Fishy Tuesday

Nice walk this morning (six miles at Memorial Park) followed by gym time working on my core.  

Lunch was a steak sandwich from the discount bin at Randalls, cooked in a cast iron pan.  My mother came over a little bit later to get a briefing on the sale of her house in Arkansas.  We have an offer, but it’s a low-ball.  The market for large homes in retirement communities has been very soft.

Dinner was at Navy Blue with the missus, celebrating our anniversary.  A nice bowl of gumbo, some blackened red snapper, and some greens. Chris Shepherd from Underbelly was there, one of my food heroes, a nice guy too.  I did not bother him.

We then went home to see the end of the Rockets game.  They beat the Knicks soundly.

Quiet day. Tomorrow, a doctors appointment and tickets to the Rockets game against the Bucks.

Walking Monday

Walking and running, for me, has always been best when it is a team sport, a social event where my friends and I can chat, tell stories, work through our life challenges, and if not find a solution, at least get the benefit of a therapeutic conversation.

This started for me, as many things do, with my father, who shared my preference for running with companions. As the oldest son, I was the first one to be told by my dad to lace up my running shoes to join him for a run.  I was, to say the least, not inclined to join him without being coerced or bribed, but my dad was old school in the way of dads in the Seventies, and if he told me to go, I went.

On the road, he found things to divert me from my everlasting pain.  For awhile, we collected beer cans from the side of the road, looking for interesting or unusual brands.  (This was before the craft beer movement, so most of the cans thrown by North Texas rednecks were what you’d expect, cheap and ubiquitous national brands, although we’d see a Lone Star or an Abita from Louisiana or a Mexican beer now and then to pique our interest.)

Then it was conversations about girls. He was 23 when I was born, so I always suspected that he was young enough to want to live vicariously through my conquests.  Once again, I was probably a bitter disappointment to him, because I’d not really learned how to overcome my core shyness until I got to college.  My dates were chaste and gentlemanly, hardly interesting at all.

When I moved to Austin for school, I was more into basketball than running, but I’d occasionally jog through campus or the Capitol complex, always a fun run with lots to see (and a really cold water fountain inside the Capitol building, which you probably can’t do today for security reasons).

When I moved to Houston after law school, I would find interesting people to run with.  One was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, another was a medical ethicist, and one was a law school intern who eventually came to work at the DA’s office (and eventually became a respected judge).  That last partner and I trained together for the Houston Marathon in 1994, spending hours together talking about everything.  To this day, our discussions are governed by a concept we called “runner’s privilege.”  He knows more about me than most of my family.

Today, I walk with my friend A, and we have similar long conversations about life, the universe and everything. I’d tell you more about what we discuss but,,, runners privilege.

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Today, it was a three mile walk at Memorial Park, then gym time (chest day), then some leftover pizza for lunch and a short nap.  After I showered, my trainer called to see if I wanted to join him and his wife for another walk.  I did and we did.

Then, I cooked a frozen turkey pot pie I’d made last November with leftover Thanksgiving turkey, and we watched the Astros win over the Red Sox on TV.

A mellow day, mostly exercise.

Sunday Dinner

A quiet day, highlighted by biscuits in the morning (10 minutes from scratch into the oven today), doom-watching the Sunday morning political shows, and then preparing my contribution to this month’s Supper Club.  I was asked to bring green beans and a bottle of wine.

The wine raised an interesting question: what goes with Polish food?  The Internet machine spat out the answer: a crisp Reisling to cut through the heaviness of Eastern European cuisine.  HEB had a nice one for 22 dollars and the advice turned out to be good - the acidity did not let the food muddy the flavor, and it was a refreshing compliment on an early spring evening in Houston.

The green beans were also successful.  I used an Ina Garten recipe for green beans with gremolata (a sprightly mixture of pine nuts, minced garlic, fresh parsley, grated Parmesan cheese and lemon zest).  My new favorite technique is blanching raw vegetables - two or three minutes in boiling water to set the bright color and soften the veg, then a dunk into ice water to stop the cooking.  It makes green beans so much easier to cook.  Then a quick sauté in olive oil, a toss with the gremolata, some salt and pepper and that’s it.

My friend W was this month’s host and his wife did all the cooking. Stuffed cabbage, pierogies, kielbasa, a pork remoulade, roasted potatoes and carrots, chicken soup, green salad, and poppy seed Bundt cake.  And my green beans!  

It was four couples and lots of good conversation.  Dinner parties really are underrated.  They seem so bourgeois, but you have to get past the social conventions - the awkward greetings, the quick sizing up of each other, the conversational gambits - and recognize that it’s just having dinner with good friends.  I think old age lets you get past all that.  Who am I trying to impress any more?

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I am almost out of my prescribed medications a week before going on my annual golf trip.  That means I have to see my doctor this week, which means I get weighed in again.  I run a little heavy these days, so the weigh-in is no fun, but I am slowly getting over it.  I feel good, I exercise a lot, I am getting stronger every week, and again, who am I trying to impress?

I also need to get some presentation materials in tomorrow for a speech I am giving later this year at the State Bar’s Annual Meeting.  I am filling in for a friend on the topic of selling a law practice.  I am no expert on this topic, but that has never stopped me before.  Fortunately, my friend has given me her presentation materials and I actually studied this issue in the past when I was on a committee working on the ethics rules, so thirty minutes shouldn’t be a big deal.

I also need to take one of my dogs to the vet tomorrow.  She is not eating well and has a sour smell.  I hope it’s not a liver or kidney problem.  We lost a dog a few years ago for something similar and it would break my heart to lose this sweet, sweet dog too.

Wish me luck.

Slow Saturday

Up today at 7:15, not much sleep, with recurring dreams about a song that I cannot remember now. I find myself doing this more often, laying in bed, half-asleep, half-awake, participating in my dream world as an interested observer.  It feels like I have agency in this place, able to direct the events, but that’s not true: it is one of the many illusions of my subconscious.

