Category Archives: Veteran’s Affairs

Evening With the Authors in Lockhart

Posted on by
3

Yea these many months ago, I was invited by the organizers to be one of those authors in a fund-raising event to benefit the Clark Library. This is the oldest functioning public library existing in Texas; and since Texas was not generally conducive to the contemplative life and public institutions such as libraries until after the Civil War, generally – this means it is a mere infant of a library in comparison to institutions in other places. But I was thrilled to be invited, and to find out that Stephen Harrigan is one of the other authors. There were two elements in his book, Gates of the Alamo which I enjoyed terrifically when I finally read it. (Well after finishing the Trilogy, since I didn’t want to be unduly influenced in writing about an event by another fiction-writers’ take on it.) First, he took great care in setting up the scene – putting the whole revolt of the Texians in the context of Mexican politics; the soil out of which rebellion sprouted, as it were. (And he also touched on the matter of the Goliad as well.) Secondly, he had a main character who experienced the Texian rebellion against Mexico as a teenaged boy and who then lived into the 20th century. I liked the way that it was made clear that this all happened not that long ago, that it was possible for someone to have been a soldier in Sam Houston’s army, and live to see electrical street lighting, motorcars, and moving pictures.

That just appealed to me, for as another author friend pointed out – we are only a few lifetimes ago from the memories of great events. For instance – my mother, who is now in her eighties; suppose that when she was a child of eight or ten, she talked to the oldest person she knew. Suppose that in 1938, that oldest person was ninety, possibly even a hundred. That oldest person that my mother knew would have been born around 1830 to the late 1840s; such a person would clearly remember the Civil War, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, possibly even the California Gold Rush and the emigrant trail, the wars with the Plains Indians. Now, suppose that the oldest person that my mother knew and talked to as a child and supposing that person as a child of eight or ten had then talked to the oldest person they knew – also of the age of eighty to ninety in the 1840s . . . that oldest person would have been born in 1750-1760. That oldest person, if born on these shores would remember the Revolution, the British Army occupying the colonies, Lexington and Concord, General Washington crossing the Delaware. All of that history, all of those memories, in just three lifetimes – three easy jumps back into time! Nothing worked better to establish how close we are to events.

Anyway, I am looking forward to this – and since my daughter and I will drive up to Lockhart around midday Saturday, and the event doesn’t even get started until early evening, we are planning to go to the Kreuz Market and prove to ourselves that it really is one of the five best BBQ places in Texas. And she wants to check out any thrift stores and estate sales going on.

(Reposted to allow comments – that old punctuation in the post title bites again)

College Edumacation

Posted on by
2

Well, following upon da Blogfadda’s tireless coverage of the various implications of the currently about-to-implode higher education bubble, I suppose that I might weigh in on the various merits/demerits of the so-called bubble, and the efficacy of even bothering to attend an institution of so-called higher education, with respect to my current career as a producer of readable genre fiction – which is not as highly-paid as the casual reader is likely to expect, but still . . . that career is underwritten by a pension earned for military service. It’s not the generous pension that I might have earned as a public servant in California as a prison guard or lifeguard, or municipal employee in certain urban sinks . . . but it suffices to pay the mortgage and a little over, since I had the good sense to retire and buy a residence in Texas, fifteen years ago. So, anyway – college education, value of, personal development . . . et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Personally, I felt that I got a great value out of my college education, and my parents – being the first in their families to achieve degrees – were all about the four of us being college attendees also. Dad went all the way to a Masters and almost a PhD, courtesy to his own industry and the GI Bill. He was pretty pissed about missing being awarded the PhD, I tell ya – he took out his frustrations building an ironwork chandelier, exactingly designed to hold the thick beeswax candles that my great-aunt Nan scored though being a stalwart member of the altar guild at some Episcopal establishment that rewarded her with those. Well, anyway, the ‘rents were pretty well hipped on the values of getting higher education, and three of the four of us kids eventually do so – but in the meantime, at what expense? And for what payback? It was pretty well drilled into us; our college education would be self-paid, although Mom was an uber-mom, in comparison to the mothers of our peers, growing up where we did, and at the time that we did. Which was a working-class, blue-collar striving suburb; I don’t think Mom and Dad ever entertained fantasies of red-brick Ivies for us, or even their own alma mater, Occidental College. Which was just as well – saved wear and tear on the emotions, ambitions and pocketbook. Community college for lower division, state Uni for upper, and if you can figure out how to do that and not live at home – good for you, kid!

