but once the motivation was revealed it became the most interesting question, albeit a disturbing one, that I've ever been asked.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. - James Thurber

p.s. This may sound too intense but what about Sophie's choice? Sophie surrendered her soul and became a living death....unlike Carla Jean's coin toss at the end of the movie version of "No Country for Old Men." She told him, "The coin don't decide. You do." If it were me and the Nazi was serious, as most of them were, I would not make the choice. It would just eliminate one life and destroy the others. He already had the power of life and death. Why give him power over your mind and soul. The soldier must decide and live with it. Not me. We are in this together. When my kids and I taste each others desserts we do not wash the spoons.

Three Ninja Turtle Episodes

2009-11-22T01:03:00.012-06:00

How do you measure time? As a teacher I was very good at ending the lesson seconds before the bell rang. Sometimes the lady teachers were secretly counting the number of class periods left until they could make a dash for the rest room. It seems as time shrinks so do the units. In the fall time was measured by how many grade reports left to generate before the two week Christmas break. In the winter it was how many weeks left to prepare for statewide testing. In the spring it was how many days left in the school year to complete the curriculum. Near the end it was that one especially challenging class....only 9 more 6th periods left! Even so, the traditional clock is running in the background and I am usually not as surprised as I claim to be when I find that time as "flown".

A child's notion of time is appropriate to their experience. A year to a ten year old child is one tenth of his life but the same to a fifty year old man is one fiftieth of his life. A child has little or no concept of delayed gratification. OK....I know many adults who don't have a grip on that either. Anywayzzz, when visiting the neighborhood pool I did not surprise the kids when it was time to leave nor did I tell them they had ten minutes left. I borrowed a practice from my own dad and chose something they could count. "You can all jump in the pool three more times and then we have to go." Yeah they stretched it out but I planned for that too. One place my dad could not help us was in the car. He would drive over a thousand miles at a time stopping only for restrooms. There was no use asking him if we were there yet because we were never going to be there. For my own kids I drew on their experience with television. They had a concept of how long cartoon shows lasted. There were no videos in cars back in those days but if we still had an hour and a half left on the drive and the girls asked how much longer until we get there I would say "the same time as three Ninja Turtle episodes." Worked like a charm.

Spend sufficient time confirming the need and the need will disappear. - unknown

The verdict is in....

2009-10-22T13:47:00.011-05:00

....and it is "sometimes". I'm speaking of emoticons. Those sometimes welcome but often annoying symbols displaying emotions in your emails. There are a few I must use or I would have no friends. My sense of humor has a wide range and when it gets to the dry/sarcastic end of the spectrum even my best friends aren't sure if I am joking or not. There is no voice or body language. I rely on just one symbol....

:-) or ha ha....happy or agreeable or mildly amused

I do use some others while on pages like Facebook reserved solely for the benefit of my friends that are internet addicts....such as OMG or LOL. But I draw the line at things that are never going to happen like ROTFLMAO. I mean really, did your ass just fall off and if you are on the floor why are you still typing instead of looking for your missing ass. If it's that funny let's get on the phone so we can really pee in our pants. I'm all for that. Finally, I must admit to a new addition that Judy used yesterday. It is the only emoticon that ever made me laugh of it's own accord. It has no use except to make me smile.....

:-(l) It's a monkey!

I hope something makes you smile today. :-)

Itty Bitty

2009-10-21T08:32:00.004-05:00

This itty bitty Cub Scout was selling popcorn tins in front of Hobby Lobby. I made him go through all his wares and tell me everything. He went slowly over the prices and what was inside....very slowly and pausing often to think it through. His mom and brothers standing behind him were slowly nodding their heads and silently mouthing the words as he went. Did I mention he went slowly? I pointed at a tin and handed him a bill and everyone shouted in unison "He did it by himself!" It was so funny but he really did.

They grow up so fast!

2009-10-20T10:56:00.003-05:00

Last summer I was parked in the Home Depot parking lot at night getting some stuff together before I went in. I noticed this cat come out from underneath the pallets in front of the outdoor gardening section and thought what a cool place for a stray cat to live. A few seconds later and at least 15 feet behind the first kitten popped out and followed the mom down the front of the store toward the other far end. Like clockwork, one kitten after another emerged from the same spot the same distance apart. No fear. Just trotting in a line that stretched the length of the store. I saw them two more times. A few months ago I was walking into the HEB at night and I heard a car honk, one of those half honks that happen by accident. There was a car parked between the grocery store and the Home Depot. It was covered with "teen aged" cats playing tag on the hood and harassing the driver. He was waving an arm out the window. The cats thought he was joining in and were attacking his arm. Last night I saw several adult cats strolling around the garden section as if they didn't know each other. They grow up so fast.

Santa Baby....

2009-09-17T14:55:00.009-05:00

My birthday card from Desilu. (click to enlarge)

One evil queen that doesn't seem to impress Desi. (click to enlarge)

I was never enamored of costumed characters. I did not like robots, ventriloquist's dummies, clowns, department store Santa's, dancing characters at Disneyland, etc. I especially was not fond of Santas with their gin blossoms and wool suits that smelled of Chesterfields and the sweat of every other Santa who had used the suit that season. When asked what I wanted this year my thought was usually, "Off this lap, thank you!" My kids did not like clowns at all especially after Stephen King's IT was made into a movie. As a toddler Desiree squirmed and cried while her mom tried to get a photo of her with Mickey. She got that from me. I loved Halloween type get ups but was deathly afraid of anything in a costume that totally hid whoever or whatever was wearing it.

One day when they were quite small we were enjoying a day in the neighborhood pool when they spotted something on the bottom. Since I was squatting in four feet of water I just reached down and brought up a baby's head. Little girl screams all around. It was a doll's head, no body, and no hair. Not especially evil but quite startling. I don't know where that head is today but after twenty years I believe it is still making surprise appearances in Christmas presents between the girls. A few years ago I was in the video store and saw a two movie disc with a photo for each on the front. Once photo was an evil clown with blood dripping from his pointy teeth and the other was a pile of baby doll heads exactly like ours. I can't believe I did not rent that movie just so I could scan the cover.

When I was a teen and working a Boy Scout Expo I had to wear a gorilla suit for the "amusement" of children. One little girl was anxious and about to cry so I showed her who was inside. When she saw the gorilla rip off his own head and saw me inside she screamed bloody murder....thought the gorilla ate the man. I should have seen that coming.

99% of department store Santas give the rest a bad name.

That Boy Makes My Eyes Itch.

2009-09-11T12:19:00.020-05:00

L to R Joey, Danny, Steven Get a load of my mom's PINK '57 Mercury. (Click to enlarge)

Looking westward on Sims from my house. The school and bridge are at the end of the block. Garden Villas blocks were really long. The ditch is where we hid before throwing dirt clods at passing cars. We had escape routes to the bayou on the right or the alley on the left. (Click to enlarge)

No re-writes here or clever phrases. Just reminiscing in honor of Gail, Judy, Lee, and any other "kids" out there.

The Culpeppers, two doors down, sold their house to the Cottens. I only saw the pool twice....something I considered an exotic possession. One day I am walking down the bayou with Danny and Joey Collie and we came upon this pipe sticking out of the embankment. It had a wheel valve on it several inches across. We couldn't figure out what it was so Danny tells me to open the valve. I tell him he's crazy. He looks at Joey and tells him he has to open it or he can't play with us anymore. So he opens it. Water comes out like a pumper truck. It was wicked. We didn't realize we were below the Cotton's back yard. The pressure was tremendous. Danny grabs the valve but it won't budge. For a second we freeze and just stare at each other before scattering like roaches when the kitchen light comes on. It took me all of two minutes to race home and there is my mom with the phone in her hand. "Did Danny Collie drain the Cotten's pool?" It's no mystery why she chose Danny's name but how the hell did she know so quickly? It was still draining all ten or twenty thousand gallons. Before the advent of the internet our neighborhood was full of stay home window watchers.

