I had a wandering day yesterday. Drove to Luckenbach. Listened to music. Drove to Fredericksburg. Listened to music. At both places I ran into friends. We talked, shared stories, and drank a beverage or two. It was a warm day, but in the shade with a breeze, it felt nice to be outside amongst the living. There was even talk of plans, of things to do, and places to go. It was the sort of day that gave you hope there would be other days like it to come.

When it came time to rise this morning, I pulled a pillow over my head and snuggled back down under the covers. And actually, I was already out of bed when it came time to rise, so the decision required me to get back into bed. And it did it. Unapologetically. It was nice and warm. As I lay there, I even thought for a brief minute that maybe I should have a whiskey drink to start my day. I mean, whiskey does make me feel good. So, why not?

I’ve always valued punctuality. Start times are when you get there. That’s why they’re start times. Yesterday, I was invited to a gathering that was to start at six. It takes me an hour to get to the destination in question. So, I geared my day around that travel time. I even left a little early to get gas. But at the station when I keyed in the destination it announced my arrival time as 6:45, which meant I was going to be, gasp, late.

I am puzzled by the mystery of what others see and hear and why. I could stand or sit for hours looking at the Night Watch in the Rijksmuseum. It’s the same with any painting by Turner at the Tate. I love Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor. Or Billie Gibbons playing Blue Jean Blues. I love the puzzle of quantum mechanics, geology, and chaos theory. They’re all things that strike a chord within me and release whatever it is my body releases when it sees or hears something of beauty or interest.

I’m on a new computer. Well, newer than my old but not really new, new. It’s used. Anyway, except for the operating system, I’m trying to exist outside the Microsoft Universe. I am not sure it’s worth the effort. I am an old dog and I miss the software where I performed my old tricks. At the moment, it seems as though I've simply traded one all encompassing tech universe for another. Still, I have to try because I’m engaging in a collaborative effort with my daughter and she knows the new universe.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Aesop’s fox and his unattainable grapes. He tried. He failed. He walked away. To ease the pain, he decided the grapes were probably sour and not worth having. Nice move actually. He kept his self-esteem, and moved on to hunt for other grapes more accessible. And while he was hunting, maybe he had time to think about how he went about getting the grapes and came across a new method, something different to employ so that the next time he encountered high grapes, they’d be his.

Spent yesterday in mostly contemplative silence broken only by two requests for directions from store clerks and a song I sang in my bedroom as I played my guitar. Did three loads of wash. Practiced putting on the living room carpet. Took a short walk. Fixed a pot of navy beans. Watched the PGA championship, and spent some time sorting out my needs and desires. I’ve found it’s important that one gets those in the right buckets because you can go broke financially and emotionally if you mix them up.

One of these days I think I’ll ask one of the AI programs to write me 300 words in three paragraphs on some topic that strikes my fancy. Although, frankly, I’m terrified it will do a much better job than I ever could. Still, I think it might be fun. After all, it’s drawing on the writings of some fairly good people, and I’d still have to edit it and get it ready for publication. And I’ve heard that the prompt you use to get the outcome you want is fairly important. So, that would keep me involved.

We graduated a grand-daughter from college yesterday. Now she’s on to graduate school, and work in her chosen field which appears to be sports information. I say this because the world is changing fast, and I think chosen fields in general are drying up faster than corn in a hard drought. We laughed, at first, about the commencement speaker, a local weatherman, but I thought his speech about preparedness was spot on. 

We buried the kitten. Actually, my son buried her. He found her in the grass beneath the small cluster of oaks. There was no sign of a struggle or any damage. He dug her a grave beneath the trees and covered it with limestone rocks to keep the digging scavengers away. All around are turks caps, rock roses, and spiderworts. A nice resting place.