I don’t mind. I am a firm believer that the dream world is where I clean out my anxieties, or at least face them down for a while.  It is also a place where creativity burbles, like swamp gas in mossy water.

To wit:  The song I wrote for my band’s CD, Down at the Courthouse, was an original song written in my sleep. I woke up, the chord progression on the front of consciousness, but quickly receding.  I ran in my pajamas to my piano and hunted for the chords, finding them - B flat, E flat, resolving to F, our old friends 1-4-5, blues from the crossroads. It was a good song, plucked from my subconscious one time.

In fact, it may be that there is a whole catalog of songs in there, each played once during REM sleep at 1:45 in the morning and then forgotten.  Maybe that’s what distinguishes artists from the rest of us - they live inside their subconsciousnesses (great word), remembering everything.

Anyway, I woke up, fed the dogs, worked my puzzles and then off to basketball.  My friend M was joining me in the game and I had to be on time to bring him into the gym.  This is always a fraught moment, because you don’t know if the guy you bring in can actually play, or if his bad play is going to reflect on you.

He did fine and will become one of the Saturday regulars.  We played seven games and he played with aplomb.  He did look like he was about to have a heart attack at the end, but he shook it off and smiled, ready to come back again.  Good.

Lunch was a ham sandwich and leftover sweet potatoes and beans.  Dinner was a petit steak and chicken breast with salad at Texas Roadhouse with my wife and mother.  Then some Rummikub and cards at home with my mother.

I do need to start working on improving my time management.  I have a book to write and a speech to prepare for.  Procrastination rules my life.  That has to change.

But tomorrow is Supper Club at W’s house, Polish food night.  I am bringing green beans!  

I guess I will begin the change on Monday…

Just Friday

I need a haircut. I also need to go to Costco for a bulk package of Flonase and a bag of oranges.

The problem is that I am retired and Friday is one of the three days of the week that the normies who still work for a living do their errands, like going to get a haircut and buying a bag of oranges at Costco.

In July. I will have been retired for five years. I have stayed busy, to be sure, but I have also adopted the lifestyle pace of the retiree community, in which Mondays through Thursdays during the day belong to us, just as midnight to seven belongs to the night shifters, a community I have interacted with on occasion when I used to work the intake desk at my old job and when I would help my sister on her family’s bread route, going from supermarket to supermarket reloading the shelves with loaves of Pepperidge Farm bread, redundantly secured in its double layer of plastic. I learned that the world is fundamentally different at 4:00 a.m., with its own rules and privileges, including “no cop, no stop” discretion at traffic lights, and easy familiarity with the small community of people doing their jobs at that hour.  They all know each other well.

Same for the middle of the workday. Want a haircut?  The chair is open, just for you.  Want a specialty nut for an orphan bolt in your tool chest?  Home Depot has all the time in the world to help you find it.  Want to walk the loop at Memorial Park?  Parking spots abound, and there is plenty of elbow room for slow walkers like me.

Given that, why would I wait an hour for a haircut on a busy Friday?  The bag of oranges and Flonase can wait too.

So this Friday was a slow day for me.  I did my puzzles, took a walk with my friend A at Rice, got my feet imaged and measured at the Fleet Feet shoe store (it turns out that I am a natural D width, instead of the E or double E I worried I might be), and when FF did not have the Brooks Glycerin 23s I wanted, I got a pair at Dicks instead. Then home for lunch, a little reading, feed the dogs, and off to a poker game at my friend T’s house.  I made $25, which ain’t bupkis.

Really, the only thing worth reporting on today was that I had a long talk with A at the park about a question I have been asking myself lately: Am I a good person?

I am definitely a nice person, and a person that most people enjoy spending time with.  I can be funny and supportive and interesting.

But am I a good person?

I have noticed that I spend a lot of time in this blog talking about my dad.  I think that is because he was a genuinely good person, deeply influential on his family and friends and community.  In retirement, he was active in his church and in service organizations and volunteered with my mother to be court advocates for abused children in the Arkansas CASA program.  These are all the kinds of things good people do.

I am not nearly that involved in bettering the world. I help out with volunteer bar activities, and try to do things to make my family, both near and far, happy.  I like to cook for others and share my food with my friends.

But am I a good person?

I can be overly competitive, cheap, neglectful of my friends and family, and materialistic. I can be lazy and procrastinating and usually look the other way at roadside solicitors. I can be as suspicious and supercilious and judgmental as a Real Housewife settling scores in a season finale episode.

As I reflect on this, I tell A that I don’t want her to give me an answer to this question, because it is fundamentally unfair to ask a friend to honestly answer it.  If she says yes, that’s what a friend would do, so you don’t know if it’s true.  And if she says no, that would be hard for her to say and awful for me to hear.

She tells me that it is not for her to say anyway. She says that whether I am a good person or not should initially be defined by my own standards and sense of morality and community.  And if those personal standards do not correspond objectively with normal standards of decency and goodness (like a certain president we know), telling that person otherwise is generally going to be fruitless absent that person having a moment of clarity, an epiphany of self-awareness.

So the better question for now is this: Do I think I am a good person?

I do, but I also think I can do better. 

That may be my project for 2026.  Whatever I am doing now, I will try to do better.  More thank you notes and postcards to old friends.  More volunteer work (this year, I am going to be doing my part for democracy by volunteering at a polling place, using my bulk and fierce stare to deter Proud Boys and ICE agents from intimidating people exercising their right to vote). More kindness to people who need it.  More walking my beloved dogs.

Tomorrow, basketball!

Guitar Thursday

When my mother moved south from her home in Arkansas

last year, it was the beginning of an adjustment period for her that worried all of us. She moved from a large two-story house on top of a hill near Hot Springs to a small townhome about five minutes from my house.

