20 - 20 HINDSIGHT

 Two incidents in the hunting field:

I was hunting in New Mexico, at the base of Mangas Mountain. I was sitting in a position carefully selected for observation of any coyotes responding to my call. I had the wind in my favor. They would be coming down and out of the brushy draw, into the clear area just below me.

I worked the call with the expertise developed in years of experience calling coyotes in South Texas. I put the call in my pocket, and lifted the Browning .270 off my lap to allow me to shift my position — the hard ground was getting uncomfortable. A casual glance over my right shoulder revealed two coyotes gazing intently at me from ten feet away. Behind me. Where they had to have come the wrong way, up wind, across open ground, to approach me where I was sitting out in the open. I was grateful that they had not attacked me. So grateful that I allowed one of them to depart, unharmed.

The other incident was while I was sitting, patiently watching a small pond high up on Luna Mountain, where we had found bear tracks in the soft mud around the water. Stan was similarly positioned about twenty yards to my right. I was fighting to avoid snoozing, when the report of Stan’s .25-06 woke me up. Wide awake, I stood up facing him. He pointed to the crumpled 150 pound bear lying on the ground 20 feet away. That gentle looking ball of fur had been bringing a mouth full of teeth, and four paws with 20 claws right up to my backside.

Mixed feelings, defined: Stan shot MY bear — just before it licked me in the ear.

And an incident in the city:

Working narcotics while I was a deputy sheriff entailed a lot of sitting in my car, watching locations where drug transactions were made.

I felt rather foolish — embarrassed, actually — when a dealer crept up from behind me and appeared suddenly at the window of my car.

No real harm done — he just looked into my eyes, and turned and walked away. He’d made his point — I’d have to try another day, to get anything on him.

The takeaway from these incidents is this: there is a need for a device that monitors my six, to notify me when anyone — man or beast — approaches from the rear.

Reminiscence

 

It is often the case that some insignificant element of my day-to-day activities reminds me of events in my childhood.

Tonight —

I just put a cake in the oven.

When I make that statement the usual response is to ask me “Duncan Hines, or Betty Crocker?”

My reply is “Neither —  it was Hershey’s Cocoa, flour, sugar, butter, milk, and eggs.”

Tonight, as I was vigorously beating the assembled cake mixture, my memory wandered back to a day in 1944 when Mom was guiding me in the art of cake making. She demonstrated for me the technique of beating, and handed me the cake bowl and the spoon. She told me to beat the mixture 100 times. I was informed that the beating instilled air, so that the cake would not be flat.

At about the count of fifty, my arm tired  —  and I swapped hands to continue beating with my left hand.

“No, no, no!” Mom shouted —  “if you beat it backwards you’ll beat the air right back out of it!”

She had learned that from her mother. Who knows how many generations have held that belief?

I didn’t question it.

But I have never forgotten ..

Sugar and heart attacks

 Disclaimer: Please take note that this dissertation does not offer medical advice. I am not medically trained, and I am not qualified to give medical advice. This essay is purely a discussion of my personal experience, and is presented as entertainment Consult your doctor for any medical advice you may need.

“One if by land, and two if by sea —

And I on the opposite shore will be . . .

Ready to ride and spread the alarm . . .”

And so it seems established that the urge to spread warnings of imminent danger is founded in our heritage . . .

And accompanying that is the desire to share awareness of cures and solutions.

Being of a somewhat analytical bent I fancy that I have on numerous occasions devised or discovered causes and cures that seem to escape the attention of others. This is written to share a personal experience.

When I was a teenager many of my contemporaries chewed gum. I did for a time . . . I favored Juicy Fruit...

But somehow I found greater pleasure in sucking on a Life Saver.

Pop related that his dentist referred to them as “Tooth Rotters.”

I seemed addicted to them. Always had a roll in my pocket, and a mint in my mouth.

Perhaps that may have contributed . . .

The antibiotic regimen that is  followed by patients of dentists is well understood — a loading dose of 500 mg of Amoxil four hours before a dental procedure that is deemed risky, and 250 mg every hour for the next four hours preceding the dental procedure.

That is the standard prophylaxis, to prevent bacterial incursion through the teeth, into the circulatory system, which might then initiate a myocardial infection.

