August Recap

 

Well, today is the last day of our first full month down in Texas. Officially we’ve been down here 47 days, and let me tell you, the longer I’m here, the faster things seem to be going.

How are things going?

Glad you asked!

The house is in a good place. We’re about 99 percent unpacked, with about 90 percent of everything in its right place. We bought a sofa and two swivel chairs from a neighbor for our living room. We bought two new bed sets for our daughters, and a new bed frame for ourselves. A table and pictures for the foyer. Everything seems well with the place. The girls have their own “apartment” upstairs, but we all gather from time to time to watch a TV show together after dinner.

Oh, I just had an ADT alarm installed, and can control everything – a doorbell camera, a rear driveway camera, video recordings from both, the alarm itself and the panic button – all from my phone. So we feel safe. Not that we didn’t before: it’s a safe neighborhood. However, that safe neighborhood comes at a price, as we just got a letter from the HOA to replace two dead bushes at the side of our home or be fined. Oh well.

The girls are slowly but steadily adapting to their schools and schedules. We met all their teachers on two separate nights. Little One is taking an astronomy class, and they have star parties every Monday after a New Moon. Guess where I’m taking her next Monday! In the evenings when I’m cleaning up the kitchen they like to take out their bike and electric scooter and zip up and down our quiet streets. We do have two community pools, one of which has a volleyball court, Patch’s latest obsession now that she’s on her middle school team, though we only have been there once. Patch’s first volleyball game is tomorrow night.

Me, I’m getting by. Applied to thirteen jobs to date – lucky thirteen! – and have spoken with two recruiters. Had two interviews with a major soft drink manufacturer down here, but despite me following up, they haven’t reached back out to me. I think I might be overqualified – that’s the message I picked up during the second interview. I am waiting to schedule a phone interview with another company I reached out to, this one in health care, which is more aligned with what I was doing up north. They emailed me stating they were very impressed with my resume, but we’ll see.

To keep from going stir crazy I think I’m going to resume work on my space opera novel. I started outlining it last fall (up to 16 pages worth) and worked on it off and on until the logistics of the move in April took everything over. It’s calling out to me, so I think I’ll break out that outline, fatten it out some more, and start composing some sections in no particular order (ever ambitious, I wrote seven story lines into this novel, so, similar to how movies are filmed, I see no particular importance to write the novel in exact chronological order).

I started off walking and working out religiously, but may have overdone it. I’m not a kid anymore. Indeed, sadly enough, it seems half my daughters’ teachers are young enough to be my children. I took yesterday and today off, but tomorrow I think I should resume walking, maybe a mile or a mile and a half, instead of my usual 2.5, and maybe do some stretching instead of lifting the dumbbells. It helps with the attitude, the mindset.

Speaking of religion, we joined a local church down here. It’s actually a huge church, perhaps three times the size of the church we left up north. But we’re happy with it. We were actually selected to bring up the gifts to the altar two weeks ago, in front of a congregation of probably five or six hundred people. The church itself is new but retains a very reverent vibe, mixing traditional sacred art and design with the southwestern architecture so prevalent down here. Patch is looking to be confirmed this year, so we’ll have to investigate that now that we’re members.

The wife has been steadily growing in her new job. She’s making great coin, so money’s not a worry. She’s been out bonding with her team as well as her boss, and everything seems to be going well for her. Actually, we haven’t had a bad experience down here. The neighbors we’ve met have all been wonderful. Everyone’s been so nice. I think in 47 days I’ve only been honked at once on the roadway – a daily occurrence back north up in Jersey.

Book-wise, I wrapped up Frankenstein a few days ago and am finishing Keegan’s WW2 book on naval warfare this afternoon. I’m still adhering to my reading plan of a few weeks ago (now halfway done, by the way), but I think I’ll supersede Symond’s World War II at Sea with a book about Texas history I picked up for a dollar in a thrift store I went to with the little ones. And maybe chase that with the Asimov book, The Stars Like Dust, I picked up last Saturday.

