Travel

The shampoo aisle scares me the most

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment
coffee at Pint and Plow in Kerrville

There’s an echeveria succulent on my table at Pint & Plow. Monday morning… a day I actually like even on a workday, which this is not. I gave myself the day off, since I accomplished a work goal last night after a long couple weeks. (“Accomplished.” Seems a dissonant word for a blog about coffee and, soon enough, getting one’s money’s worth at H-E-B using a coupon for Hill Country Essentials paper products. Oh yes, Dear Reader, we are indeed going there. I know you want to, because I know all three of you quite well.)

So: coupons.

Yesterday afternoon I went to the “big H-E-B” on Main Street. I say “big,” because we have two H-E-B stores in Kerrville. The other is on Sidney Baker South, and it used to be an Albertson’s. But H-E-B bought it out, because H-E-B in Texas is to Albertson’s what In-N-Out Burger in L.A. is to Whataburger. (Whataburger is not in L.A., as you probably know. Closest it gets is Phoenix, where there are 13. There are only 16 In-N-Out Burgers in the same area.)

So I’m in H-E-B yesterday — good grief, I wish I didn’t have to do that shift-shift-shift thing when I use the capital H, E, and B and the en-dashes in between, but WordPress doesn’t use predictive text to fill in the store name the way my iPhone does. (H-E-B: please buy WordPress. We know you already own Apple.) I’m in heb yesterday, near the end of my shopping list in Aisle 22, where paper products are, and soon to be in shampoos. Let me tell you, Dear Reader, of all the aisles and products in H-E-B, it is the shampoo aisle that most intimidates me. I am less intimidated by parking my cart in Aisle 39 so I can use the nearby restroom. If you don’t know Aisle 39, it’s where the “Maximum Absorbency Underpads” are. IYKYK, as those under 30 say, and since I turn 60 in May, the last thing I want is to return to my cart and find Schreiner College soccer players snickering at me for being next to the underpads. All in due time, my meal-plan friends.

But with 1,454 different shampoo-related items — ranging in price from “worth the cost of what I put in my hair for literally only nine seconds and then wash down the drain” to “Should I buy shampoo or pay off my student loans?” — I opted for VO5, which cost $0.98.

Waaaay too many shampoos.
This one’s just right: 98 cents.

Dear Reader, an iPhone can render the outdated symbol for “cents” when you hold down the “$” key and move your finger one slot to the right, but the MacBook Air keyboard does not, to my knowledge. When you hold down the “$” key on a Mac, it comes out “$$$$$$$$$.” It’s an indication that pennies are increasingly worthless, but the good news is saying, “Well, that’s my two cents’ worth” is increasingly accurate. Imagine when two cents was a lot of money. (People in Colonial America actually gave a damn what you had to say.)

I had not yet had to skim the bottom row of the shampoo aisle looking for products measured in cents and not dollars, and I was in front of the toilet paper and paper towels. I couldn’t remember which we needed; I knew it was one of them. And then I saw a yellow coupon hanging from one of those metal loops that look like they’ve been liberated from three-ring binders. It promised I’d get $2 off my cart if I bought $12 or more in Hill Country Essentials paper products. Well, I figured, we’ll surely need both of those at some point, so let’s go for it. And this brand of toilet paper is much higher quality than say, Scott 1000, which touts “1000 sheets per roll.” This is great marketing, because you need 500 sheets per bathroom visit. So when you buy a 12-pack for a family of five today, you’re headed back to H-E-B for another pack tomorrow at 2pm before school lets out.

I plucked a coupon and after running the shampoo gauntlet headed for checkout.

I had 22 items — more or less — because if there’s a doubt if I have 10 for the self-checkout or 15 for the Express lane, I will count and count again, because the last thing I want is for someone behind me to send me evil looks the way I do to them. As I always quote from the Good Book, “And ye shall surely judge those who are merely doing the best they can in line at H-E-B and expect that when they shall judge you, ye shall surely remind them loudly and clearly and in the presence of others ‘who’s the damned judge and Who is not’.” And attention H-E-B shoppers: doesn’t it make you slightly uncomfortable when the store employee roaming along the congested checkout area tells you to take your overstuffed cart down to the empty Express Lane to ease overall store traffic, and then you start unpacking, all the while worrying that someone with 14 items will show up behind you and you’ll have to use your well-rehearsed line, “Haha! The lady who works here sent me down here. Haha!” And they give you a slightly judgmental stare, so you actually quote for them your life verse.

There actually is a story about the coupon — about how the cashier didn’t ring it up and I was strolling away and noticed that my receipt didn’t show a deduction and by that time I was near customer service and they retrieved the coupon from the cashier and then, checking my receipt to make sure I had bought $12+ in Hill Country Essentials paper products, which I indeed had, handed me two dollars and 13 cents (for the tax) — but what I really want to say is that I just stepped away from the table with the echeveria succulent to use the men’s room and came back to find my computer still here.

