Not my bear. Too dark for photo. But this is about what I saw of it as it bounded down into the creek bed.
Work day book-ended by report this morning of Elmore Leonard’s death and sighting tonight of a young-looking black bear in Orno Creek. I am an admirer of writers who are craftsmen and the handiwork of bears.
Refrigerator, August 2013
I’ve thought about this Hemingway sentence for years: “On the smoking skillet he poured smoothly the buckwheat batter.”
The goal was visual, I think. All the more reason to like “Big Two-Hearted River.” Canned spaghetti and beans soon to celebrate. (I think well-read brother Pat tried it before I did).
“He opened and emptied a can of pork and beans and a can of spaghetti into the frying pan.”
“I’ve got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I’m willing to carry it,” Nick said.
First day of school, Las Vegas, New Mexico, September 1956
Halloween get-up, Hawkeye Village, Iowa City, Iowa, 1953
Not sure what my mother was thinking, but dressing the Hawkeye Village kids in women’s clothing seemed to be the gag for Halloween 1953 in Iowa City, Iowa. That’s Pat front row, left. And that’s me, next to him, apparently about to barf. Nor do I know what Mom was thinking when she dressed Pat and me in short pants for the first day of school in Las Vegas, New Mexico, September 1956. I do believe we were the only two kids wearing shorts at Douglas Elementary School and I suspect we were the last. ( I think there actually is a kid in the background of this photo wearing jeans and suspenders). Pat does not recall the ordeal of the shorts, which I remember precipitating an assault on the way home that day. Turns out that what stuck in my younger brother’s craw all these years was that I had a notebook and he did not.
Enchanted Cottages, Denison University
Hawkeye Village, Iowa City. Visit from the grandfathers. Mom, right.
Mom bathing brother Rob, Iowa City. Think the running water was down the road.
My first home, married student housing, Denison University campus, Granville, Ohio, late 1940s. My father, an undergraduate on the GI Bill, would have been 20 and my mother 19. My mother told me they saved nickels for Hershey Bars. Graduate school at Iowa City, where Dad studied at the Writers’ Workshop, was even more spartan — and farther from families in Granville and Newark. The first Iowa City domicile was an old trailer house with rooms separated by Army blankets. We then moved up to a relatively plush neighborhood of remodeled Quonset huts.
It’s a beautiful day and we’re feelin’ good and goofin’ off. For-the-record photos above and below. Lori and Sara threw us a party this morning and gave us a ride home in the Subaru. (Cooper prefers being driven about to hoofing it these days. I’m not prepared to admit the same holds for me). Got a birthday serenade over the phone from Santa Fe and promise of dinner at the Range on Sunday. Sister Jane called and I think there might be notes and jam in the mail from Hope and Winifred. Judy and Bob gave me space and taped a birthday note to my garbage can out on the road. Colleen sent me an e-card. Now lunch and reading and naps. Maybe a walk in the hills this afternoon if it clouds up; evening otherwise. Gotta go find some earrings for a certain, soon-to-be 7-year-old niece. It was seven years ago today that I brought Cooper here from the Eastside Animal Shelter, estimated age 3. He was still covered in stitches and ticks. I let him out of the car and into the house. He trotted down the hallway, took a quick right turn into the office, relieved himself by my desk and has lived here happily ever since. I can’t believe Lori wrapped presents for these guys. I suspect Dianne had something to do with it. Thanks, all.
Cooper booking mug, Eastside Animal Shelter, August 2006
Copper and Sara open present at party for Cooper, August 2013
Camera-shy co-pilot, August 2013
Facing iMac paparazzo, August 2013
Jack Germond/ Washington Post file
Maybe you have to be a newspaper person to understand why it’s sad to see people like this go, but this morning I’m thinking about Jack Germond.
I didn’t know him but I read his stuff, saw him on TV and always liked his style.
I suspect he was like some of the others — my first editor, for one, John R. Bott, he of the New York Post and later The New Mexican — who would work long hours to do their trade right and brush off inevitable criticism with a, “Whadda they want for 25 cents?” (Probably a nickel when Bott started).
