Uncle Pat's Window Seat

There is absolutely no way I personally can sit down to write after a quick check of my emails and facebook page. No Way. Pretty much I can make it through my emails; I don’t actually have that many.  Right now I’m negotiating with a fellow on eBay about a used calabash smoking pipe.  I “need” this as a prop for a Sherlock Holmes tour I’m putting together.  I have to “extend and enrich” the learning experience.  The hassle is that I can’t get into my PayPal account because I’m in England, and I have a different sim card in my phone.  PayPal can’t verify I’m who I say I am. That leads to another completely separate rant about “smart” systems and the removal of humans from the loop.  Everything works perfectly until it doesn’t work at all.  Right now the really cool pipe is stuck in a loop while this other fellow and I work it out.  Over my teaching career I probably bought five thousand dollars worth of stuff on eBay to support my teac...

Yesterday was a good day. I got my writing done in the morning . . . took the entire morning when you factor in making breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and washing and hanging up a load of laundry. I originally put down “hanging out” a load, but it’s different here.  In Texas when I was a kid, the clotheslines were a half-dozen pretty stout-gauge lengths of wire strung between four-inch diameter silver-painted iron pipes something like thirty feet apart. When those West Texas winds came up I would gather the hanging-down corners of the sheets (this was before fitted lower sheets) and angle them to catch that wind in my sails. I hadn’t yet read of Captain Blood on his pirate ship “Arabella,” but I absolutely could have identified with Captain Jack Sparrow. I can still feel the sun on my coffee-bean-brown back and the stiff brown grass under my bare feet, smell the detergent and bleach from my full-bellied sails, and feel the playful tug of the wind I had caught. It was by no mean...

Second conscious start of beginning a new daily writing  habit. This time is harder than the first. The first time I was “full of piss and vinegar,” as one of the grown men in my life used to say.  I don’t remember which.  I know my Dad would have said that.  And considerably more besides.  He learned to swear in the Army Air Corps during World War II.  It was a multicultural skill.  Apparently my Uncle Bailey mastered the same skillset.  I picked up my vocabulary in the Navy.  Dad was a fighter pilot.  Uncle Bailey was a navigator in bombers. I was a Navy Aircraft Loadmaster.  I probably picked up my love of flying machines from these guys. One of the family stories is that when Bailey was a kid, he wanted to be like Clyde Barrow, and he would raise dust clouds and Hell itself roaring up and down the dirt roads around Amarillo up in the Texas Panhandle.  Came the War, and the Air Corps needed navigators as well as pil...

My scheduled start to walk Hadrian’s Wall path the first part of July is starting to get right into my face. I have wanted to do this for a couple of decades, and now it’s actually possible. There was always a plethora of reasons I couldn’t, but now I can. There are still “reasons,” but I’m up for this anyway. First obstacle was simply to get to England. Well, I’m in England. That’s an amazing first step in itself. I’m no longer an ocean away, just a train trip away. A hundred and fifty British pounds round trip. Then, a pretty good-sized one is that I sold or donated most the camping gear I had left from Scouting when we downsized and sold the Dallas house to go tiny-housing in Missouri. Then, when we sold up in Missouri to come over here, the rest of everything went. OK. I can deal with that. I can buy new kit (that’s the preferred term over here), online or in big-boxes here in London. The consideration becomes: is this going to be a one-shot deal (buy cheap stuff), or am I g...

It’s eight-fifteen in the morning. I’m sitting in the bedroom typing this morning because the other people here have overrun the kitchen for their breakfast, and the aromas emanating therefrom of frying meat and coffee, though wonderful are exclusionary; my Southron manners won’t let me intrude.  I, on the other hand, am sitting here working because last night, when I emptied the last of our milk jug into the mocha Kathryn and I finished our day with, did not immediately hoof it down to the corner store to replace it.  “Down” means “uphill in the dark.” It’s not worth it putting off this third morning’s writing that long, taking that much longer to begin the day’s expeditions.  So I got dressed enough to be civil if I got caught by strangers in the hall to scarper to the bathroom, decided not to put on socks, shoes, and a sweater and strike out for the store.  Instead, I have tucked my bare calves and frozen feet under the blanket and sheet, leaned back into...

It’s 11:30 of a Wednesday morning, and I have parked my tail in a chair to write.  I got off to a slower start this morning because two new groups moved into this vacation rental last night and tied up the kitchen and upstairs bathroom this morning. I realize I could have started this exercise sitting akimbo in our room, but that’s not my “assigned” space, and overcoming the lure of my destroyer sailors’ website and the military humor and more website is hard enough without coupling it to being close enough to my wife to readily, easily, pleasantly converse.  So I waited till breakfast was done, the dishes were washed, and the kitchen was clear.  Those conditions have been met, and here sit I, alone in splendor.   The sky is what I’m starting to think of as BSS . . . British Standard Sky . . . more cloud than clear.  The trains seem to be on time; at least they keep reflecting light through the glass doors.  The breeze has dropped, and it’s sixty-t...