Two doors down from the Cotten's was the Agnew's. He was the president of Oshman's Sporting Goods. I'm in Danny Collie’s backyard when his colt bites the crap out of my rib cage. Danny smacks the colt and the mare bites him. He smacks the mare and she jumps the fence and takes off down Sims Dr. We are chasing her on foot when she turns down the Agnew's driveway, jumps a low fence while simultaneously ducking under a covered walkway (don’t know how she managed that), and races across the backyard. Danny is worried she will spill off the edge of the bayou's embankment and fall down that hill. I'm worried about a pool....covered tightly by a greenish tarp....which is covered with dead brown oak leaves. Rip, splash! The mare is struggling to keep her head above water and the tarp only offers a small opening. Her shoes knocked out huge chunks of concrete from the sides of the pool. We did save the horse but Mr. Collie had to get out his wallet….again.

The number of quotes appropriate to a situation that seems to get worse by the minute is endless. I had to stop reading through my list before I just posted the whole thing. :-)

Inside every small problem is a large problem struggling to get out. - unknown

The first pull on the cord ALWAYS sends the drapes in the wrong direction. - unknown

Never worry about the bullet with your name on it. Instead, worry about shrapnel addressed to 'occupant'. - unknown

Once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is to use a bigger can. - Zymurgy's First Law of Systems Dynamics

That boy makes my eyes itch. – Lisa Jackson

Hook, LIne, and Sinker

2009-09-08T00:51:00.012-05:00

Recently Desiree posted her thoughts on the need for a skill that separates you from the pack when applying for a job. She really hit the nail on the head.

In the spring of '77 I made a bold decision that will be the subject of a future essay. For now let's just say I needed money. I usually landed jobs because I was good in the interview process. That is important when you are 21 because at that age no one has much of a resume. I decided on the job of refilling vending machines. When I showed up for the interview I discovered it was more complicated than that. It was a small vendor with a huge contract. I would be alone in an IBM plant from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m.....with no help from anyone....and I had to repair breakdowns as well as service the machines in the dark. I was not sure I could do all that but youth has no fear and it wasn't going to cost me anything to find out. I reported on time to the owners home. He was in a wheel chair wearing nothing but a towel and dripping wet from the shower. Whenever the interviewer does NOT want to be at the interview then the interviewee is just screwed....unless he makes an impression. The languid interview told me he was mostly interested in the business end of the operation and that looking for the right mechanic was a chore he detested. I also discovered that he knew nothing of mechanics and that made it very difficult to show him that I did. At the conclusion, I walked outside to my '69 Cadillac....the only handy prop that was mechanical in nature. I had it! Turn the key but not long enough to start the engine. Do it again. Raise the hood and get my tools from the trunk. Crawl under the car and remove the starter making lots of superfluous clanking noises. Rub a little grease on my face and knock on the door, starter in hand. "Sir, my started died. There is a Hi-Lo Auto Parts at the end of the block. Can I leave my car in your driveway long enough to get a new starter?" Walk down the block with the starter in hand and a can of WD-40 and a rag in my pocket. Spray the starter all over and wipe it clean. Walk back to the car and reinstall the starter. Don't forget the clanking noises. Just as I'm getting ready to leave a teenage boy comes outside and says, "My dad asked if you could come back inside for a minute." Hook, Line, and Sinkaaaaaahhhhh!!!!......free Twinkies all summer.

A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that individuality is the key to success. – Robert Orben

Change is inevitable, except from vending machines. - Larry the Cable Guy

Good News Comes in Threes

2009-09-04T16:27:00.005-05:00

What could make a grown man post a picture like this on his blog?

All the Tea in China

2009-08-29T13:21:00.015-05:00

I finally tried tupelo honey like from the Van Morrison song. Clover honey was the only kind I had ever seen until I bought some wild flower honey in Colorado. That didn't taste much different. Then one day I tried orange blossom honey and it was smooth and sweet…not bitter like clover. Well, today I got a jar of tupelo honey at William-Sonoma and it is so good...very thick with a very different flavor. It even feels alien...plastic and less sticky. The tupelo is a gum tree from the Deep South. I will probably put it on oatmeal but at ten times the price of clover honey I feel like I should snort it or shoot up with it.

All through our marriage the song made me think of Sandy and me even though it was written before we met. I don’t know why. Maybe she was worth all the tea in China or maybe I was a man of insight. I never told her. I did not want to risk having the thought minimized. Maybe that is the definition of fantasy or romance….or both.

You can take all the tea in China
Put it in a big brown bag for me
Sail right around the seven oceans
Drop it straight into the deep blue sea
She's as sweet as tupelo honey
She's an angel of the first degree
She's as sweet as tupelo honey
Just like honey from the bee

You can't stop us on the road to freedom
You can't keep us 'cause our eyes can see
Men with insight, men in granite
Knights in armor bent on chivalry
She's as sweet as tupelo honey
She's an angel of the first degree
She's as sweet as tupelo honey
Just like hone y from the bee

Every once in a while someone comes along who is a little more primitive than the rest of us, a little closer to our beginnings, a little more in touch with the things we're made of. -Stargirl by Jerri Spinelli

Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance. - Oscar Wilde

Crossing the River Styx

2009-08-16T04:48:00.032-05:00

I am deviating here from the one paragraph goal. This essay was originally posted in serial form....one paragraph per day. This is not a polished work but is a rough draft without style. It may be years before I revisit this. It is a true story and not easy to tell.

Crossing the River Styx

Her sister lived across the street from our house on Sims. She lived in Groves and came for the summer after graduation. Dan and I would lean against his pick-up after dark shootin’ the bull while she was making out with older guys in various back seats parked next door in her sister's driveway. I never saw her face. How was I to know she was the same cute girl I kept seeing everywhere all summer? I had come home for summer classes after a disastrous freshman year at UT. My friends had moved and my parents were gone for days at a time. I went everywhere alone. Every morning on the way to campus I stopped at the corner and there she was sitting on the grass waiting for the downtown express bus….smiling at me. It was not merely a polite smile. It was an excited smile. Finally, one night at Pizza Hut she walked across the dining room and just sat down in front of me, a bold move in those days but the only way to get around my shyness. Her name was Jhanney, pronounced Johnny, because her mom had wanted a boy. She had been waiting all summer for me to say hello….right across the street. Sheesh. She was only saying something now because she was leaving for home the next day and then off to Stephen F. Austin. She wanted me to write. I was confused. That usually happened when a girl paid attention to me.

Her letters were from the girl next door, not the back seat girl from last summer. I didn’t spend much time pondering that contradiction. I had little to offer and the only thing I asked for was hope. They had perfume on them. In those days mail was quick, a first class stamp delivered a letter overnight, handwritten, and didn’t say a lot...they were more about feelings. Long distance calls were brief, expensive, and not very private. We talked about innocuous things. She had broken a dorm room mirror and didn't want to tell her parents. She didn’t have a good relationship with her mom. I sent her money to replace it. I called one Thursday night and she was uncharacteristically blue. It was homecoming weekend and she didn't have a date. The next afternoon I drove my '49 Chevy from Austin to Nacogdoches on two lane highways through the Davy Crockett forest. I called from Madisonville which excited her and her roommate. The car broke down twice. It was pitch black and freezing up there at night but I was an expert at this routine by now…flashlight in mouth, clean this, tighten that, push start….whatever it took. I arrived late in the evening.

