Category Archives: Personal

Another old picture

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I’m sure no one finds these old pictures as interesting as me, but here’s another one. It’s a scan of a Polaroid that had a lot of dust on it.

Me, with Jesse riding shotgun

Me, with Jesse riding shotgun

This was taken in 1979. I was 29 and had only recently adopted Jesse. As you can see, my hand is on Jesse. Any time I was close enough to touch her, I had my hand on her. The VW is a 1972 bus, the best of a dozen or so that my friend Errol and I looked at in Atlanta. Jesse and I were getting ready to take a trip in this picture. We went up to New Kensington, Pa, to see my brother, and then out to Colorado and New Mexico to visit Errol’s brother Tom.

I’ll point out a few things of interest. Behind me you can see two foam mattresses. The lower was Jesse’s at night, and the higher one was mine. My father figured a way to span the gap between the third row seat and the driver’s seat with a bunk. It worked great. Jesse rode on the bunk during the day with her head on my shoulder. She was a good traveler.

You can see that there was a time that I had no gray hair in my beard, and I had a full head of hair. And no spare tire. For any runners, the shoes I am wearing are the great-grandfather of all modern running shoes, the Nike Waffle Trainer. I bought a pair of them in San Francisco in 1977 to train for and run in a marathon held near Carson City, Nevada. My knees worked in those days.

The Airstream trailer in the background was the one my parents used for several years to travel all over the country, and into Mexico and Canada.

The VW had the same old air-cooled four-cylinder engine that the Beetle had. It would do just about 60 miles per hour on the highway. It had no air conditioning, but if you opened the driver’s window and cranked the huge sunroof open a little, there was a smooth, relatively quiet flow of air through the cab. It was bearable even in the summer. In the winter, however, the pitiful little puff of lukewarm air that came through the heater vents was just about enough to keep frost off of your toenails.

Jesse and I spent a lot of nights in that old VW. We stayed in campgrounds, in rest areas and in parking lots.

There is really no context in which you can say that an old VW bus was a good car. It was slow and dangerous. On the front end there was literally nothing but a thin piece of sheet metal between you and the world. The rule was, if it looks like a car is going to hit you, lift your legs.

But I miss it.

When I say I would like to have it back again, what I really mean is that I would like to be 29 again.

On the trail with BD and Jesse

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I got Jesse from the pound in Atlanta in 1979 when I was bumming around after quitting work at the Augusta newspaper (That was the second time; that time it took, and I never went back.) Her cage had a sign identifying her as a Dalmatian named Sugar who was not good with children. She wasn’t a Dalmatian. I think she was mostly some kind of birddog. She was too smart to be a Dalmatian. She was not “Sugar”. There was no way I was going to step outside and scream, “SUGAR!!!” So she became Jesse. And I suspect that it was kids who were not good with her.

She went everywhere with me. When I brought her home to my parents’, she came inside with me, the first dog ever allowed to stay inside my mother’s house. When I decided to go to graduate school at Georgia Tech, a requirement for finding a place to stay was that dogs be allowed.

She was good company, much better, in fact, than any roommate I had while at Tech. Every day when I came home I changed clothes and walked her a couple of blocks to a vacant area where I could let her run free for an hour or so.

I ran too, but it didn’t relieve all the stress.

Graduate school is stressful. My brother, who also got his PhD from Georgia Tech, said several times he thought he just couldn’t take any more, so he went home and started packing. Me, too. Graduate school is like working full time and going to school full time. Coursework means you always take your work home with you, or, most likely, don’t go home until all the work is done.

School was not the only source of stress. I lived about three blocks from I-75. There was a railroad line just behind the houses across the street from where I lived. Jets flew over all the time to Hartsfield or to one of the local airports. The noise was constant: cars, trucks, trains, airplanes. Sometimes I would stand in the driveway and listen, and think, if I don’t get away from this noise I am going to go freaking crazy.

So on some weekends I would drive up to northeast Georgia where there were several places to access the Appalachian Trail. Saturday mornings I would pack my stuff, load Jesse into the car and drive a couple of hours to a trail crossing. I would walk into the woods at a leisurely pace, stop somewhere for lunch, walk on a bit and find a nice, level campsite not too far off the trail. We spent the night and then walked back to the car on Sunday morning. A lot of people consider backpacking a competitive sport. Their goal is miles. My goal was to get away from things for a while, so I almost never went more than six miles or so along the trail.

