Two monks were once travelling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was falling. As they came around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection.

“Come on, girl,” said the first monk. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud.

The second monk did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. “We monks don’t go near females,” he said. “It is dangerous. Why did you do that?”

“I left the girl there,” the first monk said. “Are you still carrying her?”

Mount Shasta: Why am I writing a weblog? Why would you want to write a weblog?

A long, long, long time ago, Lao-Tzu was leaving the city, and the gate-keeper stopped him. Recognizing Lao-Tzu as a man of great learning, a walking treasure, the gatekeeper refused to permit Lao-Tzu to leave until Lao-Tzu wrote down what he knew.

The book written down we call the Tao Te Ching, and it describes the mysterious Tao which underlies and animates all the universe and all life.

Frankly, I don’t have anything that valuable to write down. I might as well admit it; you’d have guessed it anyhow. But I’ve seen this in action …

Some years ago at Network Answering Service, a young man named Chris N. came to work. Of hundreds who worked there, Chris stands among a handful notable among humans because he took responsibility for his actions. That means you could assign him something, and he’d do it or discover what was needed to do it and handle that and then do it. If he made a mistake, he made no excuse. In my experience, this trait is rare in humans, and I greatly respect it.

One day Chris made a one-page comic strip, called “The Airtight Answering Service of Richard French” (later re-titled “Cronographics“) about our little band of OPs. From time to time, Chris would add another page, spotlighting various OPs in some science-fiction adventure. These we posted on the wall in the bathroom, where all could enjoy them.

Chris worked there for some years, and then one day it was to be his last. If memory serves, it was the day of our Christmas Party, and there was a certain amount of wine. When Chris was ready to leave, slightly sloshed, he was surprised when I ambushed him in the stairwell, refusing to let him leave until he finished Cronographics.

He requested pen and paper, and sat on the stairs, and drew a final page. And then he left, going on to other adventures both sacred and profane. His final page was magnificent.

I have no such talent. But I’ve seen some things, and known some people, and some of these people and stories might be interesting to others.

So in the hope that some of these stories might be of interest, and that some of these insights might prove useful, I write them down, in this world-wide journal, the weblog.

May you find something of interest here.

San Anselmo: As you perhaps know, Adrienne and I are moving to Mount Shasta in two weeks, which is causing a lot of what we could call “packing” activity.

It also causes some money-juggling activity, closing some accounts and opening others. We’d pressed a Bank of America account into service for our new place, and after I returned home today from San Diego I reconciled our accounts.

There was a mystery check on the new account, for $600.

As it happens, during the last week Bank of America has added the ability to retrieve an image, so I was able to look at the check. There was a check written to Adrienne and signed by me! (Or something that kind of resembled my signature.)

Adrienne! That scamp!

Ten miles north of Henrietta, Texas, 1873: Several families from Iowa arrived, settling here on the rolling plains of north Texas. They built homes and planted rows of Bois d’Arc trees along the Fort Sill tract, a line of trees four miles long. Trees for shade, and trees for a windbreak.

Along this lane, the families settled, Ackers, Hoeber, McNeeley, Hooker, and Hurns they were.

Crossing the ragged road was Long Creek, marked by a wandering line of trees meandering across the prairie.

A mile up Long Creek lived the Millers, on whose land a big gas well would run wild in 1905. In the place I know as the farm, the Ackers family lived. That original home burned, but the well survived, dug deep by hand and lined with stone.

But most of these settlers moved on.

Cattlemen and cowboys came. In 1889, the Parker County School Land, a large tract of 17,000 acres, arranged for surveying by Mr. R. W. Watkins. Mr. Watkins hired a boy of 9 as driver for his hack, to carry stakes and equipment. That boy grew to be my grandfather, Frank Hurn.

The boy’s father, William Hurn, bought 200 acres in December, the first buyer from the tract, and the remainder was opened for settlement in 1890, at a price of $6.25 per acre. Settlers from all parts began to arrive. Wanting a community center, William persuaded the Gent & Fuller firm to donate two acres for a church and school.