Her freshmen dorm mates loved her and treated me like I was the grand prize. They came from small East Texas towns named E’toile, Patroon, Jericho, Caledonia, and Elysian Fields. They all wore high school band jackets….except for Jhanney. I knew she was all about band but maybe she wanted to look older. I stayed in the boys’ dorm with her friends. Houston Sterling’s band was actually in the homecoming parade. I said that's my school and all her friends got really quiet. Later she said it was because they were surprised that there was not a white student in the band and they danced instead of marched. We went to the game and got gussied up for the dance. But Jhanney asked to leave very soon after we arrived. She just didn’t feel comfortable. The shadow of a frown was not going to give up the reason. If she had looked down at the ground I would have squeezed it out of her. She studied the horizon instead.

The county was dry in those days but students partied with booze anyway. Jhanney was not into that…..she was just goofy small town fun. Every time we returned to the dorm her friends would surround us and beg for details. Jhanney and a girlfriend kept doing this trick where they each put a raisin on the back of their hand, hold it about waist high, and then hit that hand with their other hand. The hand with the raisin would remain motionless but the raisin would vanish. I would look all over the place and couldn't find it. They would both do it at the same time like the Doublemint Twins, over and over laughing themselves to tears because I couldn't find the raisins. I told them to do it while I watched from across the room. I noticed their mouths opened for a split second. They were so talented that the raisin was flying off their hand into their mouth without the hand ever moving. Inertia! They had a mouth full of raisins and smiled while they ushered them out between their lips one at a time. She had such a pretty mouth. I noticed there was a bandage on her hand and she told me it was from hitting a guy. Ha ha. I never had so much fun in the company of pretty girls. I totally forgot what a nerd I was.

We went to church on Sunday. Later we climbed the forest ranger’s lookout tower in the piney woods and kissed. We started comparing what kind of futures we imagined for ourselves and without realizing it she was including me, using words like "you" and "us" instead of "a guy". She was looking away and not at me. She drifted away inside and we didn't kiss anymore the rest of the day. I left after dark and drove most of the night. I almost fell asleep at the wheel between Elgin and Manor so I stopped on the side of the road for a nap. I got back to Austin just before sun up.

The Christmas holidays rolled around and I was so excited because we would both be in Houston. She came to visit her sister across the street but she waited four days to let me know she was in town. I had begun to worry the way anxious teens do when they wonder if they have been jilted. Without cell phones or email we did a lot of waiting. She said she had to talk to her sister first. It just seemed like four days was a long time. I guessed I was not exactly a boyfriend and cooled off. Sitting in my car she asked if we were breaking up….an odd question from someone who was being so mysterious. So what song comes on the radio right then? Neil Sedaka's slow sad remake of his own song "Breaking Up is Hard to Do." Crap.

It was a long spring semester. I started writing her again in the summer but she never answered. The following September her mom called me in my dorm room in Austin. We had never met or talked before but she said my letters kept arriving and thought it was time to call. Jhanney had been killed in a car wreck that previous summer. Her mom wouldn't tell me anything except where she was buried. I never cried. I didn’t know how to feel. I got the phone call on my 21st birthday. The coming year would be my most unproductive and yet the greatest turning point of my life.

Twenty years later, Sandy, Jewel, and I drove to Port Arthur so my mom could see her old hometown. We stopped by the cemetery on a Sunday but the office was closed. We walked down every row and couldn't find Jhanney. The cemetery only had one plot or about three or four spaces that appeared to be used but unmarked. I got the funny feeling standing there that she was near. Another five years passed before Sandy and I passed through again on the way to New Orleans. This time I went by on a workday and the cemetery office was open. Her plot turned out to be the unmarked one. She was buried there with no tombstone. The original logbook from 1976 listed the cause of death as drowning. What? It just so happens that my grandfather was a long time Justice of the Peace in Jefferson County and the current JP had been a young man when he defeated my grandfather in an election sometime around 1970. In that area JP's are popular guys with a lot of sway. So I went down to the Port Arthur branch of the courthouse and once the staff found out who my grandfather was I was treated like royalty. Then I ask a few questions and their physical posture shrank. Along came someone with authority and I was figuratively shown the door. WTF? I left because you can disappear into an East Texas jail. I looked up Jhanney’s address in the phone book and called her mom. Mind you this is now about 25 years after her death. This time she opens up to me. She had never recovered from the loss of her daughter. She couldn't bring herself to put a tombstone on her grave. Her bedroom had not been disturbed in 25 years. The picture of the bull rider on her dresser must be me. Then came the bombshell. Right before I had visited Jhanney for homecoming she had been assaulted while walking across campus at night. Her mom still had her high school band jacket that the attacker had slashed up with his knife, probably saving her life. She was a strong girl and had fought him enough that he ran away. Jhanney said she had not been raped. When she returned to her dorm room she broke down and punched out every mirror she could find. Then I remembered the bandaged hand and the money I had sent her for a broken mirror. She dropped out of school. In the fall, her letters had been perfumed. In the spring they disappeared altogether.

In June she had gone to visit a friend in the hospital in Port Arthur. On the way home that night she drove off the levy, her car sank into the water, and she drowned. There was no shortage of witnesses. Her mom said there were two versions of what happened. Some said she peeled out of the hospital parking lot because some boys in a car were following her and she couldn’t hold the curve on the bridge over the canal. Others said she wasn't being chased. Some witnesses said she climbed over the seat to the rear window, screaming and fighting to get out. Others said she just drove into the water and sat there calmly smiling until it was over. The JP was an old high school friend of the mom and he fixed it so there would be no autopsy. Her mom claimed she did not want to know what really happened that night. Maybe the good ol' boy asked her to pass on the autopsy for fear it would get some hometown football hero in real trouble. Maybe some boys remembered a different Jhanney than I did. Maybe Jhanney just imagined they did. Maybe the mom had not been allowed to grieve properly. Maybe Jhanney’s sister was right when she said her mom was touched in the head and refused to buy tombstones for anyone including her own mother. Maybe the mortician was right when he told the same sister that Jhanney was still wearing her seat belt and had not struggled to get out. A lot of maybes. Jhanney’s dad apparently was not a factor in anything. So around town everyone says she died in a car wreck, the cemetery register was recorded as a drowning, her dad was no help, her mom wouldn't/couldn't talk about it much or even put up a headstone, and the public records were left incomplete. Welcome to the Golden Triangle.

My lasting memory is of her kiss. When I saw her that New Year’s Eve I had a feeling it would be the last time. We were riding down Belfort on a cold night, in that ancient car with the bench seat, wool seat covers, and no seat belts. It was during that short time I had a beard. She was sitting next to me but she was still distant on the inside and I still didn't know why. She tried to be playful by pretending she didn't like me. She slid across the seat and polished the door handle. Then she slid back. When I didn't smile she did this about three times. I turned to kiss her at the same moment she leaned up to kiss me. The static turned to an arc and the flash was blinding. The charge jumped from her into my beard and burned her lip. I said something about thunder and lightning when we kissed. I couldn't tell if she was laughing or crying.

I hope there is a heaven….at least for Jhanney’s sake. Her detachment in life and want of a tombstone in death reminds me of the sailor in Horace's poem who drowned at sea….unable to cross the River Styx and enter the Elysian Fields.

If here, upon the tempest-beaten strand,

You lie confined, till some more liberal hand

Shall strow the pious dust in funeral rite,

And wing thee to the boundless realms of light.

A Mariner and the Ghost of Archytas

BYU, Arches, Canyonlands (UT), and Valley of the Sun (AZ)

2009-08-13T10:19:00.038-05:00

I ferried Roxanne's car 1500 miles up to Brigham Young University and took some photos along the way. I'm so tired I can't seem to think of anything clever to say about them. I tossed in a couple of similar pictures of Arizona from a different trip Roxi and Sam took. After this load of photographs I hope to get back to writing essays.