It’s Texas after all, not New York City. And then I went to ask for “more” coffee and not “another” one.

Because Texas itself is a “more” kind of place.

Foxes vs. coyotes vs. werewolves

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

A friend of mine brought me two dozen eggs yesterday from her farm.

I learned that hens produce more eggs in warmer months than in colder ones — which stands to reason, unless you’re from new York City, where eggs are produced in air-conditioned grocery stores year-round and 24/7 — and with it getting warmer here lately — it’ll be in the 70s+ for the next ten days — the hens are doing more of their hen thing. (What do they actually do besides lay eggs? And doesn’t the verb “lay” conjure up only two nouns: bed and eggs? More New York questions that I share with only you three who are reading this.)

I happened to ask her about foxes, given their rather too-cozy relationship to hens — “cozy” as in being the “big spoon” to their little one until hunger overcomes them and spooning transitions to dining — and given my experiencing a mysterious sound the other night that Karen later determined was indeed a fox and not a werewolf. (I was not about to admit that I experienced horripilation — read the post HERE — over a fuzzy red dog that probably was a hundred yards away.)

My friend said that, yes, there were foxes, but a bigger issue was coyotes. We discussed the unique bark of a fox — my now having expertise in distinguishing a fox bark from a werewolf growl — and then she said that coyotes, too, have a unique bark: “They sound like a bunch of drunken frat boys,” and she played a video on her phone taken from her property where, indeed, the pack sounded like inebriated males with underdeveloped frontal cortices. Grinning, I concurred with her comparison, though my smile was only half-sincere since she was not aware that I, too, had sounded that way when I was in college, and I didn’t have a fraternity membership to blame for it.

Bobbing for apples near the United Nations

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

My friend John sent me a Facebook Messenger note earlier this week saying he was coming to Kerrville and would I be up for a late night or early coffee the next day. “Absolutely!” I replied. First thing I thought was, He’s not coming to Kerrville; he’s coming through Kerrville. Or near Kerrville. I was right, he was driving on I-10, which runs by Kerrville. Prepositions matter. They betray intent.

John was a grade school classmate at Trinity School in New York City. The two most vivid things I remembered about him were his nearly always smiling face and bubbly personality, and that he had a birthday party during 2nd grade where we got to bob for apples. Now, I’ve been to birthday parties later in life where we go paint-balling, and that can be loads of fun provided you’re wearing five pairs of sweatpants you don’t mind throwing out afterwards. But the worst thing that happens when you bob for apples is that you might get the collar wet on your Star Trek t-shirt.

He and I reconnected on Facebook a few years back and, as many did, he stayed connected after Tuesday, November 3, 2020, when — as you might remember — the country held an election. We did have an election that day; that is undisputed. What is also undisputed is that people had a dispute about what actually happened that day. And what is also undisputed is that some interpreted the dispute as treason and that those who disputed exactly what happened that day shouldn’t be allowed to fly on airplanes, which in a sense was all fine and good because no air carrier serves Fresca anymore and gas was still cheap on November 2, so I might as well drive wherever it was I wanted to go. (After all, I’d be driving through “fly-over country” anyway, and they have Fresca along the way.) The fact is that those of us who chatted it up before, on and after November 3 were having a “gay old time,” as the Flintstones theme song went. There were others who, too, were having a gay old time in the Fall of 2020, and many were themselves gay, or black, or gay and black, or Hispanic, or poor, or immigrants from Iran or Asia, or union members in Flint, Michigan. The main people who weren’t having a gay old time were straight married women in their 40s who wore yoga pants and drank matchas at Le Pain Quotidien on Manhattan’s Upper West Side after school drop-off and before walking over together to the 11 AM class at SoulCycle. They were not having a gay old time. Instead they were making pink pussy hats and marching down Fifth Avenue, as if The Met had projectile vomited Pepto Bismol toward Trump Tower. (By the way, pink pussy hats on eBay are trading 10:1 for vintage Star Trek t-shirts.)

pink pussy hat

So John and I re-connected some time before things got treacherous and stayed connected when they got downright expensive to drive and dangerous to have needles stuck in your arm ostensibly to make things less dangerous.

While in New York and until his father’s work brought them to California after his fourth grade year, he lived in 50 United Nations Plaza. It’s an apartment building nary a block uptown from the United Nations itself. It’s nice. There currently is a 3-bedroom, 3,000 square-foot condo up for sale for a cool $8.4 mill. And, yes, that’s almost $3,000/sq ft. That’s an abstract number. Let me contextualize it for you: when we moved from New York to Texas, we got three times the living space for half the cost. We also got a landlord here who doesn’t come over to fix a faulty toilet and tell you on his way out that you needed to clean the kitchen or it would attract roaches.

