Trulock Brothers Christmas 1963, NaNa, Zeke

Our last Christmas at the farm.  Arch was born on October 23rd of that year.  Apparently, another person (probably our dad) was taking a picture from the left (your left).  This one was taken by our maternal grandmother, Elner King Miller.  We called her NaNa, pronounced Na-Naw.  That's her in the picture below, visiting Hawaii in 1973. The date, not quite visible in the top right corner, is June 6, 1973.  That's exactly one year after the sudden death (stroke or heart attack) of my paternal grandmother, Frances Andrews Trulock.  We called her MiMi. 

 

 

And this is Steven's dog Zeke (1974-1986) wearing a pair of Mother's rose-colored glasses in the yard at the River House, probably in 1980 or 81.  Steven brought Zeke back from a trip to Florida he made after he graduated from high school in 1974.  Apparently Marc Cronin and Buddy Brown, also native Pine Bluffians, were in Florida at that time, too, since they later came back to Arkansas with Zeke's brothers, Strider and Prince.  Steven hitchhiked back from Florida sometime in June of '74 (when I was taking the physics class at UALR) with his new puppy.

Cactus Vick card and Costa Rica photo 1974

Sometime in '73 or '74, I got my official Cactus Vick Square Shooters' card.  I was about 19 at the time, hanging out with Mike Oldner and James Pascale, among others.  I don't recall the circumstances of obtaining the card.  Cactus Vick  may have had his little kids' carnival thing at Jefferson Square in Pine Bluff, and I picked up the card there.  Or maybe I ordered it through the mail, which would be something I'd have done as a gotta-be-clever 19-yr-old. My sense of humor hasn't changed much since then.

In April of '74 I went to Costa Rica with my father and his friend Joe Hardin, from Grady.  Daddy and some other Arkansas guys invested in a farm in Costa Rica and tried to grow rice instead of bananas.  It enabled Dad to go to Costa Rica about once a year for 6 or 8 years.  Even after the rice farming didn't work out and the investors sold the land, Dad still went down there a few more times just on pleasure trips.  I got to go with him in '74.  We three gringos spent three nights (with 4 Costa Ricans) in a cabin on the square-mile uninhabited Cano Island, now a nature preserve where overnight stays are not permitted. (I think the Ranger Station is at the location of the former cabin.) I hope to return to Cano and go snorkeling next April, the 40th anniversary of our trip.  The photo below was taken at the home of one of Dad's Costa Rican friends near San Jose.  Joe Hardin is the man in the cap.  He ran against Orval Faubus for governor once, and has a lock & dam named after him.

More Maui photos

Above:  the wharf in front of the Pioneer Inn.  Below:  Pat and Jessica, the masseuse who had given me a massage earlier in the day.  This is also in the area of the wharf, where various booths selling stuff are located, but the booths were mostly closed at night.  Oh, yeh, Pat has his hand on his black "English Lab" named Blue.

 Above:  Rachel and me at the Hyatt Hotel's Luau.  She's one of several young women who were vacationing from Dublin, Ireland who were renting rooms at Pat's Place.  Below:  That's Rachel's brother on her right and a friend of his next to Pat in front, and Donita in the bow tie.  For more info, see my Maui journal writings at my Ink On His Face blog.

Some Maui 2008 photos

Pat and one of the guests at the Lahaina self-service B&B he managed.  Foreground: clothes line.  Background:  shower.  Not visible to the left of the picture:  screened in communal kitchen.

Above:  Looking out my bathroom window, I could see the roof of the screened-in kitchen, and the general disarray and disrepair of the place.  Below, Pat is coming out of my private (half) bathroom into my private loft area that he kindly arranged for me to use while I was there. 

 

Above:  my sleeping loft, which looked out onto a church and its parking lot and mountains beyond that.  At one time there was a kind of built-in couch where the white paint turns to brown along the back wall, but it had become merely a wooden bench that I stepped up on to get into the loft by the time I stayed there.  Below:  This is the entrance to the building where my room was, with stairs just to the left inside going up to my room.  This bottom floor was a sort of garage or storage room with a gravel floor, and more junk stored in it.

 

 The bearded fellow looked like Pat is why I took this photo.  I thought it was Pat at first, but realized my mistake as I got closer.  This is the park-like area along the waterfront adjacent to the Pioneer Inn and the little Lahaina branch of the Maui public library.  The photo below shows what the bearded fellow would have been seeing in front of him.  There are surfers out in the surf waiting (you can see their heads) and hoping for a big wave.  The stone ruin/patio is what remains of some once-significant public building.

This is the Pioneer Inn viewed from the parking area near the wharf.  Previous photos above where taken in the area where you can see the tops of palm trees.  Yeh, it's not a big place.
 

4th of July 1988

I believe the motel was called the Stagecoach Motel, at St. Johns and IH35 in Austin.  The occasion was a 4th of July visit by Mother and Glenn.  The year was 1988.  Mother had both a point-and-shoot 35mm camera and a Kodak/Polaroid that made instant prints.  This is one of the instant prints, the previous post is one of the 35mm ones from the same trip.

