A couple days ago, Abner and I wandered into the stable courtyard at the estate and sought a table in the shade for some rest and water before continuing on our walk. We had walked up from the lagoon and it was a particularly sunny warm day but since I was anticipating the arrival of my current guests, I was trying to make sure Abner would get as much exercise and stimulation as I could arrange prior to their arrival. It has been warm though so we have had to kind of take it easy.

Well the stable courtyard was pretty crowded so I wandered over to a table in the shade outside the ice cream shop where a morbidly obese man (picture Jabba the Hut in overalls with saggy manboobs oozing out the sides) in a wheelchair sat alone. I asked him if he would mind sharing his table and he kindly welcomed us to join him. At the time we stopped he was engaged in a somewhat onesided conversation with a middle-aged couple who appeared to have stopped to chat with him on their way to the ice cream shop. From what I overheard in the next few minutes, I am fairly certain they regretted this decision. The husband was black and very dark skinned at that, and his wife was white. This isn't a particularly unusual situation from what I have observed since moving to the South. I am actually a little surprised at how many mixed-race couples one does see, given the impression I always had, living outside the South, that this probably was still a pretty risky business here. Nonetheless, my impression is that both versions of the White/Black coupling are quite common here now so I was not at all surprised to see this couple.

When I sat down and opened Abner's canteen so he could drink, the man was engaged in a chat with the fat guy in the wheelchair about something or other patriotic that was undoubtedly brought on by the wheelchair bound guy's NYPD hat or some other piece of patriotic regalia with which his costume was quite resplendent. Most of the conversation seemed pretty one-sided with the wheelchair guy doing all the talking. The part that really started to get my attention though, was when he decided to start talking about race, and in particular, black people. It started out quietly enough with this rather odd claim that his great great great great (you can insert as many as you want here) grand pappy had been the first Baptist man of color to cross to the west side of the Mississippi River in (are you ready for this) 1701! Now, you have to understand that this comment was coming from the mouth of an enormous white Louisiana cracker with a very thick and pretty uneducated-sounding drawl. All I could think, as he was claiming to have "culluhed" ancestry to a practically Ethiopian looking man was that the really black guy must have been almost ready to fall down laughing.

As the soliloquy progressed, he said that this ancient predecessor might have been Cherokee or sumthin. . .he wasn't sure. From this point, he proceeded to go into a speech about how he couldn't get behind this "African American crap". He informed everyone around who could hear his voice, which was every bit equal to his bulk, that he was brought up "callin em nigras, then culluheds, then blacks, a bunch of othuh names, and now I'm spected to call em African-Americans!" He informed us that his kids don't even know what that means, and then he tried to make it all better by saying that as far as he was concerned, we're all just Americans.

As all this was going on, you could tell that the black guy and his wife were really trying to figure out how to get away from this character and I was praying that they would stay so he wouldn't talk to me. Well, no such luck. They eventually begged off and he turned his pontifical attention to Abner and me. Now understand, this guy was very friendly, but was a hick from someplace in rural Louisiana who had apparently scored bigtime in a settlement on an accident of some kind and now spends his time driving around the South in a new motor home.

He began his confab with me by asking the predictable questions about Abner. This readily segued into relating stories of his own dog experiences which, naturally, involved Coon hounds. Sitting there listening to stories in which pretty much every sentence had something to do with coons, being broadcast at about 120 decibels by a guy with a very heavy drawl who had just minutes before been reciting the list of names to use for black people, felt just a teeny bit awkward. There was, as you might imagine in a popular tourist attraction in the South, an ample supply of black people standing around, and somehow this guy talking about shooting coons and having his dogs chase coons up a tree being so entertaining that he fell over laughing just felt awkward when I knew that some of these people probably hadn't heard that the beginning of the conversation was about a dog, or as he and others of his persuasion called it, a daowg.

After a while, I felt like Abner had had enough down time in the shade and probably wasn't interested in more water so I thanked Bubba for sharing his table and friendly conversations and Abner and I escaped his magnetic aura, only to wonder who might be the next one to sit down there and what direction this character's next conversation might take.