We talked about getting her involved in the senior community in Pearland, which is well-served by the Knapp Senior Center. I know this because I’ve been there with her, not just as her son, but as a qualifying senior citizen myself. We have been to a few of the Wednesday morning bingo games, which are well-attended and only a little cliquey.

But she doesn’t want to go by herself, and I’m not ready yet to hang out with people in their seventies and eighties, so that hasn’t worked out, probably for the best since I don’t want my mother doing a lot of driving any more.

We hoped there would be more engagement with the people in her gated townhouse community, but that has been slow going, and will likely be even slower as the weather gets hotter and her neighbors start staying inside more.

I thought it would be cool if she volunteered to work as a crossing guard for the elementary school near her home, but I am becoming more sensitive to her frailties, and I am not sure she would do well crossing the street thirty or forty times a morning with the boisterous children.

When I have discussed this with her, she has assured me that it was not a problem.

“I’m really not interested in making new friends,” she said.  “I have you and your brother and your families and that’s enough for me.”

I kind of understand. New friendships arise organically from shared experiences and events, but when you are 88 and independent, the opportunities to connect with people are rarer and there is less time to invest in developing potential relationships. Better to stick with the known quantities.

And that’s okay with me. My brother and I have tried to be involved in her life: he takes her to church, his wife helps my

mother with her various doctor appointments, my wife and I have her over regularly for dinner, and I look for opportunities to get her out of the house.

About a month ago, I took her out to lunch and then instead of driving her home, I stopped by a music school to see if they had lessons available for her.  They could not have been nicer, which eased my mother’s concerns, and we signed up to take a weekly one-hour class together.

It has been great fun. My mother got a new guitar - a scaled-down Taylor acoustic in mahogany - and the teacher has been pleasant and supportive.  In turn, my mother has been diligently practicing and is now up to eight open chords, as well as two strumming patterns including the boom-chucka-chucka.  I have been improving too, picking up some new techniques and music theory.

After the lesson, we go do something fun.  Today, we went to the garden center for flowers for her patio garden, and then got a smoothie.

“I really enjoy our lessons,” she told me today when I dropped her off.

Me too.

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Breakfast today was an English muffin with turkey sausage, and a bowl of cereal.  Lunch was a steak sandwich and plantains from yesterday supper.

I worked out at the gym too. Today was hamstrings and chest, which were challenged by schlepping about 200 pounds on a hexagon bar back and forth in a farmers carry, and by hanging by my hands from a pull-up bar.  

The latter exercise is notable because it is the ultimate reality check - you begin by thinking this is no big deal, because you are the same monkey boy who swung effortlessly in the playground.  But you are not.  Instead, you are an old man carrying sandbags on your frame, trying to hang on for dear life with soft hands not accustomed to heavy lifting.  No bueno.

After I got home from guitar, I skimmed about three tons of tree pollen from our pool, and then got a call from my trainer.

“You said I’m old school in your blog,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” I said, dreading what was coming next.

“What are you doing now?” he asked. (Another anxiety-provoking question.)

“Sitting,” I said.

“Well, get up and meet me at Berry Miller.  We can walk three miles.”

I was too tired to argue with him, so I agreed to go.  As two of his daughters worked out on the middle school track, he and I walked three miles while he pushed a carriage with his third daughter.  His wife came by after a while with their new dog and joined us on the walk. He really has a lovely family and they are raising their kids right.

After we were done, I limped to the car and drove home.  I’ve earned the right to sit on the couch now.

Action-packed Wednesday

I was up until 1:00 a.m. last night playing cards, and then had to be up at 7:30 in case a contractor showed up early for work on the house.  I was really in no mood to get out of bed, but the cliches are true: the older you get, the harder it is to sleep late.  Once I was up, I was up.

Breakfast was a bowl of cereal with a banana and skim milk.  Every now and then, I try to do better: A bowl of oatmeal with some dried fruit, a breakfast smoothie with protein, or a bagel with salmon, for example.  

And sometimes, I swing the other direction: pancakes, donuts, fritters, kolaches. I have been, in fact, making my own kolaches with artisanal sausages and good cheese or other proteins like leftover brisket or turkey.  Not good for you, but so so satisfying.

But the good old bowl of cereal is a good default for me, especially if I throw in a protein bar before exercising.

After breakfast, I went to Rice University to walk the track around campus, 2.8 miles or so.  I walked with my friend A, who is a great exercise companion, full of interesting conversation and good cheer.  We have gotten faster in our walks, averaging 16 minute miles, which does not impress my trainer, who seems to be expecting us to walk like the Keystone Kops in old silent movies, double-time because the guy cranking the reel wants to get the show over with in time to meet his girl by the wishing well.  I don’t move that fast anymore, not sure if I ever have.

After the walk, off to the gym for a truncated core workout.  A and I teamed up to alternate bear crawls three times around the periphery of the gym.  My trainer is old school - bear crawls, farmers carries, deadlifts, crunches - and he is impervious to whining, which is kind of the point.  I could go online and get any number of workouts that would be effective if done right, but human nature being what it is, we don’t do them right, partially because proper form can be difficult to attain, but mostly because humans don’t like pain.

In short, I pay my trainer to inflict beneficial pain on me.  And he does, with a smile.

The training has helped me a lot.  Not aesthetically - I am still lumpy in all the wrong places (thanks bad breakfasts!) - but I am probably stronger now than I have ever been.

Of course, being strong doesn’t mean the workouts are easier.  I did Russian twists and air-ups while tossing a medicine ball to A, all of which made me whine and gasp and flop around like a dying fish on the really gross floor of the gym.

Eventually, the workout ended and I raced to have lunch with my friend and former work colleague E.  Now working for the City, she is positively radiant, a happy and fulfilled person.  We are dumplings and drank good tea and got caught up with each other’s lives, something we do every other month or so.

