The Hurn Farm, near Hurnville, Spring 1964: On the north side of my grandmother’s two-story house, it was cooler. She planted flowers and ferns there, and, just north of the stone smokehouse, a bed of delicious strawberries.

My grandfather had fallen from the horse, and it had addled his thought. She cared for him, for he could not work any more. On a weekend away from college, I visited as she dug up bulbs with her trowel, near the fence. Or perhaps she was planting them.

“Why not move into town?” I said, echoing my mother and my Uncle Doc. Between jabs at the earth, she glared, then her face softened.

“This is my home,” she said. Though at the time I thought myself very mature, probably she realized she’d have to spell it out for my ignorance. “I’ve lived here all my life,” she said. “We made our life here.” She pointed with the trowel at the flowers, at the fruit trees, at the cornfield. “We’ve grown these things, and we’ve grown old. This is our home.”

“But now that you have to take care of Granddaddy,” I persisted, “you’re vulnerable out here. In town you’d be closer to help if you ever needed it.” I loved her very much. She’d been consistently kind and clear all of my life. All of us were worried.

“I’ve never been a town lady,” she said, returning to the bulbs. “I’ve never been one to drink tea with my little finger in the air.” She paused, thinking, then said, “I’d rather dig.”

And dig she did. Was she angry? Angry at this turn of life? I don’t know. My flibberty-gibbert mind probably flew away to other, less important and more consuming matters. But for just a moment, squatting near the earth with her, watching her gnarled brown hands, hearing her voice, I knew there was a rightness in what she said, something fierce, true, and wonderful.

Only two weeks later, I got a call and came to see her in hospital. She’d had some Hershey’s syrup, a sweet thing, and she’d stored it in the can in the refrigerator. And, having a treat, contracted food poisoning which flattened her in bed that afternoon. She called out to Frank, her husband.

He came and saw something was wrong.

He had difficulty operating the telephone. He had to make a number of attempts. Time was passing. Finally he succeeded in reaching somebody on the party line. They couldn’t understand him but understood something was wrong.

Everybody knows everybody else. They called my Uncle Doc, who rushed an ambulance to the farm, eight miles north of town. And in the hospital she died. My grandfather was housed in a home nearby, from which he never escaped alive. I visited him there; it was no life for the man he had been, and he soon left. His heart had been torn out.

Have you ever read the I Ching book, where it will describe disaster, and then it says “There is no error.” In other words, things go to hell, but you did nothing wrong. Once, at a convention in Las Vegas, I played some blackjack with a buddy who was a good gambler. I stayed pat with sixteen, and lost the hand. As I groused, he looked at me with clear eyes.

“You did the right thing,” he said, “but you lost.”

Frank Hurn and Maud Hurn. My grandparents.

They did the right thing.

San Anselmo, June 24, 2003: Tonight it is so hot I am unable to fall asleep, and in the wee hours encounter a black mood. Before long the mood will pass, but I think about what we leave behind in this world.

My sometime nemesis, Emmett Chapman, in my opinion, hopes to be remembered for the musical instrument he designed, and for the two-handed tapping technique he pioneered. It might be so, for a while. For forty years, or a hundred, perhaps even longer as a paragraph or footnote in music books.

For most of us, our works do not stand much chance of enduring. Perhaps the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. His works endure, but who knows his name? Perhaps the Taj Mahal. The sultan’s name can be found in history books, as can the name of the woman he so loved. But even history books will some day fade.

For most of us, we have no works likely to endure the long seasons. For a very few of us, we leave works which might last a few hundred years, maybe. The blink of an eye in our cosmos.

I have no children. Some day I will be a memory, slowly fading, and when that memory has faded, will be gone.

But I think of Adrienne who has grown daughters. I think of my brothers and sisters who have children grown and children yet growing. They leave a walking, talking legacy which might endure for a time.

Any guarantee of eternity? None whatever.

But they have a chance.

Denton, Texas, 1964: In my latter year in college, working as night auditor at the Holiday Inn, I finished my work, then studied or dozed till the morning shift. This particular night, around two in the morning, the lobby was deserted, and I was reading a small book of ghostly stories. It was to prove a mistake.

