The journey.

Recently I was inspired to sit down with mom and encourage her to lay out some old family history. Specifically, the long list of moves we made, from one town and base to another during Dad's long, over 30 year career in the Air Force.

My sister prompted the whole thing. She'd apparently gotten mom to lay all of this history out for her once before, but then she'd given the list too some shrink. Something to do with all the moves, from one grade school, junior high and high school to another, and the impact that she believes our gypsy life had on the choices she's made in her life. The shrink had apparently been amazed at the list and asked if he could keep it. Now, with mom getting older, sis wanted me to take the history down again before it was lost in the mists of mothers aging memory.

When sis broached the subject, the idea of getting all this history written down sparked something in me. I started getting excited to get the information for myself. So, a few weekends ago, when I went over to visit and take care of a few things for mom, I grabbed a tablet, sat her down in her chair and she proceeded to dictate the beginnings of the list to me.

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Before we go into all that, let me point out the obvious. I've been absent from this place for quite a while. With my recent issues, I guess I've been left with a mix of feelings for the blog that's made me reluctant to come here. At the same time, I guess there hasn't been a hell of a lot going on in my life right now that I'm ether interested in telling everyone about, or that I feel comfortable telling everyone about. There's no tellin' who's reading it, after all.

The old FHB had gone from a very private, hidden person to one who felt comfortable pouring himself out here like his life was an opened book. It was almost an obligation. I felt I had to be straight and honest with everyone. I guess the pendulum swung from one extreme to another, with no thought for potential consequences.

Turns out that guy was a naive fool. When the roof come down on his head and his 20 year teaching career went spinning down the commode, he began relearning some valuable lessons. So I guess he's a little gun shy when it comes to revealing anything here now, but I don't know if I can help it. You can't really ever go back.

I do miss this place, and those old days. I guess I need to find a middle ground. Try to learn what to reveal, and what to hold close to the vest. I figured this list from mom could be as good an excuse as any to look back into my life and post something again. Something relatively safe. So here goes.

Thing is, the family story really begins before mom's list begins.

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As some of you already know, my dad grew up on a tenant farm here in Central Texas, in a time when very few poor people had many options about what life they would grow up to lead. In those days, as in the many centuries before, one's destiny in the south was in many ways dictated by birth. Some folks were born to money and land (more land than money), and the family responsibilities that came with it. Others were born to work that land for others.

Whether you were Black or White, the life of a Sharecropper (or Tenant Farmer if you were a little better off) was one of endless toil and few other job opportunities. Having said that, being born when, where, and who he was, my dad was pretty lucky. Mom has always said he was the luckiest person she ever saw.

Growing up in the 1920s and '30s, dad had a hand full of interesting factors in his corner. For one thing, he was White. As poor as everyone was back in those days, at least a White man had a few more options when it came to education, and that could lead to a few other job opportunities. Having said that, there were a hell of a lot of white men in my dad's family who didn't have the gumption to take advantage of their opportunities. Enough said on that subject. Dad's next advantage was his family.

My grandfather (with my grandmother at left), William C. Wilson Sr., inherited from his father the sum of $200. His father had owned a lot of land in the area, and he'd set my grandfather and his brothers up as sharecroppers on that land. But my great grandmother died, and my great grandfather remarried another woman who brought an earlier son into the family. When my great grandfather died, she inherited everything, sold off all the land, settled up with her husbands family and moved to California.

My grandfather hired on as a sharecropper and spent the next 15 or 20 years farming on another man's land (one might say, so much for the advantages of being White during segregation). He farmed a few large plots of land for a Mr. Holland, for whom the local farm town is now named. My dad was born and raised on Mr. Holland's land, and had it not been for the Great Depression and the Second World War, I might have been born there too.

In those days, education was a luxury for most farm families in the south. It hardly existed at all for Blacks or Tejanos. White folks saw to that. After all, with so few opportunities out there for anyone, why not make sure that your own kind will be able to enjoy a monopoly. It was a cut-throat world back in those days, and had been for as long as anyone knew.

That was the reality of the times my dad grew up in, but even with all the advantages of being a White man in the South, my Grandfather had only made it to the seventh grade. Still, as poor as they were, he and my grandmother worked tirelessly to make sure their kids were educated. He served as a school board member in his local school district, and paid taxes to support the education of his children, and those of his neighbors.

That's dad in the middle, between his brother Sam and my grandfather, who is holding my uncle John. They're sitting in the cotton field. I love this picture.

So, growing up picking cotton, my father went to a little community school house, walking or riding a horse and tying it to a tree that still stands in the front yard of the building. He attended school there through Junior High, then transferred to Academy High School, graduating early, at the age of 16, in 1939. He started college then, sweeping up at Temple Junior College at night and working in a gas station to help pay his tuition. When the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came over the radio one evening in late '41, dad supposedly became determined to join up.

He was like so many other boys and men in that moment, pissed off and burning for revenge. But my grandfather talked him out of it. In stead he took a welding class in Waco, on the advise of an older friend, and accepted a job at a North American factory in Los Angeles. He was living in a house on the beach and working the midnight shift as a riveter on a production line in Inglewood, where they built B-25s, when the news of the Doolittle Raid broke in April of 1942. He told me once that the newspapers were full of the story one morning as he and his coworkers ended their shift.