We had a fun lunch.  She has her own good exercise plan - no runs longer than a 5K, with an emphasis on consistency and getting faster.  I like this approach because it lessens the risk of injury and is over faster.  My trainer, on the other hand, wants me walking 6 to 9 miles a throw, which is a huge time investment.

“You have dogs,” he says.  “Take them with you. What are you going to do otherwise?  Sit on the couch?”

That is never as persuasive as he thinks it is.  I like my couch.  (Actually, I kind of don’t like my couch - it’s too deep and hard to get up from. But this is why we do squats at the gym.)

After a short nap, I then called my mother and invited her to dinner.  I ended up making sous vide steaks, purple sweet potatoes tossed in maple syrup, and pan-fried sweet plantains (top ten dish for me when done right).  Dinner was a hit and finished with a nice piece of lemon cake my mother brought with her.

We also had some of the pickled green beans I made.  Verdict: Mom and I liked them, tender crisp and tangy - my son and wife HATED them.

That’s a good day.  Tomorrow, guitar lessons!

Poker Tuesday

My favorite non-athletic games, in order:

(1)    Texas 42 Dominoes (and its rarely seen variant 88).

(2)    Hold’em poker (and its extremely dangerous variant Omaha).

(3)    Rummy 500.

(4)    Backgammon.

(5)    Hearts.

I’ve written about the domino game before (see here), and I have written about poker frequently too.  

Rummy was our family game for many years, a complicated variant of gin that my dad loved and my mother has become quite adept at too.

Backgammon was my game in college, balancing aggression, probability and luck.  I have always been very good at it, whether in person or online.  It’s hard to find people to play in real life, however.

Same for Hearts.  It is easy to get a game online, but there you don’t get the pleasure of watching someone in person catch the queen of spades unexpectedly, their faces falling as they replay the hand in their mind, wishing they had played any other card.  My brother’s face is particularly aggrieved when that happens, which is why he doesn’t play with me much anymore.

Tonight was my biweekly poker game at my friend Jimmy’s house.  The way it usually goes is a tournament with between 25 and 30 players on three or four different tables, and then, as players get knocked out of the tournament, a cash game.

Tonight, the poker tournament did not go well for me, but I won about $185 in the cash game, so it was pretty much a wash for the night.  The stakes are not scary, so the point really is the camaraderie and the competition.  I’ve been playing in this game for about 15 years and consider the guys to be some of my best friends.

It’s what I tell my son frequently: you have to find your tribe and then say yes.  If you are lucky, you can belong to many tribes - for me, family, basketball, gym, band, cards - and know that there are people out there who have your back because you share their interests and have their backs.

I am a lucky person.

____________________________

Breakfast today: bowl of cereal with skim milk, then a couple of energy bars before leg day at the gym.  I leg pressed about 380 pounds and did walking lunges, tire pushes, step-ups, sumo squats, and some kind of weird curtsy exercise with the TRX straps.  Then a hot dog for lunch, and some chicken quarters with green beans for dinner.

My culinary highlight today was making two quarts of pickled green beans with the produce I got at the farmers market on Saturday.  Two kinds of vinegar, a little salt, a little sugar, and pickling spices with blanched beans.  They will soak for a day or two and then we will see what we have.

Tomorrow, a long walk, some more exercise, and lunch with a former co-worker.  And I need to practice my guitar!

Nighty night!

Learning Monday

About three weeks ago, the Houston City Council voted on my nomination to serve on the Board of Directors for the Houston Forensic Science Center, approving my appointment unanimously.  

I had never been the subject of a vote before, and it reminded me of that moment in a wedding where the minister says, “If anyone has any reason to object to this union, speak now or forever hold your peace.”  

(This, by the way, is the worst question you could possibly ask at a wedding.  It is either a non-event or a terrible opportunity for an old boyfriend or stalker to hijack the ceremony.  Who needs that?)

Fortunately, no exes showed up for the vote and a friend of mine on the Council said some really nice things about me, so I am now on a Board of Directors.

This morning, I received an orientation briefing by the staff at HFSC.  I will not recap that event, except to say that those people are brilliant and dedicated, and we are well-served by them.  They are the definition of good government.

And I’m just excited to still be of use in my old age.

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I started watching Death by Lightning on Netflix last night. It is about the assassination of James Garfield by Charles Guiteau in 1881.  The show is really well-done, the period details convincing, and the leads - Michael Shannon, Matthew MacFayden, and Nick Offerman - are charismatic and compelling.  (Plus that late Nineteeth Century facial hair is so great!)

The funny thing is that I was already familiar with the story as told in Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation.  That book is great fun, especially the audiobook read by the author with guest voices reciting the words of the historical figures, including Jon Stewart as Garfield.

Both the show and the book are highly recommended.

__________________________

Breakfast this morning was a kolache and an apple fritter at Christy’s Donuts in Midtown Houston.  Apple Maps had recommended it when I got downtown sooner than expected and was looking for something to eat before the HFSC meeting.  The kolache was nothing to write home about, but the fritter was amazing.  It’s hardly healthy - one step removed from eating glazed funnel cake - but very satisfying.

Lunch was a turkey sandwich and cole slaw at HFSC, and I made dinner tonight.  Chicken Florentine!  Chicken breaded in flour and grated Parmesan, pan fried, then sauced with a mix of soup, wine, butter, garlic, shallots, cream and cream cheese, with basil, oregano, and wilted spinach.  It came together fast after I prepared my mise en place, and I served it with some salad, garlic bread, and leftover coconut rice.  It was a keeper.

__________________________

Tomorrow, a long walk, some exercise, and poker in the evening. I also plan to read April 1865 in the morning after my puzzles.  I may also order a pair of swim trunks to start swimming laps.  It’s going to start getting hot down here, and I hope to transition to indoor aquatics instead of outdoor walking, but I need to find a lap pool.

