Ode to My Brother

 My brother, Ray, would have turned 75 today—if his life hadn't been interrupted by cancer, as so many have been. Too many. Cancer is the scourge of our times. The last coherent conversation I had with him he told me he was hoping to make it to age 70. He missed it by three months. And he said he did not want to die while Donald Trump was president. Unhappily, he did. 

When I was a little girl, my brother was my everything. He was five years older. He looked out for me, took my side against Mother and Dad, as I did his, and held my hand when we went off on our adventures together. And we had many many adventures. Once he got into junior hight school (7th, 8th, and 9th grades in my hometown), he was given permission to ride the city bus downtown, and I was allowed to go with him. We walked the three blocks to the end of our street where the bus stopped. Ray always gave me my fare so I could drop the coins into the meter beside the bus driver. Then we took seats all the way at the back of the bus, because we were going what we considered a long way to the downtown library. Now, it doesn't seem like such a long way, but back then the bus stopped at a lot of corners. It took thirty or so minutes to get downtown. 

The stop beside the library was a hub where several bus lines converged. I don't remember which line was ours—that was Ray's job to keep up with—but we looked at the time table signs and decided how long we had to "fool around" downtown. Our fooling around consisted of lots of time at the library, and almost always a movie at the Centre or Ritz theaters, both of them nearby. The library was the old La Retama Library, not the new one that stands up on the hill in Corpus Christi now. The old one was three stories with an elevator to the third floor but if you just wanted the second floor, there was a beautiful, wide, curved freestanding staircase you could climb, and climb it I did, pretending I was a princess in a castle. Ray was always busy doing some sort of movie research in the microfilm department. I never then or now knew what he was researching. It seems we came from a family of researchers. I have myself spent many hours in the microfilm departments of a library.

The third floor of the La Retama Library was the children's section. There was usually almost no one up there but me, which suited me fine. I could continue my princess pretend game uninterrupted. I gathered an armload of picture books and sat at the low round table with child-sized chairs and spread all those books out in front of me, making up my mind which ones I would check out that day. You could only have three at a time. I liked the ones with lots of colorful pictures, but not too baby-ish. There had to be a lot of words to read, too. And I wanted stories about real people, not animals which probably explains why I never read The Velveteen Rabbit until I was an adult. I had no guidance. No one to tell me which books I should pick, the ones that might be good for me, or the ones that might be classics. Nobody ever told me about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, although I did see the movie on television. We were not a fancy, academic, or even well-read family. We didn't have a lot of books in our house: a set of World Book Encyclopedias, and maybe a couple of other old books. My parents were accountants, not scholars. But at least there was the wonderful library downtown. 

We also had a Bookmobile that came to the end of our street. Again, it was Ray who somehow found out about it, and dragged me by the hand down there where we got our first library cards. After a foray downtown to the big library, I could then turn in my three books at the Bookmobile when it came every other Thursday. I loved the Bookmobile, too. It was dark and cramped and smelled of books, and there were little cushioned benches where you could sit and paw through the pages before you checked out a book. The woman who drove the Bookmobile always sat up front knitting and never bothered or even spoke to anyone until they had books for her to stamp the due date on a flap inside the cover. It was another great adventure, rushing down to the Bookmobile after school for more books to read.

So whether he ever realized it or not, my brother was directly responsible for putting books in front of me and giving me my lifelong habit of reading, and later writing. When I wrote my first terrible (and forever unpublished) novel, thinking it was the greatest thing I had ever done, I gave it to Ray to read. It was about 300 manuscript pages, and he read maybe eight of them before he handed it back to me and said, (kindly for him), "It's not ready to publish." I was crushed but he was right, it wasn't. By then he had his degree in Radio/TV Journalism so I trusted what he said. But still, I was crushed. He never told me, later after I had a novel or two published, but I think he was proud of me. He always came to any event I had anywhere near where he lived. 

