It was 2011, near the end of a long drought and shortly after the Lost Pines Fire in Bastrop destroyed my favorite forest.
Fun Fun Fun Fest had just moved to Auditorium Shores in Austin and the lineup looked pretty good. My concert buddy and I turned up with a list of bands we wanted to see.
I was still excited about Occupy Wall Street around that time, even though the movement seemed to be fading. I didn’t participate beyond checking out the “Occupation” at Austin City Hall, but still I wondered, was this about to be “the revolution”?
So we show up at the festival and everyone is wearing bandanas over their faces like a bunch of insurgents. I was like, oh shit. OWS is getting its second wind. Maybe I underestimated them.
Just then a gust of wind caught me in the face and I got a mouthful of dirt. Summer had killed all the grass along Auditorium Shores. Every time the wind blew it was like getting sandblasted in the face.
The dust was so bad my friend’s allergies flared up and he had to bail partway through.
I saw some good shows despite the dust. I was impressed with how far Budos Band had come since I saw them the first time. Love that Ethiopian world funk. Saw Grimes before she dated Elon.
Not bad. Witch house, I guess you’d call it. Public Enemy put on a hell of a show. I waited for them to mention OWS, but they never did. Kool Keith cracked me up. For some reason I got more out of the rappers.
I still kinda wish I’d gone to the Danzig show. My buddy got to see Glenn Danzig throw his jealous fit because Slayer had a bigger stage, the one where he drove off and left his band. That would’ve been entertaining.
No complaints. Instead I saw Public Enemy who were as badass as I hoped they would be. I wondered if they might mention OWS, but it seemed like a pretty white movement… They didn’t mention it.
I kept waiting for a sign that police truncheons and infighting hadn’t killed OWS yet.
Eventually I figured Henry Rollins was a radical guy as well as a great storyteller. If he didn’t bring up OWS, then that was it. No revolution. At least not yet…
I read the book of Jonah on a whim recently, and damned if I didn’t like it. You know the one, where Jonah gets swallowed by a whale (or fish. Who cares?).
Yahweh actually wasn’t a dick this time, lets the city he was going to smite off with a warning.
As usual, there was a pretty big “or else” if Ninevah (modern day Mosul, Iraq) didn’t get its shit together, but he gave ‘em a chance. He didn’t just explode them like he did Sodom and Gomorrah.
In this story, the employee is the bad guy. He refused to relay the ultimatum IN CASE they repented. He wanted to seem them to get zapped. I started thinking about Yahweh and Jonah as an employer/employee relationship and the story got funny to me. I could see it from both sides.
If I’m Yahweh, Jonah has got to be the worst employee ever. What. A. Whiny. Bitch. He hates the Ninevites so much he’d rather die than give do a simple job and pass a message along.
If I’m Jonah, this is a story about the worst job ever. You get one shitty assignment too many and you’re not allowed to quit.
Don’t report to work, God sends a storm after you. Try to drown yourself. He sends a giant fish to swallow you and spit you out at the job site. You’re not even allowed to die. When I was a newspaper editor I used to joke that if I died, they’d put a laptop in the casket and make me finish the next edition before I could lay down. I also got a kick out of the Ninevah repenting so hard even the animals had to fast and wear burlap sacks. That’s some serious compliance. I guess they could tell Jonah was in a really bad mood.
My drawing capabilities aren’t what they used to be, but this is close.
When I was two I dreamed I was inside a playland of soft clear tubes, inflated with air like the bounce house at the kiddie park.
Countless children filled the tubes, which appeared to be endless. It should have been a fun dream, but it wasn’t.
Children slid down slides. They shouted and squealed. They tossed beach balls around.
There were no adults, only small children. Everyone could play and play as long as they liked.
And all around was that clean yet cloying smell. The smell of fun, the smell of a new toy, the odor you could taste when you stuck it in your mouth.
It should have been fun. But that clean yet cloying smell was wrong in a way I couldn’t explain.
The fun went on forever and no one was in charge. I was uneasy. I didn’t know how to feel.
Anytime I smell a beach ball, buy new shower curtains or blow up an air mattress, I get a flashback to that dream. It’s the fragrance of fun, but still I feel uneasy.
I put a lot of stock in dreams, especially the ones that stick around. Sometimes it takes years to understand them, sometimes I never do. But they feel like messages.
