Christmas Morning in Lockhart

MERRY CHRISTMAS MORNING TO ALL YA’LL.

I’m writing a couple of hours before sunrise on Christmas morning, sitting on the back deck with my laptop, shivering a little. Nita’s still asleep, but pretty soon I’ll awaken her with a kiss, roamin’ hands, and the temptation of hot coffee.  

I’m one of those guys who sometimes goes into a funk around sunset. I remember the old Kingston Trio song lyric, “about this time of day I gets to feeling low, wondering who’s my baby’s latest beau.” After 45 years with Nita, that’s not my personal sunset remorse, but that time of day still grabs me sometimes. Pretty sunset colors aside, late afternoons often leave me moody.

On the other hand, I love being awake and outside for sunrise.  Awake and outside at sunrise every now and then, that is. Today is such a day. I love birthdays, and Jesus’ birthday works fine for me as a get-up-early-day, even with no toys to set out under the tree.

And today, Christmas Morning of 2015 has significance to Nita and me. It will the very first Christmas morning since we started this shared-life gig in 1972 that we have risen in a house with just us two in it.  Huh, how about that.

I expect we’ll sip that tempting coffee, open each other’s gifts, and then just sit,talking about our sons, daughters-in-law, and grandkids for a bit with no one else around.  We’ll see lots of family later today and in the days ahead, but this morning it’s just us two. In other circumstances, I’d be depressed about a Christmas dawn without the chaos of kids, but today, I’m rejoicing at the chance to walk a new path with NitaBird, no one else in sight.

Even as newlyweds, we traveled to parents for Christmas--and then we were parents, and still traveled to our parents' homes during the holidays. We’ve hosted parents and grandparents in little Lockhart for Christmas, we even went skiing in New Mexico with kids and family one Christmas. But we’ve never awakened and been just Phil and Nita on Christmas morning for the opening of gifts to each other. How’d we miss that?

Speaking of 1972, our first Christmas together, that was the year we gave our parents what we thought was the coolest gift ever. We were smug and naïve, but at 23 and 24, smug and naïve was the norm in our day, and likely still is. Regardless, here’s the gift:

 

That photo is of the cover of the extremely limited edition of the record album we “cut” for our parents as Christmas presents.  Nita sang, and I was the sound technician and graphic designer of the cover. She was the flower, I was the gardener. Worked for me just fine back then, works for me just fine 45 years later. She’s still singing and I’m still grubbing away.

We recorded the songs with Nita sitting on the floor in the living room of our apartment in Austin, hence the album name. Clever, huh? We’d bought a cheap microphone at the University Co-op and plugged it in to the reel-to-reel tape deck we’d bought earlier in that first year of our marriage. Nita accompanied herself on her guitar, bought by a friend in Mexico a few years before, and on the old upright piano that her mother bought used in the 1950’s.

The album is eighteen songs recorded by solo lady folk singers of the era. Joan Biaz was probably Nita’s favorite. We took our newly made amateur tape to a recently-opened professional recording studio in Austin. The owner was polite, humoring us, I imagine, and quoted us a decent price for making two master records from our tape, stressing each would be fragile and would scratch very easily. 

Then he put our tape reel on his machine and listened to the first song. Then the second. Then he started looking sidelong at Nita while he kept listening.

Finally, he clicked off the machine, spun around on his stool, and asked if we could afford to come in and record the songs in his studio. He knew a good guitar player who would charge much. He sounded like he was impressed with Nita’s voice. 

We were living on $450 a month then, and after bills had about $50 a month for groceries. Though Nita was properly flattered, she declined.  In the end, he ran the tape through some sound filters to clean up the background static, and made the two master records for $80. To this day I don’t know if he screwed us or was exceedingly kind.

 All that to say, one tune is my favorite: Amazing Grace. That’s about as good a song as there is to consider on Christmas morning. This was before Judy Collins included Amazing Grace on an album the next year, beginning the song's journey to become THE national anthem for Christian America. Didn’t hurt, I suppose, that Spock or somebody was buried in space in a Star Trek movie with Amazing Grace being played on a bagpipe.

Nita sang it in three-part harmony, doing each part herself, a feature allowed by our miraculous Japanese tape recorder. That is, it would record three-part harmony if I was deft enough to rewind the tape and restart it at the exact right spot each time for the new overlay of sound,  keeping the recording volume not too high and not too low, while Nita wore big headphones to hear the previously recorded parts while she sang. Or something like that. It was a long time ago.

Of course, I’m real biased, but I think my girl’s version is better than the one Judy Collins recorded. But, to be fair, Judy’s lovely song of grace sold several hundred thousand copies and Nita’s was restricted to two gift records. It’s tough to be a pioneer.