As the years went on and we grew up, we stopped seeing so much of each other. Lives get busy and diverge, but we never EVER failed to give each other a call on our birthdays. We usually talked for an hour or more, about all the things that were going on in our lives, about members of our family we had heard from, plays he was in, books I was writing, TV shows we were watching. We talked about our parents, our dogs and cats, our houses, cars. A lot of it nonsense, just keeping in touch. My-my, how I miss those phone calls. 

There's a memory I have that keeps coming to me. I tried to remind him of it when he was lying in the hospice hospital in Austin, but he was far too close to death to listen or care. It's a memory of the two of us climbing up on the roof of our house, something we were NEVER supposed to do. Capital punishment would follow if we were caught. But we sat up there one summer night when the parents were off somewhere playing cards, perched right at the peak, side by side, his arm around my shoulders to keep me from falling, peering over all the other roofs of the houses in our neighborhood, watching from a distance of maybe a half-mile, the screen at the drive-in theater out on the highway. We couldn't hear what the actors were saying, of course, but we didn't need to, we had already seen the movie downtown at the Centre or Ritz and knew the storyline. I remember it as a cool star-studded night, but maybe it wasn't. Maybe it's just my imagination embellishing it, but it was so much fun, sitting there with my brother, that it has stuck in my memory all these years. 

Onward...

11th Month, 11th Day, 11th Hour

World War I, aka The Great War, began in 1914, between the European powers. American got into the war in 1917 after German U-Boats started attacking our merchant marines. So for the first three years of the War to End All Wars, so-named by Woodrow Wilson, the United States was neutral. By the time we got "Over There" France, England, Germany, Italy, Turkey, etc had already lost millions of soldiers to the war, a brutal affair where the military command was still fighting in the warfare style of the 18th and 19th centuries against 20th century weaponry, a fact that forced armies to seek cover down inside elaborate trenches. It was a bloodbath.

It didn't take long before America began to rack up casualties too, losing in about eighteen months more men than a decade of fighting in Vietnam would years later. Germany had thrown all it had at the war effort, men and materiel. On November 11, 1918, at 11 o'clock in the morning, the antagonists signed an armistice, or a ceasefire. For the next 36 years, we commemorated November 11 as Armistice Day, and in some places, Remembrance Day. Armistice Day was what my parents told me it was called when they were growing up. After World War II came and went, the veterans from that war thought they deserved a day of commemoration too for their great sacrifices, and in 1954, Congress changed the name of the national holiday to Veteran's Day. 

But what does it mean now? Where I live there isn't even a Veteran's Day parade anymore, like the ones I remember as a child living in Corpus Christi. My family is full of veterans, mostly from WWII. Almost all the men I knew growing up, family and family friends, had served in some capacity in that war: my dad, my grandfather, several uncles, close family friends, even some of the women enlisted in various causes, and those that didn't still did SOMETHING, like taking old tin pots to a collection area to have them melted down for ammunition. Everyone gave up things to help the troops. People were issued ration books for groceries and blackout curtains were hung over windows. My mom told me about a U-Boat scare in Corpus Christi Bay when she was a girl, and the air raid sirens that would sound as drills. Her high school yearbook is filled with pictures of men in Navy uniforms, classmates or enlisted seaman from the Naval Air Station nearby. 

It was nothing, even when I was a child, to see men with empty sleeves, or on crutches or in wheelchairs from limbs lost. My dad's closest friend was a double amputee who had been shelled in a foxhole during the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, the precursor of the more famous Battle of the Bulge. Another good friend of Daddy's had been hit by fire during the amphibious landings in the Bay of Salerno during the Invasion of Italy. My grandfather drove landing craft in the South Pacific at Leyte Gulf, and during that battle prayed to God that if He would see him through he would hand over his life. Shortly after he got home, my grandfather went into the ministry and became a Baptist preacher for the rest of his life.

The children of those 16-million veterans, my generation, were steeped in World War II. It was absorbed into us without having to be mentioned. It just lingered, everywhere around us, even in the row-house neighborhoods built for all those veterans and their new families. The kids played World War II in the streets, interspersed with Cowboys and Indians, of course. We knew how to make the sounds of ack-ack gunfire, and machine-guns, and bombs falling. A kid down the street could mimic perfectly a trench mortar letting off a round, so we even had a bit of the First World War thrown into our WWII street battles. I supposed kids are still playing war but doing it on the computer screens now, with realistic gore and trauma. Somehow it doesn't feel the same. 

