Great restaurants start with great chefs, one of my favorites being Patrick Gwynn-Jones, owner of Pomegranates in London. He has a way of keeping things in perspective. One holiday season, in with some friends one evening for a fairly early dinner before a play, the burly Welshman came to our table and one of my guests had the temerity to ask about his specials.
“Damned if I know, Old Boy,” the obviously tipsy Gwynn-Jones explained, “I’ve just finished lunch an hour ago. I was thinking about curried goat, but that doesn’t seem very Christmas-y, now does it?”
I still don’t have a Christmas tree, so I guess I’m not very Christmas-y either. The Immortal Tomato is doing fine, so I may reward him yet with a flocking and an honored spot by the fireplace.
This is nothing unique to me, even in Lake Charles, but the terrorist attacks in India struck a little close to the mark. Many years ago I went to Bombay (as Mumbai then was) on business. When I inquired of a friend who had been there about the hotel I had booked, he referred to it as “the second-nicest hotel in Bombay.” I stayed at the Oberoi Towers. I had preferred the Taj Mahal Hotel, but it was full. Both were the targets of attacks last week in which almost 200 people were killed.
My first view of the Oberoi was its Sikh bodyguard at the door, an imposing six-foot-plus guy with a full beard, turban, and sword. He looked fierce to my Western eyes; certainly he wasn’t; and certainly he was no match for a machine pistol. The hotel itself was okay. My best memory of it is the shopping center, which was attached. The ceilings were low to my Western sensibilities and things felt a little “close.” Didn’t see the shops mentioned in the accounts of the attack. It would have been a nightmare under any circumstances, of course, but imagining the crowd in that place and those narrow, low corridors gave me a shiver or two.
Strictly as a tourist, I did make my way to the Taj, which is next door to the Gate of India, the archway seen on television footage of the violence used by Indian soldiers as a sniper post. The Taj was beautiful. Full cricket field out back, gin-and-tonic bar right out of a Merchant-Ivory production. Now a battlefield.
My worry this season is that we will see more and more battlefields made from monuments. Like many others, my primary emotions when the World Trade Center was bombed, and the Towers fell, lay with those innocents who died in the smoke and rubble, or worse, broke high windows and jumped to avoid a fiery death. We could identify with them, in part because so many of us had been there.
I went to the WTC many times, for business and other reasons, but remember most the lunch I tried to have with Allen Gerson, a Manhattan lawyer friend, at Windows on the World. Allen is now a member of the New York City Council from Greenwich Village and bears responsibility for part of the reconstruction efforts at Ground Zero. At the time it was bombed, I had a case with a lawyer from New York who was standing in line to vote when he heard the plane go overhead and strike its target. His voting precinct was in one of the Towers. His apartment, child’s school, and law office were all within three blocks. All were closed for over a year after the attack.
I’ve been lucky to have traveled far and extensively, most of the time under a now-long-gone penumbra of protection I believed I had as an American citizen. We have gone from bulletproof to targets in the last 30 years for many reasons, some from us, some not. Clearly, the world has changed for everybody. But maybe more for Americans.
We don’t believe we should be hated. As a people, we are sure we always have the best of motives, the purest intentions, the most money to give and the loosest pockets for those in trouble, a light and a magnet for the world. That belief, it must be pointed out, is mostly generated here. As late as the end of 2006, only 20 percent of our citizens possessed a passport. Today, a year after travel restrictions tightened sufficiently to require that document to travel even within the Western Hemisphere, only a third have one. In other words, we know what we think of ourselves, but by and large, little appreciation for how the rest of the world sees us.
I was watching a comedy special last night in which Ricky Gervais, an English actor, made a snide remark about the value of the dollar and asked his American audience how they liked being a third world country. Certainly we’re not there yet, and the advantage we have over the Europeans in our current financial straits is that American ingenuity, commercial innovation, ambition, and old-fashioned hard work will get us farther along than most of the government-based solutions advocated by others. We will never be anything other than a first-rate power in the world.
But that status paints a target on our back as surely as it provided a bulletproof vest 30 years ago. I love my country, and I am proud of my countrymen, but I fear greatly for them. Let us pray, in this season of peace, for wisdom and courage for our new President to show our best face to the world and for trouble to our enemies.
And this column was about as Christmas-y as curried goat. Hope you got something out of it.
