Canyonlands National Park, Utah: Returning from a camping trip, on her way home to Marin county (north of San Francisco), Dixie Goldsby discovered a stowaway.

In the back of the Honda, Chipmonk #1344 was contentedly feasting on a low-carb protein bar.

When Dixie arrived, she contacted WildCare, a wildlife rehabilitation center based in San Rafael. WildCare investigation determined that Chipmonk #1344 was male, healthy, chowing down in preparation for hibernation, and needed to get home … somehow.

Enter pilot Ray Romano.

Ray offered to fly Chipmonk #1344 back to Utah, accompanied by WildCare board member Jan Wild — that girl is just wild! — and off they soared in Ray’s light aircraft. High winds and Utah turbulence tossed the aircraft, creating a sense of excitement and adventure, and blew them into Arizona, where Ray and Jan and Chipmonk #1344 spent the night; and the next day the aircraft touched down near Canyonlands National Park.

By this time, a media circus had assembled. There, amid flashbulbs adequate to document the voyages of Mick Jagger, Chipmonk #1344 was picked up by a chauffer from the National Park Service.

Chipmonk #1344 found his 1400-trip quite fun, and he especially liked the protein bar. But now he’s returned to his burrow in his own tree, and sends his warmest regards to all his new friends and acquaintences.

But after all, winter is a-coming. Time to settle down.

Henrietta, Texas, 1955: In our town were two movie theatres. The Dorothy, one block south of Ikard street (also known as highway 287), was near the Methodist Church and Grover Thaxton’s hardware store. One day, I heard a wonderful report from Billy Ray, who’d just seen a Saturday matinee called “Them“. Oddly enough, this movie was about ants, but they were very, very big.

This sounded great to me, so I wheedled and wheedled the price of admission from my mother, and went the next Saturday. It was then that I learned that the movie changes every week, as I sat through an incomprehensible film about grown-ups who just talked to each other. Nothing happened at all!

I knew that movies were supposed to have fights and mahem, because I’d seen a movie before, while visiting kinfolk in Houston. That movie was Treasure Island, a stirring adventure about a young boy very much like me, I then imagined. I remember it clearly, and in fact, sometimes I can still hear Long John Silver’s parrot, crying “Pieces of Eight! Pieces of Eight!”

After Long John Silver and the big ants report, this “talking” movie seemed pretty lame.

On the same street as the Dorothy theatre, and several blocks north, across from the courthouse sat the Royal Theatre. The Royal had exciting pictures out front, generally showing cowboys, but in addition to Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Hoppalong Cassidy, and Lash Larue, they also featured Abbot and Costello and Ma and Pa Kettle. I saw Peter Pan there, and This Island Earth, and a horrifying 3-D movie called House of Wax.

In the early days, the Royal’s Saturday serial featured Commander Cody, who wore a helmet and rocket pack, and after making a kind of jump could be seen flying through the sky. Flash Gordon and crew fell into eternal pickles with that rascal Ming the Merciless, and week after week Tarzan narrowly escaped being trampled, roasted, drowned, and eaten.

About the time I became a teen, the Dorothy burned down, leaving a hollow stone shell and the Royal, but a few months later, our town was abuzz with the news that a new drive-in movie was being built west of town.

The Clay County Leader newspaper trumpeted a big contest to name the new drive-in. My grandfather, usually taciturn, found this so exciting he decided to enter, because he’d figured out a sure-fire winner.

Since our town was named “Henrietta”, he reasoned that “The Henry” would be the perfect name for the drive-in. Sitting at his wooden desk, he wrote out a letter to enter the contest.

For weeks we watched the contest. I was there the day the paper arrived, announcing the winner. Grandfather fetched the mail and brought it into the kitchen and sat down at the table. He opened the newspaper. He stiffened.

“The Rietta?” he said. “What kind of stupid name is that?”

London, England, 1871: Due to the current debate about the exact wording of this excellent poem, as a bloggard public service, Mr. Edward Lear’s complete lyrics are here provided —

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat:
They took some honey,
and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
“O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!”

Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl,
How charmingly sweet you sing!
Oh! let us be married;
too long we have tarried!
But what shall we do for a ring?”

They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the bong-tree grows;
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood,
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.”
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand on the edge of the sand
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

Near Hurnville, Texas, Summer 1971: After Dr. Strickland died, Mama purchased the farm from her parents’ estate, and we moved there. On the third day, Paul and I struggled to carry things into the house from a pickup out front.

“Jesus!” I said, gasping at the weight. The hired man chuckled.

“Better call on someone closer,” he said.

In a foul mood, I trudged into the house.

Later that afternoon, we helped Mama hang some pictures. My sorry mood persisted. But let’s picture the entryway.

After the covered front porch, inside the front door, the small hallway is paneled in dark-varnished wood. Coming in, to the left of the doorway upon the wall once hung the first telephone, a large black box with a cone sticking out, and a cup-shaped receiver hanging on a hook beside the black box.

You lifted the receiver and held it to your ear. You spoke into the cone sticking out of the front of the box. And to ring the operator, so as to be connected to your party, you turned the crank on the left side, which rang a bell far away.

To the left, a doorway led into the parlor, seldom used, with a glass-front bookcase, a tightly-packed little sofa with wooden trim, a very fancy wooden table with a round top and a little carved lip around the top, and an upright piano, possibly never tuned in its lifetime.

