Responding with Hearty Greetings

Where's the love?

Did you have a nice Valentine’s Day? Did you engage in my favorite pastime: going out for a walk around 6pm to watch all the couples fight?

I find it a little nutty that many people have sworn off this holiday altogether. I suppose obsessive and incessant marketing make everyone feel bad for not doing enough. Love your person. That’s enough. Love them and make sure they know it. Don’t know what would make them know it? Ask them. And take in the response.

I am 100% in San Antonio right now. I know this because the mannequins are wearing cowboy hats.

I sent this to my extremely stylish friend Christina and she was rendered speechless

I am surprised to see almost zero actual cowboy hats on normal people as they go about their day. When I was a kid growing up in Texas, cowboy hats were everywhere. Straw in summer and felt in autumn and winter. Always a cowboy hat. Always cowboy boots. There were boys who never, ever took off their hats and boots (there were jokes about this too, but those should stay on the playground). Men in church laid their hats on the seat, like a second spouse—or on their laps like a….well….anyway, there were significantly more hats back then.

I am here celebrating one of my brothers’ birthdays. It always astonishes me how instantly you fall into your childhood role when you’re around your family. How can a relationship feel so familiar, even when you’ve been apart for ten or more years? When you’re not even in the family home? But the relationships are, in fact, familiar. And isn’t it quaint that the word familiar has the same root as family?

(…the word’s origins will surprise you if you don’t already know: The Modern English word, family, comes from the Latin “familia” and “famulus,” meaning “slaves of the household” and “slaves.” Before, it meant blood-relatives, it was everyone who lived in one household. I wonder what they called the unit of people who were not the servants who lived in the family home before family meant… you know… family.

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Creative Inspirations

In addition to final copy edits on the novel that’s coming out in October, I’ve been doing a lot of late-night remote work for Pen Parentis this week, but also working on edits of a friend’s story collection. I do so love hearing his voice on the page.

I frequently think of books as sustaining me, or comforting me - I wonder why I don’t think of them as friends, like a support animal—you could have a support book? Certainly there are characters I would have very much enjoyed befriending…and on some level, I did. It is like lurking in a chat group but not talking - the equivalent of standing just outside the ring of popular kids on the playground. You learn a great deal from this…

Saw a great performance on Broadway of ALL OUT, which is at its heart a concert by a truly terrific brother-sister band. In addition there are a lot of sketches—monologues and dialogues and half-scripted comedy spots performed by an ever-changing cast of comedians. It is the most interesting concert I’ve seen. And so clever. The band is the one constant and yet they don’t promote themselves.

Of course I heard the name and had to force myself to go. But I was very happy I went. They are endlessly talented. The show is ALL OUT. It closes soon - so go if you love comedy.

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Random Final Thought

Feeling the love in a San Antonio Mall that has humongous cowboy boots out front. The only way this Frito Pie could be more authentic is if it was served outside under a post oak tree in 95 degree shade with a breeze as hot as a lover whispering across the sweat rolling down your neck, and the backyard you’re in is actually the side-parking lot of a church social where the chili is being ladled from a chili pot bigger than a construction pipe by a fireman.