I’m not sure why the above dream stuck around. Maybe it was toddler’s version of the Rapture Machine dream. A hint of falseness about the world I was being sold.
Never thought to take a picture of the Compugraphic machine the typesetter used back in the early newspaper days, but I found one online that looks a lot like it.
One thing I regret about my early days in the paper business was not taking any photos of all that obsolete tech. Although they’d be in black and white and I probably would’ve lost them by now.
There was the big blue Compugraphic machine used by the typesetter, a lady who turned your copy into column-wide strips that printed out on Kodak paper. They came out smelling of photochemicals and you had to dry them out before you could paste them up.
The typesetter could only see half a column at a time. If she messed up, that section had to be done again and pasted onto the rest of the copy.
There was the machine where you typed in your headlines. In a few pre-set fonts and sizes. Biggest size was 72 points. My editor back then called that the “Second Coming of Jesus font.”
There was the waxer. You fed copy and photos through it it and coated the underside with wax, so you could stick them down on the layout sheets – newspaper sized paper, with a light blue grid on it. We used light blue pens to circle errors to be corrected. Blue wouldn’t photograph at the press.
I got so sick of having sticky hands on press day. A friend’s band once made a song about that called “wax on my ass.”
There was the big camera in the dark room we used to make half-tones – the photos with dots. If you tried to put a regular pic in the paper, it came out looking Xeroxed.
There were all the little tools you took for granted: border tape (black tape in different widths, used to put a black boxes around ads), sizing wheel (to help figure out the settings on the dark room page camera. “Where there’s a wheel there’s a way.”).
There were the layout tables, tilted at an angle. Underneath were shelves full of clip art books the ad production people used. The art had to be cut out with an X-acto knife and stuck to the page – with wax. I used to help them from time to time. I was really good at cutting the border tape straight. (Cut through the corners at a diagonal.)
I remember the tables in the back, where we had to insert (rectangular) circulars into the papers when they came back from the press.
We made a little assembly line. All hands on deck till we got it done. “You know they can train monkeys to do this shit,” was my usual joke. Your hands would be black at the end of the day.
There was a machine at the press that could do it automatically, but it broke and they didn’t want to pay the guy who knew how to run it. Kind of ironic when I think about how technology affected newspapers in the long run.
Change came quickly and slowly at once. We got computers, learned PageMaker and QuarkXpress, In Design for the folks who really stuck it out. Some tools you just used a bit less till next thing you knew, they’d be covered in dust, forgotten until the next cleanup day.
And gradually, I noticed I was almost by myself in the newsroom. Lot of jobs you just really didn’t need to run a small newspaper anymore.
It’s crazy to remember how not-advanced the tech was back then, how we got it done, and how many friends I had in the newsroom at the beginning.
I see old folks like me from time to time, complaining that schools don’t teach handwriting now. Not something I’ve lost sleep over. I’m sure kids learn to type sooner than we did.
But I am curious if my handwriting has become a secret code? Cuz most people I know tell me it’s totally unreadable. I don’t think it’s that bad, but I’m used to it.
When I was a reporter people would see my notes and go, “Ah, you know shorthand!”
Hell no. I tried to learn it once and gave up.
I had to take a lot of notes and I had to do it fast, at football games, city council meetings, interviews, press conferences. I didn’t have time to worry about penmanship.
It’s just messy messy scribbles and on the fly abbreviations, a note-taking habit I picked up in college. What I do works for me, but I did realize how it could get me in trouble if I went showing my reporter’s notes around.
One night I’m covering a high school football game from the stands in a packed stadium, people all around me. Not sure why I wasn’t on the sidelines, like usual.
Anyway, I look down at my notebook and I see. “Beat Off 4 p.m.” I had an interview that afternoon. It was an abbreviation for “Be at the office at 4 p.m.” Luckily nobody saw. I didn’t know how I was going to explain that.
I’m a crotchety old man now. That’s when you’re supposed to complain about stuff. But I don’t get complaining about “things the new generation does wrong.” Sometimes they do drive me nuts, but they’re getting older and we’re getting old.
It’s fixing to be Gen Z’s decision whether or not anyone cares about penmanship. And a whole lot of other things besides.
I stood on a hill with many others, excited and terrified. The Rapture was upon us. Those found worthy would ascend to heaven. The rest would be left behind on a doomed earth.
