All America Bloodline Blues

[This is cross-posted from my main blog at FarrFeed. I'm publishing it here to see if this network is alive or dead! :-) What you really ought to do is read it there, because my graphics are way cooler than what works on these pages, AND there's an actual bull elk mating call sound you can play! But this is the kind of thing I write about. As long as you're here, enjoy! - JHF]

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Fortunately, my mother threw me out of her house last year — otherwise, I might have gotten upset yesterday. And of course, I promised my brother I wouldn’t write about this. [sigh...] Well, there goes another one. It’s all grist for the art mill, baby, no time to lose!

There I was having my 5 o’clock tequila in the sunshine. It was a glorious Indian summer day, with golden yellow cottonwoods and aspens splashed against an impossibly blue sky. (We get that sort of thing in these parts.) My wife was walking around with her garden shears, whacking off the tops of flowers executed by last week’s 20 degree lows. The cat was looking for rare birds to kill. All in all, a fine early evening in the West, when all of a sudden, my cell phone rang inside the house. Normally, I might not hear such a thing, but I now have a distinctive ringtone: it’s a bull elk bugling, and I think we need to listen to it right now:

[NOTE: This feature not available at this Book Marketing Network blog, please visit FarrFeed to hear the elk!]

(There, that’s better!)

On the other end of the line was my brother in Tucson. He didn’t have to tell me he was calling from outdoors, because I could hear the cars whizzing by. Sometimes you just have to get things off your chest, and he did, letting me know that a few minutes before, our sainted 88-year-old mother had felt sufficiently provoked by his reaction to her in-transit hounding of one sort or another as he was driving her to Penney’s to leave him standing on the curb while she zoomed off on her own. Apparently he had pulled over and gotten out of the car to cool off, then thought better of it and came back, but by then it was no use, and the old lady pulled a U-turn in heavy traffic and headed off to Southwestern strip mall hell. He was feeling kind of bad about the whole thing, and who can blame him, given that she doesn’t see or hear very well at all and hasn’t driven by herself for years, as far as I know. I let him know I loved him, thanked him for the update, and poured another shot while I waited for the cops to call.

Oddly enough, they didn’t. What the hey?

In fact, about 90 minutes passed before I heard the elk again. (Maybe you should go back and play that thing once more.) I was ready for anything, because Tucson is one of those places where little old men and ladies regularly crash through storefronts and church bazaars trying to find the brake pedal: “The gas just STUCK!” Etc., etc. Miraculously, this was not the case. Instead of the police, my brother was on the line again, reporting that she-who-gave-us-birth [Thank you!] had returned home safely with only a single baby stroller wedged under the transmission.

Well, good. Other than an unlicensed golf cart getting stuck in the rocks at night after pulling off into the desert to avoid a police car, that was the only news. My sister is flying in from Texas today for a visit, and I hope she has a good supply of banana cream pies to toss at anyone who gives her any trouble.

I could use a snack myself right about now, and I don’t mind wiping it off my face, either.