Jesse probably ran two or three miles for every mile I walked. She was kind of like our current dog Zeke, who runs wild when he’s off the leash. But Jesse was reliable; she always came back. She kept track of me. She would run off ahead of me, and then after a while, come running back to me and take off in the opposite direction. Sometimes she would disappear ahead of me and then show up behind me. She was always orbiting me.

I loved those hikes.

It took me five and a half years to finish at Tech. I went to work in Huntsville, Alabama, in June 1986. I still occasionally went backpacking in Georgia, but it was a considerably longer drive. I don’t think my father ever went hiking with me when I was at Tech, but he did after I graduated. These pictures are from a hike we made in the fall of 1987. My father was 70 years old then. He looked damned good, and he managed the hikes at least as well as I did. All of these pictures are scanned from my old 35 mm slides.

BD at an overlook. Look at the old Army canteen.

BD at an overlook. Look at the old Army canteen.

About “BD”. My brother and I called our father Daddy. Apparently as very small boys we started calling him Pop, but he objected, so he became Daddy from then on. Our mother was Mother, but our father was Daddy. At some time many years ago, we started calling him Big Daddy. I don’t know where it came from, or even exactly when it started. I must have been pretty young. “Big Daddy” became “BD”. Long after we had grown up, if we ever had to write a note to him to leave on the kitchen counter, we addressed it to BD. My brother got him a black baseball cap with BD embroidered in yellow. We still have that cap somewhere.

On the trail

On the trail

Setting up camp

Setting up camp. Jesse is thirsty.

On this particular hike, we lost Jesse for a while. We had been walking when we realized that we hadn’t seen her for a long time. It was odd, because she usually checked in with us every 20 or 30 minutes. So we stopped to wait for her. We called some, but mainly just waited. I was pretty confident that she would find us if she was able to move, because I had already had some experience with her scenting ability.

So we sat and waited. I don’t remember how long it took, but she eventually showed up. She was very tired. I think she might have come back to the trail and somehow decided to go back towards the car. I think she ran all the way back to the car, saw we weren’t there, and then turned around and ran back to us. I don’t know that for sure, but that’s always been what I thought.

Another thing I have thought all these years is that Jesse had caught and killed something. I saw the blood on the side of her face and assumed it was from another animal. It was only recently that I had reason to rethink that. As I posted before, on one of Zeke’s unauthorized, wild romps through the woods, he snagged one of his ears on something and the flopping ear left blood all over the side of his face within the radius of his ear. If you look at Jesse’s face, you can see a similar pattern. Her ears were longer than Zeke’s, so it left a bigger trace. So, after all these years, I finally know that Jesse didn’t kill something, she just snagged her ear. Not that she never killed anything; she was pure hell on possums. But not this time.

Jesse, recovering, with blood from her ear

Jesse, recovering, with blood from her ear

I guess it was not long after this that I took another hike with Jesse. She did her usual wild running, but this time it was different. We were about a mile from the car on our way back on Sunday when she ran up behind me, came around ahead of me and laid down across the trail. The message couldn’t have been clearer: she needed to rest. I sat down and gave her a while to recover. Then I said, “Come on, Jesse, let’s go.” She got up, walked about 20 feet, then laid down again. This time I had to make her get up. We had to get back to the car, and I knew she could rest as long as she wanted once she got into the back seat.

Jesse, at rest

Jesse, at rest

I thought she was tired because she had not been getting as much exercise as she used to, and she was at least eight years old. Now I think she must have already had the cancer that killed her the next year.

When I look at these pictures of Jesse I feel a strong urge to reach out and stroke her knotty head. I would always put my hand on her head and scratch it. Sometimes she closed her eyes when I did that.

I could physically feel her head under my hand for years after she died.

I can still feel it if I try.

Zoe’s dilemma, and ours

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Such a cute little kitty

Such a cute little kitty

I don’t make a secret of the fact that I’m a dog lover, and not so much a cat lover. I think I understand the appeal of cats, and I certainly understand and respect that Leah is far more a cat lover than a dog lover. So I have tried to accommodate, if not welcome our cat overlords.

But Zoe has stressed my accommodative powers, weak as they are, to the limit.