Determined again to join the fight, dad drove home and joined the army along with a bunch of his local buddies. Long story short, during basic training, he'd qualified for pilot training, after which he was commissioned, an officer and a gentleman by act of congress. He used to tell me that he'd always wanted to learn to fly, ever since watching an old biplane fly over the house while he sat on his fathers plow (the whole US Army Air Corps was stationed at a few bases near San Antonio, only a short flight south or where dad grew up). The year he spent at Temple College is what qualified him. When he graduated from pilot training, his mother penned the eagles on his chest in a ceremony in Waco. You know she was proud.

After that, dad was sent somewhere to train on the B-26. He used to tell me that after getting his wings, he'd been given the chance to pick what kind of plane he would train on. He said he'd expressed a desire for two engines. He told me he really wanted to fly the P-38. He said they ignored all of his picks and gave him the B-26. He wasn't very happy about it, but that was the way things went during the war. After completing his training, rather than being sent to fly in combat, he was assigned the task of training other pilots on the plane.

Dad always told me he hated the B-26. He said it handled horribly, and could easily be a death trap. He used to tell a story about how he'd been given the task of training French pilots on the plane, and that one day, after a student almost crashed and killed him and everyone else on the plane, he marched into his commanders office and demanded a transfer.

Pretty ballsy I guess, and a great turn of events, because they ended up transferring him to North Carolina, where he began training on a new plane. That plane, the one that dad would always describe as his favorite, was the Douglas A-26.

Back in the 1960s, when I was a little boy, as far as I knew, my dad was just like every other dad who left home early in the morning with a briefcase and came home late, only he wore a blue uniform. He was no longer flying (he'd stopped just after I was born, after qualifying in a jet trainer), but he used to thrill me with stories about the old days, and training on the A-26. So I grew up with a love for the plane, inherited from the old man.

The A-26 was sleek, twin engine bomber/attack plane, with none of the faults of the earlier B-26. Dad said it was like drivin' a fine sports car. It was fast and agile, and had the same bomb load as a B-17. The planes evolved over time, and ended up being used in the Air Force all the way up through Vietnam. They still fly today in many private hands. If you want to see them in action, rent the movie Always.



Richard Dreyfuss is flyin' the A-26 in the movie. It actually looks like the version of the plane dad flew.

That opening scene reminds me of one of dad's old stories. Something to do with training for low level attacks by flying three abreast over a lake and sending fishermen flying into the water in a panic. He also used to laugh about flying low over farm workers and sending them flying into ditches. He was a bad boy, but those were the days, and he got away with it over and over again.

He used to tell me that when the bombs were dropped... You know, THE bombs, that he'd been on his way to the Marshall Islands, to Kwajalain, to fly his A-26C in bombing operations connected to the invasion of the Japanese home islands. Of course the bombs made that invasion unnecessary, and sent my father, in stead, to a tour of duty in occupied Germany.

While dad was there, perhaps as a response to President Truman's big offer of American aid to everyone facing Soviet aggression, Joseph Stalin tried the squeeze us out of West Berlin by shutting down the roads and rails. In the first few weeks of what's become known since as The Berlin Airlift, dad flew a C-47, with load after load of coal, until other pilots from around the world could fly their cargo planes in and take over the job. Then dad went back to his Air Traffic Control duties, where he spent the rest of his career. Thirty-two years and nine months worth.

So, back to the list. Dad by then, we're talkin' early 1949, had been sent to his next posting in Moses Lake Washington. He was a single guy, and he was havin his share of fun (he used to tell me that he and the other pilots quietly referred to the wings on their chest as "leg spreaders"). At some point along the way he'd fallen for a Generals daughter. A blond from North Carolina.

One day, three years into their engagement (yea, I don't know what that was all about ether), he came home on leave and his Aunt set him up with the woman who would be my mother. They'd known about one another for years, but mom had been just a kid when he left to go to the service. Since then she'd blossomed. They dated for two weeks, after which he went back to the blond and got his ring back. My mom said "yes" over the phone, and the rest is history.

Mom grew up in central Texas too, in a little farm town not far from where dad grew up. Her father was a farmer, and also ran the post office in their little town. Her mother worked various jobs during mom's childhood, but ultimately got a long term job at a big local hospital setting up operating rooms for surgery. She held that job for over 30 years, and was the major bread winner in the family.

That's mom's family and a few of her friends there on the right. She's sitting in the middle of the bottom row, below her mom and dad, who are standing in the back.

At some point in the 1930s, a few of mom's uncles married a few of dad's aunts, and mom and dad started running into one another at family reunions. Mom was six years younger than dad, so he didn't pay much attention to her until he came home from Germany and found out how she'd "blossomed".

Like I said, one of their Aunts, tryin' to keep mom from suffering the fate of a spinster (at the age of 19 or so) arranged for the two of them to meet again at an event in the little town of Holland. Two weeks later dad was pitching the question and going back to get that ring from that blond.

Here's where mom's list begins.

The two were married Christmas day, 1949, here in Central Texas. I think it was at a friend's house in Temple. After that, they took a week or so to drive back to Moses Lake, where they rented a house. Mom says dad was becoming more and more disillusioned with his future in the Air Force by this time. The post war military was going through a wave of downsizing, and the civilian economy was in transition. Unemployment was high, but dad thought he had a connection.