I sometimes wonder what in the world my dad, and all those long-gone veterans would think about the so-called division in our country now, or the January 6th insurrection. The last time he flew in a plane was to his squadron reunion in 2003. He got pulled out of the security line and wanded, all over his body until they located the problem: a roll of Tums in its foil wrapping inside his shirt pocket. Daddy looked the TSA agent in the face, and with a disappointed smile on his face, said, "I served in World War II. You think I'm a terrorist?" He was so insulted by the episode he never took a plane anywhere again. 

In the 1970s, I married a man who enlisted in the US Air Force. The salary for an E-2, his rank just after Basic Training, was so low, we not only qualified for Section 8 housing, but also for Food Stamps, known now as SNAP. After he got out we found a little house we wanted to buy, and since he qualified for a VA loan, our down-payment was only a single dollar bill. I remember watching the mortgage banker paperclip that dollar bill to our loan application, happy to be so lucky.

So let's celebrate and honor our veterans, but let's also continue to fund and support the GI Bill, which we have not always done readily. Let's give them the highest quality health care available instead of always skimping on that, even closing down military hospitals so veterans who are unable to travel long distances end up shut-out of the system. Let's provide mental health rehabilitation so they don't feel compelled to seek anti-government militia groups for camaraderie. It's too easy these days to forget about our veterans who may have been traumatized by the realities of modern-day guerrilla warfare. Let's provide enlisted service men and women with skills they can use once they're out of the military so they can continue to contribute their patriotism and their sense of duty and fairplay to American society. And for God's sake, let's stop using them as pawns in the game of political gotcha, or slapping magnetic signs on our cars that say "I support the military," a brag that has just become another meaningless slogan. 

Happy Veteran's Day, America. Fly your flag!

Onward...

Life Without Air-Conditioning

Last night our air-conditioner went out. It's August. Temperatures have been hovering around 97 degrees with 260% humidity. Of course, that's an exaggeration but it doesn't feel like one. We noticed about 9:30 it was getting hot in the house, and when we looked at the thermostat, it read 80 degrees. It was set for 75. By the time we went to bed, it was at 82 degrees and rising.

Lucky for us we installed six ceiling fans in this house when we first bought it. Every one of them was going on high. We thought about opening windows but the humidity ruled that idea out immediately. Instead, we laid on the bed underneath the whirling fan and tried to go to sleep without any cover on us at all. The moon is full right now and the light filtering in made the room glow. Neither of us could settle down enough to drift off, so we started reminiscing, about how neither of us grew up with air-conditioning in our houses. I seriously don't know how we stood it, except we were ignorant of it and unaccustomed to it. 

My childhood bedroom only had a single window, but my bed was shoved right up next to it. With the window open wide, and with the helicopter fan on a chair in the middle of the room, I stayed cool at night. But this was in Corpus Christi, so how could it have been all that cool? I must have been wet with dew every morning from the humidity coming off the Gulf of Mexico, but I don't remember that part. 

Our house was a modest, post-WWII house in a tacky-tacky neighborhood--block after block of houses built from one of three floorplans. My best friend, who lived kitty-cornered from us, had the same house as ours only turned around, a mirror image. For some reason, the architect who designed these houses thought it would be a great idea to put a planter box in between the kitchen and living room as a sort of room divider. I don't know of a single house in the neighborhood who kept that planter box. Daddy filled ours with concrete and mother arranged cushions on it in an attempt to make it into a bench, an uncomfortable one stuck off in an odd corner. For my brother, Ray, and I it became a great stage. Ray, who by age 10 was already an actor in his heart, choreographed complicated dance routines for the two of us. Many of them started with a launch off that concrete former planter box with high-kicks and leaps. It's a wonder we didn't break our necks. 

