Where to begin? The way I was raised and taught to be a paranoid sonofabitch, or how God, the fates, whatever compelled me into confrontation with my shadow? Let’s just see, shall we? My 99-year-old Aunt Mary finally shed her mortal coil on April 1 up in Maine, a long way from Taos and another [...]
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When does it start feeling good to be the king
They’re all dead now. Bye-bye, gone. My father, his older brother, and finally his sister Mary, 99 years old. She was fond of saying “after my demise,” so there you go: wait long enough, and everything shows up.
Shot on a Christmas visit with my parents in Houston in ’71
In the fall of ’71, it was just me and the woods. One hundred and seventy acres of them, spread across the western slope of a long forested mountain riven with streams and waterfalls. “Yellowhammer Farm,” we called it, back when there was a we. Several of us had gone in together to buy 170 [...]
The path to the acequia is next
It can’t be her, obviously. She is my sunshine. Every day I plunge my miserable soul into the neon plasma and begin again. Sometimes it doesn’t take, and I scuttle around the floor of my invisible cage like Kafka’s cockroach. Like when I consider that she could have had anything, and she chose me. Mostly, [...]
Photo from 2003. She’s happy ’cause she hasn’t seen the head yet!
NOTE: I’ve got a good one for you here, an essay I published online back in July, 2003 when my wife was getting ready to move to Dubuque to take a job. Originally entitled “Stop Me if You’ve Heard These,” what made me think of it was a Craigslist ad posted by an ex-military guy [...]
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