Yea, the Army Air Forces had been transformed into the United States Air Force in '47, and dad had transitioned to the new branch along with everyone else. After a year of marriage there in Moses Lake, dad decided to get out of the service. A friend there had told him that if they moved to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, he'd set dad up in the family business. So, in the summer of 1950, mom and dad moved to Fond du Lac and dad started a new job selling furnaces. But it didn't work out.

Mom says dad would go all over the place, getting people to commit to buying a furnace, but then all the sales would fall through. He was working on commission, so she thought they were broke. But dad didn't let the fact that they were broke stop him from buyin' himself a brand new, canary yellow Mercury convertible with a black leather top and interior (maybe something like the one at right).

Mom was wondering what the hell she'd gotten herself into, but she loved the car. She says now that she looked like a million bucks in that car, and dad's ego got a big boost. I asked her "Y'all were makin' car payments and he didn't have a job?" "Oh no," she said. "He didn't make payments. He just bought the car." Daym, yea, dad was pretty cool. And he was lucky. Yep, once again, Mr. Stalin' intervened in my families destiny.

After dad resigned his commission at Moses Lake, mom and dad were driving home to Bell County for a visit before the move to Wisconsin. During that road trip, the news broke that "Uncle Joe" had flipped the switch and the North Korean hordes had crossed the 37th parallel.

In the fall of 1950, after the job in Fond du Lac fizzled out, mom and dad drove back home to Texas. Living in Waco, dad got a job selling funeral plots at a big cemetery. Pretty soon, with the war forcing the government to rebuild the military, dad was called up to rejoin the service. He'd joined the reserves when he left the Air Force, and he'd since been promoted to Captain. So, on the stipulation that he would keep his reserve rank, dad drove down to San Antonio in the spring of 1951 and took the oath again.

After putting the blue uniform back on, with a HUGE sigh of relief on mom's part, dad was sent to a duty station back in North Carolina. After a few weeks, during which he found them a place to live, mom joined him there. They would stay there a year, after which dad was sent to a new station being set up in North Africa. He was in Morocco for a few months, with mom back home here in Bell County. Somehow, dad pulled a few strings and got his orders changed. In the end, after a five month separation, mom joined dad in England.

That was the fall of 1953. Mom got pregnant shortly after joining dad, and my sister was hatched there in England in October of '54 (that's mom, very pregnant with sis in '54). After two years there, Dad was transferred back to the states, to attend Air Traffic Control School in Oklahoma City for 9 months. Mom and dad came home with a new baby daughter and a red Austin-Healey sports car.

Sis had her first birthday there in Oklahoma. After that the family picked up and moved to Houston, where dad was promoted to Major, and got command of his own squadron for the first time. He was commanding the tower and the air traffic controllers, and still flying now and then, just to keep his pilots certification.

Sis turned 2 there in Houston, where the family was stationed for a little over a year and a half. Then it was back to Oklahoma City, where they bought a house for the first time. Sis had her 3rd birthday there. Then they were transferred to Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, Texas, where sis turned 4.

While there, the next-door-neighbors kid, a little girl named Priscella, made some extra money babysitting my sister. Her step father supposedly funded those babysitting fees by repeatedly loosing poker games to my dad. Dad was a shark like that, augmenting his income for years before and after my mom came along with a deck of cards and a pool cue.

Of course, it was after Priscella and her family were transferred from Austin to Germany that she met up with Elvis, and the rest is history. My family went from Austin, Texas to Montgomery, Alabama, where dad attended Command and Staff College. Sis had her 5th birthday there, and it's also where I was finally conceived.

I say "finally" because they'd been trying for a while to have another kid, but they'd had no luck. Supposedly they were beginning to think of adopting a little boy when mom got pregnant with me. There's all sorts of interesting stuff I can say about that time in Alabama, with the Civil Rights movement in full swing and some of the drama that mom and dad witnessed, but maybe that's for another post. I think my sister started school there. That's the beginning of a whole other drama.

Anyway, after Command and Staff School, the family was transferred to Kindley Air Force Base, Bermuda. The family arrived there in the summer of 1960, with mom six months pregnant with me. I was born that November. We were there for 4 years, which sounds like an incredibly long time for them to be in one place (that's the house we lived in there on the right, with mom and sis on the balcony). Dad made Lt. Colonel there, worked very hard cleaning up a squadron that was supposedly a mess, and he played a LOT of golf.

He and my sister loved it there, but my mom says she hated the place. Today she says that you couldn't drive any faster than fifteen miles per hour without risking a ticket, and the waters around the island were full of sharks. I guess she's just not into islands. Anyway, she says she learned very quickly not to tell people that she didn't enjoy the posting. She says everyone would look at her like she was crazy. I know I did when she told me.

I have a few specific memories of Bermuda. The water at the beach was VERY blue, and there was an incident that involved a little baby and the lady who drove me to nursery school. There was also the time dad came home with a puppy in his coat. Again, I'll tell those stories in another post.

By the time we moved from Bermuda, dad was ready to finish his Bachelors Degree. Remember, he'd started college at Temple Junior College, back when it was just starting out in the basement of Temple high school in 1939. It was 1964 when he finally got the chance to finish it. We briefly moved to Omaha Nebraska so he could attend classes at the University of Nebraska.

I think we were only there for 6 or 8 months. I spent most of the time playing with our dog in the basement. Coolest thing I got out of Nebraska was a yellow sweatshirt with the schools Indian mascot on it. He was marching forward with a Mohawk on his head and a tomahawk in his hand on the front, and then you saw him from the back on the back of the shirt. I loved the hell out of that shirt, inherited it from dad as soon as it fit, and wore it out by the early 1970s.

