HOW DID IT GET TO BE FALL?

Saturday, September 29, 2007
I’m sitting in the Seattle-Tacoma Airport in a semi-quiet spot with floor to ceiling windows looking out on the gray puffy cloud-filled sky. It looks like I could reach out and ring the water from one of them.

Traveling is always a bit disorienting especially when the trip is fast-paced and packed from start to finish and the flight path is crisscrossed. I booked the flight with American Advantage miles, which was good for the pocketbook but not for direct travel. For starters, American doesn’t fly to Montana. With mileage points though they allowed me to hook up through Alaska Air’s Horizon Air. There aren’t many of those flights out of Helena so I took what I could get: 6:10am to Seattle (one stop in Great Falls that didn’t require getting off but did require moving to my assigned seat and losing my sleeping berth). Then was the painful 7-hour layover before I could catch a flight to Dallas. Two things Sea-Tac Airport has going for it: (1) there is a great place for chair and foot massage that is very rejuvenating especially when one has had only 4 ½ hours of sleep and (2) the bathroom stall doors open outward so you don’t have to squish in your bag and yourself into the stall, work around the door to turn around and get it shut before doing one’s business. Someone thought that one through. Probably an architect with a hell of a long layover somewhere.

Thirty-six hours after arriving in Dallas –just long enough to miss the turn off at Lewisville and almost go to Mckinney rather than Denton and still have some time to sleep once I backtracked and got to the right destination-- I caught a quick flight on Southwest Airlines (my favorite) to Houston and the day after that I drove the 3 1/2 hours to San Antonio. Now coming back a week later, I had it easy this morning with an 11:10 departure from San Antonio, quick changeover in Dallas, and then nice flight to Seattle where I now have five hours before I board for Helena. I love flying and traveling but as I gain in minutes and years, it seems to take longer for my soul/life-force/innards to catch up with my body. Hopefully that will happen tomorrow, Sunday, when I get some time to stare into space –not that I’m not doing that now but it looks like I’m focusing on the computer screen.

I was in Texas to promote my San Antonio book, It Happened in San Antonio (on sale at the Alamo Gift Shop, your local bookstore, and online). I had an excellent book signing at the Twig Bookshop, a brief news radio interview, and two nerve-racking 30-minute taped radio shows. Nerve-racking because prior to I felt like I was preparing for a pop quiz on my book that led me to reading the book in the style of cramming for finals the night before. Hal, father of my friend Elaine and publicist of mine, told me after the second taping that I had a thorough knowledge of my subject and that I’d be surprised at how many authors didn’t know their material. I wasn’t surprised at all but felt that a bit of grace/luck/willfulness had gotten me through by the skin of my teeth. In an earlier conversation he told me about a book entitled Fiction Writers are Liars and Thieves, which made me feel justified in whatever I said, true or false, even though I do write non-fiction.

Hal has his own recording status, he makes tapes reading Hank the Cowdog books (on #49) out loud for a radio and reading program. Kids that have trouble reading can listen to Hal/Hank while they follow along on the page. Sounds like a great program to me and Hal with his perfect Texas accent I’m positive makes Hank and the gang come alive.

Hal, my mother and I got to the second taping about an hour early, which didn’t help my nerves any, but when the radio personality (Ron Aaron) arrived with a giant black Great Dane named Eloise by his side I decided that it wouldn’t be so bad after all. Hal asked what kind of dog Eloise was and Ron answered, “A Texas Chihuahua.” An answer even Emma would have thought funny and she’s known some of the smaller variety Chihuahuas. Later when one of our party went to the restroom, Ron said, “Oh, did he stop at the sandbox.” Ron is the executive director of the Animal Defense League of TX, a no-kill non-profit shelter that right now has about 400 dogs and cats (go to their website, the dogs all look happy and the cats coy). Hal, my mother, Ron, Eloise, and I boarded the elevator and went up to the studio and while Eloise circled around, Ron and some others gathered up equipment and another chair. The chair part caught my attention because there was already one and they were only getting another and there were three of us humans. There wasn’t a chair by Ron’s control panel either. He came back and said that I would be standing because that makes for better radio. Since he didn’t have a chair I figured he wasn’t pulling my leg. So I stood with a huge microphone in my mouth, Eloise bedded down behind me, and Ron doing his introduction. My cheat-note book out of sight behind the microphone, I swallowed hard and dove in. I had been comforted by the “taped” part of the interviews, however I found out that it just meant it wasn’t live right then but the taping wasn’t for the purpose of editing. It was The Deal. The morning taping went well but I could refer to my book and find snip-its. The second with Ron was more of an overview of the book and a discussion of San Antonio, also more banter, kind of like a non-competitive but still speed-ball ping pong match. He told me that the recording went right to the hard drive so that if I made a mistake to correct myself right then. Only choice was to jump in, hope the thoughts/answers came, and in a timely fashion. They did and I had a fine time even when Ron asked how I knew the story I had just told was true. I answered, “How do you know it wasn’t.” I got to bring in my alma mater Davy Crockett Junior High and our mascot The Pioneers and he got in a “Go Pioneers.” I also got in a plug for the Myrna Loy Center and, of course, the Rodney Street Laundry and Jailhouse Sandwich Shop & Soup Kitchen. I broke up the laundry and sandwich shop name as one must be succinct on the radio (so I was coached). It was a good day all around. The radio shows play Sunday morning (September 30th) on “Community Closeup” at KCYY-FM with Chrissie Murnin and “Talk San Antonio” on KAJA-FM with Ron Aaron. I won’t be tuning in. My voice never sounds the same on the outside as it does in my head and listening to a tape scares me.

