Author: Richard R. Barron
Things You See When You Fly
Chris Eckler, Ada City School’s STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) educator, invited me to fly with him in the Cessna 172 we both rent, the one that lives at our home airport in Ada, to Weatherford, Oklahoma, to deliver some Christmas gifts for children in need, and pick up some for kids back in Ada.
I mostly ran the radios, and we talked to Fort Worth Center and Oklahoma City approach for Flight Following, which is radar service that adds a layer of safety by providing traffic advisories.
Anyone who knows me knows that there is nothing I won’t climb, crawl or fly in just for fun, or to make pictures.
It was an absolutely beautiful day to be in the sky, and I have always loved the things I see when I am flying.
That Little Souvenir
Pamela Michelle Young Hudspeth has died. She was 58.
I was unmarried and lonely in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In May 1992, I started dating Pam, and, quite honestly, she was incredibly beautiful. She was so beautiful, in fact, that it blinded me to more realistic considerations, such as the fact that she believed in things that I didn’t: spirit photography, the “inner child,” Satanism, astrology and much more.
Still, I was so taken with her, I probably would have married her if she hadn’t moved away. Despite her odd canon of beliefs, she was always interesting.
The Writing Group
Over the years I have organized several groups that got together on a weekly basis to share our writing and challenge each other to write. Among other things, the endeavor was intended to get me closer to attractive women, and in particular, attractive creative women.
I found it very attractive that Pam wrote. She penned a column at our newspaper, often politically unpopular and inflammatory, and claimed she wanted to write books, stories, and an autobiography. Along with Frank Rodrigues and Melissa Price, Pam joined my writing club in 1991. Oddly, it was hard to get her to write much, and now, decades later, her claims of wanting to continue to write had never come to fruition.
At one point in that group, Pam and I sat across a kitchen table. She looked at me and asked, “Richard, are in a lot of pain all the time?” Now, knowing her intense spiritual pain, I realize she wasn’t asking me, she was inviting me.
Music Guides My Heart
As I write this, I listen to music that brings back those days.
My Pam playlist includes…
Here’s Where the Story Ends, Goodbye, and Wild Horses by The Sundays
I Must Have Been Blind by This Mortal Coil
Ghost and The Girl with the weight of the World in her Hands by The Indigo Girls
All I Want is You and Love is Blindness by U2
Friday I’m in Love, High, and To Wish Impossible Things by The Cure
Season of Hollow Soul by k.d. lang
Torn, High on a Riverbed, and Don’t Go Away by Toad the Wet Sprocket
Three Wishes by Roger Waters
The One by Elton John (after she heard the lyrics “a spirit born of earth and water” and said she looked up our elemental signs to find she was water and I was earth.) At one point I had the cassette single of The One, which we listened to in her car.
While we were dating, I brought her cassette mix tapes. She fell in love with the music of Phil Keaggy, so In the Light of the Common Day puts me right there on her couch with her.
A Brief and Difficult Romance
Pam and I attempted to get romantically involved starting in the late spring of 1992. At first it was just an invitation to dinner at her apartment or mine, but our relationship quickly grew into romance.
She was never comfortable with that. On some of the evenings that I had hoped and planned to spend with her disappeared because she was so threatened by genuine intimacy.
We talked about getting married. We talked about ideas. Of course, we were both working journalists at the time, so we talked about that.
Her perfume was Tribute. She smoked Virginia Slims. Her smell on me at the end of the night was oddly intoxicating.
Evenings with her were always charged with emotional energy, a promise of drama in the midst of her smoke and perfume that would light my night afire. She would always “need to talk about it.”
I knew that our night was going to be full of closeness when she would invite me to sit close to her on the couch with her legs across my lap.
At the end of all our evenings, we’d walk out to my car parked at her apartment, where I would gather her waifish body, and we would hold each other close, so close.
At one point when I could feel her withdrawing emotionally, I asked, “Do you feel it when I hold you?”
“Sometimes,” she answered.
She decided that her problems were getting in the way of our romance, and her well being, so she decided to go to a 28-day treatment facility in central New Mexico, the details of which she would not want me to share. I wrote her almost every day. She wrote back five times.
As part of the program, I joined her for the third week, and there, in the midst of a thousand tears, in the perfect New Mexico sunshine, we broke up.
I Flew Away
My saving grace was that I was, at the time, learning to fly, and the exceptionally positive learning experience of aviation couldn’t have come at a more perfect point in my life. She moved away, and I devoted much of my time to flight training, so it was easier to let her go.
That Little Souvenir
It’s that little souvenir, of a terrible year
Which makes my eyes feel sore
It’s that little souvenir, of a colorful year
Which makes me smile inside… ~The Sundays
In the decades that followed my short time with Pam, I have thought about her often, and stayed in touch, more so in the last couple of years of her life. In those conversations, she expressed endless regret at letting me go. “Now,” she said in an email, “I know with all my heart, you were who I should have been with. You were the best man I ever dated, period.”
In one written correspondence not that long ago, I asked her what she wanted. “Out,” was her answer.
In August of this year, she and I hatched a plan to have lunch in Henrietta, Oklahoma, halfway between her home and mine. We both got pretty excited, dreaming about the buffet at Mazzio’s Pizza and spending the afternoon together. But as the day grew near, she called it off, saying she was sick again.
In tremendous physical and emotional pain for years, and no longer wanting to live, she died at home this week in hospice care.
Goodbye, Pam.
The Abyss Gazes Also into You
“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” – Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
How am I happy? It’s an interesting puzzle, isn’t it? I am a happy person, and I expect I will be happy for the rest of my life. But how, especially after witnessing the illness and death of the love of my life 19 months ago, can this be?
I thought about that after a search of a cloud storage folder yielded, accidentally, the transcribed journal of someone I knew and dated in the early 1990s, who took her own life in early 1994.
In that journal, which I discovered only after she died, I found a potent sense of depression, despair, resentment, self-contempt, and misanthropy. Why? What drove her to such bone-crushing lows?
There were certainly the unambiguous signs of anxiety and clinical depression, and certainly some very serious post-traumatic stress disorder. She couldn’t sleep or eat well. She was disinclined to reach out (at least to me.)
In her journal (which she wrote as letters to me, which all started, “Dear Richard”), she wrote again and again about wanting to die. “I’m afraid no one will ever love me again, and I will be alone all my life,” she wrote. “If I live to be forty and am still alone, I think I will interfere with my destiny,” she later wrote, though at that time, she was 43.