BYU campus in Provo UT (click to enlarge)

Provo UT (click to enlarge)

Bridal Veil Falls near Provo UT. Look how tiny the people are at the bottom. Brides do have a tendency to dominate the landscape. (click to enlarge)

near Provo UT (click to enlarge)

Roxanne near Arches National Monument UT (click to enlarge)

Near Arches National Monument UT (click to enlarge)

Watch your step! That's me on the right. (click to enlarge)

South of Provo (click to enlarge)

Utah (click to enlarge)

dead people in the desert (click to enlarge)

Utah (click to enlarge)

Provo Utah (click to enlarge)

Valley of the Sun, Phoenix Arizona (click to enlarge)

Desiree :-)

Monument Valley Arizona....you have seen this in many a John Ford movie (click to enlarge)

I'm pretty sure this is where John Wayne stood in some movie like Fort Apache or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. (click to enlarge)

Utah (click to enlarge)

Enchanted Rock....

2009-08-09T03:43:00.011-05:00

Are we in Texas or are we on Mars? (click any photo to enlarge)

One of three monoliths.

Click on the photo to see the tiny people at the top of the monolith. This photo was taken half way up.

I’m moving to Mars next week so if anyone has any boxes...... - Steven Wright

Days of August

2009-08-06T18:48:00.017-05:00

This "beach" is over 80 miles long, 65 of which belong to the National Parks Service. But there are no improvements, facilities, cell phone coverage, or park rangers once you start the journey....awesome!

Even in the middle of a two year Texas drought some things manage a little green. (click to enlarge)

The gulf waters of my youth didn't look this good. Maybe things are getting better. (click to enlarge)

No reservations required. (click to enlarge)

Danielle and Roxanne enjoying a little Bob Marley on the Rumble Bee's CD player. Life is good. (click to enlarge)

A living rainbow of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple....creative girls and cooperative mollusks forming a tiny chorus line.....one....singular sensation.... (click to enlarge)

I never knew pelicans traveled in twos but there were hundreds of pairs and no bachelors. Where do I sign up? (click to enlarge)

Mine! Mine! Mine!....locals at the seafood buffet. (click to enlarge)

Big Shell Beach at the 20 mile marker. (click to enlarge)

Please forward my mail here. (click to enlarge)

Who Ya Gonna Call?

2009-07-30T05:55:00.008-05:00

(click to enlarge so you can read what the bugs have to say)

"Don't worry about getting yelled at. If you ever get in a bind you call me first. I will come get you no matter what and we will wait until tomorrow to talk it out. Just call me first." Most of us have either heard that speech or have given it. I always imagined giving it to my kids in reference to ending up on a bad date or at a party full of drugs but I must have had that conversation with Desiree at a much earlier age. Today she called me from the desert and we had a good laugh. In the fourth grade she went to a slumber party. Her being the first child I was still learning so I made sure to know the parents names, numbers, etc. but how much can you know about your little girl's friends at such a young age. Around midnight the phone rings.

Hello?

Daddy, can you come get me?

Are you homesick?

No, everyone is arguing and they're being mean.

Did her parents tell y'all to settle down?

No.

Is your friend taking sides?

She's in the bathroom shaving her legs.

Her 4th grade legs? OK, what are y'all arguing about? Why is it so ugly?

Two boys showed up, there was an argument, and they went walking down the street with two of the girls.

Pack your bag! I'll be there in five minutes!!!

I was there in three and there were two other parents already at the door. Desi was always a leader.

The definition of middle age is when the phone rings on a Saturday night and you hope it's not for you. - unknown

Yada Yada Yada......(MRT part 9)

2009-07-26T12:00:00.020-05:00

Please DON'T click to enlarge! I'm large enough already.

I lost about ten pounds before I left, ten on the trip, and five since I got back. You can't tell yet but the belt buckle holes don't lie. My goal is 100 pounds and so far I am down 38. Yea for the "diabetes blood sugar finger poking thingy" my new doctor makes me use three times a day. It's like a little task master watching me eat and inflicting just the right amount of pain every now and then to remind me. I need to give it a name. Ha ha. Actually, my new doc is so hot I have to do what she says. Whew! That means there are still some hormones left.

You girls will think this is Alberta Falls but it's not. It's one of the many falls up Old Fall River Road. It's the only picture of me on the trip. You know how I don't like pictures of me but it came out OK. When I reach my goal I will unload a catalog of new pictures of me.....me raking leaves, me riding my bike, me watching Dr. Phil......I will have to buy a tripod to take photos of myself.

So there I was 12,000 feet up, 1100 miles away, and yada yada yada I'm in San Antonio again. Just go back and read part 2 in reverse. Ha ha. On the way home Roxanne called and asked me to come out to Utah. She couldn't call me in the mountains because there were no cell phone towers. I wish we had planned on that but I was very tired of the road already. The truth is I should have gone out there in the first place to visit all the canyons, etc. I haven't seen her since December. I could have swung by Arizona to see Desilu and Wilson. But I also had not seen my sister in four years so it's all good. In my rush to get home I hydroplaned in a panhandle rainstorm going 70 mph right between a semi truck and a bridge guard rail. I fishtailed four times but didn't roll over. I saw it coming and pat myself on the back for having enough driving experience to straighten it out. Holy Crap. I drove 50 the rest of the trip.

Two interesting facts.....1) In thirteen days I never saw a single policeman, police car, highway patrol....nothing. How weird is that? 2) I paid the exact same price per gallon at all ten of my fuel stops....$2.49. How weirder is that?

There was going to be an epilogue. I made a list of cool stuff and promptly lost it. I will remember things as it enters my long term memory but while they are farting around in my short term memory they are inaccessible. You think I'm kidding don't you?

All-in-all it was an MRT.....a Manly Road Trip.

One last trip to the top.....(MRT part 8)

2009-07-26T09:55:00.022-05:00

(click to enlarge)

Had to have one full frontal shot of the Jeep. I used to call it the Bumble Bee because of the yellow/black colors but Desiree and Wilson have rechristened it the Rumble Bee.....a much more manly moniker......so don't screw with me! :-)

(click to enlarge)

Snow melt making it's way down. Whose finger is that in the photo? I swear it's not mine.

(click to enlarge)

This is a lame photo. I was driving down the South St. Vrain canyon with awesome rock cliffs hundreds of feet high and just enough room at the bottom for a road and a rushing creek. There were signs reading "falling rocks" that were sticking out from under big boulders that had fallen on them. Unfortunately, there was no where to pull over and too many curves to just stop for a photo without getting nailed by another motorist. So, I settled for this pip squeak at 10,000 feet.

(click to enlarge)

Note to self.....Jeeps are too unstable to photograph scenery while driving them. But, not bad for a pic taken through a windshield with bugs, camera in the left hand, right hand on the stick shift and/or wheel. Second note to self.....next time remember that cameras are all made with the clicky button on the right. I couldn't even see where the camera was aimed. That car in the distance is about to have an encounter they will retell to their friends for years.

(click to enlarge)

WOW!!! This made me dizzy....or maybe it was the thin air. Either way you get that feeling you could just step off the trail and fly. You must enlarge this one to get the perspective of distance.

