Dad Woulda Been 100

  Somewhere around here amidst all my stuff I have a picture of my father when he was about 5 years old.  A tow-headed kid wearing bib overalls standing by an outside water pump.

  I have kept that picture for a long time.  I keep it to remind me that my dad was once a boy like myself.  When I was a kid it was hard to imagine he had ever been a kid, he acted like he never had been one, like he had forgotten that part of his life.

  I’m thinking about my dad because this is the time of year of his birthday and this year, 2017, marks 100 years since he was born.

  Most of what I knew about my dad, and it wasn’t much, came from my grandmother, his mother.

  That he was just a year old when “The Spanish Flu” hit their town in the high mountains of western Virginia.  That my dad and the town doctor, who had a fondness for liquor, were the only people not hit by the sickness.  My grandmother attributed my father’s health to him crawling around to the coal bucket by the fireplace and teething on coal nuggets.

  Now one time my dad did tell me a story of himself, this was after me and my buddy Catfish got in some trouble, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Dad told me such things seem big at the time, like the time he and his buds ran the toll booth at a city park but were caught by the city cops.  It was one of those rare times that dad seemed to be a “real” sort of guy, admitting that he was scared that the toll booth incident would be a black mark on his life.  It wasn’t.  And in the end Catfish and I didn’t get in any trouble.

  Dad was in World War Two, Army.  There’s a part of me that thinks the war had an effect on him.  I don’t know what he saw, but after he died we opened a footlocker that had been stored away to find photos of dead Japanese soldiers, no doubt taken on Okinawa.  Before the war there were lots of photos of him in my grandmother’s collection of him smiling a rakish smile, looked like he was enjoying life.  After the war that great smile was rarely seen.

  No, I tell people I’m my mother’s son, not a momma’s boy, but my mother’s son.  Dad had left my raising to Mom.  I shouldn’t’ve taken it personally, I’m given to understand it was a way of life when I was growing up.

  The stuff that affected me most when it came to Dad was he yelled.  He yelled a lot.  I often describe it as “he could yell to peel paint off the wall.”

  Dad also drank.  He drank more and more as his career as a hotel manager spiraled downward.

  I really didn’t even know he drank as much as he did.  It wasn’t until I was 16 and my pals were over at the house.  We were playing a board game when Dad fell into the Christmas tree.

  “Your dad’s drunk,” said Lewis.

  “No,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Lewis.  “I’ve been watching him.”

  Never mind that I had watched him openly drink a bottle of blackberry brandy as he drove me and mom to the old homeplace from Baltimore the previous Christmas.  I couldn’t wrap my brain around him driving drunk and the peril we were in was lost on me, even when he nearly missed a hard curve on the interstate that could’ve sent us flying through a guardrail and on to the rocky river valley below.

  But my sister knew he had driven 300 miles drunk from an office party then fortified with the bottle of blackberry brandy.  She was waiting for us at the old homeplace and once she realized Dad was drunk she jumped in his shit and the two of them had a big row.

  I’m told Dad used to hit me when I was little.
  Clenched fist.
  To the gut.
  Couple of times lifting me right off the ground.

  Interestingly, I don’t remember him hitting me.  It was my mother and sister who told me he did.

  I remember him yelling, though.

  The best Christmas I ever had with my dad and mom was the Christmas before he died.  He had just turned 67 that December.

  No one knew it would be his last birthday.

  I was broke, had no car, I lived in a place where I slept on a foam pad on the floor and had a job that paid little.  Mom and Dad drove up to see me bearing gifts of new clothes and a bit of money.  They took me out to eat at a nice restaurant where we laughed and talked.

  The following February Dad started stumbling.  He went to the doctor’s where they found an octopus-like cancerous tumor at the base of his skull.

  The following months were like he was on a battery that was running out of a charge, he got slower, weaker.

  Then one August day I got the call from my mom:  “Come home, I don’t think he has much time left.”

  I made the 200 mile trip to the home town and went right to the hospital. 

  There was Dad in the hospital bed.

  I walked up and put my hand on his.

  “Hey Dad, I love you,” I said.

  He looked at me then looked away.

  I kept my hand on his.

  “Thanks for everything Dad.”

  Dad looked at me again and looked like he was about to cry.

  I sat down and kept my hand on his.

  He would turn and look at me then look away.  He did this a few times.

  I looked at Mom with a look like, “Why won’t he talk to me?”

  Mom gave me a look back like, “I don’t know.”

  Then it was time to go.

  When I got back to my place there was a message on my phone.

  It was Mom.

  Dad had died.

  It would be months later while visiting my mom I asked her why didn’t Dad talk to me.

  “He was very sad about you and some of the situations you’ve gotten yourself into,” she said.  “He wished he could’ve done more for you.”

  It made me kind of sad.

  I wish he would have told me that.

  Because Dad did the best he could.

  He had his life where he wrestled with his own demons and he did what he could for me, as best he knew how.

  What more could I ask for?