One of the least-accurate things she wrote was that she was, “easy to get along with.” She was about as “easy” as a nuclear war. The reason that I stopped courting her was that she was so hard to get along with.
But okay. Doesn’t all that describe me to some degree during various periods in my life? Sure. But now am I alone, living with the echoes and memories of the most amazing love I have ever witnessed, let alone experienced, yet still smile and eat and work and love my life.
It’s too easy to write her off with “she was crazy.” Is the real truth that we are just blobs of delicately-balanced biomass? Are we all just “one trade away from humility,” to cite the movie Wall Street?
Three months before she killed herself, she wrote, “You know NOT ONE IOTA of the pain I live with daily. You are NOT forced to live my life. So LAY OFF.”
I knew fragments of that kind of pain when I was younger, but I dealt with it. She was consumed and destroyed by it.
What, then, do we think and do about this? I will ponder further.
Life on the Patch
Here are a few images of my life this week on this patch of green in Byng, Oklahoma.
Best Pictures I Have Seen and Liked or Disliked
My sister reported watching and hating Reds, maybe my all-time favorite movie. It got me thinking about the best movies I have seen, and the movies I have seen that were highly touted, yet I didn’t like. Here are some the Academy Awards for Best Picture, ones that I have seen, and ones I thought should have been the Best Picture for that year instead.
There are years in which I saw very few movies, so they aren’t all listed here.
1953: From Here to Eternity. Amazing film.
1957: The Bridge on the River Kwai. The plot of this film is riveting. Runner-up: 12 Angry Men.
1959: Ben-Hur. I know this is supposed to be a classic, especially the chariot race, but this is the most closeted home-erotic film of all time. Should have won: North by Northwest.
1962: Lawrence of Arabia. This is a top ten film for me.
1966: A Man for All Seasons. I love this film for a lot of reasons, especially the intelligent, elegant dialog, and the idea of a man standing up for his beliefs no matter what befalls him. A dent is this script is its revisionist absence of Thomas More’s cruel persecution of heretics.
1970: Patton. Love the story, the cinematography, the acting. Great film.
1976: Rocky. Should have won: All the President’s Men. Marry this with The Post, and you have an evening of truly engaging stories about journalism. But then there’s Taxi Driver. It was a good year for films.
1977: Annie Hall. My wife hated Woody Allen for his personal life, but I never turn down the chance to spend the evening with Annie. Also of note: this was the lowest-grossing Best Picture of all time.
1978: The Deer Hunter. Coming Home was a close second. But I don’t feel engaged by either of these films. Their biggest flaws was my inability to relate to any of the characters. Should have won: Interiors, possibly my number two favorite movie. It’s not an easy movie to love, but I relate to every character.
1979: Kramer vs Kramer. Should have won: Apocalypse Now.
1980: Ordinary People. Maybe in my top five list.
1981: Chariots of Fire. This one might go in my bottom ten list. Should have won: Reds.
1982: Gandhi. Also in my top five list.
1983: Terms of Endearment. Almost unwatchable. Should have won: The Big Chill or The Right Stuff.
1984: Amadeus. Watched and was engaged, but wasn’t the best that year, especially the way it let Tom Hulce be just a little bit 1980s. Should have won: The Killing Fields.
1985: Out of Africa was a long, boring masterpiece. Should have won: The Color Purple, which is also kind of a long, boring masterpiece.
1986: Platoon. I considered Platoon as one of my favorite war movies for years, but it hasn’t age well, especially tainted by the presence of Charlie Sheen and his wooden narration and 80s haircut. Should have won: Hannah and Her Sisters.
1987: The Last Emperor. Meh. Should have won: Broadcast News.
1988: Rain Man. This movie made a huge splash, but I might have watched it one more time. Should have won: it wasn’t a great year in film, so maybe Colors or Wings of Desire. Die Hard was fun, but isn’t really “great.”
1989: Driving Miss Daisy. I am one of the few who are really bored by this film. Should have won: Dead Poets Society.
1990: Dances with Wolves. I reluctantly accept this win, with the caveat that I despise Kevin Costner’s bland, monotonal narration.
1991: The Silence of the Lambs. It has its moments, but given a choice, Slacker is the 1991 film for me.
1992: Unforgiven. Abby and I both loved it.
1993: Schindler’s List. This isn’t, as a film critic friend of mine recently pointed out, a fun film to watch, but it merits its Best Picture standing. Unfortunately, it competes with The Age of Innocence, another movie in my top ten.
1994: Forrest Gump. I never liked this movie. Should have won: Pulp Fiction. Duh.
1995: Braveheart. I am really bugged by this movie’s revisionist history, and it’s too long. Should have won but surprisingly is not even nominated: Heat.
1996: The English Patient. Long and boring. Should have won: Fargo.
1997: Titanic. This movie might be at the top of the “Worst Best Pictures Ever” list. My girlfriend in 2000 wouldn’t shut up about it. Should have won: maybe Good Will Hunting, but it wasn’t a very good year in film.
1998: Shakespeare in Love. Should have won: The Thin Red Line.
1999: American Beauty. This movie takes us down a dark path, but it’s masterful.
2000: Gladiator. I love this movie, but often turn it down in favor of something easier to watch.
2001: A Beautiful Mind. This might be Russell Crowe’s best work.
2002: Chicago. Should have won: The Pianist.
2003: The Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King. Abby and I gave the Lord trilogy its day in court, and found it guilty of boring us. Should have won: hmm. It wasn’t a good year.
2004: Million Dollar Baby. This movie was great, but so difficult to watch at the end. Should have won: The Aviator.
2005: Crash. Should have won: Brokeback Mountain, maybe another near the top of my list. An interesting aside is that people who don’t understand relationships or society very well called this “a gay cowboy movie,” but is really about how the difficult pursuit of happiness is, and the consequences of adultery.
2006: The Departed is a pretty solid choice, but I also liked Letters from Iwo Jima, the companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers, also a great film. It’s a toss-up.
2007: No Country for Old Men. Abby never turned down this movie, so we saw it a dozen or more times; it’s a great piece of cinema.
2009: The Hurt Locker impressed me on the first pass, but re-viewing revealed it’s flaws. Should have won: Inglourious Basterds.
2017: The Shape of Water. This might have been more of a political win. Should have won: Dunkirk.
2021: CODA. Should have won: Don’t Look Up!, just because it is SO funny.