From Nebraska, the family found itself back in Oklahoma City. By then my sister was 10 yrs old and I was 4. Sis had been to about five schools by then. One for each grade. When we got back to Oklahoma, mom and dad bought a house in Midwest City, a suburb of Oklahoma city. It was a great place to live. My family has always remembered it fondly.

After a year and a half, we were transferred the Wichita Falls, Texas. Sis was the new kid in school again. I think I started Kindergarten there. I learned how to ride a bicycle there without training wheels, and I started swimming lessons there too. Dad hired some young sergeant to teach me how to swim and dive after school. It was awesome.

After another year and a half, with dad thinking about getting out of the service again (the dread of Vietnam and his questioning the chances of ever making Colonel), and mom and sis dreading yet another move (the loss of yet another set of friends), the family was transferred back to England.

In the summer of 1966, sis was 11, going on 12, and I was 5, going on 6. We arrived in England in the summer, and spent several weeks in a boarding house in London before we found a place to live. The place dad found was base housing, but it was nestled in a suburban district on the northern outskirts of London. Today, if you go out there and look for the place where we lived, as I have done, you'll find that the trains don't stop out there on the weekends. It's the sticks.

Mom and sis hated the place (that's me, one of dad's old satchels filled with school stuff in one hand, headed out the back door to the other side of the housing are to wait for the blue bus). Other officers families were living out in the community, renting houses and sending their kids to British schools. But we were living in the British equivalent of public housing, surrounded by a mix of officers and enlisted families and their kids. The vibe in the house was thick. Mom spent those 3 years suffering from the beginnings of osteoporosis, pissing and moaning about one thing or another, and sis was becoming a teenager during the blooming of the '60s counter culture and couldn't participate. Nothing else needs to be said there.

I had my own set of problems there. I think I've posted about it all before. I was 5 yrs old when we got there, so I didn't care about the house or the neighborhood. But I was big. I looked like I was about 10, and all the older kids there treated me accordingly. Nothing like having a huge kid, bigger than you are, but too young and innocent to know how to defend himself, that you can easily intimidate. Yea, I got picked on a lot, by gangs of older boys and a few girls. It was hell on wheels, but by the time we left, the summer of 1970, even Carpenders Park, England had turned into a cool place.

That's when I began to realize what sis had been going through, moving from place to place so often. I was having a great time in England by the time we left (the shot at left is from about that time). I had a bunch of friends, and there was one girl in school (3rd grade?) who was getting into the habit of whipping around in her chair and tossing her dress up at me and the other guys. No panties. She later organized a little club where we kids would go out into the woods there where we lived and play Show and Tell. I think if we'd stayed in England any longer I might have figured out a way to have a little TOO much fun with her. Or she would have!

But we didn't stick around. Summer of 1970 we moved to Kansas City Missouri. After a short transitional period when I figured out my surroundings I spent the next 3 years in total bliss, running wild in the Missouri woods. But my sister was pissed. She was getting ready to finish high school there in England when we left. Like me, she'd gone through a lot of bullying at first, but by 1970 she was increasingly in the IN crowd.

From there she was dragged to Kansas City, where she was forced to attend and all Girls Catholic school, supposedly because the commute in the morning to the nearest public high school would have been something like an hour and a half both ways. I don't know. All I know is, she wasn't happy. And if the women in a family aren't happy, NOBODY is allowed to be. It was lucky for me that I had the woods to escape to.

After 3 great years, making lots of friends and having a LOT of fun, we were told that the family was moving again. But this time we couldn't stay in the house until the transfer took place. Mom and dad had sold the house, so we moved first to a house on base. I went from running around in the woods with a bow and quiver full of arrows, to sitting in the basement in base housing and watching TV. Dad and mom told me I couldn't run around on the base with a weapon, so the bow set never made it on the moving truck. I never saw them again. I was good with that thing too. I still miss those days.

I went from going to a school up the hill from the old house, where all my friends were, to going to a Catholic school across town that was mostly filled with tough orphans. So, I was the new kid in school yet again, with friggin' Nuns this time, and another set of tough kids to torment me. Mom decided to send me there, thinkin' that maybe the Nuns could get me to pay closer attention and study. But most of the stuff I learned there had more to do with staying out of peoples way and screwing around. The funny kids who knew how to give the Nuns a hard time were always more fun to hang out with and emulate than the kids who got good grades.

Some time late in the time we lived in Missouri, we started hearing about some folks we used to know who'd made it big. No, not Priscella and Elvis. Back in England, when my sister went London Central High school on the base at West Ruislip, the base commanders son, Gerry Beckley, had a little band that used to play at the teen club on base. By 1972 we were hearing a tune on the radio called Horse With No name, and realized that the boys had cut a deal with Apple Records and had a hit in the charts. Number one in the Billboard top 100. How cool is that?

By the time we finally moved from Missouri to San Antonio it was the late summer of 1973. I was 12, and sis was in college. She'd originally gone off to Lubbock to attend Texas Tech University, but she'd flunked out after a year and was attending community college there in San Antonio. She just stopped goin' to class, she says, because the huge crowds freaked her out, but I think it was mostly because she was away from mom and dad and havin' a GREAT time. In retrospect, I don't blame her a bit.