E P I L O G U E

    It would be years later when I had a chat with a “medium,” a close friend who had the ability to channel stuff from “the other side.”  I believed her because it came natural to her, she didn’t charge for her “service,” the channeling would just suddenly happen and she knew things about Dad that only the family would know.

  I had envisioned Dad as a new person, walking the earth somewhere as a young man.

  No, I was told.  Dad was still on “the other side” waiting.

  “Waiting for what?” I asked.

  The Medium said there was no answer.

  “He repeats he is waiting,” she said.  “He….says….the………the…..disappointment.  He was disappointed that no one was ‘there’ waiting for him when he got there.”

  That struck me as sad.

  “So he’s waiting,” I said.  “Is it like a waiting room?  Are there magazines?”

  “DON’T BE A SMARTASS, BOY!”

  “Ah,” I said as I leaned back, “I recognize THAT.”

  Mom died 3 years ago.

  I’m betting Dad’s not waiting anymore.

  I believe they’ve gone together on to the land of sunsets and rainbows.

Asteroids in My Brain

  Sometimes there are just random thoughts that drift through my mind….not enough “stuff” for a story but noteworthy enough to not let slip back into the abyss of forgetfulness.

Makes me think of The Asteroid Belt…there’s chunks of stuff there but not enough to make a planet.

Old Lady Perfume

  

  I was going through the radio station emails and came across one from corporate.

  “Mrs. Polenta is flying in this Friday for her quarterly visit.  Please make proper arrangements.”

  “Oh jeez,” I said as I hit the print button.  Emails from corporate generally went to Jack the general manager.

  Mrs. Polenta was the owner.

  There was long hair and a pair of eyes looking at me from the doorway.

  It was Duanita.  That’s NOT Duanita like “Juanita.”  Duanita was named after her daddy Duane so her name was pronounced “Dwayne-neeta.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Whaddarya sayin’ ‘Oh jeez’ for?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Polenta is coming to visit Friday, once she gets here I gotta make myself scarce.”

  “I kinda notice when she comes here you’re kinda gone right after she gets here,” said Duanita, still just eyes and hair peeking around the door frame.

  “It’s her perfume,” I said.  “It gives me a splitting headache, I mean like if someone took an axe and split my head wide open.  It’s the only perfume, cologne, toilet water that I’ve known to give me a headache.”

  “She gets it at the Old Lady Store,” said Duanita.

  “There’s an Old Lady Store?” I said.

  It was still just Duanita’s eyes and hair peeking around the door frame.

  “Old lady perfume from the Old Lady Store,” Duanita started laughing.

  Then she was gone.

  I still heard her laughing.

  “Where’s this Old Lady Store?” I yelled.

  Duanita kept laughing.

Slow to Modernize

   

  My mp3 player died the other day.

  It was 9 years old, truly a surprise gift from The Lady of the House.  In essence she introduced me to the world of mp3s.

  I don’t think I would have gotten there on my own.

  When it comes to music I’ve often been slow to modernize.

  I can remember when vinyl was on the way out, making way for compact discs or CDs.  I suppose I couldn’t imagine a world without record albums, and would it mean I’d have to replace all my vinyl.

  I kept my vinyl well into the time that record companies were cutting back on coming out with records.  I found myself buying cassettes because there was no vinyl release, just cassettes and CDs, record companies even put an extra song on the CDs and not the cassettes to entice people to buy the CDs.

  Then came that fateful day in the early 90’s when Don the Engineer at the radio station in Roswell pulled out the record turntables in the radio studio and replaced them with CD players.

  “Nooooooo,” I yelled.

  And not long later I bought my first CD player.

  It was 1991.

  Then I started buying CDs.

  It was 2008 when The Lady of the House gave me my Christmas present.

  Then my daughter gave me her old IPod.

  Not long after that The Lady of the House gave me the gift of a new IPod.

  Here in 2017 it has 19,240 songs on it.

  I reckon I’m “all in” on this new technology.

  But I still have about 600 vinyl albums.

  And about 200 cassettes.

  I just can’t bear to part with ‘em.

There’s a Story Here

  I was at Thing Land the other day.

  Thing Land is what I call Walmart.  I call it that because you can buy all kinds of things there.

  I was looking at some canned beans when I overheard words, words of one woman talking to another.

  “She drives me crazy,” said one woman’s voice, “She smells like old clothes, cat piss and liquor.”

  I stopped looking at the beans and pondered.

  There’s a story there…. “old clothes, cat piss and liquor”….I just haven’t figured out what it is yet.

The Death of Mr. Romance

  I saw a big ol’ boy walking down the aisle of the dollar store the other day.

  “Big ol’ boy” is generally a “polite” Southernism for a guy who is waaaay overweight.  The young gentleman was as wide as the aisle.  Rolls of fat were crawling up the back of his neck and on top of his head.

  There was a big part of me that wanted to take the guy aside and say, “Son, you’ve REALLY got to do something about your weight.  It’ll kill you.  Maybe from a heart attack, maybe from congestive heart failure, maybe from complications from the diabetes you’ll probably get and may already have, maybe from kidney failure from the diabetes.  It’ll cut your life in half.”