In constructing this list, I looked at a lot of lists of movies, and I felt very discouraged at the state of entertainment. There are too many sequels made just to sell tickets, and too many showy special-effects movies that don’t have good plot or characters. Many nights, it’s smarter to read a good book.
My Vision for Ada Sunrise Rotary
Here my vision for my service as 2023-24 Ada Sunrise Rotary President.
This year’s Rotary International theme is “Create Hope in the World.”
My keyword: fun.
My first goal for Rotary is to make it more popular and appealing to those who might not have considered joining. Rotary is a lot of fun, and many don’t realize that, and I would like to enhance the idea that Rotary is fun by participating in more visible activities. We need to plan to have a much bigger Rotary presence at events like Step Out of the Darkness, the Elks Fall Fest, Homecoming on Main, Fall Cruise on Main, Halloween on Main (we could hand out candy), Open House on Main, the Parade of Lights, and more as they get scheduled for 2024.
My second goal is to add five members during my tenure. I’d like to ask that each member find and bring at least one individual who might be interested in joining between now and June 2024. The sticky selling point is getting up early, so we should offer to buy them “the best breakfast in town.”
My third goal; Rotary is known for its diversity and inclusion, but I want to publicize the idea that we are leaders in those areas. We have great service programs, but I know we can do more, especially if we can recruit more members. To that end, I’d also like to improve our public presence on social media. I would like to create a “Meet Your Ada Sunrise Rotarian” each month, with an individual photograph and bio.
My fourth goal is in keeping with the theme, “Create Hope in the World,” I would love to bring in more guest speakers who would be willing to share their stories of hope. They could be anyone who faces adversity and overcomes it. I am asking our members and our program committee to keep these goals in mind when we invite our guest speaker.
I presented these ideas at our Friday, September 8, 2023 meeting, and they were a big hit, leaving everyone talking about how to make these things happen.
The Journal Turns 45!
Updated, September 2024 to include the fifth writing group.
Many of my readers will recall that I have been writing in a journal for most of my life. September 5, 2023 marks the 45-year mark. As I thought about this anniversary, I began to think about breaking it up into various periods, a kind of lifelong chronology of my writing.
1978 really was a different time. No internet. No cell phones. No air conditioning in schools (at least not in mine.) The top five television shows were Laverne & Shirley, Three’s Company, Mork & Mindy, Happy Days, and Angie. I watched the first four, but I have no idea what Angie was. We must have liked another show on another network, because I even watched the intro on YouTube, and I’d never seen even a single second of that show.
Anyway, the journal got started as an assignment for English II class in tenth grade. The first thing I wrote was the date on the second line of the first page, “Tuesday, September 5, 1978,” in a handwriting that might best be described as resembling Comic Sans.
So, what might the epochs of Richard’s journal be called? I’ll take a stab at it.
1978-1980: The Innocent Age. This was a time in my life magnified by the drama and innocence of being a mid-teenager, unspoiled by the crush of adulthood, yet with a decidedly distorted perspective about life. I felt emotionally isolated, but also thought it all revolved around me and my feelings.
1980: The First Writing Group. I took a creative writing class in eleventh grade, and decided I was going to be a brilliant novelist before I turned 18. I wrote a lot, but it wasn’t very good. I got my girlfriend and my best friend interested in writing, and they joined in, sometimes giving each other writing assignments or challenges.
1981: The Chatter Box. By this point in my writing, I was doing a daily writing dump. Anything I could think of went on the page, and while it kept me disciplined and literate, it was emotionally empty, often falling back on a sense of humor I culled from M*A*S*H reruns and Peanuts comic strips.
1982-1983: The Dark Age. By the time I was a freshman in college, I thought of myself as a deep thinker, and honestly, I kind of was. I listened to a lot of music with deep lyrics, and cobbled together an elementary philosophy. As a result, there were many nights I didn’t write anything at all in my journal. Two important deaths, both college friends, happened during this period, but I breezed over them in my journal with a kind of arrogant nonchalance.
1984-1985: The Days and Nights of Private Drama. By the time I was 21, in the summer of 1984, I was starting to express real feelings about my life in my journal, including a very powerful sense of loneliness. It was a valid expression, since I was alone in a lot of ways during that period.
1986-1988: The Bridge. I started dating a fellow journalist in the summer of 1986. It started with late night breakfasts and sitting out under the stars on a bridge over an interstate. She and I were both young and not very good at being in relationships, and if I had listened to her, I would have heard she wanted out, and if I listened to myself, I would have heard that I was into someone else more than her. It was a hard breakup, but it needed to happen.
1988-1989: My Time in Exile. I tried to move to another state to be with that girlfriend, but when it didn’t work out, I moved back to Oklahoma. It felt both like I had been exiled, and that I was living in a self-imposed exile.
1990-1991: The Second Writing Group. Three other journalists and I got together every other Friday night to trade short stories and novel chapters. We were all writing well during that period.
1991-1992: The Season of Hollow Soul. I dated a beautiful, young, creative, and at least somewhat troubled fellow journalist during this time. We were only together a few months, but I was really in love. The k. d. lang song Season of Hollow Soul came along just then and became an anthem for our break-up.
1993-1998: I Flew Away. During this period I was flying all the time. Airplanes were cheap to rent, and I had disposable income and spare time. My journal is full of fun entries about flying.
1999-2000: The Third Writing Group, Robert’s Frost. I briefly, and with difficulty, dated an endocrinologist who told me she wrote poems and stories, so we formed a writing club called Robert’s Frost. It was her, me, and four other writers I knew. We all wrote some pretty great stuff for the short time we kept it going.
2003-2004: The High Road. Abby and I met and fell in love, and my journal is all over it. She even wrote a journal for a while. Our first vacation was called The High Road, but that very phrase ended up describing our whole relationship. We got married in October 2004.
2005-2015: Diamond Days. For a while, one of our web pages was called Diamond Days, and was an expression of how happy our lives together were. We loved being married, we loved traveling together, and we loved each other. The journal, and, by then, this blog expressed that without doubt.
2016-2019: The Fourth Writing Group, Open Mic Nyte. I started attending an interesting group in 2016, and open mic venue at a local coffee house. We all read, sang, performed, or showed our art, and it was amazing. I wrote all kinds of great stuff during that great period, and often read passages from the journal itself, and I wrote about the sessions in my journal.
2020-2021: The Isolation Journals. My friend Mackenzee crafted some poems during the early pandemic under the heading of The Isolations Journals, but I like that title enough to steal it. During this period, we all faced the difficulties and missteps of the pandemic, and this period marked a sharp decline in my wife’s health.