There were days, and in the not too distant past, when I was up in the morning and moving fast. At home, on the road, wherever I was, the alarm rang and the day started. It was time to get up and write, or get up and go to work, or just get up and go. A day was afoot and it shouldn’t be wasted. There were words to find or roads to drive or things to get done around the house. I was a going and doing machine. The world was a set of class five rapids and I was good with the paddle.

A blessed rain is falling this morning in my piece of the Hill Country. Slow and steady. No breezes signalling a fast moving storm although thunderstorms are forecast for later this morning. We shall see. We’ve been a blank spot recently when it comes to meeting forecasts. Rain all around, but none for us. It happened last Friday evening. There was rain just down the road, but none fell on my little town.

An interesting thing has happened to me as I age. My paradigm of how I see the world has shifted. It started when I began wrestling with the idea that the sun didn’t actually rise or set. It was earth doing the moving, and I wanted to shift my language to say that. It continued to change when I realized, several months ago, that seeing was a passive activity. Light was coming to me. So, last night, as I did a three a.m. ramble and stood outside under the stars, my face turned skyward, I knew I was being bathed in starlight, in much the same manner as when I stand beneath a warm shower. Interesting feeling.

In this time of my disappearing, my aging, my eventual demise, I am not unhappy, depressed nor otherwise distressed. In fact, as I have been through all my other phases, my childhood moves, my sojourn in the Navy, my trip through higher education, marriage, children, and various career changes, I am excited for the opportunity. The past is very much the past, and now is what I have to live for, and I want to ensure it is time well spent. It is a chance to learn.

I felt myself enter into a new period of my life in November of 2023. It happened when I came down from Guadalupe Peak, exhilarated and tired, exhausted more precisely. I’ve mentioned this before and I mention it again because now, as usually happens with my new life phases, it’s coming into sharper focus. It’s the time of disappearing. And I think it’s a universal thing that happens to all of us as we age and make our way out the door or down the drain of life.

It was a dark and stormy night. A porch chair blew into the yard. The wind made unholy noises. The house creaked and moaned. It was a disconcerting evening since the house is clad in stone and has always felt sound and sturdy. I longed for a wind gauge, but I’ve long since given up on electronic weather stations. And this all happened in advance of the red and yellow on the radar that said, here comes the rain. In the end, I trusted the construction of the house, and found sleep. And when I woke, there was rain, and the house still stood.

I went to get a document notarized the other day and met a woman who knew my great-grandmother. Making polite conversation she asked where I lived. When I told her she started talking about Ms. Cammack and Ms. Pruett who used to live there. She knew them because her folks ran the grocery store just down the street in town, and that’s where they shopped. It’s the first time since I moved to my dad’s hometown to ever meet someone who knew his grandmother. Surreal.

Commerce. The bane of all artists. The pit in which they must slog. How to do what you love and make a living. It’s a conundrum. Early in my life, I took my love of words into the world of in-house publications in the oilfield, traveled through the world of book publishing, and eventually ended up editing drilling and completion manuals. It wasn’t Dickens, but it raised three kids and gave my family a good life. Early on, I tried my hand at science fiction on the side and did some magazine freelancing, but eventually they slid away.

Wow. I just had a moment. Prepared my coffee. Hit brew. Stood looking out the window. Realized there was no cup. Whoops! Inexplicable madness? Nope. Distracted. I realized I’d made an error setting up a product in my storefront, and each cup ordered was costing me money. Not a ton, but enough. I’m not looking to become an oligarch with these mugs, I just want to publish a book. I’ve been busy this morning making corrections.

I’m in an odd spot. I write this blog almost every day. And it’s free. And I feel like I know almost all of my readers, and I consider them to be my friends. This happened because the first posts were basically Facebook posts. Then Facebook decided to add a blog type feature, and I started using it. Then they cancelled it, and I moved to an independent website, GatewoodPress.com, set up a business page on Facebook, and voila, the blog continued to appear on Facebook. I did this to facilitate the publication of my book in 2021, The Caregiver’s Tales: The Long Goodbye, about my wife’s dementia.