Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.
Henrietta, Texas, Spring 1956 — It was the sixth grade for me, and our English teacher Mrs. Lyles gave us a huge blue textbook, which was filled with short stories, and poems, mostly Lord Boron and Percy Bitch Shelley and some other people, who seemed just a bit hysterical, but it fit my proclivities just fine.
And [Read more…]
Marin County, July 16, 2017 — For her birthday, Adrienne came down from her Oregon home to visit with her daughters and grandchildren. Her whole family was there: Layla, Celina, Jessica, Dameon, and even Rhiannon and her puppy “Penny,” who flew in from Germany. All of them remembered …
Marin County, December 24, 2007 –– In our house on Scenic Avenue in San Anselmo, I made up a Christmas Eve Tradition. Because the previous month at Thanksgiving, due to Layla’s insistence, we had enjoyed a wonderful dinner of Tofurky. Ha! Enjoyed? Who am I kidding?
We agreed unilaterally that we would NEVER have Tofurky again. Maybe it’s ok for some things, but as a substitute for a proper Thanksgiving dinner … thank you, but no. So here we are coming up on Christmass Eve, and dinner was a problem. Because Adrienne doesn’t cook; it’s against her religion. And franky I don’t know how to do a turkey, and it’s a lot of work, and so invention being the mother of necessity … I made up [Read more…]
8 Miles North of Henrietta Texas, July 28, 2017 — My mother would be one hunded years old today, born in 1917.
In this photo near the end of her life, she leans on the front fence before the farmhouse on the farm where she grew up. She (and my two brothers David and Paul) had moved back to the farm after the death of my stepfather. She’d been born Margaret Ellen Hurn, became Margaret French as my mother, and later remarried to Dr. Strickland in Henrietta.
Around the base of that tree on the left, you can just make out a dark metal band. Once upon a time, long before I was born, the tree was planted inside what must have been a wheel part. A metal band about a foot tall, and maybe four feet diameter. The tree grew and grew and grew, until the band was quite snug, about 20 years before Margaret Strickland was photographed here at the front fence.
In a recent photo from google earth, the tree is gone. I wonder what became [Read more…]
Daly City, 1989: If you read a Dashiel Hammett book about Sam Spade, or even a modern Sue Grafton book about Kinsey Milhone, you will discover that their investigations are exciting, dangerous, and apparently pay the bills. (Though Sam Spade seemingly just throws his bills into the trash.)
When I was Dr. Detecto, the private investigator, my own investigations were neither exciting, nor dangerous, nor did they pay the bills.
As proof, I respectfully submit my most exciting, dangerous, and profitable case — the Case of the Rescued Rope …
I was musing in my Geary street office one afternoon in the early fall in San Francisco. The air had just turned crisp, and I was thinking about the gubbamint and dozing off, when a tall woman walked past the window. I knew she was tall because my office was on the second floor. [Read more…]
Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota, May 18, 2017 — Jerry Lefevre was two grades older than me in High School. He bought a Chevrolet. It looked much 
like this picture, except that it just wouldn’t do.
Not according to Jerry.
The problem was the red panel. Jerry thought it was not cool.
He had the red panel painted white like the rest of the car. Therefore I cannot now find a picture to show the car. Perhaps it was the only one of it’s kind.
As was, in my eyes, Jerry.
Gravelly voice even as a teen, speaking in short bursts of [Read more…]
