Some time back, I referred to telephone recordings made by “Lonesome Cowboy Tim”. These used to run on a (secret) telephone number in San Francisco, and the story changed from time to time. The story in general was that Lonesome Cowboy Tim lived out on the prairie with a lot of critters, and they had various adventures which were very, very funny.

It seems that lots of Cowboy Tim fans still remember those days. I heard from Frank Mitford from south Florida and several others. Some of them have recordings.

In an attempt to bring these recordings back to the world, I’ve registered “lonesomecowboytim.com“, and will be putting a website up in that location. Hopefully, I’ll be able to garner recordings and post them there, and perhaps some other fans would like to help with this project, so that you can return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.

Lonesome Cowboy Tim will ride again!

Highway 89: Chad Henson from Mount Shasta was driving toward McCloud this morning, and as he neared the Ski Park, a big bear came barrelling down the slope, across oncoming traffic, and careened into Chad’s Volkswagen Rabbit.

“I slammed on my brakes,” Chad said, “but the bear didn’t even slow down.”

The Rabbit survived. The bear didn’t.

McCloud, California: Today I knocked off building megatars early, and went home for a rest and a bath, because I’m being taken to dinner on the train!

McCloud is a former mill town, ten miles around on the south side of the mountain. Very scenic it is, and at the depot we checked in and got large tickets. After a spell of sitting and watching the other passengers milling around, the conductor came along calling “All aboard!”

The dining cars have names, like Trinity, Lassen, Shasta, and Siskiyou. Although in railroad tradition, parties of two may be combined with other parties, Adrienne had arranged a private table for two in the Lassen car. We entered past the galley, where lanky young chefs were preparing the first course. In the car proper, the interior was dark and polished mahogany, with carved shapes to decorate and fit the curve of the car, and old-fashioned light fixtures.

Our table had streamers and confetti and sparklers of stars and birthday cakes, saying Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday! Tre festif!

The couple across the way wished me Happy Birthday, and, seeing that their table had the same decorations, we wished them Happy Birthday as well, and asked which of them was having the birthday. As it turned out, both of them were. The husband said, “We were very startled to find we had the same birthday, twenty years ago. She didn’t believe me, and made me show her my driver’s license.”

Behind Adrienne, a larger group had lots of rowdy fun, and behind me, a very tall and stunning blonde was sticking the Happy Birthday sparklers onto her breasts. Her muscle-man husband said quietly, “Probably one is enough.”

The train clickety-clacked into the woods beyond McCloud, and we wound along the side of the mountain, to a switchback where the conductor dropped off the train as we slowly passed. We stopped, he threw a switch, and then the train started in the other direction, with the engine pushing our dining cars, as we climbed up a slight grade and wound further up the mountain.

The deep pines began to yield to spruce, thin oak trees, and manzanita scrub, and from our higher position we could see distant ridges of blue mountain, and beyond them, faint white peaks further still. The light was lowering as we wound around the mountainside. On the way to Mount Shasta we were served appetizers of sauteed vegetables in filo dough, fancy breads and spiced applesauce, and we’d selected a dry Sauvignon Blanc which turned out quite pleasant.

As we passed through the twilight pines, a sadness came over me, as did the fancy that I could imagine our dog Tulip running and running through these wild woods, somehow happy and in the wild. Tulip died not long ago, and I miss her bitterly. Why these woods? Why did I picture her so? I don’t know, but somehow I saw her there, and felt her loss.

Our train wound higher and emerged on the west side of the mountain, and we found ourselves above our town of Mount Shasta, looking west where the sun in a huge sky had dropped below the Eddys mountain ridge. Looking down through flowering trees and shrub, we could see into the fields of Shastice Park, where we once walked Tulip and Lizzie, and now walk Lizzie alone.

The train slowed to a gentle stop, and paused for a few minutes, there on the mountainside above our town, and then slowly we reversed direction and started back along the way we’d come. The light in the sky was failing, the darkness gathered beneath the trees.

We passed a few outlying houses, lit windows looking warm and cheery in the woodland. In our dining car, piped music brought us saxophones and country ballads, and old songs like Love is a Many Splendored Thing.

Rosemary our waitress brought us warm dinners of salmon, asparagus, and new potatoes. The woods grew darker and darker, and our dining car grew louder as the wine bottles were emptied.

At the table just beyound the couple who had the same birthday was a young couple. He was probably a soldier, and had seemed kind of nervous back in the station. She was a tall and somewhat gawky girl, who seemed to think the world of him. Along the way, he left his seat and knelt on one knee in the aisle beside her. Opening a small box containing a ring, he was asking a question.

She said yes.

