Honest confession. I’m not the only at the Old Folks Boarding House whose fingers don’t handle shirt and blouse buttons very well. And she’s two years younger, both of us in our nineties. Tried to remember that game we played with the four children: “Button, button, who’s got the button?” Number Three Daughter remembers the phrase, but not the game. Nor does Dad. So I Googled: The children start by sitting on the bottom stair
Madge not Mage
You may have watched Saturday’s Kentucky Derby, the race of three-year-old horses at Churchill Downs in Louisville Kentucky, and don’t know how to pronounce the winner’s name. If I can find a TV screen, I watch the Kentucky Derby. And usually I shed a tear when the band plays Stephen F. Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home” while the horses parade to the starting gate. My mother often told me she lived in Bardstown. Broke an arm
Keeps
That October when Dad drove Mom and me to the hills of Kentucky, his birthplace, I carried my sack of glass marbles in my pocket. Hey, I was the champion marbles shooter in Hamlin Grammar School fourth grade. As soon as we got near dirt I intended to practice. I joined my younger cousins. Climbed over Grandfather’s fence. Attended class in their two-room schoolhouse. Read from McGuffey’s Reader. At recess we went outside. Cousins dropped
Climbing Up or Down
Salvage from a courthouse rebuilt somewhere near Abilene included an outdated, two-story spiral metal staircase. Dad bought the staircase. Figured he would find a place for the stairs someday. When we moved a small office building to Fort Phantom Hill Lake and turned the structure into a lake cabin, the spiral staircase led to the dry lake shore below. Sure that you know that when you climb, up or down, you go around in circles.
Slant Holes
Three Great Grandchildren—in town from South Carolina— took turns pushing my wheelchair through the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in downtown Dallas. Dinosaur collection was magnificent, but I spent most of my time looking at the oil and gas videos. Illustrations explained oil and gas exploration better than my 30-minute television Oil Country show in the 1950s. Sign said Tom Hunt provided the lessons. Hunt Oil’s contribution was crude oil and natural gas royalties
AI
Every other columnist I read these days strains over the addition of AI–computers writing their words. Before ‘artificial intelligence,’ writers got an idea then jumped out of bed and went to their keypad. For example, 2:43 AM for this ideation. Or the writer made an entry on the note pad near his bed, or sent herself a notation to read come morning. And even centuries before. The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal in his later
Rolling the Barrel
In the 1950s the American Petroleum Institute furnished the barrel, and Bob Tiffany and I rolled the aluminum prop out for luncheon club presentations. Rotarians, Kiwanians, other luncheon club members in the Abilene area listened to our message: “Crude oil makes plastics as well as gasoline.” We demonstrated from our opened upright barrel. Used the furnished chemicals and produced plastics from crude oil in a chemical beaker. Plastics were new in the 1950s. Remembered when
Deep Roots
The secret to growing tall pecan trees…. the Great Great Grandfather in Brady Texas told me…depends on the soil where you plant. Soil around the small Abilene house I was having built in the 1950s was packed hard. But A.R. Elam Trucking Company employed a bulldozer that mostly dug drilling mud pits at drilling company well locations. This time, Dad’s Caterpillar dug up the hard dirt outside the house foundation. We filled the hole with
Doing-well student
Enjoy watching the four commentators between March Madness Basketball games. Kenny Smith, sitting with two analysts to his right, took a summer college course from this old professor. Kenny also played basketball at Chapel Hill. Coach Dean Smith recruited him from New York. Kenny played guard. Called plays. Was one of his best, Dean told me. Course was a survey of sports broadcasting. Fun part, each student demonstrated an on-air technique. Kenny read a commentary.
Soliloquy
At my old folk’s boarding house lately I carry on a bunch of conversations with myself. A “soliloquy.” A fancy playwright word that describes talking aloud to yourself. Think Hamlet and Lady McBeth. Of course, those two usually command an audience. Covid demands a soliloquy. Two weeks of quarantine. Dining room closed. Meals delivered to your apartment in styrofoam containers. And worse news, another old-timer in our home passed away. My soliloquay: “Thanks, Lord, for giving