  I didn’t do that though.

  Folks seldom take kindly or even listen to the advice of a total stranger.  The reaction can be one of anger to just nodding to saying phrases of total denial like “it’s a hormone problem, I can’t do anything about it.”

  I know what being overweight does to a body, it happened to me, cost me my health.  But that’s another story for another time.

  So as I stepped into a side aisle to let the young man pass I remembered an old co-worker who had a similar physique.

  Mr. Romance.

  His name was “Wooly” but I called him Mr. Romance because even though he was a “big ol’ boy” with a big set of “table muscles.”  Wooly probably weighed about 400 pounds.  He seemed to be right proud of himself, his weight didn’t seem to bother him.

  Interestingly enough, Wooly was always in the company of much younger women, driving them around town in his 1976 Corvette convertible that had seen better days.

  Wooly and I worked together at a radio station in the southern mountains.  Wooly worked middays and did sports, I did the morning show and sold advertising.

  One day Wooly and I were kicking back.  He was on the air and I’d come back to the station with some contracts to file.  The boss wasn’t around so we weren’t under any kind of “watchful eye.”

  “So what’s with all these different girls you hang around with?” I asked.

  “Jealous much?” asked Wooly, then he cut loose with a laugh.

  “Not my style,” I said. “I tried dating multiple girls at the same time one spring at college, it got messy.”

  “Listening.  Give women your ear, they’ll give you much in return,” he said smiling and wiggling his eyebrows.  “Don’t talk about yourself so much.  Let them talk.  Look them in the eyes while they’re talking.”

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “And remember,” said Wooly, “What matters when the lights go out is who washed last.”

  “Advice from Mr. Romance,” I said.

  “Bank on it,” said Wooly.

  I lost track of Wooly over the years.

  But I found him recently with the help of The Great and Powerful Internet.

  Too late.

  Wooly died last year.

  Wooly was just 50 years old, died at a convalescent home back in the mountains.  From what I could put together from tidbits of info it looks like he had some sort of major health failure like a heart attack, stroke or something and was put in the home.

  Wooly had actually settled down and married someone.  They had three daughters.

  And judging by his obituary picture he was still a big ol’ boy when he “went on to Glory.”

  “So long, Mr. Romance,” I said to the computer screen.

Could've Been a Canadian

  “YOU’RE MORE CANADIAN THAN I AM!”

  Those words were blurted out at me at the height of an argument between me and a co-worker who was, indeed, a Canadian.  He had made the USA his home a few years earlier.

  I don’t remember what the argument was about, it was probably about politics, something The Canadian was really into.  He was really into conservative talk radio…Rush Limbaugh, guys like that.  One time I told the boss, no, make that a couple of times I suggested to the boss that he should give The Canadian his own talk show.  We might have to hire a security guard, we might have to invest in a delay mechanism but I believed a radio talk show with The Canadian would boost the ratings of our little AM radio station.

  I suppose I irritated The Canadian with my nonchalance about something political, with my live-and-let-live view of the world.

  But anyway, that’s what he yelled at me.

  “YOU’RE MORE CANADIAN THAN I AM.”

  I took it as a compliment.

  Here in angry, rabid, hyper-partisan 21^st century America my appreciation of things Canadian would probably be misunderstood. 

  I love my United States of America, but back when I was a boy, when I was a Boy Scout, Canada was a Boy Scout’s paradise:  Hundreds of thousands of square miles of deep forests for camping, mountain ranges for hiking, vast freshwater lakes for canoeing, and big ol’ rivers like the north-flowing Mackenzie for adventuresome canoe trips.

  My appreciation of things Canadian was probably helped along by having a scoutmaster who was French-Canadian and spoke of a bygone day growing up in Quebec and Maine.

  Plus I had a subscription to the “old school” outdoor magazine “Fur Fish & Game” that had stories of “bold adventure” in the Canadian wilds.

  And I’ll be real with you…The Vietnam War was going on and I was seeing it every night when Walter Cronkite came on with the evening news.  From a distance it seemed the Canadians weren’t too interested in waging any kind of war anywhere.

  So when my dad, The World’s Greatest Hotel Manager, spoke of possibly landing a job as the manager of a huge hotel in the Canadian Rockies I got all hopped up.

  This was around 1972.

  “How would you like to live in the Canadian Rockies, boy?” he asked one afternoon when I came home from school.

  Dad and Mom were sitting at the dining room table.

  “I’m being considered for a job with the Canadian Pacific Railway running their big hotel in Banff on Lake Louise.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  Then his face turned stern as it usually did.

  “Now don’t tell anyone,” he said.

  Dad was like that…never tell anything to anyone.  Including me.  I never knew much about his work and God forbid I ask him how much money he made as I did a time or two out of curiosity.  The answer was “None of your damn business, boy.”  I wondered if he got that from being in World War II, not letting anyone know your business…’cos what I did know about his job in the Army was he had to keep a lot of secrets.