September 5, 2023: Abby died in March 2022. The journal has it all there in black and white, but it’s not easy to look at those pages. But I am still writing.
2024: The Fifth Writing Group, First Monday Spoken Word Open Mic Night. This group has caught on big time with the writing culture in Ada, and it seems like more fun every time we meet. I am our defacto photographer, and I always read.
Here is a strange truism about journal writing that has not served us well: I wrote things in my journal in tenth grade that would have gotten me arrested and/or medicated 25 years ago, 15 years ago, or today. If anyone in today’s social network scene posted some of the stuff I wrote back then, the schools would go on instant lockdown.
That seems like a reasonable course of action, but the truth is that has the effect of driving self-expression underground, where it festers and builds instead of being expressed and dealt with, and I wonder if that is a contributor to more violent trends now than in 1978.
And it’s not that I was broken and violent. We all have broken and unsettling thoughts and feelings when we are inundated by the cruelties, and hormones, of teen life, and we can deal with them, or we can bury them.
Finally, today I finished my current journal volume, number 56, and tomorrow will start the next one. Question: what can I do to amp the creativity in the next one?
The Second Year of Grieving
I recognize that I have never experienced grieving the death of a spouse before. My wife Abby died 18 months ago, and I am finding my second year of grieving her death to be harder than the first.
I miss her more than ever.
Losing her wasn’t as hard as watching her lose the fight. I was there for her every day, but aside from loving her and advocating for her care, there wasn’t really anything I could do to make her well.
When I was 14, I read in The Book of Lists that the top two most stressful events in a human life were divorce, and the death of a spouse, but I had always questioned the validity of that assertion since I imagined the death of a child, especially a young child, would be the worst.
On the other hand, paindoctor.com gives an updated list, with a stress index number assigned to it…
- Death of a spouse or child: 100
- Divorce: 73
- Marital separation: 65
- Imprisonment: 63
- Death of a close family member: 63
- Personal injury or illness: 53
- Marriage: 50
- Dismissal from work: 47
- Marital reconciliation: 45
- Retirement: 45
I know other people who are currently grieving things like divorce or the death of a parent, but they haven’t expressed it to me in obvious terms. I can understand this. It can be hard to admit that something outside ourselves has taken something valuable from us – that feels weak and vulnerable.
And of course theres always room for self doubt.
Sad songs make me sad, but happy songs make me sad too, since so many of them were about us.
I talk to Abby sometimes. Usually it is just to say that I miss her.
What do I miss? I miss our debriefs at the end of every day. I miss her hand in mine as we slept. I miss the hope of another adventure down the road with her. I miss her laughter as we watched movies. I miss bringing her Braum’s vanilla milkshakes and Sonic burgers. I miss her “I love you” every day and every night. I miss saying “I love you” to her every day and every night. I miss the smell of her hair. I miss that she was proud of me and the things I accomplished. I miss her telling me every day that I looked great.
I miss you, Abby.
Mission Accomplished!
There is a joke I used to tell. Robert Oppenheimer and Erico Fermi are in the bunker at the Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945. After the bomb goes off, they turn to each other, high-five, and Oppenheimer says, “fission accomplished!”
I stopped telling that joke because so few people got it or laughed at it.
Flash forward to May 1, 2003 with George Bush aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, declaring “mission accomplished!”
Well, my most recent mission has been accomplished. After more than three weeks of cutting, pruning, sawing, and dragging, I finally got the mess of tangled branches cleaned up after a July 11 severe thunderstorm wrecked a huge number of trees in the Byng area.
As I cleaned and cut and lifted and dragged, I got into one really great rhythm after another, with my ipod shuffling song after song that made the work fun, and very good for my body. I felt strong and healthy.
On the last day or two, I got a tiny squinch of contact dermatitis on my forearms, probably from long-dead poison ivy vines that clung to high branches that fell from the walnut tree.
As I cleaned, I decided that the thunderstorm must have been in the dissipating stage, since none of the damaged branches were moved anywhere, but just forced straight down to the ground.
In a perfect finale to the clean-up, a friend of mine who does wood turning came by last night and got most of the black walnut logs that sat on the ground after the clean-up was over, giving them a good home.
These Aren’t My Memories
I was digging through a journal recently, and if I am completely honest, it was to find out when I had sex with someone that year. I didn’t find that, but I came across some extraordinary notes.
May 11, 1998…
“I’m tied of ice chest boyfriends.” ~Lisa, who was hitting on me at the time.
The most suffocating fantasy of all: the white picket fence.
The biggest imagination gap: self image. Look at yourself!
May 12, 1998…
What makes greatness? Only the struggle of the human spirit against nature, against each other, against ourselves, can make us great. Let greatness come about on its own. Yet I yearn to capture it!
May 18, 1998…
I must remember to keep expanding. My diet can always be better. I can always take better pictures. My words can always say more. I can always fly better. I can make more friends. I can forgive you.
Where are you tonight? … not in my arms.
May 19, 1998…
(In the margin) All this waits inside me. Some day we will take hold of each other and this will all come pouring out.
Does she have any idea of the depth and complexity that resides behind these oddly innocent blue eyes?
I am emptied by my honesty.
Alarming similarities between Anaîs Nin and me:
“I am unable to move from journal to fiction,” and, “I copy the pithiest aphorisms into the diary.”
June 5, 1998…
Her shallow indifference to my life was never enough to separate my quixotic fantasies from her real self.
Last night was a parade of stereotyping and sexism. Donna was our master of ceremonies.
I don’t despise who you are. I despise who you think you are.
“That was very sexy.” ~woman who watched me lick the salt off a margarita glass.
Your lies are of no interest to me, even if they are just lies to yourself.
June 10, 1998…
Mary drew the dull-orange rag from the pocket of her filthy blue overalls to wipe the mist of sweat from her forehead. The rag was dirty from engine grease, and made a black steak across her brow. Her face had been pale years ago, framed by almost-black shoulder-length hair, but the sun and age and violent unhappiness had all taken their toll, mixing her coloring to a greyish tan, peppered by by grey hair pulled back onto a pony tail.
Who is she? What does she fear?
Summer Time Is Fine in the Summer Time
Summer, my Chihuahua, has been off her feed for a few days.
I was really worried for a while, since she wasn’t eating, and had a bad bout of diarrhea that required shampooing the carpet in my home office.
The day I decided I would take her to the vet when I got home from work was the day I got home to find her wagging her tail, ready to play, and begging for a treat. She was fine.