Mom decided when we got there that I needed to go to a little private school there in town. She was convinced that I had some sort of learning disability (I now know I have A.D. H.D.) and needed special attention. It was a small school, set up in a house in an old neighborhood. It's still there now. It turned out to be a school filled with handicapped kids and kids with emotional problems and other issues, so there wasn't very much learnin' goin' on there as far as I was concerned. Like at that Catholic school, most of what I did was daydream and try to stay out of the way.

After a while, the school got a new gym teacher who was determined to get us all into the Special Olympics. When I went home and told my mom that her son was gonna be in the Special Olympics she freaked out, and before I knew it, in the middle of the 7th grade term, I was transferred to the local Junior High, Eisenhower Middle School, down the road from our house.

So there I was. I hadn't been in a regular school environment in a few years, since leaving the 5th grade. In those two years, all the other kids had changed, and I didn't know how to relate to them. I'd spent the last year or so running from emotionally disturbed kids who didn't have to capacity to control their behavior. And then I walked into an environment at Eisenhower where most of the other kids had begun to grow up. They had discovered the opposite sex, and they were HUGE into football and other team sports.

I'd never done any of that stuff (despite the little girl in England who didn't wear panties), and didn't respond well to EVERYONE in the school trying to push me into joining the team. I just wanted to find some woods and get lost. Some of them even though they could bully me into playing on their team. The whole thing amazed me. I'd learned a long time before, when faced with this sort of thing, to just retreat into my own head and ignore everything else. So that's what I did. It's good that I only had to put up with that place for half the school year. When the school year ended for the summer of '74, I couldn't get away from that place fast enough.

After being in San Antonio for about a year or so, dad finally retired from the Air Force. He'd been promoted to Full Colonel in England, just before we left, and by the time he retired he'd been put in charge of all the communications facilities at all of the air bases around San Antonio. He'd successfully avoided the war, choosing to move the family to Missouri in stead of Hawaii, which he later told me "was too close to Vietnam."

When I found out, decades later, that we'd had the chance to live in Hawaii, I asked dad what the hell he was thinking. He said that the Air Force had a reputation for sending guys from Hawaii to Vietnam, and sending their families home. So, it was better to go to Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base in Kansas City, and work in that huge concrete block headquarters building, with one door in and out and no windows. And anyway, I loved it in Missouri, so I'm glad he made the decisions he made.

Shortly before they retired, mom and dad bought a house up in Ft. Worth. That's where we'd spend about the next 20 years. Sis was gone by then, livin' through her own set of dramas that I won't go into here. I was 13 or 14, moving to yet another new town, and going to yet another new school.

I endured the 8th grade at Wedgewood Middle School, at the time when Busing was in full swing. The folks they brought into our little world there in Wedgewood were not happy to be there, and they showed us that every day. There were fights all the time, and if you walked too close to one of those buses at the end of the day when you were on your way home you would probably be spit on. It was such a special time.

Unlike my sister I enjoyed the luxury of going to just one high school, Southwest High School, just up the road from our house, which I graduated from in 1979. Shortly after that, while I attended Tarrant County Junior College, mom and dad finally paid off that house we'd moved into in '74. So, did they celebrate the event by putting a bunch of extra money in the bank? Nope, we moved. Not to another town. Just to another house. Then, a year or two later, they moved again. That third house, about a mile away from the second one, was where they were living when I finally graduated from college with my Masters Degree in 1988 and started teaching on Navy ships in 1990.

About three and a half years later, with my grandmother in a nursing home here in Bell County, mom and dad decided it was time to go home. While I was away, teaching classes on a ship somewhere in the Pacific, they moved, with all my stuff too, to the house in Temple. In a sense, that where my mom and dads journey ends. Dad passed away at a hospital up the road from that house in early 2008. Mom still lives there now, and she's goin' strong.

Meanwhile, I'm livin' in a house in Killeen that I moved into in 2003. Sis is back in Oklahoma, where she's reconnecting with some of the life we lived up there long ago. Where she and I will go from here is anyone's guess. No tellin' what job I'll end up with, or where I'll have to go. The journey continues. I've suffered one hell of a derailment in the last year, but I'm determined to get the train back on the tracks somehow. I just don't know where the tracks will take me.

One thing I can say, all that movin' around in my childhood has left my sister and I with an interesting set of life skills. I think I can go anywhere and be OK. I can pick up all my crap and make a new nest anywhere. I've been doin' that all my life. But I don't make close friendships very easily. I've lost too many over the years, and put up with too much crap in situations i was tossed into, so I tend to be very wary of letting people get too close. I've gotten over some of that in the last decade or so, but the caution will probably never completely go away.

Bottom line, life is a journey, and mine is still in full swing. I thought I knew how things were gonna turn out, but now that old plan is over. Literally shit canned. So, I can ether look into the future with a dread of the unknown, or I can try to take stock of all I've learned along the way so far, bow my neck and try to see the future as a wide open adventure. I'm trying to do the latter, with the help of all those who love and support me. We'll see how it goes. Cheers.

I weas cleanin' up the house yesterday and found that other box of old models.

The box was on a shelf up in the laundry room. I took it down and opened it up and there they were.



That's a MiG 17, made to look Vietnamese, or maybe Chinese. Vietnam era anyway.



It's missing a few missiles, and some landing gear. I know where the missiles are. No tellin' about the landing gear.



Late model Stug III or IV. A few parts that need work, and the crew. I know where most of it is.