This meant for me that I lived at home for all four years. I attended a local community college for two of those years (Glendale Community College, for those who give a rodent’s patoot about these things) – all the while carefully selecting every course taken for it’s transferability to a state university – and then went to California State University Northridge for upper division. I graduated from that august establishment with a bachelor in English, discovering only upon graduation day that all the good-looking and personable guys were in the Engineering division. Well, as I had gone to college to procure a B. of A. and not my Mrs.; this discovery was only a matter of academic and aesthetic interest to myself and the girl in line next to me, standing in our cheap polyester robes rented from whatever concession that held the rights for that graduation year. I went on and enlisted in the Air Force – which had been my intention for much of the time that I had spent marooned in academia. I did not do ROTC, by the way – that was not offered at Cal State Northridge. All they had was a program at another Cal State school that I couldn’t get to easily as a commuter student.

So – four years at various community and state institutions of higher learning, paying for my textbooks, tuition and the gas to get to classes: how did I pay for all of this? I made dolls. I made twelfth-scale dolls, and sometimes client-commissioned dolls and doll-clothes, and sold them on consignment or direct sales through a miniature shop in a nearby town. I made $25 a week, week in and week out – that’s about five dolls, with hand-sewn clothes, and composition heads, hands and feet of soda-cornstarch clay, and bodies made of cloth-wrapped wire, so that they were easily pose-able. I didn’t then, or ever, claim to be the best 12th-scale doll artist in the world, but I was the only one in that particular field at that particular time, working through that particular commercial outlet. And it did add up, not having any big expenses, other than tuition, textbooks and gas. Or at least it didn’t in the early 1970s. So I paid for all of my college education, and I came out with about $1,500 left over. I went to England on it, and spent the whole summer staying in Youth Hostels and traveling on Brit-Rail and various public transportations.

Educated, with a relatively useless degree in English Lit? Such were the circumstances that I felt then and ever since – that I was perfectly well educated, from this experience and from a mad impulse to read everything I could get my hands on, with regard to subjects which attracted my butterfly-impulsive interest. In the early 1970s in California, community colleges and state schools still offered an adequate and intellectually challenging education, even in the softer degree programs like – umm, English. A degree in it was a good starting point for quite a lot of interesting careers, even though Cal State Northridge didn’t and doesn’t have any cachet at all in the grand educational scheme of things. But I didn’t bankrupt myself retroactively – or my family in procuring a degree from it. And as a family, we also spared ourselves that desperate pursuit of red-brick-ivy-covered status-education competition. Really, Mom and Dad were totally realistic about all that, and the prospects that we would all have. For myself, I didn’t want to go on and get a higher degree; I wanted to be a writer, and I sensed, even then – that the best and most efficient way to do that was to go ahead and have a life, an interesting life, full of interesting and varied people. I’ve been knocking around the world ever since, among all sorts of people. Some of them don’t have anything beyond high school, and some of them do – and from places that are much higher thought of than Cal State Northridge. Weird thing? I’ve never felt the least bit at a disadvantage, intellectually. I’ve never been able to decide if it was the degree itself – which guaranteed to the observer that I was basically literate-and-a-bit for the standards of the time – or just the experience of life in the military which would account for that confidence. Just one of those things, I expect – being realistic about the education I got from one or the other – and not being in debt from the experience. I’m in debt for certain things – but not for my higher education.

Books and Stuff

Posted on by
Reply

So, today I had the signing – supposed to be more or less the launch signing for Daughter of Texas, at the Twig – and it was actually a bit of a bust, scheduled as it was to start in the afternoon at exactly the time the Farmers’ Market around in back had already closed down. Alas . . . it seems that the Pearl Brewery pretty much resembles a tomb, once whatever big event scheduled folds up and goes away. Part of this was my fault, for scheduling release to coincide with Fiesta, and not realizing that Easter this year coincided also with my range of dates, and that the Fiesta celebrations would actually put the Twig out of commission on a couple of relevant days, because of traffic and parking, and their immediate vicinity being the staging area for a parade . . . And it seems to Blondie (no mean detective when it comes to trends and atmosphere) that they are preferring to emphasize their place of business as sort of the FAO Schwartz of kid’s books, in San Antonio, and downplay the local, adult, independent, small-market author sort of thing . . . without entirely nuking their bridges to that community. But still – one does sense a certain chill in that respect. And it’s not just me, BTW – another indy author of a gripping book about the Texas war for independence had a signing event on a Saturday in April – and if it weren’t for me and three of his friends showing up, I don’t think he had much more in the way of interest and sales, even though his event was on a Saturday morning. Just about everyone who came through the door was a parent with a kidlet in tow.