Slow Motion Clean-Up
Readers might recall that the town where I live, Byng, Oklahoma, was hit by a severe thunderstorm in the predawn hours of July 11.
We were fortunate that very few structures were damaged, but a huge number of trees, including some of the trees on the patch where I live, were damaged. The neighborhood is buzzing with the sound of chain saws, and the air is full of light wood smoke as we all slowly, as time permits, clean it up and burn the branches.
Here on the patch, the big, 125-year-old black walnut just north of the house got the worst of it. It didn’t look too terrible at first, but as the damaged branches turned brown, it became obvious that more than half of this huge, beautiful hardwood was damaged.
I mentioned this to a photographer friend of mine, Wes Edens, who offered to bring his three chair saws over to help cut it up so I could drag it all down the hill and burn it. When I mentioned this to my next door neighbor Mike Nipps, he offered to bring his tractor over to pull some of the biggest broken branches out of the tree, where they hung by threads and tangles.
There are a couple of very large branches that none of us could reach, and I’m not interested in hiring an expensive tree guy to get them, since they don’t threaten to fall on any structures.
Abby loved the old walnut, and she would be sad to see it so torn up. But it’s not the first time the weather has roughed up this tree, so time will tell if it can recover.
Thanks again to Mike and Wes for the manpower and the horsepower.
The Mighty Wolfhound
This is me with my Irish wolfhound, Hawken Rifle Trail.
The Hard Work After the Storm
Readers of my newspaper and my social media friends know that Tuesday, July 11, 2023, a severe thunderstorm struck the town where I live, Byng, Oklahoma.
I don’t know if the storm was straight-line winds or a tornado, but it made a lot of noise, and did a fair amount of tree damage.
Fortunately, only a small number of structures suffered any damage. The house where I live, for instance, lost just one siding panel, which I nailed back up with no trouble at all.
Power lines across the street were taken to the ground by falling trees, and the power was off for 13 hours as a result.
The trees – mine and most of my neighbors’ – got pretty roughed up. Two maple trees along my 100-yard driveway, for example, dropped large branches onto my driveway, such that while I was trying to figure out how to clear them out of the way so I could use the driveway, my next-door neighbor Mike showed up with his tractor, attached a chain to the branches, and pulled them into the pasture, out of the way.
Those weren’t the only trees of mine that shed limbs or need further pruning, but it allowed me to get the cars out of the driveway without any off-road excursions.
The last couple of day, I’ve use my six-inch, battery-operated chain saw to dice up some of the branches into manageable sections, allowing me to drag them to the brush pile.
Marry this for a minute with the fact that our guest at Ada Sunrise Rotary Friday was Briana Coureur, who talked to us about paths to health and fitness. I told her that this activity, dragging branches across a pasture on a summer evening, was a legitimate workout, and she agreed.
I still have a way to go. My most-damaged tree is the giant black walnut on the north side of the house. One entire main branch blew down, though only mostly, since it is still hanging on by a sliver of bark. Other parts of this 125-year-old tree are damaged too. My plan is to clear out all I can by hand, then re-assess.
The Spider Paradox
I am living in an uncomfortable paradox, and I am sure I am not alone. The issue: spiders, and more specifically, the paradox that spiders in my yard and garden are more than welcome, yet spiders in the house instantaneously and intensely trigger my fear response.
I shared this with a neighbor, who said his trigger is snakes.
Just tonight, I saw a beautiful Argiope, a very large spider that I often see in my garden this time of year. She hung on her web between the tomato plants, and I was so glad to see her making a living eating the bugs that would otherwise eat my tomatoes. In fact, while I was picking tomatoes tonight, I saw her ambush and wrap-up a small grasshopper.
Some people are afraid of cats, mice, rats, even dogs. But for me it’s spiders, and only in the house.
How Many Life Lessons by 60?
I’ve been cooking on this item for six months, hoping to get “60 life lessons I learned by the age of 60,” but I guess I haven’t learned that much, because I topped out at 50.
- Every day is the best, because it contains all your great days within it.
- Every day is the right day.
- Looking bad in the eyes of strangers doesn’t matter, and I don’t really look bad in the eyes of my friends.
- Healthy anger is constructive, but it can turn on you.
- Resentment only hurts you.
- If you have nothing to say, don’t say anything.
- Beans are the best. They are good at every point in their chain of existence; they are good for the environment, they are good for your body, and they are good for the soul.
- No one is inherently evil, no matter how awful they seem. No one is irredeemable.
- “Evil” isn’t a thing, it’s a perception. It is WAY too easy to call something evil, like cancer or Nazis, but those examples and a million more are just a point in the evolution of the universe.
- It’s too easy to misunderstand the world because we mess up the words that go with it. “Mexican” isn’t racist, for example, because Mexico isn’t a race, it’s a nation, and “Mexican” is a nationality.
- You can’t defeat something by hating it. It will just hate you back. Try understanding it.
- If your friends tell you during your crisis that, “If you need anything, anything at all, just let me know,” it means that they don’t understand what they are promising.
- Saying “you are in my thoughts and prayers” is seldom even the case. Saying that is a fashion statement, not a real expression of empathy.
- “True friends hold you accountable for your actions.” I held someone accountable once, and at first it seemed like the destruction of the friendship, but not long after that, she told me I was right, and thanked me for calling her out.
- Silence does not imply or infer guilt or siding with oppression, because most conversations deserve thought and reason, not impulsiveness. I do NOT make exceptions to this idea because of the urgency of current issues.
- Did I block you? Boo hoo. I blocked you because you suck.
- Entertainment is pleasure, not art.
- War will always be with us, and “We’re not here to do the right thing. We’re here to follow f*cking orders!”
- Violence sometimes seems like a very clear answer until you imagine that violence wielded against your loved ones or children.
- There have been many instances in which a group will be accused, and held liable, for how they are perceived, not how they are. In that moment, it is your responsibility to stand against that.
- Your responsibility to be ready for the fight never ends.
- Marriage is as good as you make it. We made ours, and rebuilt it every day, and it was great.
- The absolute best move when someone does something dangerous, stupid, or annoying is to be nice to them.
- Hold the door for people. Thank people when they hold the door for you.
- Expressing anger and hopelessness about humanity does nothing to improve it. Express hope, and ideas to make it better.
- Tracers point both ways.
- “IF” is the word in the middle of life.
- Our possessions own us, not the other way around.
- If what you are doing isn’t fun, you should be doing something else.