The Rapture would take place inside a building in the valley below. I don’t remember what it looked like on the outside, but inside, it looked modern. Businesslike. I tried to put aside my doubts.
A loudspeaker directed us to a row of turnstiles, where you would learn if your name had been written in the Book of Life, or if you would be left behind to burn.
My name was called.
I was so relieved I didn’t think to ask questions. Like why was I not flying to meet Jesus in the air, like I’d been taught to expect? Why did God need technology, turnstiles, or loudspeakers?
The next part was jumbled. I was on my way to heaven when I realized I was lost in a maze. Then I had a monotonous job operating machines, then another, then another. Heaven never followed. I had to escape.
I’d been fooled. This was some kind of trap. A trap full of traps.
I don’t know how, but I found my way out. Only to find that everything was gone, charred, replaced by rubble, charcoal and ash. It looked like the aftermath of Hiroshima.
There was no Rapture. The building was a machine. Wealthy men built it to destroy the world, using our faith and labor. The machine was meant to eliminate the population so they could start from scratch. We had helped bring about the Apocalypse we sought to escape.
Last thing I remember I was wandering through rubble, feeling dejected and used. Feeling like a fool.
U2 – Until the End of the World
What it meant
That dream has haunted me for half my life. What was the Rapture Machine? I’ve spent the last 30-plus years trying to figure that out.
It took a long time, but I understand what the dream was telling me: The religion I knew, the one that taught me my values, had been seduced and hijacked.
The Rapture Machine promises a materialistic version of Heaven. You don’t have to die to get there, just be willing to sacrifice others or look the other way.
The Machine makes it easier by distributing the sacrifices widely. No one may opt out. They can only be cast out. How could any kind of spirituality survive that?
The Religious Right had turned Christianity into a doorway to The Machine.
I had that dream in the late 80s, when I was still trying to be a Christian, though I was souring on the Baptist church.
Churches I attended in college only seemed to care about the offering plate. One church started every service with, “The Bible Teaches it, God Commands it: Tithing.” As a college student with no job and no money, that left a bad taste in my mouth.
I went to Baptist Student Union events, hoping to make friends and meet girls, but ended up feeling lonelier than ever.
I couldn’t discuss my doubts with anyone. “Read your Bible and ask the Holy Spirit” was the signal to quit asking questions.
Meanwhile the influence of the televangelists, of Prosperity Gospel, was overwhelming the version of Christianity I learned in my little unadorned Baptist church, with its old farmers, teachers and other small town folks.
Poor Man’s Poison – Give and Take
It’s not just a Christian thing
What does the Rapture symbolize? Escape. Everyone is born in a vessel that must toil, suffer, fear and die. For Christians who believe in the Rapture as I once did, it’s a promise of heaven, the antithesis of suffering.
It isn’t just a Christian motivation. It’s universal. If you find yourself in a trap, you want to escape. Unfortunately, life is full of traps. Escape from one trap inevitably leads to another.
Promise of a better life is strong motivation, no matter your religion or lack thereof. Modern life, with conveniences our forefathers never dreamed of, will tempt anyone who wants to survive.
The Machine
The Industrial Revolution gave birth to the monster we refer to as the Machine. Or maybe it’s been with us since the dawn of civilization itself and modern machinery just raised it to adulthood.
I don’t know if it’s sentient (yet), but the Machine has a purpose: Never stop growing.
Now, with advanced AI threatening everybody’s livelihoods, it seems we’ve decided to make The Machine smarter than we are, when most of us already serve it without knowing. Feels like my old dream coming true.
The ultra-wealthy only think they control it, but they’re in a trap just like the rest of us. The more they have, the more they feel like targets. They grow their castles to keep out the poor and before you know it, they’ve built their own prisons.
The rest of are kept in The Machine by promises of heaven or wealth. Someday, always someday. False promises are the carrot, Poverty is the stick. Miserable, degrading poverty.
Premonitions and Predictions
Was my dream a premonition? Did my dream predict the future? Almost certainly not. My head was stuffed full of science fiction and literature as well as religion. My unconscious made an educated guess.
I think the unconscious part of us, the part we mostly deny in the “rational” West, can solve problems and draw conclusions based on fewer clues than our conscious minds. The problem is, the unconscious communicates through symbolism we cannot easily understand consciously.