Anyway, a two-hour stint of sitting behind a table in an almost-deserted bookstore, before Blondie and I packed it up at the hour-and-a-half mark. A bore, and a demoralizing one, at that, although I managed to get through one-third of a book about the Irish on the 19th century frontier; which I might have bought, if the author had written more about the Irish in Texas. We left then, as we had passed a parking-lot rummage sale that Blondie wanted to check out, before everyone packed up the goods or the good stuff was taken. Honestly, only two people even came up and talked to me during the whole hour and a half . . . and there were things that I could have been doing in that hour and a half, like working on chapter 12 of the sequel, posting and commenting to various websites, working the social media angle. The excellent thing is that Daughter of Texas has sold big, during April, especially in the Kindle format. Working through Watercress and by extension, Lightning Source has let me price it at a competitive level and at an acceptable discount for distribution to the chain stores – and it is selling, a nice little trickle of sales, through thick and thin. In the last month there was also a massive up-tick in interest for the Trilogy and for Truckee, through the halo effect. All of my books have very high level of presence in search engines on various relevant terms . . . so, honestly, I believe now I would better be served by working more on internet marketing, on doing book-talks, library talks, and book-club meetings – and the internet stuff. Doing a single author-table at a store just does not work without massive local media interest. I have managed to score a little of that, but not enough to make an appearance at a local bookstore a standing-room-only event. I have one more such on the schedule, at the Borders in Huebner Oaks, but after that I will probably pull the plug on any more single-author book-store appearances. They just do not seem to have any useful result; they are an energy and time sink – and I only have so much of either to allot to them. Joint appearances with other local authors; yes, indeedy, I’ll be there. Book-talks, book-club meetings, special events, special events like Christmas on the Square in Goliad, and Evening with the Authors in Lockhart, the West Texas Book and Music Festival in Abilene – and any other events that I am invited to . . . I’ll be there with bells on, and with my full table display and boxes of books. But the individual store events – It’s just not paying off, relative to the time and effort spent on them.

Guest Post – Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act

Posted on by
1

(The following was forwarded to me by reader Taylor Dardan for posting on the Brief, as something that might be of interest to older veterans.)
As the US continues air strikes on Libya and putting more soldiers in the line of fire, a number of older veterans are fighting for their own support back home in the United States. Since January there’s been a great amount of campaigning from veteran committees to get a support program for post-2001 veterans and their caregivers started through the Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act. The law just passed the January 31st deadline in which it was supposed to get off the ground, therefore Barack Obama, who signed it last year, is coming under some pressure from these committees. Even with the fight to get this act through, it should be noted that veterans who served before 2001 with caregivers are given a very low amount of support, if any at all. So hopefully the continued push for support will further expand to include older veterans, many of whom are still dealing with illnesses brought on by their time in the military.
Although this act has been facing a number of hurdles and obstacles, representatives in Congress are hopeful to have it off the ground in the coming months of spring and summer. Congress has been mostly apologetic in the inability to get started and pointed towards their inexperience working with stipend pay as a major reason for the setbacks. The act itself, as mentioned earlier, would look to support post 2001 veterans through health services, training/education on care giving for vets, as well as payment for lodging expenses. Getting this act started would be a great move in providing veterans with more support, yet continued work to include older (pre 2001) veterans should continually be examined and pressed.
Care givers of veterans serving before 2001 are given little to no support at all currently, which includes a minor amount of respite care. A number of groups and committees, such as the American Legion are continuing the battle to seek an increased amount of support for the caregivers of older veterans.
There are certainly a number of ways that these older veterans have felt the repercussions of their military service in the form of illness and diseases. This includes a number of different health problems including mesothelioma developing from asbestos, mental problems stemming from Agent Orange in Vietnam, as well as a number of heightened health problems stemming from bad water at Camp LeJeune.
A number of veterans of the Vietnam War were exposed to a number of herbicides, also known as Agent Orange. What come from this exposure was a number of health and illness problems mostly in the mental health sector. Asbestos’ material has been used for a number of years in a number of different buildings, shipyards and factories on many military bases all over the country. The problem with its use throughout the 20th century involves its exposure leading to deadly diseases such as mesothelioma and asbestosis. For example, mesothelioma life expectancy is only an average of 10 months following diagnosis; therefore care givers are often highly necessary for these patients. Contaminated water at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina was a problem for over 30 years. Once the level of contamination was discovered, bacteria such as perchloreothylene and trichloroethylene were shown in high levels in the water. These have been concluded to exposure and increased risks of neurological effects, as well as Hodgkin’s disease and a number of different cancer types. Given some of the severe effects older veterans could still be feeling today, care givers are often necessary to them, therefore further support would be greatly invested.
The charge to get this act through to help post 2001 veterans should certainly be the first step in the progress towards increased support. Furthermore, extending this support level beyond younger veterans would do a number in helping some of the older veterans of military service, as well as their caregivers.