I had been worried about sounding Texan enough but felt prepared after the flight from Seattle to Dallas with all those Dallasites and then one trip to the grocery store pretty much got me set. However after the second interview I asked my mother if I sounded Texan. She said, “No but you were well-spoken.” I don’t think she meant to imply that the two are mutually exclusive.

Side note/Wish I had a picture: As Hal and I were driving to the first interview, we passed a fast food restaurant with two drive-thru lanes: one for DONUTS, the other for TACOS.


In my last post I wrote about various different ways to define seasons. Soon after that the seasons began to divide and multiply. Summer-Montana is Heaven sub-divided into June Heaven with Precipitation and Chance to Stay Cool, July Hot-as-TX Summer-without-AC & Severe Drought Season, and August Fire and Smoke Season. And my personal seasons were June Visitors, July Buy a House via Email/Phone for Brother and Sister-in-Law, August New York City and Virginia Beach Trip to Unrealistic Redo New House in Seven Weeks with Laptop Hard Drive Crash, Diverticulitis Bout and Red Dots. The August season blended into the September season with the Redo and the final move into the redo-in-process house on the 10th. I now live on Butte Avenue (for those not familiar with MT cities, Butte rhymes with “cute”…really, no jokes). My neighbors include a small herd of deer, couple of rabbits, and graffiti tagger. The last week of August, some youngster tagged the house with the signature “Unknown.” It was funny at first because that was the last thing I expected to happen in Helena, my house to be signed in Sharpie permanent ink. When I had to clean it off, I wanted to ring the child’s neck. I figured that it wouldn’t take much to identify the tagger. I thought about stopping kids on the street to ask if they were at-risk youths or, simply, if they had a Sharpie I could borrow. I wondered for a bit if maybe the culprit was a disenfranchised buck (of the hooved kind) with pen rubber-banded to his antlers –the city has planned to bring in sharpshooters to cut down on the deer population. If I were a deer, I would feel at risk AND disenfranchised and take to scribbling to extinction. I gave up ID-ing the tagger and worked on cleaning the graffiti off the house. For future reference, paint thinner, TSP cleaner, and electric sanders do not take permanent ink off, they mostly make the wall cleaner and the tag stand out more. Also, it is hard to match up paint from a 500 year old paint can found in the Pulp Fiction-like basement even if it is the paint on the house. My mother was the last person I would think of as being the source for graffiti removal products but she faithfully reads the Happy Handyman column in the Houston Chronicle and remembered a product that cleans graffiti right off. Our Ace Hardware didn’t have that particular product but did have another one. With a good spray application and a hard scrub the tag came off. A few weeks later some high school informants told me that there was a girl going around tagging houses with “Unknown.” A girl-pioneer-tagger…I still want to ring her neck. The police officer that I talked to said that there was a gang in the area named the “No Browns” but if he was taking it from the tag, he was on the wrong track. And what kind of name is No Browns for a gang in a state with a population 92% white. Their goal is racist AND flimsy.

Just after the graffiti incident I got sick and had to have a round of antibiotics that I then had an allergic reaction to. Red dots started appearing on my stomach. I thought about connecting the dots to see if it made a shape or word but was afraid that the “Unknown” tag would emerge.

A special note about the new house, Emma shares the yard with three cats that live in the guesthouse (a tiny rental house) in the backyard. One in particular is Emma’s new best friend and food supplier. The cat is a successful hunter and as cats do, he brings the dead prey back to the yard and home base. Emma then has endless cat-roadkill treats to look forward to. She’s a happy dog even if she has feathers stuck between her teeth.


I left off my July posting with the promise of Part II and Part III. Now there are more Parts than can be counted, it’s been such a full summer. I do remember though what Parts II and III were going to be about: II was about crashing the free, Willie Nelson concert in Choteau with sister-in-law Kelly and III was about taking the Nia White Belt Intensive Training to become a certified Nia dance teacher. I’m adding a post below that tells the Willie Nelson close-up adventure story in pictures as well as two other photo essays: SHOUT goes on vacation and Emma’s Dog Days of Summer. I’ll start my teaching-Nia escapades in posts-to-come as I’ve set a goal to teach my first official class on Tuesday, December 4th. After doing radio with Eloise, I’m up for (almost) anything.