Wow! What A Year!

Wow! What a Year!!

What happened to 2012? One minute I’m in North Texas and the next minute I’m in the California Sierra’s. Life sure can fly by when you blink.

Susie and I started the year with a new job for both of us. Mine was working as an independent rep for the Bo Brown Company and her new occupation was President and CEO of “Moving Tim and Susie to California Inc.” By now (and also unfortunately) we have become pretty damn good at moving, having moved 3 times in about 4 years. It’s funny, (at least to my nimble brain I find the humor), but the stress becomes a little less, the more you do it. Hah. Sucker! It gets worse the older you get! I promised her this was the last time we strike camp and move.

When the offer came along to work for Bo and move back to California, we were both excited and a little apprehensive at first. I had coveted this position several years ago, but I was a little late in my reaction time and I did not want to get my dreams dashed again. When I heard it was open again, I jumped at the chance and everything fell into place for me. I went from a great job with Motomco to a super great job with Bo. I now work California and Arizona representing 8 awesome horse and livestock lines, plus I get to work with some super people.  Being independent and paying my own expenses has had a learning curve to get beyond, but I’m better at it now than I was a year ago. I’ve gone from Hampton Inn to Best Western and Outback to McDonald’s, but being independent is definitely where it’s at.

The weather change was the easiest switch for us. Our first morning back in California greeted us with a 50-degree morning. Toss in a high of 80 and no humidity and I’m a happy camper. I was working around Santa Barbara in July one week and the temperature was in the 60’s during the afternoon. Hard to beat.  The San Joaquin Valley and Fresno area can still get pretty toasty for a few months each year, but at least it’s a dry heat. Ha. It’s still 105 no matter how you slice it. My saving grace is that I get to travel to different areas of the state and get a little bit of a reprieve from the heat during the summer.

One of the great added values to living where we do is the abundance of agriculture. The San Joaquin Valley runs through the middle of the state and grows an overwhelmingly majority of the produce that the US and parts of the world consume. I will never get tired of driving through almond and walnut orchards. The miles and miles of grape vineyards is still amazing to me and driving through roads lined with pistachio and olive tree’s makes me glad we are here. The first time I drove past acres of tomato, artichoke, garlic and lettuce fields, my mind was boggled. It is still hard to believe that these foods being grown in my backyard, will be feeding people thousands of miles away. Even the early morning smell of dairy cow manure wafting through the fog can be refreshing. Well, sort of anyway.  

Living in the Sierra’s is the crown jewel of my existence now. Like Susie say’s, even the view of the mountains from the grocery store parking lot is pretty awesome. I will never tire of driving up the hill from Fresno to Oakhurst on my way home. I seem to decompress as I make the trek home in the afternoon. I guess my fixation with the mountains is pretty well implanted thanks to my Mom and Dad. Mom must have caught the bug when she went to college in Colorado and I think Dad was infected while he interned during and after college. As a youngster, they would always drag us to the mountains for summer vacation. Like most kids of that age, I probably didn’t appreciate my circumstances like I should have, but I think that is where the wanderlust of the mountains began to draw me in. Some would say that I have completely lost my mind, but ever since those days of being surrounded by the pine trees and aspens, I told myself that I would live here one day.  Well, that day is here and we couldn’t be happier.

 Making a move like we have done is challenging to say the least. People are different and attitudes change as much as the geography did. I will never have a true “West Coast Attitude” and my Texas accent is here to stay. As much as I miss Whataburger cheeseburgers and a Taco Cabana carne guisada taco, I am beginning to like In & Out burgers and fish tacos. Who knows, maybe I can change a few of these California nuts minds about barbeque. Stranger things have happened.

John Muir once said, “The mountains are calling and I must go.” I hope I will live the rest of my days out among these mountains and pines. 

The Good Doctor

The Good Doctor

Why do the good people in the world sometimes have to go through the toughest times? It seems that sometimes the not so good, actually have it pretty good.  Makes me scratch my head and wonder.

Rocky Denard texted me this morning while I was sitting by myself in the Atlanta airport and told me one of our good friends was having a rough go at it with cancer. As we texted back and forth for about 10 minutes, a million memories of Stephenville, Texas and our college days, flooded back to me. I had to bite my lip to keep my eyes from welling up.