The turret off of something called a Wirblewind. No tellin' where the rest of it is (Basically a Pz IV body), which tells me that there's another box of models around here somewhere.



A muddy little Schwimmwagen, with three wheels missing. I know where they are.



A Kettenkrad, tracked motorcycle. One of the last kits I started. You can see here that I hadn't finished the driver. That green putty is there to smooth out the kinks where I was makin' things up, tradin' parts and pieces. I was doin'' a lot of that in the old days.



Here's a 4 barrel (No tellin' where 3 of them are) 20m AAA off the back of a half track, and I have no idea where the rest of it is. Again, in another box somewhere.



A late model Stug IV, missing a few parts, including the gun. I know where the parts are. Check out the Zimmerit. I applied that myself, with some of that green putty and an X-Acto knife. I don't think I have the patience to do that any more.

Of course, now they make a kit with special applique Zimmerit that sticks on like a decal. And even if you still want to make your own, they sell the tools. There's no need to carve your own little scraper. No need for skill and patience at all.

Having said all that, I look at this and I think it still takes some skill to install that applique. And you know, that shit looks cool as hell.



On this one, I even painted on the decals. I was gettin' good back then, lets say, about 1986.



On the left here, that' a T-62. The one next to it is a T-72 model that I picked up in Singapore, while I was living and working on the USS Peleliu, summer of 1991. I was amazed when I found it in a store. Brought it and a little tube of super glue (the only kind I could find) back to the room and killed some time between classes.

Thing is, I was livin' with a couple of Harrier pilots who had already completed one tour, during the gulf war, and were now doing a second because some other Harriers had broken down and couldn't come out to replace them. They were pissed, and then I showed up in their life. I got back to the room one day and the tank was sitting on my desk and one of the pilots was standing over it. "What the fuck? You know we kill these fuckin' things for a LIVING? and you dare to bring this shit in here? He was joking. It was hilarious.

That T-62 was the first modern Soviet tank model kit I'd seen when I built it. WW2 stuff had been around for ever, but modern stuff, and modern soldier kits were nowhere to be found. So the T-72 was a shock when I found it. Now, searchin' the web, I see that my favorite model company, Tamiya, makes a cool T-55 kit too (my favorite modern Russian tank). Not only that, but look over on the right and check out the add-on kits you can get. Check out this conversion kit for that T-62 model I built. Amazing. SO much cooler than the stuff they had when I was modeling.

Anyway, I'll get the glue out some time and try to put humpty dumpty back together again', but i can't see myself gettin' back into the hobby. Like I said before, I don't have the patience, or the money, or the time. More important shit to do these days.

Goin' down to Florence today to go through "Substitute Training". We'll see what that entails. Cheers.

What's been goin' on.

Had a busy few weeks, the end of 2010. While I've been getting ready to take my first high school certification exam (this next Saturday), I've also been tryin' to clean up the house, rearrange things and get rid of some stuff that's been cluttering up the house for a long time. I finally hooked up Denise's computer, which has been collecting dust on my floor ever since her house was burglarized earlier in the year and her monitor was stolen. She hasn't been able to do her online banking since then, so it was good the finally get it put together.

In rearranging my desk, moving some stuff to the desk in the bedroom, I started to go through the shelves and dust off some old models that had been damaged in a few moves, and from neglect.



I decided to get some glue, gather the spare parts and try to put humpty dumpty back together again. They all needed repairs. This one needed the tracks fixed, and a few parts glued back on here and there.



Some of these guys needed arms and helmets. You can see that one still needs a hand and an SMG. No tellin' where those go off to in the last few decades. When I find the rest of his parts I'll re-glue him to his spot on that sidewalk. The three dudes on the right belong to a tank that's sittin' in a box somewhere. I need to find it.



Voila! A late model T-34-76, representing the height of my model making skills, circa 1985 or so. It still needs a new antenna, but that'll have to wait. That tarp on the side of the vehicle is made from tissue paper that's been glued and painted. The tow cable is made from wire that's been twisted and painted. I used to get so much joy out of puttin' these things together. In hind sight, I guess I should have been getting the hell out of my room, going out and figuring out how to relate to other people. But that's old history.

By the time I got into grad school I really didn't have the time for this level of modeling, and I guess I lost the interest. Funny thing... In putting this one and a few others back together, the interest has kinda been rekindled. But Jesus, have you seen the price they charge for tank models these days? I can remember when cobbling together ten bucks for one took me a week or two of odd jobs and allowance. A $20 model, like the big towed 88mm gun with a full crew, was completely out of my price range. Today, a kit like this T-34 would probably cost me $45. I just don't have that kind of throw away cash any more, and I probably don't have the patience, or eyesight for it ether. Anyway, I have more important things to do.

Plus, you can go to a sight like this and buy the tank already put together, already painted and set up, for about the same amount of money as the kit. No need to take the time to build up the skills to make your own any more. It comes right out of the box like you spent years in your room learnin' how to build it. Oh well, times change.



While rummaging around the old desk, I found this little piece of history. My Junior College ID from about 1980. God, I'd love to be able to go back there. Since I'm being forced to start all over again, I might as well have my youth, right? Not to mention all that hair.



And I found this one, taken by someone in the guard office at the Colonial Country Club in Ft. Worth, about 1988 or 9. I was basically done with grad school here, chummin' the waters and waiting for the jobs to materialize. Within' year or so of this I was living and teaching on deployed navy ships, traveling the world and thinking that I had it made.