  It didn’t make for good storytelling, but then Dad never told many stories about anything.  Now his mom, my grandmother?  SHE could tell stories, but that’s another story.

  Dad never usually told me anything about his job plans.  I reckon age had mellowed The Old Man.  Dad’s frequent changing of jobs in pursuit of personal glory was taking its toll on him getting gigs.  Here we were in 1972 and he was out of work.  In the fall of 1971 he quit his last job in Baltimore over some disagreement with the owners of the place he was managing.  Dad, Mom and me were living with his parents back in his home town of Roanoke, Virginia.

  I looked up all the stuff I could about Banff.  It was in the high Canadian Rockies in Alberta.  The hotel was a HUGE thing.  I don’t know if they still do but back then they closed up for the winter, I wondered what we would do in that time.  The place was by a giant blue lake with huge rocky peaks rising in the background.  Moose and elk moseyed over the hotel grounds grazing.

  I started taking an inventory of all my camping and hiking stuff…backpack, sleeping bag, mess kit, Coleman stove and lantern, axe for cutting big ol’ trees to make a cabin.  Who was I kidding about THAT?  I never got the knack of sharpening an axe.

  It would’ve been a Boy Scout’s dream come true.

  It was not to be.

  A few weeks later I learned that Dad simply didn’t get the job.

  Dad wouldn’t work again until early 1973 when he took a hunk of his life savings…it might’ve been all of it… and bought into a hotel in Michigan. 

  Sometime in between then and then I stopped being a Boy Scout and took an interest in girls and rock ‘n’ roll.

  I took French lessons in high school and fantasized about going to live in Maine, cutting trees, becoming a writer, getting checks in the mail for my writings, meeting a French speaking girl from Quebec and having a couple of curly haired kids that just laughed all the time and live happily ever after.

  And there was no one around to slap me in the face and say, “WAKE UP, DUMBASS!”

  To this day when “National Geographic” magazine has an article on Canada’s mountains, forests, rivers, lakes and wildlands I pore through it….

…and wonder.

                                                                                -30-

Credit Where Credit's Due

  Picture of what Waikiki Beach in Hawai'i looked like 

in the early 1960's when me and my family lived there.

 
  Admit it, you do it.

  Sometimes you wonder what your life would have been like if you’d stayed on a path and not taken a fork in the road of your journey.

  I don’t really think about it too much because there’s no way for me to imagine what my life would’ve been like if my folks never moved from Hawai’i.

  It’s quite possible that the lessons I’ve learned in life would have been presented to me just the same with the exception that it would have involved different people in a different setting.  Or would I be a radically different person?

  I probably wouldn’t have a Southern accent or an appreciation for Country music or an appreciation for all things Appalachian.

  My dad was “The World’s Greatest Hotel Manager.”

  Well I thought he was anyway, I mean, he was my dad and didn’t a number of us think of our dads as super guys?

  Dad worked for one of the country’s big hotel chains.  Looking back as an adult other people must’ve thought he was a pretty good hotel dude because he held upper management jobs at two of the company’s  top hotels in New York City and in Honolulu.

  My dad died over 30 years ago so I never really got to talk to him about his motivation for leaving these good jobs, well they seemed good jobs to me.  I was a kid.

  It was my brother who told me only a few years ago that dad felt he deserved the top job, the general manager’s gig, at these hotels.  Instead he was resident manager, which means we lived in the hotel and while he held regular office he was on-call for when a manager was needed 24/7.

  So dad transferred from New York City to Honolulu where he was resident manager again.

  Like I said, I was just a kid, so it was one big adventure to me.

  Hawai’I was big fun to me.  The beach was just a short walk away, the food was good, there were palm trees, I got to surf (well, okay, it was just maybe 100 feet from the beach but it was still fun), I walked barefoot everywhere and, and, did I mention?  I was a kid.

  I liked Hawai’i.

  And then after we’d been in Hawai’i for about 2 years we were leaving.

  We were headed back to my father’s home town in the mountains of Virginia where he’d get the top job at a big hotel there.

  I can remember that day in June.  We were waiting on my brother who had just graduated from high school to get in after being out all night.  When he got home we grabbed our bags and headed for the airport.

  A bunch of my dad’s friends were at the airport to give us a send-off and then we got on the Pan Am Airlines 707.

  My mom had tears on her cheeks, my sister was quietly crying, my brother looked sad as did my dad.  Me?  I was excited as any 7 year old would be getting ready for that feeling of the big jet rumbling down the runway and soaring into the sky.

  Sometime later when it was just me and my mom hanging around I asked her why we left Hawai’i.

  “Your father’s boss was always taking credit for ideas your father came up with,” she told me.

  I remember my father’s boss and took an immediate dislike to him, because I had always thought he was a nice man.

  “That’s stealing, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “I suppose,” said Mom.  “But there’s not much to be done about it.”