Zoe is affectionate only under very limited circumstances. If he’s hungry, he will purr and rub up against your leg. He looks and sounds oh, so affectionate. So you put his food down, he eats a little, and he walks away. Once you have served your purpose, you are no longer a part of his universe. One time he escaped from my truck at my mother’s house and disappeared for two weeks. I helped Leah search for him, and we eventually found him hiding under a neighbor’s deck. When we took him to my mother’s house, he was absolutely in love with Leah, me and my mother. For a while. And then we fed him.

He lies on the couch with us sometimes as we watch television, but that’s just a coincidence. He was going to lie there anyway. He does not seek out petting or cuddling; in fact, he actively rejects it.

"Your feeble skills are no match for the power of the Dark Side."

“Your feeble skills are no match for the power of the Dark Side.”

So the first problem is that he provides no emotional benefit to Leah, his loving owner. She tries. Oh, yes, she tries. But it does no good. He is just not interested.

The second problem is that he’s a mean cat with the other cats. He bites them and jumps on them and generally gives them a hard time. Based on my observations of some of the other cats, that’s not particularly unusual, but in his case, it seems to be more than purely feline instinct. He seems to pretty much just hate everyone.

The third, and most severe problem, is that he’s mean with Leah. He’s a biter. A few years ago he bit Leah on the arm, and she ended up with an infection severe enough that she had to make daily visits to an urgent care facility for antibiotic injections (in the butt) for a week. She was so sick for the first visit that she had to call a friend to take her to the doctor.

And then, almost a year to the day, Zoe bit her again. This time she ended up in the hospital for IV antibiotics.

And now the fourth problem, the one that precipitated this post: It’s his bathroom habits. It’s not just that he spends all day outside and then comes in to use his litter box. It’s not just that he tracks litter everywhere in the house; I know that’s a problem for many cat owners. It’s not even that he seems to make a circuit of the entire house to make sure there’s litter in every room. The real problem is that he is apparently oblivious to his own excrement once it leaves his body. He steps into the littler box, squats, pees, and then turns around and walks directly through it to leave the box. So he walks around with wet litter on his feet, spreading in throughout the house.

That’s not the worst of it. The worst is that he does the same thing with his poop. Last night, when he came into our bedroom and plopped onto the floor, his hind feed had poop on them. Our bedroom is the only room in the house with carpet, and the only place I walk barefoot. So I (we) walk across a carpet that has cat pee and poop residue on it.

And sometimes he jumps up on our bed to nap. He likes to lie on my side.

I have said to Leah in the past that Zoe is not fit to be an inside cat. It’s not that I don’t like cats. He’s just too mean and too dangerous and too dirty to have inside. I have suggested that she get a good cat, one that will be affectionate and, possibly, hopefully, reasonably competent at using a litter box. Maybe even one that likes to ride in a car with us. But Leah has had Zoe for around 10 years and can’t think of him as anything but the cat she wishes he was. She doesn’t want to just toss him outside, never to come in again.

To be fair, there are some considerations about this. He is on a special diet (no, not human arms) because of his delicate digestive tract. He has to eat canned food, and the other cats would eat it all if we fed him outside. He has to have eyedrops twice a day for his glaucoma, and that’s a two-person job (if one is not a lion tamer) and one most easily accomplished inside on a countertop. With newspaper spread to keep his feet off the countertop. So if we did toss him outside — I mean if we set him free to be the outdoor cat he is truly meant to be — we would probably have to bring him inside sometimes. Under careful supervision, and without access to a litter box.

So that’s out little dilemma.

That’s my view on the subject. Now heeeeere’s Leah!

I will admit that he’s the cat from hell*, but I just can’t toss him out to become an outdoor cat. I really shouldn’t care, I don’t guess, but I do, and I don’t know why. This has been a problem through our marriage, and we wish and hope that we can resolve it. If anyone has any advice, please feel free to give it.

* Mark again. Zoe was found as a tiny kitten wandering in the parking lot at a Piggly Wiggly grocery store. We don’t know who his mother was, but I have often said that his father was the devil.

Tom gets his feet wet

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“A whole new world can open up if you’re just willing to get your feet wet.” (Tom M., c 1988)

My friend Tom said that one day when I was visiting him with his brother Errol and Errol’s wife Cookie and daughter Debra. Tom has always been good at that kind of epigram.