Bacteria into the teeth, then to the blood, then from the blood to the heart . . .

It has taken me a long time to perceive and accept that ingesting sugar can stimulate the colonization of bacteria in my teeth -- recognizable by the unique pain in the teeth. And demonstrated by vigorously rinsing --”swishing” — a 40% ethyl alcohol solution to sterilize the teeth and eliminate the pain.

( I found a 40% ethanol solution in a bottle on my shelf labeled “Vodka.” )

Avoiding sugar in my diet spares me the pain of the infection that sugar induces into my teeth.  Which, should I falter and consume significant amounts of sugar, produces the infection and its uniquely identifiable pain.

If bacteria in the dentist's office can induce bacterial myocardia, then bacteria from my sweet tooth can certainly create the same sequence of cause and effect.

And in the distant perspective of 60 plus years I am speculating that I may have, by yielding to my craving for sugar, induced the pericarditis that stopped my heart in 1955.    ⁱ (footnote)

As I said in the opening phrases of this triviality, I am bent in a most peculiar way.

My training and experience in troubleshooting the complexities of a malfunctioning main frame computer equip me for the pursuit along abstract lines of logical inquiry, to reach a meaningful conclusion and solve a problem.

The subject matter may vary, but the techniques are mutually applicable.

Sugar consumption may be responsible for many “Heart attacks” — heart failure due to bacterial colonization transmitted through the circulating blood to a susceptible heart.

I know it. But nobody else knows it.

“Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.”

Voltaire

“...there is no new thing under the sun “

Ecclesiastes; 9

i  While attending Del Mar College I went to my nine o;clock organic chemistry class with a slight chest pain. Sitting in class, I suddenly experienced a vigorous cardiac irregularity, which soon yielded to a total cessation of all heartbeat.

Frustration

 That's the name of the game.

I am trying to fill up a bucket that has a hole in the bottom 

It is an old bucket.  It is rusty and as a result there are numerous holes. Allow me to clarify a metaphorical allegory This old body is a bucket.

It's been sitting out in the wind and the rain for many years, and it's getting rusty.  Numerous holes are forming. So that now the water runs out as fast as it's poured in.

I'm trying to fill the bucket to that line at the top, which has associated with it the legend  “Understanding.” 

I am attracted and intrigued by a podcast conversation between Jordan Peterson and Victor Davis Hansen.

I find that they talk faster than I can listen. So I turn on Closed Captions, so that I can read to verify what I think I'm hearing. 

I find their commentary very relevant, penetrating and meaningful — and I find my consciousness is wandering.  

My mentality is rusting. The holes are growing.  And my bucket of comprehension is leaking. It suggests that the bucket is beyond redemption, and the attempt to fill it is futile

A Bounteous Flock of Beautiful Friends

 

Black Bellied Whistling Duck

In 2003 through 2006 I had a small (VERY small) “ranch” south of Alice. There I enjoyed bird watching, and compiled what was for me a significant list of identified bird sightings.

Some were unique occurrences, a “one time only” event. But I didn’t list them unless, with bird book in hand and ten power binoculars in play, I could make a positive identification.

Other were frequent recurring visitors.

Such it was with the Black Bellied Whistling Duck.

The first sighting was a solitary individual, who walked across my property as if it felt at home, giving ample opportunity for certain identification.

Then there were two.

And one glorious day they slowly and majestically paraded their new family of eight across my driveway, walking single file, one adult in front, the other following the line of ducklings.

I continued to enjoy their visits while I remained on my “ranch”.

After I moved into town I occasionally saw one of these ducks perched on telephone lines!

I’ve never seen any other duck sitting on a wire — and I’ve seen a few ducks.

When they utter their unique vocalization, from their vantage point on the high telephone wire, would that be a long distance call?

Texas Cuckoo

One hot summer morning in 1988 my wife and I drove to the Pedernales State Park east of Johnson City in Central Texas. We watched for wildlife along the road leading into the park, and were rewarded with our first sighting of a punk rock roadrunner.