Kiss your family and draw them tightly to you over the season, eat lots of great food, and. . .I’ll see you guys on the flip.
Merry Christmas.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Monday, November 24, 2008
You Say Tomato, I Say…
By Jim Doyle
It dawned on me last night, floating in my hot tub, smelling the smoke from one of my neighbor’s wood fires, alternately warmed and chilled by the 50-degree variation between my water temperature and the air, that we are closing in on winter. Winter in Lake Charles, of course, means thoughts turn to idle consideration of when, or if, a freeze will kill my banana trees, and whether I should cook some fish (maybe even some pork) in those gorgeous leaves before that happens.
And if it’s getting colder, then the Megaholidays are on the way. Remember when the Macy’s Parade was the traditional start of the Christmas season, Santa Claus and big balloons with turkey roasting in the oven? Now we’re lucky to get past Halloween before the trees are for sale. I actually saw potted pines with ornaments in my grocery store last week. My staff has already placed a rather generous holiday schedule on my calendar. Soon, we’ll have one seamless celebration from Labor Day to Mardi Gras to Easter.
Harrumph!!!
This may be the year without a Christmas tree at my house. I’m down to one teenager and one returnee, and as for me, I’d be satisfied decorating my immortal tomato plant. Hey, at least it would be a “live tree.” This is, of course, a fantasy on my part. My son Harry would like to have the house decorated in National Lampoon mode (Clark Griswold and the many mini-lights). Probably should put something up.
Now, about my tomato plant.
I began gardening this year. In pots. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to commit actual labor by digging a garden; pots just seemed so much more, I don’t know, portable. Then there were the birds. An unguarded garden in my back yard would be vulnerable to all kinds of casual eaters, and since I planned to have a bounty of fresh, organic vegetables available, I wanted to keep them on my patio where my various domesticated animals, including five grandchildren, would likely shoo them away.
So, with optimism, I ordered tomato plants and other seeded mini-pots from some anonymous ad on the back of a Parade magazine. You know the type. They arrived a couple weeks later in a box, which someone helpfully deposited on my breakfast table, where they stayed for a couple of months until one of the members of the Former Mrs. Doyle Club opened the box and took a couple of the plants to her house. This was, I don’t know, maybe April.
By June, I figured I had to move the box. Looked at the seed pods. Didn’t seem too complicated. Bought some bags of dirt and planted them in the pots, and lo and behold, Magic! Green sprouts! I never knew I could do that!
Now I was hooked. I called over my yard guy and got him to transplant my then-dying banana trees, left there by another Club member, into my yard. As I watered them, an amazing thing happened. They grew! By this point I was out of control.
One day at the hardware store getting copies made of my house keys, I saw a pack of squash seeds. I love squash. Bought some more dirt and a couple more pots and planted the suckers in my patio garden. Damned if they didn’t sprout, too! My plants became my afternoon companions and part of my routine: work all day, go home, feed the dog, feed the teenager, water the plants. Even though I never spoke to my plants, I now sympathized with those who do, people I had previously considered eccentric. Hell, I’m not eccentric!
Spent most of my afternoons in the garden section of Wal-Mart. Bought two lemon trees on line and planted them in pots in my house. Bought two Bonsai trees, for God’s sake, in Florida. Added some low-light (as opposed to low-life) greenery in my kitchen. Made plans for harvest.
No harvest.
There must be something about this gardening thing I haven’t figured out. One of my tomato plants did produce five or six small fruit. The squash bloomed beautifully but yielded one miserable, hard, tasteless gourd. Finally I pulled up all the offending greenery and was about to plow the pots after Josie the Dog jumped onto a patio chair and broke my biggest remaining tomato stalk. But I never got around to it.
I decided instead to do some research. My ultimate resource is Google, which gave me a clue. Seems one of my tomato plants was engineered for cooler weather, like, say, Vermont, and that’s why it grew like Topsy but never “fruited” (and I never knew that was a verb until I became a gardener). I suppose that’s what happened to the squash, too.
Right about the time I was planning to yank my old friend the tomato from his roots, he started flowering. Last week – in November! – three fair-sized tomatoes appeared. And that’s when the idea struck me. I could move it into my house and decorate it with other ornaments, maybe a full-tomato theme. Maybe I’ll even flock the damned thing.
