DENTON – On the same day, we saw:
A reining horse that could slam on the brakes from a gallop and slide through the dirt of the largest indoor horse arena in America, then put it into reverse and rapidly turn circles that made me dizzy just to watch.
A horse clomping along on a giant treadmill as a trainer loosely held the reins.
Sydney the kangaroo, who wore a diaper and hopped about inside a prime steakhouse, which is a feature of another horse farm.
JoJo the camel, who is fond of licking folks’ ears and hangs out in a pen with a cuddly lamb and a stinky goat.
Mounted cowboys...
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EL DORADO, ARKANSAS — From East Texas, one has to work at getting to this town of 18,000 just north of the Louisiana border. This is especially true if trying to avoid the long-running construction project on Interstate 20 at the Texas-Louisiana border. As we headed east into Shreveport, traffic was backed up for miles on the westbound side, while we moved sluggishly past the now-closed Louisiana Welcome Center. Soon we left the familiar confines of this aged interstate and headed north, relying solely on the Maps app on the phone.
I weaned myself off paper maps a dozen years ago after getting...
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A framed poster of a famous portrait of Winston Churchill, photographed by Yousuf Karsh, hangs in our living room. I bought it from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1996, which hosted an exhibit of Karsh’s portraits that year. A cropped version of that portrait graces the cover of the latest biography of Churchill, published last year. Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking With Destiny came to the LeTourneau University campus earlier this week. There are 1,009 previous Churchill biographies. Despite that, Walking With Destiny has been hailed by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal...
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I read a piece by Benjamin Dreyer a few days ago in Medium, a website I recently discovered thanks to Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, owner of the Washington Post, and richest human on the planet. Bezos, if one keeps up with sleazy current events, was outed by the National Enquirer after announcing he and his wife were divorcing. The Enquirer soon after published stories about the affair Bezos was having with another woman. Bezos fought back, not denying the affair but enlisting his famed security chief to investigate how the tabloid got hold of his text messages and reportedly some rather embarrassing...
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A commemorative plate hangs in our house, from Longview’s centennial celebration in 1970. It features a half-dozen scenes from the city’s history, such as the Lathrop Discovery Well in 1931 that ushered in the East Texas oil boom, and the Dalton Gang bank robbery of 1894, which is reenacted on the brick streets of downtown Longview every spring.
My dad was a 37-year-old commercial artist in 1970. We had moved to Longview 18 months earlier from New Hampshire to escape the harsh winters and sluggish economy. He quickly secured a job working as a sign painter for a company that held the contract...
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It was a perfect day for a hike, and my Beautiful Mystery Companion and I took full advantage. We arrived at Tyler State Park just past noon Sunday, paid $12 to an impossibly young park ranger, got a trails map and headed into the park to hike B Loop. The cloudless sky was a wintry shade of blue, but the temperature was perfect — 60 degrees with a steady breeze.
We drove around the park a while, looking for B Loop’s trailhead without success. The back of the map described it as being 3.1 miles long with many elevation changes, “making it a challenging but beautiful trek through the park’s...
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The Texas Legislature is back in session. For those of us who think transparency in government is critical to a functioning democracy, that means trying to block attempts to create even more loopholes in the freedom of information laws. Every session, a bevy of bills are filed to make it more difficult for the public to obtain information kept by the folks whose paychecks we fund. FOI advocates work tirelessly throughout the session to improve bad ol’ bills or block them altogether. They also work with legislators who understand the importance of government transparency. Fortunately, there are several...
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A scraggly camellia bush is planted in a cracked pot on our back deck. It has not fared well since making the voyage from our front yard, where it joined three others in an unsuccessful attempt to add some color to a small patch of grass. Too shady. So it was placed in the pot and transported to the back deck. Its counterparts did not survive the transplants, but this camellia has hung in there for a few years now. Its leaves are mottled with yellow splotches, no doubt infested with some plant disease of which I am woefully ignorant.
About a week ago, this camellia burst forth with a fat red blossom,...
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A harbinger of the New Year has unhappily but inevitably arrived. I was running errands. There is a church on the corner where I turn onto Fourth Street to head to the Big Box Stores to which I trek several times a week. This church has rows of crape myrtles on the south and west side of its parking lot. At some point in the past week, landscapers had performed their annual Crape Murder, as some call it. I prefer Crape Myrtle Mutilation. Two rows of those lovely trees, prevalent throughout the South, had been whacked back nearly to the trunk in a ritual that is as ugly as it is unnecessary.
It...
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One of the most valuable tools for a research nerd is the interlibrary loan service provided by both academic and public libraries. Through ILL, one can request books, articles, microfilm and even DVDs. One fills out an online form provided by the library one patronizes. I have availed myself of this service uncounted times over the decades. It never fails to provide a small thrill when I’m notified that an item has arrived through ILL.
For example, through LeTourneau University’s Margaret Estes Library (where I have worked part-time for a year as a reference assistant) I obtained three...
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