One of the many indicators that I had to marry this man and spend the rest of my life with him was when we first met and, at some point, I said, “Oh, I forgot what I was going to say,” and he replied immediately, “Oh yes, I’m radioactive.” It is an old Steve Martin joke, but the fact that it came to him that quickly made me laugh because it was something that I often said.

So I have become accustomed to having those conversations that don’t require any explanation. I’m sure other couples that have been together 20 years have no trouble understanding (or couples that have been together a month and had that same sort of immediate bond). We can watch TV together and he’ll say, “Oh, that’s that woman that was…” and I will say, “No, this is the other one.” And we’ll both know exactly what we’re talking about.

Until tonight.

Sigh.

Maybe he was just too weary to understand me this time.

Mark was at his computer in his office, which is adjoining the living room. I sat down in “his” chair because from that chair I have a view of him and it is easier to carry on a conversation.

Side note: I suppose it only makes sense that Mark has “his” chair and I don’t have a chair that is clearly “mine.” I grew up in a household where there was a “Daddy’s chair,” but no “Mama’s chair.” This wasn’t Goldilocks, but there was definitely a chair that we could sit in ANYtime we wanted…until Daddy came into the room and expected to sit down.

I turn on the news (I heart Brian Williams), Mark stands up and walks toward me, stands three feet from his chair. and  says, “Trade places with me.”

I stand up and move to stand three feet from the chair, he sits down, and I say, “Okay, now what?”

“Now what what?”

“I traded places with you, now what?” I say with that “haha aren’t I clever?” tone in my voice.

“What are you talking about?” None of that “haha aren’t you clever” tone in his voice.

“You told me to trade places so I did!” Now with that desperate, “Oh please, tell me you get it” tone in my voice.

“I just wanted my chair.”

“I KNOW you wanted your chair, but you SAID, ‘Trade places with me.” So I did…” Desperation is so unattractive.

“I just wanted my chair.”

I sat and we watched Brian and soon he was dozing with a kitty on his chest.

It’s funny how a picture can so quickly remind me of so many different things. First, the era of the picture (and its oddity) remind me of a picture a cousin of mine used to have from her family. Somewhere I have a printed copy of the photo she made for me because that was back in the days where we didn’t have digital pictures and didn’t share them (I’m glad those days are gone). It was a picture of a distinguished older African-American man sitting in a chair. Black and white and from nearly the same era (it appeared) as this picture. Also in the picture were two toddler blonde-headed Caucasian children, each standing by his knees and comfortably leaning on him. There was also at least one long-eared hound dog at his feet or nearby.  It was truly a one-of-a-kind picture and she said that it was from somewhere in her family and the man was a servant or a slave or a caretaker who was very much a part of the family and an important figure to those two little boys. Like this picture, it makes you just wonder what prompted the picture to be taken. That one (the man and the boys) is very sweet. This one is just odd!

The second story that comes to mind is a family story from my family history. I would have to go look it up to remember who it was exactly, but I’m pretty sure it was an uncle or a cousin of mine from the Couch family because my cousin Paula has it written in the information that she has shared with me. In that story, set in the days before there were cars, a couple of the boys in the family were taking the wagon into town from their farm in Comanche County to get something that was needed at the store. Their little brother begged to be allowed to come along with the big boys and was permitted. It was no short trip, but it was made worse when, on the way home, a blue norther blew in and about froze the boys. So they stopped at a house along the way to seek shelter for a while. To warm the boys up, the woman of the house made a pot of coffee and gave a cup to each of the older boys. The little 5-year-old boy followed her back to the kitchen and said, “Please, ma’am, can I have some coffee, too?” She said, “Why, you shouldn’t be drinking coffee, it’s not good for you,” and he replied, “I know ma’am, but I’m 5 now and it’s awful hard to give up.”

The second story is a story of my sweet husband Mark. When Mark and his brother Dave were little boys, they lived in Richardson, Texas. Their grandparents lived in Abilene, Texas. It was not unusual for them to get to fly ALONE to see their grandparents or for the return trip. They had spent extra time after a holiday with the grandparents and, when they had to go back home, their grandparents dropped them off at the airport (ha, I’m kidding, I don’t they did THAT back then)… they took them to the airport. At some point, a woman saw the 2 boys and said, “Aren’t you awfully young to be flying by yourself?” and Mark replied (with some degree of impatience or disgust), “No, I’m 6 and he’s 5!”  As if that was all she needed to know.