Since the tomato plant is either immortal or undead, it’s good for any number of stops on the seamless holiday trail. Hide eggs in the Easter Tomato, symbol of everlasting life. Scare little kids with the Halloween Tomato, a zombie with small fruit. Call him Scrooge for Christmas because he’s stingy with his produce.
Harrumph!
Hope you guys have better luck getting fruited.
See y’all on the flip.
It dawned on me last night, floating in my hot tub, smelling the smoke from one of my neighbor’s wood fires, alternately warmed and chilled by the 50-degree variation between my water temperature and the air, that we are closing in on winter. Winter in Lake Charles, of course, means thoughts turn to idle consideration of when, or if, a freeze will kill my banana trees, and whether I should cook some fish (maybe even some pork) in those gorgeous leaves before that happens.
And if it’s getting colder, then the Megaholidays are on the way. Remember when the Macy’s Parade was the traditional start of the Christmas season, Santa Claus and big balloons with turkey roasting in the oven? Now we’re lucky to get past Halloween before the trees are for sale. I actually saw potted pines with ornaments in my grocery store last week. My staff has already placed a rather generous holiday schedule on my calendar. Soon, we’ll have one seamless celebration from Labor Day to Mardi Gras to Easter.
Harrumph!!!
This may be the year without a Christmas tree at my house. I’m down to one teenager and one returnee, and as for me, I’d be satisfied decorating my immortal tomato plant. Hey, at least it would be a “live tree.” This is, of course, a fantasy on my part. My son Harry would like to have the house decorated in National Lampoon mode (Clark Griswold and the many mini-lights). Probably should put something up.
Now, about my tomato plant.
I began gardening this year. In pots. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to commit actual labor by digging a garden; pots just seemed so much more, I don’t know, portable. Then there were the birds. An unguarded garden in my back yard would be vulnerable to all kinds of casual eaters, and since I planned to have a bounty of fresh, organic vegetables available, I wanted to keep them on my patio where my various domesticated animals, including five grandchildren, would likely shoo them away.
So, with optimism, I ordered tomato plants and other seeded mini-pots from some anonymous ad on the back of a Parade magazine. You know the type. They arrived a couple weeks later in a box, which someone helpfully deposited on my breakfast table, where they stayed for a couple of months until one of the members of the Former Mrs. Doyle Club opened the box and took a couple of the plants to her house. This was, I don’t know, maybe April.
By June, I figured I had to move the box. Looked at the seed pods. Didn’t seem too complicated. Bought some bags of dirt and planted them in the pots, and lo and behold, Magic! Green sprouts! I never knew I could do that!
Now I was hooked. I called over my yard guy and got him to transplant my then-dying banana trees, left there by another Club member, into my yard. As I watered them, an amazing thing happened. They grew! By this point I was out of control.
One day at the hardware store getting copies made of my house keys, I saw a pack of squash seeds. I love squash. Bought some more dirt and a couple more pots and planted the suckers in my patio garden. Damned if they didn’t sprout, too! My plants became my afternoon companions and part of my routine: work all day, go home, feed the dog, feed the teenager, water the plants. Even though I never spoke to my plants, I now sympathized with those who do, people I had previously considered eccentric. Hell, I’m not eccentric!
Spent most of my afternoons in the garden section of Wal-Mart. Bought two lemon trees on line and planted them in pots in my house. Bought two Bonsai trees, for God’s sake, in Florida. Added some low-light (as opposed to low-life) greenery in my kitchen. Made plans for harvest.
No harvest.
There must be something about this gardening thing I haven’t figured out. One of my tomato plants did produce five or six small fruit. The squash bloomed beautifully but yielded one miserable, hard, tasteless gourd. Finally I pulled up all the offending greenery and was about to plow the pots after Josie the Dog jumped onto a patio chair and broke my biggest remaining tomato stalk. But I never got around to it.
I decided instead to do some research. My ultimate resource is Google, which gave me a clue. Seems one of my tomato plants was engineered for cooler weather, like, say, Vermont, and that’s why it grew like Topsy but never “fruited” (and I never knew that was a verb until I became a gardener). I suppose that’s what happened to the squash, too.
Right about the time I was planning to yank my old friend the tomato from his roots, he started flowering. Last week – in November! – three fair-sized tomatoes appeared. And that’s when the idea struck me. I could move it into my house and decorate it with other ornaments, maybe a full-tomato theme. Maybe I’ll even flock the damned thing.