At the time I was living in Huntsville, Alabama, and Errol and his family were living just outside Atlanta. Tom was living in Espanola, NM, and we liked to go out to visit as often as we could. We had taken a run up into Colorado, and had stopped to look at a stream that ran near the road. On the other side of the stream, there was a dark hole that we thought might be an old mine entrance. The stream was not too wide, but it was fast and cold. We worried a little but decided to jump the stream to investigate. Tom and I jumped over safely to the other side. Errol didn’t. He landed in the stream. He was OK, but he was drenched. That’s when Tom said it.

I have known Tom for a long time. I first met him in 1971 when I was attending Georgia State University in Atlanta and he was at Georgia Tech. I met him through my brother, and we ended up sharing an apartment. We lived near Piedmont Park in a neighborhood that was a center of the hippie and drug communities. It was an interesting experience. We should write a book. Tom had recently returned from Viet Nam. He told me some stories about that experience. He should write a book.

I don’t have a lot of pictures from that time, but here is a fuzzy shot of me on the left and Tom on the right. We were goofing around in Piedmont Park after a light snow. I find it hard to believe we were ever that young.

Two very young guys

Two very young guys

I graduated from GSU in 1973 and took a job at a newspaper in Augusta, Ga. Not too long after that, Tom left Georgia Tech just shy of his architecture degree. He rode his bicycle over to visit me, a short hop of only about 140 miles. And then he rode up to Canada. He went across Canada and ended up in Seattle. And then San Francisco. And then Lake Tahoe. At Lake Tahoe he provided pretty much all the expertise for a group to set up a printing shop. Tom should write a book.

In the first half of 1976 I quit the newspaper, thinking maybe I would start writing. Instead I rode my motorcycle up to Pittsburgh, Pa, where my brother was doing a post-doc at Carnegie Mellon University. Sometime around then I heard from Tom at Lake Tahoe. I decided to leave Pennsylvania to visit Tom, so I rode my motorcycle to California. When I got there, it was so beautiful that I decided to stay. I ended up sharing a house with Tom there for a year and a half.

When I ran out of money, I rode my motorcycle back home at Christmas and, coincidentally, was offered a job back at my old newspaper. So I left Lake Tahoe, which for me was pretty much the American dream, for Augusta, Georgia, which is just no place to be. Tom and I kind of lost track of each other again for a while.

After a year at the newspaper, I quit again. By that time I think it was becoming a habit. And that time I had no idea whatsoever what I was going to do. So I visited Errol in Woodstock, near Atlanta, and we found a very nice Volkswagen bus. My father and mother helped turn it into a camper. In the meantime, Tom had ended up in Albuquerque working at Sandia National Lab, so I took the camper and headed west again. I visited with Tom and drove around New Mexico and Colorado for a while, and then came back home. Before too long I ended up in school again, this time at Georgia Tech. And, once again, Tom and I kind of lost track of each other.

Before I finished Tech, Tom was found again by friendly forces. When I finished my degree, I ended up in Huntsville, Alabama, working for an Army contractor. My degree was in atmospheric sciences, but by then Ronald Reagan had decided that atmospheric science research was a waste of money, and we should instead spend billions on a missile defense system, so that’s where the work was.

Anyway, Errol, Cookie and I took several trips out to visit Tom over the next few years. Tom eventually ended up at Los Alamos. Tom had decided that he wanted to sail a boat around the world, so, in the middle of New Mexico, he started reading about how to do it. He ended up buying a small but seaworthy sailboat in Florida and moved into it to learn how to sail. When he was confident that he knew what he was doing, he sailed off and ended up in Cuba. He stayed there for a while, and when he left, he ran into bad weather. I was at work fairly late one night when I got a call from Errol. Tom had contacted Errol to let him know that he was in the process of having his boat run into a reef in a storm off the coast of Cuba.

The short of it is that he did, indeed, lose the boat, and stayed in Cuba for quite some time afterward. He eventually traveled back to the US by way of Mexico. Tom really should write a book.

Tom is now living in Edgewood, New Mexico, living the life of a very successful retiree, seeing the world and doing whatever in the hell he wants to do. He is one of the most interesting people I have ever known, and has lived a very different kind of life from most people. Over the years our trajectories have intersected and then flown off in different directions, but we have remained friends. We are both old guys now. I’m 63 and Tom is even older than that. I thought we were pretty much confirmed bachelors and expected that to continue. And then in 2005, just after my 55th birthday, I dragged Leah down to the courthouse and we got married.