As to the cover, 1972 was before any computer-assisted-design software. Hell, it was while Michael Dell and Bill Gates were little shrimps. They probably were bullied geeks in grade school about that time.  Anyway, I took the black and white photos, profile and front, of my new wife with an old 35 mm Minolta SLR camera I’d bought used. I blew up the negatives on a borrowed enlarger in the kitchen pantry of our apartment, and made the prints that went into the two-perspective image on the cover and cut out Nita’s profile. And lastly, I covered two old album sleeves with yellow kitchen shelf paper, and used stick-on architect letters for the cover title. Twice for all this stuff, and the back of each album cover.

I guess our parents were pleased with the gifts. I was impressed. Nita was humble, but secretly proud, I think.  No career as a folk-singer followed, but a lifelong love of singing has. Nor did I become a professional graphic designer or sound technician.

Good memories, but none of that really matters now. It happened a long time ago, and since then Nita and I have had 43 years of happy shared lives. We have three grandkids now, and maybe one of them will pick up musically where Granny Nita left off.

And now, the sun is up, it’s Christmas morning and I have a gal to smooch, gifts under the tree to give her, and gifts from her to unwrap.  The kids and grandkids can wait a bit.

Merry Christmas!

Broken Bones and Filling Quivers

My weekly writers critiquing circle yesterday took their red pens to my newest chapter in Defiant Honor,  the third and concluding book in my McBee Civil War saga. This chapter contained nothing but Major McBee in the battle of The Wilderness, which was another of those mega-battles during which the fate of the Confederacy hung by a thread.  Borrowing the over-quoted words of the Duke of Wellington after the battle at Waterloo, The Wilderness was also “a near run thing.”

Anyway, the good news about the chapter’s peer review was that my fellow writers all said nice things about it. They did not even object to my including a few paragraphs focused on a cannon ball.  It was a small cannon ball, but I still fretted that the group members would lose their bearings when I shifted my narrative from the main character they’ve come to know, to a chunk of iron.

The bad news is I fear that after two and a half books of battle after battle, I may have jaded my critique group members and they are really saying, “OK, that’s fine, another battle, I get it. Now take me back to the ladies and the personal conflicts.” I’ll just have to trust they really did get involved with the drama of the battle. 

To finish the chapter, I spent an hour researching the history of Plaster of Paris as a medical technique used to treat broken bones. The gooey stuff really does apparently have a provenance in Paris, France.  It seems that after the Napoleonic Wars, during the ongoing violent rioting in Paris, a few military doctors experimented with wall-plaster-soaked-gauze as a wrap to hold broken bones in place. The British army then picked up the technique during the 1850’s Crimean War.

By the time our Civil War started in 1861, word of Plaster of Paris’s success had crossed the ocean, and a few forward-thinking doctors began trying it. Of course, awareness of Plaster of Paris wraps didn’t slow down the standard treatment of amputating damaged arms and legs, hands and feet. And I doubt any of the plaster casts were red, blue, or green like our son’s leg cast was once upon a time.

Last weekend, Nita and I attended a Christmas play at the local community theater. It’s a purely Texas play, west Texas, at that. The name is “A Tuna Christmas.” It was written some 25 years ago and first performed by two Austin actors who grew up in very small towns in west Texas. All dozen or so of the characters, including women, were done by the two men in the original performances in Austin.

We saw it, loved it, recognizing too many of our own small-town family members in the Tuna, Texas characters. We howled and chuckled. Damned clever. Damned insightful. So much so, A Tuna Christmas left Austin and went to Broadway where it gained national acclaim, and now A Tuna Christmas is done all over the country. I reckon small towns, north, south, east, and west, share a lot of traits.

We also loved our local amateur performance, even if it took a lot more than two gifted actors to pull it off. It helps that one of the original two writers and actors, Jaston Williams, moved to our little town of  Lockhart a few years back. He and his partner had gone to China and adopted a son, and likely wanted to shift to life in a small town. They have become welcomed “Lockhartians.” Jaston didn’t act in our amateur production of his own play, but he did show up at rehearsals from time to time to cheer them on.

One of the first things I noticed in A Tuna Christmas this time was an oft-overlooked eccentricity of small town dialect that happens when the two conversationalists know each other very well. The second speaker doesn’t need to say much, but understands it would be rude to say nothing in reply.

Person One: “It’s colder than a well digger’s ass out there.”  Second person: “It is.” That’s all. “It is.”

Or, first person, “That boy is dumb as a stump.” Second person, “He is.” Of course, if it were a girl being called dumb in the South, “Bless Her Heart,” would follow just sure as stink after a fart.

Leaving Tuna, Texas behind, I hope you all are shopping for that just-right gift for your sweetheart and family members. I hope you all are remembering the gift of a donation to any of the deserving charities in your part of the world.

In this season, where we pay homage to the child of a teenage mother who miraculously had a son, even though a “virgin,”  it seems a good time to reflect that families grow in all sorts of unconventional ways. 

Nita, the love of my life, is an adopted daughter.

We have a grandson who came into the world through an “in vitro” pregnancy.

Two months later we gained two wonderful granddaughters when our other son said, “I do,” to a beautiful young woman whose first marriage didn’t work. 