Mama elk doing the work. (click to enlarge)

Daddy elk...goofing off. He spotted me. I don't like the look in his eye. I better pee on a rock or something. (click to enlarge)

That must be one cold pond over there! I'm thinking major shrinkage. (click to enlarge)

Top of the world! MRT! (click to enlarge)

A Trip Down the Front Range to Boulder.....(MRT part 7)

2009-07-26T00:38:00.012-05:00

There are a lot of interesting things in Boulder.....Celestial Seasonings Tea Factory, Pearl St. Walking Mall, Flagstaff Peak, etc. I went to the recording of a radio show much like the Prairie Home Companion of PBS fame. It's called E-Town. There was a folk singer whose name I don't remember and a band called Hot Buttered Rum. I can't find the photo of the cool old timey theater but I am still looking. Each week they honor someone for a great work in ecology or community. This time it was a woman who organized a non-profit outfit to recycle old computers for the needy. She saved eight million pounds from the land fill in one year and gave out tens of thousands of computers. The things I noticed about the people of Boulder are how fit they are and in tune with nature. They ride bikes and the bus. When you drive by a bus stop they are reading books or writing something.

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Texas has some mighty fine looking courthouses but this art deco job in Boulder is my all time favorite. An interesting piece of trivia....maybe....whenever Dr. Phil is showing photos of his dysfunctional guests he uses a stock photo of a courthouse facade to represent legal troubles. I really think this is the courthouse. I recognize the relief over the front door. I will be on the lookout next time I am watching his show.

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There are three points of interest for me in this photograph. Back in '92, the green meadow on the right was my inspiration to go find a good pair of hiking shoes and start walking. There are paths criss-crossing the field. However, I've never gone for a walk there. I keep forgetting about it and things come up. Today it would be the weather. The large white structure to the left of the meadow is the Chautauqua Assoc. Here is a blurb.....Chautauqua (pronounced "sha- TAW- kwa") is an adult education movement, highly popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chautauqua assemblies expanded and spread throughout rural America until the mid-1920s. The Chautauqua brought entertainment and culture for the whole community, with speakers, teachers, musicians, entertainers, preachers and specialists of the day. My sister and her husband invited me to a Joan Baez concert in their century old wooden hall but I passed so that their old friend could go with them. The three of them went to college together when she was in her hey day. The third note of interest is that all those tiny houses built 80 or 90 years ago cost over a million dollars today. I looked it up. Sheesh.

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When in the mountains keep your eyes and ears open. The weather comes in fast.

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I was digging on the sudden wind, rain, and thunder when I remembered how lightening is an up close and personal thing in the mountains. What reminded me?.....ka-BOOM!!!! MRT!!!

How Would You Like This to Be Your Backyard?.....(MRT part 6)

2009-07-26T00:09:00.010-05:00

You just can't get a decent selection of real hiking shoes back home.

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A nice spot for a sack lunch. Looks like an inviting dip....but don't do it!....unless you want the family jewels flash frozen. MRT!

Why The Hell Did You Trade Your Perfect Pick-Up For a Jeep.....(MRT part 5)

2009-07-23T21:48:00.010-05:00

There can only be one reason and this road was it. The skinniest dirt road that goes all the way up through the alpine (in these photos) to the tundra at 12,000 feet (see the photo in part 4). You can do it in a mini-van. You don't have to have a Jeep but it's FUN. Every time I cross paths with a couple I offer to take their picture with their camera. Why are they so surprised?....like it's never been offered before. The chubby husband is a little bored and leaning against his car asking, "You came all the way from Texas in that little thing?" After I climb up some rocks I run across the more adventurous wife looking at the view who asks, "You came all the way from Texas alone?" Women are from Venus and men are from Mars.

Old Fall River Road at the low end (click to enlarge)

Wildflowers everywhere. (click to enlarge)

Snow melt before it enters the North St. Vrain. (click to enlarge)

Flowers getting their foot in the door. (click to enlarge)

Wading in the snow melt makes your feet feel like teenagers again. (click to enlarge)

There was a dude around this corner on a bike pedaling 11 miles uphill in first gear all the way. Talk about a work out...spinning class with a view. It's not easy taking a picture on this skinny road while avoiding the rocks on the right, the cliff on the left, and the surprise bicyclist in the middle. MRT! (click to enlarge)

Where is a Deep Breath When You Need One?.....(MRT part 4)

2009-07-22T23:57:00.003-05:00

Trail Ridge in the tundra - Rocky Mountain National Park - MRT!

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If You're Not the Lead Dog, the View Never Changes....(MRT part 3)

2009-07-22T17:15:00.009-05:00

Culinary School of the Rockies, Boulder (click to enlarge)

A treat. If you ever get the chance to take a one night cooking class from a culinary school you should jump on it. It's not like you are going to learn a ton of technique in four hours and the recipes are printed for you to take home....no, the real reason is that for once in your life you are the lead dog. You prepare stuff and cook stuff but you never clean stuff. I need another whisk....whooosh, there it is. I'm done with this dirty mixing bowl....zing, there it goes. I need someone to get these things ready for me and voila, they are waiting for you in a neat row. OMG, what do I do now?.....a Paris trained chef is whispering answers in your ear. I burned this thing and we can't go on without it.....chop, stir, sizzle, and a replacement appears at your side in minutes. In the end you eat a seven course meal and they open the double doors to roll you out. La Quiche Lorraine, La Pate Brisee, Onion Soup Gratin, La Salade Grande Ferme, Sherry Wine Vinaigrette, Ratatouille (minus the rats), Coq Au Vin, La Moussseline au Chocolate.

I was the only male there and the women were beautiful. Alas, they were married to engineers who had just moved there from Austin, TX to build wind farms! The people of Boulder are fit and gorgeous. Education and incomes run high. Bikes and walking are predominant and all streets are uphill. Everyone rides the bus and they read books while they wait. Ecology is a big deal. Actually, the place is a lot like Austin but with the prices tripled.

I did learn something.....I NEVER want to be a chef at a fancy restaurant. I don't mind fast paced action when the outcome is more concrete in nature but the hectic atmosphere of a high dollar French kitchen would drive me nuts when it is so easy for the chocolate to seize when making a simple mousse. (No, I didn't do that but I saw it happen.) Maybe if I was thirty years younger. Burp. MRT!

Blow West Young Man..... (MRT part 2)

2009-07-21T13:31:00.014-05:00

Capulin Volcano (click to enlarge)

Texas Hill Country (click to enlarge)

My apologies to Horace Greeley. I've taken the exact same route through the Hill Country and Panhandle for years. In the old days it was a family mini-van with children. The best way to get there was at 75 mph with infrequent but long rest stops. Now it was just the three of us....me, myself, and I. I zipped off all the side/rear panels of the little Jeep and drove 50 mph the first day. As you might expect it was a whole different experience. The sights that had been a blur in the past came into focus. I could hear the sounds and smell the odors of the landscape. Most interestingly, I made far more stops of far less duration and ended up arriving at the usual time after all.

Over half of the miles in the Texas leg and all of them in New Mexico are small two lane country highways. Fifty miles per hour may as well be five these days. But every time I pulled onto the shoulder to let people go by I got an enthusiastic thumbs up. Was it the gesture on my part or was it the Bexar County Sheriff's Deputy sticker next to my license plate? The deputy who helped me teach the drug abuse program to the seventh graders gave it to me. Said it might come in handy.