So the morning rolls around after a night during which John and his son did indeed stay in Kerrville, and he and I met for coffee at La Quinta Inn on Sidney Baker. My coffee was free, because he was a guest, and having arrived early I just helped myself. If I had so chose, I could have helped myself also to Fruit Loops, raisin bread toast or oatmeal. Which, if I’m hungry and in the area some other morning, I might just do. Because you totally could. Just smile at the receptionist as you pass like you had retrieved something from the car. In fact, that is exactly what you’d do in New York City if you needed a restroom: confidently walk into a hotel and ask anyone who works there where the bathroom is. Because the Starbucks in NYC have bathrooms open to customers only, if they have bathrooms at all. And the bathrooms that do exist have five digit codes that change every 30 seconds and require fingerprint verification. At least before COVID they did. Now it’s facial recognition.

We had coffee and chatted. John was still warm and bubbly and gracious as always and kept a big smile. He still hugs you when you say hi and again when you say bye.

In the end, he and I will have different lines on our foreheads.

SPECIAL NOTE: The editor is aware that this author’s content dips into an area that is political in nature and, therefore, possibly inflammatory. The author also told us this story, which may offset the scorn some of our readers feel. He made a comment the other day on an Instagram post about the tragedy of 9/11 and, in passing, placed blame on those who were at the time identified as responsible. His opinion hasn’t wavered: those who were held accountable were those who were indeed accountable. But because he allowed only for the remote possibility that the government may have been aware beforehand (that’s what intel is for, after all), and because he didn’t agree that the government was “behind” the attack — yes, another damning preposition — he was called all sorts of names by those who believed the Bushes orchestrated everything and was told by one person to “eat a d _ _ _, you idiot,” using an eggplant emoji for the word itself. (iPhones have made insults so wonderfully metaphorical.) The common thread is humanity. The editorial board of Biscuit Aisle unanimously believes that the only absolute truth we can all agree on — about ourselves or others — is that humanity is constitutionally flawed. That is why there is mercy. That is why there is grace.

Never, ever steam. Or GTFO.

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment
An everything bagel, one of my first batch.

If you don’t know what a “schmear” is–where the word comes from and why its etymology makes its application to bagels clear and unarguable–go HERE. And if you want to experience a bagel from the vantage point of an experienced bagel-eater, go HERE and HERE. As you can see, I’ve given the subject some thought, more thought even that I’ve given to pizza, which somewhat surprises me since I eat pizza more often. I think it’s because Little Caesar’s deep dish pepperoni is so greasily satisfying and Comfort Pizza is such a symphony to my palate that I don’t worry about not getting pizza that’s not like “real New York” pizza. Only Home Slice in Austin offers me that and, even then, they try to Austinize it, and it doesn’t always work.

That is not the case with bagels.

San Antonio’s Boss Bagels are decent, and these are what is served at PAX Coffee Shop downtown. (As an aside, and only Kerrvillians will get this, I like what appears to be a name alteration: from “PAX Coffee and Goods” to “PAX” or “PAX Coffee Shop.” The former made it sound more like a mercantile business, which it has never been. It has been and is a coffeeshop, and new owner Katie has trimmed off any excess nomenclature and made substantive changes to its interior, a couple that I like and a couple that I don’t, but all of which show PAX’s evolution into a pure coffeeshop. And that, I like.)

There are a couple bagel places in Austin that are good in my opinion — Rockstar Bagels and Wholy [sic] Bagels — but most of us have to rely on the closer Boss Bagels, whose one of two locations is beyond the TSA checkpoint at SAT. That’s actually quite smart of them; bad for us.

Rockstar Bagels, center right: “A transcendent bagel experience”?

It was time to make some Freeman bagels.

I decided to use THIS RECIPE, mainly because the writer claimed to be a “real New Yorker.” Anytime someone claims that, it is ballsy and requires other “real New Yorkers” to kick the tires. And in the end, it’s as arbitrary as finding a recipe for a good meatball written by someone who didn’t grow up in Italy or near Arthur Avenue in The Bronx. In the end, it’s all about taste and very little to nothing about the cook’s street creds. Those are useful only in marketing.

A few observations about the process:

  • I had never worked with yeast. I was told to use Active Dry Yeast and, after letting it sit in some warm water with sugar, I was told to stir it till it dissolved, which was a chore. My mistake was that the yeast-water-sugar mixture never bubbled. It may not have been ready to be stirred.
  • Kneading the dough for ten minutes was exercise! Because of the yeast (?), it was rubbery and bounced back, rather than being like biscuit dough, which has no yeast and calls for kneading only so much as necessary. Good grief! Bagel dough, and I assume all dough meant for bread products, gives you Popeye forearms and calls for a good shoulder massage afterward.
  • Dough didn’t rise to “twice its size.” It was maybe 125% of its size after resting for an hour. Probably not sitting in a warm enough spot.
  • Shaping the dough into bagels was both easy and hard. After dividing the dough into 8 separate pieces, getting the dough into round balls was difficult for me. The technique suggested in the recipe was unnecessarily confusing, and even the writer said it sounded more confusing than it was. Let’s just say that it wouldn’t have been so confusing if I’d watched the accompanying video which, like the men of the 1950s driving across the country with the family and not wanting to stop and ask for directions, I wasn’t about to do. Full steam ahead!