One afternoon, I was playing on the jungle gym on school grounds while my dad caught up on some work. He was a band director and there was a playground nearby.
Suddenly a couple of Cedar Chopper boys showed up, pushing us off the equipment, threatening to beat us up. The meanest kid was a 7th grader. I as the oldest and I was only in 2nd grade, so I stayed there while brother number 2 ran to the band hall to get help.
Pretty soon Dad came walking up, saying, “Leave these kids alone.” The boy started cussing him and then took a swing at him. Dad, being a full grown man, grabbed his fist and bent his arm behind his back, saying “Go home!”
The kid ran down the street, yelling “I’m gonna suuuuuueee!”
And that was it. Dad never got sued.
A couple of days later Dad was driving us kids and a friend of his was riding in the passenger seat. I wanted to brag about my dad so I said, “My dad beat up a 7th grader!”
And Dad goes, “Shhh no. No I didn’t!”
I didn’t understand. I thought Dad would be proud. 7th graders could be dangerous.
Lajitas was a good place to camp back then, when you wanted to do West Texas stuff in the Big Bend area. But back then there weren’t that many people around. There were times when it felt like you had the whole desert to yourself.
I spent a number of weekends there, so the memories get jumbled together, but I miss that era that will never come again. Back in the ’80s when the border was (mostly) chill.
I remember hanging out in front of the old Trading Post at sunset with my uncle and his friends. There were bullet holes in the ouside wall, from Pancho Villa’s men, so they told us.
There was a pool table outside. Not very level, but you could play when the store was closed. I remember somebody put on the Willie Nelson version of “Pancho and Lefty,” which felt like a perfect way to close a day.
The area got to feel like a neighborhood after a while. Distances are relative. On the River Road was “Big Hill.” Just a yellow highway department sign really, but we made it a proper name.
You made sure to see “DOM,” letters scraped into a cliff face during the filming of Fandango, my favorite Kevin Costner movie.
There was a place on the side of the road where you could get out and look down at the Rio Grande, waaaaay down. You might go to La Kiva restaurant in Terlingua – still remember the bones of a “Penisaurus Erectus” embedded in the wall.
There was a village across the river in Mexico where you could pay a few bucks and a man with arms like tree trunks would row you across, where you could eat dinner at Garcia’s. In an adobe building with no running water. The food was delicious.
There was a blonde teenager they called Panchita who spent most of her time on the Mexican side in a little curio shop with no customers, listening to corridos and rancheras on the radio.
When I read Terrence Poppa’s Drug Lord, Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin I wondered if Panchita might’ve been the daughter of an American lady mentioned in the book.
From what I was told, Lajitas and the village were basically connected. Tourists went to dinner in Mexico. Families from the village would cross the river sometimes just for something to do, like watch bootleg American movies before the copyright cops put a stop to it.
Los Tigres Del Norte – El Zorro De Ojinaga (The Fox of Ojinaga). A corrido about the drug kingpin who ruled much of the trade of marijuana and cocaine between Mexico and the US before the advent of the cartels.
The barker in front of the club called out with heavy reverb, “El B29-nine nine nine… Beeg surprise tonight-night-night…”
There was a big surprise all right, but not the one he meant. This was in the ‘80s, while I was on break from college. My first and last visit to Boys Town.
My uncle and a couple of his friends had invited me to go whitewater rafting on the Rio Grande, back when it had water.
After a long drive through West Texas, we arrived at our campsite in Lajitas on a Friday afternoon. We had some time on our hands and decided to go out for dinner, so we headed to the international bridge in Presidio.
We figured we would eat dinner at the train station in OJ, then check out Boys Town.
OJ was our nickname for Ojinaga. Boys Town was what everybody called the red light district. OJ’s red light district wasn’t as famous as the one in Acuña, but it had an anything goes reputation.
Going to Mexico was easy in the 80s. No passport, no fussing about walls. My uncle didn’t want to take his truck across, so we caught a ride from a resident on his way home for the evening.
We tapped the side of his pickup and he signaled for us to hop in the back. Common courtesy back then. He drove us to the checkpoint. From there, we walked to the end of the bridge where we found a taxi waiting.
He drove us to the train station, and agreed to return in an hour and take us to Boys Town. We finished dinner early and thought, why not catch a ride from the taxi parked out front? A taxi is a taxi, right?