More to come …

 My two dead bushes. 

Patch’s room making a cameo on the second floor.

Book Review: Little Big Man

 

© 1964 by Thomas Berger

 

According to the date I etched into the inside front page cover, I’ve had this book in my possession since May 18, 2013. Eighth years and three months. Don’t even remember the circumstances in which I bought it. I seem to recall being well into my first Civil War phase back then, so perhaps the Wild West / Indian theme appealed to me. Also, author Thomas Berger (1924-2014) has been on my Acquisitions List for the longest time. As an aside, he also wrote the novel Neighbors, which was made into a 1981 film starring John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, and that book, too, is on my List.

 

Why so long without being read? To be honest, it probably stayed off the On Deck Circle all those 99 months because I was afraid of it. Afraid of the investment in time – it does clock in at a hefty 445 pages – and afraid of the investment in emotions – I thought it would be an exercise in deconstruction and snarkiness. And as a fairly dyed-in-the-wool Platonist, especially with my literature, I don’t like deconstruction.

 

Well, I breezed through it in ten days, despite all the action going on here getting settled in our new homestead. And it wasn’t an exercise in deconstruction and snarkiness. No; as a matter of fact, it was kinda funny. Occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, but more of a type of witty, wish-I-wrote-like-that funny. Scratch that: more of a how-can-I-ever-write-this-well type of funny.

 

Where to begin?

Little Big Man is a Western tale covering a good chunk of American history. From the 1840s, pioneering with the Westward Expansion, through the Civil War, through the linking of East and West coasts through the great intercontinental railroads, up to the Indian Wars of the late 1870s. Our “hero” is a crusty old hoss name of Jack Crabb, 111-years old at the start of the tale, which is basically him regaling a stuffy academic with his life story. What is true? What is exaggeration? What do we make of a tale where we can’t decide the answers the either question? Well, sit back and enjoy, I suppose.

 

You don’t have to be into Westerns to appreciate the novel. Me, I’ve read about 300 science fiction novels, about 100 horror novels, and about 10 Westerns, yet I loved it. Crabb, despite his lack of book smarts, is complicated and contradictory: smarmy, a hustler, a simple straightforward man, a man of honor, a man on a trail of revenge who ultimately sets it aside, a man thrust into greatness several times in his long lived life but never one who could hold on to it. Crude, rude, and lewd. A man truly a “half-breed” – raised by Cheyenne at the age of 10 through his teenage years, then thrust back into “civilization” – proselytizing preachers, the U.S. Army, scouting, working on the Union Pacific, and, ultimately, fighting with General Custer at Little Big Horn. A man unapologetically of his time. A man who’d drive thousands of Liberal Arts majors screaming into safe spaces.

 

Along with Custer, Crabb has several run-ins with famous figures of history. Most predominantly, Wild Bill Hickok. Wyatt Earp makes a cameo, and Walt Whitman is mentioned in passing. Some of the funniest writing of the book revolves around Jack’s sister Caroline, who herself is mistaken for Calamity Jane.

 

The climax of the novel occurs as Jack stands side-by-side with Custer at Little Big Horn. Eight years earlier Jack was present – living as a Cheyenne at the time – at the Battle of the Washita, in which Custer’s men slaughtered several hundred Indians, including Jack’s Cheyenne family. After vowing revenge and tracking Custer’s movements, only to be sidetracked by the nagging requirement of having to work to keep one’s belly somewhat full, Crabb ultimately winds up trying to dissuade the highly conceited General from walking into the Indians’ trap.

 

The battle on the bluffs in which Custer and his men are wiped out to a man seemed historically accurate to me, at least from what I retained from my three-book study of the event back in May of 2019. Oh, and if Custer and his men of the Seventh Cavalry were wiped out to a man, what happened to Jack? Well, I won’t spoil that, but will only say that a chapter on Little Big Man leads to one of the most touching scenes I’ve read in recent years, and it has something to do with Jack and his foster-father, Cheyenne chieftain, Old Lodge Skins. Well done, Mr. Berger.

