A Growing Basset

Becky, our basset hound, is almost 4 months old and has more than doubled her weight since we got her at 8 weeks old. She continues to be a good companion for us and is learning some of the ways of the world. Here are some photos:

The next one displays her noble Basset profile. Her muzzle is shorter and more arching than that of her beagle cousins, and obviously her feet are an important part of her whole person:

In mid-bark. I wish dogs didn’t bark:

But this is how she gets away with all that noise making. What can you say to these eyes?:

Unwound Tape

On the way to a funeral today I saw something I hadn’t seen in a long while: an unraveled cassette tape. The convolutions of tape were wadded in a pile on the median, and a long loop stretched out across the road. In the wind, the tape twirled and glinted like a one-dimensional version of the surface of a pond.

The sight of this brought up a vivid memory. When I was a kid, and cassette tapes were it, these piles of unwound tapes were common litter, at least in the crappy trailer park in Denver, Colorado, where we lived. Twenty-five years ago, trailer parks in Denver, and probably anywhere in the West, were dry and dusty collections of transplanted mid-westerners with unbridled children and suspicious teens. Western cities back then had large tracts of undeveloped land between housing lots, and our trailer park sat next to a block of desert that was becoming a landfill. On the edge of this expanse, there was a sidewalk limned by prickly pear cacti and unkempt yucca plants. For the handful of years we lived in that place, one of these yuccas had an entire cassette tape wrapped up in its spines; I guess no one had the gumption to reach in there to retrieve the tape, and so it stayed that way for years. On windy days, like today, this yucca glinted just like the tape I saw across the road on the way to the funeral.

Five Little Pumpkins

Tom’s preschool class is learning a bunch of Halloween songs. They will be singing and wearing their costumes in a parade. Here you can see Superman’s alter-ego, Thomas, singing “Five Little Pumpkins.”

Four Things Meme

I was tagged by my wife and a friend both to do this meme, so here goes.

Four Jobs I’ve Held
security guard at Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house at U. Texas
library desk clerk at Barnard College
18-wheeler trailer floor maker, Cloud Industries
tour guide at Maker’s Mark distillery

Four Films I Could Watch Over & Over
Smoke
Babette’s Feast
Pump Up the Volume
Amelie

Four T.V. Shows I Watch
America’s Test Kitchen
Law and Order
Nature
Good Eats

Four Places I’ve Lived
Pyatt, Arkansas
Buenos Aires, Argentina
New York, New York
Montezuma, New Mexico

Four Favorite Foods
clementines
barbecued pig and cow
French toast
brick oven pizza

Four Websites I Visit Daily
Arizona State University
digg
facebook
Google Reader

Four Favorite Colors
I’ll just say it seems unnatural to have more than one favorite color. Mine is green.

Four Places I Would Love To Be Right Now
cabin in Rocky Mountains
the dining room of any fine restaurant
NLCS game–Go Diamondbacks!!
at a movie with my sweetie, no kids

Four Names You Love, But Could/Would Not Use For Your Children
Vladimir
Fidel
Karl
Frida

I’m tagging:
Barack Obama
Hilary Clinton
John Edwards
Dennis Kucinich

I realize you don’t want to see more pictures of my new dog,

but I’ve never felt this way about a dog. I’m not expecting comments or anything; I just feeling very evangelical about this particular dog, like I need to share.

And for someone who knows next to nothing about taking pictures, this one came out real nice:

I’ll try to restrain myself from posting more, but you have to admit, this is an unusually terrific dog.

Calm little doggy

I’ve never been a dog person, but that doesn’t seem to matter. I love our new dog, Becky the basset hound. She’s 8-weeks-old, cute as can be, funny, and sleepy.

Little for now, but she’ll probably make it up to 50 pounds or so, and fill up her new bed.

For more cutey-pie pictures, check out my wife’s blog.

Collections

When she became fed up with plastic Indian headdresses and other trinkets, my mother demanded that my brother and I choose something more worthwhile to collect when we visited touristic destinations. My brother chose keychains; my grandfather made a bulletin board with an array of hooks for him, and it hung on a wall in our bedroom displaying his keychain keepsakes. I chose patches. I don’t know if this is still the case, but in those days, every little tourist trap in the Rockies had its own embroidered patch. They were like mile marker merit badges. My mother sewed them on banners of felt, and I kept them folded in a drawer. I don’t know where they are now.

***

In the Denver summers, our garden was the touristic destination of plagues of grasshoppers. As I recall it, there used to be more grasshoppers on this earth twenty-five years ago. We had a plastic pitcher, the kind with a lid that twists one way to pour water and ice together through a large opening and twists the other to pour water only through a grate. It was perfect for collecting grasshoppers because the large opening for ice cubes was big enough to stuff in a grasshopper while the other grated opening held them in while still supplying them air (we were selectively humane). My brother and I would lie in the cool dirt between the rows of green and yellow beans and pluck grasshoppers from the beanleaf canopy above us. They spit their tobacco juice on us, but we were relentless. The inside of the pitcher was coated with them, and the bottom was deep with them; en masse they smelled mealy and vile.

