Frontier Justice
You can’t train a squirrel to be a seeing-eye dog
The German love for beer kept them from being Democrats
That wife of his believed ‘every goddam word’ of the Bible
The first and only time I ever saw a squirrel without a tail was at the home of Edmond Decatur Harrison, the county judge of Blanco County, Texas. In the 1950s, before my brother and I were born, my father, fresh out of law school, had been elected county attorney in the thinly populated hills west of Austin. My parents, both natives of Austin, had moved back to the state capital in the sixties when my father got a position on the staff of the attorney general of Texas. But our family frequently visited Judge Harrison and his wife in Blanco.
In the sixties and seventies most of the folks in the county and the surrounding Texas Hill Country were descendants of the original German settlers who had arrived in the 1840s and 1850s. Persecuted by the Confederates during the Civil War and Reconstruction because of the antislavery, pro-Union sentiments that many of the immigrants shared, and harassed again during …
The Front Porch
The experience of living in modern times is defined by the pace of change being faster than human beings can process in the moment. While we are looking in one place, the reality that we took for granted a little bit to the left or the right has become unrecognizable. In fact, too many things are changing at rates too various for us to take them in all at once, let alone to imagine how all these changes going on around us might all fit together. We search for familiar landmarks like statues, hills, or streams to guide us, and when we find that they are still the same we breathe a sigh of relief, even though everything around them has changed, and continues changing.
One of the main differences between human beings and dogs and horses is that we live inside of notions of the past, the present, and the future. My dog knows the difference between day and night, but she has no idea whether I’ve been gone for …
A Greyhound to Memphis
There is no such thing as the Greyhound Bus Company
Finding grace in a nightmare by Thomas Pynchon
The ducks waddling across the red carpet in the Peabody Hotel lobby will never let you down
The Greyhound bus ride from New York to Memphis takes 24 hours, so you may as well do something pretty with your time, like getting drunk before noon off a liter of J&B or tagging the initials "Nc" on the window or checking your blood pressure at the drugstore next to a transfer station. Or you can call a friend to offer some long-distance advice, even if they probably won’t take it.
“Imma tell you how not to fumble that bag,” my seatmate Jameer is telling his friend Niki over the phone. They’ve been talking about keeping her life on the straight and narrow for at least an hour now. It’s the real ones who always get the deals.
Jameer, the older of the two, is 23 at most. Blessed with an old-school name, he stays up late working on his sound, and offers advice about not getting caught up with party boys who talk game. Given the light flirting and veiled allusions to whatever happened between them …