And speaking of “steam,” if you have ever eaten a steamed bagel, you know it’s more like eating a marshmallow with sesame seeds on top.

Just don’t.

Three Things I Love About My Truck

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

When we moved to Kerrville five years ago—or, rather, when I was moved here by my Texan wife who in 1997 when we’d been married less than a year and living in New York City and I came home to find her crying over Texas Monthly’s annual chili-cookoff edition which, as you know, is like a siren call to anyone from the Lone Star State and will inexorably draw a woman back regardless of her moving to the city for her career as an architect or following her husband to frozen New England — she swore she’d never move farther north, but… — and back again to New York for his career (“Matzah in New York, Lord, and oyster crackers in New England?! Give me chili or give me death!”) and even with three sons who will eventually need expensive cars and not just weekly subway fare — friends gave us a truck.

Not just any truck.

A white-and-rust 1988 Ford F-150 ranch truck donated to us by friends in Frisco. It had less than 80,000 miles on it.

We had met the couple at the church in NYC where my wife, Karen, and I met. The man was one of two pastors, the other also being from Texas. In fact, there were lots of Texans there. In further fact, if you were from Texas and living in New York at that time, chances are you’d have at least visited Trinity Baptist Church on East 61st Street.

I did not grow up with cars. The first flat tire I changed was two summers ago on our Mini Cooper after watching a couple of YouTube videos. If it weren’t for the internet, I’d be walking the 10-mile round trip to PAX for coffee. (Walking because, my sons said, people here do not ride bicycles. “It’s embarrassing, Dad.” So aside from taking really short flights from Mooney Airfield, a motor vehicle was the only option.)

And now I’ve become quite enamored of this truck. Here are three of the many reasons.

First, it’s a pick-up truck. Which also means it’s a drop-off truck. This, as you all know — and by “all” I mean the 50% of readers who own trucks and the 90+% of that 50% who squeeze theirs into a H-E-B parking spot sticking so far out that I can’t quite get my rinky dink ’88 Ford past you; have mercy — this means that everyone comes calling for a favor.

“I need help getting this mattress over to ”so-and-so’s.”

“I need to take this old washing machine to the landfill.”

“I have a hundred pounds of mulch to haul, and my truck is a 2019 and yours is, well, old…”

Fortunately, this has not been a problem. We live closer to Mooney than to town. If you’re willing to come all this way to borrow the truck and haul your mulch, you might as well go speak to a pilot. He can drop it strategically over your garden with minimum collateral damage to your gas grill.

But the truck bed does make it possible for Karen to schlep around her art supplies and larger canvases. By the way, I sometimes use Yiddish, like schlep. (See companion article on schmear.) Not only do almost all New Yorkers of a certain age, Jewish or not, employ these colorful and almost onomatopoeic words, but they are culturally relevant for those living here, given a recent talk on Kerrville’s first resident, Joshua Brown (“Braun”), who was Jewish.

Second, there are no blind spots. While the steering wheel has too much “play”—it’s more like a boat’s tiller—and while you need to keep it under 55, go slow on the curves and easy on the brakes, it’s otherwise super safe: you signal, give a cursory glance over your shoulder, and the view through the windows—flat glass, not curved; unobstructed by any modern comfort and raised—give you a solid sense of traffic.

Finally: the quarter glass. Also called the valence window. When I have the driver’s side valence opened even a bit and crank the window down all the way, I can rest my bicep on the door and hold onto the vertical trim. I look good doing that. Real good.

I tell you. I’m wearing one of the dozens of snap shirts I’ve purchased here over the past 27 years — my urban-esque Uniqlo jeans well below dashboard level — and no one would guess I’m not from Texas.

Except, maybe, Lyle Lovett.

My prediction for car names in 2050

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

The “Gremlin” by AMC was a great Hot Wheels car. We’d set up parallel bendy orange tracks starting at the radiator in the living room–about shoulder height when we were in third grade–dropping down to the Persian carpeted floor and extending the length of our hallway. (How long was the hallway? Several Christmases’ and birthdays’ worth of Hot Wheels track long.)

These races between my brother and me weren’t about speed, though that certainly helped. They were about perseverance. Would the car go the distance to win. Did that one car that was fastest right after my brother’s birthday in September get a slightly bent axle over the next couple months, giving me the edge on December 25.

My Gremlin Hot Wheels would win. A lot. Beating almost every 2-inch challenger.

