It’s almost the quiet after the storm of Christmas, but my son and his family arrived last night, so the winds of gift giving and camaraderie will continue into the evening today. At its peak there will be thirteen people in the house along with the attendant laughter and chatter, wine, food, and more gifts. Personally, I’m a quiet conversation guy, but today I’ll mostly be a listener.

I have a mug, my mug, at my daughter’s home. It’s a nice hefty, bulbous mug, black with a deep red interior and a dark red UH on the front for my alma mater, the University of Houston. Whenever I’m in the house, I use it to drink my coffee. I got it for Christmas one year as an official encouragement to come visit any time I want, to let me know I’m always welcome. Sweet gesture.

DC. The eternal city. For me. Mainly it’s the buildings. The mall. The monuments. The Capital. The White House. I’ve come here since childhood when we lived in Bethesda. I was stationed at Quantico in 68. I walked the mall during the Poor People’s March. Flying in yesterday, I could see the Washington Monument out the window. I was moved again. It’s a place of history, and I love history.

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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.

Woke up to the sound of a barking fox this morning. I have no idea what that’s all about. Who is calling whom, and why? I suppose I could do some naturalist research and find out, but that will be a later investigation. For the moment, and this little story, I just like hearing the sound and knowing that foxes are about. They seem more elegant than raccoons, and I have both.

Videos of people feeding foxes and making pets of raccoons are pretty popular, but I like my wildlife wild and timid of humans. I think it’s best for both of us. It’s why, when I hunted deer, I never used a feeder. We went into the woods and looked for them. We hunted. Shooting deer at a feeder is simply killing, and nothing to brag about really. And I still don’t know why it’s illegal to bait dove, but you can bait deer. Who sat down and thought that up?

And none of this is really Christmas sort of talk, although a company I once worked for had an annual father-son hunt at their lease in Brackettville during Christmas vacation time. My youngest son and I had lots of memorable visits. The camp house was in Fort Clark Springs. We never shot anything, but we were surrounded by a flock of wild turkey’s once, we helped a racoon escape a dry water tank, we walked into a herd of javelinas, and we had a lot of nice walks in the woods and around the fort. I’d say those were worthwhile trips. And both of us still like taking walks in the woods.

I surrendered to my impulses yesterday. I bought the presents whose purchase I second guessed. I may be late in life but at some point, I figured I needed to start trusting my instincts. Because buying Christmas presents isn’t a mind reading exercise, it’s a small celebration of the act of thinking of someone. Of course, it helps to know if they’re allergic to peanuts or don’t like perfume. But after that it seems to me the world ought to be your oyster.

We, my arborist son and I, planted a stand of Loblolly pines in the back lots. Luckily, they grow an average of 24 inches a year. So, I might get to see them grow to a decent height, ten feet in five years, twenty in ten. Maturity is out of the question because I’m what you might call mature myself. And I don’t think another 40 years is in the cards. And I can’t say, but you never know, because I’m pretty sure I do.

As I stood on the porch this morning after feeding the cats, I counted six planes in the air. Blinking lights against the dark sky moving with purpose against the backdrop of stars and planets. There’s likely a waypoint somewhere close. All the planes seemed to be streaming up from the south then making turns just to my east to find their final destinations.

Shortly after my wife died in 2020, I talked with an artist friend to see if she’d be interested in creating a mixed media work using some of my wife’s small belongings and mementos. A work of art in memory. We gathered up little items into a nice collection, talked, and off they went. They came back Tuesday in much the same form as they left, having successfully eluded the grasp of inspiration. I think the little things felt they could still be used and pushed back against being stuck on a board forever. I’m glad they did.

I went to the recital of a friend’s granddaughter last night. It wasn’t planned, and part of a longer story, but that’s alright. The family has played a key role in my life since the death of my wife and the grandchildren know me as Mister John. We get along well. And getting to see one of them play at a recital reminded me of how much I missed my little grand-kids in Virginia and their recitals. So, it was a fun thing to do.

