By Dan Bodine
Hee, hee! A true one about an ol’ Navy sailor once caught in an airport layover between duty assignments, and broke after boozing away his travel leave money! Memory stirred from long waits by thousands of Southwest Airlines passengers in the current weather-delay odyssey. Worries in layovers, they are. But don’t say rescue angels don’t exist! Continue reading
Author Archives: Dan Bodine
“Fiddling Around” On An Ol’ Pickup
Heck, if’n it starts up and runs, no problem, right!? (DMT photo)
By Dan Bodine
Yeah, the sky has fallen upon my beloved ol’ Ford garden pickup. And I’m fit to be tied. Kinda. I’ve been accused of not fiddling around on it enough, while driving it some, too. And now I’ve burned the transmission out! Is there anyone or anything else we can hang for it? Fiddling around with ignorance, maybe?
This is my defense. Kinda. Continue reading
Hearing Aids And Terrorism In The Sound Of Silence
By Dan Bodine
Coming back home from a visit with a pulmonary doctor across town yesterday afternoon, I heard a “zip” sound in my ears. And then: Silence!
Ah…That moment when both of your hearing aids get contrary and decide to go out at the same time, this questioning moment became for me.
But it’s hard to describe the Sound of Silence. Continue reading
Honey Locust Signals Gardener’s Fall To-Do List
MYSTERIOUS? A Honey Locust tree, seen 11 years after purchase at a nearby discount nursery chain store and subsequent planting, apparently is root-bound, needing help. It’s staying alive but doesn’t grow in size from one year to the next. (Desert Mts Times Photos)
By Dan Bodine
I don’t know what else you’d call a “years-old, not-growing” tree problem like this but a root-bound case of some sorts. And not being a tree surgeon, I’m befuddled on what I need to do to help it? If, indeed, that should even be on list of worries now that fall has begun.
This Honey Locust — aptly named Sweetie Pie — was a good-size tree when purchased at a local chain nursery. Continue reading
When “Pothole Blues” Was Newspaper’s Epitaph
FRIEND OR FOE — Ever dropped your beer (or all your homework, your plate of food, etc.) when your auto hit a pothole like this? A small, troubled newspaper chain I co-owned once had this idea to draw publicity to a county reunion celebration … [Image courtesy istockphotos.com]
By
Dan Bodine
Lord, Lord, Lord! Cooking in a pothole! Why didn’t the late Don McNiel and I think about this to capitalize on the City of Alvarado‘s road potholes, when we had that small, troubled newspaper there in the ’80s in North Central Texas?
Would’ve been better publicity to help the city, yes, and also for us, too, frantically seeking more advertising revenue! Our idea, instead, was a “Pothole Blues” song contest. That didn’t lift our blues much! Continue reading
Salt Cedar’s “Water Theft” A ‘Code Ranger’ Case?
The Tamarisk trees — or Salt Cedars, as they’re mostly called in Far West Texas’ Big Big Country — were planted by the Corps in the early 1900s to help stop soil erosion in flooding. But in other times in the dry desert mountains, with their huge root systems, they’re also “water hogs”! This is a story of an angry neighbor wanting something done about a tree on an adjacent property he felt was “stealing” his plants’ water. [Commons Image courtesy of Dreamtimes]
By Dan Bodine
This idea of a volunteer code ranger to arbitrate disputes civilly to improve neighborhoods is too good to be true, right?
Say, someone trained by the city to softly suggest to another neighbor, a yáhoo maybe, or a building owner, he/she ought to scratch their heads about yard improvements? Cuttin’ down trees, maybe? Cleaning junk outta yards? ‘Cause they’ve become an embarrassment? Or worse, hurting people?! And thereby unravel a potentially dangerous knot? Continue reading
Gloria Myers Reflected Presidio Family Legacy
Removing Oleanders No Job For Sissies
SETTING: Front of our little stucco home early 2015, after I’d worked around the “landscape rocks” a few years doing landscaping. [Desert Mts Enterprises photo]
IN BACK: Setting yourself up to stop a jailbreak! [Desert Mts Enterprises photo]
When we moved upriver to El Paso in 2010 from Presidio, i. e., the only plants around our house were a Western Catalpa in the front that’d die three years later from soil fungus, 4-5 tall cedars, and three large toxic, greedy Oleanders, all in the back.
The remaining space around the house was all landscape gravel — aka, rocks, rocks, rocks! Maybe 3-4 in. deep throughout the yard, it was — rocks, rocks, rocks! All tossed on sand that’d been trucked in soon after the house was built. On a squeezed lot just short of 50 ft. wide and maybe a 115 ft. deep.
“Plants setting down roots, in this?!!” I lamented often. “What the hell did we get into here???!!” Continue reading
Christmas Eve Borracho in OJ Catholic Church
Note to readers: The original draft of a true story of a drunk at a 1994 Christmas Eve Mass in a little Catholic church shown below in Ojinaga (OJ), Chih., MX, I wrote just weeks after it happened. OJ‘s a mid-size city directly across the Rio Grande from Presidio, Tx. — where I served as justice of the peace. It hit a long-dormant fundamentalist nerve in me! The story languished for years on my computer. But this past week, posting a comment of it on Facebook about this photo drew requests to post it online. Here it is, slightly edited. It highlights a schism in modern Christianity — e.g., Christians’ role in abusive behavior and defining proper response. — DB Continue reading
Christmas Eve Baracho in OJ Church
by Dan Bodine
Forward:
On Christmas Eve, 1994, as a Far West Texas judge in Presidio, TX, I attended a midnight mass in a Catholic church across the Rio Grande in Ojinaga (OJ), Chihuahua, MX, that would change my life. A real-life drunk’d reached deep in me and snagged some underlying Baptist fundamentalism feelings.
While clinging to only two short years of sobriety myself, I gripped the back of a wooden church pew to keep from getting up and grabbing this guy who’d noisily staggered in from the plaza outside, and booting him from the church. Continue reading