And that’s where the comparison between Hot Wheels cars and real ones ends.

Most of us never would have bought the real Gremlin automobile. I mean, even looking at the photo above, you go, “Cool!” But then immediately, “That would be such a cool Hot Wheels car.” ‘Fess up. That’s what you were thinking, too, right?

Invariably, they looked like this, or worse:

My theory — and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to theorize this — is that it was all in the name.

The last Gremlin produced was in 1978. But filmmakers knew a good thing when they saw it: why not leverage that to make “Gremlins” in 1984. When the movie came out, we all remembered what a crap car we either owned or almost did.

A lot of car names have come and gone. Here are some that, mercifully, have gone:

King Midget Model III. You absolutely know this guy is British.
  • Horseless (absolutely real name; look it up)
  • OctoAuto (Spiderman’s foe on the New Jersey Turnpike)
  • Dymaxion (the car that was an early loser to Tesla)
  • Dauphine (much like its human counterpart, it ran on expensive Bordeaux wine, which during a dry season would make it undriveable the next year)
  • Model III, by King Midget
  • Aerobile (some consumers pronounced it with a long “i,” and they opted instead to buy a Dauphine, not realizing a drought was to hit southwestern France the following year)
  • the “Janus” is not a bad name but its maker has a clunker of a name: Zunndapp.
  • Morgan Plus 8 Propane (can be used for commuting or barbecuing.)
  • Iron Duke (not bad, but Mustang drivers always challenged you to a drag race and that quickly got old)
  • Multipla (which syllable gets emphasized?)
  • Biturbo (what the hell is this anyway)

We all have our favorite cars and names. I’d like to offer some of my own for manufacturers to start working on. After all, brand marketing starts at ideation.

Trilobite

The name was first used by Electrolux for the world’s first robotic vacuum cleaner but that appliance was phased out. Most robotic vacuum cleaners bump into one’s feet and don’t navigate around dog shit — look it up — and therefore have gone the way of the Gremlin.

Stapler Type Z

This sleek car is actually not meant to go anywhere. It is designed to sit in your driveway and make your neighbors envious. (Model in ballgown standing alongside only comes with the EX trim level, and she’s union so…)

The Saunter

Unlike the Stapler, the Saunter does go. But slowly. In fact, it’s designed for the occupants to enjoy their surroundings by being immersed in them. In its inimitable genius, Mercedes has designed a car that can actually ride along a beachfront boardwalk without breaking any local ordinances, allowing its driver and the person riding shotgun to step out at any point and get an ice cream or cotton candy. Or to ride the Merry-Go-Round. The Saunter’s maximum speed is 18MPH, the trunk has room only for a picnic basket and it does not come with a windshield or ABS brakes. In urban areas, it is allowed in dedicated bike lanes if those lanes are wide enough (which is never). It also rides well in planned communities.

There is no radio. Listen to the birds. Smell the roses.

Like those made by a master Artist

~ Howard Freeman ~ 2 Comments

“Shushi.” Pronounced SHOO-shee. That’s how my dad said it after he took a course in making sushi in…must-have-been 1990, 1991, 1992? Maybe it was as early as during my college years in the ’80s. I know it was at least a few years before he died. He was still generally in a good mood.

It was Dad who had taken me out for my very first sushi. Mid-80s. I’m pretty sure it was at Hiroshi Sushi on Third Avenue between 38th and 39th. I know it was just a block or so down from work, and it was quite near the Irish bar on the corner — now a TD Bank — where my colleagues and I went on Fridays for lunch, have corned beef and cabbage and three mugs of beer ($1 each), and then I’d go back to work and put my head on my desk for an hour or so. I could do that; my office door didn’t have a window.

Dad brought me into Hiroshi Sushi and we walked toward the back. If it’s the same place, the thin corridor of dining room opened up into an alcove with skylights, and it gave you the feeling of being in New York City with its urban sheen but not its cacophony.

I already knew how to use chopsticks, of course — in New York especially, kids learn how to use chopsticks about the time they learn the difference between a Four In Hand and Half-Windsor knot — but he taught me about wasabi and ginger, where to lay my chopsticks when not eating, and also that if we were sitting at the sushi bar itself that I should pay attention to the sushi chef as he did his work, because it was special, almost sacred.

Wags rips a yuppie a new one.

One summer while Mom, Jim and I were at our beach house, Dad took a course in making “shushi.” (Still to this day, I’ve never heard a single person pronounce it like that, and still to this day I wonder if his sushi teacher said it this way.)

He would make it at home, and he did a reasonably good job.