 

Grade: Recommended; solid A.

 

PS. In the 60s the rights to the book were purchased by Marlon Brando, but nothing came of it until it was sold and was later made into a 1970 movie starring Dustin Hoffmann. You may have seen it or seen it referenced. Hoffmann is wearing prosthetic makeup to age him to 120 years; state-of-the-art then but dated now. I’ve not seen the movie, and I’m not sure I have any desire to. I feel perhaps Hoffmann may have been miscast, but I could be mistaken.

Rewards of the Job Hunt

 

Treated myself to $10 worth of books at the local used book shop earlier today.

Why?

Well, still unemployed, but I’ve been casting a wide net. Relatively speaking, that is. Because the wife travels unpredictably, I have to work in a 15-mile radius from our new home, mostly for the girls and their school activities. I also want to make the same amount of $ I was making back up north. This limits me somewhat.

With that in mind, I’m still unemployed after a month of searching. I’ve spoken to two headhunters. I’ve had a first and second interview with a local major corporation. I took an online psych evaluation for another job opportunity (and probably failed, because don’t we all, with those tests? Or at least think we do, playing a balancing act between complete honesty and what we think the hiring agent wants to hear?). I’ve applied to nine other jobs on Glassdoor, Indeed, and LinkedIn.

But I’ve given myself a par of 90 days.

So I decided to reward my efforts with a quartet of old, classic SF paperbacks:

 

I’m still adhering to my early reading plan; almost half way done with it in fact. I’m two-thirds done with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and I must admit it’s much more readable than I remembered when I last transversed those pages sophomore year of high school, though it is less philosophically satisfying than adult me was looking forward to. But I’ll save that for a review later on.

Speaking of reviews, I read a great book recently and have to promote it. That will come either tomorrow or Monday.

As far as the new batch of books goes, I don’t have a plan. Three of the four clock in at 200 pages each, so they’ll be fast reads. The fourth, The Proteus Operation, is double that. It’s one of those, would you go back in time to kill Hitler type tales, with a twist. My goal is to put all four away in a single month, maybe November or possibly December, whenever I get through my current reading plan.

Well, continued happy reading! Hopefully I’ll be employed before I get to dust these latest paperbacks off.

Man Proposes God Disposes

 

About three weeks ago I posted a short entry detailing the next six books I wanted to read now that the family is established down in Texas.

(By the way, things are flowing nicely: the wife is nearly a month into her new job, the main reason we moved down here; the little ones are getting used to their new schools and schedules and are starting to make friends, kicking and screaming; my job hunt is progressing with a promising second interview tomorrow; and the house is nearly unpacked and fully operational, for now.)

Since I’m not working and have a full day with other activities such as walking, weightlifting, ferrying children here and there, and a daily honey-do list, I allow myself about an hour a day escape: reading. I have a myriad of interests, but I’ve kept unpacked only the most interesting books from the move. These include some classic fiction, and a few nonfiction tomes on the JFK assassination, an old obsession, and World War II, my current obsession. Six books, to be read in a specific order.

That was what I proposed.

Indeed, of those six books of 3,429 pages, I got through the first two: one third done. I wanted to get through all six by Halloween. But now a monkey wrench has been thrown into things, as monkey wrenches are wont to do, especially when it comes to my reading plans.

Patch, the only one in the family with a reading appetite as voracious as mine, wanted to get a library card.

So two weeks ago we google’d and Waze’d the town library and visited it. Housed adjacent to town hall, it’s a modern four-story appealing reservoir of books. Upon entrance we were greeted with friendly smiles and easy assistance procuring a pair of new cards. Patch then went off to find some reading materials (among which, interestingly enough, was an adult horror novel written by the Goosebumps author R.L. Stine. The little ones are going through a Goosebumps renaissance, mainly for nostalgia reasons.)

Having a reading plan I did not wish to borrow any books. So I browsed to get a feel for the quality and quantity of books here.

Man proposes, God disposes.

