I’m about 25% through the job of stripping the landscape cloth out of the new north garden. It’s harder than it might seem. First of all, most of the old mulch is still sitting there. Secondly, the material is now tied to the ground by coastal bermuda grass which has deep roots and strong runners. Finally, grass has grown through the material and holds the mulch in place. So, even when it’s finally pulled up there’s lots of weight.

Every once in a while, after watching an event unfold, I like to ask myself, what would I have done? I did it yesterday, for instance, while reading up on the events that led Immigration and Customs Enforcement to take Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and Fulbright scholar, here on an F-1 student visa as a doctoral student, into custody and strip her of her visa. Apparently, she was picked up because she was one of four authors of an editorial piece last year in the Tufts student paper protesting Israel’s actions in Palestine.

I wonder. Who were the men and women who arrested Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk? Were any of them married? If so, did they kiss their wives or husbands goodbye that morning and tell them they loved them?

I am in the home stretch of my spring fling of gardening. Beds are mulched. Weeds are pulled. Plants are in the ground. Everything that should be green is green. Yesterday and the day before we got more than an inch of rain, and more is scheduled today. And it’s the best sort of rain. Slow and steady.  Grasses are growing, the trees are replacing depleted stores, and the ground is softening, which is more good news for me, because I still have a few spots that need cleaning and repair.

I am in the warm embrace of spring. My bluebonnets are up and last night's rain should be just the drink they need to really flower, and the sky’s water will do the same for the spiderworts. The Irises are blooming as well, benefiting from their move to better soil and more constant sun. It will be quite a show out my kitchen window this year. And less you think I’m locked in purple, I have a Crossvine and a Texas honeysuckle giving me red and yellow blooms.

Adventures in doctoring. I showed up in a timely fashion on Monday for the scan to check my aneurysm repair only to be told that the machine was down and I’d need to reschedule. So, I did. For the next morning. Early. Once again I showed up in a timely manner and once again was told I needed to reschedule. They found me a slot close to noon at another facility just down the road. I went and got it done. My rescheduled physician’s appointment, which was to follow the first scan, is this afternoon, by phone.

Woke up to the sound of thunder and rain on the windows last night as a big thunderstorm rolled through the Houston area. I’m in town for the first of what I hope are many annual checkups on my repaired abdominal aortic aneurysm. I’m staying with my oldest son, the same son who came up last week to my place to chunk on guitars, and we did it again last night just for a bit before bed. He helped me work out some kinks in one of my songs.

There is so much going on these days in the world outside my fence that it’s hard not to notice, but one thing’s for sure, trying to get reliable news about anything, is a little bit like drinking from a fire hose. The stories come at me in bits and pieces and new bits replace old pieces before I can figure out what the first bit meant and follow ups get lost in all the confusion if any follow ups come at all. It’s enough to make someone want to run and hide, except that may be the point, although that just might be me trying to give purpose to random events.

I have a swivel rocker my late wife and I purchased shortly after we bought our first house in 1975. It’s an Ethan Allen chair and it was our first piece of furniture that wasn’t a hand me down or bought from an outlet store. It was re-upholstered in 2010 when we built our current home. It long ago lost its central, front room role to bigger, fancier chairs, mostly recliners, and was relegated to the bedroom. It came back to the front room this year, when I took over its bedroom space for my music.

I worked outside yesterday and at the end of the day I was worn out from the wind. I’ve had days of it blowing from the west and the north and now it’s blowing from the south. And it’s blowing hard, and making loud noises, and tumping things over. It’s like walking down a crowded sidewalk or jostling through people at a big music event. You’re pushed and beat upon. I’ve breathed dust from every part of Texas, and none of it feels good for me. I want it to stop.

The spring cleaning of the gardens is making steady progress. The next big project is to mulch the area that holds my newest trellis and was once home to a peach tree since departed. I’ve put down limestone blocks to replace the old fence as the back border, but there's still a couple of those to go, and there are a few windblown grasses to pull up. Then I’ll turn the old mulch, add the new and we’ll be done.