This particular story was about a panther. I remember nothing except that the last page scared the hell out of me, and, with an oath, I threw the book across the lobby.

The panther had been a totem for me even earlier. When I was a bellman, I took to wearing sunglasses at night, and told my roommates that I was to be addressed as “I. J. Panther.” For some reason, I didn’t want people to see my eyes. Or perhaps I was just trying to find an excuse to wear them, really just trying to look cool.

At that time the Holiday Inn tried an experiment. Liquor is illegal in Denton County, so our “bar” couldn’t operate in the usual way. So they made a “private club”, to which you had to bring your own bottles, and the bartender would make up mixed drinks for you.

My roommate Pat frequented the bar. At this time, he also claimed to be nerval, and excital, and altogether schitzy. His words. To prove it, he had a prescription for Valium. On an evening not long after, off work, I visited with Pat in this bar. He offered me a Valium. Like a fool I took it.

Soon the effect of alcohol and Valium made itself felt, strangely so. Since I felt really wierd, I went home and went to bed. That night my first dream was textured like a Turkish mosque. Not just a wall, but a carven eternity. Not just a cup but an elaborate goblet. But in my second dream, the panther appeared.

In this dream, I was walking across the lawn of my Uncle Doc’s house, when I saw the panther stalking across the lawn toward me. Terrified, I edged toward the safety of the porch, and then heard a woman’s voice saying, “I will teach you how to fight a panther.”

The panther had vanished. Near at hand a tall woman with long black hair stood, dressed in a white flowing robe. She then showed me a judo move with a sidestep. As I turned around, she’d vanished, and the panther sprang!

I ducked and did the sidestep, and the panther had missed me. And had again vanished. The woman in white stood upon the lawn, and showed me another move. In judo, this is called a ‘Hip Throw,” and you grab your opponent, load your opponent on your back, then duck your shoulders and raise your hips, throwing your opponent over your head.

Just as I had the woman in white loaded onto my back, I suddenly realized that the lady in white was actually the panther!

In a shuddering fit of terror, I threw her off, and it was the panther, which crept toward me. I backed onto the porch, and reaching behind me, opened the round doorknob of the screen door. It opened.

Still reaching behind me, I opened the front door, then leapt backward into the room, slamming the door. Uncle Doc’s wife, my aunt Margaret, was there. I told her to make sure the kids were safe in the house, to close all the doors and windows.

On my knees, panting with fear, I slowly raised the windowshade of the window to my left, to peer out. And found myself looking directly into the panther’s eyes. I saw there no intelligence, but only a burning rage, a lust to destroy.

Shaken, I jerked back, and then heard a terrible sound. Something was opening the screen door. An animal couldn’t open a round door knob. The panther was supernatural.

Still on my knees, holding desperately to the doorknob of the door, I looked up. At the top of this door were three tall and narrow windows, and suddenly I realized that the uppermost had no glass, for there I saw the black paw.

The black paw stretched down, and down, and down toward the doorknob, growing longer, longer than a paw could be, and longer, and longer …

I awoke in my dark room with my eyes clamped shut. I knew it had been a dream, but terror shuddered me. For an eternity, I could not make my eyes open.

I was afraid.

In evenings that followed, when I worked the late nights at the Holiday Inn, sometimes I heard a soft patter, but nothing was there. Sometimes I saw a movement from the corner of my eye.

But nothing was there.

Nothing that I could see.

North Beach, San Francisco, 1974: I’d found this neato apartment and thought myself lucky. The I Ching had said “Supreme Success!”

Little did I know how much the Chinese Gods of Divination love a good joke.

It was a success, for there I found Rosie the Cat, and took her away and lived happily ever after. Other than that, it was a disaster so stupid you can’t help but laugh.

In North Beach, on the corner of Grant and Green, just above the Hawaiian Bar, with mice and cockroaches, and Hawaiian music on the jukebox of the bar downstairs. All night long, loud lyrics like: “Hooka lakka shooka lakka, wikki wikky ogaloo!” Over and over again. The guys downstairs had the consolation of alcohol to take the edge off these songs; I had nothing.

However, I worked an odd shift at the Westbury Hotel at this time, from seven in the evening until three am. This saved me from several hours of Shooka Lakka Hooka Lakka, for which I was grateful.

