National Dog Day...

“National Dog Day” yesterday, got me thinking about Ohio the Wonder Dog…

Carla and I spent our first year together on 35 acres of remote woods, just outside of Athens, Ohio where we were in school at Ohio University. Home was a rectangular pole house that violated every known building code. One afternoon Carla decided that it would be a good idea to adopt a free puppy that another student was offering to a crowd sitting on the steps of the Student Union building. A Shepherd/Lab mix about 5 weeks old, not fully weaned from her mother. Baby “Ohio” trembled uncontrollably on shaky legs when she lapped her warm milk. She was so unsteady and new.

Fast forward five years and “Ohio” was the shire reeve of our five-acre wood in Loudoun Co. Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC, where I worked. The log cabin built in 1729 on land that was part of a grant from Lord Fairfax was attached to a summer house circa 1852. Ohio had her own house on the front porch. She preferred to live outside, even on the coldest nights, keeping busy as she took her guard duties very seriously, patrolling the perimeter and controlling the varmint population in the surrounding woods. For several years she ate no commercial dog food, just too stuffed with rabbit, possum, squirrel, and raccoon to have another bite when offered, but thanks anyway. Although we had no neighbors within hearing distance, nor outside lights, even on the darkest nights I knew that she was watching, alert and ready to challenge any interlopers, animal or human that were foolish enough to trespass. In the morning, before I went to work, I put on dirty gloves to pick the yard clean of skeletal remains from her latest dinner, tossing them up into the tree of death.

As I went off to work, it was with complete confidence that Carla, Ruth, and baby Hannah were safe from trespassers and boogie men. Ohio made sure of it. While Carla and the girls played and slept on the inside, Ohio protected the nest from the outside.

Although she was never heavy, no more than 70 pounds tops, she had a mouth like a barracuda and the heart of a Wolverine. If Carla or the girls were threatened in any way, she would give her life to put a stop to that shit. On warm afternoons though, Ohio would lie in the front yard with her very best friend, Ruth, and doze in the sun just a bit while Ruth quietly read stories to her. Total peace and calm for both of them.

But god help the UPS man or a new meter reader who didn’t know that he should always bring his binoculars to read the meter if he expected to go back to his own home at night with both legs still attached and working.

That good dog lived to be 17, pretty old for a big dog. The day I had her put down some 25 years ago, remains, the saddest day of my life.

I wrote of her back in the day:

Ohio is feeling old but still hunts on bright nights.

I collected her prizes and hung them in the tree of death.

Her larder swings with stiff winds and drips with memories of once plump Opossum civilians who should have chosen the road not taken.

Still needle-toothed skulls leer down at Ohio with a mocking sass.

No knowledge that it’s a little late for such bravado.

Who Are Your People?

I guess it was a Southern thing. Upon meeting someone new, Grandma Maverick would ask: “Who are your people?” These days, we’re too transient for a question like that to have relevance anymore. My Dad’s family, the Hallers, go back to the founding of Frederick, Maryland in the late 1700’s. I can visit Mount Olivet Cemetery and say hello to my ancestors, they all hang out there. But I don’t care to call on them, that group is not much fun, just too quiet. Dad and his brothers were the first generation to leave town for college and a less provincial existence. That’s the way many Southern towns used to be. People were born, lived and died in a 30-mile radius, and they knew who their people were.

Dad had been happy to move on and let the past go. Grandma Maverick became an accomplished family genealogist doing the exact opposite. She and Grandpa had both been born in San Antonio, Texas, had grown up together, and in spite of moving away like my father had from Frederick, they never let Grandpa  Maverick’s  heritage fade from view. Even though Grandma’s father had been a prominent railroad man, a friend of Mexican president Porforio Diaz who largely credited him with ramping up the Mexican rail system as it exploded from 398 miles of track to over 15 thousand miles in less than 20 years. That was around the turn of the century, and Grandma spoke of her memories of being a little girl, riding down into Mexico in their own sleeping car. Still, however, Grandmas focus was on the Maverick side of the family.  She maintained that although we were no better than anyone else, we were just as good.

In 1971 when the Army thought they needed me to go visit the quagmire that was Vietnam, I ran over to the Air Force and enlisted with them, keeping a keen eye on computer systems training. Not too many computers on the front lines, I noted.  But it was when I was sent back to hallowed ground for basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, that I understood what Grandma had meant. Gathering with other young guys from all over the States on our first night there, the only thing that many of us had in common, were the clothes we wore in our civilian lives: bell bottom jeans with Zig Zag patches in my case, long hair, beads, all the accoutrements of the counterculture. Mostly it was a sign that we rejected our parents dress and assumptive lifestyles, smoked ganja, and thought we weren’t in uniform, which of course, we were.