The rocky Hill Country - goats, sheep, and peach trees. There is the roadside picnic area where the girls found the resting rattlesnakes. Through the truck farms - the Jeep's soft top makes a constant racket with the windows missing but when the curve of the road is just right for the prevailing wind you can hear tractor motors and cows mooing. Just south of Sweetwater the air gets cool and you can smell earth in the air. Rain is coming. As long as I'm moving the inside of the Jeep stays surprisingly dry. I pull under the awning of an abandoned restaurant and attach all the sides and back. The rain doesn't last long but my ears could use the quiet. Up the southeast rise of the LLano Estecado. Land of the giants...windmills that is. For the last twenty years we have passed the same few dozen generators on the same wind farm. Now there are thousands along the bluffs catching the wind. Blow West young man....ha ha. The enormity of the prop blades fool you into thinking they are turning slowly. The same effect of parallax that makes giant jet aircraft seem to hang in the air. In the distance their limbs are majestic and graceful....as if performing together. Into the Texas panhandle - first the scrub. I pass the rest area that has picnic shelters made to look like Adobe Walls. Small ancient motels with cottages instead of rooms dot the roadside. They remind me of the one in Carlsbad in 1978 that only cost $10. The water glasses at the bedside were mismatched jelly jars. There goes the big old fashioned playground in the small town we used for picnic lunches. Giant swing sets, twisting slides, rolling steel barrels, chain swing merry-go-rounds, and all forms of bone crushing fun I remember as a child. The accident attorneys have not discovered this gold mine yet. The scattered pump jacks seem to nod their approval as they ever so slowly lift crude from the fields that saw their hey day decades ago. There is the exit to Palo Duro Canyon, sight of the one of the last plains conflicts. There were few casualties. The army stole 1,400 horses and then, unable to feed them, had to kill them. After that there was little the Native Americans could do but surrender. War is hell. Into the large farms - giant circular fields irrigated by motorized irrigation on wheels. From space they look like some kind of mod fabric with giant polka dots.....a game of twister for the Titans cast only in shades of green. Each field has it's own odor depending on how long it's been since they spread manure on it. The passing cattle truck pours it's aroma onto me like a tea pitcher. Finally, Amarillo....halfway to Boulder. There is the low cost hotel we were forced to use once when we hit town during a convention. A bed full of hair and unwashed sheets, a burn on the carpet shaped like a steam iron, and a hooker in the hallway with a black eye who desperately needed cab fare. Not this time....La Quinta! Wait.....got too excited....the water in the bathtub won't stop running, the pool is closed, and the waffle iron is broken.

The second half of the trip passes quickly. No open air mosey. I want to be in the mountains but I'm still in Texas. As the crow flies, the top of the pan handle is only slightly closer to Brownsville TX than it is to Canada! On the way out of town I pass the cool old fashioned amusement park and the restaurant that will feed you for free if you can finish dinner in less than one hour.....a dinner consisting of salad, baked potato, bread, and a 72 oz. steak. That's right..... 4 1/2 pounds of seared animal flesh. You are not allowed to go to the restroom, leave the table, or puke. Angioplasty is extra. On through the panhandle - crossing the Canadian River, full of water today it will be bone dry twelve days later on my return. There is the helium plant home to 95% of the world's supply of helium. It comes from the ground. XIT country - giant ranches and cattle. More giant circle fields. Finally into New Mexico passing one of the only feed lots I've ever seen up close. Cows ankle deep in the blackest poop ever. You can smell it a mile away. You can tell immediately when you pass from Texas with it's supply of taxable industry to New Mexico without. The road side parks change from places you seek out into places you avoid. The one I do stop into has two horse pens so the ponies can stretch their legs and quaff a gallon or two. Two hours of two lane hell. For the rest of the day the highways follow railroad grades. In big Texas cities you only see a few train cars at a time and it seems the end will never arrive. Out here you see the entire train on the plain and they seem so short in comparison. They come and go quickly, blowing their horns at the little boys pumping their arms in mini-van windows. This highway in the North East corner of NM is a bottle neck for a quarter of the country's RVs headed to the mountains. In the old days it was they that held up traffic. Now there is a new generation of homes on wheels. Huge rectangular prisms towing large pick up trucks on their hitches and passing me doing 80 mph. I wonder what kind of plant they have under the hood. Unbelievable. It's the only white knuckle driving on the whole trip. Beautiful pastures full of black rocky chunks called volcanic bombs. Cruising by Capulin Volcano - home of the weirdest little flying insect to fill our car and Danielle's hair one year. Up to Raton Pass, past the picturesque ruins of a mission, and down the 7% grade into Trinidad ,Colorado - halfway point for the day. The rest of the day will be plains on the right and Rockies on the left. They pop up out of the flat ground without any foothills. Just POP! Pueblo, Colorado Springs, Castle Rock, etc. More long trains and snow drift fences. The highway rolls just enough to give my arm a work out with the standard shifter. Denver, Boulder, Lyons, halfway to Estes Park and I'm there! MRT!

That last sentence skipped a lot of action but that is for another entry. I am most surprised at how comfortable the seat in the Jeep was on the long drive. Future entries will be shorter. I labeled photographs. Some might be from previous years of the same places. You can make them larger by clicking on them.

One is the Loneliest Number....(MRT part 1)

2009-07-20T08:54:00.012-05:00

Can I be frank? I like myself. I am a nice guy. Being alone is not a challenge but it's not a goal either. I wish I was married or some version of it. There, the cat is out of the bag. I am also an introverted thinker who considers everything and whose words spill out too fast, too many, and too often....followed by awkward silence. So...wanna go on vacation with me? Say no if you know what's good for you.

Armed with those two bits of knowledge it should be understandable that I still had questions when I decided to drive alone to the Rocky Mountains. It was not a choice. I've always vacationed with family or friends. Once I went with a girlfriend. That was great! So really, the question is...if you live alone, in a large house, with no job to go to, only attend church on Christmas and Easter, reached the age where women have stopped flirting with you in the produce isle and, well, you get the idea......is taking this kind of vacation going to qualify as being MORE alone? It's like the time Jerry told George that he didn't understand the fear people have of "over drying" their laundry. Once it's dry, it's dry. You can't make it more dry.

Jerry was wrong. I believe there is so much human contact in this world that you can always be more alone. Fast forwarding past the dozen examples in my head right now I'll just add that is good news. Our artifacts and influences are everywhere. I think hermits are kidding themselves. Ain't gonna happin'.

So we're off to the Rocky Mountains. I already said "we". The hallucinations have begun. (And I thought they were only caused by a singular diet of bologna sandwiches from the ice box on the passenger's seat.) ....2500 miles in a bouncing Jeep Wrangler whose color is listed as "detonator yellow". MRT!

When a Man Loves a Woman

2009-06-29T21:08:00.009-05:00

In the last three years of college I washed at least ten million dishes by hand (not counting pots and pans) at Littlefield alone, mopped a line of one foot tiles over 1000 miles long, umpired around 100 sporting events, drove 3000 miles delivering electrical supplies and pharmaceuticals one summer, and put 300,000 snack cakes into vending machines another summer...all for about $1.65 an hour. That says nothing about folding shirts at Bealle's, carpentry/custom home building, driving a fork lift in Jester's basement kitchen, washing dishes at the other three dorms, collecting bills for the landlord, cooking in several restaurants, student teaching, substitute teaching, or a dozen other jobs that I can't even remember. I even tried a little bull riding.

I didn't have to do any of it. My parents would have paid for college but the the strings attached were prohibitive. I was in love and my investment yielded three priceless dividends.

Can you guess which job paid for the engagement ring and which one of those manly men is the author? :-)

Industry is a better horse to ride than genius. - Walter Lippmann

Say What?

2009-06-27T23:52:00.006-05:00

In forty nine years as a student and teacher I never said a cuss word in the classroom. It’s simple, really...I was not raised to curse. I never heard a single curse word out of my parents, Boy Scout leaders, Methodist leaders, teachers, and only one neighborhood parent. Back then, things like cussing was reserved for the locker room when adults were not looking. Even when Mr. Collie cussed at Dan or Joe he addressed me with extreme civility. When the rodeo and the enlisted Navy taught me that every third word was required to be the F word I could still turn it on and off at will. In 25 years I never heard Sandy or the girls cuss even once. I do a little bit at home but only a very little.

