Adventures in doctoring. I showed up in a timely fashion on Monday for the scan to check my aneurysm repair only to be told that the machine was down and I’d need to reschedule. So, I did. For the next morning. Early. Once again I showed up in a timely manner and once again was told I needed to reschedule. They found me a slot close to noon at another facility just down the road. I went and got it done. My rescheduled physician’s appointment, which was to follow the first scan, is this afternoon, by phone.

Woke up to the sound of thunder and rain on the windows last night as a big thunderstorm rolled through the Houston area. I’m in town for the first of what I hope are many annual checkups on my repaired abdominal aortic aneurysm. I’m staying with my oldest son, the same son who came up last week to my place to chunk on guitars, and we did it again last night just for a bit before bed. He helped me work out some kinks in one of my songs.

There is so much going on these days in the world outside my fence that it’s hard not to notice, but one thing’s for sure, trying to get reliable news about anything, is a little bit like drinking from a fire hose. The stories come at me in bits and pieces and new bits replace old pieces before I can figure out what the first bit meant and follow ups get lost in all the confusion if any follow ups come at all. It’s enough to make someone want to run and hide, except that may be the point, although that just might be me trying to give purpose to random events.

I have a swivel rocker my late wife and I purchased shortly after we bought our first house in 1975. It’s an Ethan Allen chair and it was our first piece of furniture that wasn’t a hand me down or bought from an outlet store. It was re-upholstered in 2010 when we built our current home. It long ago lost its central, front room role to bigger, fancier chairs, mostly recliners, and was relegated to the bedroom. It came back to the front room this year, when I took over its bedroom space for my music.

There was fire, with smoke and ash in the sky yesterday. The plume of smoke hovered over us all day as the fire grew from 400 acres to 8,000 while the wind blew hard with its load of west texas sand. Then at dusk, as though someone had turned a switch the wind dropped and the cool air came. This morning it’s 42 and the fire is 92 percent contained. We could still use the rain, but the cool nights are a blessing.

The front room this morning is a maze of cables, amps, pedals, and instruments. Music is being made. We’re missing the daughter and her bass, but the boys are back with keyboards and guitars. Someone starts a riff , or dad starts singing, and off we go. Covers, originals. It matters not. What’s the key? Boom. There’s a downbeat. We’re off.

Progress is being made. The sumacs which lined the ground between my house and the fence of the back pasture, are disappearing. They are being meticulously cut and pulled by yours truly. The view of the pasture is back in season. I had let it slip away these last five years as the voracious little shrubs conquered ever more ground and closed in around me, cutting off my view and shortening my horizons. But that’s done.

You can tell you’re getting old when you wake up sore and the only thing you did the previous day was take a long walk. I guess I need to take more long walks, although I thought I was doing fairly well in that regard. Afterall I just spent a week hiking various trails in Big Bend, and I almost always chose walking over driving in camp. Perhaps I overdid it, because there’s a line in a song I like, Old Folks Boogie, about my mind making promises my body can’t keep and I do tend to think I’m young and act like it, although looking in a mirror will draw me up short.

This morning I went for a walk to the cemetery that sits beside the entrance to Maverick RV park where we’re spending a peaceful week in Lajitas. There’s not much to see at the cemetery. Most of the graves are unmarked barrows, piles of Boguillas sandstone, the bones of the earth covering the bones of men. Seems fitting and oddly peaceful. 

I had a good post day yesterday. It resonated with quite a few people. And that’s good. Except now I have to try and do it again the next day, and that’s damn near impossible, because resonating insights aren’t just lying around for the picking. The best I can do today is say that I solved the NY Times mini crossword in 44 seconds and that puzzle had 17 clues. My puzzle solving friends will understand and everyone else will just go, so?

Home again. Home again. It feels good. We pulled out of Red River, NM around 8 a.m. yesterday, and I put my head on my pillow at 12:45 this morning. Two cars, eight people. We stopped for breakfast in Taos, and from there it was gas station food all the way home. New Mexico in the daytime is pretty, Texas at night is no great shakes, it’s blackness and the blinking red lights of wind farms, until you hit the blessed Interstate 10 with its 75 and 80 mph speed limit.

We went for a ride yesterday. Headed east out of town toward Bobcat Pass and then down to the town of Eagle’s Nest. It was a lovely drive. One I’d never taken before because we always come in from the west from Quest. The scenery was lovely and I decided I’d love to see the place in summer when the river was running and everything was green.

Snow has fallen, starting its work of covering the imperfections of earth. Whenever I see a first snowfall, I always wonder if this is how an ice age started. The snow came. It stayed. It came again. It stayed. Before the days of instant communication, how would humans have known what to do? Would going south have been a thing? Of course, we’re a long way from that. The weather people are keeping us apprised, we know when the snow will end, and even where it’s snowing.

This morning I am sitting within fifty yards of the Rio Grande, just outside Alamosa, Colorado. In late February I will be camping alongside the same river in Lajitas, Texas. In both places the river will be about the same width. I could easily throw a rock across it. I suppose, running as it does through land that is mostly desert, it just never has a chance to get as big as some of its sister rivers. Plus it’s the US/Mexico border so there are lots of people using its waters.

I took my first bath and massage in Hot Springs, Arkansas in the first years of the 21st century. The idea of another person bathing and massaging me, was strange, but I persevered and found it comforting. Eventually, the massage became part of my health maintenance routine, and now my massage therapist is a vital weapon in my battle with age and despair. When my muscles knot, my head refuses to turn, or my back aches, she reaches inside and chases away the demons.

I’ve hiked to the edge of the South Rim in Big Bend National Park, and the top of Guadalupe Peak in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park, but yesterday, I took an equally satisfying ride in a gondola to the top of Sandia Mountain in the Cibola National Forest just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. We went for the views and watch the sunset, and I got both cases. It was especially impressive being so close to the mountain as the gondola climbed. It was the easiest peak I've ever done.

I’m home. And it feels good. Slept in my own bed. Walked out onto the porch this morning and looked at the pasture. Looked at the sky. Now for the rest of the day. I washed everything before I left my daughter’s home, so all I need to do is put things away, attach decals to guitar cases, and remember the good times.

In the first four Christmases after my wife’s death in 2020, I dressed myself and the house for a party in which one of the guests was gone. Children still came, friends still visited, but the missing soul was still missing. So, this year, when my daughter invited the family to her new home in Virginia, I thought it might be the perfect opportunity to start anew, do something fresh and different. I made my plans and left town and the undecorated house.

In the early morning, on a fine summer day, just as the sun is rising there can be a moment when the beach is all mine except for the tide and the shore birds. It's a sight quite literally never to be seen again, and being there to see it, to be the one to see it, fills me with quiet pleasure. It’s been that way all my life. And that's how it feels this morning as I stare off into the first day of 2025.