Dreamweaver

Posted on by
Reply

My daughter and I just lamented this week – that for two people who are not employed full-time, we are indeed awfully busy. We must maintain a calendar, to keep track of it all, and when one of us is due someplace, to do something or other. The patchwork of part-time jobs that we hold between us is sufficient to our needs. I am retired military; she draws a small disability pension from the Veterans’ Administration and is intermittently going to school in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree. I write books – which brings in a trickle of royalties and direct sales – blog for pay at a local realtor’s website, partner in a small publishing firm, free-lance edit and write, also part-time at a tiny ranch real estate firm, occasionally constrict a website . . . all of this does not produce a predictable income-stream, but it does produce one. Free lance; that is, I am a soldier of writing fortune, and to put it in modern terms, an independent contractor. I work for straight pay, when I want to, and take my pay from those who I agree to work for on specific projects for writing services rendered.

It’s fun – perilous but fun. I just can’t look at the beginning of the month and predict with any degree of absolute confidence exactly how much will be in the bank account by the end of it. That there will be enough to meet needs – is usually the case. It’s just that I never know when or where they will be coming from. Something always turns up, usually without any warning at all. It’s a bohemian way to live without the je ne sais quoi of actually being a bohemian, but it does have rewards, such as being able to set one’s own work schedule. I know what I have to do, to finish the current job; I can do it early in the morning, on the weekend, on a holiday, there is no one hanging over me, logging every key-stroke, I can kick back on a mid-week afternoon and we can go to a movie, if we feel like it.

I worked for all kinds of businesses after retiring from the military, none of which I built a second career out of, although I had kind of counted on doing exactly that. But it just didn’t work out. My business partner in the Tiny Publishing Bidness says that it didn’t work out for her for very long, either – she got bored, and couldn’t work days. For myself, I could never work for a monolithic big company again – reliable and enduring – but also boring as hell. I also worked for small local firms, which turned out to be just as unsatisfactory but in a different way. The best of them went broke or relocated out of state, and the worst of them were advertised to me as places which regarded their employees as just like family. What I came to realize is that they treat them as part of a viciously dysfunctional and abusive family. OK, then – getting out from under that kind of burden is another reward of being a free lance.

My daughter also has an eccentric work schedule, aside from her occasional classes: she cleans house once a month for a neighbor who has health issues and is confined to a scooter-chair. Lovely person – lives just around the corner from us. She also had a gig doing computer training for another neighbor who was just dipping her toes into this new-fangled computer/internet thingy, and needed about an hour of coaching once a week, in order to cope with her email and her Netflix account. Twice a week, she collects the children of another neighbor from school, and baby-sits them until their older brother gets home from school. She also works as my personal assistant when I do a book-talk, which is no-end useful to me, although currently this is for no pay. She’ll inherit the rights to my books, though – so that’ll work out. And when it comes to doing what we call “being a real Arthur” – having an assistant helps no end. She has an occasional job, delivering for a local company which does fruit-flower arrangements, thanks to a friend who recommended her. It’s only on major holidays, but she is trusted as a reliable and professional part-timer; every month that there is a gift-giving occasion in it, she’s there and on the job for anything from two to five days. She’s also been helping with the work of the Tiny Publishing Bidness, and is thinking of taking classes in graphic arts – and courses which would be of use to a tiny independent publishing firm. And she also earns a paycheck with the Tiny Publishing Bidness; doing housekeeping for my business partner twice a month, and weekly performing errands and fix-it stuff. This makes her income a little more predictable. She was let go from her own full-time/flex time job two years ago; another one of those local Tiny Bidnesses which could no longer afford an office manager. So – there it is. I think we got our hard times a couple of years ago, and now we’re ahead of the game, at least by a couple of lengths.

Relatively Phidless

Posted on by
5

Two weekends, I went to uphold the morale of another indy- and Texas-history-obsessed author at a local signing, at a bookstore which shall remain nameless because I am quite annoyed with them and don’t want to give them the traffic and it’s over a relatively piddling amount and I really ought to be big and forget about it but it’s the bloody principle of the thing and why the heck should I who subsist on freelance editing jobs and a military pension and an irregular stream of royalty checks be expected to subsidize a bookstore located in a very trendy and very likely expensive location and if they are on the financial rocks through miscalculation and their own business practices . . . well, again – why the heck should I be expected to bear some of the brunt of their various miscalculations? Oh, yeah – because I’m an indy writer, working for a teensy local subsidy press, and this enterprise is just about the only indy bookstore in town.