  It’s something I always remembered:  We left Hawai’i because a man kept stealing my dad’s ideas and my dad finally got tired of it.

  Here in the future it might’ve been handled through a corporation’s Human Resources department or a lawsuit.  But that’s not how it was done back then.  My dad trusted people to be honorable, after all he came from a state where they supposedly said, “All men are presumed to be gentlemen until proven otherwise.”

  As a kid I resolved that when I grew up if someone told me about a great idea I’d say who gave me the idea…the adult words for that idea is “give credit where credit’s due.”

  Because some guy who did it to my dad cost us our time in paradise.

  Well…

  That’s what I thought for years.

  It may have been that the general manager stealing my dad’s ideas was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” but it could’ve been that my dad thought nothing would make his mom happier than to see her boy being the top man at the big hotel in his hometown.

But still…

To this day I give credit where credit’s due.

Because it’s the right thing to do.

And besides, if you do such a thing to someone it may have a bad effect on one person…

…or a whole family.

E P I L O G U E

  Years in the future, my daughter was in college.  One of her assignments was to interview her grandmother, my mother.  Mom was living by herself, this was after Dad had “gone on to Glory.”

  The two of them sat down with a recorder and went through a list of questions that were part of the assignment.

  Among many things daughter asked Mom were the places she lived being the wife of a hotel executive.

  “And,” asked daughter, “Was there a place you liked most of all?”

  “Hawai’i,” said Mom, “I wish we’d never left.”

  Daughter stopped what she was doing, turned off the recorder and put her pen and paper down.

  “But grandma,” she said, “That means I’d never have been born.”

  Mom smiled and patted daughter’s hand.

  “I know,” she said, “I know.”

  Later, when daughter upsettingly told the story to me I told her not to take it personally.

  “One time when I was about your age your grandmother was mad at your grandfather over something and she blurted out, ‘I wish I’d never married that man!’”

  “Mom!” I said, “That means I’d never’ve been born.”

  “Oh shut up,” she said, “This isn’t about you.”

  I reckon Mom was having a bad day.

-30-

A Pet Coyote

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Definition:  Bard… In medieval Gaelic and British culture, a bard was a professional story teller, verse-maker and music composer.  A bard was a specific, lower class of poet, contrasting with a higher rank.  With the decline of bardic tradition in modern times the term "bard" acquired generic meanings of an author or minstrel especially a famous one.

***

  I used to jog.

  Every morning I’d drag my ass out of bed and go for a jog, have a shower then be off to work.

  Over the years I stopped jogging and switched to just going for long walks or a bicycle ride.

  When you’re out that early in the morning you get to see things you don’t usually get to see by riding around in a car.

  There was that time I was jogging near the Mexican border south of Bisbee, Arizona when I encountered a mama javelina and her two babies.  I REALLY ran that morning…away from the javelina.

  When I lived in Roswell in the Pecos Valley of southeastern New Mexico I was out jogging when I heard something in the dark.  I reached for my flashlight and found that the sound was that of a skunk stomping its little feet.  When my flashlight beam found the skunk it had its rear feet in the air…it was ready to spray.  I didn’t think twice, I whirled around and headed the other way.

  There was that time I was jogging on the north side of Roswell and I heard a noise that made me think there was someone behind me.

  I stopped and turned around.  There, standing under a streetlight was a full-grown coyote.

  I looked at the coyote, the coyote looked at me.

  I hunkered over and went, “GRRRRRRRRRRR.”

  I always wanted to do that.

  The coyote held his position but raised his head and continued to stare at me.

  Then he calmly walked away in the other direction.

  When I got to work at the country radio station that morning I told the tale of the coyote encounter.

  The phones lit up.

  It’s right here I’ll explain something if you don’t already know it:  In The Golden West the coyote is one of those critters that can spark a lively discussion.  Other “hot topic” critters are prairie dogs and rattlesnakes.  Ranchers see coyotes as a threat to cattle, particularly calves.  Prairie dogs dig and make holes that can cause a cow to break a leg and a rattlesnake’s bite can be deadly.  I encounter these animals I give them a pass.  Others encounter these animals they’ll do what they will:  Not my journey…not my Karma.

  When it comes to coyotes, a lot of ranchers like to shoot them on sight, communities have been known to have coyote shooting contests, dead coyotes are hanged on barbed wire fences as a “warning” to other coyotes…an interesting concept but I don’t believe coyotes give a damn that some of their relatives are hanging dead on a fence.

  Anyway, after I told the story of the coyote encounter I got callers.

  “Where’d you see that coyote?” asked the first caller.  “I wanna go over there and see if I can see it AND SHOOT IT.”

  “Don’t you carry a pistol with you when you jog?” asked another.  “Damn, too bad, I’d a-shot it.”

  Then there was the flip side of the discussion…

  “Why’d you talk about that coyote,” said a woman on the other end of the line, “Now some yay-hoos are probably gonna drive out there and try to find it to shoot it.

  When our newsman came on in to do his newscast the discussion took a completely different turn.

