PRAGUE, CZECHIA — I embarked on a four-day solo trip to the historic capital of the Czech Republic, traveling by train from Garching, the closest station to the Bavarian village of Unterneukirchen, where daughter Mere and son-in-law Matt have lived for three years. The trip took about six hours. Luckily, I only had to change trains once. With more transfers, I could have mistakenly ended up in Budapest. I have always wanted to visit that city, but my hotel reservation was in Prague.
I figure traveling by myself in a foreign country, with its different language, protocols, and customs, is good...
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München, Germany — The polka band inside the Augustiner Festhalle at Munich’s Oktoberfest is playing Sweet Caroline. Daughter Mere, son-in-law Matt and I are seated outside at a picnic table, finishing up an early lunch of roasted chicken, potato salad with cucumber, thinly sliced and savory radishes and a half-liter mug of Augustiner Bräu — a widely acclaimed lager from a brewery that began operating in 1328. Some beer aficionados aver that Augustiner Bräu is the best in the world. I don’t know about that, but it is the best I have ever tasted. That is one reason I am back for the second...
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I miss the sound of a newspaper press.
When I first heard a press slowly cranking up, in late 1968 or early 1969, it sounded like a lumbering beast coming awake, yawning and creaking, then slowly gaining speed until it became a roar not unlike that of a 747 aircraft. The press was in the old newsroom of the Longview News-Journal. I was a 13-year-old paperboy delivering the afternoon edition throughout downtown Longview.
The press was almost certainly a Goss Headliner, a rotary letterpress from which the pungent smell of ink wafted. Next door to the pressroom, a small contingent of cigar-chomping...
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I bought a new recliner last week. It’s the first one I’ve owned in more than 25 years. My Beautiful Mystery Companion finds this purchase hilarious, mainly because I’ve railed against owning a recliner for as long as she’s known me — more than 18 years. I won’t delve into the domestic details that sparked my decades-long antipathy toward recliners. Buy me a beer sometime, and I’ll tell you in person. (I’m easy that way.)
The recliner is finished in cream-colored corduroy fabric, soft and comfy, with a nifty switch that lifts the footrest. No wooden handles to yank to go airborne....
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Snake Farm - It just sounds nasty
Snake Farm - Well, it pretty much is
Snake Farm – It’s a reptile house
Snake Farm ... Uuuggghhhhh
— Ray Wylie Hubbard
Earlier this summer, while my Beautiful Mystery Companion was out of town, I went to collect eggs from our hens. I peered into their nest boxes and saw nothing, which was unusual. The girls are reliable layers. I didn’t think much of it, but I noticed that a trash can lid on the coop’s floor was a bit askew. We keep diatomaceous earth powder in the lid to reduce insects. The lid was perched on a brick paver to keep the shavings out....
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PIER 39, FISHERMAN’S WHARF, SAN FRANCISCO — A sea lion, which I have arbitrarily named Matilda, waits patiently off the port side of the fishing boat that has returned after taking out tourists for a day casting for California halibut. About a half dozen fat, flat white halibut are laid out on the cutting table, now docked at famed Pier 39 at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. A fellow wearing mirrored shades and a ballcap, hands covered with disposable gloves, addresses a fish, quickly sawing a generous filet off its side
Matilda never takes her eyes off the fellow with the knife. (Disclosure:...
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ALCATRAZ ISLAND, SAN FRANCISCO — That is a dateline I have long yearned to write, to satisfy my lifelong fascination with this desolate island in the San Francisco Bay, a little more than a mile offshore. As a kid, I devoured books and movies about Alcatraz, a rocky island developed in the mid-19th century as a fort, then a military prison, and finally a federal prison for the worst of the worst — Al Capone, aka Scarface; Bumpy Johnson (played brilliantly by Longview native Forest Whitaker in the recent series Godfather of Harlem); George “Machine Gun” Kelly; and Alvin “Creepy” Karpis,...
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This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters.
This land was made for you and me.
— “This Land is Your Land,” by Woody Guthrie
MUIR WOODS, MARIN COUNTY, CALIFORNIA — Woody Guthrie’s fabled song should be our National Anthem. Enough already with bombs bursting in air and the rockets’ red glare. Woody’s song stubbornly remained an earworm as my Beautiful Mystery Companion and I walked the nearly silent redwood forest of this 558-acre enclave, about a dozen miles north...
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I was on the tractor by sunrise earlier this week, preparing to bushhog the side pasture for the third time this year, maybe the fourth. I have lost track. Our three large critters — Pancho the Donkey and Willie and Waylon, a pair of Longhorn steers — would rather munch on shorter grass. The trio dutifully followed the mower, eager to graze. It has taken months, but Pancho is finally willing — actually prefers — to hang out with Willie and Waylon. We had to keep them separated for a long while because our aged donkey loved to chase them around the pond, running laps as it were.
We are deep...
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We have returned to doggie school. The new student is Daisy, our latest rescue pup. She is a Great Pyrenees/Golden Retriever mix who just turned six months old. Daisy is tall and lanky and currently weighs 35 pounds. She is a puppy-clumsy sweetheart of a dog who towers over the other four-legged occupants. Her favorite playmate is granddog Winston, a low-riding Havanese who can walk underneath Daisy without ducking his head.
Daisy is the first big dog I have had since working as a dogcatcher in Nacogdoches a half-century ago. In the six months I worked there, patrolling the streets of the Oldest...
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