Deep in the dark woods, Rosemary brought desserts of cheesecake and berries in whipped cream, and coffee. We listened to the clack of the rails, watched the dark trees passing our window.

In the fullness of night, we pulled slowly into McCloud, past the illuminated hotels and into the station. “Good night,” we told Rosemary. “Good night,” we told the wine steward. “Good night,” we told our neighbors.

Good night. Good night. Good night.

Spring in Mount Shasta, 2004: More than anyplace I’ve lived, the seasons here arrive with a flourish. In our yard, the pear tree already sports thick white blossoms in the chill early air. The sunlight peeps over the mountain and slants down into our back yard.

The apple tree sprouts tiny pink flowers above the deck, the birch on the corner shapes itself into a shower of green, and the lilac outside the big window grows leaves and white blossoms as you watch. Time flows. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

Spring. And I’m 60 today.

My life looks like seasons now.

This morning Kyle and Jeremy arrived at 7:30 up to the front door, alarming Lizzie most wonderfully. They’re stringing tough networking cable from my office by the garage. Under the grass, beneath the earth and around the side of the house, to include Adrienne’s computer. She’s building her Bandana Canyon website to sell bandanas, dog toys, and K-9 cookies.

SEASONS IN LIFE
Kyle and Jeremy are around 23. When you’re a guy at 23, you’re starting to know stuff about the world. You just get stronger and stronger, up to about 35, coming into your power. Your power in the world continues to grow till at least 45, but your bounce and energy level off, and perhaps begin to fade. Now, at 60, I’m starting to have some creaks. Moving more carefully.

You get smarter. But I’ve heard it said, and believe it true, that it’s amazing how much ‘Mature Wisdom’ resembles just being tired.

I’m not tired yet, but I can see how it might come to pass.

Some day.

San Francisco, 1977: Last Fall, after I’d started Network Answering Service in my studio apartment at 495 Third Avenue, the company began slowly to grow. I’d hired Bob, first just to relieve me, but as clients increased eventually I had to increase his hours, and then we began hiring Operators, which we called “OPs.”

During that same time, Doug Faunt wired up my new Cromemco computer, and I wrote a new bookkeeping program, for sending out the bills to this growing number of customers. One of my OPs named Hugh, a lanky jazz pianist, came in all excited about a dream he’d had, in which our Cromemco computer was called “Mr. Suitcase.” And from then on, Hugh insisted on referring to the computer as Mr. Suitcase. Soon everybody called the computer Mr. Suitcase.

And before long, I needed to hire a bookkeeper to operate Mr. Suitcase and my new bookkeeping program.

When we advertised, in walked Pankaj.

He was a young man, dark and serious, from India. He seemed a bit apologetic and uncertain in the rough humor from Texas and Tennessee with which Bob and I taught him the job. Pankaj was an accounting student, sent by his father to get a degree in America, because, he said, “you get the better job if you have a degree from the United States.”

The odd thing to me and Bob, thinking it over, was that he was attending a tiny trade school then located on Masonic Boulevard, called Lincoln University. It had about three buildings. The main building might have been a large restored victorian, or even a converted mortuary. We couldn’t imagine that the school had more than a few hundred students. So what would be so prestigeous about attending a small trade school in San Francisco?

Pankaj did just fine with Mr. Suitcase, and had no difficulty with the bookkeeping. He was by nature incurious, somewhat passive, and a bit gullible to the stories clients told, but he grasped the concept that his job was to make the money come in, and did his best with collections, though being pushy made him nervous. He lived with two other Indian students, in a dump in the tenderloin area, which is a rough part of downtown frequented by hookers, pushers, hoodlums, and the eternal poor.

We found Pankaj a bit mysterious. For example, he always fasted on Tuesdays. When asked why, he said evasively that it was a religious thing, that he’d always done it. On certain days, his forehead broke into beads of sweat, as if he suffered fevers.

“It’s nothing,” he said.

His full name was Pankaj Sewal, and given our egalitarian presumptions we therefore called him Pankaj. We told him to call us Bob and Richard (my name before I changed it), but the closest he could bring himself was to call us “Mr. Bob” and “Mr. Richard.” Soon, we also called each other Mr. Bob and Mr. Richard.

Finally, one day Mr. Bob asked him why he’d gone to all the trouble to come to this side of the planet to attend Lincoln University. Pankaj smiled ruefully.

“It was a mistake,” he said. “You see, there is another Lincoln University, and it is a famous school, very prestigious. My father intended that I go there.

“But when I applied, I got the wrong school, and sent off my application to San Francisco. Then, when I got here, I saw that it was the wrong school, but what could I do?

“When my father finds out,” he said mournfully, “I don’t know what he’ll do.”