I must admit to you, Dear Reader, that just now I was looking up sushi terms to write a little more precisely — I have always loved good nomenclature since learning sailing terms as a teenager, and part of getting a skipper’s rank was a test on “nomenclature;” even “nomenclature” itself is cool nomenclature…but. Back to it. — I was looking up sushi terms and was reminded (Okay…I pretty much learned for the first time) that “sushi” refers to the seasoned rice itself, not necessarily the final product we’re served (with seaweed, rice, seafood or vegetables). In fact, if I’m going to be very vulnerable right now, I’ll admit that I thought “sashimi” was sushi without the seaweed — that sashimi was simply the fresh uncooked fish sitting on top of rice. Sashimi is in fact the fresh sliced fish all by its glorious self.

All that said, Dad did a pretty fair job of it. He was adventurous with eating. Not with everything, but with eating? Yes. He’d say, when anyone eating with him balked at trying something like salmon roe — which I still won’t eat — “Oh, c’mon! Live dangerously!”

“Live dangerously!” was always a tell that he was smiling inside. That he took great pride in his two sons and his daughters-in-law. That he was enjoying the company of anyone fortunate enough to dine with him.

It is said that people who enter a crowded room are one of two types. One type says, “Here I am!” The other type says, “There you are!” Dad was the latter.

After a while, Dad was neither.

Dad ended himself in 1998, and in looking back I recall that he hadn’t been doing much dangerous living in the kitchen. In his cooking heyday, in addition to sushi he’d have made various Middle Eastern dishes, most of which had no names, dubious ingredients, but were nevertheless quite tasty. He’d make pesto and freeze some of it in ice cube trays, so that when he needed it, he could pop out a block or three and add it to pasta. He always was delayed in getting dinner on the table. Mom would have to remind him to check the broiler for the Italian bread he was toasting: “My love! The BREAD!” The slightly burned loaf would emerge with blackened edges. Scrape, scrape, scrape.

At a certain point, it was he who did most of the cooking, not Mom, because Dad was at home a lot. He got fired when his firm went through a leveraged buyout and the new C-Suite men thought he wasn’t sanguine enough in his sales forecasts. He was a “realist” (his word), born in 1921 and growing up in the Depression and WWII, losing his mother when he was 9 and his father when he was 20, requiring that he quit college in his junior year so he could support his stepmother and three younger half-siblings. But the early Boomer ass-clowns now in charge of Dad’s company had experienced suffering no worse than whether the cuffs of their bellbottom pants got dirty. At the time, I hated them. I suppose I still do. A little.

I ask myself: should I remember Dad as someone whom I saw last as an inert corpse on his bed with an empty bottle of gin on a silver tray at his side and a clear plastic bag over his head; a farewell note nearby? Or should I remember him as the father who’d put me on his shoulders when I was four, wade out into the ocean to where we could both break through the crests of gentle waves after he’d remind me: “Hold your breath.” Should I remember him as dying alone and maybe afraid? (For who can know what went through his mind at the end.) Or should I remember him as someone who was nothing less than heroic in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s and 1960s and so on and so forth, as he became the mainstay of a family that extended over generations.

Well, Dear Reader, I have to remember him as all of that.

All of that at once, as we all get remembered, or at least as we should be, if those who remember us are being generous. For generosity, in time, is something we tend to outgrow or ignore. Or withhold.

The “worst” among us now were once children who shared an ice cream cone with the family dog. And the “best” among us then sometimes leave final impressions among their loved ones that become secreted away. Rarely discussed. Causing their wives to feel shame.

The contrasting and complementary decisions we make are like tiles placed alongside each other. Like those Dad placed around the edges of a cutting-board he made when I was ten.

Like a mosaic created by a master Artist.

“AYTCH”

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

Perhaps the most important thing you need to know about the H-E-B grocery store is that you pronounce the hyphens.

Well, not exactly pronounce them. More like acknowledge them, and let them influence the way you say, “H-E-B.”

First, I want to go on record as saying that it’s a hassle to type out the store’s name that way. Holding down caps lock and then releasing it to press the hyphen key back and forth a couple times really slows the flow of thought. It’d be easier if the store’s name was, “H_E_B” with underscores, which are made with caps lock on and therefore require less effort when combined with the capital letters. Or I’d be ok with “h-e-b.” Would you be ok with “h-e-b”? I typed it twice with almost no effort, because we’re just a couple of concerned grocery shoppers trying to make Kerrville a better place to live, work and buy chorizo.

And let’s face it, this blog is about me and for me and I’m pretty much my own star reader, and if “H-E-B” becomes too burdensome to type, I’ll simply refer to my favorite place to buy groceries using the name of the store I shopped at during college in Raleigh, North Carolina: Piggly Wiggly. That name is infinitely easier to type, has great cadence and is quite fun to say (try to say it without smiling and then try it a second time without saying it slowly and elongating each syllable; I bet you can’t do it). “Piggly Wiggly… — pigg-uh-lee wigg-uh-lee” — sounds like a baby gurgling, right? It also contains four G’s, a much-neglected letter, except in several words I just used and which I’m sure you’re happy about. G is a fun letter.