Getting back to my main point; frankly, doing an event at an indy bookstore or big-box outlet is usually ego-death-onna-stick anyway, unless by some miracle of persuasion, you have managed to BS local media outlets into going along with the pretense that you are a big-name-arthur. Which is what I told my new indy-author friend – who has actually had some luck with this . . . Anyway, one may as well have some friends come along, to while away the desperate hours with sitting behind the dreaded author-table and watching customers come in through the door, studiously avoiding your eye as they slither through the immediate area, heading for the Stephen Kings and the Philippa Gregorys and the latest Oprah pick.

Really – as I told my fellow obsessive – you might almost have better luck at a Christmas craft show, if it weren’t for the iron-clad tradition of authors appearing at bookstores. I know another local author who has a cute little cookbook, very well designed and edited, and she takes a table at regular gun shows. She cleans up, BTW. Guys, guns, hunting apparel and accessories. Wives and girlfriends, feeling obliged to come along, are not really much interested in the guns, apparel and accessories. Drawn to her cute little table display like insects to a bright porch light on a Texas summer evening, they are. Marketing, baby – sometimes it’s all about sorting out an unconventional venue where there are customers with money and where your product stands out.

Anyway, there were enough of my fellow Texas-history-obsessive friends showing up that we had a good time of it – alas that he didn’t have the good time that I had at the fund-raising luncheon the week before, where I nearly got writer’s-cramp scribbling messages and a stylized initial in the front of what seemed like an endless stream of my own books . . . hey, that’s a problem that is nice to have. I can get used to it. I promise onna-stacka-Bibles that I will never be a witch about this, I will be pleasant and obliging and always have time to talk at least briefly to a fan, even if it’s not a convenient time or a welcome interruption – I will make it seem like it is. I have skills that way. After the requisite time-behind-the-table was done, my author friend, three of his friends, and Blondie and I repaired to a table at Sams’ Burgers, to replenish the inner person and to talk about Texas history, a mad passion for which is shared by all of us at the table save perhaps Blondie, and then only because she is dragged into it by my interest. At the age of five, she got dragged into every significant museum and location of historical interest between the then-Iron Curtain and Gibraltar, so she ought to be used to it by now.

A matter of wry amusement to me is that I don’t have any sort of advanced degree for this. S’help me god, all I have is your basic state university English degree and only a BA at that. I did all the classes towards a Masters in public administration, way back before Blondie was born – but I swear it was only because I was bored silly and that was about the only higher ed program offered at Misawa AB . . . and the education counselor must have talked a good game or I had no sales resistance at all, because I wound up taking all the classes . . . even though I had no interest what-so-freaking-ever in public administration. Still, a lot of the classes were interesting, in and of themselves, so I suppose I took something away from that educational experience. Not that any of it applied in a way that I can see to my eventual career of scribbling respectably well-researched genre historical fiction . . . but it’s just as well there is no entry-qualification for that. Nope – no licensing procedure for those who wish to trot out our creative works of fiction before a (hopefully) appreciative audience . . . yet, anyway. There is no end to the writing of theses and papers and that sort of thing by those possessing PHDs, but very few of them have the ability to make them gripping reads, appealing to the general public.

But I was thinking, as I was scribbling this – I’ve been able to hold my own, when it comes to those matters that hold my interest – with all sorts of people, and some of them are . . . ummm, academically credentialed well above and far above my own level. I’ve always liked the thought of being an autodidact, a person who basically educated themselves, a person who read voraciously and thought about . . . things, outside the mainstream of currently acceptable intellectual thought-processes. And I’ve been thinking – that when it comes to writing agreeable, interesting and accessible genre fiction – it may be more doable to start with someone who can write vividly and with some degree of competence and discipline, and who might have learned or be taught mad historical research skills . . . than it would be to teach someone with all the skills to be a good story-teller and writer.

You know, I am also thinking – for dramatic story-telling potential, this could be a great rom-com; a serious and academically credentialed historian, married/involved with a historical novelist. Hilarity definitely guaranteed to ensue. Plot – oh, I could come up with something. I’m a novelist, after all.

On the Edge of the Wilderness

Posted on by
2

Well, it’s not the wilderness, actually – that place where my parents built their retirement house, but it would certainly look so to someone more used to living in the city. No streetlights, and the houses are set back from unpaved roads, so a possessing good stock of flashlights and fresh batteries are something that every household out here needs, especially if people are planning to go somewhere and return after dark. I had to work the combination to the front gate by the light of my cell phone at one point, so no – I won’t forget a flashlight on my next visit, especially if I am going someplace after dark. There may be starlight and moonlight on occasion, but underneath the trees, it can get as black as the inside of a cow.