And now, this day, July 27, Tom will marry Kay. I guess he decided it was time to get his feet wet and open up a whole new world.

And so, from both of us, congratulations and best wishes Tom and Kay.

Where should Leah and Mark move?

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I have been trying to retire for a couple of months now. Soon (I hope) I won’t need to be close to Huntsville, Alabama, where I have been working for the last 27 years. With both of our parents gone now, we have been talking about moving away from here in the northwest corner of Georgia.

Back in 1999 I bought the land where we now live. It’s near the top of Lavender Mountain, overlooking Rome to the south and, on a good day, with a view all the way to Kennesaw Mountain, just outside of Atlanta. Over the next five or six years I built the house. I hired a carpenter and one helper, and then the three of us framed and dried-in the structure. My good friend Tom came to visit from New Mexico and helped with some of the work. Other people came around sometimes to help, including Leah and my brother and both of my parents occasionally. My father, who worked as an electrician in his youth, planned to help me do the wiring, but he died before we could start. He did do a lot of heavy manual labor when I was clearing the hundreds of small pines off the lot.

I hired contractors for the work I didn’t trust myself to do. I had an electrician do the wiring, a plumber do the rough-in, drywall hangers do the hanging and mudding, and a floorer do the wood and tile. But the rest, my family, friends and I did ourselves. And, in case you haven’t built a house, that is a lot.

Leah and I got married in May, 2005, and moved into the house. We mostly like living here. It’s quiet and can be quite beautiful. Leah would prefer to be a little closer to the grocery store, and I wish I had cut a lot more trees early on. Winters are reasonably mild, and spring and fall can be very nice, at least for short periods. But the summers in Georgia are brutal. It’s hot and humid and you can’t do anything outside without getting soaked in sweat. Plus the house is too big. Upstairs we have three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Downstairs, which is not completely finished, has a large family room and another bedroom and bathroom. That’s way too much for two middle-aged – no, wait a minute, I think we are already past that age. Oh well, never mind that part. We have a fair amount of money in the house, and we would like to think we could sell our house, buy a smaller house, and then have a little left over.

Anyway, we are thinking, but we don’t have any place in particular in mind. I would like to live some place where it’s not quite so humid, but not really arid. Leah tends to agree with that, with the proviso that it not be too cold or too hot. I think we could handle cold more easily than hot, but I don’t really want a harsh climate. Neither of us wants to live in a big city, but realistically, we should probably be reasonably close to a reasonably large town. Rome is reasonably large, by our standards. There are decent places to buy food, and, if we should get sick, there are two fairly large hospitals. I’m not sure whether we could stand a really dry area. I found on a cross-country motorcycle trip that I suffered green withdrawal when I rode across Utah and Nevada. I was surprised at what relief it was to see green trees when I reached the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Just for the fun of it, back in June I started tracking temperatures in Terlingua, Texas, and Alamosa, Colorado. Terlingua is right outside Big Bend National Park. Alamosa is in south central Colorado, near but not really in the mountains. I used the Yahoo weather app on my iphone. I laughed every time I looked at Terlingua, because the highs were over 100 F every day. Alamosa was also funny, because the lows were generally shown in the 30s. Perfect. Just average them.

The Yahoo numbers don’t seem to track with other weather data, so I checked a few sources online. Based on what I found, the June temperatures in Terlingua were pretty much mid-90s, except for a few upper 80s and a few 100s. The lows started around 68 and ended up around 72. There was a decent amount of rain for such a generally dry area. Average annual precipitation is just under 12 inches.

Alamosa had highs in the 70s and 80s, with lows from the upper 20s early in the month to around 50 later on, with a little over a half an inch of rain. It was a surprise to me that Alamosa has a drier climate than Terlingua. Average precipitation is under 8 inches per year. Still, I have to laugh a little: on average there are only two months without freezing temperature, July and August (usually).

For comparison, in June Rome, had highs in the mid to upper 80s with a few 70s late in the month. Lows were mostly in the upper 60s. Rainfall was about 6 and a quarter inches. Rome gets an average of 56 inches of precipitation a year. That’s just four inches short of five feet of rain a year. We have droughts, but the rain in even our drought years would wash Terlingua and Alamosa completely away.

We are not really considering moving to Terlingua or Alamosa (although if I had multiple lives I might consider living in both at least for a while. Just for the hell of it, you know.)  But we still don’t really know where to move to.

Does anyone have any ideas?