Since the tomato plant is either immortal or undead, it’s good for any number of stops on the seamless holiday trail. Hide eggs in the Easter Tomato, symbol of everlasting life. Scare little kids with the Halloween Tomato, a zombie with small fruit. Call him Scrooge for Christmas because he’s stingy with his produce.
Harrumph!
Hope you guys have better luck getting fruited.
See y’all on the flip.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Family Ties
By Jim Doyle
I am a history buff. Lately, I’ve been studying my personal history – actually, my family history – and it will be no surprise to you, Dear Readers, that there are some real characters locked away in that treasure trove.
Who knows if it’s accurate. But if it is, here are some of my relatives:
Lots of writers: John Milton, William Faulkner, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, George Orwell, Truman Capote.
Several presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Bush and LBJ.
One preacher burned at the stake for being a witch.
Some great actors: Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Cary Grant.
And several famous African-Americans: Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, and P.B.S. Pinchback, Governor of Louisiana.
I have to admit it left a peculiar taste in my mouth to confirm my ancestors (at least one of them) owned slaves, having thought (and been taught) all my life that our Methodist religion, dating back to the 1840’s, sided us with the abolitionists. But with a huge family tree rooted firmly in the South, I suppose it was inevitable.
My branches are laden with the Doyle, Webb, Duncan, Watson, McKinnie, and Nuckolls families, and those are among the most common of the Scot-Irish stock that drifted down through Virginia and the upper South like a wave about 150 years ago.
If you’re searching for good stories and interesting people, look no further than the Watson clan. My mother was one of 10 children, and the oldest girl, in a farm family that survived the Depression (maybe some of those skills will come in handy).
Her twin brother Leva was famous among my friends because he drove a Rolls Royce (actually it was a 1938 Plymouth he bought new, but nobody knew the difference) and worked at Fort Knox (he was an x-ray technician at the base hospital).
Uncle Julius owned a piece of history. The Battle of Middleburg was fought on his front yard. Leonard, father of my two closest cousins Carl and Roy, was a paratrooper who drove a general around Hiroshima right after World War II and died much too young of lung cancer. Five aunts raised exceptional children.
And that brings us to Lewis, who will soon celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary and is my only surviving uncle.
Like his oldest brother, Lewis was famous among my friends for his car and for his job. He drove an original Edsel, which he kept until about 15 years ago, and he worked as a welder at the nuclear plant at Oak Ridge. He is, in every sense, keeper of the family flame.
Every two years he hosts the Watson reunion at his home in Fairfield Glade, Tennessee, on the Cumberland Plateau. I’ve spent the July 4th holiday there in a jacket watching fireworks and keeping score as the kids captured fireflies. Some of my best memories are on his back deck, counting my cousins and soaking in the remarkable, enveloping feeling of a family whose numbers do not diminish the ties and love that bind us all together, today and back up the tree to those many, many limbs.
Geraldine, Lewis’ wife, is my “favorite aunt” in much the same way I am her “favorite nephew,” in other words, it’s our little secret. I still remember the first time I met her, probably when I was about 8. She and Lewis had two children and the oldest, Julia, is our family hero. She was the national poster child for juvenile arthritis before she was ten.
I remember her about that age, sitting quietly in the den at my house sobbing softly to herself in the pain she has carried all her life. And in marrying her husband Steve she added yet another interesting occupation to our mix: Steve is a nuclear engineer who works at the bomb plant in Oak Ridge. He’s in charge of “packaging.” I don’t even want to think about what that means.
Steve gave me one of my prized possessions one reunion, which hit at a particularly bad patch for me, about a week after my lifelong friend Gary Cole died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Other circumstances added to the frazzling effect of that blow. As I got ready to leave, Steve handed me a hat and said, “Here. You need this more than me.” The hat bore the logo: “S**t Creek Survivor.” I don’t even want to think about why a guy with his job had it. But there are days, less lately thank God, when I wear it proudly and defiantly.
This week’s ruminations may not be worthy of my cousin William Faulkner or even the Ravenmonger of Baltimore. But the point is worth considering. If home is the place where when you go there, they have to take you in (Robert Frost), I think it’s a metaphysical place rather than a physical location.