***

Before I began the forced collection of patches, I once used my meager funds to buy a little leather sack full of assorted marbles at a tourist trap. They were mostly cats’ eyes with one larger shooter. I’ve never played the game of “marbles” in my life, but I often poured the sack out on my bed and admired these as objects of beauty. Not long after that purchase, my mother got a one-time job cleaning out a house that renters had abandoned in a mess. My brother and I were allowed to scavenge through the loot, taking what we found valuable. I found a large glass jar full of what seemed like misshapen marbles. They were all sort of an artificial glassy blue color and not entirely spherical. (I think now that they were some sort of glass slag from a metallurgical process.) I made the mistake of adding them to my marbles, but the new marbles were legion and without personality. Like weeds, they sapped my other beauties of all their goodness, andI soon didn’t look at any of the marbles at all.

Hi to Mom

My wife has been out-of-town all week at a conference. She emailed today asking if I would put up some new pictures of our kids. We made vests out of paper bags this morning. They started as space suits and since have become cowboy outfits–though Lily’s has mostly been more for waving around.

Turkey Trot

I grew up in Pyatt, Arkansas, a hamlet ten miles to the west of Yellville, the county seat of Marion County. Every October, Yellville hosts, and has hosted for over 50 years, a festival called the Turkey Trot. It’s a fall event–cool air and leaves–and is typical of these small town celebrations: fair food, a parade with homemade floats and local high school marching bands. But the Turkey Trot is special, too.

What makes it special? Well, there’s a turkey calling contest where some ol’ boys ( and girls) sound just like turkeys, with and without mechanical assistance. I’d have to say that my own brother can imitate the turkey’s song pretty well. And there’s a Miss Turkey Trot contest, but I suppose that’s not so unique.

The Turkey Trot is particular and notable and strange and wonderful because small airplanes fly over Yellville’s town square and drop live turkeys onto the crowd below. You catch one, you get to keep it to do with it as you want. In my travels around, I’ve told a lot of people about the turkey drop, and many have turned bald-faced disbelief my way. Then I tell them, “Wait! That’s not all. One year, the animal rights people protested and so they decided to drop frozen turkeys instead. They were like Butterball bombs!” Even more disbelief.

Once when I was in college in New York City (so far from Pyatt), I saw a nice hipster girl wearing a tight green t-shirt that read “Turkey Trot, Yellville, Arkansas.” Normally bashful around girls, I ran right over to her and gushed, “You’ve been to the Turkey Trot?!” She looked at me with confusion and maybe a little fear then remembered her t-shirt. She smirked and said, “No. I got this at a thrift shop.” Ironic t-shirt bites true experience in the ego. I skulked off.

Anyhow, I’ve done some looking into the frozen turkey bombs, as I don’t actually remember the buildings exploding. I’ve come to the conclusion that the frozen turkey drop was a rumor started from someone making a knowing joke against those “crazy animal rights people,” though it may also be some kind of permutation from this scene from WKRP in Cincinnati:

I did some more reading and found the following on Wikipedia concerning the Turkey Trot:

One of the longest traditions in Yellville is the annual Turkey Trot festival. Beginning in 1945 with the first turkey dropped from the roof of the Marion County Courthouse, the festival continues today. It is held every second weekend of October with the best-known attraction being live turkeys that are dropped from airplanes over the town square. October 2005 marked the 60th anniversary of this festival. The 1970s television show, WKRP in Cincinnati, parodied the turkey drop on one of their best-known episodes. Yellville and the Turkey Trot Festival were also included in the American supermarket tabloid The National Enquirer in 1989 with photographs of the festival and commentary on animal cruelty. Due to the bad press, the turkey drop ceased for a few years. It has since resumed. The Turkey Trot festival also includes a Miss Turkey Trot Pageant, a Miss Drumstickz Competition (best legs), dinners, musical entertainment, a 5 kilometer run, a parade (which has included former Arkansas governor and current presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, and a nationally recognized turkey calling contest sponsored by the National Wild Turkey Federation. Crafts and tools related to the hunting of wild turkeys are also sold in streetside booths along the town square. Entertainment at Turkey Trot has ranged in recent years from famous acts like John Conlee singer of “Rose Colored Glasses” and Jeannie Kendall from the Grammy-award winning group The Kendalls, to more local entertainment by area groups such as The Muddles, Joe Sasser and Friends, and Carnes McCormack.

Joe Sasser was my 6th grade teacher and taught me a song I love to sing called “Down in the Arkansas.” I found a clip of an old timer singing the song with verses that I didn’t know before. Click here to listen.

Cowboy Tom sings for you

This evening, our power was out for three hours as a result of a hailstorm. Not to be outdone by the weather, we set ourselves to taking photos and videos on the back porch. Lately, my son Tom has been in a very patriotic summer program at Alex’s church. I’m generally uncomfortable with patriotic displays, especially at church, as I find them idolatrous. But I’ll make an exception this time due to Tom’s exceedingly cute innocence.

I guess I forgot to mention that Tom is a baseball-playin’, no-shirt-wearin’ cowboy.

You’ll have to turn your head sideways for this one: