photography – Page 42 – I'll Call It Like I See It

learning new tricks from old dogs

I first published this post in August, 2015 but I still love it. My dogs have always been my best teachers about what truly matters. I learned that from my daddy.

From the time I was five or six years old growing up in rural southeast Texas in the 1950s, my daddy used to take me with him to hunt quail during what I remember as a relatively short season in the late fall and winter months. Quail lived in coveys in fields in the countryside around us and were excellent at hiding from their enemies in the tall grasses that would become hay when baled. You could walk and walk and walk some more until you felt like your legs were going to fall off if you had to put one foot ahead of the other again, but the quail were always one step ahead of you unless you had help locating them.

Enter the hunter’s best friend: the German short-haired pointer a/k/a in Grimes County, Texas as the bird dog. A good bird dog could run through a field sniffing and sniffing, sometimes whining, until he caught a whiff of a covey of quail; then he would stop, raise his right front leg to a ninety-degree angle, curl his medium-length tail over his back and point his nose exactly in the direction of the covey. He remained in this precise position until the hunter walked up beside the dog which would cause the quail to take flight with the sound of their fluttering wings making a whoosh noise as they left the ground.

Whoosh! Bam! It was over that quick. The covey rose from the ground cover, and my daddy would shoot his twelve-gauge shotgun. Occasionally a bird would fall, and I would run to retrieve it and put it in my jacket to take home to my grandmother who would be happy to fix it for our supper. We rarely got our legal limit, but we would usually have enough for a meal.

The problem my daddy had was he never had a “good” bird dog. He got the puppies from different people in the area who always assured him their dogs were the best in the field, but invariably the pointer he got didn’t respond well to training. A common trait Daddy’s dogs had was rather than stopping to point and hold their position, they would stop to point for a split second and then run as fast as they could to try to catch the birds by themselves. Of course, the quail would take flight when they heard the dogs and be long gone out of shooting range by the time we caught up with the dogs. Daddy would halfheartedly fuss – but the dogs rarely improved.

As I think back on this now, I believe our dogs had an identity issue which caused their lackluster performance in the field. Whether they did well or not in the hunting arena, they were fed regularly with delicious scraps from our table (dog food wasn’t on Daddy’s radar screen), petted and hugged on an equally regular basis. They came indoors for their pets and Daddy often scooped the big dogs up to hold them on his lap while he talked to them about their shortcomings. My daddy was a very diminutive man – about five feet six inches tall – and those dogs weighed almost as much as he did. They looked at him with adoring eyes and absolute trust…and seemed to be saying I promise I’ll do better next time…but they wouldn’t.

Daddy with what he loved most – his dog and his Bible

My daddy loved his bird dogs. We always had at least one dog in our family for as long as I can remember and at one time when I was in high school, we had three. I know that for sure because I still have the original oil paintings he commissioned at that time from an artist friend of his.

Daddy’s Bird Dogs: Rex, Seth and Dab (circa 1966)

No wonder I love my dogs. I’ve never personally owned a bird dog, but I’ve been on the receiving end of the adoring eyes and plaintive expressions of more than a few dogs of my own throughout my adult life. I confess to holding them on my lap if I can scoop them up, but even if I can’t do that, I will give them lots of love and kisses whenever and wherever they will stand or sit or lie down to be so smothered.

Loving dogs – or any animal for that matter – is the gift that keeps on giving to us mere humans, but the gift comes with a high price tag because their lives are relatively short. Indeed, it seems the older we are, the faster we lose them.

Two of our three remaining dogs that have given us much more loyalty and adoration than we deserve over the past decade have now been diagnosed with cancers that will ultimately take them from us. What I have learned from them is that they both keep their pain to themselves without complaints. They are not troubled by wondering why they are in their particular situations, and I think this allows them to try to keep changes in their routines to a minimum. They like to roll the way they’ve always rolled if they possibly can.

I am a contemplative person – I can’t help myself. I find I can spend a great deal of time trying to figure out “why” this happened or that took place. Unfortunately, discovering “why” doesn’t necessarily lead to productive change. As a matter of fact, the opposite is likely to occur. So when I find myself in a position similar to the ones my dogs are facing today, I hope I have learned my lessons from the examples they have set for me and focus less on “why” and more on “so what.”

That’s the way I’d like to roll.

P.S. My daddy never asked anyone to make an oil painting of me.

