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Monday, December 28, 2015

Slade House by David Mitchell

Slade House by David Mitchell

A short collection of vignettes which reveal the mystery of the sinister Slate House. This is the least impressive book of Mitchell’s that I’ve read; it felt like a few notions from his earlier works that barely amounted to a look at a haunted house tale.
The prose is fine, but unimpressive. The revelation(s) are obvious from a long way off.

I enjoyed this book, but it is nowhere near the level of quality of some of his other works.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Mr. Mitchell’s epic Cloud Atlas spans several centuries, leaps continents and cities in a single sentence, comprises itself of at least five different variants of the English language, and flirts with as many different forms. This is not one novel, but a collection of novellas which loop and coil around one another, inform one another, flirt with greater themes and truths while still (mostly) managing to maintain a coherent shape and an approachable style. This is a masterpiece written by a truly gifted and disciplined craftsman.
Structurally, this book sprawls across five stories: The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (a diary), Letters from Zedelghem (an epistolary), Half-Lives: A Luisa Rey Mystery (thriller), The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish (memoir), An Orison of Somni ~451 (interview), Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After (oral history), and then back through each of them for a second visit in reverse order. Each is quite different, sometimes they stop in mid-sentence.

For this reason, the book is long and occasionally frustrating, in the way several of Mitchell’s books can be. Just about the time you’ve got a grip on the new language of a particular section, just as you’ve started to really become engrossed in the narrative or the trials of a particular character, Mitchell changes the channel on you. The metaphor of channel surfing feels appropriate somehow, because it feels that abrupt and disconnected. But unlike channel surfing, these stories are intertwined, sometimes if only at the “butterfly flaps its wings in China” level. And there is a greater whole presented with themes that seem to carry throughout other Mitchell works.

This is a great writer with something to say and a powerful drive to transcend the confines of genre fiction.

I finished this one the morning of December 19th, 2015, the day after our 11th wedding anniversary. We have just arrived here on Dragon’s Cove for two weeks. There is a rainbow over the violence of the sea just to the west and the strange old witch house creaks and groans a little as it warms up.

Time for another cup of coffee.

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Ghost written is one of Mitchell’s early works. It consists of a collection of stories which are connected only through tenuous links. The boy who runs the music shop in the first tale happens to sit near a man from the second tale, and so on.
There is a lot of terrific writing here, and we manage to span the globe, from a lovestruck record store clerk in Tokyo to a Russian con-woman to a Chinese peasant. Almost each of these tales is compelling in one way or another.

The themes and stylistic trademarks that Mitchell will end up getting a lot of praise for in later works are almost all right here. Good stuff.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Jacob Z is a low level Dutch clerk who has just landed on the Dutch occupied spit of land just off Nagasaki from which trading enterprises with Imperial Japan are conducted. The dutch are the only country allowed to trade with Japan for decades and this is the only allowed port. Dutchmen (there are no women present) are only allowed to visit the mainland under heavy supervision. Jacob Z rises in prominence, discovers corruption, falls in love, and meets a powerful mentor. Time passes. The intrigues of the local warlords get complicated. Samauri are involved!

The prose is beautiful. It’s David Mitchell. We get a couple of dizzying perspective shifts and a few abrupt time lapses. The result is an epic, beautiful pastiche of a few lives in a strange place with a few hints of magic. Terrific work.

Perhaps my favorite of the Mitchell books. Perhaps.

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
This was the first of the David Mitchell novels I read. It was a gift from my aunt, Terry. I was blown away.

First, the writing is really good. Really good, filled with observations and techniques that elevate this one from a novel to literature.

Second, the plot and structure floored me. In what (I now recognize) is David Mitchell’s style, we jump from narrative to narrative, across a span of many years. Of course, they are all interconnected, though it is hard to see how each time we jump narratives.

I don’t want to give away much more here, except to say that this one paid off for me every page along the way, and paid double at the end when I was able to look back and finally see the epic expanse of what he had done.