For me, it’s the bosom of my family, from slave owner to freed slave, uncles and aunts to cousins and grand cousins, once-in-a-while reunions to sporadic e-mails from some of my more loyal blood. In this hectic modern world spinning further from its comfortable and known center towards exciting and new possibilities, tempered by fear, may we all be Survivors.
I am a history buff. Lately, I’ve been studying my personal history – actually, my family history – and it will be no surprise to you, Dear Readers, that there are some real characters locked away in that treasure trove.
Who knows if it’s accurate. But if it is, here are some of my relatives:
Lots of writers: John Milton, William Faulkner, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, George Orwell, Truman Capote.
Several presidents: Eisenhower, Kennedy, Bush and LBJ.
One preacher burned at the stake for being a witch.
Some great actors: Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Cary Grant.
And several famous African-Americans: Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, and P.B.S. Pinchback, Governor of Louisiana.
I have to admit it left a peculiar taste in my mouth to confirm my ancestors (at least one of them) owned slaves, having thought (and been taught) all my life that our Methodist religion, dating back to the 1840’s, sided us with the abolitionists. But with a huge family tree rooted firmly in the South, I suppose it was inevitable.
My branches are laden with the Doyle, Webb, Duncan, Watson, McKinnie, and Nuckolls families, and those are among the most common of the Scot-Irish stock that drifted down through Virginia and the upper South like a wave about 150 years ago.
If you’re searching for good stories and interesting people, look no further than the Watson clan. My mother was one of 10 children, and the oldest girl, in a farm family that survived the Depression (maybe some of those skills will come in handy).
Her twin brother Leva was famous among my friends because he drove a Rolls Royce (actually it was a 1938 Plymouth he bought new, but nobody knew the difference) and worked at Fort Knox (he was an x-ray technician at the base hospital).
Uncle Julius owned a piece of history. The Battle of Middleburg was fought on his front yard. Leonard, father of my two closest cousins Carl and Roy, was a paratrooper who drove a general around Hiroshima right after World War II and died much too young of lung cancer. Five aunts raised exceptional children.
And that brings us to Lewis, who will soon celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary and is my only surviving uncle.
Like his oldest brother, Lewis was famous among my friends for his car and for his job. He drove an original Edsel, which he kept until about 15 years ago, and he worked as a welder at the nuclear plant at Oak Ridge. He is, in every sense, keeper of the family flame.
Every two years he hosts the Watson reunion at his home in Fairfield Glade, Tennessee, on the Cumberland Plateau. I’ve spent the July 4th holiday there in a jacket watching fireworks and keeping score as the kids captured fireflies. Some of my best memories are on his back deck, counting my cousins and soaking in the remarkable, enveloping feeling of a family whose numbers do not diminish the ties and love that bind us all together, today and back up the tree to those many, many limbs.
Geraldine, Lewis’ wife, is my “favorite aunt” in much the same way I am her “favorite nephew,” in other words, it’s our little secret. I still remember the first time I met her, probably when I was about 8. She and Lewis had two children and the oldest, Julia, is our family hero. She was the national poster child for juvenile arthritis before she was ten.
I remember her about that age, sitting quietly in the den at my house sobbing softly to herself in the pain she has carried all her life. And in marrying her husband Steve she added yet another interesting occupation to our mix: Steve is a nuclear engineer who works at the bomb plant in Oak Ridge. He’s in charge of “packaging.” I don’t even want to think about what that means.
Steve gave me one of my prized possessions one reunion, which hit at a particularly bad patch for me, about a week after my lifelong friend Gary Cole died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Other circumstances added to the frazzling effect of that blow. As I got ready to leave, Steve handed me a hat and said, “Here. You need this more than me.” The hat bore the logo: “S**t Creek Survivor.” I don’t even want to think about why a guy with his job had it. But there are days, less lately thank God, when I wear it proudly and defiantly.
This week’s ruminations may not be worthy of my cousin William Faulkner or even the Ravenmonger of Baltimore. But the point is worth considering. If home is the place where when you go there, they have to take you in (Robert Frost), I think it’s a metaphysical place rather than a physical location.
