Author Archives: spottywestgoeseast

I’m in Corryton, Tennessee, at my aunt’s 55+ senior condo — part of a attractive, 12-unit development surrounded by farmland. I’ve been here a week now. Last Saturday I took a Greyhound bus from Raleigh, NC, where I was visiting family. The eight and a half-hour trip landed me in Knoxville a few minutes after midnight. For $65 it’s really a pretty good deal.

The other two Greyhound options were more than 15 hours and more expensive. The red-eye that leaves Raleigh just after midnight is $163. Go figure? Usually misery has a price discount, not the other way around.

Actually, Greyhounds are much improved from the days when I took my first solo trip as a 13-year-old in November 1978. The date is retrievable because someone told me there had been a mass suicide at a place called Jonestown. (Suicide at gunpoint.) Trailways was a national bus line back then but the competition didn’t seem to do much to improve the experience. Smoking was still allowed and the back of the bus was often like a barroom. 

Now drinking and smoking are prohibited and boisterous behavior is usually not tolerated. The AC was a bit much but I always bring extra layers when venturing to indoor spaces in the south. I gave a soon-to-be fifth-grader a long sleeve shirt. She was trying to make a heat tent by stretching her t-shirt over her bare knees and sock-less feet. 

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I’ve put my cabin-building dreams on the back burner. My current focus for the triangular piece of land is to get to a place where I’m carrying a walking stick more often than a machete. Right now only about a sixth of the boundary line is hikable and there are no established trails that bisect the property over the central knob. Ideally, those trails would have carved-out steps where the incline is steep.

I bought a utility cart to drag all my brush and tree-clearing equipment with me as I work. I can already tell this will be a big time and labor-saver. I can’t believe I didn’t do this sooner.

On Tuesday, I made my first trip to the land. I removed the wire mesh and steel cart out of Aunt Linda’s car, assembled the sides and packed in my chainsaw, more fuel and some new tools.  I cleared the path from the nearest spot on the road to the shed. A light rainstorm in the morning kept the spider webs down. Small saplings, poison ivy and other ground cover had popped up since my last visit. 

There are new, low-hanging branches and thorny vines that grab my clothes.  I assume the thorny vines are a wild rose but I’ve never seen them flower. There are also plenty of newly fallen trees. 

This land would be considered a tinderbox out west, but there is enough moisture here that it is not a high risk. Still I need to get serious about better land maintenance. It was a dry spring until a few weeks ago. 

I’d hoped to clear some of the newly fallen trees from the already established trails, but after I got all my equipment to the shed (where it will stay during my visit), I couldn’t get the chainsaw started. This has been an issue since I bought it and it’s not because of user error or being a novice. After about a hundred pulls I gave up. 

Realizing it would be best to get the saw to a shop as soon as  possible, I packed up, locking the cart and everything else in the shed. 

My cell phone wasn’t getting good reception probably due to the rain. When I got closer to Blaine I pulled over and called the Ace Hardware in Halls where I’d bought the saw. They are backed-up for two months on repairs but I was told I could bring it in for a quick check. 

A buff, young, 6’5”,  giant-of-a-man pulled the cord over and over as effortlessly as if it were the string on the back of a talking doll, but he wasn’t able to get it started either. He tried switching off the choke and pulling the spark plug just as I had. No luck. I couldn’t leave it there but he recommended I call around to some other stores. 

I found a place that could take it about thirty minutes away in southwest Knoxville. By the time I left, it was rush hour. 

Traffic jams are no longer just a big city problem. It took me over an hour to get back to the country roads outside of Corryton where it finally cleared up with about ten miles to go. 

With plenty of non-chainsaw work to do I went back to the land the next day. I pruned the path that goes from the shed to the flat prospective-cabin-spot. By the time I got there my right hip was aching and giving sharp pains every time I lifted my leg.  I pushed through and did some sporadic clearing on one of the two, partial, paths to the memorial stones. 

At the granite slabs, I pushed off a thick mat of wet, fallen leaves and then hobbled back to the cabin-spot pondering whether to clear the trail down to the prospective driveway. The hip was telling me not to be a fool. 

I’d tweaked it a few weeks before–twisting at an odd angle at the climbing gym. It was a noticeable sore spot but I always have a half dozen of those.  

The plane ride to Raleigh made it worse. I was in the middle seat stuck in an odd pose. The big guy on my left took both arm rests and I tried to be conscious of sharing the other side with a woman on my right. My feet were spread around my backpack. My arms became t-rex appendages as I tried to make good use of my time doing computer housekeeping  on the fold-down table while balancing pretzels and drinks to take advantage of refreshments when the steward rolled by with her cart. At some point the hip started to sing an aria of pain.

It didn’t help that I visited a climbing gym in Raleigh and another in Knoxville on Monday where I climbed through the discomfort. I’m usually the oldest person bouldering. As mellow and encouraging as most climbers are, I often feel like I have something to prove. 

As my hip picked up its operatic solo during the second act on my land, my biggest proof is that my body is not as supple as it once was. 

I made an appointment with The Joint Chiropractic, a chain of 700 offices across the country. They have quick walk-in service whereby they manipulate you into pretzel shapes and with sudden, violent motion, snap things into place. I felt great and wasn’t limping when I got off the table. I bought a pack of eight visits. The doctor recommended ice and a hard-foam, body roller. 

After about two hours everything hurt again and it was hard to walk, but I’m going to stick with the procedures. I figure, if it’s making me feel good for two hours then it’s probably on the right track. 

I’m disappointed that the chainsaw and body are keeping me from getting more done. I’ve been here for almost a week now but only spent about four hours on the land. The upside is that I’m getting this blog post out!

When I was here over Spring break the trees had not leafed out and I took advantage of the relative clearness to find more of the boundaries. I brought a metal detector with me and was able to find the buried barbed wire fence that runs for about ninety percent of the northwestern border. I marked trees all along the way and now have a more exact knowledge of this, the longest, side. 

Once I’d marked the boundary I went back to measure to make sure that my corners were correct and that the distance from each other matched that on the survey. At first I used a 250 foot string, but it was difficult to manage. It didn’t lay flat on the ground, easily became tangled, stretched or curved and was a pain to roll up and unspool. The next day I switched to using a hundred foot tape measure. It was all-around easier.

I even found a “set stone” indicated on the survey thanks to the help of a friend who told me that a “set stone” is exactly what it sounds like — a stone that is usually marked with a dab of red paint and small enough to be moved around and set in place to indicate something like a boundary. 

I met with the older couple that recently bought the land on the east side and we took a ride on the road that leads to the top of the knob on their land. We talked about where we believe the road intersects my boundary. Then we walked through the woods together where they had found the corner pin – a piece of iron rebar pounded into the ground and tied with red marking tape. 