Which some of the neighbors have, by the way. A cow. And some goats. At least half of them have horses, too, now all winter-shaggy and bored, mooching around in their corrals, next to the road. At once place, the horses managed to chew away a lot of the three-rail wooden fence. The previous owners used to keep it all in good repair and painstakingly painted white. The new owner doesn’t seem to care quite so much. Everyone has dogs in their yards. At my parents’ place, one can track a pedestrian around the neighborhood by following the sounds of sequential dogs barking. There are also coyotes on the prowl, especially at night. This does not make it healthy for outdoor cats; my parents and most of their neighbors have lost cats to coyotes and other predators, in spite of taking every care. It seems that the only way to keep cats entirely safe is to keep them indoors.

For some strange, atavistic reason, my parents have always loved living on a dirt road, out in the hills. Possibly this cuts down the numbers of door-to-door evangelists and vacuum cleaner salespeople, but it’s heck on automobile suspensions … especially when a heavy rain has gouged huge gullies across the roadway, and what would have been the gutters on either side became canyons capable of swallowing up Mini-Coopers. Or they would, if anyone was demented enough to drive a Mini-Cooper along some of these roads. This last December was nothing but wall to wall rainstorms. A couple of their close neighbors are contractors, with small businesses and earth-moving equipment. They have a lot of fun playing around, re-grading the road, although one of them, known as the Bad Neighbor, didn’t helped much at all. He tried to fill the ruts with adobe, scraped up from his property. Alas, wet adobe turns into slippery mud; in the next heavy rain, one particular spot will be a kind of automobile slip-n-slide for an unwary driver traveling at more than 20 miles an hour. The water and power authorities offered more useful assistance by dumping concrete and asphalt rubble into the deepest of the gullies.

The rain made everything even greener than the winter rains usually do, though. The big fire seven years ago cleared away a lot of undergrowth, and of course, the various fire departments since then have cleared even more. The familiar marks of an old brush-fire are evident everywhere: the parti-colored dead branches of a tree or a shrub, bleached white in some places, soot-blackened in others, sticking up out of the middle of a lush thicket of new green growth.

Birds were everywhere – humming-birds squeaking like rusty hinges, and quail rustling through the undergrowth. I would surprise rabbits in the morning, when I walked down the hill for the newspapers: tan-colored, with a little white-cotton powderpuff for a tail. They lolloped lazily out of my way, as if humans didn’t frighten them very much at all. Probably they don’t: dogs and coyotes must be more of a real danger to the rabbits.

And that’s what it’s like, back in the hills. Given a choice, I’d have my own country retreat … but I think I’d skip the unpaved road part of it. Asphalt paving is a wondrous invention.

Winterreise 2010

Posted on by
5

(Hey, I’m back – got in last night … or, um … very early this morning. Here is a post that I wrote at my parents’, but had no way to post at the Brief from their house!)

Over the last decade – or perhaps even longer – all of the adventure, the fun and the excitement of traveling by air has been removed with cruel and surgical precision. Slowly, slowly, all of the frivolous extras have been chipped away, or become expensive add-ons. A small bag of peanuts and a cup of juice, enjoyed while sitting elbow to elbow in a tight-packed flying cattle car, and the only thing to look forward to (aside from the whole journey being over) is a long slog through the wide-flung nodes of a hub airport in order to catch a connecting flight at another gate. Which as luck usually has it, is as far from the gate where you were unceremoniously decanted as it can get and not be in another county. Or state.

No, about the only good fortune one can hope for these days is meeting a congenial person, whilst waiting for your flight or during it, and passing the idle hours in interesting conversation. Here I was most fortunate – even with the East Coast being socked in with Donner Party levels of snowfall, and the West Coast being served up with relentless rainstorms – I passed the time traveling home with a succession of no less than three very congenial fellow travelers.

The first of these had been at the San Antonio airport all day, trying to get into onto flight to Salt Lake City and very tired of working Sodoku puzzles. There is only one kind of young man under the age of 21 who routinely wear a black business suit, conservative tie and white shirt. LDS missionaries – they hardly need the nametag, at all. Turned out his home was in Windcrest, he was going to the 9-week long LDS missionary training course in Salt Lake City before going to South Florida for his tour of mission duty, because he was fairly fluent in Spanish. Then, he thought he might join the Air Force. I don’t think he had ever been to Salt Lake City – and I used to live there.