For me, it’s the bosom of my family, from slave owner to freed slave, uncles and aunts to cousins and grand cousins, once-in-a-while reunions to sporadic e-mails from some of my more loyal blood. In this hectic modern world spinning further from its comfortable and known center towards exciting and new possibilities, tempered by fear, may we all be Survivors.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Winds of Change
By Jim DoyleMy lifelong friend and college classmate Jimmy Buffett once wrote a song called “Trying To Reason With Hurricane Season.” Amen, Brother Bubba.
No way to make sense of this one, no sir. Hurricanes used to have memorable names filled with dread because of their rarity: Audrey, Betsy, Camille, Katrina. But Rita? Sounds like the blond on the barstool at K.D.’s waiting for her turn in the video poker booth. Gustav and Ike? Two of the Smith Brothers. And this year a hurricane hit MAINE, for frak’s sake. What’s up with that? My tracking chart doesn’t go past Virginia. Even Buffett couldn’t make up a song about that one, at least not without a volcano in the background.
Before I get too far down this malarkey road, let me be perfectly frank about that frankly imperfect representation of my relationship with the author of the World’s Greatest Love Song. (Hint: It’s about beer and a bodily function performed in pairs. No, not potty breaks.) True, we did go to the same institution of higher learning, the University of Southern Mississippi. At the same time. I was a freshman living in the Pike House and he was a senior next door at Kappa Sig. If we ever me, it was probably over a glass of the vintage bourbon of the day, Rebel Yell, vintage Monday. I do vaguely recall signs on campus offering a free concert at the Student Union by my fellow frat boy, but I never went. Hell, if it’s free, how good could he be?
Anyway. . .
Let’s hope this hurricane season is over now, not on the official date of November 30. I’ve seen enough. Coming back from Houston last week on the Port Arthur highway (it’s shorter and faster) I saw a new kind of road kill. Alligators. Five of them, one about eight feet long with a Buffett-worthy character eyeballing him in brogans and coveralls, trying to find a way to lift him into the back of his King Ranch 250.
I have lived south of I-10 since 1972, and not until Rita have I ever been personally affected by a hurricane. Never even evacuated. This year, when Gustav was bearing down on us, I wound up looking at the ducks in the Peabody pond in my hometown of Memphis. So, are things getting worse? I don’t know. Hard to tell. I’ve been suffering from Boomer-itis lately, a creeping sense of nostalgia. I think the old days really weren’t that great compared to now; we just remember them better. Short-term memory goes first.
Actually, the first symptom of Boomer-itis is an incessant, compelling need to turn first to the obituary section of any given newspaper. I have a picture on my wall at home of my first grade birthday party held in the parlor of my home in Bolivar, Tennessee, an antebellum house bought by my father for $5,000 in 1942. According to my brother Thomas, they had to completely remodel the house because the former residents were raising goats in the living room. See, Bolivar is kind of in the country. Anyway, by the time I came along, the goats were gone and the house was restored to its original luster, brightened in the immortal Kodak moment of that picture on the wall by memorable, shining young faces. My friend Blake White is standing next to me with a smile that makes it look like it was his birthday. My cousin Carl Watson is off to the side next to Maria Reynolds, daughter of my dad’s best friend and one of two at that party who is no longer with us.
Maria was one of the sweetest girls I ever knew, and she had a special connection. Her aunt was married to Guy Williams, whom you may remember as the dad from Lost in Space but who will always be Zorro to me. I met him once at her house, wearing my Cub Scout uniform. I was tongue-tied and couldn’t say a word, but I loved Maria’s stories about “Uncle Guy.” Last time I saw her she was a nurse at the local old folks home. I never knew she was dead until I saw her headstone one spring day.
The most recent loss among my party guests is Jody Sharp, a tall kid who moved away in ninth grade and, as far as I know, I never saw him again. He died last week. His obit was in the Bolivar Bulletin. R.I.P. Jody.
Most of my adult life those days, and that place in the picture, and those true lifelong friends, have been a refuge from the storm, more literally lately with whatever forces bring more, and more powerful, winds of change our way, winds of all kinds, actual, financial, political, personal. Whatever eternal truth there may be recognizes the prime directive that life is change, for better or worse. And everybody needs a little shelter from the storm now and then.
May each of you, dear readers, find your shelter.
It’s good to be back. Many, many thanks to all of you who said a kind word to me over the last few years about missing this little bit of doggerel, and special thanks to Patrick Marcantel and Lauren de Albuquerque for finding room in their hearts (and their paper) for me again.
See you on the flip.
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