This doesn’t show how teeny tiny he is. Right now he just the right size to pick up and have his torso fit in the hand easily.

Mark has been complaining that the cats love me and don’t love him. His cat, Nathan Jr., was always climbing up in his chair to sit beside him or curl up and nap with him on his chair. Since sweet Nathan has been gone, Mark has not received quite the same measure of affection. With Willie, it is easy to see why he bonded with me. He was about 3 weeks old when Mark left on a one month tour. So while Mark was off working and playing gigs, Willie and I bonded a lot. We bonded a lot because I gave away his mother and brothers and sister before Mark came home. And then sweet Phil was in foster care with a single woman a long time before we got him, so he was always more comfortable with me. So Mark has been saying he wanted a new cat. But it was just talk, we didn’t need a cat.

And then Monday, my friend Miss Trish, our catsitter and an employee of Austin Pets Alive!, the good folks who rescued Phil and raised him as a bottle baby until he was well enough to go out in the world, posted a picture of a kitten they had at their little storefront. He was just the cutest thing. I admired him on Facebook and Trish posted another sweet picture for me. I asked for a picture of his tail (since I’m partial to long-tailed cats) and she told me that his tail was normal length, but had a kink in it. Our cat Willie has an interesting kink in his tail too, to I like that. She suggested I come see this sweet kitten that they called Ian (they are named alphabetically, just like the hurricanes).

I went over to Austin Pets Alive! after work and took them some cat litter while I was at it. It didn’t take long before I was in love with little Ian. He was in a “room” with a couple of grown cats and he had no fear of them and marched around like he owned the place. So before I knew what was happening, I was filling out paperwork and passing their inspection and getting ready to bring little Ian home with me.

I got home just before Mark left for his Monday night gig, but he thoroughly approved of my choice. He knew I got a prime A #1 kitten!

Willie and Phil are not so sure. There was some growling and hissing on the first day, primarily from Phil, and primarily directed at us, not at the kitten. Things have calmed down considerably and the boys have all played together a little bit. Phil is not sleeping up by my neck like he has always done, but I hope he will get back in his old habits, soon. This kitten isn’t a substitution, he’s just an addition.

Come see him before he grows up!

This came up when we were on our wonderful New Mexico vacation. I drove by cute little adobe houses in the mountains with smoke curling from their chimney and a sweet little garden plowed and ready to plant by the side of the house and I wondered what their daily life was like there? What did they do for a living? Was their life as peaceful and cozy as it appears or is it hectic and crazed and anxiety-filled like mine?

This isn’t the first time I have had these thoughts. When I was a little girl, Daddy and I had a "thing" when we traveled. He and I liked old houses, where my Mom and sister were more into fancy and new. We would drive past an old broken down, unpainted farmhouse and Daddy would say, "There’s a house for us, Janice, how about that one?" I would agree that it was perfect for us and I would picture what life would be like in that broken down house out in the middle of nowhere.

And I don’t just do it for old houses, either. Mark and I were in Houston for New Year’s and we drove through the River Oaks section of town with their fabulous Christmas lights and decorations and enormous houses, guest houses, 8-car garages, etc., and I wondered about THEIR daily life. Did they really have time to enjoy their beautiful home or were they always traveling for work, staying late at the office?

So, what I’m thinking is that average daily life is interesting to people and I am going to write entries from time to time that are probably a little boring to some, but might be fascinating to someone that wonders what in the world a woman with no children does all day. Or a woman that has one of the coolest jobs in the world does while she sits in her cubicle for 8 hours. And what it is like to be married to a drummer. ETC.

But that entry apparently won’t be this morning. But when I do write it, it will probably start with how I always spend too much time on the computer in the morning and then I get showered and dressed for work in 5 minutes. Then my friends will begin to understand why I look like I do.

Along with that, this week someone is demolishing the KVET building I worked at on Lamar in Austin. There is a reunion of the old employees in the parking lot the evening before that sounds like a lot of fun, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to go to it. I worked in that building less than 6 months. When I first went there in August of 2001, I thought, “Wow, this is a cool, old authentic radio building!” It was so old-fashioned with it’s long narrow stairway up to the actual studios and offices on the second floor. The studios were incredibly cramped and the sales people practically sat in each others’ laps in their offices. It didn’t take long for me to realize how nasty dirty that old building was and it lost a lot of its charm when I first pulled myself up to the board and my fingers hit rock hard chewing gum that had been put there by disc jockies for decades.