Finally, just yesterday, our nephew and niece and their three biological kids who live in Atlanta, Georgia, returned from China with an adopted fourth child, a son named Caleb. 

All of those "second-chance" means of filling the family quiver are wonderful things.  They are.

Fording Rivers

For the past twelve years during the weekend before Thanksgiving, I’ve taken part in a Civil War reenactment at a place called Plantation Liendo, about fifty miles north of Houston.  A creek that is normally dry or a little more than a step-over trickle runs through the property. This year our preplanned battle scenario on Saturday included all the reenactors crossing the creek. The problem was we had a good hard rain storm early Saturday morning so that by 1 pm when our two columns of reenactors needed to cross the creek, it was running maybe fifteen wide and a foot deep at the spot where we all intended to cross.

Some reenactors didn’t want to get their feet and trousers wet, and retraced their route to the concrete bridge we’d used to first cross the flowing creek.  That added about a mile of cross-country marching to their day. Most of us, though, decided we were OK with having wet feet, and slogged across. The water came over the top of my ankle-high brogans and reached about to mid-calf.  The deep gooey mud at both banks was worse than the cool water which actually felt pretty good on my sore feet.

In Redeeming Honor, there is a historically-founded scene where the soldier characters have to cross the  Potomac River shortly before the battle at Gettysburg. The fun part was that many of the soldiers took off their trousers for the crossing of the waist-high ford, and some had long drawers on and some did not. Lots of Rebs apparently went commando.

During the actual river crossing in 1863, and in my novel, at the same time as the Texans were wading, a buggy carrying several young ladies crossed the same ford going in the opposite direction. You can imagine the excitement that caused at a time when women dared not display even their ankles in public, and young men did not ever appear shirtless in public, much less without their trousers. But war changes the rules, then and now.

The photo here is of a different bunch of reenactors fording the Potomac River near Harper's Ferry, West Virginia during a pre-reenactment march. While this photo is G-rated, perhaps it gives a sense of what the soldiers looked like holding all their gear and weapons above the water.

  

The bottom photo is lifted somewhere off the internet and is just for fun since it involves a Civil War soldier fording a river and probably reflects how most teenage boys think about going to war. It took me a while to notice that the lovely lady has a bandaged leg, so the scene is not entirely contrived. Right.

Finally, keep in mind that all three of my Civil War novels are available on Amazon and would make good Christmas gifts for the Civil War nuts in your family, ages 15 to 95 – my dad’s 95 now and is reading the third one.

Happy shopping to you all.

McBee, McGee, and TMI

Beginning in my teen years in the 1960’s I read every paperback novel I could find written by John D. McDonald. Mostly I found his books on the twirling metal racks in 7-11 type stores or in the news-stall downtown that was popular with teenage boys because the guy would sell us Playboy magazines.

McDonald wrote pop crime fiction and was best known for his serial anti-hero, Travis McGee, whose book titles each included a different color. (Pale Gray For Guilt; The Girl In the Brown Paper Wrapper; A Deadly Shade of Gold) If you pick up on the similarity of my main character McBee to McGee, I assure you it's coincidental. :)

I’ve read that VP Dick Cheney got Prez W. Bush hooked on McGee novels while Bush lived in the White House.  I’ve never been comfortable with that bit of information, as I’m not sure I want a President who puts himself to sleep reading the same fluffy-sexy-violent paperbacks that I enjoy. I mean, the President has important stuff to think about.  On the other hand, maybe W needed to escape reality for a while each evening more than I did. At our professional peaks, he was running a war on the other side of the world, while I was running a high school just around the corner.

The image here of The Deep Blue Goodbye is of one of the very first McGee books. It’s not hard to tell what about this cover appealed to me, and it wasn’t the 40 cent price. In fact I bought a Spanish version of this same paperback during my only trip to Mexico City during spring break of 1970, but it didn’t work to self-teach me the language, since I rarely got past the A’s: Adios Azure

One of McDonald’s traits as a writer besides the inevitable gruesome death and his occasional great wit was his tendency to go into minute detail when describing random things. Things like stereo systems or boats or even the interior of a restaurant. As a teenager, and even in my 20’s and 30’s, I usually scanned over those details as TMI-Too Much Information. I was much more interested in getting to the sex, violence, and wit.

Last night, on the Facebook page of a reenacting friend, a lady, I read a new term that I can relate to every week during a part of our church service. When the pastor asks the congregation what prayers need to be collectively offered, the result is often an organ recital. Not music, but a string of people who stand and describe the dysfunctional organs of someone in their family, or a friend, or co-worker, or a Christian on the other side of the world. We all seem to enjoy voicing grim details, when just a name would do nicely. Again, a case of TMI. We don’t want or need the bloody details and the Lord already knows them, so just a name would do nicely.