Brandon Manning called me a few weeks ago to tell me that Dr. Don Henneke had some pretty wicked cancer (excellent descriptive word from Rocky) to deal with. I was shocked and in disbelief, but I took it in stride. I suppose Rocky’s message hit me a little harder, no offense to Brandon, but I guess the brevity of it all finally hit me. Rocky told me he had visited Doc and he described a man that was a shell of his former self. 

All of us met Dr. Henneke somewhere around 1986 or 1987 while attending Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas. “All of us” were a tight-knit group of guys, mainly Ag majors I ran with, trying to find our way in the world. Dr. Henneke, I never could call him Don even though I wanted to, was an equine studies professor who came from the real world. He grew up in the cattle and horse world of Oklahoma and through the years, gathered his BS, MS and PhD from Oklahoma State, LSU and Texas A&M. He had real world, practical knowledge, plus an overwhelming intelligence that he hid from most people. Big and hulking, he had a personality that was intimidating to say the least. He didn’t say much unless he had something that needed to be said, but his words stuck to you like glue. I don’t think I ever had a better teacher. He had a way of putting ideas and information into an “agricultural perspective” that has stayed with me all these years. He used this gift when he was describing a set of mare pens we were repairing. I was learning to weld and my grasp of the art was pretty pathetic. The welds were not neat and straight, but better described as “gorilla welding”. In other words, huge globs of metal and flux that got the job done, but I was using one welding rod per every 2-3 inches. He was inspecting my welding and I meekly told him that I was not very proud of my work. He took a drag off his cigarette, closed one eye so that the drifting smoke would not burn his eye, and encouragingly said, “That’ll work fine. It’s the functionality of it that really matters.”

The first spring that “all of us” took Equine Repro, we spent every weekday afternoon and most Saturday or Sunday mornings, at the Horse Center on the Tarleton college farm. The first time we saw Dr. Henneke palpated a mare, he shocked us all by lubing up his bare arm and inserting it up to the shoulder into the mare’s rectum. The palpation act was not shocking, most of us had seen that before. It was the lack of an OB sleeve that threw us. Palpating a mare is where you feel the mare’s ovaries and determine if she is ready to breed or if she is pregnant. Normal practice except that most people use a plastic OB sleeve to keep their arm clean. Not the Doc. We all kind of raised our eyebrows and looked at each other with a “What the hell?” gesture. After he had palpated the group of mares we had gathered, he went into the barn’s lab and scrubbed his arms and fingernails thoroughly (thank goodness he had good hygiene) and we had to ask the question most of you are thinking now.  We said to him, “Doc, why don’t you use a sleeve to preg test these mares?” He replied in his usual, matter of fact way, “When you use a sleeve, your sense of feel is diminished by a layer of plastic. I just have a better, more accurate touch without the sleeve. Plus, once you go sleeveless, you’ll never go back.”  We would have took Doc more serious, but Steve Adams then made the comment “I bet you have to keep your arms shaved, don’t you Doc? Probably helps keep those little shit balls from rolling up on your arm.”

I loved to hear Dr. Henneke’s stories from the days when he was our age. He was managing a breeding farm in Oklahoma and was showing a breeding stud to some potential clients. Breeding studs can be pretty cagey and mean at times, but this one was at the top of the list. He knew this going in to the pen, but Doc said he let his guard down and let the horse get out of his view for a half second. Before he could react, the stud lunged at him with teeth bared and chomped down on his chest. Luckily it was wintertime and Doc had on a blue-jean jacket and vest, plus a long underwear top and a jean shirt. Doc hollered at the horse in his usual way (he called it his “dog and children” voice) and fought off the old stud horse. Even with all the clothes he was wearing the horse bit through all those layers of clothes and ripped a chunk out of his upper chest that took 6 stiches to close. After he healed up, he installed an electric hot wire around the top of the stud pens to keep the stud horses from fighting with each other, plus to protect people that might get to close to the pens. He had the pens wired up for a few weeks and another client wanted to see the same horse that had bit Doc. He was a little more cautious this time and sure enough, the old stud thought he would have seconds at Dr Henneke’s expense. Doc explained that he maneuvered himself closer and closer to the new hot wire and with eyes in the back of his head waited for the horse to make his move. As the stud started to lunge, Doc said he rammed his fist in the horse’s mouth and grabbed the horse’s tongue. With the other hand, Doc reached up and grabbed the hot wire. Most people would have to really plan this revenge carefully, but Doc’s mind worked a little more different than ours. The jolt of electricity ran from the wire, through Doc’s outreached arm, through his body and hit that sumbitchin’ stud like a ton of lead. Doc said he held on for as long as he could and the stud’s eyes were as big as bowling balls. The horse pulled back and shook his head, did a few jump kicks, farted and ran to the other side of the pen. We were like little kids sittin’ around the campfire telling ghost stories. “How did you not get shocked? we asked. Doc then went on to explain electricity to us and how the stud was grounded and the electricity did not even faze him, only the horse. Doc had reverted to “boring, over-educated Doc” and the shock of it all faded. We looked around at each other and rolled our eyes. But still, you have to admit, true or false, it’s a good story.