We had a garage, which made us special. Many of the houses in our neighborhood only had driveways. Daddy and his next-in-line brother, Sid, built the garage together. The only thing they didn't do was pour the concrete foundation. After the mixer truck left, Daddy pressed my right foot into the edge of the cement and wrote the date with his index finger. My 4-year-old footprint must surely still be there.

Our garage was as big as our house. It was a two-car-plus boat garage with a grease pit so Daddy could work on our cars without lying on his back. There was a small shop at one end where he had his table saws. I used to hang out in that shop for hours when he worked. Now, I wish I had learned some of the things he knew, but at that time I just wanted to be wherever he was. He really was good with his hands, had taken classes in work working and mechanics at the local tech college. By profession, he was an accountant, the youngest of five to second-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe. All Dad's brothers could build and fix and take care of plumbing and the like. Most of my friends had dads who could do those things, too. It seemed to be something men were born knowing how to do, just like our moms all knew how to cook and sew and clean house. I didn't realize until I was grown that not all men are handy with their hands, just like not all women can wield a skillet or a needle-and-thread.

In the center of our garage, double doors opened onto a crescent shaped patio where we played hours of ping-pong, or sat in the Adirondack chairs Daddy built visiting with neighbors, friends, and family. Out in the yard was a playhouse Daddy also built, for my fifth birthday. It looked exactly like our real house, complete with the same asbestos siding and tan paint. My dog, Gaylie, and I had many tea parties inside that playhouse, although I do remember his tail knocking things off the little shelves built into the wall. I suppose someone since has dismantled the playhouse but it was still there when we moved. By then I was 12 and could barely crawl inside the door.

Back to my bedroom and that noisy, oscillating fan. It was a huge thing, full of oil and dust. It had two speeds--loud blast (and I mean BLAST) and so low it would almost stop oscillating. The blast speed was so forceful I could tie-down the corners of my top sheet and the wind from the fan would lift the sheet like a parachute. Me, my scottie dog stuffed animal named Scottie (how original!) and Lollipop, my purple poodle, would play under that sheet tent until Mom or Dad finally hollered at me to go to sleep. I was never allowed to handle the fan even to turn it off or on. A friend of my parents had a young son who stuck his hand inside the cage of a moving fan and had lost two fingers. 

My mother mostly lived in fear that my brother or I would do permanent damage to our bodies. There was a entire list of things we were not allowed to ever do, including climbing trees, horseback riding, and roller skating. Of course, we did all three of those things whenever the opportunity arose. I recall being really high up a backyard tree one day when Mother came home early from work. I stayed still and quiet, heart pounding. She didn't even notice Gaylie (who normally mauled anybody who came into the backyard with lots of hello hugs and kisses) sitting patiently at the base of the tree staring up at me in the limbs. As soon as Mom stepped inside the back door, I clambered down, much to Gaylie's delight. He was so happy to have me back on earth, he tore around the backyard in big wide zoomies.

We weren't poor but we weren't rich either. Since Mother worked (back then most mom's didn't) we had enough to go out to eat on Friday nights. We rotated between Piccadilly Cafeteria, Taco Village, Angelo's Pizza, and Whataburger. Occasionally, we got to go to Chung May's. It was a high-end (for the times and the place) linen-tablecloth Chinese food restaurant. Back then, we knew nothing about Chinese food so we always order the Cantonese Surprise Dinner for Four. It varied from trip to trip, but it was alway served in multiple courses with hot tea in a precious tiny porcelain pot. We felt fancy when we ate there. I always picked Chung May's for my birthday night dinner. Later, when I was in high school, one of the boys from the Asian family who owned Chung May's was our drum major. Since I was a majorette, I got to know him pretty well and had a big-time crush on him. All these years later, Chinese food is still my favorite, just a tad above Mexican and Pizza. Hmm. I guess we are what we come from after all.

Well, the air-conditioning man has just pulled up to the curb, thank God! Memories of days without a/c are fun but I'm glad they're just memories. I would rather belong to the good-old days of NOW with cold air blowing in every room.