But it was on day two, after the Air Force made us strip down to our tidy whities, after they shaved off our long hair, standing there, out of uniform, naked, no more beads to identify our clan, no flowing manes, no decorative jeans with torn knees, it was at that moment that I realized that almost all of my 24 hour buddies, were lost, naked and adrift. Without the show, the brightly colored finery, most of the guys no longer knew who they were. They became putty in the hands of the DI who was yelling at us. Oh sure, I did as I was told, but the difference between myself and many of the others was that I knew that I was a Haller and a Maverick. No better but just as good as anybody there, or anywhere else. So yes, Grandma, I knew who my people were, and that everything was going to be just fine.

MAVERICK

"This is a biography of a word. It is about a word that was essentially born in Texas, grew up to achieve success here, and eventually became famous the world over.  It has now gone well beyond its modest roots as a simple noun and transformed itself into impressive, symbolic fame as a metaphor. 

The word is maverick. Maverick got its start in San Antonio, Texas, more than 150 years ago. In the world of words, it is a star: James Garner played Maverick in the TV western of the same name in the ’50s and ’60s, Tom Cruise was Maverick in Top Gun, Senator John McCain’s nickname is Maverick, and in Texas have the world champion Dallas Mavericks basketball team. The word means one who shuns custom, the lone wolf, one who blazes their own trail and is willing to go against the crowd, an independent thinker.

Those are the more symbolic meanings of maverick, but most people know that the word’s original meaning referred to unbranded cattle. Any cow that was unbranded was a maverick. But what fewer people know is that the original herd of unbranded cattle that launched the expression was owned by a man named Samuel Maverick. Those unbranded cows were Maverick’s cows. That is how the term came about. Ironic that his failure to brand his cattle branded his name in perpetuity. 

Some say that this was his clever means of claiming all unbranded cattle as his own. 

“There’s another unbranded calf. That’s mine.” Not true.

The fact of the matter is that Sam was not all that interested in ranching. He was a land baron, a real estate investor. He was more interested in acquiring land than actively farming or ranching it. He at one time owned so much land in Texas that he ranked up there with Richard King and Charles Goodnight. There is even a county named for him – Maverick County. Eagle Pass is the county seat.

I think it is a shame that Samuel Maverick became famous for his unbranded cattle because there are dozens of far more impressive ways that he demonstrated his maverick nature. He was a rare and unsung hero of the Texas revolution. In so being, he often lived up, quite impressively, to what his name would come to mean. 

As a rich lawyer in South Carolina (with a degree from Yale), everybody in the Maverick clan expected young Samuel would take over one of his father’s many businesses. But he didn’t. He shocked them all when he chose a different path. He said that he was going to Texas to seek his fortune.

He arrived in San Antonio in 1835 as the winds of war were blowing. No one was buying land then because no one was sure they could hold it. Sam bucked that trend. He jumped in quickly and bought huge tracts of land around San Antonio and further east on along the Brazos. He seemed to believe in the old folk wisdom that you should buy land when no one wants it and sell it when everyone does.

He quickly became a trusted and admired man in San Antonio and joined the Alamo militia.

In fact, he would have died at the Alamo had he not been selected by his fellow volunteers to sign the Texas Declaration of Independence as their representative. So he was a maverick on March 2, 1836, when he risked his life, along with 59 others Texans, by the act of signing what Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna considered a treasonous document.

After independence was won, Samuel Maverick served as mayor of San Antonio, again putting a target on his back as a leading citizen of a rebellious city. Santa Anna had not given up on getting Texas back and so kept a list of those who were his enemies. 

Six years after Independence, Santa Anna struck again. He sent General Adrian Woll to rattle his sabre in San Antonio and kill all those who took up arms against him. Maverick organized a resistance on the roof of the Maverick building. It was comprised of 53 men. Though they killed 14 and wounded 27 in the initial skirmish, they were soon surrounded by 900 Mexican troops and were forced to surrender.

Fortunately for Maverick and his friends, Woll did not carry out orders to execute them, probably because they were more valuable alive. Woll instead took many of these prominent Texans as prisoners and marched them back 1,000 brutal miles to Perote prison. One of them died along the way. Even today, at the Witte Museum, you can the water gourd that sustained Sam during that tumultuous march across Texas and Mexico.

