Sidetracked Charley

Thicke, prince of cats   I always considered my family from Kansas City. A town I was not born in (St Joseph hospital was closer) and only partly raised. My father was born in Iowa but Mother in Missouri somewhere. Her family was from Mexico, Missouri where as far as I have been able to ascertain her grandfather was the town drunk. From the second grade on we were military gypsies which saved us from dying of starvation on the plot of land now under the Kansas City Airport runways. In the era after WWII there was a return to the land movement and a belief with a couple acres of land and enough side businesses you could survive without working for The Man. Mom and Dad were obviously their generation's version of hippies. We had a truck farm on an acre, chickens to produce eggs we sold, and kennels where Dad raised hunting dogs. He also showed and trained them.  The Korean Conflict and my father being a pilot saved us from all of that. And in the second grade I was in Roswell, N...

There was a television show of the same era as the original Twilight Zone I used to watch. The basic theme was an event in each episode which changed drastically the direction of the characters and the plot. I became obsessed with defining those events in my past. I had some big ones. There was my mother's breast cancer, the art teacher coming after me with mat knife and then inviting me into he storage room for me to apologize, and being struck by a skier while teaching. But not all turning points in our life are so clearly defined. Sometimes we continue on our planned route without realizing we must have taken a turn because this is not where we thought we would be. As my sister would say in our off road adventures, "Not lost but just unsure of how to get back to where we started." To which I would ask, "Is that what we want to do? Go back?" It rarely was. We sort of enjoyed going beyond the limits of the GPS. Note: in the mountain west that is easier ...

Chamisa Blooming There is something about the open plains and a totally straight line of highway for mile after mile which frees the mind to think. On this trip back from Trinidad I was thinking of so many other trips across the plains in the last few years and the difference rain can make. I want to use the word lush but so many in the east will not understand that used in this context. The grass, already beginning to go gold because of night temperatures looked so thick and so long in spots you almost felt it would be difficult to walk through. And indeed a lot of the locals were not walking. One of this herd of buffalo got up when I walked (waded) to the fence line. The grass was up to my knees and almost up to their bellies. They definitely looked well fed. Buffalo on the Vermejo Park Ranch Even the post rut Pronghorn Antelope were too stuffed to move much. A rather nervous animal in the best of times this one even allowed me to get out of my truck to get a better a...