This is my next-to-last evening living in Austin. Nearly everything is packed, most going into storage in East Texas until we buy a house. A few tasks remain tomorrow, such as a trip to Goodwill, and loading up the trailer and the SUV with what will stay with me — clothes, toiletries, the computer, a few books. So I am indulging myself with a few hours on the backyard deck, reading magazines and breathing in the scent of the wax-leaf ligustrums that dominate the foliage off the deck.
The smell of this hardy shrub — those in my neighbor’s yard reach the crest of the roof, providing a natural...
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My Beautiful Mystery Companion and I have begun house hunting in Longview. Sale of the barely lived-in Austin house is imminent. Packing is well underway. Wisely, I have kept boxes since moving away from Longview nearly two years ago. This will be their fourth use in 23 months. Nor will it be the last, since nearly everything I own is going into storage until we find a house. I’m shacking up with my wife, the BMC, in her small bohemian duplex on the south side.
This will be the 13th home I have participated in purchasing, but the first for my BMC. Before we met, she preferred to remain free...
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I took the slower but less stressful route from East Texas to Austin the other day. I was pulling my utility trailer back to begin loading up stuff in preparation for moving back Behind the Pine Curtain. After two years of living apart, the Beautiful Mystery Companion and I — along with daughter Abbie and Rosie the Wonder Dog — will all live full-time under the same roof. It makes me smile to think about it.
This trailer and I endured a couple of life-threatening mishaps during the last move. First the hitch lock broke and the trailer popped off the ball, luckily without mishap since I was only...
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I spend a few days each week ensconced in the Briscoe Center for American History at UT, looking at microfilms of Texas country newspapers from the mid-1940s through the late 1980s for a book project. I think I’m chasing a pretty interesting character and hope eventually I can cadge a modest book contract out of this.
While perusing I often become sidetracked by a horrific tale of murder, or a gruesome car wreck, maybe a long-forgotten political scandal involving a county commissioner. In Texas, most political scandals involve either county commissioners or sheriffs, in my experience. These...
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Nightmarish tales of my ineptness abound when it comes to plumbing repairs. It apparently is a form of handyman dyslexia. When it comes to carpentry, woodworking, even rudimentary electrical repairs, I am— if not Mr. Fix-It — at least his loyal assistant. I can hang a ceiling fan, swap out an electrical breaker, build a coffee table, replace a windowpane or lay down ceramic tile. But if water is involved, my brain turns to mush.
Past disasters are the stuff of legend:
• I stripped the valve off an icemaker tube as the movers literally were bringing in possessions, thus requiring me to frantically...
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Our 14-year-old daughter was watching another police procedural show the other night. The Abster is hooked on “NCIS” and similar programs that invariably show a corpse cut open on a slab in an autopsy lab. At the moment, she plans to be a forensic psychologist so that she can solve the types of mysteries she watches on television. We are fine with whatever career she chooses, but I likely won’t be visiting her at work. I have no interest in seeing a dead person slit open from stem to sternum.
During the show, a whacky Target commercial came on with folks running around in brightly colored...
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For Lent I gave up two habits of which I am quite fond: nibbling on dark chocolate and nibbling on my fingernails. I never do both at the same time. That would be messy. I love dark chocolate so it seemed a meaningful item to give up for 40 days. I hope going that long without gnawing on my fingernails — admittedly a bad habit — will shed me permanently of this tic before I break any more teeth.
I have healthy but brittle teeth, about half now topped with crowns. The front ones have been patched several times. Years ago, I broke one dumbly and absentmindedly trying to pull out a watch stem...
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DIBOLL, TEXAS — I recently spent a day in this logging town just south of Lufkin, once home to the corporate headquarters of Temple-Inland, a community whose fortunes have risen and fallen as that company’s have done the same. I was here to research back copies of the Diboll Free Press in the History Center for a book project I’ve begun.
First, a word about the Diboll History Center. It is a jewel of a facility, beautifully constructed out of yellow-pine beams and decking. It is a valuable repository of the area’s rough drafts of history. The staff is friendly and helpful. I have a special...
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Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most: that people are basically good. That honor, courage and virtue mean everything, that money and power mean nothing — that good always triumphs over evil. And I want you to remember this: that love — true love — never dies. I want you to remember that, Boy. Doesn’t matter if they’re true or not, you see. A man should believe in those things because those are the things worth believing in.
— Robert Duvall in “Secondhand Lions”
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Douglassville, Texas — Brad Teel lived...
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The view from the office window at times was like watching a silent movie. That allowed me to fill in the subtitles. For the first few months I was there, a few dozen homeless people slept in the church parking lot each night. About the time I arrived each morning at 7:30, they were rolling up their sleeping bags under the direction of a burly fellow who apparently served as the unofficial straw boss. Slabs of cardboard that served as a thin buffer between the asphalt and bedrolls were collected and deposited in the recycling dumpster across the alley. Cigarette butts and other litter were meticulously...
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