So I immediately put everything else on the nightstand on the back burner and went out to buy as many of his books as I could find… Since Vancouver no longer actually has, you know, bookstores, I had to go to Tokyo to find the next one, just a block off Shibuya crossing…

The Martian by Andy Weir

The Martian by Andy Weir
Finished this one on a trans-Pacific flight from Canada to China, safe in an awesome spaceship operated by Air Canada. I’ve never read a more delightful, more scientific, sci-fi novel.

Mark Watney gets stranded on Mars when the NASA mission he is a part of goes sideways. Alone, without communication, he… I will tell you no more. But suffice to say this tale is never dull, despite being peppered with hard science. Mark is one of the more likeable heroes I’ve read about in a long time. And while the “man-vs-nature” core conflict seems like something that would have gone out of fashion around the time of Stephen Crane, this one manages to be vastly more engaging than, say, Tom Hanks talking to a volleyball.

The Martian is a light, joyful celebration of human knowledge, scientific inquiry, and the human spirit. It’s also a fine adventure story, and a superb lesson in how to use language to make what could be dry subjects interesting.

The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry

The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry

McMurtry pops the bubbles of several of the western hero clichés in this short novel. Doc Holiday, Wyatt and the Earp Brothers, Charlie Goodnight, Quanta Parker, and a few others bouce from Denver to Texas to Tombstone Arizona. None of them are portrayed as heroic figures; their deeds are pointless, their mistakes and foibles all too human, their lives short and mostly ugly and without meaning.

The writing is elegiac, sprightly, and the dialog humorous in the way that many of McMurtry’s dark/light cowboy duos are. His treatment of gender relations is pretty similar to what he has done elsewhere, in which clueless, work-obsessed men disappoint their ladies with their fumbling lack of social grace.

The only thing that perplexed me was this: McMurtry is busy setting up and knocking down legends here; taking clichés and masterfully subjecting them to the harsh spotlight of a modern sensibility on what they might have really been like. (The casual domestic abuse scene, for example.) But when it comes to the Indians, they are mostly treated like stage villians, no more nuanced than Blue Duck in Lonesome Dove. They torture whites for fun, roast genitals, “invade the privates of female captives with fireants” and so on. The savage redman cliché is treated here with all the nuance of a Michael Meyers film. And I’m not sure why, because LMM certainly is aware of what he’s doing.

The “showdown at the OK Corral” for which Tombstone is best known takes place in less than two pages; we watch see Wyatt Earp’s last days as a geriatric suffering dementia in Santa Monica, well into the age of the automobile. He was, in McMurtry’s telling, a legend who never deserved to be remembered.

A Deadly Affair at Bobtail Ridge by Terry Shames

A Deadly Affair at Bobtail Ridge by Terry Shames

Terry’s newest book is more sure-footed, denser, and darker than Samuel Craddock’s previous escapades have been. Samuel himself is a more nuanced character here (he makes the occasional mistake, and has moments of self-doubt.) Feels like we’re moving away from the small-town cozy and towards a more mature and complex mystery. Though there are very few surprises here, because the whodoneit part (and even the location of the body) is telegraphed quite heavily, there is enough other stuff going on here that I was engaged the whole ride. There’s still a little bit of art, a lot of cinnamon rolls and iced tea, some horses and cows, and some Texas dialect. But mostly, we’ve got a chief-of-police tracking down a couple of (long cold) murders and digging up dirt (literally!) on the moderately sordid past of an old friend.

I enjoyed this one a lot and am eager to read the next one!

Meditations on Violence by Rory Miller

Meditations on Violence by Rory Miller
Lately I’ve been casually teaching a few of the folks at the office the basics of boxing and krav maga. I’m certainly not a truly qualified instructor of either of these disciplines, but I’ve spent a lot of time trying to learn both over the last decade. Sgt. Miller’s book and his instruction in-person in Austin stuck with me. So while I’ve read this one before, I found myself going back to it to think about how I should modify my lesson plan. I reread it over a very long week here in the glorious Vancouver summer.