I’m facing the same issue that some paragraphs in every chapter are either Too Much Information or Really Neat Facts, depending on the reader. As a writer of historical fiction, I’m prone to want to educate the reader about the 1860’s, to teach them how different life was before the essential inventions we take for granted, like air-conditioning, cars and refrigerators, not to mention computers, cell phones and Twitter and so on. And that’s not even getting into the military side of my novels, where solders’ ranks and organizational terms like brigade and division confuse readers.

So, I walk the fence and depend on my critiquing group of non-Civil War enthusiasts to help me keep things simple. But I still yearn to describe how many brass buttons of what kind were on the wool frock coats of a certain shade of gray worn by the Fifth Texas Infantry in 1861. And I want to elaborate on the differences between 1853 British Enfields, 1861 American Springfields, and 1854 Austrian Lorenz muskets. But that’s TMI, for sure. If you really want to know that arcane stuff, you can google damned near anything.

And honestly, I’m still more interested telling the reader how Faith, John, Levi, and Edwina sort things out among them while they cope with the hardships of 1864 in the last of the McBee trilogy: Defiant Honor.

Thanksgiving and General Lee

It’s Thanksgiving week and our house is full of grown kids, wee grandkids, and happy dogs. Walking space on the floors is iffey, what with the litter of toys, sprawled dogs, crawling Jackson, and two little girls who are only still in sleep. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this at four a.m., hoping I can get’r done before the bedlam begins again. But I wouldn’t trade it.

I spent last weekend at a Civil War reenactment as a book-selling vendor in the mornings and a soldier reenactor in the afternoons. The reenactment was near Hempstead, Texas, just north of Houston, and has occurred annually since 1999 on the site of an 1850’s home called Plantation Liendo, that is now a cattle ranch.

During the real war, the cotton plantation first became a Confederate army training camp which transitioned to being a prisoner of war camp for Yankee soldiers captured during the battles in Louisiana and Galveston. During reconstruction, the ill-fated General Custer lived there for a while during his stint as Texas’s military overseer. We didn’t like Goldilocks any more than the Sioux did, but they handled him better.

This past weekend the old home became a stand-in for the McLean farmhouse in Appomattox, Virginia. That’s where General Lee finally met General Grant to surrender the shattered remnant of his army. The photo below was taken in the parlor of the house at Plantation Liendo during the one-time-only reenactment of the surrender. 

Those eight local Texas reenactors in the photo took great effort to portray the men who were present, including Lee and Grant. Meanwhile, a few hundred of us stood outside on the lawn in blue and gray, respectfully waiting for our turn to replicate the final stacking of arms by the proud Confederate veterans.

I think Keith Mitchell, the photographer, did a terrific job in capturing the solemn mood of the day. Even if the real event happened in April, 1865, not November, our recreated Texas surrender seems a proper conclusion to the four-year series of events that have commemorated the Civil War’s 150th anniversary.  

On to book writing, I’ve switched from calling the final Captain McBee novel “McBee 3” to what I think today will be the title: Defiant Honor. The  story will not include the surrender at Appomattox, but will reach into 1865 to bundle together loose plot strands that have unwound in three books set over the four years of Captain McBee’s service as a Confederate officer.

In that regard, I’m knee-deep in carrying McBee and Levi through the Battle of the Wilderness, the bloody fight in May 1864 that was truly the beginning of the end for the South. Historically, the Texas Brigade played a key role at the Wilderness, their last-minute arrival giving me the chance to include General Lee as a character who makes a vital cameo appearance in a critical juncture.

Robert E. Lee is one of the historical figures who smart authors handle with great care. If any one American has personified the admirable qualities of leadership while under great strain for a long time, it’s General Lee.

To many people, Lee still IS the South, even 150 years later. So much so, I suspect that how I present Lee as a character, even if just on a couple of pages, will go a long way in shaping readers’ judgments of my writing ability and whether they will recommend my books to others.

After all, a Civil War novelist who doesn’t get General Lee right, just ain’t no writer a’tall. So I’m sweating the details this time, because that old man is everybody’s grandpa down here where sweet tea is liquid gold.

Come Thursday, I'm going to eat lots of turkey, cheese grits (with bacon crumbs), and pecan pie. Then I'll try to stay awake to watch the Cowboys try to win a football game. Hope you can do likewise. 

On Friday, I'll be out in front of our local Wal-Mart for an hour or two standing by the Salvation Army Red Kettle wearing a red apron and ringing a little handbell while thanking people for dropping a few bills or coins into the pot. Hope you'll do that too when you're out during the holidays. Dollars go further than dimes, but every bit helps someone else.

Henry's and Winchesters and Me and Jackson

Yesterday was “Constitution Amendments Election Day” here in Texas. All seven proposed amendments passed, including a very redundant one that guarantees Texans the now “constitutional” right to hunt and fish. Duh. Yea, it caused a lot of people to wonder just what we’ve been doing for the past 200 years.