- Procrastination, no matter how much you claim you enjoy it, makes the task more difficult in the end. Thus…
- Just do it.
- Make that dream into a reality. Whether it is “Doctor” in front of your name or bicycling across Europe, no one is going to hand you these things.
- Your insecurities are lying to you about vulnerability. Being vulnerable can bring your heart and mind to new levels.
- Get up and move. Walking anywhere, anytime, is better for you than sitting.
- Listen to your wanderlust.
- He/she is just one person. There are 8 billion more.
- You decide what is true and meaningful. Don’t bet bullied into someone else’s ideas about the true nature of it all.
- Touch heals, which is why broken people don’t touch you.
- Hard work at every level is honorable.
- If you did everything you dream about doing and wish you would do, you’d never be bored again.
- Creativity in any form is the high point of human behavior.
- Words and how you use them make a difference. Well-crafted words and sentences command respect, and poor language damages your image and credibility.
- Manners matter, especially in the 21st century full of incivility.
- Standing up for what you think is right can be an asset, but be sure your really are right.
- It’s so hard to be honest, especially when many around you are in love with your own dishonesty.
- Try actually listening, instead of just waiting for your turn to talk.
- No one ever said, “That $29,000 helicopter ride was totally worth eating all those stale Burger King french fries.”
- Nobody ever said (or will say), “I sure am glad we put all those oil wells in the Grand Canyon.”
- Make your bed, hang up your coat, contain and eliminate the clutter.
- Know what among your possessions is really valuable, and what is really just garbage, and act accordingly.
- Dress up; I mean professional attire. If I were a boss and you came to me for an interview in shorts and a t-shirt, I won’t look twice at your resumé.
All About Rotary
As of today, I am your 2023-2024 Ada Sunrise Rotary President.
It honors and amazes me that I was elected to do this, since in some ways, I don’t really see myself as an adult, and never have. I know I do an adult job, was a good adult husband, and I behave as an adult in the community. But me as a civic leader? Wow.
Rotary International is what’s known as a “service organization,” meaning we exist to provide enrichment to our community. The motto of Rotary is “Service Above Self.”
My fellow Rotarians and I usually meet at the Aldridge Hotel in downtown Ada, but Friday we were at Pontotoc Technology Center due to the Aldridge being closed this week.
Ada has two Rotary Clubs, Ada Sunrise, and Ada Rotary, and either of them merit a look if you are interested in joining. I have friends in both clubs, and they are both full of good people who welcome me.
So what do I want to do as Rotary President, and how would I like to lead? I would like to have more guest speakers on topics like health, fitness, the environment, diet and exercise. I would also love to bring in more guest speakers in the creative realms like artists, poets, authors and musicians.
I am a champion for issues like donating blood, and even at today’s meeting, I encouraged us all to donate.
Of course, the bottom line of leadership is to lead through example, so I hope to work as hard as anyone in our Rotary Club, and, by extension, have as much fun doing it as anyone in the club.
So if you have ever been interested in joining a civic club and Rotary looks like a good fit to you, email me, or just come by one of our meetings on a Friday at 6:45 a.m. at the Aldridge and find me, and I’ll introduce you. We would love to see you!
Our DNA in the Dust
It is with a sense of amazement that I admit I am about to turn 60. That means that I moved into the Adams Center Dormitory on the campus of the University of Oklahoma 42 years ago.
42 years is something to ponder. The world has changed so much in that time, as have I. That’s the reason I think it’s a mistake to do anything permanent, like get a tattoo or have a baby, when you’re 18. What on earth was I into when I was 18? Hi-fi stereo? Camaro vs Trans-Am vs Z280? Melissa?
Wait, wait, wait. Before you go off on me for advising you when to have children, yes, I know tons of happy people who had children at a young age, including my late wife Abby, whose daughter was born when Abby was just 19.
But with health care improvements and increasing lifespans, I happen to think it’s a smart move to wait until you settle into adulthood before you take on parenthood. According to healthline.com, for example, “Experts say the best time to get pregnant is between your late 20s and early 30s. This age range is associated with the best outcomes for both you and your baby. One study pinpointed the ideal age to give birth to a first child as 30.5.”
But back to my younger days: the two things that remain in my life that I loved in 1981 are writing and photography.
I thought of all this because one of my college roommates, Carey Johnson, who at that time we knew as “Chip,” sent me a couple of photographs of the dormitory where we lived, Adams Center, and the strip mall across the street from it, Stubbeman Village, being demolished.
Adams Center was a complex of four red brick towers that, along with Walker Tower, dominated the skyline of the south part of the OU campus. Stubbeman Village was right across the street to the west.
Help me remember, Norman people: Stubbeman Village had two restaurants: Mr. Bills and Pinocchio’s, the Half Acre Food Store, a video game arcade, and a movie theater, where my friends dragged me to see the terrible animated sci-fi fantasy Heavy Metal. Later that same year, my first girlfriend Tina took me there to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show. What else was in Stubbeman Village?
I was doing a lot of changing and growing, and screwing up, in those days, and while some of the friendships I forged remain to this day, others I carelessly squandered in my arrogance. I was moody and mopey and hard to get along with (please don’t mentally say “and still are”), and I took college much less seriously than I should have, so I didn’t really get enough out of it.
One thing I did manage to create and nurture in college was my love of writing and photography, which have become some of my strengths as the years have passed. During my time in college, I remember that I couldn’t wait to get out of journalism classes and go do some journalism.
But now, the buildings where our young lives were lived, fun was had, and mistakes were made, are dust. I like to think that some small of us, maybe just traces of our DNA, remain in that dust.
Like a Dockside Bully
I recently rewatched a couple of my favorite home entertainment items: A Man for All Seasons, and Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror.
A Man for All Seasons tells the tale of Sir Thomas More, named by King Henry the VIII as Lord Chancellor of England, but, when More declines to endorse Henry’s divorce from Cathrine, Henry has him beheaded in 1535. It’s an engaging story for a certain audience.
At one point, More is being interrogated by Thomas Cromwell…
Sir Thomas More: You threaten like a dockside bully.
Cromwell: How should I threaten?
Sir Thomas More: Like a minister of state. With justice.
Cromwell: Oh, justice is what you’re threatened with.
Sir Thomas More: Then I am not threatened.
It’s a great scene, and an excellent commentary on the nature of bullying.
Later in the film, one of More’s friends asks him to relent and endorse Henry’s divorce, “for fellowship!”