  “I had a pet coyote named ‘Bitch’ when I was a boy,” he said.

  This was a guy who would go on to become a very good friend to me, a man I would go on to call “The Bard of the Pecos” because he had many stories to tell of southeast New Mexico.

  The Bard grew up in a small town in Roosevelt County, New Mexico.  He told tales of life in the dryland farming and cattle country, like how his family kept rabbits in a big pen, nothing more than a hunk of their yard surrounded by fence with some strands of wire over the top to keep hawks from dropping out of the sky for some free eats.

  So anyway, whenever it was time for some rabbit on the table, The Bard’s daddy would go out to the yard with his .22 rifle and pop a rabbit, one of many, out in the pen.  “After all,” said The Bard, “You don’t want to get too familiar with somethin’ you’re gonna eat.”

  When The Bard was just a boy his daddy died.  “Dropped dead of a heart attack playin’ softball at a church picnic.  I was six,” he said.

  The Bard would go on to finish high school, shoot himself in “the dangly bits” by accident while camping with friends, join the military, come home, patronize the cathouses of eastern New Mexico a couple of times, go to college at the regional university then go on to be a newsman.

  And I was about to learn of the pet coyote he once had.

  “Raised her from a pup,” said The Bard.  “I think she was the runt of the litter.  Found her while I was out walking the range one day.”

  “She was just like a dog,” said The Bard.  “Came when I called, played ball, stuff like that.  But I had to keep her penned up at night or when I was in the house or away.  She didn’t like that.  She’d pace back and forth in that pen all the time.”

  “So one night, I don’t know how, she got out and killed my momma’s chickens,” said The Bard.  “My momma told me I had to get rid of her.  If I didn’t she’d shoot her and wouldn’t mind doing it.”

  “You know my momma worked at the little café in town and that day she was bending the ear of everyone who’d listen about her boy’s pet coyote who just killed all her chickens.  One of the customers that day was a coyote trapper and he said he’d take Bitch.  He said he’d keep her and use her urine to trap coyotes,” said The Bard.  “I hadn’t been home from school long when he showed up with a cage and took her away.  I cried and cried, but I knew my momma was right.”

  I could see it all as The Bard told his tale.

  We sat quiet for a minute or two while a country song spun on the turntable.

  Then The Bard stood up and left the radio studio.

E P I L O G U E

  

  Twenty-five years after he told me that story The Bard of The Pecos caught The Cancer and “went on to Glory.” 

  When I think of my old pal I think of many things, one of which is a line from the Tom T. Hall song “The Year Clayton Delaney Died”:  “I often wondered why Clayton, who sounded so good to me, never took his guitar and made it down in Tennessee.”

  I often wondered why The Bard never put together all of his stories of growing up in The Golden West in the cattle and dryland farming lands of eastern New Mexico.  That would’ve made a good book or a few.  Maybe it had something to do with why he wouldn’t go to work for newspapers:  “They won’t pay me what I’m worth.”

  The Bard was a damn fine writer, a damn fine storyteller, an aficionado of good cooking, dancing with to a good Willie Nelson or real country song and a guy who was like a brother to me.

  And I miss him.

-30-

The High Sierra

  Insterstate 80 passing through The High Sierra with its high country snows...

  You’d have to hang around her a bit to learn that she ain’t from around here. 

  You might think that at first, that she’s a New Mexican, but she’s not, she’s a Californian, a northern Californian.  She’s from the land of high mountains, tall pines, deep snows and blue lake waters.

  And if you read her stuff on The Facebook she’d like to go back, back to around Lake Tahoe.  I reckon things made more sense to her there than Albuquerque.

  The High Sierra…what with miles and miles of mountains and pines it’s the kind of place that appeals to my inner Boy Scout.  But after my “Florida adventure” I ain’t pulling up my roots no more to go to a place where I don’t know a soul and I have to start all over again.

  I’ve passed through the High Sierra when I was a trucker.  About all I ever knew about it was that Lake Tahoe was up there and the story of The Donner Party.

  The Donner Party was a bunch of folks in a wagon train headed to California in the winter of 1846.  They got stuck in deep snow, I mean probably 8 or 12 feet of the stuff, ended up snowbound in the mountains and ate their dead to survive.

  I passed through the High Sierra westbound on Interstate 80 back in the early summer of 2002.  Westbound means a long downhill grade, about 25 miles I recall, all downhill, one long downhill ride from the tops of the Sierra Nevada to the lowlands around Sacramento.  Did I write the word “downhill” enough?

  I drove an 18-wheeler for a year.  It’s something I always wanted to do.  I saw the country from coast to coast, I didn’t get to see the far northeast like Maine and Vermont nor the far northwest like Washington, Idaho, those states.

  I grew up in the mountains so I had heard many a tale over the years of truckers losing their brakes going down long mountain grades.  Who knows the exact cause of those wrecks but it was said it was usually an overconfident or inexperienced driver who took the grade too fast, lost his brakes and went rocketing down the mountain and off the road. 

