Every day I wake up, hummin’ a song
But I don't need to run around, I just stay at home
And sing a little love song, my lover, myself
If there's something that you wanna hear, you can sing it yourself
— “Everything is Free,” by Gillian Welch
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Late every afternoon, just before decamping to the back-deck gazebo to read and listen to NPR, I pick up my Yamaha classical guitar and run through several scales, then play a half-dozen or so songs. The lyrics above are part of one of the songs I have learned to play. “Everything is Free” ostensibly is about how streaming music...
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A large succulent grows in a pot on our side deck, under the careful care of my Beautiful Mystery Companion. She often moves plants around, trying to find just the right combination of sunlight and shade. This season, she scored a goal by placing this succulent, called the Zulu Giant, or stapelia gigantia, in this spot. It has exploded in size and bloomed for the first time in the years she has cared for it. The bloom is exotic and somewhat creepy, as can be seen in the accompanying photo. That dark spot in the center of the bloom consists of the detritus of dead flies, which is how the bloom is pollinated....
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I recently bought a greenhouse kit on eBay for my Beautiful Mystery Companion, who loves nothing more than to play in the dirt — unless it is playing with a puppy. We have a bevy of decorative plants she tends to, while forbidding me to do anything more than admire them. I am happy to oblige. I can kill a plant just by staring at it too long. It’s a gift.
For years, the plants in winter have taken up residence either in the house or the shop, which is a one-car attached garage filled with power tools rendered useless when the plants arrive. They don’t fare well in either location — not enough...
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Just off Judson Road in my hometown of Longview, there is a creek behind an apartment complex that was dammed up decades ago to create a small lake. I lived for about a month at Willow Lake Apartments when I first returned to Longview in 2008, while the house I had purchased was being remodeled. I am not positive that Willow Lake is the official name of the lake (it doesn’t show up on any maps I could find online), but since it is partially surrounded by willow trees, that works for me.
I often cut through the narrow road on the west side of the lake to get from our house to the Big Box Stores....
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The last time I shook hands with someone was in early March. A friendly fellow, who occasionally came to the CrossFit Citadel gym, stuck his hand out. I shook it, really before thinking. The coronavirus was already in the news, a faraway threat but rapidly drawing closer. After the handshake, I unobtrusively went into the restroom and washed my hands.
The last time I hugged someone besides my Beautiful Mystery Companion occurred the next day, when a woman who I hadn’t seen at the gym in months got out of her car the same time I did. She’s what we call a “hugger” in East Texas. It was good...
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An American flag hangs from our front porch. The flag is three-by-five feet. It is attached to a pole that juts diagonally from a porch post. The flag often gets wrapped around the pole when a breeze kicks up, often winding itself four or five times around the pole. When that happens, I hold on to the post with one hand, lean out and unwrap the flag — whose corner I’m barely able to reach — so that it hangs properly once again. I have repeated this action hundreds of times in the eight-and-a-half years we have lived in this house.
During the last several months — with a pandemic killing...
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For the past two summers, a weekend ritual — in addition to mowing, trimming and cleaning up the yard — has been to don a pair of gloves and pull up a 30-gallon trash can’s worth of a pungent mystery vine that threatens to strangle the mature azalea bushes that grace much of our yard.
The mystery vine appeared after the May 2019 straight-line windstorm, which left four trees on our house and several more down in the backyard. When the debris was chain-sawed, chipped and hauled off, much of the back and side yard was now in full sun. That’s when the mystery vine cropped up, winding its way up the azaleas,...
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I have been teaching a photography class online for nearly a month now, meeting via Microsoft Teams with my students every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. As always, my LeTourneau University students are intelligent and engaged. But there are definitely challenges to this type of teaching.
Two words often bandied about in education quarters this pandemic season are synchronous and asynchronous. The former means “at the same time.” The latter means the opposite. There has been quite a debate in public education about which method to use for teaching online. I am teaching synchronously, meaning...
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On Aug. 30, about 100 folks raised a glass on Zoom to toast the memory of Molly Ivins, the acerbic and hilarious columnist who died of cancer in 2007. It was Molly’s birthday, and the event was a fundraiser for the Texas Observer, the venerable, gritty progressive magazine that she once co-edited when in her 20s. I have subscribed to the Observer for more than 40 years and have written a few stories for it — the most recent four years ago, the first back in 1982. That first piece, adapted from a creative writing class I took under Bill Stotts in graduate school at UT-Austin, was the first piece...
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My longtime compadre Jaìme called me Sunday afternoon, the first time we have talked in five years. The number on the phone said the call was from Mexico. I have had a couple similar missed calls in the past month or so, which I was unable to return, since I don’t pay for cell service into Mexico. But I suspected it might be him, so I answered.
Sure enough: “Mister Gary, it’s Jaìme.”
My Spanish is rusty and was mediocre at best even when I spoke it regularly with him. Jaìme speaks a smattering of English but generally expected folks like me to learn Spanish by osmosis. That was actually...
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