So, what happened that spring day in 1982? I didn’t say a cuss word but I did say something vulgar. It was a doozie. I took a class of ninth graders down to the empty cafeteria for a demonstration on the linoleum floor. Back in those days there were very few designations for learning disabilities and in fact that term itself was not widely used. This class was in the catch all category of “slow learners” who had long rap sheets. I was squatting down for a demonstration and struggling for an explanation they could wrap their minds around. I looked up to make eye contact and only the girls were watching. The boys’ heads were on swivels...looking like dogs at the park who had to check out everything. We had talked about that so many times that I just sighed and said, “We’re going back upstairs. You guys are just jackin’ off!” I think my stomach dissolved into a pool of acid when I heard the words come out of my mouth. It was hard to tell since my brain had done the same. Incredibly enough, I never flinched on the outside. Their eyes were as big as saucers as they came to attention. In the pregnant pause that followed I could hear my own heartbeat. Then from the back row came a timid male voice saying, “Mr. DeBord, I’m not jacking off.” How I kept a straight face I will never know. My diaphragm clinched and my colon twisted to keep the laughter inside but I held my stern look together and replied, “Then pay attention!” and they did.

I’m sure the reason they shaped up was because that probably was the kind of last chance language they heard at home when they had gone too far. As for that anonymous ninth grader....well....I have to assume that somewhere in his past he had been caught red handed.

That boy makes my eyes itch. - Lisa Jackson

Inside every small problem is a large problem struggling to get out. - unknown

Enjoying the "Salad Days".

2009-06-08T04:51:00.004-05:00

Desilu's "Made in the 80's" party and her new digs out West. Enjoying the salad days. Living proof that sometimes youth is not wasted on the young.

I hear that our forties are the old age of youth and that our fifties are the youth of old age. Hope springs eternal.

I love her so.

We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. – Joseph Campbell

"Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young." "The higher up you go, the more mistakes you are allowed. Right at the top, if you make enough of them, it's considered to be your style." – Fred Astaire

Coming Home

2009-06-06T13:45:00.012-05:00

Some sailors in the squadron ran their households while on sea duty as if they were only gone for the weekend….writing a check for the light bill from 12,000 miles away. Many of the family men could never embrace the idea of leaving. We had to put certain things out of our mind or it would greatly affect our performance and safety. We prepared our affairs, possessions, and loved ones before we left and then just let them go. Wives essentially became single mothers. We thought about them constantly in a sort of helpless manner avoiding the details about what might be happening back home. This at a time when wives had a great need to express the details. Coming home after six or nine months was a shock to our system....an abrupt end to this emotional and perceptual freeze-frame. Our wives looked different, our little babies turned toddlers strained to remember this man, someone else had repaired our cars, and the furniture was out of place. Yet we were very much the same person we had been before we left. The last few days of deployment we let ourselves yell hurray, remembering what we were returning to, only to find that life had pressed on while our memories were stuck in a time capsule….for a little while….a little homesick even after we returned.

The worst things: To be in bed and sleep not, to want for someone who comes not, to try to please and please not. - Egyptian Proverb

I Saw Her Standing There

2009-06-05T05:35:00.003-05:00

Sir John sang the song at this year’s Grammys. Songs pushing fifty should not be performed by singers pushing seventy even if they made it famous. Today I can listen to possibly the greatest rock and roll song ever at the click of a mouse. It wasn't so easy in 1964 when a 45 rpm cost 25 cents. We weren't poor...we just had our dad for a dad.

Every August we made a pilgrimage to Evergreen Colorado to escape the gulf coast mosquitoes, humidity, and heat. Nearby is one of the most beautiful concert venues ever...an outdoor amphitheater called Red Rocks...a natural outcrop of red sandstone slabs standing on edge...50 ft. tall and 300 ft. long. We read in the newspaper that the Beatles were playing. It's hard to describe the phenomenon of the Beatles but even children my age (9) were imitating them on the playground...shaking heads and pretending our hair reached all the way down to our ears. We were raised to ask for nothing but we begged our dad to let us go to the show. He often told us what we did or didn't want and on this occasion he told me Rock and Roll was for girls. He paid $6.25, a lavish sum at the time, for each of my sisters to see the concert. Only 7,000 of the 9,000 seats had been sold.

A very strange footnote….one sister claims I was in the concert and she had to protect me from the screaming teenagers, the other is sure I was in the parking lot just a few hundred feet from the stage, my parents don’t remember, and I seem to remember both versions.

Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before. - Stephen Wright

Sounds like a wiener.

2009-06-05T05:29:00.007-05:00

I said weenies today. Fifty three and I still say weenies. I called my father "daddy" his whole life. I also say ice box instead of refrigerator, drain board instead of kitchen counter, grade school and grammar school instead of elementary, oleo instead of margarine, typewriter instead of keyboard, and words like beauty parlor, barber shop, glove box, hi-fi, and record player. Coke means any kind of soda. I even use the word Xerox as a verb. The favorite of friends and relatives has to be my use of the plural possesive...y'all's...the only word I know of that has two contractions.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit. - Salman Rushdie

Oh Dark Thirty

2009-06-05T05:26:00.003-05:00

Veterans Day seems like it would be more significant. Institutions put on programs. It's all over the news because of our troops in Iraq. But for me it seems strangely impersonal. No one here knew me then. No one knows my rating or in which branch I served. In fact, only one person all day, a student, addressed me as a veteran even though I was wearing a large ribbon with the word on it. No friend or relative, not even my ex-wife who was my partner in service, dropped a note of recognition. I don't mind. Even though I spent months at a time tracking Soviet nuclear subs that is not the kind of thing I remember the most. What lives with me is how the experience changed my life in profound ways. Some are good (living abroad), some are bad (developing epilepsy), some are ugly (standing watch over suicide patients as they sleep on Treasure Island), and some are most curious. Concerning the latter, when I get up early for work and leave the house before there is any morning light a small part of my insides feel as if I am at RTC Orlando. I smell something that is not there...the peculiar odor of the metal marking pens with the white paint used to stencil our heavier clothing. My head is a bit heavy as if I have pulled the middle watch....wandering alone in the cool, dark air without much direction, waiting for eight bells.

So I guess Veterans Day for some is all about serving our country. At various times today I felt that. But when the alarm goes off every morning at "oh dark thirty" it's way more personal.

"Tattoo, Tattoo, lights out in five minutes." - (uncredited voice)

What a difference a day makes, twenty four little hours....

2009-06-05T05:25:00.001-05:00

December 17th is coincidentally both the date we began our teaching careers and later our stint in the Navy.

In 1979 I was still a few days away from graduation but San Antonio was desperate. There was no substitute teacher to relieve. For a whole semester the classes had been "baby sat" by a volunteer mother. The school was built in 1928 down by the railroad yards across that ancient New Braunfels St. bridge full of holes so large you could drop a basketball through. There was no air conditioning but I was on the second floor and my room was all windows and transoms. The first period of my first day presented me with three full term pregnant eighth graders in the front row. There was much squirming and labored breathing. The girls did some of that too. :-) I also had the girl whose mother had been killed by the parade sniper earlier that year....a wonderful student, a Mormon, and the only girl in the school who wore a dress. The pay was $400 a month.

They say the first bug to hit a clean windshield will always land directly in front of the driver's face but, after a titanic struggle to graduate, my windshield was anything but clean. I considered myself lucky to be there.

Stand out of their light.

2009-06-05T05:24:00.004-05:00

When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: “Only stand out of my light.”

One day my seven year old daughter Roxanne, the namesake of Alexander's Persian wife, came to me with a jar. It was a tiny baby food jar that she had filled with water and a single marble. She asked why the marble looked small on this side of the jar but when rolled to the other side it looked larger. I almost shouted with joy…such a little girl with such an observant mind. I made a pitiful attempt at an explanation of refraction she could hold on to but within a half minute she was off on another adventure. Someday I will come back with a better explanation and celebrate her curiosity. In the meantime, she thinks mostly of dancing and that makes me happy. You never know where a marble will lead them if you stand out of their light.