I have also talked to some people this week and had the opportunity to tell some of my radio stories. It brought back memories of stations I might have only worked at a month before I moved on (yes, I could be fickle) and stations that I spent years at and loved so much about them. I don’t want to be in radio again, I just want it to be 1981 again, I think.

Okay, so it wasn’t the perfect writer’s workshop. As I looked around the room of 50 or so gray-haired women and men, a couple of baldies and maybe 3 who could pass for someone under 40, I realized that I am a middle-age wannabe writer. It was a lot easier to go to writers’ conferences and workshops in my 20s and be a young, eager, wannabe writer.

Saturday I participated in a really nice day at the beautiful Blue Rock Studios near Wimberly with Sarah Bird telling us all she knows. She claims it was her first seminar, which is a surprise and I think this now opens up a whole new opportunity for her. I loved it. She talked about her writing style and did a lot of motivating about “telling the story you need to tell.” I know I have lots of stories I want to tell and there are plenty that don’t require the death of the person I am writing about, so I need to get with it.

This TINY little blog is a small start. It is nice to be back. Thank Sarah.

Easter is here tomorrow and that makes me think of many good Easters I’ve had in my life. In Amarillo, Easter was like Halloween in that, as likely as not, it was too cold to do what you planned to do… hunt Easter eggs. We would wear our light spring dresses and white shoes, but freeze all the way too and from church.

As an adult, a favorite Easter memory was when I lived in Dallas and went home to Canyon for Easter. My best friend Beth joined our family for the day and my sister and her family were there. The boys were about 3 and 2 and were adorable in their little matching clothes hunting Easter eggs. We would hide Easter eggs in plain sight and when I “couldn’t find” an egg laying right in front of me Brandt was a good helper by pointing and saying “Aunt Zan, it’s RIGHT THERE.” Connor mostly sucked on his pacifier and had no idea what the fuss was about.

In Austin, our Easters are often bluebonnet trips into the country. We’ve had plenty of those this year and seen so many beautiful bluebonnet patches. And Mark is off on a trip of his own this weekend so I am home taking care of things that have been shoved aside for the last few weeks while I entertained others, did taxes, did work, or felt crappy. I’ve had a highly successful day and if tomorrow is just as successful, there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

My friend Jenni wrote a blog post about why she loves SXSW today. I read it and it did make me get a little bit excited about the week ahead. I also like the long walks and realizing how close things really are, even though I may only walk that much once a year. And I like running into people and meeting people and discovering new music. I wouldn’t be the Brian Wright fan I am today if I hadn’t heard him at a SXSW stage in the middle of the afternoon many years ago.

But I’ll go ahead and bitch and complain about things that most people would love to have to deal with in order to get to experience SXSW each year. Please don’t come back at me with all the good things about it and why I shouldn’t bitch. This is my blog and I’m going to bitch if I want to.

The main reason I dread SXSW and can’t wait for it to be over is because of how hard Mark has to work through it all. The last couple of years might have been a little bit lighter because of the economy, but this year it seems to be back at full tilt. Most of the year, Mark works from Tuesday through Friday at the drum/gear shop and often has to take gear on a weekend and be with a show for 12 or more hours. But when it gets near to SXSW time, he spends longer and longer hours putting gear together for bands and then it is almost a 24-hour-a-day job by the time this Friday is here. Yesterday he went to work about noon and came home at 4 in the morning. I expect today will be much the same. And there is no weekend or Monday off during SXSW. He’ll be working straight through all the festivities. He won’t get to go out and experience any of the bands he’s putting gear together for. He is there through rain and cold and on his feet all night long putting drums together and taking them apart and keeping track of dozens of sets of drums all over town.

My second gripe about SXSW is that my birthday is almost always during SXSW. On my 50th birthday, SXSW started late and I had a whole Sunday before SX to celebrate me! We ate Mexican food and enjoyed the spring weather and walked around the State Cemetery. My idea of a great birthday. Every other birthday is overshadowed by SXSW. On the good side, I do get to celebrate my birthday each year with Ray Benson at his big party and I am looking forward to that because I see many friends that I really like at that big event.