Miller’s experience with violence- mostly through his work as a corrections officer- seems as if it makes him an expert on the topic. I enjoyed his thinking and writing again, through I find myself raising an eyebrow at least every page or two at what seem like tall tales. (“Sarge didn’t even spill his coffee!”) Still – in my limited experience, this is a unique book, which focuses on the delta between martial arts training and real world applied violence. And it is a useful lens for thinking about how to teach folks a little self-defense.

Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood

Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood
Collection of short stories, which purport to be “wicked” but often fall pretty far short. The first of these is the best and the remainder gradually slide downhill. Atwood herself-- or at least an elderly female Canadian writer of fiction—appears as central to most of these tales. And there’s a fair amount here that feels like it is revisiting the Toronto writers scene from the sixties. Are these the same people we met in The Robber Bride? I’m not sure, but there are similarities.

She’s a good writer, and the language is solid, some of the imagery neat. (Particularly in the first story of the collection.) But overall, her body of work is much, much stronger elsewhere, so this is probably only really interesting to the completionist.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a modestly interesting management book on how to better structure interpersonal realtionships between company leaders. Presumably the lessons here could be applied to any working group, but they seem particularly focused on top level executives. There are a lot of feelings here and the book is pretty focused on the way people interact with one another rather than establishing core competencies, thinking about how to load balance effort, strategies for establishing dominance in a market, dealing with competitors, etc. Basically, if you’re interested in thinking about how some group of senior level people at your company might not be getting along well, this book might be interesting for you.

The most interesting element here is the way he tells the tale, by using a fictional Silicon Valley company and showing us the interactions of their leadership group throughout a few meetings. Sound dull? Well… It is. But it is still far, far more interesting than the epilogue, in which we move from the parable format to a more direct checklist. Here’s the list of the Five Dysfunctions:

Absence of Trust
Fear of Conflict
Lack of Commitment
Avoidance of Accountability
Inattention to Results

Now as a framework for thinking about your team or studio or company this is a pretty decent place to start. And that does make this book useful if you’re the kind of person who has ever stood in front of a whiteboard and tried to get others to think about how your organization could improve. If barbarians with axes, or gumshoes, or cumshots, or vampires, or futurism, or whooshing spaceships, or martial arts, or geopolicitcs are your thing instead.. Pass.

The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie

The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie
There are no heroes here.

And no one gets to escape. They are all bound into a senseless and brutal conflict. Most of them die, usually after being maimed, defeated physically and spiritually, and end their lives morally bankrupt and mostly unmourned. There are no heroes here.

If you like any of Abercrombie’s work, you’ll like this. The focus stays mostly on the barbarians. These are men who know the legends of Threetrees and the Bloody Nine but not much more. Perhaps a few of the older Named Men fought with (and against) them a few times, but for the most part, those days are quickly fading into legend.

Byaz and the knights of the Union are here, also not being heroic. They try. But they fail, when stupidity, arrogance, cowardice, or other human frailties end up putting them in the mud.

There are no heroes here, but Abercrombie writes a high octane tale of three to five different factions in a local protracted skirmish that ends up with a lot of people dead. It’s an anti-war novel, in fact, and none the worse for treading familiar ground in both genres. Hardcore barbarian battle fantasy and Catch-22 style anti-war are seldom found in the same body. Nice work.

But there are no heroes here.

Revival by Stephen King

Revival by Stephen King
The preacher starts messing with electricity. Fate deals him a rough blow and his fortune becomes tied with a small boy. Each travels through a few decades of America in the back half of last century. Their paths cross on occasion.

The preacher gets dangerous, becomes a demagogue and a revivalist. He cures people, but… They have unexpected side effects. Perhaps because they are ripping a tear in the warp and weave of things and starting to let in parts of the Great Old Ones? You’d have to read to find out.