"If I worked in a big laboratory I would shout "Eureka!" every now and then just to boost morale." - unknown, found on a greeting card.

Corn-fusion in Fe-brew-ary

2009-06-05T05:23:00.002-05:00

Nature gets a little drunk in the month of February here in the Texas Hill Country. The red bud trees burst out with these red/violet blossoms before they even grow leaves. Then the mountain laurels, woody bushes with dark green leaves year round, put out these deep purple blossoms hanging in bunches that look like grapes. Even the woody part looks like grape vines. To top it off, the blossoms have a strong fragrance that smells exactly like grape Kool-Aid! The blossoms turn into pea pods that have hard red seeds in them the size of a grape. If you rub them against the concrete until the insides start to show and touch them to your friend's skin it produces a burning sensation. Kids call them "burner beans." Finally, the short gnarly live oaks, which blanket the area, lose the green leaves they've had for twelve months. They grow new leaves first and then the old ones fall off in a couple of days. We are ankle deep in small hard slick dead leaves that slip right through the tines of your rake.

"Mother Nature is a maaad scientist, Jerry!" - Cosmo Kramer

So sue me.

2009-06-05T05:16:00.003-05:00

A panel of early learning "experts" on PBS today told me children should not be given toys because they stifle creativity. Even coloring books were pooh-poohed because they had lines. One panelist has a room full of old appliances which the kids disassemble and then take the pieces home with them. I'll bet mom and dad love her. They agreed that the key to learning is to let the child do anything they wish but never leave their side. Uh, yeah...that will be a great defense when junior jacks his first CD at Wal-Mart.

When I was a child being indoors was usually a form of punishment. Mostly I was running down the bayou with a stick in one hand and a dirt clod in the other. My parents never asked where I had been upon my return. It's a miracle I made it to adulthood but apparently playing without them was not a cognitive or formative disaster.

We made some good guesses when it came time to have our own kids. They loved their driveway skates and sidewalk chalk. They had one computer game....an American Girls program for writing plays which they put on for the neighborhood parents. One day I used a garden rake to bulldoze Dani and Roxi's strewn clothing into a heap. Put them away and then you can play. When they were done they played dress up. Yes, the clothes ended up back on the floor. The photos are Desi and Roxi playing with their favorite backyard toy. I told them it was The Magical Rainbow Maker, Princess Water Ballet, and Super Kool-Aid Fountain. OK OK...it was a lawn sprinkler....the grass was dying. So sue me.

"The time has come", the walrus said, "to talk of many things: of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings. And why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. Calloh, Callay no work today! We're cabbages and Kings!" - Lewis Carroll with help from Walt Disney

Fly me to the moon, let me play among the stars....

2009-06-05T05:14:00.002-05:00

We lived next to the airport when NASA was formed. When the astronauts came they stayed in this motel on Telephone Road called the Skylane Inn. It had a neon sign that read "Orbit Room". I remember riding my bike over there and just staring at it from the other side of the road. My parents would not tell me what the Orbit Room was but they assured me none of the astronauts would go into that part of the motel. When I asked my elderly school teacher, she would only say with a sniff, "That is where Frank Sinatra would loiter if he stayed in that motel." Of course, all my grade school teachers, when asked where babies came from told us they were found in the cabbage patch. I might have believed that if anyone in Southeast Houston had a cabbage patch. I think in those days we were still waiting for someone to write a textbook on how to communicate with small children.

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer. - unknown

"Want to Get Away?"

2009-06-05T05:13:00.001-05:00

So this week...ummm...something funny happened on the road. I stopped at Whataburger where a kid was hosing down the drive-thru. I had to exit during rush hour, with wet tires, an empty truck bed, and cross over four lanes lickity split. You can guess what happened. I jumped into a gap in the traffic and the pick-up fishtailed wildly in both directions. The light turned red before I could get completely straight so there I sat, waiting to turn left, with my truck slightly askew, wondering if anyone had witnessed the action. After a moment I realized I was the only car at the light. I looked in the mirror and there they were in both left turn lanes....all waiting about fifty feet behind me. I shrank about two inches in my seat. I half-heartedly waved them forward. One line leader ignored me with a terse look and the other line leader shook his head with an expression that said "I don't think so." I shrank another two inches. I'm pretty sure the light stayed red for an hour. If there had been a camera you would now see me on a Southwest Airlines commercial...want to get away?

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough." - Mario Andretti

That would just be rediculous.

2009-06-05T05:11:00.001-05:00

This year there was no Martin Luther King Day tree. I took it down in time. One year I had a Thanksgiving/ Christmas/ New Year/ Martin Luther King/ Valentine/ Washington/ Rodeo/ Lincoln/ St.Patrick/ Easter/ Fiesta/ San Jacinto/ Cinco de Mayo tree. That's when I took it down. I couldn't let there be a Mother's Day tree. That would just be ridiculous.

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow. - Mark Twain

Is it better to have loafed and lost than to never have loafed at all? - James Thurber

Houston, we have a tree...

2009-06-05T05:08:00.002-05:00

We will have a tree this Christmas. Yea! Last year I retired the behemoth with it's miles of copper wire and picked up this little ragged thing for a song after the holidays. I was tired of doing the full body floor wrestle, arms and legs in a bear hug, trying to get the tree back into the box. Too many years of fluffing and unfluffing the tips had swelled it's girth beyond control...sort of like Desilu and Roxie on a bad hair day. I had quite a surprise when I set up the little one today. I'm sure the factory workers in China must think we are crazy for all the things we do in the name of Christmas but there is one worker bee for whom it must have gotten personal. One of the branches had a tuft of human hair snarled in the folding mechanism. I'm sorry....I couldn't stop laughing. It reminded me of the time Dani cut all the hair off the right side of her head. Anywayzzz, if you're over there reading this...I'm sorry and I hope it grows back soon.

Once you open a can of worms, the only way to recan them is to use a bigger can. - Zymurgy's First Law of System Dynamics

"Musick hath charms to sooth a savage breast..."

2009-06-05T05:03:00.010-05:00

- William Congreve, in The Mourning Bride, 1697

Yes, it is breast and not beast. For Desiree's first studio recital she passed on the classical pieces and chose a tune from A Charlie Brown Christmas. I was secretly proud of her for that. It took place in a large auditorium at Trinity University. We were asked to sit through the whole recital but everyone knew that was impossible. It was very long, small children were there, and the pieces could get tedious. As soon as a piece was over people would exit or enter, doing so as quietly as possible. Many students chose long classical pieces in which we quickly lost interest...literally pounding the keys. Children squirmed. Rhapsody in Blue lasted twenty minutes while the audience only recognized bits and pieces from the background music of a United Airline commercial. Heads quietly bobbed and turned during each performance. That all changed when Desiree played "Christmas Time is Here". The instant she played a few notes, every head straightened and then turned to the person next to them. As if they had rehearsed lines, you could see their lips silently repeat "I know that. I love that." Children grabbed a parent’s sleeve and pointed at the stage. Adults poised for movement sank slowly into the nearest seat and silence fell. I noticed her hands. They seemed to stroke the keys instead of strike them. Often the sound seemed delayed as if the sight of her hands arrived before the notes. The music had an ethereal quality....delicate.... almost as if she were on the edge of the galaxy and in my lap at the same time. You could see the music on everyone's face from peaceful to reflective to sublime. When she was done, the audience slowly returned to their routine with stress levels lower, patience no longer at a premium, and people looking at each other with warm expressions.

Yeah, that's Desi. She is a music therapist now.

"Finding the right work is like discovering your own soul in the world." – Thomas Moore