This couple would like to buy this corner of the land to have their road free and clear of my property. I haven’t suggested a price, but, unless it is inordinately large, I’m more inclined to give them right-of-way with the hope that I could use the road too. It’s useless to talk price or access at this point. We really need to get our common boundary re-surveyed to know exactly what is theirs and mine. Unfortunately they were sold the land believing that the road is entirely on their property. 

I’m happy to say that while my time has been short traipsing around the woods, it has been tick-free (WARNING–tick pictures below). I bought some additional shirts and pants for land work and have been more careful about securing clothing: sticking pants in socks, wearing a light neck gaiter, covering my hair and spraying DEET-based insect repellent around my ankles and wrists then rubbing a handful into my face, neck, and ears. I finish off by running my still DEET-damp fingers through my hair. 

Ironically, just before my trip I got two ticks just brushing through high weeds on the roadside in Tomales, CA. It was only the second and third time in my 32-year stay that a tick has latched onto me in California—and the first time was just a few weeks earlier in Briones Park. Maybe all the rain we’ve had has brought them out? 

Funny, the two ticks that I got the same day were two different species – a Pacific Coast tick and a Dog Tick. I got them both off after about four hours so I’m not worried that they transmitted harmful bacteria (it’s generally agreed that it takes at least 24 hours for the bacteria in their guts to make it into their hosts.) 

I did use the bites as an excuse to get a round of an antibiotic, Doxycycline, to have on hand just in case I get bit by the lyme-carrying, black-legged tick or find any species on me that I think may have been attached a while. 

Speaking of dangers in the wood (thought this one worries me less), this adolescent bear was spotted across the road, about fifty yards from my shed next to my neighbor’s house. Here are the pictures the neighbors took a few weeks ago:

It feels good to get a post off again after that long blank stretch. Summer solstice was unmarked for me on Wednesday except for a radio announcer who mentioned it. I know solstice is the official beginning of summer but, for me, it means my school break is almost half way over. Still there are plenty of possibilities for new beginnings, adventures, rest and relaxation.  I hope you find lots of that good stuff. 

I’m only about fifty pages in, but this is a gorgeous book I want to share. Take care. 

I don’t like saying it—being a believer in human redemption—but it’s been a good week for the death of diabolicals: James Watt, Pat Robertson and Ted Kazinski. I’m sure they have loved ones who have better memories of them than I do.

Cary Grant is dead too. Turns out he’s been dead a while—since 1986. As it happens, his costar in the film North By Northwest, Eva Marie Saint, is still alive. She’s 98.

In the great urn of ashes, Grant’s are still on top. His memory is still in the hearts of many, but even he will eventually blow away and be part of the cosmic ash that makes up stars.

Its theorized that the Brazilian rainforest is lush and fertile due to winds blowing sand from the Sahara across the Pacific. Fertility relies on the infertile. Mr. Grant is still fertile. Clara Bow and Fatty Arbuckle of the silent film era less so. Both my parents and my friend, Rhett Stuart, all dead 14 years now are unknown to most, though very much still in my mind. 

When I was housemates with Rhett, living at the bottom of Hayes Street in San Francisco, I sometimes heard him weeping late at night when a friend or relative died. The last of his era were dying out, the way—if I anthropomorphize—I imagine Martha, the last passenger pigeon on earth might have felt in the Cincinatti zoo before she died alone in 1914, her genetic code and the billions of her kind who preceded her never to be seen again. 

“I don’t know if I want to live in a world without Dinah Shore,” Rhett wrote when the actor passed—a statement that resonated particularly with me since Dinah and I are from the same small town of Winchester, Tennessee.

My grandmother Flora, born in 1908, four years after Cary Grant, lived a long time after him. She died in 2007, six months shy of her hundredth birthday and thirty-five years after my her husband, my grandfather Sterling. 

This death theme came about from a simple Wikipedia search after rewatching North By Northwest with a friend this past weekend.  Lord knows (if I were a religious man) I’ve been searching for a theme these five months or so since I last blogged. There was a moment during Spring break in April when I visited my land in Tennessee when I had a post ready to go , but I held it back.

It hasn’t been writer’s block as much as publisher’s block. After tromping around on my land in April, I  took off an extra week from work to tromp around a particular million-plus-populated-southern-metropolis in search of a relative who became homeless around Christmas. After writing extensively about my search, the ethical dilemma of revealing someone else’s life situation without their permission reared its head. I had the feeling of being an interloper. Was I capitalizing on my relatives tragedy just to get a story? What part of it is my story? What is my responsibility? It was too confusing to digest.

The thought came to me—is any of it important? Anything mildly amusing? Where do I set my writing bar: an interesting bowel movement or nuclear holocaust caused by the war in Ukraine? 

While I was in Tennessee the state government ousted two black legislators for violating the chamber’s rules of behavior. I was never so ashamed of my home state. They couldn’t even profess “well rules are rules” because they hadn’t kicked out the white lady legislator who had done the exact same thing as the black men. 

Then there is the anti-drag law that was passed but has since been ruled unconstitutional by a Trump-appointed Federal judge. Tennessee legislators make me want to show up in a yellow summer dress wearing bauble earrings with my beard and work boots on. I’m just glad most of my Tennessee friends and relatives feel the same way I do. I’ll be there in a few days.

Previous to going to Tennessee I was already reeling from a feeling of existential insignificance. In late March I went to the California Association of Bilingual Education conference (CABE) at the Long Beach Convention Center. I brought copies of my story The Easter Thingy to read at an open-mic in the enormous vendor’s hall in the convention basement. An attractive space was designed for this — a large rectangle of artificial grass surrounded by a white picket fence with park benches around the perimeter.  I handed out copies of my story as people gathered inside the “park”. Others milled through the nearby rows of educational book publishers, tech companies and public school districts vying for new teachers. The vendor’s hall was a place where you had to be careful of eye contact or pausing too long at a candy bowl lest you be hooked into a spiel. 

The open-mic was actually in the style of a poetry slam with audience judges using a 1-10 scale to determine a winner.  The ebullient MC happily gave me permission to read an excerpt from my short story along with a few other readers who didn’t fit into the slam genre. Everyone was welcome. But it was strange being judged with numbers and competing with others truer to the slam form. 

Despite the kindness of the host, I felt out of place with my sad, though educationally-thematic story. I was an old white guy reading about societal disparity of wealth and race while young women of color with shaven heads slammed about coming from that place. As a storyteller, it’s difficult to ask for a seat at the table when I’ve been told by many, it’s my turn to shut up and listen. History’s a bitch. 

