I am so happy that living in this little town has allowed me to do those things I have loved the most — play music with friends and ride horses with friends. This was our music group more than ten years ago, with our great pastor Chuck Crane, who started the group. We have played in some of the most wonderful places — church, fall fair, at funerals and the birthday bash of a 97 year old fellow who had been a bomber pilot in WW2. such a joy to join with others in making music. If I had stayed in the city this would not have been possible. Back row left to right — Kim Donoho, Tom Bomer the reknown fiddler, Mark Hall, Kathy Lewis, Bottom, Church Crane, me Diane Causey. I am grateful they let me play with them.

Me, June and April in the middle. I have so few good pictures of the marvelous and amazing Evelyn O’Hara because she’s always in that big helmet!

That’s us on the Rio Grande, Arrmando our guide on the right. We’ve gone so many places— New Mexico, Big Bend, Palo Duro Canyon, the lovely country around Huntsville, and of course locally — Hooter Clayton’s place especially and I remember when June and I discovered Robin Springs there in a box canyon — hundreds and hundreds of robins flying past us, and we followed them, and there in a terrible drought was a tiny spring trickling from pool to pool — they knew where it was. They were flocking to it, thirsty on their journey north.

Above, we rode across the Rio Grande very briefly and then turned and galloped back. Thank you my dear friends for a rich, wonderful twenty years here in this tiny town. Or, we all live outside the town itself but let’s count the outliers.

There has been nobody to talk books with, I’ve of course been outside the Texas literary establishment, which is urban, so very urban. But I wouldn’t trade all this for the awards and cocktail parties and the seminars and the other various gatherings. These above were my girlhood dreams — adventures on horseback, playing all the old music that moves me so much — listening to Tom play or sing ‘Wayfaring Stranger’, Diane and Tom’s duets on piano and fiddle, singing in harmony with Kathy and Kim and Mark — what a joy! Diane and Tom had a deep sense of the old music and its structures and inner architecture, we all came from that culture.

But I must say Diane and her husband Tommy were great fans of my books and read some of them in manuscript.

Like Wanda Waters — read News of the World in manuscript — stood up for me during the Woke Attack, a true and loyal friend.

I just feel a lot of gratitude.

This is my far-future fantasy, started about two years ago, almost finished. I know it is unusual and does not fit in the usual categories of far-future stories. Far-Future Glitz, with Amazing But Sinister Technology. Characters; slick powerbrokers, upper-class, educated, wrestle with ethic demons. Dash about among the planets and/ or galaxies to meet threats. Power Girl Top Scientist; brilliant investigator of experimental improbabilities, saves humankind. Dashes about among galaxies, foreign terrains. Upper-class, educated. The mass of humanity; suffering peons rarely seen. Down there somewhere.

My premise is that post-post-apocalypse humanity reverts to village-type organization. Avoided clichés of grunting ruminants in religious cults brandishing spears. Tried to be practical; I know how village-type organizations happen, and the basics of pre-electrical-power light, heat and toolmaking. Have become weary of the premise that in the collapse of what we know as ‘civilization’ (cool technology) people instantly turn into savages. At the same time, tried open the door to fantasy. I enjoyed writing this.

The Tavern at the End of the World

“The inn does not point to the road; the road points to the inn. And all roads point to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters; and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.” G.K. Chesterton

CHAPTER ONE

His parents left him to die at the edge of the forest. It was late October, when winter was beginning and the warblers had taken all their voices and had flown south to some mysterious kingdom beyond the horizon. His mother and father lifted him from the cart in a hard, firm grip even though he held on desperately to the sides. They pulled his hands loose finger by finger. The house dog barked at everything from under his mother’s skirts, barking at the entire world because something was wrong and the dog felt it in the air and was sounding the alarm but the people around him did nothing but make high-pitched unhappy noises.     

He felt himself dropped onto the ground like a sack of unconnected bones. His mother’s face was wet and her hands were in fists. She would not look at him. She was enormously fat. His father bent over and held him by both forearms and sat him down in the leaf litter beneath an oak tree and said that if he could walk through to the other side of the forest, there would be light, and a river and a pleasant land where he might despite everything find himself alive and well.

To read the rest of the first 5 chapters, click here.