A lesson in commerce. My daughter and I spent several months discussing, designing, and creating a series of mugs for me to sell in our online store at Gatewood Press. The goal was to create something with the potential to sell not only to the fans I have for this blog, but to a broader base. To that end we even advertised on social media. I used the approach in 2021 when I published my last book, with good results. The results this time? We sold two mugs.

It is rather comforting for this old man to be back in the universe of Microsoft. Writing in word and calculating in Excel. The addition of the company’s AI tool has rounded out the package. I was late to the company’s initial offerings, but like the virus in Pluribus, eventually they assimilated the competing word processing and spreadsheet offerings in the early days of computing and became universal in the business world of my youth. I learned to love and use its tools. We were peaceful and happy.

Went for a short walk yesterday. Stood and looked at a tree. A fairly ubiquitous sight, a tree. They’re everywhere, and they just stand there, mostly looking the same from day to day, month to month, and year to year. But as I looked at this tree, I thought of the scene in the Matrix where Neo suddenly viewed the world as strings of data and nothing was real, and I thought of the tree as a big collection of atoms, strings of data, with an entire life going on inside it.

We planted five oaks when we moved into this house sixteen years ago. Two Chinquapin. Four Lacy. And a Burr. The Lacys and one Chinquapin are part of the original planting. The Burr is the second of its kind, as is one of the Chinquapin. The current batch is doing well. I stand in their shade, strain to see the tops while there, and two of the Lacys are starting to overtop the drive, while another offers shade to our visitor parking spot.

Spent my evening yesterday with people making music. An open mic, welcome to all comers, and they came. The evening is hosted by a friend which is what gave me my initial boost of courage several months back. I’m not real sure why I needed it. Sixty years ago, when I first picked up the guitar, I had a trio and we’d play for anyone at the drop of a hat. I guess as the years wore on, I learned how much I didn’t know, and that began to give me pause. These days, in the twilight of my life, my nerves twitch when I play for strangers.

Two years ago, in November, I hiked to the top of Gudalupe Peak, the tallest mountain in Texas. I got up the next day and did a seven-mile hike. Five months later, I had an abdominal aortic aneurysm repaired. I shut down. I haven’t been on a monumental hike since. Lots of short ones, but nothing like that one year of the South Rim and the Peak. Mostly, I’ve chalked it up to letting my body heal and age, but I hardly ever think of those seven stents anymore. So, that excuse is long gone. I think it’s time to strap on the boots and backpack and get moving.

Made a tactical error before bed last night. Ate some spice drops, my candy treat. Sure enough right about 1:30 the sugar hit my system, and up I popped. I know better than to eat before bed, but the drops were there on the counter begging to be eaten. I obliged. My suddenly awake brain thought it was time to work, so it dredged up some 1990’s workplace memories for me to mull. I said no thanks. Got up, took a big drink of water, and got back to sleep.

I’ve worn the letters c, d, l, and k off my computer keyboard. You would think e would have been the first to go since it’s the most used letter in the English language. But I’m betting the demise of d, l, and k has something to do with the fact that my fingers rest on them as I type. J and F are protected by little protrusions that identify them as index finger keys, anchor points for the hands of a typist. C is most likely the victim of ctrl-c. The copy shortcut.

An inevitable consequence of aging is the increasing number of Sad Anniversaries peppering my life. I’ve lost acquaintances, friends and family. And not only have I suffered losses, but my friends have suffered losses, and the closer they are to me, the more I know about them. And because we’re close we all share the pain, which is probably helpful, although the pain of grief is so deeply personal, that it’s hard to know what’s going on inside the mind of the one grieving. Still, we do our best and hope that it’s enough.

There was a time when the noise of the highway down the street from us abated. Late at night and early in the morning. Those days are gone. The sound of rubber on asphalt comes at all hours now. The road between Johnson City and Fredericksburg, once country, has a winery and tasting room for nearly every mile between the two cities. Even Hye, a wide spot just down the road, has a winery and a distillery.