Immediately, this book jumped off the shelf at me:

 

Wow! Since childhood I’ve been a Roger Zelazny fan. A strong second-tier SF master who should have been more widely read outside the genre, Zelazny was prolific from the mid-60s until his death in 1995. He specialized in series where classical mythology – Greek, Egyptian, and Indian, for example – are translated into a science fiction setting, but also wrote a score of stand-alone novels. I first read To Die in Italbar (1973) as a kid of twelve (Patch’s age right now, interestingly enough), and re-read it twice over the years as an adult. Additionally, I’ve read:

This Immortal (1966)

Lord of Light (1967), twice

Damnation Alley (1969)

The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth (1971)

The Guns of Avalon (1972)

A Dark Traveling (1987)

But nothing since summer 2015.

His output numbered at least fifty books, which includes numerous collaborations with other famous SF writers (including one with Philip K. Dick, on my Acquisitions List), but does not include works of poetry and short story collections and anthologies.

So imagine my surprise when this book leapt out at me – the Chronicles of Amber, ten books in one twelve-hundred-plus page omnibus. Now, Guns of Avalon, Book Two of the Amber series, I did read back in 2012. Unfortunately, that was around four hundred books ago, so I do not recall the plot, but I do note that I ranked it as an “A” in my reading log.

This really appeals to me. The past year I’ve generally been reading doorstops nonstop. The average length of these books is probably around 450 pages, and the average weight of each book is about four pounds. So although this Amber anthology might weigh a bit more than that, each book clocks in at less than a third the amount of pages, so I can put some mileage on the brain reading-wise.

On the old Reading Plan I’ve read The Witnesses, the Warren Commission testimonies, and Little Big Man, a classic Western, which I’ll review in the next few days. I think later today I’ll crack the first of the Amber books. I’m always on the lookout to fall into new worlds Should be enjoyable, and I’m anticipating the re-read of Book Two especially.

Oh, and unpacking I came across a small book on naval warfare by one of the masters of the field, John Keegan. It’s basically divided into four long segments. The third is on the Battle of Midway and the fourth on two caravans sunk during the Battle of the Atlantic. I think I’ll read the Midway section concurrent with the first Amber novel, as I’m missing the daily fiction/nonfiction reading balance the past five weeks of sticking to one book at a time.

Happy reading!

411 Elm Street

 

Last Sunday the Mrs. decided to take us all out for sushi. But it couldn’t be any old sushi den. It had to be the hippest, trendiest sushi place in all of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. She is, after all, hooked into all the relevant Dallas Instagram pages and such. That’s just the way she rolls. The place she selected required days-ahead reservations, so we found ourselves heading south towards Dallas at 5 o’clock in the evening, sun still shining bright and high in the sky.

As we neared the city we saw this tower:

 

We’d been into the heart of Dallas two weeks earlier and the Mrs. remembered it vividly. “I need to know the story of that tower,” she said now.

So while seated and awaiting our sushi rolls I did some smart phone research. The tower struck me as an homage to Soviet-style architecture – klunky iron junk. But it does light up brightly in the night sky, with moving colorful images, as I remember from two weeks earlier. Turns out it’s called the Reunion Tower, and it was built in the late 70s, and it is an icon – but to the city of Dallas. It even appears every now and then in television shows, including, appropriately enough, that prime time soap opera from the early 80s, Dallas.

I also discovered the tower is 1,000 feet from the site of the JFK assassination.

Furthermore, a quick search revealed that Dealey Plaza was but two miles from the sushi restaurant in which we sat dining.

I announced an impromptu post-dinner destination. My wife would drive to Dealey Plaza, turn that left onto Elm Street, drive past the Texas School Book Depository, past the grassy knoll, and under the triple overpass. I’d be in the passenger seat snapping as many pics as I could on the cell phone. (I commissioned both girls to also take pics, but they were nursing engorged bellies in the backseat from overconsumption of raw fish.)