Onward!

A History of "My" Hurricanes Past

The first hurricane I remember was Hurricane Carla, a Category 5 in 1961. I was eight. We had a weekend cabin on Copano Bay at Rockport that my dad had built, and we worried that it would blow away. For some reason my brother and I stayed with my aunt during the storm. We watched it rain and the cars parked along the street rocked with the wind. I remember thinking all those cars would blow over. Carla hit at Port O'Connor but she skidded along the coast for a bit before moving inland, and got close enough that she filled our Rockport cabin with two feet of sandy mud. The cabin stood on four-foot stilts, but the sand got inside anyway, and we had a big mess to clean up. We also lost a lot of our beach.

The next hurricane to impact my life was Hurricane Beulah, a Cat 5 that struck in 1967. I was fourteen. Mother and Daddy had a "hurricane party." They liked to play games and had some friends over for Pinochle. I helped Mom make dips and put out chips. Everybody was excited by the storm blowing outside. When the power went out, everybody made their way home through the wind and rain. I remember the phone ringing as, one by one, the guests reported back that they had made it home. The storm came ashore at Brownsville with a twenty-foot storm surge. There was so much rain with that storm, streets and homes were flooded. In fact, the flood of record on the San Antonio River still stands from rain caused by Beulah. We got a few days off from school, which when you're fourteen, seems like a big treat. Beulah caused more beach erosion at our cabin in Rockport, and shortly afterwards, Daddy sold the place. This turned out to be a good thing because the beach where our cabin stood is now completely gone. Any building that would have been on that stretch of land would have long ago fallen into Copano Bay.

In August of 1970, a Category 3 storm named Celia came into the Gulf of Mexico. All the predictions were for it to make landfall at Galveston, but those predictions soon changed to Port O'Connor, then Rockport, moving farther down the Texas coastline, and closer to us in Corpus Christi. I remember waking up that morning to the sound of the television and my dad pacing in the den. We were not the kind of family to watch television early in the morning so just the TV being on clued me in that something was happening. At age seventeen, I had been too busy with my own oh-so important life to have paid attention to anything weather-related -- until that morning. Daddy said he had been tracking the storm through the night and he believed it was coming in for a direct hit on Corpus Christi. There had not been a direct hit on our town since the 1930s, so I was suddenly paying much closer attention. Mother put on a brave face, went to the store, bought dips and chips and came home saying we would have our own "hurricane party." At about two o'clock, I was sitting at the kitchen table writing a letter to my brother who was in the army stationed in Germany, when a big boom sounded that shook the house. The lights went out instantly. Daddy thought something had hit the front door, so he went to see what had happened. When he opened the door, the wind was so strong, it nearly took him with the door. Mother and I grabbed Daddy and helped him back inside. None of us had realized until then how strong the storm had grown.

Daddy had a long, silver, police-issue flashlight. He turned it on and we all three went upstairs. When we got into the upstairs hallway, our attention was drawn to the trap door to the attic. It was flapping around like a paper plate. Daddy reached with his flashlight and pushed on the trap door cover, and we saw the sky. Our roof was completely gone. We went into the master bedroom and the ceiling in that room looked like it was breathing, in and out. Eventually, it fell in, but we saw all that much later.

Daddy ordered us to go downstairs and get in the laundry room, which was the only one-story part of our house. I ran to my bedroom and gathered up my makeup from my bathroom (Hey-- I was seventeen!), Mother raced down to the den and gathered up the family photo albums, and Daddy grabbed a jar of peanuts out of the pantry, and a six-pack of beer from the refrigerator, and we all clambered into the laundry room. Mama threw the photo albums into the dryer and we sat on the machines, and through a crack in the boarded up window, watched the driveway fill up with lumber, most of which stayed for only a few moments before it blew off somewhere else. There were roofing shingles everywhere. A couple of times while the storm was blowing, one or the other of us had to make a dash for the half bathroom off the kitchen downstairs. We came back with reports that rain was pouring through the ceiling as if we were standing outside. While the wind was still crazy high, our next door neighbor banged on the laundry room door to check on us. We discussed what had happened, and the consensus was that a tornado must've come down our street. Later we found a rafter had stabbed, missile-like, through the roof of our garage. Luckily it hit the ground right between Mother and Daddy's cars.