Doc had a way of expressing himself with no regard to who was in the room. One time we had a mare that was having difficulty becoming pregnant.  Doc thought we had missed her estrous cycle (again) and he explained to us the art of “teasing” mares. You take a stud horse from mare to mare, mindful that the mare is safe from bites or kicks from the stud horse, and watch how she reacts to the stud. If she is ready for breeding and her estrous cycle is in the correct phase, she generally is permissive to the stud and lets you know. Some mares are very coy and you have to be experienced to catch these little mannerisms. Doc proceeded to explain to our mixed gender class, “Sometimes these mares do all but flip over on their backs to show they are in estrus. But there are those few that will be wearing a low hemmed skirt with the collar buttoned all the way to the top. They play hard to get and won’t let on that they’re in a romantic way, so you have to look for subtle reminders if you want to get them.” Everyone in the classroom, both male and female started nervously looking down at the ground or up at the ceiling after his comments.  Doc just shuffled his papers and went on to the next part of the lecture. Gloria Steinem would have had a field day with those comments.

I was the student manager of the Tarleton Horse Center when I was a junior and I got to know Dr. Henneke very well. We went to several Cutting Horse events at Will Rogers Coliseum in Ft Worth and also went to a couple of horse sales. He never had a whole lot to say to me and he was a little gruff at times, but I soaked up everything I could when I was around him. He taught us to think situations out and use our common sense, but not to forget that science was behind literally everything that happened each day. No other teacher or mentor has ever explained things in that matter. The other students at school, who did not take any classes from him, could never understand why we liked Doc so much. He did his own thing and danced to his own beat. I think that even some of the other professors at Tarleton did not quite know what to think of him. He smoked and smelled of BO and horse dung, but could beat them all with half his brain tied behind his back. I think they all secretly wanted to be just like he him.

The last time I saw Dr. Henneke was about 5 years ago while I was doing my California to Texas commute. I was on one of my two-week trips in Texas and at the time, Stephenville was where I wanted to land once we were re-located. Grat Williams and Brandon were living there and I thought that was where we would set down stakes. I knew Doc drank coffee every morning at the Whataburger in town and I timed my day so that I could catch him there. After about 15 minutes or so, he pulled in with coffee cup in hand. He saw me, gave no expression with his droopy mustache and sad eyes, and walked over to my table to join me. It had been at least 15 years since I had seen him and I always felt like he was disappointed when I left the horse industry to become a salesman. We talked for a good thirty minutes and I told him I was looking for a home in the area. To my surprise, he told me there was a place for sale right down the road from him and I should go check it out. He then told me to stop by the horse center next time I was in town and visit for a bit. There was horse sale benefitting the Tarleton Horse Program and maybe I wanted to help out with the students. I thanked him for the visit and drove off. I never went back to the horse center and I never saw Doc again.

Doc passed away last night. Grat, Brandon and John Jefferies contacted me first thing this morning. I wrote this yesterday when Doc was still with us. It really sucks to have to go back and amend this.  I wish I were back in Stephenville to pay tribute to this great man. This is the second friend/acquaintance of mine to be struck by cancer at too early of an age. Dean Lane was the first and I hoped he would be the last, but cancer shows no remorse or prejudice.  Cancer is a machine and as Doc probably would say, “has great functionality”.  Doc lived a great life in a great industry. He has more friends than he ever realized he had, plus a great family and 2 great kids. Everybody has to die and we all realize that. I just wish that the good people out there were given more time and were able to stick around longer.

