I wanted to be an altar boy in the strongest possible way when I was in the fifth grade in 1956. I wanted to wear the black cassock and white surplice. I wanted to be part of the mass.  And I did it in 29 Palms, California. I was thrilled the first time the priest said the opening lines, “Introibo ad altare Dei,” and I replied, “ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.” Which when translated means, “I will go to the altar of God, the God who gives joy to my youth.”, and not only did the mass give joy to my youth, but so did the gospels. And even today when I see the acronym DEI, I think of those lines and how the mass and the gospels infused my response to the civil rights movements for blacks, women, and gays.

Inclusion. This is a hard one, because on a personal level it’s likely we spend most of our lives excluding people and things from our lives. And while it's logical to argue that diversity is good and exposure to different foods, and music, and art will enrich our lives, most of us find ourselves settling in with the familiar religion, music, people and food that we like. And that feels pretty normal. There are even laws to protect our ability to choose, and laws to protect us from people who want to get too close to us.

I like the word equity. I have some in my home, and I try to have it in my life. It’s about fairness, but like its brother, diversity, it has gotten a bad rap in some quarters recently. What I don’t understand is why? Equity is baked into almost everything we do in our lives, especially sports. We handicap golfers and bowlers to even the playing field. We divide fighters into weight classes so that fighters are evenly matched. Horses and race cars are managed. Our public schools are divided into classes based on size. It’s about equity.

I was re-watching the Good Shepherd the other day, a 2006 film by Robert De Niro. It’s a fictional work about the creation of American Intelligence services. There’s an early scene where De Niro’s character is recruiting Matt Damon’s character to join the new endeavor prior to the US entering World War II. They’re at a Skull and Bones retreat, which is a secret society at Yale. In a quiet room over cigars and brandy, De Niro explains, “I’ll be looking for a few good men to head up various departments, in other words no Jews, or Negroes, or very few Catholics…”

Spent a great deal of time outside yesterday, and I believe I’m paying the coughing price this morning. The winds were up and so was the dust but I drove the ball well and we couldn’t quit our first round of golf this year for a little wind and dust. So, we plodded on and now my nose is stuffy and I’ve got a bit of a cough, plus I’m sore again, but I’ve decided that is simply the price of living past my best-used-by date, the other is attributed to the dust.

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.

West Texas followed me home. It kicked up on Sunday when we left Lajitas. High winds scoured the land and lifted sand and soil into the air. We out drove it, but the system kept on moving east, until it got here yesterday. There was a thunderstorm in the night, then wind, mighty wind, too. Things flew around, fences came loose, and I lost sight of the hills out my back windows.

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.

My latest trip to Lajitas and Big Bend is in the books. It was a week under the stars with friends and music. We played games. Sat by the pool. Ate good food. Laughed, and generally had a good time. There were hikes and explorations galore and my daughter got to check off a number of bucket list items which included long walks in canyons and standing by the Rio Grande.

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. 

There’s nothing like a night under the starry skies of the Big Bend of Texas. The sky goes on forever, the milky way is more than a vague memory, you can see the Pleiades and the Seven Sisters with the naked eye, and if you’re lucky a star will fall from the sky and you can once again pretend you’re a kid. It’s a restorative vision if you care at all about understanding your place in the universe.

I like to think of myself as a man of words. It’s mostly an old fashioned idea. These days everyone communications with video or podcasts. And I doubt any of my little 300 word blog posts will ever go viral. But I like words and the imagination required to make them real. Although, if they were shorter, they might have a better chance because, perhaps being pithy counts more than I think. Anyway, I have a few thoughts on some words in current usage.

A summer or so ago I went with friends to sit in the Guadalupe river. We had beer, snacks, and a popup shelter. We were joined by about a million of our fellow citizens who were floating down the river on inner tubes, boom boxes booming. Needless to say, all those people doing all the things people do in rivers, made the typically clear Guadalupe about as muddy as the Mississippi, and I can only imagine what things were being added to the soup by the tubers.

When I first started this blog in 2014, when it was solely on Facebook, I got a comment one day that said, “So what?” It stopped me in my tracks and made me want to run and hide. But then I decided I was writing for myself and if people wanted to come and read it they were welcome, but I’d still write, regardless. In the beginning, it was mostly about nature and life in the Hill Country. Then, in a seismic shift, I started writing about my wife’s illness and later, her death.

It’s nineteen this morning with a light dusting of snow. Slightly peculiar weather for the Hill Country of Texas. Of course, we’ll take any sort of moisture the heavens decide to bring us even if it's in a more or less solid form. There’s also a strong north wind blowing which means wind chills and more cold air. I think the winter storm is scheduled to loosen its grip by the weekend, just in time for me to leave for Big Bend.

It was another day of mulching and mowing and yard work for me while trying to distance myself from the goings on in Washington D.C. Having convinced myself there’s nothing much I can do, having already voted, I had decided to let the big dogs eat and try to not watch or even comment. But I’m sensitive to the currents of history and I’m an interested citizen, so I look their way on occasion. Layoffs are the big news I see, and that’s interesting to me because I’ve laid off people before, and it was hard to do, especially because I delivered the news personally.

Life is funny. My great-grandmother, by whose house my house now stands, lived almost all of her life in this small Texas town where I now live. In fact, she died in the house next door while my youngest brother sat outside in 1968 and listened to his grandmother cry at the loss of her mother. It was the same year we lost our own mother. What a trying year for all. What’s strange to me, however, is that her husband, my great-grandfather, passed away in 1949, two years after my birth, and it felt to me as though he never existed. That he had lived and died in some long ago time. While it seemed my great-grandmother had lived for ages and had always been with me.

I caught a break yesterday, another in a long string of caught breaks that pretty much define my life. This time it was small, dental, but it was still a break that went my way. I had a cavity on a tooth with a crown. It could have required another crown, or a root canal, or even an implant. But all it required was for me to keep my mouth open while the dentist and his assistant worked. When they finished the cavity was filled and I was on my way. I’ll need a new crown at some point, but not today. And just like that I went from a big cost to a little cost.