  Sometime when I was a kid trucker escape ramps appeared alongside steep mountain grades…usually a bit of road engineered right up a mountainside.  With the up angle and the soft bed of sand or gravel they spread over the ramp that would “safely” stop a runaway truck.  I put “safely” in quotation marks because I drove an 18-wheeler off-road one time, it was not a smooth ride.  I could see that if a trucker had to use one of those ramps he’d get the hell knocked out of him inside that cab, kinda like an egg-beater. 

  In the mountains you could usually tell a trucker was courting trouble when you could smell the hot brakes, a hot metal smell.  My dad said it was hot asbestos, the stuff on brake pads, but I never knew that for sure.

  So I had been warned about the long downhill stretch of I-80 and a section of I-5 heading up the Pacific Coast called “The Grapevine.”  Use your “jake brake” and take your time.

  The jake brake is also known as an “engine retarder.”  It makes that loud noise you hear the big trucks make as some of them slow down for a stop.  It’s because of the loud sound that towns put up signs that say “TRUCKERS DON’T USE YOUR JAKE BRAKES AROUND HERE” or something like that.  The jake brake slows the truck down without using the brakes by cutting engine compression. 

  So there I was riding through the High Sierra of Nevada and California back in June of 2002.  Mountain tops, tall pines and snow.

  Snow in June.

  I thought it was really cool, remnants of the previous winter’s drifts.

  Snow in June.

  I was in the company of my co-driver Frank, a dude from the Caribbean country of Trinidad.  Frank was at the wheel as we rolled into California and began the long roll down into Sacramento. 

  After seeing enough of the tall pines and mountaintops I decided to have a doze and went back to my bunk.

  Something woke me just minutes later.  It was the sense that we were going too fast and Frank was braking a lot.

  “Use the jake brake Frank,” I said loudly from my bunk.

  “I will not use the jake brake,” said Frank very matter of factly.

  “Use the jake brake Frank,” I said.  I read in one of those self-help books years ago when I was in college that you keep repeating your point to get it across to dumbasses like Frank.  Nowadays there’s Dr. Phil and the internet.

  “I will not use the jake brake,” said Frank.  “It is illegal.”

  “WHAT?” I said.  I got up, went up front and buckled in to the passenger seat.

  “What the hell do you mean it’s illegal?”

  “There was a sign back at Truckee that said ‘USE OF ENGINE BRAKE PROHIBITED,’” Frank said.

  “Frank,” I said as calmly as I could, “That was for the town of Truckee.”

  “The sign was at the state line, it is for the whole state of California.”

  “Frank, the sign is at the state line because Truckee is at the state line,” I said.  Then I looked in the rearview mirror down at the wheels.  Wisps of smoke were blowing out from them.

  “Frank, you’re burning up the brakes.  Look in your rearview mirror down at the wheels, look at the smoke.  USE THE DAMN JAKE BRAKE.”

  As we thundered downhill from the top of the Sierra Nevada Frank looked in his rearview mirror.

  “That is engine exhaust,” said Frank.  “I will not use the jake brake.”

  “Pull over Frank.”

  Frank looked at me.

  “Pull the rig over, Frank.  I’m gonna show you something.”

  Frank pulled over.

  I got out and motioned for Frank to come over to my side.

  All the tires had smoke coming from them.  And there was that hot metal smell.

  “Is that still exhaust Frank?”  I wanted to call him DUMBASS but discretion is the better part of valor as they say, or whatever they say.  “And does that SMELL like exhaust?”

  “Okay,” said Frank.  “I will use the jake brake.  But if I get a ticket for using it I must insist you pay it.”

  “There’s not going to be a f#@king ticket, Frank.”

  We got back in the rig and rolled on down the road.

  A couple of miles further there was a big sign, “MANDATORY BRAKE CHECK AHEAD.”

  “Be sure to pull over up ahead, Frank.”

  “I will not be pulling over, it is a waste of time.”

  “Frank, pull over at the mandatory brake check.”

  “I will not.”

  “Frank, let me tell you what will happen if you don’t pull over at the mandatory brake check…just beyond the mandatory brake check there will be a California Highway Patrol dude waiting and if you breeze right by that mandatory brake check he will PULL YOUR ASS OVER AND WRITE YOUR ASS A TICKET.”

  “How do you know this?”

  This was a phrase Frank asked me often, particularly when it came to life in the USA…remember, this is a dude from an island off the coast of South America.

  “From living in the good ol’ USA.  If they say something’s MANDATORY they will most likely enforce it in some way.”

  The mandatory brake check was a pull-off on the interstate.  No one else was there. 

  Frank pulled over.

  And he sat.

  “Frank, get the hell out and walk around the rig and get back in.”

  Frank gave a huff, opened his door, got out and walked around the rig.  He got back in and we took off again.

  Just about a half-mile beyond the mandatory brake check a cop had an 18-wheeler pulled over.

  “See?” I said.  “There’s a dude who blew right through the brake check and look what happened to him.”

