We were in Comfort this last Saturday … no, that doesn’t mean we were comfortable, exactly just that we were in Comfort, Texas a nice little town about an hour’s drive north from San Antonio, a lovely little Hill Country town situated where the Guadalupe River is crossed by the IH-10. In the larger world, Comfort is known for being the final burial place of a number of German Unionists, who either died in a vicious fire-fight on the Nueces River in August of 1862 or were murdered shortly afterwards. I was there because … well, this is the community in which a number of my books are set, and the ‘middle’ book of the Trilogy covers this tragic period. So, when another writer and enthusiastic local historian told me at the Meusebach Birthday celebration that I really ought to get in with this one … and we swapped copies of our books … well, I really must do things like this, meet people, talk to fans, and sell some books. It’s not a chore to actually be there and do that, but setting it up is sometimes a bit of a job and full marks to Blondie for taking the bull by the horns.
Sgt. Mom
Rerun – Plundered
A number of summers ago, when I was still stationed in Spain, I packed up my daughter, and a tent and all the necessary gear, and did a long looping camping tour of the southern part of Spain, down through the Extremadura, and to the rock of Gib al Tarik, and a long leisurely drive along the Golden Coast – I had driven from Sevilla, past the sherry-manufacturies around Jerez La Frontera (on a Sunday, so they were closed, although the Harvey’s people should have given me a freebie on general principals, I had sipped enough of their stuff, over the years), made a pit stop at the Rota naval base for laundry and groceries. I had driven into Gibraltar, done a tour of the historic gun galleries, seen the famous Gibraltar apes, and then waited in the long customs line to come back into Spain. We had even stopped at the Most Disgusting Public Loo on the face of the earth, at a gas station outside of San Roque, before following the road signs along the coastal road towards Malaga and Motril, and our turn-off, the road that climbed steadily higher into the mountains, the tall mountains that guarded the fortress city of Granada, and the fragile fairy-tale pavilions of the Alhambra.
At the Nueces Commemoration Ceremony
The bugler was there …
…Curiously bridging the gap between the 19th century and the 21st.
In the Post
I’ve been thinking for a while based on my own use of the service that the good old US Post Office is something well past its best-if-used-by date. Oh, no not that it should be done away with as a government service entirely. But I can contemplate delivery of the mail only two or three times a week with perfect equanimity … which is at least a little tragic for there were times when the daily arrival of the mail was a much-looked-forward-to thing. When I was overseas, or in a remote location like Greenland (and in military outposts today I am certain) the arrival of the mail (three times a week) was anticipated with keen interest, since it was our lifeline to the outside world. There were letters from family, loved ones, magazines, catalogues and packages with goodies in them sometimes gifts, sometimes items ordered … the whole world, crammed into a tiny box with a locking door in the central post office; the magical envelopes, the catalogues and magazines in a tight-packed roll, the little pink slips that meant a package … and then, between one or two decades, it all changed.
RE-RUN: Country Roads and Confiture Bar le Duc
(For the anniversary of the beginning of World War One, the war to end all wars, which ended instead three monarchies and came close to ending one republic and putting an empire on life-support … one of my best archive posts.)
We drove across the border on a Sunday, my daughter and I, on a mild autumn day that began by being veiled in fog when I gassed up the VEV at the PX gas station at Bitburg, and headed southwest assisted by the invaluable Hallwag drivers’ atlas, open on the passenger seat beside me. Blondie shared the back seat with a basket of books, a pillow, some soft luggage stuffed into the space between the seats, and half a dozen Asterix and Obelix comic books. Fortunate child, she could read in the back seat of a moving car for hours. Not like me— child or adult, I could not even look at the printed word while underway without becoming nauseated.