 We’re going to miss you Don.

The Long Road Home

It seems that lately I have got into a rut, complaining about rude behavior and such. Kind of like Captain Call in Lonesome Dove; “I just won’t tolerate rude behavior in a man.” I had the mindset to comment on that very subject and a great thing happened. We got a contract to sell our house in Texas.

The last 6 months have been difficult to say the least. Not knowing from week to week and then from month to month, have been tough on Susie and me. I guess I could easily vent about people who drive too slow in the fast lane or kids who have their faces permanently affixed to their cell phones, but I now I have a new outlook. Susie was getting tired of my sour mood also and she is what counts the most in my world.

I accepted a job offer back in November 2011 to move back to California and work as an independent rep for an Ag marketing company. What we thought would take 3 or 4 months max to sell our house, took 6 months.  Traveling via plane and rental car can really tax your commission checks. What’s worse is not knowing from week to week whether this was the week it would all happen. I sucked it up and wrote the checks, but I was really getting stressed, not to mention my most patient boss. He really backed me during this transition and he helped make the whole ordeal bearable.

A week ago we were talking about me getting an apartment in California and living there 3 weeks out of the month and coming home to Texas for a week a month. Two days after we had that painful discussion, we got an offer on the house and within 36 hours we had a contract.  I told Susie I had this premonition or funny itch that wouldn’t go away or whatever synonym you can come up with about divine intervention. I felt that God did not want us to be apart that much. I’m not the most religious person in the world, but I still believe. I have my own ways of showing praise and I think it has helped me live a good life.  I’m here to tell you I gave much thanks that day.

Susie and I are geeked (a California term for those that don’t sabe “dude talk”) to get to go back. The mountains of the California Sierra are a sight to see. Oakhurst is small enough to be personal, yet we have all the amenities we need. Fresno is less than an hour away, so we can “go to town for supplies” once a month. We will live 20 minutes from the entrance to Yosemite National Park. Boo yah. That is probably the best part. Every time we visit the park, we see something we didn’t see the last time. I will work about half the state from the Bay area around San Francisco, through the Central Valley over to the Central Coast to southern California, then over to Arizona. Pretty sweet.

People ask me all the time why I want to go back to our part of Cali. Good question. My best response is that I have been there and I have seen. A lot of the negative stereotype about California is way off base. Sure, the tree huggers and liberals are thick, but there are more people like us than you can shake a stick at. I read a book about John Muir, the naturalist, a few months ago. He was from the Midwest and coming to the Sierra’s he saw a majesty that he had to explore and tell the world about. I’m not that much of a nut case, but I see where he was coming from.  

Hopefully we will close on our Texas home and make the move the last week of June. I can’t see us ever forgetting where we came from, but we are damn sure excited to move back home.

Geeked would be a better term.

Pickup Tailgates and "Disco Sucks" Bumper Stickers

The tailgate of my sweet ’76 Chevy Luv pickup and the tailgate of countless other of my buddies trucks, were an ode to the 70’s. Growing up in suburban southeast Texas, many an evening was spent telling lies, hoping the girl in English class would pay attention to me, sippin’ a cold Lone Star and most important of all, tryin’ to be cool.

Growing up in Baytown, TX in the 1970’s, trucks or muscle cars like Camaro’s and Mustang’s, were the desired mode of travel for most testosterone fueled teens of my day. Unfortunately, I was relegated to a 4-cylinder Chevy Luv pickup, which is actually a mini-truck, but still a truck. It was painted calf-shit green (from the factory no less), had mag wheels and mud tires. The radio, speakers, tires and wheels were probably worth more than the truck. Not what you would call a chick magnet. Pretty lame now that I think about it, but it was mine, and it had a tailgate.

The crowd I ran with, The Country Club Hoodlums or CCH, were all from the same neighborhood for the most part. I can’t remember who tagged us with the name, but we wore it with a badge of honor. We hung out on the Baker Road bridge after school or parked out in front of someone’s house on afternoons after school let out. Most of us had known each other since elementary school and we had stuck together through thick and thin.  We didn’t hang out with the “in crowd, but I can recall when the “in” crowd wanted to hang with us. We even chose a girl to be CCH “sweetheart”, kind of like what the social clubs at school did.  I kind of doubt the girl cared much for that title or for that matter, even knew about it.

