The older of the two old men next door dumped a can of beans on the lawn. It was just one of many dishes fed to four or five cats that hung around their house and lounged the day away sunning on their fuchsia wooden porch or yellow stone walkway. The men who lived there were strange. One was in his fifties, the son, the other in his seventies, the father. Both were widÂŹowed, both clothed eternally in plain white T-shirts that hugged their âŠ
Horatio Alger may have made it big with nothing but elbow grease, ingenuity and a few breaks. But behold! You can make it with nothing more than a dollar and a weird combination of numbers based on birthdays.
âHow come you donât take a lot of this stuff home,â I ask Frank Uhr. âI mean, the good stuff.â Frankâs the guy that works on Wednesdays at the Spanish Pass dumpâreally just a little trash drop-off run by the county.
âOh Iâm tempted to, sometimes,â he says. âA lot of this stuff is useful, still in good shape.â âBut only if you have use for it.â
What was that smell, the one that brought back more than memory, since exact pictures didnât form in my mind? The smell carried feeling. It must have been the pews, for they are one common denominator in all churchesâCatholic Churches at least.
…the Serbians on the train that day smoked more than any humanly possible, which may relate to why they were painted as unhuman and inhumane in their war against Muslims.
A couple years and a few killed animals later, I ended up as the managing editor of the newspaper in Boerne, Texas, a little town founded in the late 1800s by German immigrants, but well on its way to being just another San Antonio suburb. Like many of my other rural-oriented newspaper positions, I spent much of my time cruising through the countryside on narrow roads blaring music and every now and again, catching the eyes of cattleâŠ