Then, as if a glutton for punishment, on the way to a musical jam session I snagged an empty five gallon plastic water drum from beside a cooler. I had in mind my days of playing such a drum with my first grade students as well as the free-form drumming I participated in over the years at San Francisco’s hippie hill, the cable car turn around and aquatic park. What I found instead at this “jam session” were numerous, highly trained and talented instrumentalists and a leader that looked pointedly at me while addressing everyone and said, “If you are playing a drum for this song you need to stick to a beat that goes bumbum-bum-bum-bum——bumbum-bum-bum-bum.”

The universe seemed to be telling me to shut up even though the theme of the CABE conference was “Testimonios: The Power of Our Stories”. 

I’m accostomed to being a minority in my profession. I’m often the only male in the room and, especially at my last job, sometimes the only ‘Merican white male. A teacher who I consider a friend often used the pejorative “old, white men” with me sitting just a few feet away. At first I was flattered because I thought she might not consider me one but then as the years wore on I started to wonder, am I a fool?  Well, anyone who really knows me knows I am, but still…

I don’t bemoan woke people the way Florida Governor Ron DeSantis does. I appreciate woke. I just don’t want to play a game of musical chairs where everyone is fighting for a seat and some don’t even get to play. That seems backwards. I might be able to get on board if that was his message. As it is, it’s almost humorous to listen to DeSantis belittle “woke” because he is so much asleep. 

Anyway, the impetus to get my words out was withering away with depression and a nagging feeling that this financially sound, supposedly mentally-stable, white guy,  didn’t have anything important to say about my life let alone anyone else’s. I felt particularly impotent in regards to the plight of my relative who is exhibiting signs of a mental health crisis and refusing most help other than the kind that I, at least, am not prepared to offer.

There is a growing movement in many cities to force people into treatment. London Breed, the current mayor of San Francisco (and real-life persona competing for best comic book name along with Elon Musk) seems to be in this court. I’ve wavered over the years. We all cheered when the character “Chief” throws a massive piece of porcelain plumbing through the wall to free himself in the novel-made-movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but seeing a naked person smeared with feces, ranting at the world in downtown San Francisco, makes the Cuckoo’s nest more palatable, albeit without frontal lobotomies. 

Governor Ronald Reagan is widely blamed for opening the doors of the mental institutions in California. I don’t know enough about the story to know whether he was just trying to lower taxes or if he genuinely believed in the patient rights movement, but laws changed to make it more difficult to commit people to institutions. Typically, severely disturbed people or people in crisis are taken in by hospital psych wards and then released after three days. 

Nevertheless, it seems like holding people against their will is really just a red herring in the debate about treating the mentally ill. There is a great deal of space between forced commitment and hands-on mental health care. How much of mental health treatment is really just a housing issue? 

When Gavin Newsom was running for mayor of San Francisco he was advocating for a program he dubbed “Care Not Cash” in which people would be given housing instead of monthly general assistance checks. The thought was to give people housing instead of money to spend on drugs. Many advocates for the unhoused said people weren’t spending the money for drugs but for getting basic necessities like food. They also said that people didn’t show up homeless in San Francisco (which the business community claimed) but were being evicted or priced out of the rental market when they moved. 

Something about our society wants to have these chicken-and-egg arguments that don’t really do anyone any good. In reality, every possible scenario imaginable about homelessness can be found—from the old lady evicted from the studio apartment she’s had for thirty years to partiers who arrive to live off the fatted cow. 

Ultimately “Care Not Cash” was just a good slogan. There wasn’t the will to house all the homeless people nor likely would it be possible in a city that so many people want to live in. What is possible is strong rent control and flipping the narrative of new construction from a small percentage of new units being “affordable” to the majority or all being affordable. 

Personally I like the idea of experimental, culture-shifting solutions like compulsory work service in different sectors like the society imagined in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. How profound would it be to require a doctor to be a trash collector or a vegetable picker for a month out of the year? What kind of shift would happen in our collective conscious? 

Not long after I came to San Francisco I started seeing Shepard Fairey t-shirts with a stylistically, minimalistic picture of Andre the Giant and the word OBEY. Fairey is the artist that went on to design the HOPE poster Obama used in his presidential campaign. The clever OBEY design inspired people to think about what it means to submit AND to resist. 

In the context of people who are homeless due to mental health issues and/or substance abuse it’s seductively simple to think we can solve the problem by just making them submit. A full nelson would do nicely—the wrestling version of a straight jacket. 

But making people submit rarely turns out well. The recent death of Jordan Neely on a NYC subway by the hands of one who would have him submit is a good example. Whether this case was specifically racial is hard to know, but angry white men have wanted angry black men to submit for a long time.

America can continue to wall itself off from its problems. We can go back to sticking people in institutions that have a different name other than “prison” or “jail”. Those with money can get in gated-communities and hide behind those walls coming and going in giant SUVs with their own security details. But there will never be enough mental institutions, prisons and gated-communities to escape the masses of people in poverty and crisis. 

At the same time the laissez faire of anything goes does not work either. Just spend ten minutes at the corner of 6th and Market in downtown San Francisco sometime and you will see what I mean. But San Franciscans, don’t let your experiment in containment-zone-street-debauchery swing you too far the other way! 

We all need to come clean about what creates homelessness. It’s not just drugs and mental health. It’s also the debauchery that takes place in private homes on Nob Hill, at Mar-a-Lago, in Washington, and every upscale, Great Schools, seven-out-of-ten-rated-community in this country. The haves and the have nots is widening. This is not a sea parted by Moses to the promised land. It is an enormous, cultural chasm with people falling to their deaths left and right. 

Part of the wonder and beauty of being human is that we are all different. We all have different perspectives, come from different places and have different experiences to draw on. Maybe if we could see that, if we could see that each of us is a Martha, that each of us is unique and a species in and of ourself we might be able to stop what sometimes feels like a rolling ball of nihilism that may make us all like Marthas—the next extinct species on Earth. 

Pt. Reyes, California

I have a 31 year history with Point Reyes National Seashore. By Christmas time, 1991, I had been living in a San Francisco, Tenderloin hotel room for four months and I was ready to get out of town. I’d met my friend Rhett just a few months earlier. I don’t think we had yet established our routine of Monday night dinners together but we were bonded enough for me to ask him to look after my cat, Lily, who I’d brought with me from Ithaca, New York. 

Rhett was a cat person anyway. Among the many artifacts in his single room occupancy (just a half block from mine) was a framed picture of Noodle, his Blue Point Siamese who had passed away a few years earlier. Her collar tag was push pinned to the wooden frame. 

A series of Golden Gate Transit buses took me from downtown SF to the tiny unincorporated town of Olema which is a half mile walk to the Visitor’s Center for the national park.  I hoped to get a camping permit or find out the general lay of the land. The hour and half car ride was a three or four hour bus trip then. This was before cell phones with maps and before the internet—at least for me. I can’t say how I knew about the Visitor’s Center—likely word of mouth and the White Pages. Surely a government agency wouldn’t advertise in the Yellow Pages? Anyway, there was no way to let my fingers do the walking from the drop off to where I was heading. 