All photos by Elvia Contreras Diaz

As a follow-up to Elvia &Co.’s latest adventures in Portugal, during the blackout in Spain they — Elvia and her nieces Pia and Gala — were stuck in the Lisboa airport for 8 hours without electricity — see letter below. Elvia is a dedicated student of literature, a great reader, and in all her travels she seeks out the homes and favorite places of the great Latin authors — or Turkish. Or Kazakastani! In this case Fernando Pessoa, Early 20th century writing genius of Portugal.

And since my many wonderful talents do not include skills with this semi-new WordPress confusion, I simply printed out Elvia’s Portugal letter, took a shot of it with my phone and downloaded the picture. I have tried repeatedly to shift documents from downloads to a post and am tired of trying. And I couldn’t even manage to get it straight. However I don’t think reading it slightly askew will cause any great suffering on the part of my million or so blog fans. At any rate, my favorite phrase here is “fighting like Mexican animals” at the ticket counter. Superb!

Elvia and Pia at a shoe shop

This is at Fernando Pessoa’s home, an engraved quote from his writing.

An imaginative display of the writer’s frustrations at the Pessoa home. Today we ‘d just drag blue and hit delete.

Elvia and Fernando Pessoa having a chat.

Beautiful Lisboa. So many people fleeing the Nazi regime in world War II were so relieved to see this port, safe at last. Some didn’t make it, like the writer Walter Benjamin.

At any rate, whatever the troubles or missed planes, good Portugese wine makes everything better!

So I’ve joined them in this adventure from my computer desk. Travel for me now is difficult, with wounded horse needing daily care and my health only indifferent, so I’ve had a great time! All the Contrerases send greetings and love to all Johnsons.

Photos from my friend the intrepid traveler, Elvia Contreras. She and her grand-niece went to Portugal and the photos are as lovely as I have always been told Portugal is.

Elvia on the Tajo River, looking intrepid!

Here is lovely Pia, Pia Solorzano Contreras, also on the famous Tajo bridge. I remember visiting her mother, Mariana, and dad, Chuy (Jesus) when they lived in Veracruz, and after dinner Pia sat down at the piano and played an enchanting Mozart piece and as I watched she missed a note and gave that little furious shake of the head that musicians or singers do when they flub a note, I have done it many a time, but she raced on (it was a fast selection) and finished in good style. She’s now studying in Puebla but took time to accompany her great-Aunt Elvia to Portugal.

Scenes from travel in Lisboa — a library of course!

With a flying girl on a bicycle in the upper left.

Another library, this time in a converted church. Both in Lisboa.

Here are houses in Oporto, it all seems undeveloped, un-modernized, organic… maybe this is why people fall in love with Portugal. Elvia said she liked Oporto more than Lisboa.

The medieval city Obidos, with its ancient defensive wall still standing. When I think about it, Portugal remained neutral during World War II and so these ancient towns never got bombed flat into smoking ruins like so many places in Italy, Germany, France. England.

More in the next few days! I am working at the new far-future fantasy novel and taking care of Jackson’s slowly-healing wounds, our music group played in church last Sunday (yesterday) for the first time in a long time, Sid Fly was with us, such a great performer! and Tom our fiddler, Kathy, Diane… I asked Sid if he and Kathy were cousins and they immediately made kissing noises at each other. Kissin’ cousins, get it?

It takes a great leap of faith for a reader to enter into a fantasy, purely imaginative world, at the present time because of the endless excitement of the news feeds. They can’t let go. This book will end up unread and dead I am afraid but who knows. I may publish the first few chapters on this blog.

An interesting find

My cousin sent me an old Missouri Historical Review from a treasure trove of them I think she found in a thrift shop, and in it is an article on a scholar named T.K. Whipple(1890 – 1939), whose observations on literature were obviously well-known to Larry McMurtry because he quoted him as an epigraph in the opening pages of Lonesome Dove.

“All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live and what they lived, we dream.”

Article by Lewis O. Saum, Missouri Historical Review 2005.

He died at a youngish age, of cancer, after having fought in WWI and graduated from Princeton with a PhD. He was caught up in that ancient argument about the novel, should it be representational or should it be only imaginative? Of course as Northrop Frye said, any artistic creation point to something outside itself but is the primary purpose to provide accurate reportage? This has no relevance to the fantasy/science fiction genres but even in those readers are quick to notice if an event is plausible or impossible. When 1984 was first published there was no separate category for science-fiction.