But, all right, let’s let bygones be bygones.

And so that you know I’m willing to hassle with caps lock and hyphens for your benefit since you may not shop in Texas, the truly correct way to say the store name, with emphasis and broken into syllables, is “AYTCH-ee-BEE.” That, too, required alternating caps lock and hyphens. But I’m feeling generous.

The main thing here is that if there were no hyphens, half of us would pronounce the store name as, “HEBB,” right? Like, if you’re from Jersey, California or Tulsa, you’d say, “HEBB.” Like, I don’t say I’m going to make a cash withdrawal at my local “see-aytch-ay-ess-ee” bank, do I? (No, I do not.) H-E-B wouldn’t even come across as capitalized during our conversation! All in lowercase, “hebb” would receive no more respect than any other dadgum word in this post except for AYTCH. And that’s not really a word. Except among my cousins in eastern North Carolina, who’d say to me when I was a boy, “Howdy! C’mon over and scratch this AYTCH here on thuh taupe of muh back! Do that and I’ll give you a Co’-Cola. But before you come in here cut out those lights in the living room, because after you finish your Co’-Cola, I need you to carry me to the Pigg-uh-lee Wigg-uh-lee, and we ain’t coming back here till suppertime.”

But I would not pronounce the unhyphenated name as “hebb,” because I have known for a long time that H-E-B stands for Howard E. Butt.

And there are so few decent Howards in the world.

A quick survey: a New York City shock jock (__Stern); __ The Duck; a screaming politician (__Dean); a frumpy suburban dad in “Happy Days”… (__Cunningham); and the brilliant and rich but eccentric turn of the 20th century magnate (__Hughes). Then again, the sometimes-CEO of Starbucks (__Schultz) is one of them I’m proud to have my name associated with.

Also, I am Howard Frank Freeman IV. (As in the Latin “the fourth.” Not, as some Okies say in conversation, “Howard Frank Freeman the iv.”

My mother always wanted to name our first-born son, “Howard Frank Freeman V,” so that she could nickname him “Quint” — the Latin for “fifth.”

It was a good plan, granted it was the plan of someone other than the child’s parents, until Karen said, “Beverly, we’re naming him Carter.”

She replied, “You can call him whatever you want, but I’m calling him Quint.”

Mom could be like that.

Gambusia Affinis

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

Gambusia Affinis. We need more Gambusia Affinises. If indeed that’s the plural. It’s Latin, so…affines. (Nominative plural for masculine and neuter nouns. And, yes, of course I had to look that up. In high school, I took Latin III with Mr. Smith, but he’d spit while he talked, so I’d get distracted and tune out somewhere after the singular dative. In fact, he’d point something out to the class and exclaim excitedly, “D’you see? D’you see?!” We chortled behind his back that he was saying “juicy.”) What we are talking about, in Latin or otherwise, is the mosquitofish—that is the famed mosquitofish that is both fish and mosquito-eater, a lovely combination indeed.

I was more than a little bothered. I’d taken my first cup of coffee outside to the back porch around 5:40 AM. I sat in my chaise lounge as I am wont to do. This is my routine most mornings if I rise before dawn: have my first cup outside without my phone next to me. It’s a slightly uncomfortable feeling as you well know, Dear Reader, if you have to do anything without the thing with which you are accustomed to doing everything. Yet it is sometimes desirable, occasionally even essential. For example, my personal opinion is that men who use this thing to conduct business conversations in airport bathroom stalls should immediately be stripped of their first class boarding status and placed in Group 9, where the fight for overhead space for carry-ons typically results in having one’s bags gate checked. Flight attendant upon my informing her of his men’s room transgression: “What. You don’t like having your bag gate-checked, Mr. First-Class Would-You-Like-A-Drink-Before-Takeoff-Person? Tough. Stop using your phone in the shitter.”

When I get up and prepare to go outside, I always wear a hoodie of some kind. Even on warm summer mornings when the air is in the low 70s. This way, if the gambusia affines haven’t done their job down at the Guadalupe River, I have back-up. I simply pull my hoodie over my head, blocking out most of the mosquitoes’ runway to my ears. Would you not agree that the buzzing in your ears is often a lot more annoying than a bite? But having to do so spoils the moment, and my coffee usually accompanies me back inside when it’s only half finished.

Today I asked myself, What besides the gambusia affinis eats mosquitoes? Because we all ask ourselves, don’t we, “Why on God’s green earth would He make mosquitoes?” I mean, that’s a really common question. If you’re honest, you’ve asked yourself that, especially if you’re not wearing a hoodie and even if you don’t believe in God. At that moment, drinking your coffee, especially if you’re not wearing a hoodie, you become a True Believer. You might then doubt God’s goodness or at least His wisdom. That’s ok. Don’t feel bad. Many of us have felt that way, except in places where gambusia affines are plentiful. Because where gambusia affines are plentiful, mosquitoes are few, and atheists are numerous. Mosquitofish are most often found in the southern parts of Illinois and Indiana, throughout the Mississippi River and its tributary waters, and as far south as the Gulf Coast in the northeastern parts of Mexico. (This is true; I looked it up.) If you don’t believe in God, you will find like-minded mosquito-less friends somewhere between Marion and Evansville. (And this is simple logic.)