The white tails and bass tried to launch a “Vote No” campaign, sort of like the cows that promote the Chick Filet fast food joints, but it never got much traction. I mean, who listens to ghost-like deer and invisible bass who only surface when caught? And Texans don’t much go in for whiners, even those with fins and hooves. If the antlered ones and the big-mouth fishies can’t take care of themselves, then maybe they deserve to get the hook or the arrowhead or a chunk of lead between their shoulder blades.

Is there a link here to my Civil War novels? Of course, even if tenuous.  The photo is me in November of 1964 with my first, and biggest, deer trophy, hunted on my granddaddy’s (who we called Daddy Todd) deer lease near the Trinity River bottoms in East Texas.

It was 51 years ago this month, but I can still vividly remember that a running doe broke into the clearing where my tree stand covered the game trails that crisscrossed the clearing, a rare open space surrounded by thick woods. Sensing the doe had a good reason to be running, I aimed my rifle where she had left the trees. Sure enough, just a few seconds later, here came this big-rack buck hot after her. I shot. I missed. I cussed in my best 15-year-old manner. I levered a new shell into the barrel and put the rifle on half-cock and waited.  I probably was shaking like a leaf in the wind.

Half an hour later, a contented looking doe wandered at a slow grazing pace into the clearing. Again, being the brilliant teenage hunter, and at 15, was learning how stupid, horny males of any species can be, I cocked and aimed behind her again. By damn if a big-rack buck didn’t mosey into the clearing.  I waited for him to stand still, and then I put the sight on his upper shoulder and squeezed off the shot. Bingo.  

I was one proud puppy when Daddy Todd walked up an hour later, after a fruitless morning in his deer stand. I led him to where my trophy had fallen, and he said something profound like, “Damn, Phil, not bad.”  We dragged the warm carcass to the closest place he could get his Dodge four-door sedan. We somehow levered it into the trunk, and hauled it to the deer camp where we hung and field dressed it. That was bloody business, but heck, I was floating, and if I was up to my elbows in blood and gore, so much the better.

The ten-point rack was mounted by my other granddad, and it’s still on a shelf in my garage.

I was using Daddy Todd’s new Winchester 30-30, Model 94, with open sights, the same rifle I’m holding in the picture. 

The Civil War link is that the old Winchester lever action was the child of the Henry repeating rifles used by some lucky Union regiments during the Civil War. First came single-shot breech loading rifles and carbines that could be loaded quickly without standing. They were bad enough for the Rebs to face. But, repeaters were the bane of the Confederacy. Luckily for the Rebs, only 3,200 of the 17-shot Henry repeaters were made before the war ended.

I’ve not hunted for nearly thirty years now. I still have a good deer rifle, not the Winchester, though. I guess my uncle got that when Daddy Todd passed on. I never took my two sons deer hunting. Between the cost involved in guns, gear, and deer leases, and their involvement in fall sports and Boy Scouts, it just didn’t happen. I regret that. But, both grown sons have shot the Civil War muskets at targets, and know the feel of a long-arm’s kick, the smell of burning gunpowder, and the thrill of seeing a hole near the center of paper target. That’s OK, too.

Nonetheless, in just fourteen years, little Jackson will be old enough to handle a rifle. If I can just stay on the green side of the grass, his Granddaddy Phil will be a spry eighty. That seems just the right age to put a teenage boy in a deer stand and leave him alone with a Winchester, patience, and dreams of a trophy buck. Who knows, he might get lucky. It's happened before.

Sic Semper Tyrannis and Cutting Trees

Every so often I do internet searches for the three generations of the Texas branch of the McBride family tree. Just this week, using a new website sponsored by the University of North Texas called Portal to Texas History, I found this photo. No context was given with the image, so I don’t know when it was taken. The McBride is not likely kin to me, just a shared last name.

I’m betting the image is from the early 1900’s. Looking at two of the three standing men, the guys on the outside both have similar jackets buttoned all the way to the collar, while the man on the mule and the fellow standing in the middle look to be in shirt sleeves. My guess is the jackets are some sort of issued clothing, maybe by a prison, maybe by the CCC, Civilian Conservation Corps, maybe by the railroad. Perhaps the two men who are “dressed up” are inspectors or visiting big wigs posing with a two-man work crew. There's only two of the hook tools being held. Whatever the unknown specifics, the photo is a stark reminder that jobs and life have gotten a lot “softer” and gone “inside” for most of us.

Moving on to writing McBee III, I’m still working to keep my history accurate. Therefore, this week I did an internet search to identify which specific regiment of the US Colored Troops fought the Fifth Texas Infantry, including my main character John McBee, in one of the key 1864 battles around Richmond.

I quickly found a detailed map of the battle –New Market Heights—that shows that the 22^nd Regiment of US Colored Troops (USCT) were the ones who charged the breastworks defended by the 5^th Texas Regiment of Confederates. 

The African-American soldiers in the regiment were from New Jersey, and in accordance with prevailing beliefs of the 1860’s that black men could not govern themselves, the officers were all white men. That bit of 19th century institutional racism is important to the story line in McBee III.

