Woke up happy. Then got angry.
Woke up happy. Then got angry.
So far, retirement means:
Fortunately, I am still alert enough to also keep my eyes on the sky.
After wrestling with life-and-death questions involving bacon, the Good Friday pilgrimage to Chimayo and the opening of the Trinity atomic bomb test site, I chose Cheerios for breakfast and felt righteous until my worst blood sugar crash since Larry Calloway and I encountered space aliens deep in the Weminuche Wilderness. Today, I started the day right. I had a bacon-and-egg sandwich along with my black coffee and read an old Paris Review interview with the writer Annie Proulx. Then I remembered two other favorite, late-starting authors, A.B. Guthrie Jr. and Norman Maclean.
Annie Proulx gave me a laugh and improved my outlook on life.
INTERVIEWER You were in your forties when you wrote the first of the stories from Heart Songs. Do you think you had a late start when it comes to writing fiction?
PROULX Well, I did, yeah. But so what? Why should it bother anybody when somebody starts to write?
INTERVIEWER It’s fewer years writing the stories that you seem to enjoy writing.
PROULX Oh, yeah, I suppose, but that’s OK too. The world is spared lots of crap.
I got a late start understanding breakfast foods.
For almost 50 years, I thought the Gold Standard of breakfast fare was a bowl of cereal with milk, often with added sugar. And, in school and on the trails where I spent many of my free hours, I often experienced debilitating blood sugar crashes, which I would invariably address by eating something sugary and starchy.
A friend steered me to an ayruvedic, who said my eating pattern was only jacking up my blood sugar level and spiking it again after the inevitable crash. I immediately understood my wavering attention span throughout my school years and sudden exhaustion on backpacking trips that wouldn’t be cured even with the ingestion of two or three healthy-looking granola bars.
I was in a near hallucinogenic state one evening back in the 1980s, after my writer/journalist friend Larry led me from a train stop at Needle Creek on the Animas River in southwestern Colorado up to the Chicago Basin and, the next day, over Columbine Pass to Vallecitos Creek. We were on our way to Hunchback Pass, east over the Continental Divide to Beartown and on down the Rio Grande headwaters to my truck at Sky Hi Ranch.
I believe I had consumed granola bars for breakfast and lunch — these were pre-Clif Bar variety — and probably popped another while Larry prepared to fish the upper Vallecitos for dinner. I was crouched down in camp, building a fire, a convenient position since my much of my brain had shut down and my legs had felt like linguine since noon. Three or four thousand feet of downhill will do that to you.
I don’t know who did a double-take first as two figures marched out of the trees upstream, wearing rubber suits, helmets and carrying big, elongated objects over their heads. It took a couple of moments to realize they were men.
Crazy men. Carrying boats over their heads, they had come down from Stony Pass, near Silverton, then climbed over Hunchback Pass to drop down again to kayak the Vallecito.
That trip — even though the kayakers were real — was the acme of my blood sugar problems. I Continue reading
Felt new trail lay ahead this morning.
First round of cancer treatment ended Wednesday. Follow-ups to come, but didn’t have to drive early to Albuquerque for the first time in a couple of months for radiation or chemo. Retirement from the Journal announced Tuesday, and didn’t have to head there either.
Hope, in the hat, on late afternoon walk with me, is on her way back to Montana after a five-day visit, dropping Will off first with Winifred, Tom, Nancy and Adam for a spring-break stay in Utah.
Weather service said clouds at sunset last night meant weather coming in, but it dawned clear.
Tried sleeping in, but Coop wasn’t going for it.
GENESIS by Otto Rigan at Spaceport America. (Photo courtesy of Otto Rigan)
— This morning is the last of Round 1 of lung cancer treatments — the end of a coordinated radiation and chemotherapy plan to first shrink the tumor and then get rid of it, hopefully, with surgery. Apparently, I won’t know much about the effects of Round 1 until late April and CT scans. There are hints, professional and self-generated, that it has gone well, but the tumor was big and in a tricky place and lung cancer is tough to treat.
— I can report this about the initial phase of treatment that began Feb. 12: I feel good. In fact, I have felt increasingly better as treatment has progressed. Yet, I am reminded this morning that cancer is its own deep universe. A tumor 1 centimeter in size can contain a billion cells. That sounds like a lot of potential meteoroid matter. More chemo might be called for.
— I was little jarred yesterday by the announcement of my retirement from the Albuquerque Journal, where I have worked for the past 33 years. Of course, I knew it was coming, but it is something else again to see it in print, in an email to staff. The Journal was the last and long stop in a 41-year newspaper career, but, in a time sense, it has come and gone at warp speed.
— I’ll choke up if I talk about all the kindness the Journal’s ownership, management and staff have given me in the end. So, moving on….
— I think this newly installed sculpture at Spaceport America by Otto Rigan is fabulous. Well done, you all. Even if Virgin Galactic never gets a celebrity-loaded space tourism flight off the spaceport runway, the architecture and art alone would make it worth the drive to the middle of nowhere. I especially appreciate this photograph since I napped through the planetarium show on a trip to the Museum of Natural History and Science on Sunday with sister Hope, nephew Will, sister Susan and her partner, Dick.
— Hope and Will depart for Salt Lake City today to see sister Winifred, before returning to Montana. We had a great visit that I will remember always.
— And sister Hope left me more to think about, even after a series of conversations running to midnight, ranging from poetry to horses. She doesn’t like Western movies: “Bad horsemanship and too much gunfire,” she says. Guess I’m going to have to pull my wanna-be Resistol down and drugstore-cowboy up if I’m going to keep on watching. Hope is the real deal.
My sister brought along a book about the poet Richard Hugo, which led to reading trails about his teacher and an essay about his “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.”
Here is a link to this penetrating poem about a decaying Montana mining town. It begins:
“You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down.”
But it also gives me an excuse to post this picture of my nephew, Will, taking over my lamp and chair last night and reading his Harry Potter before going to bed.
Cooper seems to have found in my 9-year-old nephew, Will, a companion he’s never had.
And he seems equally accepting of my sister, Hope. I hope he’s not going to be too disappointed when they return to Montana.
Oh, I walk with him as much as I can, but I pretty much do my own thing at home. I don’t think he’s going to go for me trying to cover him in saddle blankets. But it’s fun when that guy Will does it.
Sister Hope had a little time off. Husband and son went to visit relatives. Got someone to feed the horses. Took a little car-camping trip to where she grew up; took pictures of lunar eclipse from White Sulphur Springs and spring weather at Martinsdale Reservoir; all on way to see Angus cattle on former neighbor’s 125-year-old ranch. (Photos by Hope Harper).
dream ranch 