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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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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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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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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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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