See you then.

Basketball Sunday

Basketball and I have had a fulfilling, if sometimes fraught, relationship.  

My father was a very good player, a starter on his high school varsity team in Munnsville, New York, albeit in a school with a graduating class of about eight people, but nonetheless fundamentally sound with a very accurate midrange shot.

If he was hoping that I would be the second generation of good ballers, he was undoubtedly disappointed.  I was tallish, skinny, myopic, and uncoordinated to a fault.  

To give you an idea how in athletic I was as a child, my greatest physical skill was the ability to fall down - usually after tripping over a tree root or uneven sidewalk while reading a book - and then instantly get back up and act as if I had not fallen at all.  I am sure passing drivers watching me would turn to a passenger and say, “Look at that klutz!” and then do a double-take at the sanguine teenager in the rear view mirror, seemingly just fine instead of splayed out on the ground.

We had a basket on our driveway behind the house, with a playing space about the size of the lane on a basketball court, room enough for my father to post me up and knock down turnaround shots over my sad defense.  I used to think that he was overly competitive, like Robert Duvall in The Great Santini, but nicer about it.  I now think he was actually kind to me, letting me get a basket now and then to keep my hopes up, instead of just sweeping me aside over and over for easy wins.

He coached my youth basketball teams and maintained his integrity by not favoring his own son.  I’d come in at the end of the first half, and play a little more midway through the second half before I would be benched in favor of the real players.  He was unapologetic about it.  “You’re doing your best, that’s all

I can ask from you, but we want to win, right?” he’d say.  I always felt like a consolation prize in those moments, the kid he had to take home instead of the one he really wanted.

I tried out for the high school team my freshman year, but years of playing on a driveway with my dad had taught me how to make a ten footer and not much else. Passing, dribbling, rebounding, defense, court sense: all of these things were not in my tool box, and the high school coach did not have a place for a 130 pound midrange shooting specialist.  He offered me a spot as a team manager, but my pride would not let me be the towel boy for a bunch of preverbal mesomorphs.  I went back to the band, and then got a varsity jacket on the swim team my senior year.

I played some high school church ball, playing with a mix of kids and dads, us Catholics against the various Protestant sects in my hometown, no love lost, and I learned how to take an elbow to the face and give one back.  I was still an uncoordinated stork, but I began to see how the game really worked, the movement of the players and the angles for defending and attacking the other team.  I also came to really appreciate my father’s skills, not just as a shooter, but as a team leader, always cheerful and supportive, pretty much universally loved by his teammates.  He was one of those guys who just fit in naturally with others.

I then went to Texas and started playing pickup ball at Gregory Gym and on the outdoor courts behind Jester Dormitory.  This was my real education in the game, learning how to fast break - it was like speed chess, always attacking - and how to find my role. The game was Darwinian, pushing you down until you were on the right court playing the right way against players at your own level.  Sometimes you’d get to play with much better players, but not for long, and those games were not much fun.  I’d play the third court out of four, steering clear of the studs and near-studs, but also avoiding the terrible court where the ball could easily end up over the fence down a storm drain because the guys did not play well or seriously.  Court three was my speed - the semi-athletic dorks wanting not to embarrass themselves and to have a good run before going back to work on a term paper.

During that time, my dad got me a job during the summers working for the city’s parks and recreation department, mowing park grass and emptying out garbage cans in the lake parks.  The work day would start at 7:00 and we’d work until 11:00, and then spend the entire lunch hour playing three on three in the truck yard on a nine-foot hoop attached to a rail timber.  The game would be the full-timers, the guys who worked year-round for the department, against the young summer guys. The full-timer team was headed by a wiry guy named Marshall, a Moses Malone lookalike named Eddie (who once tried to convince me that professional wrestling was actually real by putting an Iron Claw in place on my temple), and a slow guy who had been in my graduating class but had decided to work for the city instead to pursuing more education.  My team was me and the Mueller brothers, farm boys with short hair who would not have been out of place in the movie Hoosiers.  It took us all summer to figure it out, but we eventually started regularly whomping the full-timers in games that became dunkfests.  I’m pretty sure that was my apex as a ball player, getting raspberries on the gravelly concrete court, shirtless and sunburned, plenty of motor and flexible muscle from swimming for hours as a 50 free specialist, catching alley oops on that nine-foot rim on backcuts that Eddie never saw coming. So much fun.

I kept playing ball throughout undergrad and law school, including on Rec Sports teams that never won but had a good time and beers afterwards.  (I did win a coveted Rec Sports Champions shirt once, playing co-ed water basketball with my sister one summer in a four-team league.  I wish I still had that shirt.)

During law school, I played ball for the Texas Attorney General’s rec league.  I’d gotten a clerkship there when the head of the Habeas Corpus Division, while interviewing me, looked at my height and asked me if I played ball.  When I said I played all the time, he hired me with no further questions and slotted me in the low post on his league team.  We also played once a week in a game on a cul-de-sac driveway owned by a plaintiffs lawyer who was a basketball fanatic.  It was three in three and the games were very competitive in the Austin heat.

The relationships I made there paid off when my boss recommended me to the District Attorney’s Office.  I moved to Houston and played some ball here and there, but aside from an ill-conceived YMCA team, nothing serious.  There was a fun game in the old downtown Y during the lunch hour on a scaled-down court with middle-aged lawyers, but that game went away when they knocked down that building and opened a nice new building with regulation courts, too big for a quick lunch game.

But then in 1997 or so, I was invited to play ball by a local defense attorney who had built a half court in his backyard.  This was not the cul-de-sac game: it was in a stand alone A-frame building with a composite floor, wooden bleachers, electronic scoreboard, air conditioning and heating, bathroom and water fountain, and even a hanging display naming the regulars in the game, like you’d see in a high school gym.

