I have spent dozens of hours on the road the past few months, peddling books, taking a road-trip vacation, and visiting friends. A few days ago, my Beautiful Mystery Companion and I took our daughter Abbie to DFW airport. After that, in a rare moment of weakness, I offered to take my BMC to her two favorite shopping stores — Home Goods and TJ Maxx. My BMC is not a huge shopper but loves occasionally whiling away a few hours looking for bargains —possible Christmas or birthday presents for others. Usually, I bring a book and find a chair in the mall, but these were free-standing stores — and it was 98 degrees...
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SEASIDE, FLORIDA — The flag in front of the tiny post office in this tourist community is at half-staff. Two days earlier, a student at Santa Fe High School, between Houston and Galveston, killed eight students and two staff members. Once again across this country our flags are lowered, thoughts and prayers offered. I have no answers. Apparently, nobody has a solution because the carnage continues. And the flags drop again to half staff.
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Seaside is 24 miles east of Destin, where we are staying in a spacious beachside condo generously offered to us by a friend. Seaside is quaint,...
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THE DECK — The time had come. Pollen season had finally ended. The deluge of pine peanuts had subsided. The oak trees ceased dropping clusters. The time had come to tackle the massive wooden deck that wraps around the rear and north side of our house. By n
ow, I know the drill.
This is a four-day process. The deck is 1,800 square feet with long benches and railings all around — a shipload of treated pine that has to be stained every spring.
The first spring after we bought the house, I got a bid from a painter. He quoted $3,000 but was nice enough to explain what needed to be done,...
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For the sixth straight weekend, I’ll be on the road peddling books. On Friday night starting at 7 p.m., I’ll join two other authors at Austin’s Book People, my all-time favorite bookstore. If you’re in the neighborhood, come on by and keep me company. In case you have missed previous shameless attempts at self-promotion, the latest offering is titled, Yours Faithfully, J.A.: The Life and Writings of H.B. Fox, the Circleville Philosopher. It is a biography of one of the funniest writers I have come across. Researching and writing it has been a labor of love. If you can’t make it to Book...
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It started with a startled cat and an inadvertent swipe of a clawed paw. Rosie, our smart but high-strung dog, leaped up on the ottoman on which Tot, one of our two cats, was snoozing. This startled Tot, who is normally both sweet and skittish. Rosie began yelping and whining after Tot swatted her in the eye. No doubt it stung. Rosie immediately sequestered herself on the other side of the house, propped up on a couch pillow
. We soon noticed her eye was swollen nearly shut. I called the veterinarian and made an appointment for the next morning.
As I got ready the next morning, I noticed...
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Bruno Sammartino died a few weeks back. His is not exactly a household name anymore, though his death did merit a story in The New York Times. Sammartino died at 82 in Pittsburgh on April 18.
His name was well-known in our household in the 1960s, when Bruno was heavyweight champion of the World Wide Wrestling Federation for 11 years in the 1960s and 1970s — a record since unmatched. My maternal grandparents were avid wrestling fans, and we spent many Sunday afternoons watching matches on their color television, which was a novelty among the middle class 50 years ago. I didn’t own a color...
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I am on a quest for a new shoulder-style messenger bag. It is not going well.
For more than 25 years, I have used a canvas case — what is often called a messenger bag — to tote around a laptop, portfolio, books, pens, an eyeglasses repair kit, thumb drives, copies of the New Yorker and whatever else I needed. I was given the bag at a meeting of Cox editors in the early 1990s. It was sturdy, weathered well and embroidered with “Cox Newspapers” on the front. I had to have the strap repaired a few years ago, and the fellow stitched it up with brown thread for some reason. The bag and strap...
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I have spent a lot of time moving books in my part-time job at the Margaret Estes Library on the LeTourneau University campus. The library is about to undergo a facelift this summer, getting new paint and carpet. That means shifting a bunch of books around to create sections of shelves that can be moved by a machine able to pick up nine sections at a time — but that’s the most. In a few places we had a dozen sections fastened together and three had to be disassembled and hauled off. The evening I took apart and hauled off dozens of metal shelves almost certainly will be my personal record for most...
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We’re at the peak of azalea season in our neighborhood, which is ablaze in riotous blooms and covered in pollen. It lays a yellow-green carpet on cars, driveways, houses, etc. Past experience has taught me to tamper my obsessive-compulsive instinct to haul out the pressure washer and wash the pollen away — only to discover a fresh coat by the next morning. This time, I will wait until I am certain the trees are finished leafing out, no longer dropping pine peanuts, oak clusters, sweetgum balls and yellow powder before I begin an amphibious assault.
The pollen is a small price to pay for the beauty...
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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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