We struck up a friendship with Driver Two, who I’ll call Roberto. He didn’t speak English, but my uncle’s friend Mando translated. He had a lot to say about Boys Town and how the girls there all liked white meat.
After a surprisingly long ride, we arrived at a collection of bars and clubs. He dropped us off and agreed to come back in a couple of hours.
The first bar was quiet and nearly empty. We chatted with the lady at the bar, who had a really cool bracelet made from old Pesos.
About half a beer later, a man burst in the door and tapped Mando on the back, hard. Taxi driver Number One had found us and he was pissed! Behind him was a cop with some kind of assault rifle.
“You made me come all the way back to the train station and you weren’t there,” he said in Spanish. “You’re paying my fare!”
Mando relayed the message. No arguments from us. We didn’t even bother to count. We just grabbed whatever bills we had and put them in his hand till he went away.
Lesson learned. Wait for your taxi.
We weren’t ready when Roberto came to get us. Mexico partied late! The strip clubs weren’t even open. He said he’d find us on his next trip out.
We looked for a more happening bar and figured, why not see a strip show? We weren’t there for the brothels. The barker at B29 Cabaret got our attention. What was the big surprise?
It was dark inside. My uncle and his buddies found a table and ordered a round of Dos Equis for themselves and a bottle of Coke for me.
Then an inebriated man at another table motioned for me to come over. Why me and for what? I was nervous as hell, but I went.
All he did was stick out his hand and say, “Americano.” He apparently liked the look of me and wanted to shake hands with an American. That memory really stuck with me.
Several beers and Cokes later, Roberto turned up. We still weren’t ready. He’d made several runs to OJ and back, but we still hadn’t seen a show. They were trying to find out how much beer they could sell us.
We invited Roberto to sit at our table and bought him a beer. He settled in and had several. He’d picked up enough fares for the night and was there to party.
After a while he got up and hollered. “Bring out the girls!” he said in Spanish. “These gringos want to see a show!”
And was there ever a show. Three girls came out and danced on the stage, then came out on the floor, between the tables, including ours. I’m sure I was blushing.
I thought they were cute, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as expected. I could tell they didn’t want to be there. They wouldn’t look you in the eye.
Then Spanish classical music began playing and out came a tall woman in a fancy dress and headdress. She wore a lot of makeup and had long, false eyelashes.
She held up a fan and performed a classical dance, demure, but flirty.
Then the DJ put on something with a beat. She thrusted her pelvis and gave all the drunks the come-on. She lifted her dress and did something with her high-heeled shoe. I saw a lot of tongue.
Then ta da! She tore off her top, took off her wig and took a bow. She was a he. My uncle and his buddies’ mouths were hanging open.
They were older than me and had their beer goggles on. I’d been drinking Cokes all night. I thought he was a woman, but too old for me and wearing too much makeup.
I just thought, huh. I guess that was the “beeg surprise.”
There were no more girls, but the night was far from over. A conjunto band started up. Mexican men wearing oversized cowboy hats and buckles danced with their wives (or girlfriends more likely). Roberto got up and spoke to the band.
We were all exhausted except Roberto. He was into the music. “I’m waiting to hear my song, then we can go,” he said. I was about to fall asleep.
All of a sudden, “Crash!” A man threw a metal chair in the center of the room, cursed in Spanish and stomped out and nearly slammed the door off its hinges.
I thought “Oh shit! Which way is north? Am I gonna have to walk to the border? What if he comes back in with a gun and starts blasting?”
But apparently that was par for the course at the B29. The band played another song and folks went back to their cervezas.
“We can go now,” Roberto said with a grin. He and the band had given us the REAL surprise.
He filled us in on the way back to OJ. The federales has just killed the local druglord in a shootout. The man who threw the chair was the druglord’s brother.
Roberto recognized him and thought it would be great fun to request a corrido about the shootout. Roberto wasn’t afraid of much apparently.
Incidentally, I read Druglord: Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin, by Terrence Poppa in the ‘90s and learned a few things about that night. The druglord who got shot had to be Pablo Acosta, who turns up in the Netflix show Narcos Mexico.
I haven’t found anything about Pablo having a brother, so maybe the guy meant compadre or associate. I don’t know who the band was, but the song was almost certainly “El Zorro de Ojinaga,” made famous by Los Tigres Del Norte.