This is King, so it’s a good yarn, loads of jus’ plain folks writing, and a whole lot of the author’s love of rock n’ roll and Americana.

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie
In a land without honor where only money and murder have value a rough and tough merc leader and her brother are betrayed.

She crawls back from death, gathers a collection of troubled badasses and ruins all their lives in her singular pursuit of vengeance.

I like Abercrombie’s violent, dystopian take on fiction. For my money, he’s better than Jar Jar Martin.

Naomi’s Room by Denis MacEoin

Naomi’s Room by Denis MacEoin

Atmospheric and sad horror novel that ends with a skull-crushing nose-dive into clichéd resolution. It was the ancient crap in the attic from the time the house was owned by that eeeevil guy who did the eeevil stuff. Too bad he ate your daughter’s soul, dude.

It’s been a while since I read this, and I recall that the writing was acceptable. I remember thinking the scene in the London shopping center when the girl disappears was compelling; I could feel the growing terror in the main character as the terrible realty that his daughter had been kidnapped

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

Sanderson’s big new epic fantasy series got a lot of love from the right corners, so I picked up a thousand page paperback brick and threw it in the bag for Vietnam. Perfect beach reading, even on too-windy a beach near an ancient city far away…

Good battles. A few interesting heroes and anti-heroes cavort around, a couple of coming-of-age plots that felt a bit tired unfold. There’s a cool system of magic, and a focus on interpersonal intrigue. My biggest beef is that the scenes between men and women in this book are almost all terrible; does anyone ever actually have sex in this universe? I don’t think so.

I’d read the second one. In fact, I’ve owned it since the day I got back but haven’t started it. Hardback.

On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee

On Such A Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee

She travels across a ruined, crappy dystopian land in search of her brother. The writing is decent, but nothing amazing. Then she ends up in the city, where she is some kind of a weird slavegirl to an elderly couple. Luckily, her brother is one of the most celebrated neurosurgeons in the land or something, and… I just can’t remember. This one didn’t make much of an impression on me.

Vietnam by National Geographic

Vietnam by National Geographic

As mentioned previously, the National Georgrapic series of travel books do a very fine job of giving the flavor of each place without being such an exhausting phone-book-catalog of temporal restaurant and hotel details. The National Geo book on Vietnam gives us lots of pictures and glossy highlights of each town and borough, along with lightweight historical context for why a place is the way it is now.

We used this book to plan our 10th wedding anniversary trip to this wonderful country… And we had a ball. I’ve written more on the subject elsewhere, but here’s a little timbit on one of the things I will most remember:

“And oh God the food. Never have I been to a place with such an obsessive interest in food, and no country I have visited has such a wealth of incredible, diverse dishes. In each of the four cities we visited there was nary a square foot in any ally or sidewalk which wasn't taken up by people cooking or eating. The calendars hawkers tried to sell on the street were not of fast cars or local girls, they were of the monthly specialty soups. From French coffees and baked goods, to the freshest of herbs, to the dozens of kinds of noodle, to high quality delicious grilled meats of every kind, Vietnam wins the gold ribbon for food. If you are a foodie, a chef, or a cook you owe it to yourself to come here…”

After Christmas, Before New Years

It's time!

From a little pub in the charming town of Yachats where we come each day to check internet...

Updates coming for a collection of novels, including most of the David Mitchell collection!

-tf

Sunday, November 08, 2015

Long Overdue

It's been a while since the grey day in February when I last updated this blog. The world keeps turning. It doesn't slow down.

We've had many adventures this year. Perhaps in a month or so I'll tell you about a few of them. China, Boston, Japan, Cali, Stampede, Texas, the Rockies.

It's rainy grey fall overlooking the harbor. We had a relaxing weekend. Macbeth, Onesies party, Tableau, Main Street with friends, flaming orange and red trees and puddles on the seawall. Halloween is behind us now (vampire black-tie affair followed by karaoke!) Dragon Cove is just a month away.

And there have been quite a few books.