More replies, “And when we die, and you are sent to heaven for doing your conscience, and I am sent to hell for not doing mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?”
Can you imagine someone of such character today?
And that brings me to the other piece I rewatched this week, the 5-part Netflix miniseries Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror. It’s an interesting study in bullying, especially the horrible bullying by radical Muslims, also sometimes called “Islamists,” toward their communities and especially toward women.
At one point in one of the episodes, an interviewee says, “Afghanistan is the worst place in the world to be a woman.”
These actors are the biggest bullies on the planet, forcing other people to behave exactly as they say or face cruelty, torture, or death.
These excellent excursions in entertainment certainly sparked a lot of thoughts about bullying, and conversations that revealed how many people feel that they were bullied when they were younger or continued to be bullied to this day.
At one point (I think while I was mowing), I had an epiphany about bullies: they really are afraid. They really are. Think about it: one of the very hardest things to do every day is be honest and vulnerable, and then think about how hard bullies try to act dishonest and invulnerable.
In conclusion, I would encourage anyone reading this to make an attempt to improve your entertainment consumption habits with media like that I have described. Even if you don’t agree with the underlying points of view, it would do us all a huge service to cast off our baser viewing habits and try to use them as educational.
I expect I will have many more thoughts about this topic as the weeks go on.
Words of Wisdom, April-May 2023
“Illness is a cross, but perhaps also a guardrail. The ideal, however, would be to draw strength from it and to refuse its weaknesses. Let it be the retreat that makes one stronger at the proper moment. And if one has to pay in suffering and renunciation, let’s pay up!” ~Albert Camus
“Liberty is the right not to lie.” ~Albert Camus
“Sometimes offers for help are actually cries for help.” ~Unknown
“The main thing, when the sword cuts into your soul, is to keep a calm gaze, lose no blood, accept the coldness of the sword with the coldness of a stone. By means of the stab, after the stab, become invincible.” ~Franz Kafka
Please tend my marigolds
This year is my first vegetable garden since 2020. In both 2021 and 2022, my wife’s failing health took priority over getting a garden planted and attended.
I’ve had a garden most years since I moved to Byng in 2004, and it is among my very favorite things to do. The best thing about it isn’t the produce, although it is fantastic, but the beauty of being outdoors in the evening sun, tending to and caring for live plants.
For the years I was married, I would come into the house with a basket or bag full of tomatoes, cucumbers, cantaloupe , onions, lettuce, strawberries, spinach, and bell peppers, with a huge, proud grin on my face, eager to show Abby what I had grown.
Despite her absence, I am still going to be grinning with pride when I start getting produce this year.
I also very regularly grab a camera, especially when the light is nice or when I see something unusual, like the large caterpillars I spotted recently.
Wednesday night I mowed the grass for a bit, then dug weeds in the garden. At some point, I stepped in some fire ants, but it took them a while to migrate past my shoes and socks to get to some of my leg to start biting me. And bite me they did. I know they are just doing what fire ants do, but they really do hurt. Fortunately, I am not allergic, so it’s more of a nuisance than anything else.
In addition to the fruits and vegetables I cultivate in the garden, I have a small orchard with peach, plum, and cherry trees. Some years I have unlimited peaches and plums, and some years, like this year, I have none at all, due to a late frost.
I almost always plant marigolds in the garden, ostensibly because they attract beneficial insects, but mostly because I love the look and smell of marigold flowers. When Abby was still with us, I often brought her marigolds from the garden, along with wildflowers from the pasture.
In the spring of 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic brand new and remaining largely unknown, I wrote to a friend that, “if I get the Rona and die, please tend my marigolds.”
Bookstore Days
I recently came across a YouTube video about the demise of Borders Books, and it sent me down memory lane about my bookstore days in the 1990s.
My friends in Norman, Oklahoma, and I would often meet for lunch on Sunday, then pick something to do in the afternoon. Much of the time, we would make a grand tour of the bookstores in Norman: Hastings, Borders, Barnes and Noble, and, in the mall (remember the mall?), Waldenbooks.
We browsed for hours, almost like in a library, though we almost always bought something.
I don’t know if it sounds bombastic or pretentious, but my first stop was usually the philosophy section. I was absolutely entranced by the idea of reading the world views of brilliant minds, both contemporary and historical.
Once in a while a couple of my Norman friends and I would drive up to Full Circle Books in northwest Oklahoma City, often paired with a stop at Akins Natural Foods nearby. Full Circle is just the right combination of coziness, impressive selection, and employees who love reading.
I don’t want to leave Ada out, of course. Many of us loved going to Hastings in North Hills Center. One of my closest friends, Jamie, worked at Ada’s Hastings for years, and I was always glad to see her there.
Ay, there’s the rub. As with everything else in the 21st century, reading has been transformed by our electronic devices, and not always for the best. I don’t want this to sound like a post mortem for reading. Some of the best people I know love to read, and would rather grab any book one their shelf than watch or listen to anything on their smartphones.
Hastings and Borders are gone, swallowed up by e-readers and bad business practices, but somehow Barnes and Noble is still around.
Not too make people know this yet, but I am finally getting my book together about my life with Abby, so a final question might be: would you read it in print, or would you rather see it on your smart device?
The Persistence of Memory
I haven’t had a huge amount of time off in the last few weeks. Today is Monday, and while I often have Monday off at my newspaper, that’s the day I teach photography, so it’s not really a day off, and as it happens, this was the only day my newspaper could arrange for a gym for our all-star basketball game, so I’ll be covering that this evening.
I try to fit projects into the gaps and cracks, but often enough I get inspired by something else, from the weather to sunsets to brilliant conversations, and today was no exception: as I was cleaning out and archiving files in my iCloud drive, I came across this photo:
I’d been looking around Google Maps for this and that, and why I thought to navigate to my first girlfriend, Tina’s, house, I don’t know.
Still, it brought back a spitload of memories, mostly positive ones, about my time with her and this house. She and I dated from the middle of my junior year in high school until the end of my first year in college.
Of course, the rabbit hole of Google Maps lead to the rabbit hole of my own journal.
I first went to Tina’s house in November 1979 because Tina stopped showing up in class, and I found out she’d been in a car crash. I helped pick glass out of her hair.
I can picture the inside of the house: the dark, seldom-used living room on the right side of the photo, the kitchen and dining room in the middle, and the den on the left side. Tina’s bedroom was at the back on the right, and it had bright red shag carpet, and she had a bright pink velour bed spread. A trio of shelves above it displayed her Smurf collection.
