The following text thread speaks for itself. My youngest, now 20, is staying with his grandparents for a couple of weeks before he flies to Maryland to help me move back to Texas. It began with me asking how things were going. Son - Things are fine, time is moving pretty fast but it’s amazing how slow this year has felt. I feel like I can remember something about every week since early February. I’m not the only one who thinks this year resembles 1968 fairly closely. Me - I heard a historian on NPR today say that the recent events reminded him of 1968 also. The major difference, he said, is that this time people have time to get involved because they’re unemployed or on lockdown, out of school, etc. Son - I wouldn’t want to erase this period away, it’s been incredible to see. You no longer can claim “blah, blah we all got involved back in the day, none of you youngsters protest.” I’d be out there if I wan’t living out of my suitcases pinn...
REVOLUTION, I SAY! It’s time to stuff the profit-swollen airline swine back down into the deep dark corporate pit where they belong! Time to put the genie back in the bottle and cork it forever! Listen. Over the years I’ve flown quite a few times. Many times, in fact. I’ve flown all over the United States and I’ve flown internationally. As of this writing I’ve flown to, I think, 23 countries, plus any number of times internally in several of those countries. The most harrowing of all those internal flights was in 1986 on an Air India jet from Arusha, Tanzania, to Kigali, Rwanda. We’d only been in the air for about an hour and weren’t terribly high above the mountains when there was a sudden boom! and a great shuddering of the entire plane. For half a minute the cabin rocked and vibrated to the sound of grinding gears. It scared the hell out of me, but none of the flight crew seemed particularly alarmed— maybe that sort of thing was a common occurrence for Air India, I don’t know...
I mentioned in my last post that I've been away from social media-- my blog and Facebook in particular --for the last eight months. I said I had my reasons. I said I wasn't sure I wanted to be back. I'm not very comfortable around people, even less so in forum where I can't see their faces or hear their voices. I need to look into a person's eyes to know whether they care, whether they're telling the truth. But my instincts (my spirit guide?) suggested it was time to give it a try, so I'm giving it a try. For a while. I am not the kind of person who makes friends easily. I am not one who turns heads when I enter a room. I am the kind of person, it seems, who has a quiet impact on the people I meet. They don't notice me until I'm gone. And that's okay. My ex-wife always used to say that I am the kind of person who craves attention and "attaboys," but that when they come I don't want them. I run from the spot...
Marcher seul sur la route. It means “walking the road alone.” Starting back in 2011 or 2012, somewhere in there, I created my first blog site. It was called Pouring Music From a Cup and its banner photograph was the view from the top of Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas. You may remember it. A few years later I put a collection of my blog posts together, 42 of them, and self-published the collection in a book also called Pouring Music From a Cup . The cover of the book was c reated by a young artist named Summer Westover, and it looked like this: However, like the blog, I chose to put the book to sleep last autumn. The reasons don’t matter. The point is, the book is resting comfortably on Amazon, along with my other books, and won’t awaken again until it is kissed by a beautiful wandering princess. You can’t see or buy any o...
“I believe that there is a hidden hero in every man and a hidden angel in every woman.” She calls herself Lili, though that’s not her real name. I do not know Lili. We haven’t met— not yet. To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure what she looks like. Yes, I’ve seen photographs of her, but they were rather dark and pixilated, and that, I think, was intentional. She says she doesn't feel comfortable presenting pictures of herself in public, but I guess in this circumstance she felt she had to. What’s speaking to me about this odd beginning to what, perhaps, may eventually evolve into a genuine friendship, or even relationship, is that it speaks of a certain humility on her part not often found in others. This may well be a time when I will be forced to accept the person based upon who she is on the inside before I find myself drawn to what I see on the outside. You know that old war horse: accept me for who I am . That’s tough to do when you’re immediately distracted by...