Sam and friends were put into dark cells, chained together, and subjected to forced labor. Sam, as the representative of his men, asked for better conditions and was put into solitary confinement just for asking. 

After a couple of months, Sam was told that Santa Anna would offer him his freedom in exchange for signing a document saying that Texas had been illegally seized and should be returned to Mexico. Lesser men might have taken the deal. But Maverick refused. He wrote, “I cannot bring myself to think that it would be in the best interest of Texas to reunite with Mexico. This being my settled opinion, I cannot sacrifice the interest of my country even to obtain my liberty, still less can I say so when such is not my opinion, for I regard a lie as a crime and one which I cannot commit.  I must, therefore, make up my mind to wear my chains, galling as they are.”

While Sam was in the dungeon, unbeknownst to him, San Antonians elected him as their Congressional Representative in the Republic of Texas. 

His release was finally negotiated by General Waddy Thompson, a family friend who was also trusted by Santa Anna. He did not have to sign anything. But Sam refused to leave without his San Antonio friends. He waited for them to be freed, too, which happened within a few days. Then they all traveled back to San Antonio together.

When Sam left the prison, he took with him the chains that had bound him all those long months as a lifelong reminder of the incalculable value of freedom."

W.F. Strong is a Fulbright Scholar and professor of Culture and Communication at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. At Public Radio 88 FM in Harlingen, Texas, he’s the resident expert on Texas literature, Texas legends, Blue Bell ice cream, Whataburger (with cheese) and mesquite smoked brisket. 

Reflection...

Every day for several years now, I’ve passed this Nick Patton print that hangs in my hallway next to a large mirror. They complement and balance each other, framing worlds both present and ethereal. The mirror flips me around, offering a perspective I can only see from outside myself. It shows me the forest while I’m still among the trees.  Conversely, Nick’s painting draws me in and invites me to a different place, somewhere very familiar, just out of memory’s reach. A beam of sunlight warms a wooden chair and my mood. Light slats blaze with floating dust protozoa, undulating, in and out of view like microscopic bumper cars, cilia driving directionless traffic. Children’s voices, muted in dual soliloquy, bounce softly down the stairs. Presents still wrapped in brown paper coats, vie for space on a high shelf inside the narrow closet, chair sentinel guarded, offering an invitation to sit. I pause, quiet in the moment, before my climbing footsteps make my presence known to the eager chaos that awaits me there, more valuable than each breath I take on my way home, just 5 stairs up.

hmh

June Bugs...Start Your Engines!

On humid summer nights in the late 1950’s, my Grandparents house was surrounded by the ominously dark woods of their Virginia land.  Mating screams of a million cicadas pulsed the air like a wild heartbeat, essential to the ebb and flow of those sweaty August evenings, the air heavy with petrichor. Bright porch lights attracted a mob of insects, and many huge, colorful moths to the screen like flies to a picnic lunch. As a budding entomologist, it was a little slice of heaven for me to be able to skirt the outside walls while the adults on the porch socialized with friends and settled many of the great problems in the world, over drinks, ice cubes clattering a kind of reassurance to me that all was well in mine.

 Although there were many larger insects to choose from, I looked for the June bugs, often hearing them before seeing them. Loud, bumbling fliers, insect dirigibles, crash landing and bouncing off the screen harmlessly onto the surrounding bushes, all just SOP for those guys. Selecting the pick of the litter and dropping them into a jar partially filled with leaves and grass, I screwed on the lid after punching plenty of holes in it. I wanted to assure myself that my new champions would get a good night’s sleep, ready for their flying competitions in the morning.  

Ten AM or so was perfect flying time, the sun fully committed to the day. With some of Grandma’s finest thread, I carefully folded the end into a slip knot, a leg noose, and slid it up just under the joint of the largest rear leg of each flier. When I had one ready to go, I launched him into the wind, watching intently as he lifted slowly, gaining both speed and elevation. Ten, twenty feet overhead, circling, diving, looping with the sound of a miniature buzz-saw. June bugs are the work horses of the flying insect world. Whenever I had a friend staying with me in the guest house, we would have races. The fliers could only lift a certain amount of thread, maybe thirty feet or so. Then they would level out, unable to climb any higher. We would clip the thread and let them go on their own, trailing aft down-lines, their elevations maxed out. Running underneath, we could catch them with a minimal jump, sometimes tying two lines together to watch them vie for direction and dominance. All great fun with no casualties. We tired of the game before they did. With delicate precision, the June flyers were cut loose of their bonds, given their emancipation documents, and tossed gently into the wind.  