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Stay safe, stay sane and stay tuned.

April 16, 2020

your so-called social security

When I looked at our bank account last night for the umpteenth time before going to bed, I was ecstatic to see the Covid-19 recovery money had been deposited by the guvmint. Ecstatic for us – and for the guvmint as well. I told Pretty yesterday if we didn’t get the money by today, someone was going to hear from me. (As if the guvmint would be very afraid of a call from me.) Since her nonessential antique empire is shut down without any protest from us, we really are very thankful to have unexpected deposits. I remembered a post about other guvmint checks I published here in January, 2015.

One of the most popular country singers and songwriters, Merle Haggard, wrote one of my favorite songs, Big City, with lyrics that are much more meaningful to me in 2015 than they were in 1981 when I first heard it. “Gimme all I’ve got coming to me…and keep your retirement and your so-called Social Security. Big City, turn me loose and set me free.”

Yep, in 1981 I was thirty-five years old and the owner of a very small CPA firm that had a growing clientele with low overhead. How small was very small? That would be one person: me. I had been working full-time since 1967, was in robust health – full of piss and vinegar – with visions of acquiring great wealth through hard work and perseverance in America, the land of equal opportunity. Retirement? Social Security? Bah, humbug. Irrelevant and unimportant, but I paid my Social Security taxes along with everyone else.

Fast forward to 2008, the year I turned sixty-two years old. My robust health became more of a pisser than vinegar, which forced me to retire much earlier than I had planned, long before acquiring great wealth. I had worked for forty-one years in a variety of jobs with numbers as their primary common denominator; I had made both good and bad career moves in those years but was moderately successful in the good years while being financially challenged in the lean ones.

Regardless of the triumphs and tragedies in my working life, I continued to pay my income taxes plus Social Security taxes every year along with everyone else in America. When I became disabled at age sixty-two, I began to receive my retirement benefits from the Social Security Administration. Because my prospects for acquiring great wealth looked slimmer than my prospects for acquiring great weight, I’m afraid I couldn’t sing along with Merle who apparently didn’t want his Social Security.

I’m happy to have mine – happy to be on the receiving end of what I paid into for more than forty years. Thanks Merle, but gimme all I got coming to me including my so-called Social Security, and then Big City, turn me loose and set me free.

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Stay safe, stay sane and stay tuned. Seriously, my friends. Please do.

April 15, 2020

between hell and hackeydam

As if the Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t enough, apparently the weather has also turned against us. I hear the wind howling in the trees tonight outside my window – with the possibility of tornadoes on the way according to the weather forecasters. I feel like we are caught between hell and hackeydam, a place most undesirable. I first introduced the phrase and the man who shared it with me to my followers eight years ago, but the story will be new for some. Whether you remember him or not, Bubba Sage should give you a smile.

Once upon a time not long ago and certainly not far away a great Texas storyteller held forth on a Sunday afternoon as his audience gathered around a small dining room table, and it was my good luck to be there for the performance. He was the last guest to arrive for the barbecue luncheon but proved to be quite the addition to a little band of friends and family who gathered for a traditional birthday celebration for my cousin Martin at his brother Dennis’s home outside Navasota.

I should’ve known I was in for a treat when Carroll “Bubba” Sage announced his presence with an entrance worthy of royalty. This very large man with a closely trimmed grey beard moved into the kitchen as the screen door slammed behind him. He balanced a homemade German chocolate cake in a single layer aluminum cake pan as he came in, and I felt the energy in the little house went up a notch. When he retrieved a package of coffee he’d also brought and declared he never went anywhere without his own Dunkin’ Donuts coffee because he couldn’t possibly drink anything else with his cake, my antenna was up and ready for the ride.

What a ride it was. Bubba grew up as the younger child of parents who owned and operated what was affectionately known by its patrons in the 1950s as a beer joint. He was born and raised in Navasota which was, and is sixty years later, a small town in Grimes County, Texas, a county that was dry back in those days so his folks opened their establishment across the Brazos River in Washington County which was wet. Dry county equals no adult beverages allowed. Wet county means go for it.

In addition to serving beer, the best barbecue and hamburgers in the state made the place standing room only for a long time, according to Bubba’s stories. I know barbecue like that from years of chasing brisket in Texas hole-in-the-wall restaurants and could visualize the scene as Bubba’s daddy cooked the barbecue outside behind the tavern on a long open pit built out of bricks with a crusty black grill to put the meat on. I swear I could smell the aroma, or maybe that was my cousin’s chickens and sausage cooking outside in a smoker for our lunch.