The Post Office was a knottier problem. Several names (for the community) were sent to Washington. All were rejected, because for every name there was already a community in Texas with the same name! One day, after a second round of this disheartening news, Col. Bill Squires of the Henrietta Post Office, said to William Hurn, “The heck with it! You go home and forget it. I’ll send in a name that they’ll take.”

He sent in ‘Hurnville’, so Hurnville it was.

Mr. Luther Kelley of the Kelly Brothers firm in Henrietta built a store in Hurnville, but only three families ever lived in Hurnville itself, though the surrounding rich farmland was thickly settled by 1896. At that time, Hurnville sported the general store, a blacksmith shop, a barber shop, a short-order and cold-drink stand, two churches, a cotton gin, the Literary Society’s weekly newspaper, a one-room school, and Dr. Finley’s office.

William Hurn’s son Joe taught the Hurnville school, a three month school, for the lump sum of $75. This was the high point, and soon after, settlers began pulling up stakes to move further west. Rural Free Delivery replaced the Post Office. The growing nearby town of Petrolia drew away the Baptist Church. Hard times took the Methodist Church, and the tiny school was consolidated into Henrietta, the county seat.

When I was a child, my grandfather told me that he once carried the mail in a wagon up into Oklahoma Territory, where it went on to be delivered as the Pony Express. However, the dates don’t match up worth beans, so either he was a-woofin me, he was speaking of his father, or I disremember exactly.

The Pony Express, a remarkable feat in the American West, was in service only from April 1860 to November 1861, delivering mail and news between St. Joseph, Missouri, and San Francisco. My grandfather would have been born too late to be carrying mail for the Pony Express.

The 1890 Oklahoma Territory census still exists. Nearly all other old census records were destroyed by fire in 1921. This census was ordered in June of 1890 by Governor George Steele, the first territorial governor of Oklahoma. Oklahoma attained statehood on November 16, 1907, as the forty-sixth state. So I reckon my grandfather carried the mail up to Oklahoma, but not for the Pony Express.

In November of 1959, my grandfather wrote of these events. At that time Hurnville had a resurrected Baptist Church and Dan Oster’s filling station and grocery store. And as my grandfather wrote, “a community where all are friends and would welcome anyone who might come to join us.”

Of the original settlers of the Fort Sill tract, the descendants of only three still held title to land in 1959, those three being Bud Frey, Frank Hurn, and the descendants of F. D. Stine.

In 1972, I visited Dan Oster’s store with my friend, writer Barbara Austin. The church was gone, and Dan Oster was old. With the death of my grandparents, my mother had purchased the farm. Later, when she died, the farm was purchased by my cousin Nancy and her husband, rodeo champ Perry Lee, and they raised a family there. In some recent year, they sold the farm, and moved into town. I don’t know who owns it now. I wonder who lives in that place I knew so well.

In my uncle Eugene’s book “A Pictoral History of Clay County”, photographs can be found of the Hurnville that was, of William Hurn and of my young grandfather. You will find a copy in the Henrietta Library, or through the Henrietta/Clay County Historical Society.

In 1999, an acquaintance named Bob Hampton and his wife moved from Wichita Falls to a red brick house about 3 miles north of my grandparents farm, not far from where Dan Oster’s store once stood.

A cemetary remains. A concrete marker identified the location of the old school, but the marker vanished in the dust of a road-widening project.

There now remains the road, and memory.

Henrietta, Texas, Summer 1970: My youngest brother David was a tow-headed skinny kid with an active manner, and often serious. Paul was David’s older brother, and 14 years my junior, so I left for college when he was still little. It was only when I returned home as a young man that I got to know the boys as they grew up.

