Cooper came home with me from the animal shelter on August 16, 2006. The shelter people guessed he was 3; the vet said anywhere from 3 to 8. At any rate, we celebrate his birthday on August 16. He’s waiting for breakfast on Sunday morning here. In summer, he regularly takes the breeze on top of the picnic table.
I gotta do something different in the morning. I wake, start reading the latest Trump assaults on decency and wonder, “Where am I?”
And I’m starting to feel my own descent into taking pokes at Trump on Twitter — including “Admired Eddie Haskell” and “Should Carry Gilligan’s Island” — has been pretty tame.
Trump-free afternoon
I think we’re going to revoke landing privileges for the Trump Jet here at dreamranch.
Or maybe we’ll just build a wall.
That guy in the golf hat caused a bad dream for a guest last night and I think he is disturbing my dog.
My old firefighting and trail-building buddy Bob cruised in yesterday with his son, Tyler, on their way to California from Texas. I cooked them dinner and we watched the GOP debate.
My dog Cooper shrank from the TV and stayed outside, despite our rare company. He came and laid at Bob’s feet after we turned of the tube and shut out the talking heads.
I think I know what had been bothering him.
Cooper tends to shy away from loud people who repeat words like stupid with strange emphasis.
I was a little worried about feeding beans and chile to two non-natives traveling a thousand miles in a small car. But my buddy Bob had only one complaint when we rose early for breakfast this morning.
He said he’d had a bad dream about a really rude person showing up for supper.
My Apple devices chime and I am transported to Montana, 10 again, feeling the grass tickling my bare legs, the warmth of the late Sunday afternoon — the forbidding return of structured learning still a couple of weeks away. Sister Hope has sent me a picture of nephew Will at home outside Helena, two-month-old chicken Berry exploring the lawn, unafraid of the long-legged, tousled-hair boy who’s been slipping him grasshoppers. Thanks, Hope. And, Will, may all your summers be wonderful. “Summer,” my sister writes, “fleeting moments like a flash of feathers.”
So far this morning, I have considered opera, biscuits and gravy, learned that it is World Lung Cancer Day and read tweets from a famous author about peeing on a tree in his driveway before getting behind the wheel for a bagel run.
You are at risk for such things if you check your email and Twitter right out of the chute.
I am still not sure how the day is stacking up on my end, although I ultimately relied on my cowboy larder out here in ruralburbia to have those biscuits and gravy.
You might think the California author’s choice of bagel, cream cheese and sliced tomato, sprinkled liberally with fresh-ground black pepper, would be the healthier breakfast choice, but I say not necessarily so if you consider the California freeway lifestyle. I already have lung cancer, and driving, as we know, is pretty risky, too.
On the lung cancer score, I am readying for a trip to MD Anderson in Houston and was grateful yesterday to find non-stop flight from and to Albuquerque. As for operatics, I am sticking mostly to my own theater these days.
Frankly, I haven’t been back to the Santa Fe Opera since suffering several years ago through painfully silly scenes of pirouetting doormen and grass-skirted aboriginals line-dancing on a desert island. I didn’t have a date for the Willie Nelson concert there and gave my tickets away. I stupidly neglected to make reservations for Lyle Lovett. I would have proudly remembered seeing those two at SFO. In case you don’t want to experience similar loss, I will remind you that Esperanza Spalding and Grace Potter are coming to Santa Fe’s Lensic theater next week and Los Lobos (“Rain, rain, rain…an evil rain…”) are slated to appear at Buffalo Thunder in Pojoaque. (To get to Buffalo Thunder, just follow the long line of US 84 traffic now visible through the open north side of the opera house).
My only defense to today’s uncertainties, other than a movie cowboy’s steely resolve to face all waking hours as high noon, is to poke fun at them with words.
The opera curtains opened when a friend wrote this morning to rat out, in a nice way, Tommy Lee Jones, who sat a seat away from her at a recent Santa Fe Opera performance of Salome. Although he appeared studious and appreciative, my friend said she overheard him suggest to his company that they could leave at intermission. Trouble was, Strauss made this opera one big act.
Well, I wouldn’t fault Mr. Jones, given my last experience there and the fact that I am a fan. He looks to be a real horseman and I like his movies. Now that I think of it, if “Cold Mountain” can be an opera, so could be Jones’s “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” although there probably isn’t enough room to drag a body around by horseback on the SFO stage, while you can probably fake all the hiking in “Cold Mountain,” which was good but read kind of like an opera in need of an intermission.
But I should be grateful. Opera recently provided me with a brush with fame, one of the few others in my life being in the audience for an appearance of Sky King and Penny at the Ohio State Fair in the mid-1950s.
It was the very same production at SFO, where my friend saw Tommy Lee Jones, that resulted in my first Google alert for John Robertson — a digital seed that I planted a long time ago but which had not stirred until conductor David Robertson struck up the music for John the Baptist in Salome.
An opera reviewer mentioned the conductor and the beheaded Baptist in the same article, published by one of my former employers, and a Google algorithm bingo rang the “John Robertson” bell on my iPhone, although I clearly would have been closer to fame sitting a couple of seats away from Tommy Lee Jones.
This photo of brother-in-law Bill’s Clydesdale, Chance, which I employed as click-bait on Twitter, is relative to all this in that he is kind of a ham and it seems his big mug would work on an opera program — a rather handsome tenor. And I’ve always felt my association with him represents another brush with fame.
T.C. Boyle @tcboyle 2h2 hours ago Montecito, CA Ah, well, you can tweet away all you want, but eventually it comes to this.
But on Sunday the famous author T.C. Boyle tweeted this hot-milk and empty-screen reminder that fame does not come easy:
T.C. Boyle:
“People tend to romanticize the picture of a writer—they want it to be easy, something a genius can just knock off between debauches, because if it is, if it doesn’t require talent, discipline and a lifelong commitment, then maybe there’s a hope that they, too, someday can knock out their own great and stirring work … I have never written a sentence—or even thought of writing a sentence—without being in the clearest state of mind. This is my life’s work. This is what I’m meant to do, and why screw with it?” Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No.161, Summer 2000
Dorothy Parker:
“But don’t forget that, though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren’t. Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time.” Paris Review, The Art of Fiction, No. 13, Summer 1956
If you see nothing new on dreamranch, you might find me on Twitter.
Sometimes I can’t muster more than a tweet. But there’s also something so ludicrous about Twitter, I just can’t resist.
So, my Twitter handle is @jrobertsonNM at this here address. And the latest can be seen by clicking on that little file folder at the top left of this page.
And I’ll explain this later.
There was a cool breeze through the living room and I guess we just felt like hanging out.
I wonder how far beyond “Happy” this Pharrell will go?
Could he be a lyrical inspiration globally for thoughtful youth?
If I were a reporter again, I would like to be off chasing the hopeful, non-violent leaders of the new world. I think I would start with Pharrell and Malala Yousafzai.
I’m not sure I understand the lyrics of “Freedom,” but I’m all for the song and video if the message is “freedom” alone. Combined with the images in the video, my guess is this is how the words will be understood.
How exciting, anyway, to see young people with command of the world’s attention advocating thoughts of freedom and peace. Surely not the hard work of international diplomacy, as in the case of John Kerry, but, I sense, the inspiration for new world order.
I’m soon to be 66 years old but I cannot shake the idealism of my youth in the 60s and 70s.
I know I speak of platitudes but I believe young people had something to say then — and praise be the 26th Amendment — and I believe they provide inspiration now.
Perfect retirement afternoon, despite the gloom of Russian literature. (Don’t take it to the beach).
And there were no announcements.
dreamranch 