I've been spending a lot more time with mom these days, using my free time to try to help her out when she lets me.



I helped her take one of her cats to the vet about a month ago. Little Angel had been in a fight with another critter in the back yard and had a big gouge taken out of her ass. She didn't like it when I caught her and put here in the carrier, and she's still avoiding me now. But her ass is healing, and mom is happy, and I guess that's what matters.



I accompanied her to the commissary on base a few weeks ago (yea, I can get on the base. No problems). She goes about once a month and fills up two carts with a months worth of stuff. Dad used to go with her, but since he passed she's been goin' by herself, pushin' two friggin' carts around with a bad hip.

I beg her now to let me go with her, and recently she's let me help out. It's fun, makin' me feel like I'm about ten years old again as I follow slowly after her down the isles. But really, it makes me feel really good to help her out. I'll miss the hell out of things like this when the day comes, so I don't want to miss anything now.

A week or so ago, Denise and I drove to Kentucky to spend Christmas with her kids. We left here around noon-thirty on the 23rd. and drove all day, stopping in Jackson TN around midnight and spending the night in a dingy old La Quinta.



Here's our view of Nashville, which we zipped past after eating breakfast at a nice little Denny's on the outskirts of Jackson.



I found a new brand of jerky at a truck stop along the way. Pretty good stuff, but not as good as the stuff the kids make down in Florence.

We rolled into Bowling Green a little after noon, and settled in with Denise's daughter Lynn, her husband Dale, and their daughter Payton. It's always fun to see these folks, and to see Denise turn into a bubbling mass of quivering goo in the face of her precious little granddaughter.

By the time the sun went down it began to snow.



Yep, we had a white Christmas. It was awesome. They couldn't keep me from runnin' out there in my shorts and playin' in it.



Denise and I had a chance to spend Christmas morning with her new granddaughter, little Payton. You can see here that she's already learned to hold the cell phone up to her ear.



I also had a chance to introduce little Payton to the mountain man hat. She loved it.



After enjoying Christmas morning with Payton in Bowling Green, we drove in the snow up to Vine Grove and had another Christmas with Denise's other daughter Chantel, her fella John, and Denise's grandsons.



We also got the chance, later that day, to visit with John's family and enjoy yet another Christmas. Yep, that's three sets of presents. pretty good if you can get it.



And John's family laid out the Christmas dinner. We had a wonderful ham, dressing, and all the other fixin's. It was wonderful.



The next day, Lynn and Dale drove up to Vine Grove and we had yet another ham. I tell ya, I can't get enough of the pig.

After a few days in Vine Grove, during which we all made a fun trip up to Louisville (I'll tell you about that in the next post), Denise and I drove back down to Bowling Green.



After getting there, Denise and I drove over to the local liquor store, to restock the pantry, and picked up dinner at Jimbo's.



That's a double meat, bacon cheeseburger with pickles, jalapenos and all the other fixin's. Delish!



The next morning, this last Thursday morning, we slept in a bit, took a few more pictures of the little girl, and then began the long drive home.

We hit the road at about 11:30AM. Denise drove from Bowling Green to Little Rock, where we had dinner at a Cracker Barrel just west of town off I-30. First time I ever had dinner at a CB. Not bad. I took over the drivin' duties then and took us home. We drove up into the garage at about 2:30 in the morning, and hit the sack soon after that.

It was a wonderful trip. We both look forward to the day when the drive is much shorter. But there's no tellin' when that'll be. Too many unknown variables in my life now, but we'll work it out.

Anyway, Happy New Year to everyone. Let's hope 2011 turns out to be a much better year than 2010 ended up being. Cheers!

I was ten years old, happy as I'd ever been in my life, runnin' free in the Missouri woods when this tune came out in 1971.

Those days seem a million miles away now. Like someone else's life. Summers spent deep in the thick, green woods, shooting arrows at anything that moved, building tree houses and forts, pretending to be soldiers, or hunters, or Indians on the warpath. Anyone other than who we were. After the crud I'd been put through in England, Kansas City was paradise.

My friends, Mike Hinkley, Greg Rogers and I spent our winter days wondering at the magic of the ice storms that coated the trees, running in the deep snow, slipping and sliding on the frozen creek that ran behind our houses and sliding down the tall hill on our sleds. It's funny how, when prompted, the mind jumps to those warm, fond memories.

It was ages later, long after I'd memorized all the words, before I learned the sad inspiration for the song... That Mclean was singing about Buddy Holly, among other things. I still love it, and still sing it to myself at the top of my lungs when I hear it in the car. I'm instantly taken back to those good times. It's wild how music can do that to ya.

Other weekend drama.

Aside from mom's birthday and all the left-overs from Thanksgiving, Denise and I had a few more little dramas over the weekend.

First, Friday night, as we were beginning to drift off to sleep, I heard one of the cats making a weird noise. It was a strangely muffled but loud meow. I got up from the bed in time to see my little buddy Tiger...

This is him, a week or so ago, sacked out in my chair. he's my buddy. The only one of the six cats that I feed that acts like he loves me. He was the runt of the litter, shoved around by the others when they were kittens. I'd always make sure he got to eat, so he learned to love and trust me early on.