Jenni mentioned the traffic and that is a nightmare for those of us who live here. Last year we had a company part on the east side and, knowing the city and knowing what downtown would be like, I cut way east to make my way south to avoid the downtown streets. It didn’t help. The minute I cut back toward my side of town I was in long long waits for red lights and it was ages before I was back home. This year our company party is in an even more hard to get to place and I have no clue where I’m going to be able to park for it.

A good thing this year is that I am a little bit more secure in my job and know how much I can be gone to go enjoy the festivities and how much I need to be in the office to do my job. That is a good thing to know. I enjoy the day parties and the day music more than the night events, so I will be taking advantage of my schedule and experiencing what I can throughout the afternoons and getting my work done in the morning.

That’s enough bitching for now. I think most of my anxiety over SXSW is my anxiety and has nothing to do whatsoever with the event. I have had some great moments during SXSW, just like Jenni points out, and I am eager to see who I run into and what music memories I come away with when it is over.

But I did get to meet my cousin Gary Hood this weekend. That was a highlight of my holiday. He and his wife Judy came through on Saturday  morning and I met them at the highway corner so we could become acquainted. As is the case with a whole lot of my “cousins,” we have never met.

Gary used to correspond with my grandmother. Back in the days before I did a lot of correspondence in my genealogy, he was researching his family and found out about my grandmother somehow and wrote letters to her. She was a good letter-writer and kept up the correspondence. He lived in Arkansas and she had just moved to Austin, I believe. They were distant Hood cousins and Gary came down twice over the years for the Hood Reunion in Georgetown and met my grandmother and the others there.

Fast forward to about 5 or 6 years ago. I get email from Becky Hood in Amarillo (another cousin I’ve never met) introducing herself to me. She had heard about me from Gary Hood in Arkansas, but tracked me down through the radio station. He only knew of me because of my grandmother telling him about me. Becky and I began an email friendship and exchange of information and I got to meet her on a trip to Amarillo almost 5 years ago. We hit it off immediately and had so much in common, beginning with the same hometown. My best friend even knew her sister from high school, another connection.

When Facebook came along and took over the world, I eventually became friends with Gary and we exchanged some information and became friends. He travels the world frequently and takes beautiful pictures, so I have enjoyed seeing his travels from my home.

Gary’s great-great-grandfather and my great-great-great-grandfather (I think I have that right) were brothers and lived in Arkansas before the Civil War, near where Gary lives today. Mine fought in the Civil War and was injured and had to use a cane the rest of his life. That injury didn’t keep him out of the war, though, and he continued to be a part of the Confederate force and fought the Union soldiers in Mississippi. I’ve forgotten the name of the battle now, but the Confederates were forced into retreat and had to retreat across a large river. There was sort of a bridge made of boats and they were retreating quickly, but the Union forces were advancing so rapidly, the Southern soldiers had to torch the boats to prevent the Yankees from using them as well. This still left hundreds of Confederate soldiers on the wrong side of the river. Many swam and drown in their attempt to get across. My g-g-g-grandfather was captured and kept in a prison camp for a period of time.

He did survive the war and went home to Arkansas. I need to ask Gary about his ancestor’s service because I expect he was also in the Civil War – who wasn’t if you lived in the South and were of fighting age?

After the war, the two brothers, along with another brother who was the g-g-g-grandfather of Becky Hood, came to Texas to homestead. Becky’s ancestor and mine stayed and found their home here. Gary’s tried it a while and decided he wanted to go back to Arkansas. Which he did. The End.

Some examples:

The title “What I Done Wrong” should have been a clue as to how bad this could be. “I been sittin’ here for three long days wonderin’ why it was you went away…”

“There’s a Gideon’s Bible in the drawer, bars on the window, bars on the door.”

“We walked in starched up with our ostrich on…”

“Daddy had a 1941 Ford when I was just about ten years old.”

“I got a brand new pack of cigarettes, I’ve got a brand new pair of shoes.”

“They say sweet salvation saves your soul, but without my woman I just don’t feel whole.”

“Loneliness is the only thing that keeps me company these days when I’m by myself.”

and my favorite:

“My Daddy picked his poison cause I guess that it fulfilled him”  (okay, you’re thinking, that’s a weird lyric, but then the next line ends with “killed him” and you realize it was one of those contrived rhymes he forced)

So did he cover all the country bases? Prison, trains, truck, or getting drunk? Not exactly, but enough of the others (two about Daddy!) that I would give him a “Trite Award.”