There was fire, with smoke and ash in the sky yesterday. The plume of smoke hovered over us all day as the fire grew from 400 acres to 8,000 while the wind blew hard with its load of west texas sand. Then at dusk, as though someone had turned a switch the wind dropped and the cool air came. This morning it’s 42 and the fire is 92 percent contained. We could still use the rain, but the cool nights are a blessing.

The front room this morning is a maze of cables, amps, pedals, and instruments. Music is being made. We’re missing the daughter and her bass, but the boys are back with keyboards and guitars. Someone starts a riff , or dad starts singing, and off we go. Covers, originals. It matters not. What’s the key? Boom. There’s a downbeat. We’re off.

There’s a cool breeze this morning. A Carolina Wren is looking for friends, and the day looks promising. We sure need rain. All that’s promised, however, is more wind and dust, laced with fire warnings. This bodes ill for summer, which is why I’m making plans for Maine and maybe the mountains of New Mexico, anything to escape the heat, if and when it comes, which it most likely will.

My world is getting turned upside down. In addition to learning I have to hate Canada and love Russia now I’m starting to hear that empathy might cause the fall of Western Civilization. That’s going to kill the sympathy card business and lord knows what florists will do. And talk about re-thinking history. It seems as though the success of the various civil rights and civil liberties movements for blacks, women, and gays was a direct result of empathy, of people walking a mile in someone else’s shoes, and thinking, “Wow, that’s uncomfortable and why do they have to do that?”

I think the AI revolution has started and it’s more insidious than I thought. Yesterday, without warning, six large fingernail clippers showed up on the island in my kitchen. I have no idea how the hive mind communicated with them, but it did and there they were. Of course, there might be another less fun explanation. Whenever I’ve needed a clipper I get one from a place where I know I keep one–my dopp kit, my car, the bathroom, my guitar case, or a drugstore. Then at the end of the day, when I empty my pockets I put the clipper on the island. Although I did not know I possessed six of them, and I don’t know how I failed to see them gathering. That was a revelation and an interesting discovery.

I wanted to be an altar boy in the strongest possible way when I was in the fifth grade in 1956. I wanted to wear the black cassock and white surplice. I wanted to be part of the mass.  And I did it in 29 Palms, California. I was thrilled the first time the priest said the opening lines, “Introibo ad altare Dei,” and I replied, “ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.” Which when translated means, “I will go to the altar of God, the God who gives joy to my youth.”, and not only did the mass give joy to my youth, but so did the gospels. And even today when I see the acronym DEI, I think of those lines and how the mass and the gospels infused my response to the civil rights movements for blacks, women, and gays.

Inclusion. This is a hard one, because on a personal level it’s likely we spend most of our lives excluding people and things from our lives. And while it's logical to argue that diversity is good and exposure to different foods, and music, and art will enrich our lives, most of us find ourselves settling in with the familiar religion, music, people and food that we like. And that feels pretty normal. There are even laws to protect our ability to choose, and laws to protect us from people who want to get too close to us.

I like the word equity. I have some in my home, and I try to have it in my life. It’s about fairness, but like its brother, diversity, it has gotten a bad rap in some quarters recently. What I don’t understand is why? Equity is baked into almost everything we do in our lives, especially sports. We handicap golfers and bowlers to even the playing field. We divide fighters into weight classes so that fighters are evenly matched. Horses and race cars are managed. Our public schools are divided into classes based on size. It’s about equity.

I was re-watching the Good Shepherd the other day, a 2006 film by Robert De Niro. It’s a fictional work about the creation of American Intelligence services. There’s an early scene where De Niro’s character is recruiting Matt Damon’s character to join the new endeavor prior to the US entering World War II. They’re at a Skull and Bones retreat, which is a secret society at Yale. In a quiet room over cigars and brandy, De Niro explains, “I’ll be looking for a few good men to head up various departments, in other words no Jews, or Negroes, or very few Catholics…”