Hurricane Celia literally changed my life. Not only was it a disaster for my family, but it did so much damage to the refinery where Daddy worked that the decision was made by the company to close the refinery altogether. Daddy was transferred to another refinery in Purvis, Mississippi. So instead of attending the university in San Marcos as I had planned, I went to the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, and eventually married a Mississippi boy, whom I would have otherwise never met.

In August of 1980, a Catergory 5 storm brewed up in the Gulf. It was named Allen. By this time, I was married with two kids and living in a brand new house in San Antonio. My parents, who had also come back to Texas, were once again living in Corpus Christi. After Celia they had sworn they would never sit out another hurricane, so they evacuated to our house in San Antonio. Allen came ashore at Port Mansfield, well to the south, but that also put us on the "dirty" side of the storm. Because of the counter-clockwide rotation of Atlantic hurricanes, the prevailing winds will swirl out from center towards the east, so when a hurricane makes landfall, you always want to be on the "clean" side, or to the west. When Hurricane Rita hit Houston in 2005, I was already living in DeWitt County, a hundred miles west of Houston. We didn't get a drop of rain. A hundred miles to the east was devastated. That's the way a hurricane works. There is a clean side and a dirty side. When Hurricane Allen came inland, he hooked up the Rio Grande River and that put San Antonio on the dirty side of the storm. Our brand new house had roof damage and our sliding door leaked to the point where the carpet had to be pulled up. When Mother and Daddy went back home to Corpus Christi, they had one tree limb broken and a board missing from their fence. Their house was completely fine. They should have stayed home!

Hurricane Claudette hit Seadrift, Texas in July of 2003. It came ashore as a weak Category 2. Since it was only July, the Gulf of Mexico wasn't warm enough to fuel a big hurricane yet. But Claudette blew hard enough and broke enough tree limbs where I lived in Yorktown to give me a big reminder of the damage a hurricane can do. I cowered in my living room, recalled that afternoon in the laundry room, and prayed the storm away. We had two massive piles of broken limbs after that storm passed.

A few weeks ago, in August, Hurricane Harvey hit Rockport as a Category 4 storm. Things have changed with our technology. Safe in my house in Yoakum, I was able to stay in touch with my loved ones in the path of the storm via text messages. And I was able (when the power wasn't out) to track the storm online. It was a torrential rainmaker. It devastated the Texas coast where it made landfall and dumped 50 inches of rain on Houston causing a Biblical flood. See what happens when you're on the "dirty" side of a hurricane. We got almost seventeen inches in Yoakum, and our little place south of us on Carancahua Bay came through with the loss of just a few roofing shingles and some palm fronds. My significant other's precious granddaughter who lives in the Caribbean just came through a Category 5 storm, Irma, in the same way, by texting with us while we monitored the storm online. It helps a lot to be able to stay in touch through these things. And the predictions are so much better than they used to be back in the olden days.

Living on this planet, near the coast, I'm sure there are more hurricanes in my future. They are, after all, just doing their job--taking the heat from the equator and redistributing it over the earth. And they're pretty efficient at doing that, oblivious to the humanity in their path. After Harvey left, the temperatures in Yoakum were ten degrees cooler than they had been before he arrived. It was noticeable, and it has stayed cooler. It's the way the world works. Now, if Mother Nature would just do something about these mosquitoes!!

Onward ...

Notable Books, According to Me

Awoke this morning feeling good about life, about living in a place where the air is sweet and fresh, where you need a jacket to sit outside in July to drink your coffee, where the main sounds are the crows cacking and the tickle of squirrels climbing up the barky pine trees. Yes, this house is small, but it has a beautiful ceiling. It rained yesterday. The roof leaked a little over in the corner by the television. It's the first real rain we've had since we bought the place. I found a flashlight to check for other possible leaks, ran the spotlight up and down the ceiling beams. I found a lot of cobwebs, but no other wet places.

