One of my favorite recipes contains these simple words, a hearty dollop of sour cream. The word hearty carries a feeling of joy and is the epitome of the idea when you cook that you measure with your heart. The word dollop means a small, soft lump or blob, but when modified by hearty, you’re being given permission to go a little crazy, to live outside the box.

My team won last night, which is an odd thing to say because the team is only mine in the sense that I went to college there and have donated money over the years. But I have no say over the program or its direction or how it plays the game. My only job is to cheer and go to the games if I can get there. I’ve been to one this year and might go to another. Over the years I’ve attended lots of games, mostly in the company of a group of close friends who also call it their team.

Drove into Houston last Friday with a long-time friend to watch our college team play ball on Saturday. Our crew of season ticket-holders used to number ten. Now it’s two and we only buy tickets when we need them. The game was played on a fine fall day in Texas with lots of sun and highs in the nineties. Our team won after a delay brought on by lightning. There was rain too. Just enough to make the humidity spike.

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.

Walked out onto the porch last night and took a big drink of the dark sky from the big dipper hanging low in the east. I remember as a child finding great pleasure in being able to spot the dipper and its cousin, the little dipper. Then later in life Orion’s belt became the night sky feature with which I was most familiar. Why it drew my eye, I have no idea. All I know is that last night I was happy to be reminded of my childhood.

I was poking around in the attic and made a discovery. I found our coffee cup collection. Thirty cups in which I can read a short story of my life. There are cups from cities, states, countries, and places we visited. There are cups from my working life. Some of them even had desiccated bodies of scorpions in them because that’s what happens when you live in the country, in Texas.

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This is a small thing. Tiny. But. I am once again carrying a handkerchief. There are a variety of reasons why it’s handy, and I probably don’t really need to enumerate them. Suffice it to say, I carried one for the longest time as a young man, then got out of the habit. I don’t know when, and I don’t know why. But I am back. The biggest gain, in my book, is that I will no longer open the washer to find shredded tissue.