It was getting late, around 3 p.m., when the bus pulled away on the eve of Christmas eve. I had a school backpack with my sleeping bag, water, and some snacks. I carried my tent separately. The visitor center was closed up tight. I went to a trailhead that pointed downhill into the deep, dark woods and thought if I’m going to a place called Sky Camp I probably want to go up. That logic, or the fact that I already didn’t know where I was, had me turn around and go back to the road. I walked about a mile and was stopped by a police officer—or maybe it was a park ranger. Anyway, I remember he had a gun. He wanted to see my ID and took it back to his car.

“Did you know your license has been suspended for an unpaid traffic violation?” he asked returning.

No I didn’t and I had to think for a bit before remembering that I had gotten a ticket in New York City before driving across country. I was in my newly purchased, but short-lived, 1968 VW van sitting in a clearly marked no parking zone waiting for a friend to come out of somewhere. I was shocked that the meter maid gave me a ticket instead of just asking me to move along. Later, I couldn’t fathom a good reason to pay the ticket since I was moving to California. 

Anyway, the Pt. Reyes officer confiscated my license. I was astonished that California cared about a fine I hadn’t paid in New York, but I was beginning to understand that long arm of the law metaphor. I might have learned something from an earlier incident. 

An unpaid ticket for illegal bathing in a gorge outside of Ithaca had resulted in a bench warrant for my arrest a year or two before. In this case, the ranger had warned me and three of my friends that he would track us down if the tickets went unpaid. I was the only one who didn’t comply. Sure enough that same ranger showed up one night at my door and I had to post bail right then and there for him not to take me to jail. A few weeks later I paid the fine in front of a judge and got whatever verbal reprimand he had to give. 

I never did pay the New York City ticket and it was ten or fifteen years before I stopped being nervous that the infraction would catch up with me in the form of hundreds of dollars in interest and penalties. 

The Point Reyes officer let me go after asking me questions about where I was going and what I was doing and if I had any weapons. I showed him a pocket knife. 

It wasn’t the greatest interaction, but at least he set me straight about where I needed to go. I doubled back to the trail head and then saw a board that showed where Sky Camp was along with all the other camps on the trail that would eventually lead me to my final destination for the next day — the Point Reyes Youth Hostel.  I took a paper map that was in a pocket on the board. I’m not sure how I’d missed all of it before.

It was dark when I got to Sky Camp—close to a three mile hike. Fortunately the night was clear and the moon was full. But the camp really was in the sky and there was a fierce, cold wind blowing and the campsites were on hard ground surrounded by smooth boulders. I decided to try the next camp which,  if I had known how to read a map better, wouldn’t have been Glen Camp. It was five miles away, mostly downhill. 

Glen Camp was protected by woods but dark and damp. I reasoned that being attacked by a mountain lion or bear, though unlikely, would more likely be here if it was going to happen. Moonlight hardly made it through the trees. 

I set up tent and slept for a few hours but woke up freezing. I knew I’d be miserable trying to make it through the night, so I broke camp and started hiking again to stay warm. 

Eventually I came to a clearing and there before me was the Pacific Ocean glowing blue in the moonlight. The trail skirted a massive boulder and I climbed onto its side and laid down. The air had warmed. A soft breeze was coming off the ocean. I fell asleep but woke when it started to get cold again and started walking to what I hoped was next—Coast Camp. 

It was more than six miles along the open cliffs above the seashore. The trail followed twenty feet from the edge and then snaked around intermittent ravines. It was dark around the ravines which became tunnels of trees, but I could still make out the glow of the trail. I was concerned that my headlamp batteries would die and tried to use it as little as possible.

Morning light gradually grew and it was full on daylight by the time I hit Coast camp. I was overwhelmed with fatigue having just hiked about 18 miles. I thought about pitching my tent there, but decided to push the two more miles to the Youth Hostel. I figured that would be my reward and I’d be out of the elements. Even though it was clear and warm I was ready to have a roof above me. 

Not having had much experience with hostels I didn’t know they generally close in the morning after chores are done and don’t open until late afternoon. I’d have to wait until 4 p.m. to get in. I spent the next six hours lounging around the outside of a closed education center not far from the hostel. I’d brought a book to read. I don’t remember what. Maybe it was one of Carlos Castaneda’s or Zora Neale Hurston’s or it could have been Lila by Robert Pirsig. I think I’d already finished everything Ann Tyler had written by  the time I moved to California. Anyway, I didn’t want to do much exploring in the area. My swollen feet made that decision. 

At four o’clock, one last problem revealed itself. The desk clerk wanted to see identification to check me in for a bunk. I told her my story and she asked if there was a reference she could call. Rhett was the only person I knew in San Francisco and she dialed the 415 number and I heard his deep, somnambulant voice vouch for me as an upstanding citizen. There was only one other person in the hostel besides the clerk. He was about my age and had a car which was a good thing, because the next day was Christmas and the hostel would be closed.  After a relaxing evening before a fire, surrounded by books and warmth, the next morning he gave me a ride to Stinson Beach where I got another Golden Gate Transit bus and arrived back home to the Balboa Hotel, with its smell of Barbersol and sautéed onions, as the sun was beginning to set on the city.

For the past three decades I’ve returned to Point Reyes many times, alone and with friends, for day trips and overnights. We even managed to get Rhett out to the youth hostel—not an easy task given his perennial car sickness and the winding roads to get there. 

I hope you are having a wonderful Martin Luther King, Jr. day. Not that I’ve illustrated it in this blog post, but breaking the law is sometimes a good thing. 

Even though I’m an atheist, deities somehow still make it into my subconscious. I was feeling slightly self-satisfied as if the gods of weather had chosen my winter-break flight plans (scheduled for last night) over the poor fools who had chosen to travel around Christmas. Their flights were canceled left and right. Almost all of Southwest Airlines shut down. Yet warmer weather and rain were predicted for Chicago when I would be laying over on my way to Tyson McGee Airport in Knoxville, TN. 

Then the pestilence gods weighed in and took Pelé and several other notables, and for me, they tapped my shoulder with a case of COVID. (Okay, who am I kidding. The gods didn’t tap my shoulder. They just threw out a trail of coronavirus dust. Who am I to be tapped?)

I briefly considered traveling with COVID, but quickly decided that would be morally reprehensible. Also, I’d be miserable. My head was feeling like it had been trash-compacted with cotton. All fluids bypassed my brain without even a smidgen of capillary action. Oh for a sloppy sneeze!

