The Caregiver’s Tales: A Blog

It’s a cool summer morning in the hill country. The cats are fed, and I’m giving the trees a quick drink. We’re in a heat wave and the ground is fast losing water. Plants and grasses are drying up, almost everything is brown. I don’t know when we’re expected to turn the corner, but I hope it’s sooner rather than later. Although, two years of big spring rains have left the lakes full and the rivers running. So, all is not lost.

Yesterday evening I sat outside looking at the moon. Unlike the sun, it’s easy on the eyes. There’s no burning demand for your undivided attention. It’s just quietly cool, hanging there in the night, bathed in the leftover light of earth’s bright star. I’m a big fan of the moon. It rings a lot of bells deep inside me.

Almost everyone I know is using AI because, truth be told, it’s fun. Suddenly, if you’re a fan of Star Trek: Next Generation, we’ve all got a computer version of Data, a sentient android, or Tony Stark’s Jarvis. It’s comfortable and fun because, as the conversations progress, it’s easy to feel as though a human, who knows a lot, is talking back to you. And if you’re looking for a term for that feeling, it’s anthropomorphize. It’s important to remember, however, that it’s only software and it’s far from flawless. But, that being said, I think it’s here to stay.

Yesterday I went digging around in the archives of the Houston Chronicle, and there was my work from fifty-six years ago. The writings of a young man who knew nothing, but felt that he knew everything, or at least everything worth knowing. I was an older college student at least six years behind my contemporaries from high school who had graduated college well before I became serious about university life.

Frank Beard, the drummer for ZZ Top, passed away. And as often happens with memorials like this, it will be more about me than him because I only knew him personally for the briefest of moments in the early 70s. We were all young men when I interviewed Frank and his bandmates for a profile in the Houston Chronicle’s Zest Magazine. They were one album into their career.

There are times in my gardens when I just let the plants do what the plants want to do, and this includes those plants we might call weeds. For instance, in the front yard by the big oaks, I’ve let the bindweed bind, and it’s traveled up into some low hanging branches on one of the big oaks. I actually think it looks good, which is a nice excuse for not pulling it down.

When I was at Seminole Canyon State Park recently I saw an exhibit that featured the local people hunting. They were chasing a rabbit, barefoot, across the arid land that surrounds the park. Given the number of prickly plants in the park, I wouldn’t run through it with boots on and wearing long pants. But there they were, chasing dinner, barefoot.

One of these days I might spend some time cataloging the spiders who call my place home. I saw a new one this morning on the screen door. One I’d never seen before, a crab spider, of the genus Xysticus. According to the Wikipedia page about them, they’re ambush hunters, which means no webs to grab me in the dark. I have no idea what he thought he might find on the screen, but I’m guessing he was going somewhere else and merely stopped to rest.