At that time we had a huge orange tomcat named Kitty. David and Kitty were great pals, often exploring together, and when David took a nap on the long white sofa, Kitty would find him and wash David’s straw-colored hair. One afternoon, as I walked through the living room, I found the two of them fast asleep on the sofa. David had his arm over Kitty, and Kitty had his arm over David.

But Kitty had an annoying habit.

Kitty had no regular mealtimes. Kitty ate when Kitty got hungry. No matter what my mother was doing, Kitty would begin rubbing against her ankles, yowling loudly. No matter that my mother said “Shoo!” No matter that my mother pushed Kitty away. Rubbing and yowling continued steadily until my mother gave in and went to feed Kitty.

But what if my mother wasn’t available. David, Kitty’s great pal, would become the target. Kitty yowled and rubbed David’s ankles until David would go and feed Kitty.

Kitty did not try this strategy on me or Paul, because it didn’t work. Paul and I would not react to these guerilla tactics, and so Kitty concentrated on our mother and David.

Mama complained. David complained. But grumbling and complaining, they’d open a can and feed Kitty. I told them that they were just training Kitty to expect a reward from that behavior. Mama frowned.

“But he just makes so much noise!” she said.

Paul tried to explain it to David, but David just said that Kitty was hungry. So I suppose it unsurprising that one day Paul appeared with a serious expression on his face.

“I’m worried,” he said. I looked up.

“About what?” I said.

“I’ve just realized,” he said, “that Kitty has more will-power than Mama and David.”

Near Carl and Cole, San Francisco: Lori Jane Ingram, my then wife, was an attorney by schooling who disliked lawyering, and who ran the operations side of our company, Network Answering Service.

She was good at it, interviewing and hiring the operators, training them, scheduling, and keeping our official manual up to date: very important, we believed. She organized our annual Christmas Party, and she instigated the ‘TGIF’ Pizza Party, where we brought in a dozen huge pizzas every Friday afternoon, the office kitchen filled with the scent of fragrant tomato sauce. Operators who weren’t scheduled on Fridays dropped in anyway, so we knew it was a hit.

For such a thoroughly modern Millie, now and then she enjoyed sewing.

Before the Wherehouse record store moved in, the building across the street sold fabrics. There Lori would prowl the patterns bin. These envelopes, with names like Vogue, Butterick, and McCall’s, pictured a dress or blouse, and contained huge tissue-paper patterns to be cut out with pinking shears, those strange scissors that cut a zig-zag line. It was like making full-sized paper dolls.

With fabric covering our dining table, pinning the pattern to the cloth, Lori spoke with a mouthful of pins. “Grnmmrph,” she said, “Lrrrn mufr grnmmph rrmuphr.”

What?

And then, for Christmas, she made me a beautiful bathrobe. In thick, soft, deep blue cloth, the robe was at once heavy and a delight upon the skin. Big pockets and a sash, and I felt like Henry the Fifth. I wore it, with great delight, for years and years.

The Spring following, we’d taken some days-old kittens from the Humane Society. When kittens arrive that young, a volunteer must be found to nurse them, else they die. I was that volunteer, and we had six kittens the size of little blind mice, to be fed one by one with the tiny bottle. They lived, they tumbled, they opened their tiny blue eyes and gazed with wonder and awe at me, their huge mama. They kicked, they rolled, they walked, they scampered, they climbed everywhere, and when they were old enough I returned them to the Humane Society where they were all adopted and went on to other adventures.

Except for one. This one stayed with us. When I dozed in my robe upon the sofa, the kitten would creep into the sleeve, and there would nap along with me, as soft and lovely as my wonderful robe.

I’ve received presents in my lifetime. This robe was one of the best presents ever. It reminded me of a cowboy-style red shirt my grandmother once made for me; the shirt had a yoke with white piping, and pearl snaps for buttons. Back then, as a child, I revelled in the shirt because it was so beautiful, and I felt like a sharp dresser.

Now, as an adult, I revelled in the robe because it had been made, by hand, for me, with love.