I’m glad to have grown up before the days of personal electronics. Now, too many kids sit inside on Summer nights staring into the lights of a smart phone or similar device, all somewhat reminiscent of those bugs on a porch screen, staring into the lights. These days the main thing flying with the kids, is their thumbs.

hmh

Your Advice, Please?

As I’ve said many times here on FB, Carla and I have been married almost 40 years and I still love and lust for her as much as when we were young. That’s partially due to the fact that we are polar opposites. I’m a planner and obnoxiously anal about many things. I want everything in the house, and my life, to be just so. She lives a stream of consciousness lifestyle, blowing unpredictably with any wind that catches her fancy. My own rigidity can be irritating, while Carla’s unreliability can be frustrating as well. Somehow in the bigger picture all of that works for us. 

Take this morning for example. Food planning, preparation and presentation are important to me. Carla thinks I’m crazy to devote so much time and effort. She happened to be home from her night job this morning and had an hour or so before she had to head out to her day job. (I know that sounds nuts, but it’s her call. She is a worker and likes money. The day job is to provide in-home elder care to a lady in her mid-nineties who sleeps most of the time so Carla can too.) Anyway, I started to make a breakfast I had planned a day in advance, as I often do with meals. This morning it was fresh Flounder dusted with corn meal and Old Bay, two organic eggs, scrambled with baby leaf spinach and a three-cheese Mexican blend, a toasted English muffin, home ground organic coffee, and a Virgin Bloody Mary. Carla declined it all and ate a piece of cold boiled corn she found still floating in the pan of water that I had cooked it in last night. She gnawed on that, standing up over the sink, as I carefully folded my napkin into a triangle and placed it under my fork, to the right my plate, where it is supposed to go. My Pandora was playing and with the table set for one, I sat down, taking a bite of muffin, while Carla grabbed up all of her Publix bags. She often carries three or four bags of extra stuff…condiments, napkins, plastic ware, clothes and God knows what else. One of the few times I did look inside a bag that tore open, I found metal solder, some party balloons, a stale croissant wrapped in a napkin, and a partially used lipstick tube (She doesn’t use lipstick). Don’t ask me to explain.  Then, with a rush to my side and a quick smack on the cheek, she left for her day job. 

Seven minutes later she called me. I knew it was something, I was guessing that it was gas. “I’m out of gas at the intersection of US1 and 206. I asked some lady to push me but she said that she didn’t know how.” I told her that I would grab my gas can and be there in about eight minutes. I was. I gassed her up and listened to make sure that her sixteen-year-old civic junker would start up again, and with a deep throated cough due to a large hole in the muffler, it did. She was off again, kicking up dust from the swale.

So here’s the advice part. Carla’s gas gage works just fine. Somehow she thinks that she is saving money by stretching out the miles between fill-ups, or only buying a few gallons at a time. I’ve explained to her that if she drives the same number of miles, she uses the same amount of gas regardless of how frequently or infrequently she buys it. But logic doesn’t work and I get the “out of gas” call about three times a year. Am I an enabler? If I refused to rescue her and she had to wait for AAA or walk to a gas station and hope to borrow a gas can, would it stick? If she didn’t have old reliable (me) just a phone call away, would she make sure that she never ran out again?

OK, tell me what to do. Continue to rescue her or put my foot down?

I already know the answer though. It’s not an issue of logic. Certainly I will continue to rescue her because she is the way she is and so am I. I have the gas can filled up and ready to go, sitting in its spot on a shelf in the shed. I’m organized and ready. Carla will grab her Publix bags and go, wherever and whenever she pleases, without a care in the world.

