Posted by admin on April 12, 2013 in
Musings Betty and I are going north to Moscow, Idaho, to screen our documentary film BRAVO! and as always, the prospect of traveling to a new location leaves me with—besides a sense of elation—a sense of trepidation…sort of, anyway. Not that I am on edge like I would be if I had to travel to Syria [...]
Tags: Big Hatchet, Bravo!, Bureau of Land Management, Chihuahuan Desert, Columbus, El Norte, Hermanas, Mexico, Moscow, New Mexico, Pancho Villa, pistols, quail, ravens, Stetson hat, Syria, Tres Hermanas, Undocumented, Vietnam
Posted by admin on September 12, 2012 in
Books,
Travel I am sitting here in central Maine thinking about radiant hardwoods that glow like neon in the waning light of evening. Brilliant, possessive reds and oranges and yellows crowd my inner vision, but we are in Maine too early, so the only colors here are summer green and the hinted ends of the maples barely [...]
Tags: Autumn, Blue Ridge Parkway, Boston, Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, Chatanooga, Chickamauga, Chuck and Donna Dennis, Civil War, film, Jamestown, Khe Sanh, Lee and Betty Plevney, Maine, Marie Chalmers, Mississippi, North End, Old North Church, Ripley, Tippah County, Vietnam, Vietnam War, Washington DC, Williamsburg, Yorktown
Posted by admin on August 20, 2012 in
Musings,
Travel Yesterday the blue in the sky acted like a magnet, dragging me into the puffed-wheat world of clouds. The road bored into a thick hardwood forest. The humidity and temperature pitied my dry-skinned Idaho-ness and remained in the realm of comfort. Betty and I showed at Shiloh battlefield early, before the midday Sunday visitor rush [...]
Tags: Antietam, Bark Road, bayonet charges, Bloody Pond, catfish, Catfish Hotel, Civil War, Corinth-Pittsburg Road, East Corinth Road, Gettysburg, grape shot, Greasy Grass, Hornet's Nest, Khe Sanh, Little Big Horn, musket balls, Normandy, Peach Orchard, Pittsburg Landing, Shiloh, Shiloh National Military Park, Spottsylvania Courthouse, Tennessee, Tennessee River, Vietnam
Posted by admin on February 24, 2012 in
Musings,
Photography Last Saturday Betty and I hung her photography exhibit in Boise at an event titled Art in the Bar V at the Knitting Factory Concert House. It turned out to be a 15-hour event and it took us a few days to recover from that experience. Betty shared booth space with her photographer and writer [...]
Tags: Allan Ansel, Aretha Franklin, Art in the Bar, Betty Rodgers, digital art, El Greco, expressionism, Jefferson Airplane, John Lennon, music, photography, Sheila Robertson, tattoos, The Beatles, Vietnam
Posted by admin on August 26, 2011 in
Books I cleaned my office this last weekend and as I straightened the bookshelves, J Edward Chamberlain’s, Horse (Blue Ridge, New York, NY), fell on the floor. Horse is a narrative that laymen can read about how mankind and the horse have developed a somewhat unique, symbiotic relationship. As I hefted the book, an image of [...]
Tags: Arizona, betting, Casa Grande, Cloudcroft, cowboys, gambling, horse races, horses, hostler, jockeys, Los Conquistadores, New Mexico, pin ball machines, Prescott, quarter horses, Ruidoso, Sierra Blanca, Vietnam
Posted by admin on July 15, 2011 in
Musings On April 8th, 1968, I flew into the Tucson, Arizona airport returning from my thirteen-month tour of duty in Vietnam. When I got off the Boeing 707, two of my best friends, who lived in Tucson, and my parents, who lived seventy miles to the northwest, were waiting for me as I debarked. The shock [...]
Tags: Afghanistan, Iraq, Khe Sanh, Making the Corps, Marines, Siobhan Fallon, Thank You for Your Service, the draft, Thomas Ricks, Tucson, Vietnam, You Know When the Men Are Gone
Posted by admin on July 8, 2011 in
Musings Last Friday my wife Betty and I enjoyed lunch with the Idaho Writer’s Guild while we listened to guest speaker and author, David Schmahmann, read from his book, The Double Life of Alfred Buber, (The Permanent Press, 2011). I have not yet read the book, but from what I learned at the luncheon, it’s about [...]
Tags: David Schmahmann, hookers, Idaho, Idaho Writers Guild, Khe Sanh, pagodas, United States military, Vietnam
Posted by admin on June 24, 2011 in
Musings I just read an essay about Africa in which the author mused about sitting in an airport waiting for a ride out of Nigeria. As he dealt with delays and uncertainty, he killed time watching the insects fly around as evening arrived and he noticed how the locals trapped them and cooked them in a [...]
Tags: Africa, Boise, C-Rations, cannibalism, civilized, cockroaches, Fanta, grasshoppers, Idaho, insects, katydids, Khe Sanh, leeches, McDermitt, Mormon crickets, Mt. Jefferson, Nevada, Nigeria, Sebastopol, spiders, Vietnam
Posted by admin on May 13, 2011 in
Musings Yesterday, walking along the sidewalks that wind through the subdivision where we live, Betty and I admired the fulsome blossoms of ornamental trees that line the streets and walkways. Dogs barked . . . Dachshunds, Springer Spaniels, yellow Labrador Retrievers, German Shorthairs, black mutts with gray and wizened mugs. The sound of a plane engine [...]
Tags: 2011, airplanes, America, Bear, bomb shelters, Boy Scouts, Civil Defense, Cold war, Eagle Scout, gin, graduation, Khrushchev, MIG, Nuclear Winter, Russia, Santa Cruz River, Tupolev-T95, Vietnam, vodka
Posted by admin on April 8, 2011 in
Musings One of the Twitter headlines for The Washington Post.com on 4/5/2011 was, “Is it impolite to bring reading material to a public restroom?” I chuckled when I read that and not because of the inanity of the query, but because of memories that hove into my mind’s view. In early April, 1968, I had just [...]
Tags: Arizona, black widows, flies, Heads, Hill 861, Idaho, Incoming, Khe Sanh, Khe Sanh Shuffle, Mohawk, Orson Welles, Outhouses, Phu Bai, tar paper, The Black Rose, The Stars and Stripes, Tyrone Power, Vietnam
