When I was in my last year of teaching junior college—meaning next year I’d be 26 and wouldn’t be drafted—I needed a strategy for getting through that last semester. Three years in the bizarro town 60 miles from the Gulf should have gotten me killed, beaten up, or at least arrested (and then beaten up). [...]
history
Fleeing in a hail of bullets
It wasn’t easy, but I tracked him down. The 111-year-old fugitive from justice has been living all this time in Taos, New Mexico. Thought he was pretty clever, he did, except that bad guys always screw up in the end. What gave our boy away? The only single-wide in Llano Quemado without tires on the [...]
Just look and read below
This is the little house in Wall Lake, Iowa where my wife the classical pianist lived until she was three years old. We visited it on the way to Dubuque. Next door on the right is the house where an older woman lived whom she used to visit as a child. According to her, she’d [...]
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 [...]
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.
.png)