School Story:
Excerpted from the Message Forum pages, 18 out of the 25 Things About Me:
1. For a while during the 1990s into the new millennium, I dusted off my vintage 1966 9’8” Dewey Weber Performer board and once again took up surfing.
3. On a blustery, isolated, yet starkly beautiful day, I hiked and semi-climbed to the top of an uninhabited island-mountain while in the Arctic Ocean 70 miles off the coast of Northern Norway. And furthermore — with good reason — you might ask the simple question, “why?” Well, that’s another story entirely.
4. I believe there was only one bullfight event ever held at the Astrodome — the bloodless bullfight mentioned by Margaret Willis Boles in her “25 Things” — Ronnie Honea and I were also there that night. As a counterpoint, I’ve also seen bloody bullfights in Monterey and Puerto Vallarta.
5. In the “25 Things” listed by Ray Beets, he mentions that he met my apartment mate while in Munich on a business trip. Ray had told me the story during the last class reunion. The apartment mate to which he is referring is Omar from Beirut — and for a time during our freshman year at the University of Houston, Omar shared an apartment with me, Ronnie Honea, and Terry Wheeler. It is always a curious thing to come across personal connections in the most unexpected of places.
6. And speaking of unexpected, I was in Florence, Italy among a crowd of strangers standing in the rotunda looking up at the larger-than-life sculpture, “David,” by Michelangelo. As you may recall, it’s a famous sculpture powerful and large in every aspect. And therefore, in this particular location, it was most startling and complimentary to hear — in a voice much louder than the hushed murmur of the crowd — someone calling out my name. It was a girl I’d met in an Austin symposium six months earlier. And that’s yet another story.
7. David Lydic and I were apartment mates both as undergraduate students in Austin and post-graduate students in Houston. In Austin we were in the same German class and often spent late-night hours at a Denney’s drinking coffee, discussing current affairs, and trying to speak German.
8. For several years during the 1970s they kept asking me to be in the church choir. I kept saying, “no.” Then one day they asked if I would direct the choir, at which point I accepted and directed for the next two years. Ever since then I’ve had the impression that story is somehow psychologically revealing — but I’ve never quite put my finger on it.
10. One of my most interesting professional interior design projects was when I did the house of Air Force General López Reyes in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Everywhere I traveled with the family we were accompanied by armed guards and a machine gun-mounted Jeep. A couple of days after finishing the project I attended a house reception they hosted for the then President of Honduras, Suazo Córdova. There were about forty people at the reception and about 400 uniformed guards outside. A week or so after the party, General López became the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. A couple of years later I saw him in an interview on 60 Minutes, some of which was filmed in the study of his home.
12. Accumulating several interesting stories too long for this space, I once hitchhiked across The Republic of Ireland into Northern Ireland and along the coastal road from Londonderry to Belfast. I was in Belfast on the weekend of the Orange Parades. The UDA had hijacked 60% of the city bus system and was using them as barricades to parts of the city. There were clusters of hooded combatants every few blocks, and there were armed British soldiers maneuvering on every block. The night before leaving Ireland on a ferry to Stranraer, I was awakened by gunfire from a battle a block from my budget hotel.
13. Speaking of hitchhiking, Ronnie Honea and I once hitchhiked to Tennessee and back through Mississippi and Louisiana.
14. Because my grandfather called the house at 3:30 A.M. and insisted that we wake up and go outside to see, in 1966 I was able to witness what has since been described as one of the strongest meteor showers in history, the Leonids Meteor Shower of November, 1966 — at its peak showing an estimated 100,000 meteors per hour. It made a HUGE impression on me. And I consider that single telephone call as one of my grandfather’s best family legacies.
15. Another meteor story — at about 4:00 A.M. in July 1982, I was alone in a field watching the last half of a lunar eclipse when a meteor shot across the sky and passed over the face of the eclipsed moon. I haven’t done the math, but I believe it is such a rare occurrence that I’d be safe to say only a few people has ever seen that set of circumstances all at the same time — a meteor across the moon during an eclipse.
17. Following the publication of 3 Savanna Blue in 2000, co-written with Peggy Lynch, Carlyn Reding (Byron Luke’s older sister), and myself, I’ve been invited as a featured poet for a number of readings and seminars in Dallas, Fort Worth, Temple, Austin, The Woodlands, and various other places, and often been involved with both the Houston and the Austin Poetry Festivals. All told I’ve read at well over a hundred literary venues.
19. As a summer student at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, I would often join other students and faculty for an afternoon “Tea” in Carlyle Hall. Selected teas would sometimes extend into various other liquid specialties produced in Scotland — and there was always lively discussions about any and everything. On the first day of classes, the opening lecture was given by Prince Philip himself, apparently in Edinburgh for the day from his Scottish country residence, Balmoral Castle. That afternoon during the tea-time, with about twenty-five people in the room, Prince Philip once again arrived with Angus McKay, the school director. I was talking with another student, Ian McNaughty of Aberdeen, when Prince Philip and the director joined us.
So there I was, a Texan sipping tea — wearing an off-white travel shirt, a tie, a pair of blue jeans, and Red Wing boots — and just hanging out and chattin’ along with a member of the Royal Family. He was very friendly, we conversed about five minutes or so, then he continued his circuit of discussions through the room.
20. One time in an art gallery at the Pacific Design Center, I shared a buffet with Mel Gibson and two woman with him.
23. In 1987, my former wife, Ada, and I attended the day-long San Francisco festivities for the Golden Gate Bridge 50th Anniversary. After most of the estimated half-million people came off the bridge, we walked onto the bridge and had almost an hour strolling around near the middle with no cars before the antique car parade finally began.
24. My mother died five years ago after many difficult years fighting Parkinson’s Disease. My dad is now 91 and has a girlfriend — a lady he first knew seventy-three years ago in his high school.
25. In Austin in the early 1970s, I dated Elizabet, a graduate student and instructor from Germany. She moved back to Germany a year later. In the early 1990s, while reading some old travel logs in the canning room of my great-uncle’s mountain house in North Carolina, I found reference that my relatives had met Elizabet’s family (and Elizabet, then 5 or 6 years old) while traveling in Oberammergau, Bavaria in the mid 1950s.
Sometimes it really is a small world.