I canceled my flight and the nine days I planned on spending in eastern Tennessee. There was about a 30 minute period of reverie when I suddenly saw those nine days open up before me without obligation or plan. That quickly turned to boredom as I was quarantined to my room and did not feel like reading or writing or throwing away old texts and emails or doing anything that might make me feel like life has a purpose. 

So I tried to watch Sleepless in Seattle. I liked When Harry Met Sally so I figured I couldn’t go wrong. Right? …Wrong.

Why is it that some movies just don’t hold up? It moved at a snail’s pace and I kept hitting the 10 seconds forward button and then resorted to sliding the bar at the bottom of the screen. When was I gonna get hooked? I’m a lover of romcom, but this was lite on both. I gave up.

I switched genres and latched onto The Outfit. I always love watching a person that seems to have their shit together no matter what and this tailor, or I should say cutter, could thread a needle while gangsters tromped by him in his back workroom. Maybe it’s my theater background, but I also love movies that are heavy on dialogue and take place in one or two rooms, for example: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Glengarry Glen Ross, and, of course, My Dinner with Andre. 

After that, it still wasn’t bedtime. It’s getting dark at about five o’clock.  I still had a few hours of wakefulness. About a month ago I started listening to a sleep podcast called Sleep with Me but that’s mostly for when I wake up at three in the morning. Scooter, the host, calls himself your borepal and he is very good at guiding you through the deep, dark night with his squeaky dulcitones and meaningless meanderings–his words. Sometimes I put him on before I go to bed but I don’t generally have difficulty falling asleep then. And even Sleep with Me, boring as it is, would not have put me out with my cotton head at this early hour. 

So I went back to try another dose of romantic comedy—something more updated. I latched onto About Fate. It may not be memorable, but it charmed me and it was a nice palette-cleanser after the darker movie. Still it was The Outfit that made it into my dreams.  I was in a dimly lit room with stacks of different size black, white and grey paper on an old, polished oak table. The stacks were not neat rectangles but with triangular points of the paper laid at odd angles atop each other. I evaluated paper size by turning the stacks without actually lifting any of the sheets. There was some sort of puzzle I was trying to figure out. It was all about slow and careful consideration like the main character of the movie.

Now, here we are. It’s noontime Saturday and it has been steadily raining for 15 hours or more. Rain is hopeful like the new year. 

Another day in bed. More movies to watch? I’m not reading much although I did read my book group’s The Rosie Project which is going to be made into a movie that I’m sure will fit in the romantic comedy category. It’s a fun read. 

I may try to rebook a shorter trip to Tennessee if I test negative soon enough in this vacation. My head has started to leak, releasing much of the built up pressure. At one point last night I felt something like a wet, pointed feather trying to wiggle down into my lungs. It made me cough for about ten minutes and I wondered if that is how the deadly virus works its way into people’s lungs—a thin, hollow dart covered with hairs that subsequently open and expand to release the whole team. 

I covered the cold spot on my chest with my hands and stopped listening to a podcast We Were Three about a woman who lost her father and brother — both anti-vaxxers — to the disease.  I’m vaxxed and boosted. I’m safe. At least, that’s what I told myself. But I didn’t want to relate too much to the deceased whose symptoms were being described through phone texts discovered after their deaths. I may be an atheist, but the power of negative and positive thought, short of being magical, is well-established. 

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Here is the big news I’ve been waiting to tell you — THE BACK PATIO PROJECT IS DONE!!!

This last photo shows the patio after the first rain. I picked a three-day window to paint the concrete which included temperatures above 50 degrees and no rain. But the directions also said, don’t wash the paint for two weeks while it is curing. I’m pretty sure rain counts as washing. There are some bubbling spots now and places where Sasha’s little claws have scratched through the soaked paint. I’m not sure why I chose not to follow the manufacturer’s directions since I knew there would be rain. Did I think the gods would give me special treatment? It was likely that and a dose of impatience.

It only took a few hours to roll out the red so it won’t be much sweat to scrape up the bubbled spots and put on another coat this spring. Experience is a blessing. Maybe that’s the lesson for the new year.

Best wishes for your coming projects and dreams. Welcome 2023.

This mushroom photo is just a bit of a hook to get you interested in reading. It is also one of the reasons I had such a difficult time getting out a post this summer while in Tennessee. I took a lot of photos on my land, but I was overwhelmed about how to present them. The options available to me as a non-techie, non-designer person were pretty limited without upping my game or paying big bucks to someone to do it for me.

Jillian told me about this free graphic design program called GIMP, so I worked hard to learn how to make photo grids. The mushroom one was really difficult and if you look closely you will see that the lines aren’t even. I think it’s pretty good for my first grid and if I ever do one again I’ll have to reteach myself since it’s been over two months, but hopefully the pathways will be slightly less obscure.

I’m at the ending stages of my back patio renovation. I’m currently painting. I may have mentioned in an earlier post that my mom had an indoor apartment painting business for a while. One of the tricks she taught me was that you don’t always need to clean your brush at the end of the day. You can just wrap it in a plastic bag and stick it in the refrigerator. Well, I’ve taken this practice to a whole new level. I’ve been using the same paint brush for over a month now. (Before I entered this serious painting phase I was priming new plywood and lumber as well as painting Presto Patch and other fillers I used to repair rotted wood.) I use Purdy paint brushes which are perhaps the best in the business. And no I’m not fishing for sponsors (but if you work for Purdy or Presto Patch do get in touch). 

The paint brushes (I’ve got a small and large) fit nicely in a Dave’s Bread bag. I put the bag of brushes behind my half gallon of milk which I’ve started putting on the door of the fridge because it’s so annoying to try to dig it out from behind bottles of juice and pickles that make their way in front. (I use the milk every day for tea and often cereal, but sometimes go a whole week without juice or a pickle.) Which reminds me—I was recently talking casually to a nurse practitioner friend about my milk intake and she asked what kind I drink and I told her “regular”, not having “whole” immediately available in my word bucket. She dropped her chin, looked at me sideways and said a little incredulously “You mean red top”?

I’d never really thought of that—how whole milk has that color coding—but yeah, even my cardboard boxed Organic Clover Milk uses red in its type to denote whole milk. Two percent is blue. Skim (which I don’t consider milk at all but just cloudy water) is usually pink or lavender.  Milk is interesting. There is also coding on every milk container that can tell you all kinds of stuff about where it originates from. 

One more side step before I get to some of the pictures I took this summer. 

When I paint–and I’ve actually done quite a bit of it in my life–I don’t tend to listen to the radio or anything. Having sound isn’t my go-to. Quiet is my go-to. Jillian and I are pretty compatible as housemates this way.