Anyway, he was makin' this weird noise that night, like he was meowin' with a full mouth. Sure enough, he had a rat in his mouth, and he'd brought it in to me to show it off. Thing is, as soon as I got out of bed he dropped the little offering, and it scurried off into the darkness of the living room. Of course, this isn't the first time one of the kids had done this. But it's been a hell of a long time.

When I first moved in here, in 2003, they used to do it all the time. They'd bulldozed the field in front of the house to build the HEB, and there were rats and critters all over the neighborhood. the boys had a field day. I used to leave the front door cracked, like I did at my last apartment, so the cats could come and go at will. But pretty soon after movin' in it got to where I had to leave the doors closed. I was sick of the chase.

By the time I put in the cat door in the guest bedroom, this sort of thing was long forgotten. I felt sure the cats had killed everything in sight. Still, every now and then we find the pieces of a bird carcass, usually a pile of feathers, in the guest room. The dead rats, when we find them, are found out in the back yard. Recently though, instead of finding them in the yard, the kids have gotten into the habit of bringing them in and finishing them off in the house. Denise will wake me up some days with that look on her face and say "You need to get up NOW!" I always know what that means.

I usually laugh as I'm putting the poor dead critter in a plastic bag, tyin' it shut and walking it out to the dumpster. And there's always a part of me that wants to chase her around with it, if only briefly. But I've learned that that can get out of hand really quick. I thought she was gonna have a heart attack on me a while back. And that was just with a little dead garden snake. Again' a present from the boys.

Anyway, so I turned on the lights in the living room and located the rat, which was hiding under my stair machine. Tiger was pointing the way. When I leaned the StairMaster over it skittered out and under my recliner, Tiger in hot pursuit. He was watching every move that rat made.

I lifted up the recliner and there he was, shifting from one side of it to the other. It's little rodents life must have been flashing before it's eyes. I put the chair down again and went and got my BB pistol, thinkin' I'd plink the little dude when I lifted up the recliner again. But when I did, he bolted, and tiger bolted after him.

That was the last I saw of the rat. Next thing I know, Tiger is relaxing in the guest bedroom, seemingly unconcerned that his dinner has escaped, and I have no clue where the little bastard is. I looked all over the living room while Denise sat there in bed, watching.

"Well, where is it? Did you get it?" she asked as I strolled back into the bedroom. "Uh, nope. No clue," was my response. "Well, close the door," she said. "It can't get in here can it?" "Naa," I said, lyin' my ass off. I put a towel down on the floor by the door. I reassured her that there was no way the little dude could get into the bedroom, or into bed with us (shiver me timbers), and put my trust in the cats. I figured that when all the commotion died down, they'd come back in the house and do what cats do.

The next morning, there was no sign of ether the cats, or the rat. I hoped that some time during the night, the cats had done their duty, but there was no obvious sign of it. Then, some time Saturday afternoon, Denise noticed something under the footrest of my chair. I looked and sure enough, there sat about the last inch or so of a rats tail. Yep, something like a death struggle had gone on while we slept. But it wasn't until late Saturday night that I found the real evidence.



It was when I went in to the hallway bathroom, to make an evenings offering. I was sittin' there on the throne, checkin' out the deals in the latest C.I. catalog, when I saw a little swath of something crimson there on the tile next to the magazine basket (which normally sits in the corner, up against the bathtub and wall). Blood on the floor tile. When I pulled back the basket, the full scope if the carnage was revealed.



Look closely. You can even make out little bloody rat footprints, and what might be the last scatological offerings that were involuntarily given as the feline hunters took their fatal bite. Yep, I live with some deadly ninja kitties, fer sure. I just wish they'd do their killin' outside.

The other drama this last weekend was much less bloody, but much more expensive. By the time we returned to the house Saturday night, after having that nice Birthday dinner with mom, I walked down to the road to get the mail and noticed a lot of water in the gutter. I soon discovered that water was gushing out of my water meter box.



It was a gusher. I called the city water department and they sent someone out to turn off the flow. I could have done it myself, but I thought you needed that special tool to do it. you know, the one they always have. I now know I could have used a wrench. Live and learn.

The city water guy turned off the water and dug out enough mud to see that it was going to be my problem. The pipe that was busted was mine, and not the cities. Also, he told me that I'd have to pay for all that water that had been gushing out into the street for God knows how long. We'd left to go to mom's about 4:30, and returned at about 10PM, so that could be a LOT of water.

I assumed it was broken PVC, and though about fixing it myself. But I don't trust myself to do it right. I called my usual plumber Sunday morning, but they don't work weekends. Eventually, after calling around, I finally got someone to come out and deal with it.



It turned out to be pretty simple problem, right there in the meter box. There was no serious digging required. I dodged a bullet on that one. Having watched the dude do the fixing, I think I could fix it again myself if it ever breaks again. It was just this piece of angled PVC, which had become unglued and popped out, causing the gusher.



When I rubbed some of the mud off of it I saw a hair line crack in it's side, which probably contributed to the failure. God thing is, it's probably the original item, put in place in 1996 or so when the house was built.



Thing is, the first time he fixed it, the bond didn't hold up to the pressure. I was sanding there, about to take a picture of the fixed pipe when WHOOSH, the seal burst open and the water sprayed out, and he had to jump in and turn off the water again.



It took the dude three tries to get it to hold, but in the end it was fixed. At least, it's still holding. We'll see how long it lasts. There's something like a two year warranty on the work... $485 later. Just what I need right now, and unexpected expense. Next time I'll do it myself. Cheers!