Roadrunners are fairly common in Texas, and I have seen many. But the sight we saw that day will long be remembered. The cuckoo sat beneath a small thorn bush just across the ditch alongside the road, and stared at us as we marveled at him. He stood and erected his crest, and amazed us with the revealed brilliant orange coloration. When he folded it he appeared as any road runner, stately in his gangly pride, with contrasting black, white and brown. But when he erected that crest the luminescent orange was magnificent!

Bird calls

When I told Stan that I had heard a roadrunner cooing, he was skeptical. “In my half century in the South Texas brush I have seen a bunch of roadrunners, and I never heard them coo.”

Well, I understood his dubiosity, but I know what I heard. I was looking right at the bird when it cooed, saw its movements when making the sound, and heard it clearly. Similar to what a pigeon does, but at a lower pitch.

I saw that bird frequently while I sat in the porch swing at my “ranch” (A one room house on a large one acre tract). The elegant fowl pursued its life in the mesquite thicket between my house and the highway, and occasionally I heard it cooing. One day, in an exuberant state of Dr. Doolittle optimism, I attempted to duplicate the sound I heard.

Frankly, I had no expectation of the same success I remember in calling a quail.

To my amazed gratification, the roadrunner replied. More than that, it began moving in my direction. I called again, probably five times in all. With each exchange, the bird moved a little closer. A few halting steps each time it answered, then a pause to assess.  It moved in the open, along my driveway, approaching my position in the porch swing. Finally it became too nervous, and half ran, half flew back to the safety of the thicket.

Some years before, while sitting alone in my car at the skeet range of the Victoria Gun Club, I heard the familiar covey call of the brown bombers — and in response to my call a big cock quail walked to and around the car. He stopped beside the car door, cocked his head and looked up at me...

FOWL OF A FEATHER

Occasionally I was honored by the passing of a flight of wild geese. Canadian honkers. Beautiful. It was always a thrill to watch a flight of the big black and white birds honk their way past in an early morning fog.

One morning while I sat in my swing, reading and relaxing, I heard a flight of geese approaching. I put my book down to watch them, and I was pleased to see about twelve or fifteen geese approaching from the South, low over the trees.

But wait – there’s something strange!

They were flying in their typical V-formation. But they were low, zigging and zagging in a way never seen before.

As I watched, fascinated, they approached, generally headed toward me. And finally they were close enough to see that the leader was smaller … could it be a … ?… yes, it was!

A mallard drake – green head distinctive – was leading the flight of geese. He seemed to be trying to elude them, but they matched his every turn, across my pasture and beyond the trees.

Sparrow Hawk

I have a new companion. No, let me choose another word  —  a new neighbor. His awareness of me is much less than my appreciation of him. He watches me in cautious speculation whenever I am too close – but otherwise he is intent on his own pursuits, and remains blithely unaware of my gaze.

This small Sparrow Hawk sits in silent, patient watchfulness on the power line along the highway, straight out from my kitchen window.  I stand in quiet admiration, observing his occasional plunge to the grass below, extracting an insect or small animal for a hasty meal. He carries it with him to his perch, eating on the mount, and then resumes the hunt. 

As I sat in my porch swing, alternating my gaze from him to a red-bellied woodpecker in the mesquite across the driveway, the hawk spied an item of interest in the driveway in front of me. Swooping in colorful rufous display he swept up a tidbit too small for me to see at thirty feet – and yet he had discerned it from over thirty meters.

As I carried the garbage can to the road behind my house for pickup by the obliging county truck my ubiquitous sparrow hawk flew in acrobatic abandon not twenty feet from me, chasing a very frightened curved-bill thrasher, which protested noisily as it dove to safety in the brush pile alongside the road.  The small hawk abandoned the chase, but the thrasher was so frightened that it refused to leave its refuge in the thorny limbs. It eyed me warily, but clung tenaciously to the security it had found, even though I approached within ten feet.

The sparrow hawk has been resident here for about a month. Where, I wonder, did it abide previously? And how long will it bless me with its entertaining presence?

No matter – I will enjoy it so long as it graces my neighborhood, and then I will look anew to another neighbor. Spring approaches, and with it the return of the scissortails, with their noisy chittering and graceful aerial ballet. Life is a tableau of continuing, changing delights. And I enjoy them all.