And my, oh my, talk about entertainment. The Sage Place had music on the weekends when Bubba’s daddy played the fiddle in the band. As Alabama sings, if you’re gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddler in the band. The women’s petticoats swirled to the fast music and then swayed to the slow tunes as they danced the Two-Step. The female patrons particularly liked the little boy who was always there and let him wear their costume jewelry sometimes when they saw him eyeing it with lust in his eyes. He was in heaven.

The young boy grew up to become one of the teenagers that puffed the magic dragon in the middle of the Brazos River at a place he and his friends appropriately dubbed Smokey Point. They also created a theater of sorts at Smokey Point where Bubba developed a reputation as the Star of the Brazos. I was mesmerized by this big man’s recitations at our dining table. He took me totally by surprise when he began quoting a section of Young Goodman Brown, an obscure short story by the nineteenth century novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. I could picture him standing on the rocks at Smokey Point as the Brazos River flowed past the theatrics this young teenager performed.

As all good storytellers do, Bubba threw in a few words to grab his listeners’ attention and he grabbed mine when he said, “I’ve had close calls – been caught between hell and hackeydam more times than I like to remember.” Excuse me I said as I interrupted him. But what does that mean and how do you spell it? Bubba laughed and said it was like being between a rock and a hard place but for some reason his family used this phrase instead. (He added he had no idea how to spell it so I’ve spelled it phonetically here and will now use it as if I created it.)

The lunch was delicious. Bubba’s German chocolate cake was the best I ever tasted which includes both of my grandmothers’ efforts so that’s high praise. I stayed to play dominoes after we ate and then began to say my goodbyes when the game was over. As I cut a piece of cake to take with me, Bubba made one final rendition in the kitchen. He recited portions of “The Hill” from Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology which ends with the line, “… all, all are sleeping on the hill…”

Honestly, does it get any better than that?

view from my cousins Dennis and Martin’s place

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Stay safe, stay sane and stay tuned.

April 13, 2020

no one is born hating

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Nelson Mandela (1918 – 2013)

My heroes when I was a child growing up in Grimes County, Texas were always the cowboys in old western movies I watched on Saturday mornings with my daddy. They were men who settled their differences with guns but fired only at the bad guys who were easily identifiable as thieves, cattle rustlers, or other desperadoes out to do wrongs to innocent ranchers or townspeople. The bad guys were often found drinking whiskey in saloons in the company of women with “loose” morals – women that sometimes turned out to be damsels in distress. The movie cowboys rescued damsels in distress whenever they spotted one and fought to bring justice to the lawless frontier that was the American West.

As I aged, my heroes have thankfully changed, but the people I most admire are still the ones who try to lift my vision toward higher ground; and by higher ground I mean a place where justice and equality reign in tandem against the forces of unfairness, dishonesty and outright evil. My cowboys have been replaced by men and women who choose to settle their differences with words that effect change more powerfully than did the guns of the Wild West. They are people whose examples give us hope of rescue when we find ourselves in the saloons we make of our lives.

Nelson Mandela was such a hero to me, a man whose extraordinary personal sacrifice changed the politics of his own South Africa which inspired dreams for peace and democracy around the world. Facing the death penalty for sabotage at his trial in April, 1964 Mandela spoke these words:

“I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

He was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released in 1990 by President F. W. de Klerk who then negotiated with Mandela’s party to end apartheid in South Africa. Twenty-seven years of his life with no personal freedom, and Nelson Mandela became a symbol of freedom for his nation and the rest of the world. In 1993 Mandela and de Klerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to end the oppression of apartheid in their country. Mandela became the first black president of South Africa in 1994.

For me, Nelson Mandela was as brave as any cowboy I watched in the Saturday morning westerns of my childhood. In a world today where the ideals of democracy and personal freedom are under attack by forces as evil as the Covid-19 virus which claims the lives of the poor, people of color, the elderly – those who are marginalized by our own divisive institutions as surely as the institution of apartheid did in South Africa – I look to Nelson Mandela for his sacrifice and courage that showed me the power of peace in the midst of turmoil, hope for unity in a world divided artificially by the hate we’ve learned to love.