I love that.

hmh

An Average Life/Bio

I̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶b̶o̶r̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶o̶o̶r̶ ̶b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶c̶h̶i̶l̶d̶.̶ ̶ Sorry, that was Steve Martin. We weren't poor. Dad was a successful attorney with his own law practice at 25 Broadway in Manhattan. He was top of his class at Johns Hopkins and at Harvard Law. A very pleasant man, a walking encyclopedia, who didn't care much for kids. He cared very much for Mom though, and kids happened. Four of us. Our house was just like the Beaver's house. Mom wore dresses and pearls. She even looked a bit like June Cleaver. Dad read the paper and smoked Kent cigarettes. All that proper behavior gave me the hives though, so I went over to my buddy, David Callahan's house. Chaos ruled there. A Black Racer escaped from its cage and zipped all over the place and half-way up the walls, trying to bite people at every opportunity. Antique rifles were stacked in most corners. Many were loaded. A babysitter blew a hole through the living room floor and into the basement. We made bombs and blew stuff up. Mrs Callahan stocked the kitchen cabinets with Twinkies, chips, and all the wonderful “junk food” items that my mother never bought. If my house was like a library, David's was like a carnival.

College in North Alabama was an eye opener. I only went there because when my freshman year ended at the University of Georgia, they didn't invite me back. At Athens College, the entry requirements were not so tough. If you could fog a mirror, you were in. After four years of insanity dealing with all the social changes that Robert Zimmerman had been croaking heresies about while I was in a town straight out of the 1930's, I graduated in spite of it all.

But first, I lost a game of Ping-Pong to Howard Rau and was too bored to wait for my next chance to be up. Very stoned, impatient for life to start happening, I slipped around the corner and into a phone booth to call my college girlfriend who had already gone home. I asked her to marry me because I thought that was just what people did when they got out of college and I had at least another ten minutes before it was my turn back at the Ping Pong table anyway. That call set in motion a nightmare of events that included a huge church wedding, which I especially hated, and an old man three piece band that I hated even more. We divorced two years later.

Having drawn a low lottery number and with the Army breathing down my neck, I ran over to the Air Force recruiter and got myself signed up. DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency. Four years in the bowels of the Pentagon keeping records on Red Chinese missile sites and Jane Fonda. I witnessed shockingly few examples of any kind of intelligence at all.

Four years of bachelorhood in a huge lakeside townhouse shared with three other bachelors was one big, fantastic party. I was like Snoopy on top of his dog house, dancing feet a blur. So happy not to be married, every morning was Christmas when the fog cleared and the thought of being single came rushing back to embrace me, like waking up a millionaire with Heather Locklear next to me (remember, this was some 35 years ago. She was hot!).

But fate had other plans for my time. Working at The Reston Times newspaper, where I had been for a year or two, Carla started working in the classified department and we hit it off. I fell hard and we eloped within six months of meeting. Now, 36 years later, we have two unique and wonderful daughters.

Ruth is 33, a professional assistant and show nanny for some rich people in Hollywierd. The old, ugly nanny has to stay home when they travel. Ruth's life is all about private jets, personal chefs, trainers, bodyguards, and multiple estates. Tough duty.

Hannah is 28, a gypsy hippie yoga instructor who has been on her own since she was 15. She just didn't come home one day, called me, and told me that she had rented a condo on the beach, was safe and happy and didn't need my support. We've always been close and she's always been her own boss. That determination has taken her all over the world, solo. Dancing on tables in a tapas bar in Spain, surfing the coast of Rio, living in South Africa, Australia, SE Asia...and now in Medellin, Columbia. She's such a breath of fresh air.

Largely, her mom is responsible. Carla home schooled the girls. Threw out the rule book and listened very carefully to the girls needs. No TV, lots of books, field trips, chickens, country living at it's best. I worked in a variety of roles. Rising up through the ranks of a national air courier business in the 1980's, software development and sales in the early 1990's.

That's when we moved to Florida. I launched a magazine: “New Homes and Communities” recognizing the benefit of chasing the new construction market in Florida. That went well and lead me to the proverbial “offer I couldn't refuse”. I went to work as a realtor for a large home-builder that had been a print advertising client. The money got crazy and we bought investment houses. The recession put an end to all that. I'm a genius Realtor, I buy high and sell low.

Now the dust has settled and we're relatively poor again. I still work for a builder, but only part time. We live in what had been our smallest rental, and life is very, very good. Sometimes it's more about what you save than what you earn.

All in all, an average, uneventful life. Like most people, we spent the first half of our lives acquiring two of everything we never really needed, and the second half trying to get rid of that stuff. Life is simpler now, my give-a-shit levels are almost bottomed out. I care a lot more about a very few things, family, friends, and a lot less about most other things. But we've never had to deal with tragedy, lost a child, faced cancer or major illness. We've just had a very long string of warm, wonderful days full of great food and lots of laughter... days that turned into years, a lifetime. Maybe that's not so average after all.

hmh