It turns out that the regimental flag of the 22^nd USCT is still in a museum, and that it was designed and painted by an African-American artist. Here is an image of the original flag in the museum and a colored photo of a replica of the flag used by a group of reenactors.

The painted image of the black soldier bayoneting a Confederate sergeant is pretty striking to me. It leaves little doubt that the regiment hoped to go into combat and not just be content with building fortifications and roads as many of the USCT regiments were assigned to do, including the 22^nd during the spring of 1864.  But, by the summer, when General Grant needed more soldiers, an entire division of 12 regiments of African-American soldiers joined his siege of Richmond, and most went into combat.

I’m not writing here about the particulars of the day the 22^nd USCT attacked the 5^th Texas Infantry, since that is grist for the plot in McBee III. Suffice to say men died on both sides.

A curious part of the history of the 22^nd USCT is that after spending time in Virginia after Richmond was taken by Grant’s army, the 22^nd was transported by steamboat to Brownsville, Texas. There they fought Texans again in the last battle of the Civil War in May of 1865, at Palmetto Ranch near the Mexico-Texas border--almost a month after Lee surrendered at Appomattox.

A last point about the flag is the Latin motto at the top, loosely translated: Death to Tyrants. Virtually the same motto can be found on some of the Confederate regimental flags scattered around in museums. Both sides were quick to label the enemy as tyrants, validating their own side's position by name-calling the other. Sounds familiar to today's politics, and war.

That’s the history lesson for this week.

Out of the Raft After Fifty Years

Phil's Note on October 14th: This post is from earlier this year, but I've moved it to the top of the list for a couple of days. It's a memory of a long time friend, Garland Ellis, who passed away last March.. I've just received an email list of other members of our Longview High School Class of '67 and moved up the old post so other high school friends of Garland might easily find it and read about him.

Here's the original post about Garland, and, yes, Leonard Nimoy, who died the same week.

Leonard Nimoy-Spock of the pointy ears-passed away this week at age 83. I was a high school nerd during the TV run of the original Star Trek series, and was a big reader of science fiction – Heinlein, Bradbury, Clark and others. As a SF fan it was a pleasure to see the first “serious” effort to bring the genre to the masses through television. Forgive me for referring to episodes like “The Trouble with Tribbles” as serious, but on the whole, Spock and Kirk’s Star Trek was thought-provoking and great fun. And, seeing a space western on TV somehow added a bit of credibility to the SF paperback books which I always seemed to be reading.

Someone sent me a You Tube link to an interview with Nimoy in which he relates how he borrowed the split-fingered Vulcan greeting sign from a Hebrew ceremony he attended as a child. Essentially, the hand-sign is a Jewish blessing that Nimoy himself decided to use when he greeted the first other Vulcan character to appear on the show. He wanted a Vulcan-specific “handshake” to greet her. That Vulcan was a Jewish Italian actress who knew the religious origin of the hand-sign, and responded in kind, and the split-fingered symbol took off on a life of its own. “Live Long and Prosper.” I’m glad that Leonard Nimoy was able to both live long and prosper.

Yesterday Nita and I got one of the phone calls we all dread. The caller was Raz Ellis, the distraught wife of Garland Ellis, who called to tell us Garland had died just a few hours earlier. Garland was a friend of fifty years, one of the guys who I ran with in high school and college and with whom we’ve maintained a long-distance friendship, usually by phone calls these past few years.

Garland was a career Navy officer who did tours on the USS Chicago, which was a heavy cruiser, and on one of the giant aircraft carriers, the name of which I’ve lost. After retirement from the Navy, Garland stayed in San Diego where he worked in the defense industry, as a liaison between contractors and the navy. 

I can tell stories of us misbehaving as adolescents, driving to Bossier City, Louisiana to legally (and stupidly) drink pitchers of beer at Shakey’s Pizza joint and Singapore Slings at the Carousel bar. Stories of paddling down the Sabine River in deep East Texas, years before the film Deliverance was made. Stories of Garland’s and my great dirty dish war in college, a week-long stalemate when we each stubbornly refused to wash the dishes in the sink, swearing it was the other guy’s turn. Another roommate finally washed the damned dishes to break the gridlock. Stories of camping at Big Bend National Park and backpacking in Colorado with our wives, and stories of the summer month we spent in Japan as houseguests of the Ellis’s while Nita was pregnant.

When our grandson was born a few weeks back, Gar called right away to congratulate us.  I told him of finding a long distance phone bill in son Todd’s “baby book” from 1981 when Todd was born. Among the expected calls to family was an eight minute phone call to Japan to let Garland know that the kid who got a free ride up Mt. Fuji in his mama’s belly was now on the ground.