To the right, a doorway led into the … what would I call it? It was the room where grandfather’s lean-back chair sat. Here he read the paper, and in the late day, taking a rest, if awakened from his snoring, he’d deny it. “Asleep?” he said. “I wasn’t asleep. I was only resting my eyes.”

Before you and to the right, an elaborate carved wooden piece which has a seat below and great hooks above for hanging coats.

Before you and to the left, a stairway led to a landing, and from there to the second floor. The wooden panelling was only waist-high, and above was a yellowed wallpaper on which were isolated scenes of a lovely cottage beside the road, and a carriage pulled by prancing horses. My grandmother had a motto hanging here, telling about living in a house by the side of the road and being a friend to man. This seemed very wonderful to me as a child.

But now, age 26, I was far too smart, far too wise, far too knowledgeable. In fact, I just about knew everything. Which is why I was so stupid.

I held up a picture to the wall upon the stairway. It showed a wolf standing upon a wintry hill, coat ruffled by the cold wind, gazing down upon a snug cabin in the hollow below, its windows glowing with warmth. My mother said she wanted it more to the left, then more to the right, then back to the left, then more to the right.

Tired and irritable, I set the picture down, and pulled a pencil from my shirt pocket.

“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” I said. I crudely drew a big rectangle with the pencil upon the wallpaper. “You want it right about there?” My mother’s face fell; tears hovered.

I had ruined the wallpaper. There was no replacing it. A little part of the past had crumbled away.

495 Third Avenue, San Francisco, June 1976: My friend Dennis B. and I had been writers together at the San Francisco Writer’s Workshop, which met every Tuesday night at the San Francisco Main Library. Before emigrating from Texas to San Francisco State, I’d found an announcement in Writer’s Digest magazine, and showed up at the Library as soon as I arrived in town.

After some weeks, we both stopped attending the Writer’s Workshop, but stayed friends. Dennis’s family were back around Chicago and had done very well in the metal fabrication business. Therefore, Dennis had joined the peace corps, became a photographer and writer, and drove a cab.

One day he confided in me that he’d invented the Cabdriver Philosophy of Life. Stated briefly, it was: “People come into your life. People go out of your life. You go round and round and see some things, and then the ride is over.” Not bad, all things considered, it seemed to me.

But I mention Dennis because of his odd habit.

Dennis was forever doing good, in this way. He read voraciously, and whenever he found something perhaps of interest to a friend, he’d clip it and mail it. Dennis had a lot of friends, so he must have been pretty busy. I myself got dozens of clippings over the years.

But this one said, “Whirr …”

It was a three-paragraph story in a box, and started out asking: “What’s about the size of a breadbox, can do thousands of calculations per second, and costs a few hundred dollars?”

The answer was the new crew of “micro-computers”. It seems that a company in New Mexico had taken an advanced calculator chip and realized that it had all the parts of a functioning computer. By adding memory and circuitry for display and typing, the Altair was born, followed by the Imsai, the SWP, and others.

The article said that you could see these computers in Berkeley on University Drive, at a store cleverly named The Computer Store. In those days I was postering Berkeley for my fledgeling business, the Thumbtack Bugle, so I parked my motorcycle outside, and went in.

Yup, there were some boxes about the size of bread boxes, with switches and blinken-lights. Completely incomprehensible; completely fascinating. A rotund fellow in a beard and overalls pointed things out to me, and then I bought copies of Byte magazine, and Kilobaud magazine. Byte. Hmmm. Kilobaud. Hmmm.

Hastening to a coffee-house across from the Co-op I devoured the magazines from cover to cover. The articles made little sense, but the ads weren’t too bad. For example, the Apple computer was then a single board, selling for $666. All you had to do was add a case, power supply, keyboard, and display monitor. Hmmm.

Somehow I learned that up at Lawrence Livermore Lab, in the Berkeley Hills, was a science museum where kids could play on the computer, so I motorcycled up there with a book on BASIC, and started learning how to print “Hello, World!” on the screen. Oddly, it wasn’t very difficult, which perhaps explains the large number of 11-year-old boys typing alongside me.

Somehow I learned that down in Silicon Valley, there was an organization that worked similarly, except that you could call in from your house to work on the computer. I motored down, and met Doug F. He was a thin, long-haired, brilliant, nerdy fellow who ran the computer, always and forever dressed in jeans and a t-shirt picturing a heavy-metal band.

Following Doug’s guidelines, I bought a teletype and a modem, which then meant a big box with two foam cups into which you stuck the telephone receiver. With this teletype in the closet, I started programming. I got a sorting program typed in, and set it to sorting 300 names. On this speedy time-sharing computer, it took fourteen hours.

But by then, I’d decided that I must have my own computer. The magazines were starting to make sense, and I settled on a Cromemco, which was very powerful. It was also expensive, so I got it in a kit, and Doug said he’d assemble it for me, which was good because I didn’t know how to solder. I raised part of the money from Henry, a local philanthropist I’d met once when interviewing for a bookkeeping job.

The assembly seemed to take forever, and if I nudged Doug, he’d exclaim, “Don’t go sweating on me!” Doug was eccentric, showing up at odd times. One day he said there would be a great sneak preview, so we walked up the next block to see what turned out to be the world premier of Star Wars. His job at that time was programming government computers so that satellites could determine whether a farmer’s fields in Russia were growing wheat or alfalfa.

Finally, the computer was ready. It was a large black box, sitting on a table in my tiny apartment. Doug plugged in the teletype, and tapped a few times on the carriage return. It began typing.

“Hello,” it said.