Hanging out, sitting on the tailgate of a pickup was the social epicenter of our formative years. We would park in front of someone’s house, or better yet, sit in the parking lot of McDonald’s or one of the unsuspecting businesses along Texas Avenue in Baytown, Texas and spend the time, talking about what we wished we were doing or who we wished we were doing it to.  We dipped snuff and spit into a puddle of tobacco juice that was as big as a hubcap, slowly growing in size as the night went on. Gee, I wonder why most of us never really had steady girlfriends?

Conversations were generally about cars, girls, and music and not necessarily in that order. We could never understand why “that” girl would want to go out with “that” guy. We would laugh at the guys who were 18 or 19 years old and still hanging out on Texas Avenue. We said that if we were that old, we would be in Houston at a nightclub or bar and we damn sure wouldn’t be hanging out on the main drag. Famous last words; many a night at age 19 & 20 were spent sittin’ on a tailgate.  We were so preoccupied with our trucks and our world that we were barely aware that Iran had taken some Americans hostage or other current events of that era. Except for the now famous Mickey Mouse, “Hey Iran!” poster, which had Mickey’s middle finger extended in that most offensive way, we would have never know there was a conflict in Iran. We would talk about what concert was coming up or what kind of tires we were saving to buy, and that generally held precedent over a history test, the Berlin Wall or what Walter Cronkite had told the nation that night.

Unfortunately during my high school days, disco music had gained a foothold and even at our young age, we knew this low point in American music could not prevail. To show my allegiance to the cause, I put a “Disco Sucks” bumper sticker on my truck. Of course my mom told me I couldn’t park it in the driveway with that displayed. Cultural anarchists never get a break.  I could not begin to count the number of 8-track tapes of Montrose, Van Halen,  Journey, The Marshall Tucker Band, Led Zepplin and Willie Nelson were played to their demise those nights. Didn’t it suck when the songs bled over each other on 8 track tapes? Or how about when the song would fade away right in the middle of the cool guitar solo, only to pick up where it left off when the tape changed tracks. Brutal. Radio stations KLOL 101 rocked and KIKK was country cool. All the righteous cars had FM 101 bumper stickers and the best pickups carried the “Proud to be a KIKK’er” stickers. They just don’t make bumper stickers like they used to. I had a “Lone Star Longnecks and Aggies; No Place But Texas” bumper sticker that I was the most proudest of. My “Onward Thru The Fog” sticker came in a close second along with the “Holley Equipped” sticker even though my little green truck was far from a racetruck and only carried a little 2-barrel carburetor.

Going to the Decker Drive In was required activity if you had a truck and a tailgate. The “Decker” was a drive in movie that played 2^nd run movies and when we were really lucky, soft-core porn. We would crowd 3 in the front seat and another 3 or more in the bed of the truck, and along with a couple of six packs, we were kings.  With lawnchairs as thrones, we passed many a summer night paying money that was extending some B-movie star’s career a few months longer. I don’t remember many of the movies we paid to see, mainly because beers and left-handed cigarettes were consumed in mass quantities. Don’t worry Mom, more beer than anything.

Muddin’ was a great pastime in those years. Southeast Texas is notorious for its “gumbo mud” and with the amount of rain we received, we never had much problem finding mud holes. Since you had a pickup, you were required to have mud tires and hence, you were supposed to drive through the mud at any time the moment arose. A few of us had 4-wheel drive and Brook had a “heavily equipped recreational vehicle” (“Stripes” reference with Bill Murray) that had big tires, a bumper guard and best of all, a winch. Brook generally was the one who pulled you out of the mud when you got stuck. I bet his folks got tired of phone calls in the middle of the night that generally went like this: “Brook. I’m stuck. Yes, again. Come pull me out. “ Brook was a gamer and never turned anyone down.