Pianos

I don't know why, but I had a longing for a piano. In 1957, while living with my parents at 1614 10^th Street in Corpus Christi, I got Mom to accompany me to a piano store way out on Ayers. A cooperative salesman demonstrated several used pianos, and made me a price, to include delivery, on an old but serviceable spinet.

For $125 I owned a piano.

In retrospect I must admire Pop for his tolerance — for I did all this without his permission — all the while ignoring his reaction to my Horn playing at 4329 Kostoryz.

I enjoyed the piano, but I abandoned it without regret when I married Marty and moved out.

PIANO #2

A few years flew by, and in 1960 I was living in Austin with my second wife Doris.

We visited her biological father's sister at her home north of Austin. There I discovered an old piano, very rough in both appearance and functionality. It was sitting out, exposed to the rain, and really looked bad. And played worse.

It was mine for the asking.

Doris' Aunt's two sons were strong, healthy teenagers — and her husband, Vince Rush, was a very healthy, functional sixty year old. Who owned a pickup truck.

We moved the sad old piano to the living room of my apartment at 306-1/2 W. 42^nd Street in north Austin.

Vince was born in 1900. At the time described above I was twenty-four. I regarded Vince as an old man. Today, as I write this I am eighty -six — and I look back with sad longing for what I was, and for what I could do, when I was sixty.

I addressed the cosmetic issues on the piano. Quantities of “plastic wood” were used to reform the rounded-off corners, and sandpaper and black high gloss enamel transformed the appearance.

In that period I was attending the University of Texas, and welcoming my daughter Elizabeth to our existence.

School by day, and working part time at various jobs — including full-charge bookkeeper for a small manufacturing firm (Toungate and Coates, mfg of fiberglass cooling towers), and then as a printer's assistant on a huge four color printing press at the Steck Printing plant.   I found occasional part time work in helping two brothers who owned a used furniture store, where I bought furniture for our apartment, when they delivered furniture.

Through them I contacted a piano repairman — a somewhat elderly colored man who came to my apartment, deftly removed the “works” from the piano, and returned and reinstalled it a week later, and tuned the piano, for a very nominal fee.

I was proud. I was the owner of a beautiful piano which played like a brand new one. I enjoyed it.

At the end of the spring semester at UT I grew discouraged when I could not find a job — prospective employers refused to invest in a new worker who would certainly quit when the next semester started.

So when Pop came to town, driving his big yellow Ford pickup truck with the cow skull, complete with horns, mounted on the front of the hood — and announced that he (along his wife and daughters) was moving to Tucson, I said “Wait for me — I'm going with you!”

He did, — and I did.

I left that beautiful black piano in the care of the furniture dealer brothers.

PIANO #3

Fast forward, through more moves, new jobs, and two more children for me and Doris. We lived in Alice, Texas, where I worked for NCR. In the living room of our house at 765 Schallert was a beautiful upright piano.

Doris commented on the look of serene ecstasy that showed on my face while I was playing.

Her awareness of my attachment to the piano doubtless figured in her decision to take the piano with her when she left me in late 1966. Movers came in while I was at work and emptied the house. She also emptied my life — taking my three children from me. There began the most agonizingly sad period of my entire life.

PIANO #4

I survived — and in 1969 I married Evelyn. We bought a house at 1907 E. Warren in Victoria in 1973, and in 1975 I bought a NEW piano.

In 1979 I left Evelyn.  And the piano.

PIANO #5

More unwise and regrettable decisions led me through a progression of relocations, through Corpus Christi,  Austin,  Denver, then Birmingham, and a return to Texas in 2003 -- where I settled in Alice.

While living in a house that I bought in 2006 at 1145 E.5^th Street in Alice I bought a used piano in a downtown junk store. Stan Russell and his trailer helped me get the piano home. From 2007 until 2013 I spent hours playing that old piano — styled, incidentally an UPRIGHT GRAND. Rich tone.

Regrettable and unwise decisions found me leaving Alice in 2013 — and I left tha piano when I vacated the house.

Now, when I buy a lottery ticket, I dream of the special treats that I will enjoy should I ever win. I visualize a house with a living room capacious enough to embrace a GRAND PIANO. Such a juvenile longing. But understandable. After all, somewhere, piano number six awaits . . .