One Year Ago Today

Melba and I were in Kyoto, Japan one year ago today. We rose at 3 o'clock that morning and by 4:30 a.m., without any breakfast in our bellies, we were standing on the platform in Fussa with tickets in hand for the train to Tokyo. It was dark, cold, and raining. Our sleepiness was exceeded only by the excitement of what lay before us; the Shinkansen, Japan's famous bullet train. I was anxious to experience the feeling of zipping along the rails at 188 miles per hour on the way to Kyoto, 350 rail miles to the west through the Japanese countryside.

I "borrowed" the picture above.

At Tokyo the train station was remarkably busy even at 6:50 in the morning when we pulled out. The interior of the Shinkansen was spacious -- lots of leg room, the seating great. If only the airlines would duplicate those conditions flying would again be a pleasant experience.

And what efficiency! The train was staffed with the most professional and congenial people; from the conductor to the gal that gathers the trash. As each entered or exited the coach he or she would face the passengers and bow. What wonderful etiquette. I missed this formality when we got back to the rough and tumble U.S.A.

We pulled out of Tokyo at 6:50 a.m. and arrived in Kyoto at 9:11 a.m. The stop in Kyoto to get off the Shinkansen was two minutes long. As quickly as that, the train was gone.

Melba and I posed in front of the Golden Pavilion Temple in Kyoto. That real gold on the temple walls.

The grounds around the temple were picture-postcard beautiful.

This young lady was one of many uniformed bellhops in the Kyoto Hotel Okura. I did not let an opportunity to pose alongside her slip by.

This was the entrance to the Fushimi Inari Shrine. It is home to countless torii gates. It takes about two hours to walk the entire trail.

Some sources place the number of torii gates at 30,000.

I have to thank Melba for asking these Japanese blossoms to pose with me for a picture. When I laid eyes on on these beauties I lost my power of speech.

We left Kyoto at 1:29 p.m. and arrived in Hiroshima at 3:05 p.m. -- 170 miles later.

Beer Caution

Benavides, and the whole county for that matter, has a serious drinking problem. Had I been more business-sabe as a young man I would have studied sales trends, seen the rise of lite beer labels and invested in a beer distributorship. I'd be busy with my time running to the bank instead of posting to a blog with five readers.

This holiday season the motto for the Quik Pantry convenience store in our pueblito ought to read "Piss Away Your Paycheck." Passers-by need to be cautioned about the beer consumption around here. Our population is posted at only 1686 on the city limits signs , but the countless cases of Natural Lite taking up most of the floor space at the Quik Pantry leads me to wonder how many local consumers out of that 1686 are going to guzzle down these many cans of beer-flavored swill?

There are a good number of deer hunters overnighting in camps all around here. They're often seen at the Quik Pantry stocking up on goods necessary for an extended hunt. I would hope that they were not the targeted demographic for sales of this Anheuser-Busch piss-colored obscenity, Natural Lite. I expect more from folks who dole out top dollar for a first-rate hunting experience. No. The hunters are blameless. It is certain that the locals, whose mantra is "quantity over quality", will consume this $3.99 a six-pack stack of canned waste water. Its low price must dull the nerve endings of their taste buds. That is a serious drinking problem.

All Boy

Evan wants to pump gasoline, air-up tires, work with hand tools, dig with a shovel, use a handsaw, hammer nails, pick up ants with his fingers, and wash and squeegee my truck's side windows. Carving today's Thanksgiving turkey did not appeals to his interests; even if it did involve using a big knife. He is all boy. My little friend loves animals; furry, feathered or fishy -- but he doesn't trust ostriches.

El Trago

Last night I was talking with an old high school friend using Skype, the video/audio app for real-time face-to-face communication over the Internet. He lives in Portland, Texas. The Skype idea was his suggestion -- to spare our cell phone minutes. One of our topics was wine. Earlier my wife and I happened to be sampling a Cabernet my Portland friend had given me a short while back and she liked it very much. Later in the evening I looked it up on the web and learned that it was a very pricey label that my friend had gifted, so I called him up to thank him again. Before we were through talking I had killed the bottle all by myself, except for the one glass Melba had enjoyed earlier. It was all so mucho bueno.

I never drink alone, but my friend was sitting in virtual space at my kitchen table via Skype, so I convinced myself that I was not drinking solo. Although, he did not imbibe at his end. Before we clicked off that evening I was enjoying a pleasant buzz. It worked to joggle loose faded memories and the misty minded malady brought to mind an incident from about 25 years ago.

One afternoon Dad and I were driving back to the Ranch from the South Texas hamlet of Concepcion. Topping the hill not two miles south of the house we happened on an old red sun-baked pickup that had run off the road and torn into a barbed wire fence. Its front end had smashed into a stout cedar corner post, so there was a respectable amount of damage. Those old corner fence posts are about thirty-six inches round and set firmly six feet into the ground. They're not going anywhere and I ought to know. Over the years my brothers and I helped Dad plant a good number of those sonsofbitches along countless miles of fence on the Ranch. They don't make them like that anymore. The fences Dad strung were made to last. Sometimes, on the last day of a fence job, if there happen to be a small imperfection in the twist of a wire or a bow in a line post, Dad would say that he would be long gone before someone else came along to replace it. He was right. Some of fences he strung are nearly fifty years old.

The truck's two occupants were still sitting in the pickup so we figured the mishap had occurred only moments before. Dad slowed and pulled off onto the barditch. Walking up to the scene we observed movement from a pair of heads. They were bobbing so we figured no one was dead. What they were was dead drunk. The old fools had been making good progress on a bottle of Old Crow on their merry trek south on Highway 339. Between them on the bench seat and on the floorboard were the remnants of a couple of six-packs, a fifth of whiskey, and the bottle of Old Crow. These old fellows took their trago seriously.