At some point during a big painting job though I usually get tired of the quiet and when that happens, more often than not, I turn on NPR and listen to talk radio/news. But the other day I’d had enough of that and turned on KCSM, “the bay area jazz station“. That bought a little more time with Jillian who was also working outside and who would have gone in if I’d turned on news. She said as much and, anyway, I was tired of listening to all that pompous, feel-good-cheery-corporate-sponsored-stuff with the sudden lower-register-voice-drop meant to signal an appropriate change for reporting tragedies. I could have turned the dial to KPFA where I can count on cynicism, but I was just tired of talk. Talk, talk, talk. Elephant talk.

Anyway, KCSM was quite enjoyable and I realized how long it had been since I listened to this station when I heard the DJ introduce himself and didn’t recognize his name. 

After about an hour the light started to fade. I was working after work. Soon it was almost completely dark and I turned on a clip-on work-light. A new radio segment started and the DJ was playing Brazilian jazz. A song came on and towards the end, I started to recognize it, but it was being sung in Portuguese and I couldn’t figure out where I’d heard the tune. I probably would have given up trying, but as soon as it ended another version of the song started up, also in Portuguese. It was nice music. Very pleasant, but by the end of the second one I was bothered. What the hell was this tune?

Oh well, it was time to quit. I dropped my paintbrush in the Dave’s bag, turned off the radio, went inside and showered. 

I warmed up some beans and rice from the fridge and went to my nesting place in bed with my computer. I was still thinking about that song and the name Bruno Mars wormed its way into my brain and I googled Bruno Mars songs on my computer. BAM! The wonders of the internet. “Locked Out of Heaven”.

It was that eight beat refrain that I kept hearing that was making me say I know it! But here’s the kicker. I didn’t.

The refrain is, “Your sex takes me to paradise, your sex takes me to paradise.” I laughed to myself. I had thought it was “You sex-text me to paradise, you sex-text me to paradise.” I’ve never really done sex texting and I always thought, hearing this song, that going to paradise over sex-texting might be an overstatement, but hey, I could see it happening. What I thought was really funny was that it took listening to a song in Portuguese for me to find out what the lyrics were in English. 

Okay, right angle change back to my summer trip and some of the photos.

Spicebush Butterfly were everywhere in the forest. I often saw them at different adult ages. As sippers, not munchers, they only live a few weeks and toward the end the black color has turned dusky grey and they often have holes or chunks missing from their wings.

There was a very popular milkweed plant on the side of Poor Valley road bordering the land and I often saw these first three species there. I only saw one example of the Zebra Swallowtail. In the close-up it is sitting on the shoulder of Stewart’s daughter, Jennifer. I went on a morning canoe trip for a mile or so down the Holston River with her family and friends. We stopped for a lunch break on a sandbar and this butterfly was very attracted to Jennifer. It stayed there on her shoulder for ten minutes or so. I learned from Stewart that I likely saw this species there because Pawpaw trees grow in the fertile soil next to the river and they are host to the butterfly’s caterpillar. Pawpaw trees produce the largest native fruit in the United States. To quote this website, “When ripe, the flesh is soft and custard-like, with a flavor that has been described as a blend of banana, mango, and pineapple.” They become ripe in the fall which may be why I’ve yet to find the fruit or (knowingly) even seen a tree. I’m imagining the fruit is something like the Cherimoya which I have had, but I won’t know until I try it.

Next time on SpottyWestGoesEast…the continued pondering of cabin building and, perhaps, what’s up with this blog that claims, ostensibly, to be about race?

It’s well for me to remember that all this land I enjoy walking and exploring was formerly the domain of Cherokee and the land I now live on, that of the Ohlone.

Also, if you go right now to your Google web browser and type in “bay area radio stations”, KPFA will NOT show up on that list.

Does anyone still want to sponsor me? Dave’s Bread? Clover?

I called emergency services when I was staying in Corryton, TN this summer. 

It was three in the morning and I woke suddenly with a strong smell filling my nostrils. At first I thought it was interesting, but quickly became worried as the smell intensified. What was it? I lay there on the left side of my Aunt Linda’s king-size bed, which for all impractical purposes was cot-width because I’d chained myself to the length of my computer’s short power cord.

I let my mind drift above her 12 unit, 55-and-older condo community to imagine what lays beyond the acres of cow pasture and wide-spaced farm houses. I was pretty sure there were no chemical plants nearby. But how far away were the people in Bhopal, India when chemicals from a nearby plant escaped in the middle of the night and killed thousands?

The smell seemed to be getting exponentially stronger. I rose, turned on lights and set about sniffing. I sniffed in the living room. I sniffed in the kitchen. I sniffed in the front bedroom and bathroom. I opened the back door, went outside and sniffed around the small back patio and over next to the air conditioner unit. After so much sniffing, the smell had so inundated my olfactory that I could no longer smell anything. I knew the smell was there, but it was as if I’d taken a physical blow to the nose. 

Should I call the police, the fire department, wake the neighbors? I was only sure of one thing— I had to get out of there. Maybe it was fertilizer I postulated. But why now? Surely no one was spreading it in the middle of the night. 

I dressed and went out to the car my aunt Linda loaned me. I drove up the hill to the corner of the country road above the little valley where the condos sit. At the stop sign I pushed the button to lower the window.  Was the smell less here? I couldn’t say. I needed more distance. 

At the next corner I paused again. Left or right? To the left, a half mile away, is the hub of Corryton—a library, a post office, a fire station, a tire store and where Aunt Linda and Stewart live. To the right…well I’ve been that way but I couldn’t remember anything but country. Left it was. I drove slowly with my window down. The roads were barren. Night insects sang in my ears. The parking lot of the fire station was brightly lit. I pulled in making a wide arc to park facing the road. There were lights on inside but if anyone was in there they were asleep somewhere in a back room and I wasn’t going to knock on the door. I googled the fire station on my new phone.

Rural/Metro Station 33 was what it was called and it said open 24 hours! Before I pushed the call button I sat there trying to think how I would describe the smell. I knew the person on the other end would ask. Chemical didn’t seem quite right. Aren’t all smells chemical? It’s a poor word for someone who doesn’t like describing, but likes having described. 

The smell was still there in my nostrils although I had the suspicion that it might not be in the air surrounding me. I closed my eyes and focused on the sample of droplets that lined my cranium like condensation in a dark cave. Then it hit me—it was like fresh mown grass times one-hundred. The times one-hundred part was important to get across. This wasn’t just passing a newly mown field, it was like having the super saturated smell of one-hundred acres of newly mown hay compressed into a Binaca blast spray container and then having that injected into each nostril.

When the emergency dispatcher answered my call I suddenly became aware that it might sound like I was pulling a prank.

“I know it sounds crazy but that’s the only way I can describe it,” I said after emphasizing the one-hundred times. 