Those of you who really know me well are aware of the fact that I have almost never been able to successfully and intentionally grow any plant. Weeds I can usually do pretty well, but anything that lives in a pot or that you have to put into the ground and actually take care of us not an arena in which I have shined. Well, there are 5 raised beds in the front part of my spare lot, with lawn surrounding them, and I have pretty much ignored them since I moved in here. One has some mint growing in it that might have been a leftover from the previous owners, and one has beautiful irises that bloom every spring for a few weeks, but other than that, they have been filled with weeds since I arrived. . .at least I think they are weeds.

In any case, Jay has decided that since he and Lori have very little space in their yard that is available or sunny enough for vegetables, his is going to be Farmer Coble in my raised beds. I said it was fine with me since the deal is that I get to share in any veggies that manage to survive being in such close proximity to me and my black thumb, but I was not initially optimistic. I bought a couple different kinds of basil plants and Jay brought over a bunch of tomato plants, a cucumber and some other stuff and has spent hours preparing the soil with all kinds of attractive additives and stuff. There are these very impressive cages on top of the tomato plants with black trays at the bottom that are supposed to prevent cutworms (don't ask) and the whole thing looks really professional. My contribution is that I dump my coffee grounds on the soil from time to time because I remember someone telling me that that really adds something to the soil that makes it richer. Probably is bullshit, but what do I know?

Well, time is passing. It has been more than a week since I started to post this latest installment but I have been a busy boy. Jason Mininger and Maren Conrad came for a quick visit that, like most others from my Sacramento friends, was punctuated with almost obscene displays of gluttony. To make matters worse, Jason brought 8 stupendous bottles of wine which, as you will understand, would have been criminal to waste. . .so we drank them all over the three days of their visit. Mostly we looked at art and visited Biltmore although we did squeeze in a quick visit to Mount Mitchell. It was really quite a nice little side trip. It had been a trifle toasty in Asheville but Mount Mitchell is more than 4,000 feet higher in altitude and the temperature dropped 15 degrees on the way up. Maren and Jason both bought sweatshirts which kept them warm and commemorated the visit. Abner and I didn't.

No sooner had I taken them to the airport, where they dealt with Delta cancelling still another flight necessitating a car rental and drive to Atlanta, than I raced home and started doing laundry and preparing for a trip to Indianapolis to do a quick consult for my sister Lisa and her husband David. And yes, for those of you who remember it, their was a film in the 60s called David and Lisa but my sister didn't star in it. She would have been wayyyyy too young.

The visit also provided an opportunity to scoot up to Fort Wayne to spend Father's Day with my parents and my other sister Jan and her new companion. All in all, it was a very rushed trip between the tasks I was undertaking for David and Lisa and the social time with family, but to make matters worse, I had another experience that has just about put me off flying completely.

The best fare available between Asheville and Indianapolis was on Northwest (aka Northworst for those of you who have never had the pleasure) and involved flying to Detroit and changing planes in both directions. For those westerners whose geographic knowledge of the midwest is somewhat limited, Asheville is Southeast of Indianapolis and Detroit is Northeast. As the crow flies, the distance between the two locations is probably only about 350 or so miles, but on this route, you fly about 1,000 miles each way. The flight there went without a hitch so I was lulled into complacency. I was scheduled to depart Indianapolis on Monday at 5:20 and arrived at the airport almost an hour and a half early. All departure boards indicated an ontime departure, so I went through security and camped out in the departure lounge to await the flight and to finish a book I am reading to review for a theater journal, but more about that later.

The pattern airlines love of saying a flight is 10 to 20 minutes delayed and then updating it another 10 to 20 minute increment each time the previous deadline passes began to happen at around 5:00 pm. I checked with the gate agent to see if I was going to have a problem in view of my 9:20 connection in Detroit but he assured me that I would make it with time to grab dinner at one of the fine dining establishments at the airport there. Meanwhile, every 20 minutes, they added a few more minutes to the delay. Finally the gate agent admitted that the plane was sitting on the runway in Detroit waiting to take off in a long line of delayed flights. The air time between the two cities is only about 45 minutes so if the damned thing got off the ground, we would be good to go.

Eventually he announced that it landed in Indy and would be at the gate by 6:15. He asked everyone to have boarding passes ready because as soon as the inbound passengers were off, they were going to board us and head back to Detroit to try to make up for the delays. Since they were trying to get us out by 6:35 this still would have gotten me there in time for my connection, if not the lavish meal with which I had been tantalized.