Here are the four best pictures I took:

 

1. The Texas School Book Depository

I didn’t catch it at first. We were driving along a canyon of somewhat rundown buildings when suddenly the street ahead opened up. My wife took a left (the Waze app was not clear on directions here) and stopped at a light. I glanced behind me and instantly and shockingly saw that famous façade: The TSBD! I had seen it hundreds of times in black-and-white photos, and here it was in color, framed by trees, behind us. I realized we took a wrong turn and were on Houston Street, so I told her to make a right onto Main. Elm would be parallel to our right.

I actually got shivers staring at this building, knowing the great transformative events that had taken place nearly a lifetime ago. It was very, very surreal.

 

2. The Grassy Knoll

I’d have to go back and check but I think there’s a wall in the center of the pic where the “Black Dog Man” – a darkened figure allegedly armed with a rifle – stood according to some conspiracy theorists. Zapruder would have been standing just beyond the right side of the picture when he filmed the assassination.

 

3. The Picket Fence

Witnesses say gunfire came from the direction of this fence, and some said they saw puffs of smoke. Another encountered a man on the other side who flashed some official credentials – the “Badge Man” – but who could have been an assassin himself. Afterwards investigators found cigarette butts and numerous footprints behind the fence.

 

4. The Triple Underpass

The famous underpass where the limo can be seen rocketing down at the tail end of the Zapruder film: Jackie Kennedy climbing on the trunk of the limo to retrieve parts of JFK’s head, a secret service agent hauling himself up on it to protect her, the vehicle accelerating from 10 mph to over 60 to get to nearby Parkland Hospital.

 

We went through the underpass and made a U-turn and drove back up, but couldn’t get onto Elm for a closer look with the way traffic is routed in the area (and which we were quite unfamiliar with). However I was satisfied with this initial run. A nice, neat, thrilling surprise.

I remember years back, a decade or so ago, wondering if I’d ever get the chance to walk through Dealey Plaza and see all the significant markers live and in person. Never would thought I’d be here now, but here I am. Still planning an extending visit here in the Fall, with more time to spend, walking about, and taking better photos. I’d also refresh my memory a bit better on the conspiracy angles, and if any information I’ve given here (most off the top of my head) is incorrect, it’s merely due to a rusty memory concerning my studies of that day in November 58 years ago.

 

Book Review: The Witnesses

 

© 1964, 1965 by the New York Times Company

 

The cover reads: the testimony of 75 key witnesses to the assassination of President Kennedy and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald … selected and edited from the Warren Commission’s Hearings by The New York Times with an introduction by Anthony Lewis.

I’m glad I picked this book up. I found it randomly at a used book store back in December and later realized it would be something good to read as soon as we moved down to Texas. Dealey Plaza is, in fact, 32 miles straight south from our new home. I think in the fall I’m going to take the girls down there for an afternoon, to see the Texas School Book Depository (now the Sixth Floor Museum of the assassination), the “grassy knoll” of the plaza, and the X that marks the spot on Elm Street where JFK was gunned down.

I had never read the actual testimony. Well, I do remember borrowing the first book of the Warren Commission report from the library (if I remember correctly it’s a summation of sorts, I think), but I never got more than a dozen pages in. From 2009-2012 I was pretty heavily into the assassination. I must’ve read eight or ten books on the subject. Mailer’s book on Oswald was good, Posner’s and Bugliosi’s books were good on the Lone Gunman theory, and probably convinced me of that.

This book, too, was good on the Lone Gunman theory.

Or is that what they want us to believe???

Anyway, reading the testimonies of Marina Oswald, Jack Ruby, Ruth Paine, George De Mohrenschildt, the Dallas Police officials, brought a sense of déjà vu to me. I’ve heard a lot of this before, paraphrased, in other books. But – and I’m only partially being facetious here – not warped or cherry-picked to advance a particular theory or point of view. And strangely enough, it was a page turner. Far from being dry.

One part of the testimony stuck out to me – almost in a laugh out loud way. This exchange between Gerald Ford, Allan Dulles, Robert Inman Bouck of the Secret Service, and Samuel Stern, one of fourteen assistant counsels for the Warren Commission:

 

FORD: How often do your people check to see procedures which are used by these various agencies for the determination of whether an individual is a dangerous person?

