Archive: March, 2018 - Gary Borders

Fifty Years Ago, the World Turned Topsy-Turvy

Fifty years ago, on March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson preempted regular programming on the three network channels to make a startling announcement. Our family gathered around our snowy black-and-white television in Allenstown, N.H., to watch. Nineteen days earlier, Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy had stunned pundits by taking nearly 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary against the incumbent president. Johnson “won” the Democratic primary — the first in the nation then and now — with 49.6 percent of the vote. But McCarthy’s unexpectedly strong showing was national...

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Exploring The ‘Grand Canyon of Texas’

PALO DURO CANYON -- The road to the “Grand Canyon of Texas” from nearby Canyon in the Texas Panhandle is straight as a yardstick while the terrain is so flat that the sky stretches for 180 degrees. It is windy on this late winter day as my Beautiful Mystery Companion and I make our way to the Palo Duro Canyon State Park. It is nearly always windy in the Panhandle, especially this time of year. We pay our $10 entrance fee, tape the receipt to the windshield and enter to discover, a few hundred feet down the road, a vastly different terrain. We stop at the Interpretive Center, get out, and walk...

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Searching For Boxes of My Book

AUSTIN — I spent the first day of Spring Break driving around a compound of at least a dozen massive warehouses, looking for my books, in an industrial park in North Austin. The sales manager left me a voicemail when I missed her call: “Just look for the Customer Pickup” sign. I could not find that sign anywhere. Finally I found a glass entrance door with the name of the company stenciled upon it. I parked and went to the door. It was locked. What the heck? Did they take off for Spring Break? I called the main number, and after three tries (Welcome to America) a human answered. She was clearly...

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On Phone Books & Other Obsolete Items

As we shivered our way into 2018, reveling in actual winter weather that is giving away to spring, I started thinking about all the items and services rendered obsolete in the past few years, at least for me. For example: Phone books. Print versions of phone books are rapidly becoming obsolete. For years, I have chunked the ones plopped in our driveway straight into the recycling can. If I need to find an address or phone number for a business or any other public entity — a courthouse office, for example — I go to Google. As fewer folks have land lines in their homes, the phone book has become...

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A Treacherous Trip to The Panhandle

We left Longview last week in a driving rainstorm, headed on a 500-mile trek to Canyon, home to West Texas A&M University. My Beautiful Mystery Companion was making a presentation at a literacy conference, and I was the designated driver. Not that she was imbibing, just that she designated me as her driver for this voyage. Canyon is 20 miles south of Amarillo. I checked the weather app incessantly before leaving. Rain in Dallas, clear skies in Canyon. It looked like we would drive out of the rain, and we did — right into the aftermath of an ice storm, starting a few miles west of Denton....

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