His arguments were drowned in the then-media hype about Sherwood Anderson and Willa Cather, slice -of-life taken from the supposedly dismal societies of small towns and supposedly small minds, always with a main character who “escapes”. who “longs for the urban scene” and so on. These novels were inevitably praised for their realism.

In Study Out the Land he wrote “Why do we apply to literature a criterion which we have long since outgrown in the other arts? The novel has become akin to the group photograph. Having looked first for ourselves and having surmounted indignation, we look for our neighbors and fellow lodge members…(but) literature involves creation.”

He was a friend of Edmund Wilson and H.L. Menken, for all that.

More photos from the Yucatan trip and news of Jackson is that he is slowly getting better. His care is really exhausting so I put him at the vet’s in Bandera for boarding and care until Tuesday.

Elvia in heaven Elvia is truly a bookworm and is enormously well-read. This is the Ghandi bookstore in Cancun, and I am amazed and encouraged by the amount of books of all genres, plus translations of the classics that were there.

Ghandi Books has also started its own imprint, I think they are using print-on-demand, but this encourages Spanish-speaking authors and I hope sparks new novels, new books of poetry!

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At a restored old hacienda near Merida

Me at the Tren Maya station in Merida

Old and new!

too much happening!

A wonderful ten days in Yucatan with friend Elvia, and then home to a visit from my very favorite niece Denise and her husband and daughter and grandkids, and then no rest for me as Jackson my palomino got into a cattle chute and was very seriously injured and now requires a lot of daily care, bandaging, getting meds down him, cold-spraying injuries and so on and so on. I am going to call Bandera Vets to see if they will take him as a patient-care case for a week to give me a rest. It’s just more than I can do.

Plus! tomcat DT got mauled by a dog and had to have his tail amputated. He is now a bobcat. That took a lot of back and forth to the vets, which is 30 miles away over mountain roads. I am actually trying to write a book. From time to time.

Family — Denise and Scott, Ambril and kids

And not least my problem child Jackson the playful, idiotic but gentle palomino who got himself into a cattle chute. If We can keep the infection down he may make it.

December 21/24

From now on the days get longer.

As a sign of things to come, when I went to the Organic Farm to get my eggs I found these carrots in the refrigerator, looking sunny, looking tropical, looking delicious. It’s a pay-on-the-honor system so I weighed them in at just over a pound, left my money and fled with my loot.

My tomcat got mauled by a dog and returned home with modest little meows as if nothing was really all that wrong, but I took him to the vets’ 30 miles away and he needed sixteen stitches and after a few days at home it was obvious that his tail was broken, and it was not healing, so it had to be amputated. It’s been hairy. The situation, not the tail. The tail is no more. He was on sedatives for the last week and is finally better but not allowed to go out despite his unearthly howling. He’s upstairs here in the study watching the birds at the birdfeeder. Sleeping. Grumbling. God I hope that tail stub looks better after the hair grows out, as it is… it looks like…never mind. I refuse to take a picture of it.

It’s solstice and the sun comes through my windows in a different angle, shining through the slatted screen around my bed, it is far to the south and makes a sun-pattern like a palm-leaf of light.

This was the West Virginia.

Cold weather, wounded cat, water-gun warrioress

Poor DT lost a fight — stitches, broken tailbone, probably bruised all over but you can’t see it because of the fur. Three days at the vet’s, the horrible Cone of Shame collar and locked into the guest room for recovery. There have been two stray dogs wandering this part of the mountain, seeking whom they may devour and they just about did for DT. So I went and bought a ‘paintball’ gun (it actually shoots water pellets) and it took me FOREVER to learn how to put it together.

It looks very outer-space. Hopefully if I see them I can approach them sneakily and blast them with my interplanetary deadly-water weapon and maybe they’ll go somewhere else. If not, more serious measures ensue. This goes for coons, squirrels stealing all the black-oil sunflower seed etc.

What to read? I am ordering The Iliad. I have never read it. Have read The Odyssey several times over.

Cold weather has arrived; 50 degrees today and down to low 40s at night. So looking forward to the Tren Maya trip.