“Well, would you like me to send someone out?” the woman asked.

“I hate to wake anyone up about this,” I said. 

“We don’t really go on that. I just need to know,” she said. 

“Well, I guess so. I’m really concerned that it might be some sort of chemical leak.” 

After I ended the call, the phone soon rang again and I had to explain the situation all over. This new dispatcher told me that they were having to send people from Union County because there wasn’t anyone available nearby. 

I drove back to the top of the road above the little valley where the condo units sit and parked at the stop sign, facing the road, to catch whoever came before we went down. Fields surrounded me. Porch lights of a farmhouse nearby kept going on and off like there was a short in the wire or perhaps there was an animal activating an automatic sensor. After about 15 minutes, I laid my chair back and closed my eyes. Before drifting off I had the opportunity to reflect on what kind of fool am I? 

In about 40 minutes I heard the sounds of a big fire truck accelerating out of the curves up the road. A fireman in a black Suburban preceded the fire engine. We spoke between open windows. 

“It’s the third unit down there on the right. I’ll follow y’all down,” I said.

The fire truck following the suburban turned in front of me, engine whirring with all the strain of a machine hauling hundreds of gallons of water, ladders and equipment.  I followed and parked behind the fire engine with its rolling red lights and heavy idling engine. I imagined neighbors peaking from behind curtains.

I won’t belabor this story any longer except to say the two men who showed up were very nice. They identified the smell as a skunk that they theorized had sprayed next to the central air unit. How embarrassing! I’ve smelled skunks a thousand times in my life. I can only guess that this one being so close impacted my olfactory in a way that took it out of commission. 

R.C., the neighbor across the little condo loop, made me feel better the next day telling me that a skunk a few weeks back smelled just like burning wood. He also said he hadn’t heard the fire engine, nor had the neighbor who shares a common wall. I saw her at Hammer’s Five and Dime in the town of Hall a week later. Her coworker came around the corner to join in listening to the tale of a fool who called the fire department about a skunk.  ————————–

If I’d known two months ago that I would still be in patio-renovation-mode I wouldn’t have made an optometrist appointment in San Francisco for nine Saturday morning on this labor day weekend. I had to get up at my regular work-rising-time (about 6:15) to catch BART and make it there on time. Ah well. Might as well continue the grind. I got there at 8:45. 

Haight Street Eyecare hasn’t been on Haight Street for about 20 years now. But that’s where they were when I first went to get a screw replaced on my glasses in 1991. I’d first discovered my eye doctor sitting on Haight Street trying to sell a breaker bar that was one of the few tools left after the rest were all stolen from my VW van which I had driven to SF on the path to hippie enlightenment. The breaker bar sat between me and my companion Shigeru with a sign that said $10. Shigeru was a Japanese tourist who had helped me rebuild the engine on the ’69 pop top camper I’d bought from Tiny, a farmer in Ithaca, NY who liked to put beat juice on his cheeks to give him a rosy appearance.

Doctor Chan was maybe a few years older than me then (strangely enough he still is) and I remember thinking how he’d already made something of himself while I was busy being a bohemian. That thought just shows how I’ve never really gotten over my indoctrination in—to use an old hippie phrase—the establishment.

Some beautiful young woman roughly my age, who I would never dare to ask on a date, put a new screw in my glasses for free. That bought my loyalty for these last thirty years. I’ve spent many thousands of dollars with them since then. 

Dr. Chan is very thorough and I appreciate his looking at my eyeballs with all their blown out veins on his big computer screen. I’ve seen pictures of his children appear in his office and watched them grow through these greatly spaced stills. The oldest is now in college. It’s like watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade every year.

I had time Saturday morning to go find a cup of Joe. I’d forgotten how deliciously empty San Francisco feels on an early weekend morning. The office at the bottom of Fillmore near the Kabuki movie theater didn’t open until 9 so I went uphill until I found a cafe. They were playing some Violent Femmes and somehow it worked well with the floral wallpaper in their bathroom. It took me back to my youth so I was happy to add a dollar tip on the $3.50 cup of coffee. I sat and sipped it for ten minutes and then carefully coasted back downhill with my to-go cup. I spent $350 on a new pair of prescription sunglasses (that’s after insurance) and another $160 bucks on some contacts. Nothing like purchasing prescription sunglasses to make one feel vain and self-indulgent. 

How much are the contacts I asked the young woman helping me. “$75 for a box of ninety days.”

“Oh, good,” I said elated at the reasonableness. “I’ll take a box.” 

“Okay, that’s for one eye. Do you want a box for the other eye?”

—————

My beard got caught in my windbreaker as I was zipping it up a few mornings ago while riding my bike with no hands. I often do that sort of thing when I’m starting out. Sort of the same thing I do when driving. I almost never put my seat belt on until I’ve started moving in a forward direction. Then I take my hands off the wheel and buckle up. Sort of stupid. I’m much more likely to get into an accident at the worst possible moment, but it has something to do with my desire to save time and the influence of reading the book Cheaper by the Dozen when I was a teenager and the father always doing two things at once for the sake of efficiency like shaving and reading the paper—basically to save time, as if any of it can be saved. Which it can’t. It just flows out through the hour glass and when it’s gone it’s gone and it doesn’t matter if you were safely zipping up your jacket before you got on your bike or zipping it up while riding. It’s all a crapshoot. Over the years I may have saved a full hour zipping up my jacket this way, but I might be killed by a catastrophic head injury and loose all that time and an additional fifteen or twenty years. 

I’m currently on a mission to not have a mission, which means I will likely be zipping up my jacket and putting my seatbelt on before I start moving. I’d like to watch the water flow by rather than be in the stream, if that makes any sense. I’m tired of fighting the current. 

I saw a video a few years ago of a man floating quickly by some tourists who happened to be filming the millions of gallons of water going over Niagara Falls. I believe this footage was verified as the last seconds of a known suicide. The guy wasn’t fighting the pull of the water at all. It would have been futile anyway. He wouldn’t have even been able to stay in one place even if he was Mark Spitz. He had a sad, reflective look on his face. With 20 or 30 seconds before he hit the falls he had time for a full newsreel of his life.  Anyway, this is sort of a non sequitur but it came up when I thought about not fighting the current. To be clear, in this case, I would rather be on shore not fighting it than in the water. 

I have another non sequitur and really, I assure you, I’m not working on a stand-up routine. Why does the rather elegant woman’s prerecorded BART voice say “Arriving out” and “Now boarding out.” It doesn’t even make sense. How can you board out? Don’t you board in? And, why is there a long pause before the stop is named like the computer has to do the calculation at that moment to decide where the train is. “Now boarding out…………Concord”.