The photos are of Garland and me when we both were young and fit. Once Gar joined the Navy it seemed he was always “in uniform,” squared away, even way up in the Rocky Mts. The action photo is one Garland never really liked, but I enjoy, since it’s me trying to keep his big ass in the raft, and not the other way around, as it well might have been that day, the way that rubber boat was bouncing through the rapids.

Good memories of a long friendship. And yesterday, at age 65, Garland had a heart attack and fell down the stairs at home, to die at the hospital some hours later.  Just…damn.  

Peace Be With You, my friend of fifty years. You did prosper and you did live well, but I sure wish you had stayed in the raft with us a little longer.

An Evening With Thirteen Texas Authors

A week ago I had the gratifying experience of being publicly recognized as a novelist. I was among a dozen plus one Texas authors who were the featured guests at Lockhart’s annual “Evening With the Authors” garden party. 

For the past fifteen years a group of supportive folks have hosted this fund-raising event to help expand the book collection of Lockhart’s public library, the Dr. Eugene Clark Library.

The Clark Library building is itself a 116 year old historical landmark and the oldest still-functioning library building in Texas. The red brick building has a three-story-tall rotunda, a stage for performances, a balcony, lots of hardwood trim, and wooden study tables illuminated by old-fashioned reading lamps with green glass shades. How many libraries have a huge vintage stained-glass window featuring an open book and celebrating “reading”? 

The photo is son Ben and his wife Meredith smooching on the stage in front of the big stained-glass window the day after Thanksgiving last year when he proposed to her in the library. (She said ‘Yes!’)

For me, the Evening With the Authors event was my once-only opportunity to have the attention of friends and neighbors and revel in the new role of “local novelist.”

It was also a big deal to me to see my three Civil War novels stacked up on a table sponsored by Barnes and Noble Booksellers, next to the books of the other writers who were present. A fair number of my novels sold, which was also gratifying.

Once or twice a year I sell my Civil War books at Civil War reenactments, but the Evening With the Authors was different. I wasn’t competing with snow cone and kettle corn vendors, but with other recognized authors, and the 200 potential buyers were all people who actually like to read.

To top off the joy of the occasion, my mom, now 90, but still the sharp-eyed lady who took her three kids to the library every week throughout our childhoods, sat next to me at my author’s table. I was proud to introduce her as the person who started and nurtured my love of reading way back when. And of course, grandson Jackson had to make an appearance with his great-grandmama.

Naturally, there was of a spread of tasty rations and the ongoing popping of corks from many bottles of Texas wine to encourage conversation and the use of credit cards for folks to buy lots of books.

As to McBee III, I’ve shovelled through the snows of the first two chapters, the action in both chapters occurring in January in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. I diligently strived to introduce the established characters to new readers without unduly retelling the story in Redeeming Honor and boring anyone who has read the first two volumes of the trilogy. 

Writers of sequels and “threequels” have to confront that issue from the first paragraph. And the final title won’t be McBee III, it‘ll be another honor title, unknown at this time.

This past week I read quickly through two fine new CIA spy novels focused on us vs. the new Russia under Putin. Both are real page-turner thrillers written by a man who spent over 30 years as a CIA operative, along with his wife. The books are Red Sparrow and Palace of Treason by Jason Matthews.

One of the two central characters in both Matthew’s books is a young, beautiful, competent woman spy into whose character outline I shamelessly colored in with shades of Faith Samuelson as I read. I think the two dangerous women have a lot in common. That means I like Matthews' lady spy.

Have a good week and READ SOMETHING for fun.

66

Today is my 66^th birthday and this is my 63^rd blog post. Too bad I didn’t count ahead and do three more posts during the last year so today could have been #66 on my 66^th.

Anyway, I’ve just elbowed my way up to the Social Security trough, hopefully to keep some of on my children’s payroll taxes in the family for a long time. Although, it’s possible that the taboo platter of thick-sliced bacon I cooked for my celebratory breakfast might shorten my monthly drain on the SS bank account. Before the bacon grease congeals my blood to slurry, here’s a few random birthday reflections.

Today, while Nita keeps grandson Jackson next door, I’m alone and writing this blog post and Chapter 2 of the final Captain McBee Civil War novel. I’m introducing Faith, the lady lead in all three books, to new readers by writing a steamy bit in which she reflects on her last night on a mountain trail wrapped in a blanket with the good captain.

The chapter is also an experiment to see if a 66-year-old grandpa in 2015 can put together the right string of words to fog up his own eyeglasses while jumping into the head of a 29-year old woman who grew up in a tightly constrained Victorian southern culture. We’ll see.

Two weeks ago I went to a Civil War reenactment on the Arkansas-Missouri border, commemorating the early war battle of Pea Ridge. The photo below was taken as we started the Saturday battle for the paying spectators. Given the recent controversies surrounding the venerable and abused old Confederate battle flag, we all figured those crossing jet contrails were intentional, someone’s editorial statement, appearing as if from one of the rebellious gods up in the blue sky.