There were a lot of long goodbyes on that front porch, winter and summer.
Since I wrote in a journal, she gave me a copy of Jay’s Journal (since debunked as Mormon propaganda), which I read cover-to-cover in a couple of days.
We woke up February 9, 1980 to find a foot of snow on the ground. I walked to Tina’s (one mile in the snow) where her mom and siblings joined friends for pizza, then session after session of snowball fights.
“I never had so much fun in my whole life. We were rolling around on the grass when I saw an airplane fly over, so I yelled, ‘air raid,’ and we both ran and hid under George the bush,” I wrote later that year.
In October 1980, she had an operation on her elbow. My journal doesn’t say why, but her arm was in traction with a drain tube in it. I have no recollection of that at all.
On another occasion, we were horsing around and I dove out that front window, breaking one of the panes with my heels. I wasn’t hurt, and had to buy a new window pane, but I remember that moment perfectly clearly.
She considered Dan Fogelberg’s Longer as “our song,” though I did not. I took her to see Fogelberg in concert in Norman in early 1982.
She worked at a toy store in the mall.
She had an older brother and a younger sister. I don’t remember much about them. Her mom and dad were divorcing at the time, but she and I stayed in the margins of that as much as possible.
As far as I know, there are no photographs of us together.
Sleep Well, Dauphine
It’s been a month since anyone heard a peep from this blog, and while there are some legitimate reasons, there are as many lame ones. The biggest blame falls to work, which, while it is the absolute dopest the bomb there is, the middle of April through the middle of May take it all.
So here it is, my latest news and other stuff.
My sister Nicole and brother-in-law Tracey’s dog of nine years, Dauphine, died this week.
When I got home from covering baseball recently in Edmond, I found the house air conditioner had failed again. I know it’s old, but it sure would be nice to catch a break.
One result of this occurrence was my installation of a large window-unit air conditioner in the living room, which I had purchase for cheap from Amazon in early 2022, knowing I might soon need it.
The guy came the next day and fixed it, and for not as much money as I had feared.
The mass shooting in the greater Dallas area was just a few miles away from my step daughter and her family’s home. Chele said they recently shopped in the mall where it happened.
I can sort of see the light at the end of the tunnel of the big clean-out. This week I made giant strides in the house and in the office, but I think it’s ridiculous that … yeah, I know. When we get married, we are making a bargain with our spouse, and that includes, in our case, my making peace with her collectionism.
The garden is taking off like it should be. After a couple of seasons of very serious drought, both from the earth and from my ability to garden, April and May have been ideally rainy to bring the garden along.
Movie Review: Purple Rain
I first saw Purple Rain in about 1987, during a period when girlfriend Kathy and I were renting movies about four times a week. She loved the movie at the time, but I think she would agree that it has aged poorly.
Purple Rain is an attempted fusion of a concert movie with a biopic. The concert part works great, but the plot? I wonder if the plot was needed at all. Maybe it was a studio formula that said, “you have to have a plot. It can’t just be a concert.”
The biggest flaw in the plot is when the manager and his ilk are talking about The Kid not having the sound any more and needs to be replaced. Truth: if you saw a show half as good as The Revolution’s show in this movie, you would simultaneously cum and shit your pants, then need hospitalization to have your smile removed.
Other thoughts…
The “girl show” Morris puts together with Apollonia 6 isn’t sexy it all. It’s clumsy and unmusical.
If it was Prince’s intention to spell out to us what a bastard and egomaniac he was in real life, well done.
The music, though not performed live for the film, was mic’d and mixed to have a concert sound to it.
On my second watch-through this week, it dawned on me that much of the bad acting is due to the rotten script. “It’s all I dream about. What about you? What do you dream about?” It feels like it came out of my tenth grade journal.
In conclusion, I find this movie poorly-written and filmed, but the concert footage is as good as the album. When I watch again, I will fast-forward through all the dialog to get to the performances.
Back in the Left Seat
My social media circles might have noticed this week that I have returned to the aviation hobby after a 20-year hiatus.
I always wanted to be a pilot. I became a licensed private pilot May 1, 1993, just short of 30 years ago.
I flew a lot in the 1990s, when the hobby was less expensive. My wife (then, girlfriend) Abby and I flew together in the spring of 2003. By then, the local aviation community had become less active, and there weren’t really any airplanes to rent here. She and I rented airplanes at Shawnee.
One of the reasons I am flying again now is that thanks to Ada Wings, there are three aircraft that live here at Ada to rent.
There are some myths about flying as a private pilot that I should dispel. It’s very safe. We’re not test pilots or daredevils, and the airplanes we fly are airworthy. One thing that keeps us safe is our respect for the weather, which most non-pilots don’t really understand. We don’t have airliners. Most private pilots like me fly close to home because it’s fun. We can’t jet up to Nova Scotia in a couple of hours. We fly for fun, and for the challenge of becoming better pilots.
Monday I flew with Ada Wings’ flight instructor Zach Burkhead, who gave me my first flight review in 21 years. Everything came back to me pretty quickly, but I still feel like I should sharpen my skills. My landings were sloppy, but that’s to be expected with dormant muscle memory.
The two aircraft I flew Monday were a straight-tail Cessna 150, and a Cessna 172.
Burkhead signed me off for two years, and checked me out to rent their airplanes.
If you’ve ever dreamed you would like to learn to fly, make it happen. I did, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Natural Born Tillers
I write this on Easter Sunday, April 9.
Friday I bought 18 Celebrity tomato plants, 6 Cherokee Purple heirloom tomato plants, 2 tomato plants of unknown type, 12 Yellow Giant pepper plants, and 24 slicing cucumber plants from the Byng FFA/Horticulture sale, the program at the high school near my home.
Yesterday I got all but the cucumbers planted.
I normally plant cucumbers from seeds, but since they had them at the sale, and they weren’t expensive, I thought it might give me a head start.
Words of Wisdom, March 2023
“Forgive others, not because they deserve forgiveness, but because you deserve peace.” ~Jonathan Lockwood Huie
“Truth does not mind bring questioned. A lie does not like being challenged.” ~Unknown
Till, We Meet Again, or Tine After Tine
My first tiller was named Tilly, of course. It was the smallest gasoline-powered tiller available.
Abby decided the new (2020) one’s name is Tyler.
I tilled a nice patch for the garden yesterday, which was tougher than before since I did not get a garden in last year.
I expect to till it at least two more times before I get anything planted, especially to dislodge all that stubborn Bermuda grass.