  “You do not know this.”

  “No Frank, but there’s a pretty damn good chance that’s exactly what happened.”

  And so we rolled on in to Sacramento without hardly saying another word to each other.

  Frank and I remained co-drivers until later that summer.  I got tired of his bull-headedness, like the time in Ohio when I woke up to find us parked in the parking lot of a highway porno shop, Frank insisting it was his “right as a man” to stop in such a place even though the company we drove for was notorious for being owned by a devout Christian. 

  “Frank, can’t you just hear that phone call?” I said when he got back in the rig.  “Some busybody calls Chattanooga headquarters and says, ‘You’re not a Christian company.  I saw one of your trucks parked at a porno shop in Ohio.  Here’s that truck’s number…”

  I also got tired of him getting us lost and him waking me up during my sleep time saying, “Grant, wake up, we are lost.”

  Years later, just for the hell of it, I looked him up on the internet.

  Frank was promoted to trainer in the company.

  I leaned back in my chair and laughed out loud.

                                                                -30-

Tales of the Southwest: Conversation with a Rattlesnake

Note:  The Lady of the House and I are doing some in-town moving so the computer is getting packed up.  It may or may not be some time before the next blog entry......

            Actual factual photo taken with my cell phone camera of the young rattler 

I encountered on a lunchtime walk

            I was out for a lunch time walk the other day when I came across a young rattlesnake stretched out in the November sun by the side of the road.  It probably was just a foot long.  I took a picture of the youngster then went looking for a long stick.  I found one and used it to urge the critter off into the tall grass, didn’t want to see Kid Rattlesnake smooshed by a car.

            I think he was a bit chilled.  That young rattler didn’t act like the rattler I came up on in Lincoln County a while back.

            It was an early fall morning.  I was on the north side of the Capitan Mountains driving on back to Clovis.  I rounded a bend and there was this big ol’ rattlesnake stretched out on the blacktop, warming up for a big ol’ rattlesnake day.  It must’ve been 5 feet long.

            I pulled up alongside the rattler and rolled down my window.

            “Hey,” I said to the rattlesnake, “you better get off the road, somebody’s gonna come along and run over you.”

            The snake didn’t move.  There was nothing in its eyes to indicate it had understood what I said.  Maybe he didn’t understand English.

            I backed the car up and edged the front fender toward the snake.  It coiled up in the classic rattler pose with its neck arched and its rattlers buzzing.

            I leaned out the window.  “Hey, I’m just trying to keep you from getting killed.”

            The snake lunged.  I heard a soft, small thud against the car.

            “Aw man,” I said to the snake, “give up this aggression thing.”

            I drove past the coiled serpent and pulled over about 20 feet away from it.  I thought it was so cool, I hadn’t seen a rattlesnake in the wild before.  I got out of my car, grabbed my bag phone (that’s how long ago this was) and decided to call my friends and share my encounter.

            One of those I rang up that Sunday morning was my friend Kent, Bard of the Pecos.

            “Dude, you should see this, it’s a big old rattler all coiled up in the middle of the road and rattling, listen,” I held the phone toward the snake so Kent might hear the rattling.  It was loud.

            “Did you hear that?” I asked him.

            “You really are one crazy sumbitch, just turn your car around and run over it.”

            “It ain’t gonna hurt anyone.  I’m out in the middle of nowhere.”

            “The only good rattler is a dead rattler,” he said.

            Everyone else I called agreed with Kent about the snake and my mental state.  

I started tossing stones at the rattler hoping to scare it off the road. 

“C’mon dude, get off the road,” I said.

It rattled.

I was hoping no one would be coming along who might run over the snake or think I was a can short of a six-pack.

“Doesn’t anything bother you, dude?” I asked the snake.

It rattled.

            Then one of the stones landed close enough to the snake to bother it.  It straightened out and moseyed off the road to a bush where it coiled up again and resumed its rattling.

            Satisfied I’d lent a helping hand I hopped back in the car and resumed my trip home.

            Rattlesnakes, just like coyotes and prairie dogs, can get some folks into heated discussions.  Like that time I wrote an article where I waxed poetic about encountering a prairie dog town…I got an email from a woman over in Roosevelt County telling me I was a dumb city sumbitch and I didn’t know what I was talking about.  Prairie dogs cost ranchers money in cattle lost to broken legs from stepping in prairie dog holes.  I wrote her back asking her if she knew my buddy Kent, Bard of the Pecos, ‘cos he thought I was a dumb sumbitch too and she lived not far from him.  Turns out they were school chums.  After that the woman and I were just like old pals.

When it comes to western animals I figure to each their own.  If someone’s going to go out of their way to smoosh a critter on the road, shoot one, trap one and so on well there ain’t much I can do about that…that’s the way it goes.

            And then I know that sometimes its hard to avoid hitting an animal on the highway.

            But whenever I see a rattler in the road, I’ll swerve to avoid it.  And if I have time I might pull over and have a chat.  They’re fascinating conversationalists.