Not really needing an explanation with all the telling evidence in plain sight, my Dad asked the driver, who was still in his seat, "¿Que les paso, pariente?"

I was over on the opposite side seeing if I could assist his passenger. He was just sitting there rubbing his forehead. His hat lay down on the floorboard by his boots.

"¿Como se siente, hombre?" I asked. When I scanned the interior of the cab I took special notice of the smashed windshield. There was an impressive melon-sized indent in the shattered glass were the old man's head had met the windshield with considerable force. It was a wonder the impact hadn't split his head open. Thank God for small miracles. The lines from the song God Loves A Drunk ring true.

But God loves a drunk, although he's a fool

And he wets in his pants and he falls off his stool.

Quitting Time

It's amusing that there are people in Benavides who have been around so long they still refer to me as joven. I'm 56. These are men and women who were young and pretty when the pueblito was a vibrant community. If I lament its passing I can only imagine how its demise affects the more seasoned citizenry. They must appreciate the fog as much as I do.

The Morning Veil

From this perspective fog is welcome in Benavides for two reasons. One, no long commute to work lies before me. The job is only a three minute drive away and the danger of poor visibility on the road is a brief affair. Two, the morning fog veils the pueblito in a dewy softness that masks its blemishes until the late November sun burns the dampness away.

This is an excellent time of the year in this part of the country. For those whose memories of fall and winters past are a storyboard of bitter cold, shoveling snow and icy sidewalks, South Texas is a bit of heaven -- climatically speaking. Hell! We're still wearing T-shirts and running our A/C units; though only a little. I can appreciate how all those thousands of Winter Texas haul their 40-foot travel trailers down here to bask in the warm winter sun while the less fortunate in the deep freeze belt of the USA curse the cold. It's going to be a pretty day once this fog lifts.

A Week Ago Sunday

Ours was a stay-at-home weekend on the calendar, but a week ago we were up to Austin to ride trains, cruise through a game reserve, see the bats swoosh out from under the Congress Street Bridge and to take the kids to see some military history at Camp Mabry. Both Evan and I liked the tanks on display the best. With a Flip camera in your pocket it is so simple to capture the action and the Mac makes it even easier to share it to the world.

The iMovie 8 application on Macs is awesome. The more familiar I become with it the more I realize that I need to get my hands on iMovie 9. That son of a gun has a video stabilization feature that I must have. Movie editing was fun before, but this app makes it way much more funner. The only drawback is que me quita mucho tiempo. iMovie 9 would have helped render my shaky video into a smooth-as-glass production. I think I can get it for under $80. A Mac loaded with iMovie 9 and a MinoHD Flip camera.... hey! ...we're talking Cecile B. DeMille time, baby!

Can You Hear Me Now?

We do not own one single cat, and yet we shell out $6.99 every week for a bag of Fancy Feast Gourmet Gold dry cat food. It is very good eating if you happen to be a cat. Every bite is a pricey nibble as far as I am concerned, but then my wife the animal lover is generous to a fault. So if feeding cats that do not belong to us gives her a small measure of comfort, then who am I to complain? Let her drop a three-pound bag of the stuff in the grocery cart every week. Hell! What's $400 a year to feed cats with no names and that don't belong to us? If it helps keep the little lady happy, then I'm happy.

Back in January the first morning I stepped out of the trailer a nice looking black cat with white socks and matching muzzle ambled up to me and started rubbing against my ankles as if the two of us had a long-standing relationship. "Hey, Melba!" I called out. "You gotta cat out here!"

Melba loves cats. Seeing the furry creature would gladden her some. She came out to have a look and expressed a tender "Awhhh... it's so pretty." She found something in the kitchen to feed to the animal and after it finished lapping the last of it from off the concrete slab we thought no more of the cat.

Word of my wife's benevolence must have got on the cat grapevine because the next day Mr. White-Socks-with-Matching-Muzzle showed up with a great big husky-looking tabby. Melba took one look at the pair and made a mental note to herself to get a bag of cat food next time we went to Walmart. Apparently, cats can read human thoughts because a week later a third cat showed up. He had white fur, a brown-striped tail, a crown of fur on its head that was wheat colored and only one ear. Well, a first it appeared to have only one ear. The one on the right side of its head was normal-looking enough, but as it drew closer I could see that the left ear had been badly mangled in what must have been a flesh-ripping mother-of-all-cat-fights rumble with some feline rival. There wasn't much left of the ear except a bloody wrinkled flap with a bit of that wheat-colored fur on it. I looked at the cat and said, "You poor fellow. What a mess." The cat focused his grey eyes up to me with a dismissive look that seemed to say, "You should see the other guy."

We've been feeding these three ever since, and Mr. One-and-a-Half Ears still shows up once in a while with that same left ear bloodied and looking like a piece of masticated beef jerky. I wonder if it can even hear out of that thing?

A Week Ago Saturday

The 14th was such a fun day. We would gladly have it again.

The Final Solution

In a perfect world Benavides would have an Office of Urban Planning. The staff would be fully funded, full of determination and filled with fire in their bellies. They could arrange with the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers to roll in with a division of men and bulldozers to raze every abandoned structure inside the city limits; an action the likes of which would introduce urban beautification on a grand scale to the pueblito. It won't happen. Instead, the town will fall away in piecemeal fashion, two-by-four by two-by-four -- brick by brick. I see it happening near the corner of Humble and School Streets. Too many deserted houses and building are beyond any hope of restoration. They serve only to shelter varmints. Some actually have people living in them. These substandard edifices call for the final solution -- complete extermination. Let the weeds and brush reclaim the empty lots.