That’s my honeysuckle in the last ice storm. In the meantime, the San Antonio symphony at the new Tobin center, more cold weather, a lot of reading, a lot of internet searching for good book blogs and singing. Riding this Wednesday, some of us going up to the Mill Creek area. Read Howey’s Sand which was good except for the prostitute mother, which I found not a believable plot device, and am also reading The Black Sheep, a history of the Marine fighter squadron in the Solomon Islands, WW2, led by Pappy Boyington.

Could any of us ever live through anything like that again, and still keep fighting? This question comes up when reading any WW2 history. They just seem like a different subspecies of homo sapiens sapiens. Their photographs look different; they were thinner and they looked back at the camera lens in a different way. They knew more. Their clothes were stronger cloth and thicker. Their hair was different.

Greg ‘Pappy’ Boyington was stopped by his flight controller one morning as he scrambled out of his tent for a dawn patrol. Boyington was running across the coral-based airstrip on one of the Solomons. His flight controller pointed out he didn’t have any shoes on. Boyington said, ‘I can fly an airplane with no shoes’. (He was hungover, badly) and the flight controller said. ‘Yes, but you’ll need them if you go down’.