So in lieu of gambusia affines, I wondered, What birds eat mosquitoes?

I knew purple martins did. And bats. All of a sudden I hear a lone bird singing in the tree to the left of the porch. It was the first birdsong of the morning, and it was so crisp and loud that I thought maybe it would wake Karen. (Our bedroom windows are directly next to that tree.) I wondered two things: what species was that bird I was hearing, and could it pass muster eating mosquitoes as contrasted against the gambusia affinis? After all, the mosquitofish is specifically named for its prowess at eating mosquitoes.

I didn’t know whether the bird I heard was a purple martin, a mockingbird, or some other species. (If I don’t know what bird it is that I’m hearing, which is usually, I assume it’s a mockingbird, because it obviously mocks other birds so much that it fools you and me, and if I say it’s a mockingbird, I sound knowledgeable, especially if you have less clue than I do. Once when we were on vacation in Ruidoso, New Mexico, I heard and saw what I thought was a raven. As you know, they can be easily mistaken for crows. But ravens have special spiritual significance when they appear in your life. They can be an omen. So I actually researched online the sounds and slight physical differences between the two species, like their beaks and tails, to determine if I was hearing a crow or a bird that might mean I am the long-awaited savior. The savior part is crass Tuesday humor. But I can assure you that I did indeed research ravens with the full expectation that seeing one meant something of grave importance. Those of you who know me will roll your eyes and be like, “Yeah he did.”)

While I didn’t have my phone with me on the porch today for the aforementioned reasons, I thought, “There must be an iPhone app that helps me identify birds by sound.” Sure enough there is. Apparently, the best one is Merlin Bird ID. (That is, if you consider a 4.8-star rating on the App Store from 44,000 users as opposed to Bird Genie, which has 2 stars with 93 users, the first of whom was smart and gave it a 1-star try and 92 others who were not so smart.)

I went inside to my office and downloaded Merlin Bird ID and waited for the 983 MB file to install—that file was only Texas’s birds, by the way—and quickly walked back to the porch, hoping that the bird was still singing. It was. I followed the instructions and found out that it was either a Carolina Wren or a Purple Martin. Most likely a Carolina Wren (so said the app).

I marveled at the app. And I also felt a deep satisfaction knowing that bird’s specific tribe. I found myself not caring whether it ate mosquitoes or not. There is something most satisfying about encountering something, having it enhance one’s appreciation of nature and the peace of the morning, and then finding out what its name is.

Gratitude comes much more easily when you know the name of the one you’re thankful for.

Restoration

~ Howard Freeman ~ Leave a comment

With torrential rain last night and early this morning — “torrential,” that is, contrasted against our standard “none” — you know I’m going to talk a little about the sky. Or skies, as I pointed out recently. Carol Arnold yesterday on Facebook posted a painting of hers inspired by a rainstorm in Junction, Texas. She had been driving home from Marathon.

Marathon is the town you drive through to get to Big Bend’s main visitor center. Yes, you could go through Terlingua but from Alpine, where you’re staying, if not Marathon itself, it makes more sense to go through the latter. You have to go through a border patrol checkpoint, because in Big Bend you can cross into Mexico, most notably by wading into the Rio Grande at the Santa Elena Pass. In fact, you can get to Mexico there without getting your shirt wet.

The drive back from Marathon along I-10 East affords many big-sky panoramas. There are only a few places in the U.S., and even the world, where you can still enjoy a natural panorama. Human settlement, even one with low-rise dwellings, can’t be considered a “panorama.” It would take Nature to restore it.

Click-hold and move the bar above to reveal all of Carol’s painting, and look to the lower right. That swath of dark means someone’s getting dumped on. In Junction, that’s probably the people coming out of McDonald’s just off the highway on their way to or from Mason.

My photo is aimed southwest from Comanche Trace. Planes are probably grounded at the Kerrville-Kerr County Airport. Or if the dump is far south enough, people at Toucan Jim’s restaurant are scampering inside from the backyard dining area, running and giggling as they grasp onto the stems of margarita glasses and the edges of plates with jalapeño poppers. Feeling the sizable raindrops start to cool their skin under their light-colored shirts, now polka-dotted with gray, and knowing it’s only a sudden and short-lived luxury. Table neighbors, strangers just moments ago, glance at each other and smile. They begin friendly negotiations to determine who gets to sit at the bar to finish their meals and who looks for a spot elsewhere inside. Men stand sideways between bar stools and occasionally apologize to the person behind them.