The hour on the ground – and the two hours in the air to Salt Lake City were enlivened by the guy in the seat next to me; he was going to Park City for the skiing and a better time to do that doesn’t exist. He’s a native Texan – and it proves that San Antonio really is a small town because he had gone to school with one of my former employers. Turned out that we had some other mutual friends and interests, including one for local history. His grandfather and great-grandfather were cattle ranchers out in West Texas and I had written a book touching on the great days of trailing cattle north to Kansas – heck, I even had a copy of J. Frank Dobie’s book about longhorns in my bag.

Because of the delay on the ground, I was pretty sure I’d miss the connecting flight to San Diego … but they had just begun boarding as I jogged breathlessly along the concourse between gates (note to self: start jogging regularly again). Made the flight with about fifteen minutes to spare; I could have just walked fast, but not keen on spending the night sleeping in the terminal, fond as I am of watching the sun come up over the Wasatch Front. For the fight to San Diego, I shared a row with a young Coast Guard member’s wife, who was coming home to San Diego after a flying trip to Fargo, N.D. We had a lot in common, as it turned out: her trip was a last visit to her grandfather, whose health was failing rapidly, mine to be with my family and to sort out matters after my Dad’s death. She had three-month old baby son whom she adored – and laughed and laughed when I told the story of how my father had snake-proofed my brother and I. On one of the first dates with her husband, he had proudly brought a rattlesnake that he had killed, and skinned it in her kitchen sink

So, the flight home was passed very agreeably – although Delta did their part, I think the people I met along the way were the main means of making the journey at least a little pleasanter than it could have been.

Day After Christmas Update

Posted on by
11

Pip’s husband John called, just about an hour ago. It seems that Dad’s organs are failing. I am having to work out ways to get to San Diego sooner than the second weekend of January. Mom was very chipper and cheerful last night, which possibly faked me out a bit. She was OK with me coming for two months in January, said that the hospital was sorting out what the problem with Dad’s circulatory system was – but I would have to work out the internet thing myself and at my own expense …

So, just now, working on a whole new set of plans.

3:25 Update: Brother Sander just called. Dad died about ten minutes ago. Everyone was there, save Blondie and I. Dad would have been 81, a week from tomorrow.

The most awful thing about this is how fast it happened – barely two weeks, and without any warning at all that anything was so wrong with him.

The Aged P Update – 12/23/10

Posted on by
3

Blondie and I were updated last night by long telephone conversations with Pip’s husband John, followed by another one with youngest brother Sander. The news is guardedly good regarding Dad – he is still in ICU, but awake, coherent and has been able to get up and walk around, and have visitors. He is also giving the nurses hell, of course – but I am sure in the most charming way. He will probably move into a regular hospital room in the next few days, but the down side – is that he will be there for a while, as the pneumonia is still holding on.

Pip is going to take Mom to her home in Pasadena for Christmas; Pip, after all, has two children who deserve to have something like a normal Christmas. Mom is OK, basically – but the thought of leaving her alone at the house just gave everyone the heebie-jeebies. J.P. and his wife (who live near El Centro) will ride herd on Dad. We’ll call Pip on Christmas Eve for another update, and to get an idea of when I will be most needed.

I am still intending to go out to California by the Sunset Limited in early January and stay for about two months – it seems that a coach seat is extremely reasonable in comparison to airfare, and although it takes about 24 hours (even without allowing for delays) that’s about as long as it takes to drive. I can take up to three fifty-pound bags, and avoid being molested at the security gate; what’s not to like?

Several readers have made donations to the travel fund – for which I thanked them extravagantly. Financially, this is will be a huge wrench, not just because of the cost of travel, but that I will not be able to work for certain paying clients during the two months that I’ll be away. With luck – and if I can talk Mom and Dad into getting internet access at the house, I can go on working on other stuff, carrying on with the various book projects, and with the Tiny Publishing Bidness. Fingers crossed on that one – otherwise, I’ll be camped out most days at the Valley Center Public Library, which would negate some of the purpose of being there for Mom and Dad.

So – Merry Christmas all. Next report, Christmas Day.