Nerds posing as Nerds

On the University of Texas at Austin campus, July 1988.  DWT and Glenn Farrell King, who is a first cousin of my mother's.  She took the picture, but her choice of campus architecture could have been much better, don't you think?

1984 Desktop

It was a one-bedroom apartment in a duplex at 205 South Barton Street in Little Rock, with a driveway alongside the house (outside this window), and on the other side of the driveway, an old unfinished cinderblock ruin that had trees and underbrush growing in it--a good buffer zone.  I got the old manual typewriter fom my father's office in Pine Bluff.  It had belonged to an albino cousin of my father's named Charlie Orto, who worked in the office and  is the only person I can recall seeing who wore a green-shaded accountant's visor.  He shot and killed himself in the men's bathroom of the office in 1972.  One of Charlie's uncles was named Charles also and had also killed himself, in 1925.  The connection to my family is that Eliza Orto Trulock,  aunt of the younger Charlie Orto and sister of the older one, was my great grandmother.  In 1926, she also committed suicide (she shot herself in the heart, according to the newspaper account).  I took possession of the Underwood typewriter in 1976, with Dad's permission. I used it to write several unpublished stories and numerous letters, including eight or ten published letters to the editor of the Arkansas Gazette (and two guest columns) in the ten years I had it. I left the typewriter with one of my mother's first cousins (diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic in the 1960s) who moved into a downtown Little Rock apartment when I moved out in 1986. It eventually wound up in the little attic above the carport at my mother's house on Cherry Street in Pine Bluff, but I couldn't find it after she died in 2005, so its present whereabouts are unknown. The desk also came from Dad's office in 1976.  It was painted black and I stripped it down after I got it but it remained stripped and unfinished until 1991, when I sanded it and put a clear polyurethane finish on it.  I still use it, and also still have the Danish-designed office chair, a gift from my live-in girlfriend at the time, Karen Jo Simmons (now ex-wife).  I messed around with electronics more back then, and had a soldering iron, a variable transformer, and a home-made 5 volt power supply on the desk.  I don't do electronics anymore, or very little anyway.  I got interested in the electron itself, resulting in my becoming less of a hobbyist and more of a researcher. Well, hold on, I guess what I am is a hobbyist researcher!  My stack of books now would be about 100 feet tall if I could stack it straight up. In 1984, I already had in mind moving to Austin, Texas, and had visited there twice.  I suppose that's the reason for the Texas Monthly magazine on the typewriter.  The move to Austin occurred on my birthday in 1987.

 Framed people on the wall are Einstein and Bohr in Belgium about 1927, Dmitri Mendeleev, and Isaac Newton.

Another snake photo

Don't know what kind* of snake this is, but I'd temporarily forgotten I took this photo when I posted the previous snake photos.  Definitely not poisonous, so I didn't mind getting a little bit closer to it.

 

You can see a reporter named Chuck Dovish, or somebody, holding one of these snakes in the AETN video about the Bayou Bartholomew Trail, which is where I was when I took the photo.  I don't see this type of snake out there very often.  Mostly see cottonmouths and nonpoisonous water snakes that look like cottonmouths, and of course the occasional copperhead.  Never have seen a rattler on or near the trail.  Or anywhere in Southeast Arkansas for that matter.

*Update:  Apparently this is a Mud Snake.

A couple of not good photos of snakes

When  I see a snake that could be a cottonmouth or copperhead on the Bayou Bartholomew trail, I just turn around and go back.  After all, I'm just walking or running for the pleasure of it, so one way is as good as the other.  (Yes, there was a day when I was wearing sandals and not paying attention and stepped on a young copperhead who was under some leaves and I was bitten.)

 

A couple of weeks ago, I encountered a sizable snake that could have been a cottonmouth (also known as a water moccasin) or a nonpoisonous water snake.  I didn't want to get close enough to figure out which.  I turned around and started walking in the other direction, but remembered I had a disposable camera (recyclable, so they say)  in my pocket.  So I went back, but not too close,  and snapped a not-very-good photo as the snake was crawling slowly off the trail:

I was hoping since I didn't have a zoom lens that I could zoom in digitally on the photo on my computer, but it gets too fuzzy with more zooming than this. 

Also, last year sometime I took this photo of a grass snake or garter snake out at the farm below where my treehouse is:

Sure makes me wish I had a good photographer with me at such times as nature presents a good opportunity. 
 

Dining Room mess

Well, I have to confess, it's usually a mess.  Magazines, loose papers and newspapers, books, loose photos and undeveloped film.  And in this photo, a plate of shrimp shells sitting on a New York Review of Books I used as a placement (I need to buy some real placemats but keep forgetting to).  An "Obama for President" glass from the Flying Saucer bar that I bought at the Goodwill store in Pine Bluff.  Also, similarly, the floor has stuff, mainly magazines, scattered about.  Gotta go home now and do some straightening up.  Unless something else comes up.

 

This is a very small sampling of my bookshelves.  I measured recently and have about 1,200 linear inches of bookshelf space.  Taking one inch as the average width of a book, which I think is pretty accurate, I have approximately 1,200 books now.  And yeh, one more on the way!  A collection of Robinson Jeffers' poetry.

 

Latest Jessie photos