A Hat on the Bed

The other day when Martina and I were packing up to go to Fredericksburg, she tossed my ball cap on the bed. Although I never said a word, I gently picked up the hat and put it on the nightstand. Somehow, after all of these years, I still carry the old superstition about putting a hat on the bed within me. 

When I was a little boy, I remember a story about someone blaming the death of a family member on a cowboy hat being place on a bed. After hearing that, I never intentionally allowed one of my hats to be on a bed, and especially not a cowboy hat, for it could not just bring bad luck but actual calamity. Today, of course, keeping hats off the bed is more of an old custom than an actual superstition, but then, maybe somewhere in the back of my mind, that old irrational worry has never left.

Here is Jason Boland, who I once had the pleasure of seeing open for Merle Haggard at John T. Floore's Country Store, talking about hats on the bed and singing about luck.

A Mosquito by the River

This morning while reading the poetry of West Texas native Christian Wiman on the porch, a mosquito landed on the corner of the book. The pages moved slightly in my hands, with the angle of the read-pages' plane causing the mosquito's shadow to lengthen or shorten with what seemed my every breath. 

Texas Pecan Coffee and a Sufi Poet

This morning I sat on the porch reading Rumi, a thirteenth century Sufi poet who knew a whole lot about living and life. The sun shone through the red yucca blooms in the yard, making them almost seem translucent, and the wind swayed the desert willow in the background. I just sat there drinking Texas pecan coffee and contemplating the words of a wiseman from another place and time.

Yet I am not the only Texas writer who enjoys this particular poet. A few years ago I read an interview with Robert Earl Keen, and he talked about reading Rumi at his Scriptorium. For your listening pleasure, here is a song by that venerable Texas songwriter.

   

An Afternoon in Fred

While in Fredericksburg recently, we stopped by the place formerly known as Choo Choo Trolley, a fine purveyor of pots, yart, and ceramics. I've always liked the place because of the live music on weekend afternoons. A few years ago, I even sat in with Gale, commonly known as Galevis, who had a regular gig there. Although we did not purchase a ten foot metal armadillo with a Texas flag on its back to hang above our mantle, Martina did buy a funky little ceramic lizard to go in one of the cactus pots on our back porch.

Picking Peaches at Nanner Manor

Through some odd morphing of nicknames over the years, my uncle has come to be known in certain circles as "Nanner." His dwelling place, of course, is called "Nanner Manor." At Nanner Manor, my aunt and uncle have peach trees. We visited their house on the weekend, and Uncle Nanner of Nanner Manor gave us a couple of burgeoning bags of those Parker County peaches. Martina then turned many of those peaches into a fine Czech-Tex cobbler.

Here is an action shot of Uncle Nanner on a ladder picking peaches at Nanner Manor.

  

A Raptor on the Roof

This evening our neighbor sent me a photograph that solved a mystery around our house. Martina and I had been wondering why we had not seen many birds in our backyard lately. We had not seen mockingbirds, purple finches, or even sparrows around the house. We had, however, seen a fair number of rabbits, though their numbers had seemed to have thinned out as of late.

When I first looked at the picture, which was of my neighbor's garage taken at two in the morning, there was a car in the driveway, and I figured my neighbor had sent me a picture of a creep stalking the neighborhood. However, when I called and he pointed out the owl on top of his roof, everything made sense.

Here is a cropped version of the picture my neighbor took. Even though the photo now appears grainy like the ones of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, I still used The Cornell Lab's Merlin birding app to try to identify the owl. According to the app, this nocturnal visitor was most likely an Eastern Screech-Owl.   

Texas Student Wins the National Spelling Bee

A young Texan proved victorious at the Scripps National Spelling Bee this year, his victory secured on the word "koinonia," which, according to Merriam-Webster, means "the Christian fellowship or body of believers." The winner, fourteen-year-old Karthik Nemmani of McKinney, made it to the competition as a wild card. This is truly a testament to the spelling prowess of North Texans, who, according to the Dallas Morning News, took the first three places in the national bee this year. Congratulations to Karthik and all of the other youthful Texans who made it to the finals!

My own spelling bee story is hardly as illustrious as the one above. Although I won the school spelling bee in the fourth grade, I crashed and burned in the sixth grade spelling bee. Though I studied hard and could spell pretty much any word in the book, I got knocked out in the first round by the word "abut," which I apparently had been mispronouncing. Upon misspelling the word, I hollered a rather mild FCC-approved vulgarism into the microphone. 

The auditorium burst into laughter, and my teacher met me at the edge of the stage absolutely hot under the collar. She said that if I thought that I was cute or funny I was dead wrong. I replied that I did not think either of those things. The word had simply slipped out because I got disqualified in the first round. It was merely the agony of defeat.

But enough with my crash and burn. Hurray for McKinney's Karthik Nemmani and the power spellers of North Texas!