On Such A Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee
The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
Naomi’s Room by Denis MacEoin
Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie
Great North Road by Peter x
Revival by Stephen King
The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood
Meditations on Violence by Rory Miller
A Deadly Affair at Bobtail Ridge
The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry
The Martian by Andy Weir
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
Ghostwritten by by David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

And perhaps one more...

Coming soon!

Happy autumn,
-tf

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Uvarum Double Feet



My father, Henri Victor Fields, died this morning on Valentine’s Day 2015.

He was born in East Texas in early May of 1947 to Maggie Peal Fields, an artist, and her much older husband, Harry Fields. He grew up there in Frankston among the towering pines and humid sticky days. Harry worked for the Texas Railroad Commission at a train depot near the small central square. Before long, Vic had a little brother, Gene Fields. Copper haired to Vic’s sandy blonde, cheerful and at ease with people, Gene and Vic occupied different ends of a spectrum in many ways, very similar in others.

Vic was exceptionally bright. He told me he would read the dictionary, one word at a time each night. According to Vic, during the nineteen fifties Maggie and Harry rented out parts of their house on Commerce Street to travelers. Maggie made biscuits and Harry worked at the depot, and “Little Fields” grew up among the strangers at the boarding house and the nosy rhythms of a small town. Stories of Vic and his brother’s adventures in East Texas were the fables of my young life.

Maggie was a painter throughout her life and Vic grew up in a house of artistry. He and his little brother had a fondness for pranks, many of which are probably the things his friends remember best about him. For example, Harry had a fear of fire. Vic and Gene made what looked like a giant match from a broomhandle and painted plaster. They would run through the hall of the house in Frankston pretending to strike this giant match on the floor. Another time, they apparently rigged up a telephone in a treehouse and used it to call far off places. (Russia is how the story goes.) I suspect this was as much Gene as Vic, but my Dad’s telling of the tale made it easy to imagine the two little boys giggling and reaching out to a larger world from a platform in the boughs of the great pines.

The boys had a dear cousin, Ange Lyles, whose mother was close with Maggie. Angie and her mom lived there for a while in Maggie’s house. Many of Vic’s early stories involve Angie, and sepia photos from that time show a girl with big cheeks and bigger eyes peering at the boys from the porch. The cousins remained close throughout their lives.

Vic strove to get out of Frankston and eventually made it far. By all accounts he was a gifted student at the local highschool, where Maggie also worked as a librarian as the boys grew up. Upon graduation, Vic was (as the story goes) the first boy from his school to ever attend University. In the summer of 1967 Vic headed off to college at the University of Texas in Austin. Around this time, the boys played in a band. Vic told stories of trips to Austin to play, though one suspects Gene was the better musician of the two.

Within a year or so (after, perhaps, a semester spent back in East Texas, where Vic had to do penance at Henderson college for having had a little too much fun and spent too little time with his classes) Vic moved into La Voyager apartment complex, north of the University Campus in Austin. Next door lived a long haired, dark eyed beauty named Sherry. She studied studio art at the University. Their first date was the weekend of Texas Roundup, an event in which neither of them participated. Before long they were married and had a Siamese cat named Old Kitty. This started one of their many traditions. For the rest of Vic’s life, there was always a Siamese in the house.

Vic studied political science and Sherry studied art. They drank beer at Shultz’ Beer Garden and lived on the periphery of the counter-culture movements of the late sixties. Vic loved Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, The Beatles, the Stones. After graduation they bounced around a bit. They lived in Denver as ski-bums for a season, in Cincinnati, and then returned to Dallas for graduate school. Realizing that Vic had a mind and focus which could go far, a professor there recommended him for the University of Columbia’s Russian Studies Institute in New York.

They moved to Manhattan, lived on the Upper West Side near Columbia. Vic studied Russian language and politics there. Sherry worked at Saks Fifth Avenue initially. They fell in with the Columbia poli-sci literati and often told stories of their peers and mentors there. One of these was former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, “ZB,” about whom they told stories.