BOUCK: We don’t do that systematically. We frequently have such discussions but they are usually on a specific basis. Our representatives will call up and say, “We just received this information. Would this be of interest to you?”

DULLES: Have you made any study going back in history of the various attempts that have been made, and successful and unsuccessful attempts, that have been made against Presidents or –

BOUCK: Rulers.

DULLES: Or people about to be President, or who have been President?

BOUCK: Yes, yes. We have not only studied all of our own but we have studied all of the assassinations that we could find any record of for 2,000 years back. And strangely enough some of the thinking that went on 2,000 years ago seems to show up in thinking of assassinations today.

STERN: Do you increase protection on the Ides of March?

(pages 552-553)

 

A good worthwhile read for any armchair historian interested in the assassination.

In the Belly of the Beast

The silver lining is that it probably would’ve hit me way harder had we moved down to Dallas five or more years ago.

Man, is our new area football obsessed.

At first I thought that it was a cliché: if you’re a Texan, you’re into football. You know, the “Friday Night Lights” thing and all. Yeah, I have a brother-in-law who’s a Lone Star native and who’s been pushing the Texas Longhorns on us for years. But it started to hit home when we learned my daughter’s high school football team, which normally practices on a five-acre lot of prairie, will be playing its games at The Star, the Dallas Cowboys’ practice facility.

So, yes, it seems football is a big deal down here.

Now, football used to be a big deal for me, too.

My father played some low-level college football and wound up a high school defensive coordinator. My godfather, his best friend, tried out for the New York Jets in the sixties. I watched football with him, as well as with my two uncles when I got older. Both uncles were diehard Giants fans, and it wore off. My friends during my teens and early twenties were Giants fans, too. This was the Parcells era when the Giants were a dominant team and went to the Super Bowl twice.

Later I worked for a company whose owner was a diehard Giant fan. I saw Eli Manning, and could’ve chatted him up and shook his hand if I were a little more courageous. The wife was a Giants fan and we watched three Super Bowls together. I was finishing my daughter’s nursery when Eli started his first game.

Then around 2016 the whole kneeling thing happened. I am opposed to kneeling. To me, it’s disrespecting the flag and all the great things this country is about. Yeah, we’re not perfect, but we’re the best place on the planet to live. You don’t see migrant caravans storming the beaches of Cuba to get in.

Anyway, I digress. I’ve watched a grand total of three football games in the past five years. I’ve spent zero dollars on the NFL. As a result, I no longer consider myself a football fan, despite many happy years of chugging beers, barbecuing, watching the games with my pals. No more.

So it was a bit of a culture shock when, last week, my wife took us to The Star.

Now, not only is it the Cowboys’ practice facility, it is also a massive mini mall. Eateries, shops, museums, and plenty of office space. The Mrs. wants me to nab a job at a company that leases space at The Star, that’s how close it is to our new house.

She had to pick up some housewarming items from a local boutique at The Star, one she follows on Instagram. We drove in and had brunch and an interesting place somewhere across from the turf below the Jumbotron along Cowboys Way. I’m sure Jerry Jones got a nice percentage of our brunch bill, probably $10, to add to his net worth of $800 billion. Anyway, the food was good, and the boutique was phenomenal, at least according to my wife.

But walking around this Mecca for Dallas Cowboy fans sure gave me a weird vibe. Set in the concrete walkways were slabs devoted to Cowboy stars of the past, their names, position, active years and jersey numbers etched into concrete. Flags displaying current local team members adorned every light post. Stores sold buttons, pendants, posters, bumper stickers, kitchen magnets. I didn’t see a pro shop, but I’m sure several of them were strategically positioned around The Star for Mr. Jones to get his fair share of memorabilia revenue of the team he invested so much in.

(A team that’s been 26 years without a Super Bowl win, the dormant Giants fan in me has to point out.)