I’ve played in that game for nearly thirty years now.  That’s where I was this morning, playing four-on-four half court ball with guys I consider my basketball brothers.  It’s a highlight of my week, and a barometer of my physical condition. Right now, I feel pretty good, moving well at 62 against much younger guys, no back pain or ankle sprains or breathing problems.  I suspect things are going to change at some point - age is always lurking - but I will do whatever I can do to keep going for many years to come.

I miss my dad, who died at 63 from colon cancer.  If it had not taken him, I really believe he would be playing in this weekend game with me.  You think about how the death of a loved one affects you, it’s not just the big stuff.  You look for your dad, who was always open, and he’s not there.  I’m just glad we had the time we did to play together.  What a gift.

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Breakfast was a Chappell Hill sausage and cheese kolache and a glazed old-fashioned donut with a Diet Coke.

Detroit-style pizza and March Madness tonight!  (My bracket is currently in the 98th percentile because I am great.). 

Better choices tomorrow.

Farmers Market Saturday

In Pearland, the Parks and Recreation Department sponsors a farmers market on the third Saturday of each month.  My mother had noticed this in a local news mailer and I had clipped it and put it on the refrigerator under a magnet.

Yesterday, I did the math and realized the market would be this week, so I sent a text to my mother and brother, asking them if they were interested in going.

At about 6:20 this morning, my mother replied, “What time?”  Getting no response (because we were all still asleep), she wrote at 7:45, “I think I will pass.”  

This was tricky.  I did not want to force her to do something she’d decided not to do. BUT … this could have been her way of forcing US to act. (My mother is a double black belt in the martial art of motherly guilt judo.)

My brother called me shortly afterwards to strategize and we decided to extend her an invitation to go to the market at 10:00.  She made us stew a little, then said, “OK, I will go.”

Phew.

I met my brother and his wife and son at my mother’s house and off we went.

Now, when I think of a farmers market, I imagine stalls of produce, where your purchases are placed in a brown paper bag, still lightly dusted with the dirt from which they had been plucked that morning.  I don’t think of the following:

*   A karate school demonstrating exercises.

*   About fifteen Etsy-style clothing stalls, with things like dog bandannas and bibs saying, “Baby’s First Easter.”

*    Crystals, both for collectors and for meditation.

*    Psychiatric counseling services.

But there they were, all looking for engagement and business, eyes tracking you like a falcon on a prairie dog.

I passed on them, but spread the cash around on whipped raw honey, mason jarred giardiniera, caramel corn, a cookie, and two heirloom tomato plants.  (I checked out the tomatoes when I got home and found out that one of the plants produces a small yellow fruit notable for its lack of any discernible flavor.  Oh well.)

We were done by 11:00 and headed for the car when my brother said, “You know, the best farmers market is on Airline and 45.  Let’s go there!”

I looked at my mother and she shrugged.  I shrugged too.

Off we went again.  There are two things to note about this trip.  The Airline market is a REAL farmers market.  There was an unbelievable amount of produce, all super-fresh and diverse.  If I lived near it, I’d probably become a happy vegan.

But … the Airline market is about 430 miles from Pearland, or so it felt.  The trip there was uneventful, and we had lunch at a fish place called Connie’s.  I had a nice fish taco plate with shrimp fried rice.

At the market, I got some very ripe plantains (my favorite starch by a mile), a bag of green beans, and some purple sweet potatoes to mash for pancakes for my grandson.  My mother found a nice white rose bush for her house.  My brother got a bag of oranges and some mangos.

The ride home was okay until we ran into a funeral procession being protected by motorcycle cops.  This is a nice blog, so I am not going to hold it against the guest of honor that he made the long ride home longer.  We all will hold up traffic someday.

Two farmers markets in one day.  That may be a personal record, which I can assure you will never be broken in my lifetime.

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Another aspect of this blog I’m working on: the Library Project.

Here is a picture of my office library.  These are not all of our books, but they are the books we really care about.

The weird part is that I have probably only read about half of the books.  Many are books that looked good when I bought them.  Many are by authors I trust.  Many are about interesting topics.

So, it is my goal to…read them.  All of them.  (Well, all of them except for the dictionaries and reference books. I am a nerd, but not a mega-nerd.)

I will start with the left book cabinet and work my way down.  When I finish one, I will discuss it, and then decide whether to keep it or give it away.  Simple as that.

The first shelf is pretty intimidating:

April 1865, by Jay Winik.  I have not read this, and did not buy it, but who can argue with Civil War history?

Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe, by Simon Singh.  I tackled this a few years ago, but did not finish.  I am looking forward to trying again.

In One Person, by John Irving.  His bisexuality book.  I bought it, it sat on my bedside cabinet for about a year, untouched, and migrated to the library.  John Irving is the writer I always wanted to be, so time to take this one on and see what he has to say.

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Dinner tonight: a grilled pork steak and some coconut rice.  Not super-healthy, but the pork had been in the meat drawer and needed to be cooked or tossed.  My children will tell you that given that choice, I always choose the former.  I am my mother’s son, not letting good food go to waste.

We’ll see how that decision works out for me tomorrow.  Basketball in the morning!

Good night!

Active Friday

Last night, my mother, who is a very spry 88 years old, living in a townhouse with her two rescue cats, Frankie and Simon, told me she wanted me to take her to the driving range so she could try out her new golf club.

“It’s a 357 club!” she said.

“What?” I said.

“It’s three clubs in one!  But I need you to come with me to get my practice balls.”

I wasn’t sure she was right about this golf club she had bought online, so I checked it out.  It was not three clubs - just a seven wood - but it was being marketed to seniors as an antidote to “the senior swing sacrifice,” which was lost strokes due to missing greens.

It turns out this was not the problem with my mother’s golf game.  At about 9:30 a.m., we got a bucket of balls from a nice lady at the Southwyck golf course and went out to the driving range.  I teed up a ball for her and told her to let the big dog eat.