Not sure what the cab driver’s deal was or why the chair thrower was so pissed. The song makes Acosta a tragic hero as far as I can tell. I reckon he must have had enemies though. Maybe it was just a case of “too soon.”
Ken Roberts, author of The Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing, talks about his encounter with a pair of Cedar Chopper kids on Bull Creek, when he realized there were people in Austin with a totally different culture.
I grew up in the Texas Hill Country in the ’70s and I want to talk about the Cedar Choppers. I’ve been reading a really interesting book about their history, The Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing, by Ken Roberts.
I’ve already learned some interesting things. Like for instance, you’d think with that drawl and being in the South, that the Cedar Choppers would’ve been all in for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
In fact, they were just as divided as everyone else. Roberts writes about an outfit headed by Dick Preece (1833-1906) that refused to fight for the Confederacy. “For two years they used the hollows and caves of Bull Creek to wage guerilla warfare against the Confederate home guard, calling themselves the Mountain Eagles.”
Not something I expected.
Hallie Mae Preece singing ballads for John and Alan Lomax in 1937. She was part of an old Cedar Chopper family from the Bull Creek area outside of Austin.
I recognize most of the last names in the book. I wasn’t a Cedar Chopper, but in a way they were my people. They were part of the mix, always around. I had some as friends. Grandpa, who was a medic in WWII, used to go into the hills when they had emergencies.
They’re the people who cut the cedar posts that fenced the West. Same people as in Appalachia, but at the end of the migration. They got to the limestone hills of the Edwards Plateau and never wanted to leave.
Until the economy made them.
Alexa Dee Crooks sings Little Blossom, a song that made it to Central Texas through Appalachia, all the way from the British Isles.Read her description under the video. Interesting stuff.
They provided wood and charcoal that powered Austin, Texas as it modernized. They made some of the best whiskey during Prohibition. They got to hunt and fish and live next to clear running streams. The Ashe Juniper kept them afloat during the Great Depression when so many others were going broke.
Gene Landrum – No Beer In Here, Cedar Chopper blues recorded in Boerne, Texas, in 1978.
Now their former territory has been nearly wiped out by urbanization. I get sad every time I drive in the outskirts of Austin and see the exclusive neighborhoods on Lake Travis, pretending to be “Tuscan.”
The people who live there think they have everything, but the Cedar Choppers were richer if you ask me. Eventually that rocky, almost worthless farmland, became “scenic” and worth a fortune and the Cedar Choppers had to move to town. Everyone lost.
An unnamed storyteller relates the tale of a loudmouth who made the unwise decision to pull a knife on a cedar chopper.
A lot of the reason I miss the Cedar Choppers is the very thing some people hated about ’em: how they could and would beat the ever lovin’ shit out of you if you disrespected them. I respect their cussedness.
Because people in town did disrespect them, a lot. And it wasn’t right.
They had the fiercest honor culture you ever heard of. If you were in the know, you didn’t fuck with them. Great friends, terrible enemies.
We had legends about them.
There was the one about the Cedar Chopper driving in the outskirts of Austin with a load of posts who decided to stop and let his kids buy Cokes. When the kids came out and said the man refused to serve them, he went in with a chainsaw and sawed the counter in half and said, “Now sell my kids a Coke.”
How do you not respect that?
They’ve owned the term at this point, but when I was a kid, calling someone a Cedar Chopper would get you in a fight. A lot of townies looked down on them, but if you were smart, you minded your manners.
Granny used to equate forgetting to comb your hair with “going out looking like a Cedar Chopper.” I think that was projection. She grew up a whole lot like a Cedar Chopper on the headwaters of the Guadalupe, and didn’t get treated very well when her family moved to town.
I actually owe my life to one Cedar Chopper neighbor who my mom said looked like she could whip a bear with a stick.
She caught me and my friends trying to crawl into a “cave” in front of her house where the ground had collapsed over the new sewer line. She saw what we were doing and said, “Oh no you ain’t!” and closed up the hole with a pickaxe.
We were so pissed. “Why doesn’t she mind her own business?” But that would have been the end of me. She also annoyed me and my siblings by making us share our candy with her kids. Different ideas about property it seems like. In the hills, squabbles over candy were probably a matter of cousin vs. cousin.
I also remember her park ranger husband shared a watermelon with me once on their front doorstep. I was just some kid on the street. They were different than us, but good people.
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