In the later stages of the PhD program there at Columbia, Vic was approached by the Central Intelligence Agency. All but the dissertation done, he and Sherry left New York for the woods and suburbs of Langley, just West of the Potomac. In the height of the Cold War, he worked for the CIA as an analyst, building dossiers on members of the Politboro. He told stories of CIA role playing sessions in which each of them acted the part of a different minor official in Moscow, trying to consider the angles of spycraft that would give the US some advantage.

As the story goes, Vic was eventually tapped to move to Russia for a year under some bogus pretense. Sherry was recently pregnant, and they declined. Instead, he took a job with Dow Chemical, which had plans to expand their distribution in the Soviet Union. They moved to Chicago, where they had two boys.

But the lure of academia called. (And probably the joy of raising a family on a chemical salesman’s wage amid the snow and strife of Chicago in the late seventies waned quickly.) They moved back to Texas, to Lubbock where Vic entered law school at Texas Tech University.

Sherry worked as a City Planner, Vic learned the law. Soon, a third child was born. A daughter. Blonde and big eyed. Lauren. Weezel. Vic made friends there; some of these would remain close to him for decades. They drove out to the Pinky’s liquor store and drank Coors beer and talked about professors.

After graduation they moved back to East Texas and lived for a while in Maggie’s old house again. Brother Gene and his wife, Jemmy, lived nearby as well with their daughters, Robin and Allison. It was a house of kids and art and music and noise and southern cooking. Vic took a job with the Ramey law firm in Tyler while Sherry probably went a little bit nuts killing time in rural East Texas.

They moved to Tyler, to a two story house on Pinecrest Street. Near a few blocks of undeveloped woods they raised three kids, several cats (still Old Kitty, but also Houdini), and a pile of Golden Retriever puppies, beginning another tradition that would last throughout Vic’s life. (Rusty begat Scout who begat Ranger. Is that how it goes? Close, maybe.) The kids went to school, joined the scouts as Gene and Vic had, learned to cuss. Sherry worked as an artist. Vic made partner at the law firm.

His love of pranks continued. He would stop at a local nudist colony out on the interstate and sign up the other partners for mailing lists. Once, when going to a fortieth birthday party for another lawyer, he bought a pig from an East Texas farmer. He took the pig to the party, wearing a sign that said, “Happy Birthday!” Everyone got a good laugh, and when the party was over, they expected Vic to take the pig away. Of course, he just smiled and said, “Nope. This is your pig now.” (See, Vic knew even then that pigs could not be rented. Once you owned a pig, it was yours!)

Vic developed a running habit then, in the latter part of the eighties. He ran from the house to a nearby lake, on the grounds of the University of Texas at Tyler. He saw foxes there, and ducks, and would take Rusty on some of these runs. He grew more intense, grim. He would fill up a backpack with encyclopedias and dictionaries and run. Around this time he also developed an enthusiasm for backpacking and dragged his family along on several truly brutal treks among the peaks of the Rockies.

He loved the mountains, particularly the Continental Divide near Pagosa Springs, in Southwestern Colorado. He also learned to scuba dive around this time, and took his family on several vacations to Grand Cayman, where we swam with stingrays and saw sharks deep down along a wall.

But Vic was discontent as he approached forty. He struggled then with a depression that had likely been with him since his father had succumbed to dementia some years before. The fear of losing his mind was a great cloud on Vic’s horizon, and he spoke often of it in these years. Needing a change (and probably fearing that their children were growing up a little too East Texas redneck for their more liberal tastes) Vic and Sherry moved again, this time back to Austin. They moved in circles sometimes, I guess.

In Austin they rented a house in the hills west of town, and Vic became a partner with Davis and Davis law firm. Mike, Lauren, and I grew up, wrecked cars, got mediocre grades, made friends. Ripened. Vic worked with insurance companies and chemical exposure cases. Sherry painted and threw pottery. Old Kitty and Houdini were replaced by Dragon.