Yes. We met on a popular dating site that I won’t name because it’s a nonsensical name that begins with Z, and I’ve had it with romantic nonsense. She called herself “J” which I soon convinced her to reveal stood for “Janna.” And of course she was pretty. At 57 she’d obviously taken very good care of herself. Imagine my delight when I read her profile story and saw how closely it mirrored my own: New to all of this dating experience so I’m a bit skittish and shy. Divorced in 2015 after a twenty-five year marriage … I’m looking first for someone I can trust, someone who enjoys going places but also enjoys a quiet night at home, and someone who is authentic. I retired from education after teaching for 34 years in the public schools. I couldn’t wait to send a message to her! I too was fairly new at the online dating scene, or if not exactly new, patently naïve. I too had been divorced in the not-so-distant past after a two- decades-plus marriage. I ...
Let me confess at the outset: I love the English language. Not because it’s my native tongue, although that’s certainly part of its allure, but because its rich palette derives from so many other languages. Unlike any other language in the world, English is malleable, eminently fluid and versatile. Like any other language it has rules and it has exceptions to those rules. It has its variations, contradictions, idioms, dialects, and is utterly confusing with its hundreds of homonyms, homophones, and inconsistent spellings. Then again, like the artist’s palette that has many tints and tinctures of every color paint, the possible combinations of those colors is endless. Words and sentences are my passion, my comfort; I dare not abuse them. They are my intellectual children. I feel protective and nurturing toward our language. For this reason I wrote a blog a few weeks back titled “Words and Phrases That Should Be Tortured and Killed.” It wasn’t an exhaustive list, but i...
Maybe it began with Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold when they marched into Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, armed like G4S Security mercenaries and killed twelve students, one teacher, and wounded twenty-one others before, thankfully, ending themselves. Maybe it was the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre that occurred on December 14th, 2012, when, for whatever deranged reason, 20-year-old Adam Lanza walked into the school and killed 26 people, twenty of the them children between six and seven years old. Maybe it was the public outrage that at these and what seems like an endless stream of school shootings before and since. But somewhere in the reactionary cauldrons of American public rhetoric the idea of arming teachers bubbled to the surface. Put guns in the hands of teachers, proponents said, and any would-be assailant will think twice about entering a school, knowing that staff members in that building are also armed and can respond with deadly force. They called it a...
Okay, I get it. Language is derivative; language is fluid and ever-changing, adapting to the times. Cool. Far out. Totally. Choice. P honus-balonus (bet you don’t recognize this one, do you? It’s from the 1920s; means nonsense or, more colloquially, “bullshit.”). I also get slang, idioms, dialect, colloquialisms, and all the lingual variations that verbal communication implies. I understand that, like, the vast majority of us are not, like, linguists, or writers or, in these times of social media, even, like, literally, decent texters or bloggers. And I think it’s, like, a generally accepted fact of life and society— any society —that most people are, like, at best only okay talkers. Which is to say, most people talk like they drive: only aware of themselves, in a hurry and unconcerned with how they get there, careless, oblivious, ignorant of the “rules of the road.” Oratorically, they don’t care how air-headed they sound if the person they’re talking to gets the idea. ‘L...
First published in July 1998 . I came to Texas kicking and screaming. Stepped off that 727 at Houston Intercontinental Airport on July 19th, 1973 after having spent two weeks in Sarasota, Florida, with my grandparents, their grapefruit trees, and swims in crystal blue water twice a day at their beachfront cabaña. I’m not sure I ever knew exactly why I was spared the cross-country move from Knoxville, Tennessee to Humble, Texas, when my mother and brother were forced to pile in the Blue Oiler— packed window-to-window and its tailgate bulging with shit that should have been thrown out in the back yard and set on fire —and endure two and a half days of ever-flattening Tennessee, through Memphis, and then the Arkansas state highways, eternally reduced to a single lane for the entire length of the state . . . but they did. Listening to my old man swear at the “ sorry sombitches” at Ford who designed the Torino, at the truckers clogging the left lane,...