It was also interesting, leaving work at three in the morning. The busses run infrequently that late, and taxis were expensive, so I’d walk through the Stockton Street tunnel and through a deserted Chinatown at three. All the shop’s trashcans pungent with strange chinese vegetables and worse, but these barricades didn’t stop me.

At home at last. But two doors up at Wumpers Bar, they had after-hours entertainment with Perry and the Pumpers. I’ll give the Pumpers one thing: they were plenty energetic. So, to the strains of pumping rock and roll, it was time to hit the hay.

The bars and shops on Grant have lots of garbage, and trashcans filled with empty bottles. So much that the trash companies come every night, sometimes three times during the night. The growling trucks and the crashing din of the bottles leant an exotic ambiance to the late hours on North Beach.

Luckily, the mornings are pretty quiet.

Except one day, I’m awakened by a loud, repeating banging. A voice is chanting “Go**amned Phonebooth! Go**amned Phonebooth! Go**amned Phonebooth!”

Rising to peer blearily from my window at the sunny morning, below my window, a stringy unkempt fellow is kicking the back wall of the phonebooth below. A burly fellow across the street calls out “Hey!”, meaning Stop, or maybe What the hell are you doing?

Stringy guy sticks his head outside the phonebooth door, and screams, “It took my dime!” The guy across the street, a big guy, makes a fist and yells to knock it off. Stringy guy, glaring, makes off down the street.

I go back to bed.

I’m awakened by a loud, repeated banging. A voice is chanting. I rise and peer from the window. Stringy is back.

Now, the mailbox has been tipped over and lies flat on the sidewalk. Stringy guy is kicking the mailbox over and over again.

“Go**amned Mailbox!” he screams, “Go**amned Mailbox! Go**amned Mailbox! Go**amned Mailbox!”

Ah, life in North Beach.

Dallas, Texas, Spring 1966: Living in Dunia Bean’s apartment on Gillespie street, I worked at the Cabana Hotel. The Cabana is a clone of Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, complete with over-sized statues of Venus, David, and the rest of the crew. Inside, a vast two-story lobby with greenish marble floor and a round sunken area with sofas enough for a football team.

Overlooking this magnificance, our front desk where I worked with Dick and Earl, dignified alcoholics. Dick taught me how to get big tips at crowded times, and Earl as a young actor fought swords with Errol Flynn in the movie Captain Blood. That was a while back.

But this was in the spring, and for the first time since the war, Texas was going to have Daylight Savings Time. We were all abuzz.

Paul the Bellman was a portly fellow, balding and gabby. He made big tips because he knew about health food and horoscopes. This was years before such things were popular. His most popular health food remedy was honey and vinegar; he’d recommend it for almost anything.

On the way to the elevators with the guests, he’d ask about their birth-date and provide predictions and prescriptions all the way to the room. Then I suppose it just seemed wrong, to the guest, to tip miserly to the fellow who’d taken such an interest in their fortunes and their health.

Paul the Bellman was very opinionated, and also had an annoying habit of slapping his hand down on the bellman’s marble-topped desk when he was about to speak. This made a loud pop. I think it was his version of banging the Judge’s gavel before pronouncing sentence.

So, while we were all discussing this radical new change, Daylight Savings Time, and how we would set our clocks before we went to bed, Paul returned to the bell desk.

Slap! went his open palm on the marble desk. “Well,” he said, “I know what I’m going to do.” We all stopped talking. He continued. “I’m going to set my clock for one a.m., and then I’m going to wake up, and set it ahead to two a.m.”

We all stared in incomprehension. “Why, Paul?” I asked.

“That way,” he crowed, “I won’t lose an hour’s sleep!”

I grinned. “But Paul,” I said, “If you’re awake when you move it forward, won’t you lose an hour’s wake?”

He pondered this. “Naw,” he said, “You can’t lose an hour’s wake.” We all nodded.

Slap! went his palm on the desk. He scowled. “But those guys better watch out,” he said.

We looked at each other. He went on.

“Because when they’re changing the time, they’re messing with the sun,” he said. “And they’d better not go messing with the sun!”

Thus came Daylight Savings Time to Texas.