———-

The following pictures will explain why I haven’t yet written about my trip to Tennessee this summer or about the cabin I’m still pondering building in the woods. The pictures show the process I’m calling my “back patio renovation”.

The project started before I went to Tennessee in July and picked back up when I returned over a month ago. I’ve basically been going at it non-stop—full days on the weekends. On weekdays, after work, I take a nap, work on the patio for a few hours, eat and watch a little tv, then fall asleep. I’m very lucky to have friends who are helping me on a work trade basis, especially since they are master carpenters and I’ve been perfecting cutting a straight line these past few years. 

Left to do: apply tar paper and rolled asphalt roofing, install new electrical for lights and plugs, tie the patio roof into the main house by going through to the attic and linking the structure with the joists there. Oh, and I want to paint the whole underside structure to make it look spiffy.

Each step of this project has come with dozens of small tasks to prepare for the next part. What I think will take a day takes a week. I’ve shifted from being bothered by all these details to embracing them for what will mean having a job done well-done that will last and be safe.

Below, Jillian’s new puppy, Sasha Moon Piperaceae, aka Shasha Moonbeam Pepper, has also been taking up some of my time though contractually I’m obliged to do nothing but enjoy the fruits of her sweetness. Yes, we have it in writing, but who can resist this face!

p.s.–Jillian told me I used the word sistered in here a bunch of times and that people might not know what it means. I guess it shows my excitement. It’s a new word for me too. To sister a rafter, a beam, or joist (joists refer to floors, rafters to roofs) means to add another one next to it running parallel. It strengthens the board. A 2×4 becomes a 4×4, a 2×6 a 4×6, etc. Incidentally, those measurements aren’t accurate in lumber. 2x4s once were two inches by four inches but now they are 1.5 x 3.5.

Twelve years ago on this date, my mother died one day before her 70th birthday. She’d be 82 if she were alive today. In a sort of surreal moment, a  group of friends called and sang happy birthday to her on the phone as she was dying. 

Mom was such an interesting person. She defied the roles set for women of her time, was a hard drinker (and hard curser when she drank—which was every night) but a loving mother and good cook (she said she couldn’t boil water when she married my dad).

She had many jobs over the years and threw herself into them with a passion. She was a university secretary, but could not suffer fools, so if she worked for a department (school of social work at Florida A & M, physics and then social work again at the University of Southern Mississippi) then the dean was likely an outstanding person. 

She was a direct and unflappable salesperson. Over the years she sold World Book Encyclopedias and Shaklee Vitamins door to door, following leads and making cold calls. She sold life insurance in an office full of men  where she did suffer fools for a short time and was given the most rural, poorest territories. I went with her to collect premiums one time and call on new, potential customers. I was a new teenager, bored sitting in the car waiting for her at each stop. The heat and humidity of a Mississippi summer day were the only thing repressing my near irrepressible hormones. I was revived each time she came back and started the car with its air conditioner and radio playing Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” it seemed every five minutes. 

“Later in life, she was an OPC in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. (“OPCs are the individuals who fill timeshare presentations with potential buyers by pitching them on the beauty of timeshare ownership and, often, offering a thank you gift for attendance”—thank you internet). 

I sat with her once on the street in Gatlinburg as she pitched to tourists wondering by. Between eyeing potential customers (she only pitched to couples and had to assess whether they had “two pennies to rub together”) she sat on a stool in a little shed reading a paperback. This was her pitch:

“Hey, come here.” 

First off, she established whether the couple made the minimum annual income for her to proceed. It was sort of catch and release fishing. The ones who didn’t make enough were let go quickly. I don’t know how she managed to do this without offending people. The ones who did make enough and were hooked were scheduled for a sales presentation and promised dinner at a local restaurant or $100 cash or some other enticing gift. 

She travelled with this same time share company to Park City, Utah one winter and pitched to what she called “the heal and toe clickers”—people passing by in ski boots. I visited her there and watched her in action at a ski resort, sitting outside in a protected area between the lodge and ski lifts. 

In the mid-70s she started an indoor house painting business. She made business cards and called it the Paint Doctors because she started it with my dad who was a PhD university professor and often did summer work not related to his teaching. We lived in a large apartment complex at the time and she ended up getting the gig of repainting every unit that was vacated. She was all about speed. I went with her once and she showed me how to cut in, then set me to doing it while she rolled out the walls. 

Being her own person was what was most important to mom. If Reva Jo couldn’t do that then no job was worth it. 

She had large, car-driven, newspaper routes in Denton, Texas (the Denton Record Chronicle) and in Hattiesburg, MS (the Hattiesburg American). She often rolled papers while driving at the same time, could throw papers with either hand through the passenger window or over the windshield.

While I was starting high school mom began volunteering with a group called WRANPS (pronounced ramps)…the Wildlife Rehabilitation and Nature Preservation Society. I’m not sure how my sister felt. Maybe she was already out of the house, but I know my dad and I sometimes resented the amount of time she spent with WRANPS. I think my dad didn’t like that she wasn’t earning an income. I probably didn’t like that there weren’t as many home cooked meals. Anyway, during this time mom became an expert at rehabilitating raptors and was one of the few people certified in Mississippi to handle golden eagles. 

Reva Jo bred and raised mice in a cottage behind our house and I went with her a few times to watch her pitch live, frozen or euthanized (slung on a hard surface by their tail) mice to hawks and owls being rehabilitated in the WRANPS aviaries. Live mice were thrown to the birds that were almost ready to release. They’d catch it in a talon and then rip it apart with their beak. For the very sick ones I think she’d have to stick a mouse down its throat  or maybe she’d chop it up. I’m not sure. I didn’t witness that, but I know she had to become the mama bird for some of the ones in bad shape. 

Some of the birds didn’t make it, but some did and she got better and better at the job as time went on. 

I’m not sure why I never went to a release. It’s likely that I was just a teenager not that interested in hanging out with mom. But it’s possible she never invited me. Maybe she wanted to keep that part for herself. It’s possible that letting a bird go symbolized something so personal for her that she didn’t want to risk sharing it with a kid who might break the moment and ask what’s for dinner. 

I guess each of us is, or has been, a burden to someone in our life-if we are lucky. Hopefully there is enough joy to balance it all out. 

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It’s been more than two months since my last blog post. I’m sending this off Sunday morning before getting back to a back patio renovation project. I’ve been trying to get a post together for the last month, but one of the things holding me back is pictures. I’ve got too many of them from a three week trip I took to Tennessee and I want to format them nicely. I need to get over that. Perfection is the enemy of progress. Also, I’ve been a little depressed. Also, I worked summer school. I don’t want to say never again…but there is a high likelihood. Lots of “also”s these days but the fact is I just haven’t made time to stick my butt in a chair and put it all together. Thanks mom for giving me a little kick today.