AUSTIN — It has been 55 weeks since my last visit to River City. We received our second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine more than a month ago and thus feel safe to travel. I still took the usual precautions, wearing a mask in public, generous dollops of hand sanitizer, doing my best to keep my distance. That was impossible at Buc-ee’s in Temple on Sunday afternoon, where I stopped to refuel and relieve. That place looked like Miami Beach on Spring Break, except everybody was fully clothed (thank goodness) and mostly masked. I figured out later it was the last day of Spring Break, and folks were...
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Make the world go away
Get it off my shoulders
Say the things you used to say
And make the world go away
— Made famous by Eddy Arnold, written by Hank Cochran
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Eddy Arnold was known as the Tennessee Plowboy, back when the music industry loved to hang nicknames on singers. Arnold, born in 1918, grew up on a farm that his dad sharecropped until he died when Eddy was just 11. He had to drop out of school to help on the family farm. His dad had been a fiddle player, and his mom played guitar, so he naturally took to music and began playing at school functions and other events. Legend...
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I hugged my two oldest daughters this week for the first time in more than a year. It felt wonderful.
While we have seen each other a few times during this pandemic, it was always at a safe social distance, masked and outside. Since I received my second vaccine dose more than two weeks ago, it was time for a pair of hugs from Kasey, 41, and Meredith 39. Both daughters and their husbands received their first dose of the Pfizer vaccine in recent days.
First came a day trip to Houston, on a pleasant March Sunday with a cloudless sky and temperatures hovering around 70. It was a perfect afternoon...
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A dozen of us geezers gathered together on Zoom last Sunday. This group of friends and brothers who have known each other, in some cases, for more than six decades. The occasion was the 68th birthday of one member of the group, who set up the call. Man, that guy is getting old!
Just kidding. I’m not far behind him in years, though I’m not rushing it.
As one would expect, there was a lot of reminiscing during the 90 minutes we spent together. Some of us see each other fairly regularly, though obviously not during the pandemic. But a handful of the dozen on the Zoom call haven’t seen...
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