Friends and Fans

Posted on by
1

We were off to Fredericksburg on Monday; Fredericksburg, Texas – a medium-sized town large enough to contain two HEB supermarkets, a Walmart, four RV parks – and two museums, one of which – the National Museum of the Pacific War – draws considerable tourist interest – and a marvelous kitchenware shop which might very well be the best one in the state of Texas. (It certainly makes Williams – Sonoma look pretty feeble in comparison.) The town has begun to develop a little bit of suburban sprawl, but not excessively so. Most of the town is arranged along the original east-west axis of streets laid out by German immigrant surveyors in the mid-1840s, along a rise of land cradled between two creeks which fed into the Pedernales River. In a hundred and sixty years since then, houses and gardens spilled over Baron’s Creek and Town Creek. Log and fachwork houses were soon replaced by tall L-shaped houses of local stone, trimmed with modest amounts of Victorian fretwork lace, or frame and brick bungalows from every decade since. Main Street – which on either side of town turns into US Highway 290 – is still the main thoroughfare. A good few blocks of Main Street are lined with classic 19th century store-front buildings, or new construction built to match, storefronts with porches which overhang the sidewalk, and adorned with tubs of flowers and hanging baskets, with shops and restaurants and wine-tasting rooms catering to a substantial tourist trade. Fredericksburg is a lively place; and I have been visiting there frequently since I came to live in Texas.

I actually have a curious relationship with the place, having written a series of three historical novels about how it came to be founded and settled. Thanks to intensive research which involved reading practically every available scrap of nonfiction about the Hill Country and Fredericksburg written by historians and memoirists alike, I am in the curious position of knowing Fredericksburg at least as well as many long-time residents with a bent for local history do, and holding my own in discussions of such minutia as to how many people were killed in cold blood on Main Street. (Two, for those who count such things. It happened during the Civil War.) And for another, of having a mental map of 19th-century Fredericksburg laid over the present-day town, which makes for a slightly schizophrenic experience when I walk around the older parts. Eventually, I may have to do a sort of walking guide to significant locations, since so many readers have asked me exactly where did such-and-such an event take place, or where was Vati’s house on Market Square, and where in the valley of the Upper Guadalupe was the Becker ranch house?

Mike, the husband of one of Monday’s book-club members is a fan of the Trilogy, and although he couldn’t come to the meeting (being at work and all) he still wanted to meet me. He had actually contacted me through Facebook a couple of months ago, for a series of searching questions about where I had gotten some of the street names that I had used in the Trilogy; many of them are not the present-day names, but are what the original surveyors of Fredericksburg had laid out. I deduced that being stubborn and set in their ways, the old German residents would have gone on using those names, rather than the newer ones. After all – when I grew up in LA, there were still old-timers who insisted on referring to MacArthur Park as Westlake Park, even though the name had been changed decades ago. So, the book club organizer gave me Mike’s work number at the Nimitz Foundation (which runs the Museum of the Pacific War) and said we should call and his assistant would get us on the schedule for that afternoon. It was my understanding that this gentleman was a retired general – OK, I thought ‘eh, another general, met ‘em by the bag-full . . . matter of fact, there was a general even carried my B-4 bag, once,’ (long story) but anyway, we had a block of time to meet Mike at his office – and a lovely discussion we were having, too; he was full of questions over how much research I had done, and terribly complimentary on how well woven into the story.

Mike thought ever so highly about how I had made C.H. Nimitz, the grandfather of Admiral Chester Nimitz into such a strong and engaging character – although we had a discussion over how devoted a Confederate that C.H. Nimitz really was – probably not so much a Unionist as I made him seem to be, but I argued that C.H. was probably a lot more loyal to his local friends and community than he was to the Confederacy – so, nice discussion over that. It seems that the Mike was born and grew up in the area. He and his wife (who was German-born) had read the Trilogy, and loved it very much – they were even recommending it to everyone, and giving sets of it as presents. Well, that is way cool – I’m in regular touch with three or four fans doing just that; talking it up to friends, and giving copies as gifts. Local history buffs, or they know the Hill Country very well, they can’t wait to tell their friends about it; as Blondie says, I am building my fan base. So I had a question-packed half hour and a bit; me, answering the questions mostly, and Blondie backing me up. At the end of it as we were leaving, Blondie casually asked about a few relics on the sideboard, under an old photograph of C.H. Nimitz and Chester Nimitz as a very young junior officer; a very battered pair of glasses, and a covered Japanese rice bowl: they came from the tunnels on Iwo Jima. Blondie said ‘oh?’ and raised her eyebrows. Yes, Mike had been allowed into the old Japanese tunnels; Rank hath it’s privileges – and Iwo is a shrine to Marines, after all.

After the book-club meeting – two hours, of talk and questions, and hardly a chance to nibble any of the traditional German finger-foods, an hour-long drive home, which seemed much longer. I fired up the computer and did a google-search, and found out the very coolest part. (Blondie had a suspicion, of course – being a Marine herself.) Mike was not just any general, but a Marine general, and commandant of the Marine Corps. How cool is that? One of my biggest fans is the former commandant of Marines, General Michael Hagee.

I’m actually kind of glad I didn’t know that, going in – I think we both would have been at least a little bit intimidated.