You’d be a fool if you thought these guys didn’t know their business and how to do it well. Bott set me straight more than once.
“If this was a real newspaper, you’d be fired,” the old New York newspaperman, who started as a copy boy on the Post’s Lindbergh kidnapping desk, told me in a New Mexican episode that still makes me shake in my boots.
Bott, who chomped on cigars and was fond of martinis, died at 70 in 1984. Germond made it to 85, despite reported bad habits, and finished a novel before he departed Aug. 14.
There’s a pro for you.
Here’s a little of what the AP said: “WASHINGTON — Jack W. Germond, the portly, cantankerous columnist and pundit who covered 10 presidential elections and sparred with colleagues on TV’s “The McLaughlin Group,” has died . . . He had recently finished his first novel, “A Small Story for Page Three,” about a reporter investigating political intrigue, being published Friday.”
Here’s the rest: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/08/14/us/politics/ap-us-obit-germond.html?hp
Here’s a commentary from Germond’s friend Walter Mears.
And here’s a video interview with his friend Dan Balz.
Neighbor who lives above Orno Creek reports by email this Sunday morning that a black bear climbed over the wall to his back porch at 12:30 a.m. Bear described as “pretty large and very agile.”
This report on feral horses in New Mexico and the West came in the New York Times this morning: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/11/us/on-fate-of-wild-horses-stars-and-ndians-spar.html?hp&_r=0
Continuing to read Nathaniel Philbrick’s “The Last Stand.” Philbrick does a good job and I’m enjoying the book, but Evan S. Connell’s “Son of the Morning Start” remains my favorite on Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. I’m still trying to figure out what Larry McMurtry was up to with his 2012 “Custer,” although the illustrations alone are worth the book’s cost.
“The Last Stand,” Nathaniel PhilbrickConnell’s book is a bit of a mystery, too. I’ve read it several times and can’t escape thinking that, despite all the death, it’s at least partly comic history.
Connell, who died earlier this year at the Ponce de Leon senior living place in Santa Fe, was known by my father and stepmother’s crowd as “The Great Stone Face” when he hung out with them at the No Name Bar in Sausalito in the 1960s.
Evan S. Connell / Ralph Crane – Time & Life
I met Connell once as an awestruck teenager. He came to a party at our house on Caledonia Street in Sausalito with Gale “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine” Garnett. The only other “famous” writer I remember meeting in that house was drunk, had bad teeth and was wearing a maroon tuxedo. Drunk was not unusual there: the half-humorous watchwords of my father’s San Francisco Chronicle crowd were, “Never trust a man who doesn’t drink.” But I won’t name the drunk author, partly because he reportedly later jumped off a Bolinas cliff. My image of Connell is that he kept to himself and wrote, making him all the more admirable to me.
I like the photograph of Connell in his San Francisco days — I think he had a Post Office job for a while — standing in a no doubt cheap apartment with a Sophia Loren poster behind the kitchen stove.
California Street
As long as I’m on the subject of West Coast writers, I’ll say how much I miss Oakley Hall, whose images of San Francisco in the late 1880s never leave me. To say nothing of “Warlock” and “The Downhill Racers.”
It’s hard to write anything approaching an essay on a workday morning. I can bang out a column for work — during the Legislature, for instance — but that’s with a newspaper deadline looming. Nearing 64, though, I am still sharp on other scores and against some of them I measure my races with age. Knocking one of my heart pill bottles from the top shelf of a kitchen cupboard, I can still catch it with the other hand before it hits the counter. By heft only at the kitchen water tap, I unerringly fill the coffee pot to the 10-cup mark. Pumping iron never has been my cup of tea. Meanwhile, my Aussie buddy and I must be two of the laziest and happiest guys in Placitas. He’s content to nap while I slake my brain with French roast before our morning walkabout. (141) 
Plus, an Arizona ash joined the desert olives at my place in leafing out in August after recent rain.
Desert olive had no leaves until a few days ago. Drought shut it down. Protectively. Rains revived it. Same with several others around the house. Buffalo grass also returned.
dreamranch 