Well, it was not to be. The passengers got off and the gate agent got on his little microphone and announced that our flight would be departing at 6:30 the next morning and that he couldn't make any arrangements for the roughly 120 people to whom he had been lying for the previous two hours and that we should all go down to the NW ticket desk where there would be plenty of agents to assist us with rebooking for the next day. We were, of course, responsible for our own ground transportation, meals and hotel rooms in the meantime.

I immediately sprinted (well maybe that isn't exactly the right word since I had my little rolling carry-on trailing behind me) to the Avis counter where there were already about a dozen people in the same boat I was in. Luckily I was able to rent a Mercury Grand Marquis (one of my all time favorite cars) that was available for a one-way rental to Asheville. By the way, it had California plates. . .this car had been around.

By 7:15 I was exiting the Indianapolis airport for the 488 mile drive home. It took a 6 hours and 45 minutes door to door with one stop for gas and one for a bag of M and Ms and a pee break. Somewhere between Louisville and Lexington KY the sun set and by the time I past Knoxville, the only vehicles left on the road were a bunch of 18 wheelers that were lit like the Las Vegas strip and a very large ugly blue Mercury Grand Marquis that lurched like a drunken dinosaur around every bend in the road when going through the Appalachians.

I got home at about 2:00 in the morning and had to spend 15 minutes on the phone with NW airlines to make sure I could get a refund on the unused part of my ticket and inform them that I was not a no-show at the departure 4 and a half hours later. I was so tired by the time I got home I couldn't bring myself to return the car to the airport and retrieve mine until the next day.

So now I am thinking that maybe I will drive on any trip I take that can be accomplished in a single day. I really have no choice when going to California or any international flights, but the airlines have really made domestic travel so unpleasant and so undependable that it really has stopped being worth it. Even when everything went as scheduled for the trip up to Indy, the door to door time from my house to my sister's was about 30 minutes less by plane than it would have been by car and I would have been a hell of a lot more comfortable and been able to take Abner with me.

In the Sunday edition of the Asheville Citizen-Times, a perfectly execrable newspaper published by Gannett, there was an article about art collecting written by one Arnold Wengrow and heavily featuring me and my art collection. Arnold had approached me about an interview a month or so ago and at the time said that this would probably be a small article with 8 or 9 people featured so I wouldn't have to worry about quotes or anything. As it turned out, there were two photos including one on the front page of the Living section that showed me with a drink in my hand and a lot of art kind of crushed together. On the version they posted on their website, there were 10 photos. There were also numerous quotes, most of which were reasonably accurate.

When Arnold interviewed me for the article and found out that I had practiced architecture before moving to Asheville and that I had some experience with theater design due to the years I spent on the Community Center Theater Expansion project, he asked me if I would write reviews of two books about theater design that were about to be published. It seems that Arnold is a frequent contributor to a trade journal in the theater industry and was looking for someone to write these reviews.

For reasons that I cannot currently recall, I agreed to read the books and review them. He got me a copy of a current issue of the publication for which the reviews were to be written so I could get an idea of length and format. What he didn't tell me was that there was a distinct possiblity that one or both books would be as dry as the Mojave.

Normally, if I really am bored with a book or loathe it for some reason, I just put it down and move on to something else, but in fairness to the author, I didn't feel like that was an option this time. I have only finished the first book but it definitely would have been a candidate for stopping after about 40 pages. In a way, I'm kind of glad. I think it will be easier to write a scathing review of this dreck than it would be to write a glowing one. Somehow, when I read raves it seems like they always set the eventual reader up for a disappointment and frequently sound like a lovefest for the author. I think it is hard to write really good reviews without sounding like you are gushing. That won't be a problem this time.

I have a piece of sad news to report. Some of you may have known my old and dear friend Ann Thoke. She and I have been close friends since we met as neighbors on Garden Street in 1974. Ann's mother Sue died suddenly but peacefully last Thursday at her home in Florida. There are times in life when you form a relationship with a parent of a friend that is actually a piece of your relationship with the friend. That was the case with Sue Thoke. She was this funny smart short fun person who was always a treat to be around. To me she was ageless and I always looked forward to the times when I got to see her. I will miss her.

It is late and I want to finally finish this and post it. Maybe if I have time tomorrow I will post some pictures. I hope you are healthy and happy.