I've seen ceilings before that this one is patterned after -- on old adobe porches primarily. Long beams spaced about three feet apart, with planks adjoining in a perpendicular fashion. The boards on the ceiling here are knotty pine and smooth, with rougher beams that are actually supportive and not just decorative. These beams extend through the exterior wall and out to the edge of the porch overhang. On the porch the beams are painted, but inside they have been left natural to darken with age. Now, that the paneled walls inside have all been painted a light off-white, the beauty of the ceiling really strikes out. And now that I have inspected them with a flashlight, the ceiling has also been de-cobwebbed.

The atmosphere here is really conducive to reading and I have been getting a lot of that done. Don't know why I seem to have no time for reading when I'm at home in Texas. I downloaded some books to my Kindle before we left Texas. Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragnoso is the first one I read. It's about a woman's relationship with a pedophile, and is particularly timely with the Jaycee Dugard story so much in the news right now. It was one of those books that hangs with you, disturbs you and makes you try to rationalize. Also downloaded was Remember Ben Clayton by my friend Stephen Harrigan. Stephen is another writer who hales from Corpus Christi, which is our only real connection. He's a wonderful writer and this novel is his best to date. I'm finding it fresh and factual, particularly since it's dealing with a time period I researched considerably for Right From Wrong, and his characters are lively and real. I'm not completely finished with it, and plan to say more about it later.

One thing I have found with all this reading is how easy to handle and convenient the Kindle is. It doesn't tire my hands out the way a real book does, and mine has a little light attached to the cover, so I can read in the dark, which I have been doing for a while every night before I go to sleep. The one thing that is not handy about the Kindle, though, is that it is easy to lose your place, and you never know what page you're on at any given time. There's a bookmark, but it isn't always easy to get back to the mark if you happen to accidentally hit the paging button a few times. The other thing you miss out on with a Kindle, is photographs that might be inside the actual book.

This is the main reason I bought from Barnes & Noble online, with a birthday gift certificate, a book called River of Traps by William DeBuys & Alex Harris. It's about these two men's years living in the New Mexico mountains in the shadow of the Truchas Peaks, and an old Hispanic man who befriended them. Harris is the photographer and there are some lovely full-page black-and-whites inside, and the descriptions and history of the area are beautifully told by DeBuys. The old man, Jacobo, is wise and witty and so familiar to me of similar men I had friendships with during my years of living and working in San Antonio.

Finally, there's a bookmobile that comes to our village once a month from up at Cimarron, which is about halfway between here and Raton. In June, I got a card and checked out two books, one of which turned out to be a lovely, informative treatment of The Mountains of New Mexico by Robert Julyan. The author has visited each of the mountains he discusses, gives so much information about the geography and how the land was formed, that even though I had originally intended to only peruse it for mountains in our area, I ended up reading the entire book cover to cover, and took it with us when we visited the Capulin Volcano when the boys were here. I'm one of those people who needs to know where I am in the world, in a much more detailed way than just by giving an address or distance from some larger town. I still feel a lot of mystery around me here, and won't quit reading until I think I understand this place, its people, its present and its past.

Meanwhile, it's time to take a shower and get this day started. It's nearly noon and I've done nothing but read, drink my coffee, and listen to the birds in the trees.

Onward ....

Hurricane Memories

I'm reading ISAAC'S STORM by Eric Larson -- a bit overwritten, but still I can't put it down. And while reading it memories of my own hurricane story keep creeping into my mind. Mine was not the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the one this book is focused on, but a much smaller one that came into Corpus Christi in 1970. If you've ever experienced a hurricane, then that will be your storm, and it will be the one that makes the big impression on you.

I was 17 years old, still in high school. My brother was in the Army, stationed in Germany, and I was writing him a letter, sitting at the kitchen table, while Mother was putting together some snacks. Daddy had been watching the weather on television since before daylight. I remember so well getting up to the sound of the weathermen. We were not in the habit of turning on the television first thing in the morning like so many people do today. The weathermen were predicting that the storm would turn northwards and head to Galveston, but Daddy insisted that it was coming into Corpus. He kept insisting this because our barometric pressure was dropping.