Legendary Texas golf coach Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book talks about gripping a golf club as if you were holding a live bird, with just enough pressure that the bird can’t fly away but not so tightly that the bird can’t breathe.

Mom took that advice to heart.  In fact, she went further and swung the club as if there was a baby bird on the golf tee that she did not want to hurt.

The sun was in our eyes, so she could not see where the ball was going when she hit the ball.

“How was that?”

“Good, Mom.  Try hitting it a little harder though.”

She tried again.  The ball made it to the fringe of the range.

“Better, Mom!”

She hit about ten more and had enough.  “I don’t know about this club,” she said.

I told her that being outside on a beautiful spring morning was all you could ask for, and a passing golfer said, “You got that right!” smiling at my mother.

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Lunch was barbecue at Rosemeyer Bar-B-Q.  (Ironclad Rule of Life 241: Barbecue is better at places spelled Bar-B-Q.)

I was there to give some advice to a first year law student whose grandparents are good friends from my poker game.  I gave him the usual spiel - law school is like Survivor: make alliances, compete like crazy, and play the game.  And we each had a great plate of cue: jalapeno cheese sausage, brisket, ribs, and a side of gumbo.  Plus FREE BEER.  Oof.

Highly recommended.

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Took a nap in the afternoon after that lunch.  Then off to the 713 Music Hall to see Kathleen Madigan tell jokes.  She was great.

All in all, another great day.

A Good Day

Nothing too unusual today.

I got up this morning and challenged myself to make biscuits from scratch in less than thirty minutes.  My biscuit recipe is in my cookbook Recipes That Mostly Work All of the Time, and is pretty simple: flour, salt, and baking powder mixed with grated Irish butter, and then moistened with buttermilk and honey.  I laminate the dough, folding it over itself several times to make layers, cut the dough into rounds, put the rounds into a mini cast iron pan, brush with some more buttermilk, and bake at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes.

I’m not sure if I made the thirty minute deadline, but it was pretty close.  I split one and ate it with honey and butter, and used another to make a turkey sausage breakfast sandwich (with no eggs, which are disgusting to me).  With a cold Diet Coke, it was the breakfast I needed today.

I worked my puzzles and then went downtown to work out. Today was interval day at the gym - high speed rowing, then alternating pulling a sled and jumping up with a weight plate, then alternating deadlifts and farmers carries with two 70 pound kettlebells, then alternating lateral shuffles and slams with a heavy bag.  There was probably something else in there, but I was just trying not to die, so I didn’t take notes.

Lunch was some leftover Panda Express and then shower and off to guitar lessons with my mother.  Our teacher is pretty great - he is exceedingly pleasant and patient with both of us as we try to learn the old classic I’ll Fly Away, with our good friends, the D, G and A chords.  I am trying to get better with barre chords, but I need to practice more.

Afterwards, I took my mother to the Pearland Recreation Center for a tour.  It turns out that she is eligible for a free membership through Medicare’s Silver Sneakers program. I get a discount too for being advanced in age, and I may join to start swimming some laps.  The pool is very impressive.

Then off to dinner at a Korean BBQ joint, which was good, but a little weird.  Why go out to eat and then cook your own food?  Plus, it turns out that a tempura fried Oreo is not worth the calories - too soft and strangely flavorless.

Tomorrow, I have an interesting lunch plan and then we will see the comedian Kathleen Madigan downtown.  I haven’t made a dinner plan yet, but it will probably involve a small plate of something green after tonight’s Korean overload.

I will also post another entry in the interview of my father tomorrow, so you got that going for you, which is nice.

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Random picture from the iPhone:

Sean Marrelli, John Floyd and me at the 2015 Grown-Up Spelling Bee, a fundraiser for the Pearland ISD foundation. Our team won the event in our matching yellow ties.  We took the competition way too seriously, but they raised a lot of money.  

Two years later, I emceed the event myself in what ended up being the last spelling bee.  Was it something I said?  Or was it my sparkly coat? 

I will probably never know.

Keeping Things Interesting

Last week, I took inventory of what was coming up this year.

I have a golf trip to Mesquite, Nevada in April, a speech at the State Bar's Annual Meeting in June, my annual trip to Las Vegas to play in the World Series of Poker.  I am also committed to a trip to upstate New York sometime later this year to visit my aunts and uncle, as well as a trip to Colorado to visit my nephew and his very significant other, dates to be determined soon.

On a weekly basis, I work out with my trainer A, I take weekly guitar lessons with my mother, play basketball every Saturday morning, play poker every other Tuesday, and am in a supper club with friends from the poker game once a month (this month - Polish food!).  

Every morning, I share my Wordle result with three groups of friends, and I solve the NYT Crossword as I have every morning for 1,145 consecutive days.  I also do the NYT's Strands, Connections, and mini-crossword, the Slate.com daily trivia quiz, the Washington Post's Keyword and On the Record puzzle, a game called Oroboro, and a game called Waffle.  I am also in-season for the Learned League, an invitation-only trivia league with extremely difficult questions.

Professionally, I have some pending matters in East Texas and West Texas, I am committed to updating two books on ethics and legal conflicts respectively, and I am now on the board of directors for the Houston Forensic Science Center.  I am also in the process of mapping out a book about a weird abbey in New York City in which I am currently the central character.

I am, technically, retired.

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When I turned 50, one of the gifts I received was a collection of individual beer cans from Spec's Liquor in downtown Houston from my friends J and L.  Fifty cans of beer from various microbreweries across the country.

In a contemplative mood ten years after the death of my father, I decided to take advantage of this largesse by writing a blog reviewing each of the beers and telling stories about my life.  I called the blog Fifty Beers for Fifty Years, and made it through sixteen beers over ten months before setting the blog aside, feeling like I had mostly said what I wanted to say.

