Travelers

Oftentimes, in unexpected and unusual ways the past has a way of catching up and when it does in some painful or unpleasant way, I retroactively reconnoiter in an attempt to discover exactly at what point in time the decisions I made or actions I took set in motion events that led to whatever outcome. Sometimes it's not hard at all. I was aware as I was doing it and so, like jumping onto a moving train, the repercussions and changes they heralded came as no surprise. However, that's not what I want to write about tonight. Tonight, I want to write about the future because my son, Logan, and I are about to jump off a platform onto a train that is moving very fast.

At this moment there is an eleven year old South Korean boy named David Lee hurtling toward us across the Pacific Ocean, seven miles high and close to 600 miles per hour; he'll arrive in Austin late tomorrow and then he'll come to live at our house for the next three months. There are reasons for this.

Though eleven seems startlingly young to me, Logan's school routinely hosts foreign exchange students from SK. This past Monday, the Principal sent out an email to the effect that there was a desperate need for a family to host David, as he was about to board a plane and come over and so far, no one had volunteered.

Ending the Year

I dreamt about my grandfather again last night. Though he died almost thirty years ago, he still appears regularly in my dreams and last night’s tracked most all of the others I have of him. He’s always the same, in his late seventies, active, fit and interested in whatever is going on, which is a far remove from how he was at the end, broken in body and spirit.


In my dream I was driving a red truck that had been sitting up for some time. After getting it up to speed, the thick layer of dust had blown off to reveal the old and spider tracked paint, patterned with minute hairline cracks like an impenetrable, organic labyrinth sprung from the slow passage of time. I drove into and finally through a howling

A Small and Perfect Gift

This year I woke to the first white Christmas Texas has seen since 1926. As I was beginning my drive from Austin to Dallas, fierce head winds sprang up from the northwest and the weather deteriorated rapidly into the kind of instant storm we sometimes get in Texas. The wind was gusting to forty plus miles per hour, snapping off road signs and hurtling icy rain punctuated with snow, slantways across the highway and into that variant beyond which is a highway's only constant, so fiercely that keeping my FJ-40 Landcruiser on the road became my sole focus. By the time I got to Dallas snow was general from there on north and west, but I didn’t expect it to last, because it almost never does.

My parents have a bungalow behind their house which is where I stay when I’m in town and when I arrived, dad had already built a mesquite wood fire and it was nice to drop my bag and

Coyotes, etc.

Okay. So I'm tired of the Facebook debate my comments about going on a coyote killing spree sparked, not because I'm tired of the debate itself, just the forum. Besides, I've been having blog-envy for some time now, but just haven't really felt moved to write anything here. That has changed.

Last Thursday, 13 August, my cat Gris went missing. I've been scouring the ranch, fearing the obvious and hoping for the improbable. Specifically, I suspected all along that a coyote had killed him, but as I hadn't heard any howling for some months and as none of my chickens had been killed for the same amount of time, I hoped that Gris was off being a cat and having a nice time. Around 10 this morning while I was out looking for Gris, I came across where a coyote had killed and eaten of of my hens.

Now, for those of you who don't know me, I live on a large ranch that is situated between Round Rock and Austin, Texas. Both cities have grown up around the ranch and I can see the top of an apartment complex from my back door. The apartment swimming pool is just across the fence from the ranch and in the summer I can walk a quarter mile in that direction and hear children playing in the water. At night it's loud music and beer bottles thrown over the fence. One or more of the apartment dwellers think it's great fun to drive golf balls onto the ranch. There are literally scores of them littering the southwest corner of the ranch and I see them every time I ride a horse or go for a walk. The point of course is that as their habitat has evaporated, the coyotes have been forced into narrower and narrower confines.

I'm an educated man and I understand that--as the poet said--"Nature is red in tooth and claw." I have also known and accepted that by letting Gris be an outdoor cat, his chances of being injured or killed by a wild animal or even a domestic dog were good, perhaps even better than average. And so, it seems that that has now happened.

So yes, I intend to kill coyotes