Mother was nonplussed by his predictions. Excited by the dust-colored sky outside, by the rain that kept falling intermittently, by the wind whooshing up our breezeway, she was determined to make this fun. She had been preparing dips all morning, and had chips out in a bowl. She wished she had thought to invite friends over for cards. She had the dominoes out.

In the middle of this, Mom making snacks and me writing my letter to my brother, the lights went out. No big deal. It was mid-day. We could certainly still see, even though the sky was heavy and dark. Daddy got out his long, patrolman's flashlight. He'd already put in new batteries. Mother went for candles, and matches. We didn't light them, but put them around in handy places, just in case. We'd been through hurricanes before. The lights could stay off for hours. Sometimes even for a few days.

The phone rang. It was my aunt and uncle who lived about two miles from us. Mother talked animatedly to them about the lights going out, about the dark sky, the wind, the rain. Thunder cracked. Lightning lit the room. And then a loud BANG! shook the house. Mother hung up the phone, said "What was that?" I abandoned the letter I had still been trying to write and followed my parents to the front door, which was the direction the bang had come from. Daddy thought maybe a tree had fallen against the door. He opened it, and the wind nearly took the door off its hinges, and him with it. Mother and I both had to help him get back inside the house, and pull the door closed. Once he was safely back in the foyer, we all looked at each other, a little frightened now.

Daddy started up the stairs, and Mother and I stayed close behind him. The narrow upstairs hall was dark. The flashlight beam was our only light. The trap door to the attic was flapping loose in its hole, as if the wind were about to fly off with it. Using his long flashlight like a rod, Daddy pushed at the attic trap, raising it a couple of inches. And we saw the sky.

"Oh, my God," Mother said.

"Our roof's gone," Daddy said. "We better get back downstairs."

But we were too excited, too caught up in the scary circumstances, and it wasn't really registering yet how dire the situation. Mother ran to their bedroom. I went behind her. The ceiling in that room was breathing up and down, ready to cave in at any moment. She raced to the closet for the photo albums. I ran back to my room, peered out the window through the crosshatch of masking tape we had put on to keep the windows from breaking. Roof material lay scattered all over the front lawn. I grabbed my makeup. MY MAKEUP! Not my high school annuals. Not the diamond earrings I had just gotten on my 17th birthday. My makeup. Well, I was just 17. A shallow teenager. What can I say?

The three of us went down to the laundry room (the only one-story part of the house) to sit on the machines and watch the storm take down our home. It was my mother's dream house. She had sat with an architect for hours three years before, planning out the rooms, the direction the doors would open, the placement of light switches and electric plugs. It must've been devastating to her to see the boards lying on the driveway out the taped-up laundry room window. We watched heavy roofing beams turn a complete 360-degrees as the eye of the storm came by us. A time or two I had to hurry in to the little bathroom off the kitchen. Rain poured through the downstairs ceiling by then, as if the whole house was being absorbed by the storm. My letter to my brother was a soggy, smeared, undecipherable glob of paper on the table, beside the dip and chip bowls overflowing with Sheetrock-infused rain water.

That storm changed all of our lives. Profoundly. The plant where my dad worked was damaged in the millions of dollars. Eventually, he was transferred to a newly acquired plant in Mississippi. My old boyfriend, whom I hadn't seen in months -- indeed he had broken up with me when he got drafted by a major league's Triple-A baseball team and moved to Florida -- came home to check on his family. He and I had an intense, emotional reunion that resulted in a shotgun wedding a few months later. And eventually, when that teenage marriage failed, I joined my parents in Mississippi along with my newborn son. I attended university there and met the man who would become my second husband. I have always said that I got my eldest son out of that hurricane, or the aftermath of it anyway. So good can come out of catastrophe, though it doesn't usually seem so at the time.

Onward ....