Last Saturday night I was extremely flattered to be among the twelve invited regional authors who were the center of attention at our local Friends of the Library fund-raising event. It’s the Evening With the Authors garden party. Each author has his/her own table and hostess and receives a stream of paying guests who stop by to chat about the author’s books and have copies signed. Of course, all the authors’ books are laid out on a table for sale and wine and tasty nibbles and bits are served.

Being one of the authors, in my case being the local author in the bunch, was gratifying on two levels. First, I was honored to be recognized and greeted as a competent novelist in a select group of writers, and not just “my friend Phil.”

Second, it was professionally validating as a novelist to see my books displayed  on the Barnes and Nobles table along with the books of all those authors who have agents and publishing houses. And a fair number of my three Civil War novels sold, which is always nice.

Finally, here’s another old photograph. This one is my great great grandmother Lavenia McFarland. She was born in Kentucky and married there in 1870 near where the climatic action in Redeeming Honor takes place.

I think she must have been a beautiful young woman. It pains me now to realize that I had her forgotten photo in a file during those weeks when I was looking for a period image of a pretty woman of the 1860’s to put on the cover of Tangled Honor, the first McBee novel. I had it all the time. I may find a way to work it onto the cover of the last McBee novel. We’ll see.

Book sales on Amazon for Redeeming Honor are trickling along. A $2.99 Kindle e-book download would make fine lunchtime reading and be cheaper and better for you than a Whataburger. Just food for thought. Sorry, I know I promised not to use this blog for any more shameless self-promotion. But it’s my birthday, what can I say.

Have a good week.

What’s the Big Deal About Honor?

I decided a couple of years ago that the titles of the three Captain McBee Civil War novels would share a theme. It wasn’t hard to settle on the term “honor” to be the commonality: Tangled Honor; Redeeeming Honor; and Something-to-be-Determined Honor for the last book I just started writing. So, why “honor”? Why not some other word?

Remember Faulkner? “The past is not dead; it’s not even past.” Bear with me.

When I was twelve I made a pact with myself. I really did. If I’ve broken that pact in the fifty-four years since then, I’ve blotted out the memory. That means I still take my personal covenant seriously. Here it is. Please don’t laugh.

I was a year into Boy Scouts and we opened our weekly troop meetings by standing at attention in our khaki uniforms. We folded one finger down and held three fingers straight up in the Scout Hand Sign, and recited the Scout Oath: “On my Honor, I will…”

On my honor. Honor. What the hell? Just what is honor? The online thesaurus tosses out four synonyms: Integrity; Respect; Dignity; Reputation. Good enough, I can work with those.

Honor matters. I think the Boy Scouts have had it right since 1910 by prefacing every recitation of the organization’s belief statement with “On my Honor.”

The aforementioned pact I made with myself as a twelve-year old is that if ever I say “Scout’s Honor” when asked a tough question, whether about my behavior, or something else, I would tell the truth.

My rabbit hole to personal safety has been that before today I’ve never told anyone else about that secret pact with myself, my internal promise not to lie if confronted and asked, “Scout’s Honor?”

But, if someone like my big brother knew me well enough to add “Scout’s Honor?” when talking with me, I’d be confined to the truth. “Did you scratch my new record? Scout's Honor, was it you?” Or, whatever, I was honor-bound to tell the truth.

Of course, my secret pact with myself also gave me an out to lie like a big dog to a teacher or whoever didn’t include the magic code “Scout’s Honor” in any interrogation.

I hope I haven’t overplayed my “out,” because I do really try to stick with the truth and not mislead or lie, even without “Scout’s Honor.”

Jumping to my choice of “honor” as the common denominator for my Civil War novel titles, here’s why I chose it: Honor is the anchor that good men need to keep their heads above the swirling currents and suck-holes of the horror of war. I think.

I’ve never been in a war, but what I read is that war can quickly wipe away the norms we were raised to view as sacred, and war can easily twist a man’s personal honor to make the unthinkable acceptable. 

That brings me around to Captain McBee and his honor. In Book I, he got tangled up in a deep patch of clinging moral seaweed, a danger he never saw until it wrapped around his legs. McBee almost drowned.

In Book II, he worked his way back to the surface, accepted a new reality of what he was capable of doing, both good and bad, and redeemed himself, more or less.

In Book III, McBee is going to struggle again to hold onto the honor--that is the integrity, respect, dignity, and reputation--he lost once and barely reclaimed.

But things in the Confederacy in 1864 went downhill at rapid pace. (Is the fall of the Confederacy the origin of the modern phrase to describe when things are going badly as “going south”?)

Anyway, elusive “honor” is going to once more do its best to confound and trip up McBee and those dear to him.

My sincere thanks to the readers of my blog who have ordered a paperback copy or a Kindle download of Redeeming Honor from Amazon. I’m not writing novels to support myself or send the grandkids through college, but sales on Amazon are gratifying proof that some folks like my books. And that’s what I really want.

It’s October and there’s actually a nip in the air outside here in little Lockhart. Hoorah!