Tonight marks one year since I last watched television. That was also the last night spent in my bay home. I’m glad I made that decision, and happy that I stuck with it. It is a very unconventional way to live, and was not always easy the first few weeks, but the absence of TV in my life has made room for much better things. Of which I plan to write more soon….

If you ask me what I did today, and I answer that I spent it mowing, we may not have the same thing in mind…

…but Saturday my mother turned 85. Now recovered from cancer, she is back to living like a woman many years younger. Almost 65 years ago she became my first and greatest blessing. As I often tell her, whatever is good in me I learned from her; all that is not good in me, I learned on my own.

As a boy growing up in a small Texas town, I rode for countless miles on an old single-gear bicycle. My friends and brothers and I spent the long summer days pedaling around town and far down country roads. No cell phones; we were untrackable. Our only directive: be home by dinner time or go hungry.

We pointed our tires toward any place we wished to go, and we stopped there until some other destination came to mind. We carried BB guns or fishing poles. On occasion, we brought home to our bemused mothers a jar of tadpoles or crawdads, dead water moccasins, baby birds, kittens.

Never since have I known such freedom and lack of care, nor am I ever likely to again.

But in what is surely an impulse partlty driven by the memory of those days, I bought a bicycle three days ago, a basic Schwinn with tough knobby tires, and have started exploring the rough country roads that begin only two blocks from my house. The same joy and freedom returns as if it has only been waiting for the roads and wind and the music of bike tires on dirt.

Not everything is the same. Reading the bike’s user manual – the first fozen pages of which warn me of the dangers and perils of misusing this terrible machine – I came to this picture instructing me of the proper way to armor a child before they venture forth:

They left out snake-proof shin guards and kitten-proof gloves. My friends and I, through hundreds of miles of boyhood wanderings, wore exactly none of those things. We would have ditched them as soon as out of sight. Nor will I wear them now.

I quit reading the manual and threw it away. Freedom is best enjoyed unburdened. Even a child knows that….

…so much time. Since I was a young man I have traveled many thousands of miles to reach wild places, in which I hiked & slept in a small tent with lightweight backpacking gear. Days were few on each trip, and I always had to hurry home to work.

Time opens before me now like a road that rolls past the horizon. It waits only for me to go and follow. A tent and camp stove just won’t be sufficient. So I got a wild idea to buy this:

The crazy thing contains a queen bed, kitchen, full bath, table & sofa, solar panel and batteries, generator, heater and AC, water tanks, and more gadgets than I have yet learned. All sitting on the truck like turtle shell.

For the first time in my 65 years, I can leave for anywhere, at any time I wish, and come home only when I am ready. (A freedom I am still having to learn.)

First decision: where to point myself and go first….

To my aurophile friends, I introduce the newest member of my family, Lizzy.

Boisterous, affectionate, daring & adventurous, she is a joy to have around. After a few weeks in her new home, she is fitting in well with her many adopted brothers & sisters. Her youthful playfulness & insouciance ease the sorrow I feel over losing Charlie & Gummie last month (more about that later, when I can write about it without pain).

Now retired for a year, I feel a need to write here more often. Lizzy is a fine way to begin…

Sunday afternoon I was offered the opportunity to dust off the old 1905 Hendersons and pipe a tribute to our veterans.  Our city organized a fine ceremony in their honor, held at the beautiful Veterans Memorial just around the corner from me, and they asked if I would play a fitting tune.  It was an honor to have a small part in the ceremony, in the company of honorable veterans on a splendid fall day.

Now normally I don’t care to share photos of me.  I don’t belong to the selfie crowd, and the world doesn’t need more photos of old bald guys.  But friend and neighbor Chris Kuhlman, a professional photographer and videographer, took a few photos that demonstrate his talent.

I’ve been thinking of my father all day, after writing about him last night.  This evening a poem came to mind that I haven’t read or thought of in many years, but which is worth sharing:

Those Winter Sundays

Robert Hayden – 1913-1980

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Cat daddy is happy. No more waking in the middle of the night for bottle feeding. And at five weeks, they are reaching a fun, cute age.

I spent last night in a lovely suite at the Marriott near the Columbus, OH airport.  The few nights before I’d spent in an old, noisy Comfort Inn in Piketon, OH – the only hotel in that town – while working with clients at the DOE’s Portsmouth site.  If the Comfort has seen better days at all, they are long gone and forgotten.  The bright, modern – and expensive – Marriott is the reward I treat myself with after the work is done and the rough accommodations have been endured.  That and a steak and Scotch dinner (they carry Lagavulin 16, one of my favorite whiskeys) in their restaurant, to make up for the Subway and Taco Bell meals that are about all that’s available in Piketon.

While settling in at the Marriott, I noticed a handful of not-so-subtle placards boasting of the corporation’s heartfelt commitment to environmental stewardship.  Such as:

And:

Good on ‘em, I thought.  I practice resource conservation at home and abroad – habits drilled into me by my mother so relentlessly that they are as inseparable from my being as DNA.  Waste is abhorrent to me; my body rebels physically at lights left on, faucets left running, AC too cool or heat too warm.

But being in an uncommonly active state of mind – I don’t know why – I considered Marriott’s declarations of righteousness and discovered they all shared one thing: I and my fellow lodgers were called upon to put the hotel’s principles in practice, while Marriott only has to print their placards – costly and wasteful enough in itself to more than outweigh any good behavior on my part – and pat themselves on their fat and self-righteous backs.

Re-use your towels, they ask; don’t ask for a change of sheets; turn off unnecessary lights.  All well and good, for Marriott’s bottom line.  If, after dropping $250 on them for a meal and one night’s sleep, I use their resources with spartan self-denial, they can save on laundry labor, water and power costs while crowing their virtue to whoever cares about such things, who shall call them on their hypocrisy?

They care for me, their ubiquitous notes claim.  If they care for me so much, why don’t they discount my charges if take a cold shower or leave the hair conditioner for the next guest?

And so it is, it seems to me, with all the Pharisees aspiring to the global-warming priesthood.  They may fly their private jets by the hundreds and thousands to grand conferences in grand cities, lodge in expensive luxury in hotels I could never afford, all to proscribe what I and others of the hoi polloi should and should not do to preserve their rarified privileges.

I think not.  Next time I find myself at a Marriott, I’m using two towels and both the tiny bars of soap…whether I need them or not.