But I guess I had other things to say.

In 2019, I played in the World Series of Poker Seniors Tournament, collecting backers at $5 a throw for my $1000 entry fee.  A live blog ensued - Scott is Playing the 2019 WSOP Seniors Tournament - and I found it extremely useful for focusing my attention on the game and avoiding boredom.  Plus it was fun to report on the strange and wonderful things I was seeing in LV.

In the years that followed, more live poker blogs ensued, some better than others, some significantly shorter than others (you can safely skip 2024):

Scott is Playing the 2021 WSOP Seniors Tournament

Scott is Playing the Main Event of the 2022 WSOP

Scott is Playing the Main Event of the 2023 World Series of Poker

Scott is Playing the 2024 Seniors and Super-Seniors WSOP Tournament

Scott is Playing the 2025 WSOP Seniors and Super-Seniors Tournaments

I also started a blog in 2022 about training for the New York Marathon that my trainer particularly appreciated:

Scott is Training for the XXXXXXXX Houston Half-Marathon

(I did not get into the New York Marathon, but the blog morphed into a blog about training for the 2024 Houston Half-Marathon, which I did not run, but did "run" in 2025 and 2026, one slow step at a time.  I am 62 years old, after all.)

That's the inventory of my blogging life.  Want to know me?  Start with these blogs.  

I contain multitudes.

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So what is this blog about?

A couple of days ago, I was walking to my car with my son after a Rockets game and we were talking about Kobe Bryant and Bam Adobayo's epic 83 point game.  I told my son that I had seen Kobe play several times, including games when the Lakers didn't care much about winning and were just letting Kobe shoot the ball on nearly every possession.  (It might have been this game in 2016, where Kobe went 6 for 11 in two-pointers, 4 for 11 from 3, and went 11 for 11 from the free throw line, and his team still lost to the Rockets 130-110.  That season - Kobe's last - the Lakers went 17-65.)

The night before, I had told my son that he should start journaling his life because it goes by so fast and you can't remember everything you'd want to remember when you are 62 and thinking about how you got where you got.  

And now here I was, proving the point, trying to remember that game where Kobe was right in front of me, blowing it up, having fun, dueling a pretty good Rockets team with James Harden and Dwight Howard and Patrick Beverley, and all I had was a bland fuzzy memory of a game at Toyota Center, no detail at all.  I wished I had a journal of seeing Kobe or Michael Jordan or Hakeem or LeBron, all of whom I had seen and enjoyed watching but could not remember in any kind of detail.

It also occurred to me that I was going to be blogging about the WSOP again and also wanted to start blogging about some things I had wanted to blog about but never committed to - e.g., reading the books in my personal library, recapping my father's last years, capturing my Wordle literature (more on that later), plus just some normal day-to-day journaling about an interesting life.

So that's what this will be.  All of the above and more, an attempt to capture 2026 in all of its messy and chaotic glory, so that I have something to read when I am old and gray and nostalgic for the time when I was young and lithe and agile.

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Rules of the road:

(1)    I will not include pictures of my beautiful grandson. If you are close enough to me, you will already have them.  If you are not, I don't want his images in the widening gyre of the Internet.

(2)    I have no desire for this to be a viral site, even if it has cool stuff.  If you get the invitation to read this, that invitation is for you.  I would prefer that you share only with people who would actually care about this content.

(3)    Don't expect daily dispatches.  I will try to be as forthcoming as possible, but blogging is hard work, especially content creation.  I'd rather take my time and get it right than meet some arbitrary deadline.  I will probably be writing this in the morning after I solve the Wordle and the NYT Crossword.

(4)    I will be kind.  This is not a tell-all, score-settling account of my interesting life - it is going to be mostly stuff that amuses me and hopefully amuses you.  As Randy Newman sang in Shame, "I myself am no longer an angry man," and my writing will so reflect that lovely state of mind.

More rules will come to mind as we progress, I am sure.

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So here is my first substantive entry.  In 2002, my father and I started corresponding about his life.  I had always intended to turn this into a small book for my mother and my family to read and reminisce about, but never got it done.  There were nineteen entries in this correspondence, and I will memorialize them here.  He was a wonderful father and a great man who also lived in interesting times.

What's your earliest memory?

My earliest memory:  I wrote a little bit about this when I wrote about your grandfather.  There's not one memory but a collection of them around when I was 4 or 5.

Your grandfather worked for a bus factory during World War II.  He was a supervisor and whenever there was a parade, he got to drive one of the school buses in the parade.  Marsha and I got to ride on the bus.  I remember riding on the bus.

Also during the war, many things were rationed, butter, gasoline, etc.  I remember going with my father to a little diner and my father and a waitress doing some sort of bartering with ration stamps.  I don't remember what was bartered but as a child it was exciting.

Around that time your grandfather got paint poisoning from regularly walking through the bus paint shop without a mask.  He was hospitalized and nearly died.  I remember going to the hospital which no longer exists in Oneida.

Your grandmother was hospitalized around the same time in the same hospital for goiter surgery. I remember visiting her and seeing her in an oxygen tent.

For what is is worth, here's my earliest memory.  I was visiting one of the aunts and watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon in 1969.  I would have been five at the time.  I remember watching the live broadcast on a television in the corner of the living room, an old black and white TV, the screen bulging out of the wood cabinet, the picture not sharp, but sharp enough, and me having an understanding even at that age of how remarkable it was that there was a man all the way up there on the surface of the moon.

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Today was core day at the gym after I did a three-mile walk at Memorial Park.  We started with the Sorenson Hold, then did sit ups on the bench holding a weighted bar, roll-ups with a rolling bar, a rotating kettlebell, and some kind of zipper crunch with my feet in a TRX.

The things I do to maintain my six-pack (hidden under a one-pack).

See you soon!