The highlight of the year was the last day of school campout in May of each year. Somehow we convinced our parents that we would be camping out in the woods and eating hot dogs. We always managed to get someone’s big brother to buy us beer, wine and whiskey and thank goodness we hiked to the campsite and didn’t drive.   Once again, mass quantities (“Conehead” reference. Remember Dan Akroyd on SNL?) were consumed and brain cells were slain. One year we were introduced to “The Peace Pipe”. I shouldn’t have to explain that one, but Cheech & Chong would have been proud. Oh the stupid shit we got ourselves into. Dink’s older brother and his friends raided the campsite and scared us into thinking the cops were after us. Richard went stumbling through the woods looking for Irving, his pet firefly.  You had to be there.  One time Barry took it upon himself to sober everyone up. He soaked a towel in an ice chest full of freezing water and would sneak up on people and wrap the towel around their heads. Imagine being in a drunken slumber and some dumb-ass wraps an ice-cold towel around your head. Barry had done this to a few people and was feeling pretty good about himself when he set his sights on Greg. Hulk, as Greg was nicknamed, threw his head up and backwards as the cold water engulfed him. Since Barry was standing behind Greg, he caught the full force of Greg’s head against his chin and was just about knocked out cold. We all laughed until it hurt and Barry sat around the fire with a bag of ice on his jaw. Good times…

Over the years we have all gone to living our own lives and going our own ways. I moved from Baytown in 1984 and have only been back a few occasions. I think quite a few of the old CCH are still living close to our old homestead. I talk to a few of them from time to time and see a few of them face to face every now and again. With the advent of Facebook, we have been able to re-connect and it’s a good feeling when you see a “Friend Request” from one of the old gang. I miss the days of having relatively few worries. Saving for retirement and trying to get your presentation completed on time has taken the place of having to wake up early enough so that you could go duck hunting or having enough money to buy Foghat tickets. When you’re biggest concern was whether or not Becky from 3^rd period English class would go out with you, life could be a lot tougher.

My kingdom for a time machine…

Note To Tiger

Mark Twain never said it better; “The reports of my death has been greatly exaggerated.” Tiger, it’s about time you stepped it up a notch and spanked the field again. I was getting tired of the rumors of your demise.

Now the question is, “Can you keep this momentum going?” Staying healthy is obviously one part of the puzzle. Withdrawing a few weeks ago with the tightness in your achille’s showed me you finally realized you’re not superhuman. Funny, you don’t look as pumped up and beefy as you have looked in the past. Wonder if that might have caused the knee issues? Hmmm…. Anyway, don’t change your regimen (at least most of it) anytime soon. Your work ethic that leaves the rest of the field scratching its collective head needs to be regenerated. Nothing beats practice. Just ask Ben Hogan.

You look like you have set the past firmly behind you now. As much as you can, let bygones be bygones and don’t look back. Who needs a black Escalade with the windows smashed out anyway? You don’t have to be a “playa” anymore to impress us. Face it, we could give a rat’s ass how many “accomplishments” you have anyway. Spend time with your kids and be a dad to them. You’re just going to get one chance to be there for them.

The time has come to be your self. Now, I’m not talking about fist pumping, over-cussing Tiger. We all have grown extremely weary of old Tiger, with the “in your face” attitude and short fuse. That was cute in it’s day and we all got a giggle out of it when you would rant and perform the oh-so dramatic uppercut to the chin. Please. Golf is still trying to be a gentleman’s game and visibly standing on the neck of your opponent and spitting on them is a little tired. That belongs in the NFL along with Sean Peyton’s and Greg William’s bounty list. Be the focused Tiger. Be the steely eyed Tiger. Let your golf speak for itself. We are never short of good role models in golf. I know, I know, Tom Watson can come across a little pompous, but you have to admit that he could win with class.

One thing I am pleased at, for the most part, is your fairly genuine refusal to bow to the fashion divas of the golf world. I am a little disappointed that you shrunk to the level of a white belt from time to time, but at least you have not fallen to Ricky Fowler status. He looks like Walt Disney threw up on him. Good golfer or not, his handlers must be castrated. He looks like the love child of Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. John Daly can wear some crazy pants, but we all know he’s doing it for the paycheck he so desperately needs.  Just dress your age Tiger, not your putter length and you’ll be fine. Clothes don’t make the player, just ask Greg Norman.

Tiger, this is your re-birth.  The swagger is back. You have every pro golfer in the world looking nervously over their sponsor-laden shoulder.  The “Oh shit. I’m paired with Tiger.”, thought is now back in the fore-front of their minds. You are in the head of everyone who tee’s it up from now on. You have got it goin’ again.

Make us proud Tiger. Give mom a hug for me.

EW