J.D.’s Columns

Nellie        A friend recently asked if I had a picture of my great grandfather. I had to confess that I did not know who my great grandfathers were. I have been told that my maternal great grandmother had one leg, and that both of my grandfathers came from the Ozarks of Missouri, one fleeing home because his brothers were hanging around with Jesse James. He homesteaded in a sod house in the Sandhills of Nebraska. The other proved up on a chunk of dryland in northeastern Colorado where he survived the 30’s by becoming a traveling pickle salesman.       The Missouri connection is what, long ago, led my folks and me to travel from Alliance, Nebraska to Rutledge, Missouri to visit my Mom’s cousin Bobbie. The year before, Bobbie had her singlewide moved closer to the highway so she could better hear the trucks climbing the grade south of her place. That is about as hillbilly as one can get.     While we were in...

Pythagoras in Diapers        A couple of years ago my wife and I were in the Pendleton Convention Center, watching a basketball game between the Coyotes and the Cougars. The Cougars were chomping some serious Coyote butt, 40-21. During a foul shot at the other end of the court, (after Coyote #22 was jerked to the floor by his ponytail,) we scurried up the out-of-bounds line and wedged ourselves into the fourth row of the bleachers behind a group of teenage girls with greasepaint paw prints on their cheeks and wearing white t-shirts emblazoned with Magic Marker slogans like “Scott is soooo hot” and “Number Nine is mine. Hands off.”      A few minutes later, while I was watching the Cougar point guard bring the ball up the floor with that stop-and-go, dribble-between-the-legs, shuck-and-jive stuff that nobody but the Globetrotters tried to do until twenty years ago, Caty nudged me in the ribs and pointed with a finger in her lap to the gir...

Hail Cesar      I worked with Cesar Romero…. not the one who acted with Tyrone Power, Burl Ives, or Rod Serling, and not the guy who played The Joker to Adam West’s Batman on television.       The Cesar Romero with whom I worked was a janitor, a green card custodian two years out of Nicaragua. We buffed floors, cleaned toilets, fixed faucets, painted, filled water coolers, emptied the trash and washed the windows together in Glide Memorial Church, a seven-story building situated in the heart of the Tenderloin, San Francisco.       The Tenderloin has always been a rasty part of Baghdad by the Bay. At the time Cesar and I performed our custodial magic, the district was becoming a landing spot for Vietnamese folks, ten city blocks in transition from a haven for street hookers, soup kitchens and sex toy shops to a home for Asian versions of the same.       Glide Church is still...

Einstein for Duck Hunters           Albert and I worked together on a project near Walden Pond in north-central Massachusetts. We were hired by a developer to help with chopping Mary Todd Lincoln’s (Abe wife) family farm into what was intended to become a subdivision and bedroom community for Boston.         Al was a skinny seventeen-year-old kid from Indiana with unmanageable hair who was already a graduate student at MIT. I was twenty-three and somewhat addicted to party life with double shots of Jim Beam and weed. I was the chainsaw operator, hacking the road right-of-way through old-growth hardwoods that Mary Todd climbed as a little girl. We didn’t have a chipper truck. Al piled the slash in clearings to be burned in the fall        During our first lunch together, I asked Albert what he studied. His doctoral thesis involved mathematically mutating a basketball in...

The Executioner’s Fork  Cambridge, Massachusetts        Five of us roomed in three bedrooms, a kitchen and one bathroom of a stout white house near Harvard Square. Charles, the producer of the unfinished film that gnawed at our waking lives shared a room with Beryl, who ate only with chopsticks and spent her days with runes and Tarot cards.      I'd quit a tree-trimmer’s job in California, enrolled in graduate school in Cambridge, then dropped out and returned to California for six months to help Charles as he ran his lens across the new consciousness born in the Haight-Ashbury. In Cambridge my friends from college were dealing Mexican weed and windowpane acid. My room was a leaded-glass turret with a radiator that sounded like it puked hailstones. There were brown roses on the wallpaper.  By pressing my thumbs on my eyes, just so, the roses swirled, collided, and turned pink.       ...

Abby and the Goat        Thirteen of us began the winter 30 miles off the nearest plowed road, high in the Salmon River Mountains of central Idaho. Four were under the age of five. A friend who had a mining claim nearby decided we needed more milk for the smaller citizens and showed up before the first snows with a load of hay and a milk goat. Her name was Mandy, marked like a mule deer with floppy ears. Howdy had an older resident goat, Granny, who was about milked out. Granny was pleased to have company.            The only other domestic critters in town were six scraggly hens, a pet rat named Roscoe who had been to Japan with his owner when she was Miss Tanfastic, a Collie named Snoopy, and a full grown Great Dane, Abby. Abby got way overexcited when dealing with quickly moving objects, like humans on sleds. By riding down a long hill, one could shoosh right into a large hot springs pool. Abby liked to run al...

Calendars without Underpants       Happy New Year to all Y’all. My interest in calendars began as an early teen in Deadwood, South Dakota, when my Dad brought home a huge boxful of old calendars given to him by an itinerant calendar salesman. In those days, pictures on calendars were about the only visual art hanging in working class homes. Most folks’ houses sported a knickknack shelf containing a salt and pepper shaker collection, or twenty ceramic hunting dogs, or what remained of the Ironstone china after the grandfolks bounced it across the prairies, but very few contained framed artwork. The images on calendars were all we knew of the Old Masters.    I lugged the box upstairs to my bedroom and began my arts education session. About fifteen deep, below the Golden Retriever puppies and Autumn in New England and Poppies in Flanders Fields and Two Cowpokes Leaning on the Fence Rail and Scenic Lake Louise and The Resurrection and Van Gogh’s Sunfl...