Vic and Sherry bought a house at 503 Westlake Drive, on an acre of hill country. They raised kids and built a beautiful home. Vic and Sherry’s Dad and the kids laid out what seems like miles of flagstones, built ponds and a deck. The house was a hub of youthful activity, parties, energy, romance, music. Vic started his own firm, hired minions. Some of these turned out to be friends. The family went on a grand vacation to Europe in nineteen ninety four. We explored the Swiss Alps, the Catacombs of Paris.

The kids grew up, moved out, but not too far away for the most part. Vic stayed active in his children’s lives. He would often stop by with a pint of Haggen Daaz Dutch Chocolate, Anderson’s Coffee (only Alfred’s Blend, of course), a bottle of Morgan Pinot. He continued to work at the law. I remember stacks and stacks of papers in his office. He once told me that after twenty years as a lawyer he couldn’t stand to look at papers or even read much anymore.

But he did read, and one of the things he read, likely the last book he ever read, was Lonesome Dove, by Texan Larry McMurtry. He enjoyed cowboy shows, and the myth of the last cattle drive appealed to him. In the story, two old friends, one light and one dark, go on an epic journey from South Texas to Montana. He could quote Lonesome Dove almost verbatim, along with loads of Dylan lyrics. Sometimes we would talk mostly in “Lonesome Doveisms” and Dylan verse; no surprise that the kids who came around thought we were pretty weird.

In Lonesome Dove there’s a sign that hangs above the South Texas ranch. The sign reads, most memorably, “We Don’t Rent Pigs.” But far below that it has another saying, a motto, written in latin. Uva uvam vivendo varia fit. At one point Coll, the serious one, teases Augustus, Gus, the light-hearted one, saying “You don’t even know what that says. It could be inviting someone to rob us.” To which Gus replies, “If anyone comes along who can read that, I hope they do try to rob us. I’d like the chance to shoot at an educated man once in my life.”

Later in the story, when Gus dies, Coll vows to bring his friend’s body back to Texas, to an orchard just south of Austin. He carries the body of his friend all the way back on the sign. The part in latin is the only piece which makes the whole journey, and ends up becoming the tombstone of Captain Augustus McCrae. It means, loosely, “Some grapes help other grapes to ripen.”

If you've been to 503 in the last twenty years you've seen the sign, or at least a replica, made with real old square nails and burned in wood. My brother and I made it for Dad. He freaked out, because he thought we’d stolen it from the museum in South Texas where the film prop hangs.

One grey day in February, a lot like today, while we walked on the stones on the shoreline at Burnet Marine Park, near Vancouver Canada, amid very different piney trees than the ones he had grown up amongst, Vic told me he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He was fifty eight years old.

He made me promise then that he would never end up in “Rusk” like his father had. I expect he made a bunch of people promise him this. He was scared.

He quit the practice of law and lived for another ten years, in his home, at 503. He had quite a few more adventures. We spent a Christmas along the Continental Divide. He came to visit us in Canada and explored the woods and coastline and mountains here. He visited his brother and spent time with Maggie in the later years of her life. He became a grandfather to Mike’s son, Greyson Fields.

Vic got his wish. He lived at home, at 503, on the porch, with his Golden Retriever, Ranger, and his Siamese cat, Blue Duck, near his Lonesome Dove sign. In the summer the yard filled with fireflies and the sound of frogs from the pond below. He ate all the Haagen Daaz he wanted. Last summer he and Gene had a reunion in Central Texas. They drank too much Shiner Bock beer, and listened to Dylan and the Stones. Sherry and Mike looked after him right until the end. In the last six months of his life he was a sad, scared skeleton. But he was surrounded by family, in a comfortable and familiar place that he built with his wife, his family, his hard work, and the strength of his younger mind.

Lauren and he sat on his porch swing and drank coffee in one of his last lucid moments. Alfred’s Blend, of course.

Some grapes help other grapes to ripen. Lauren will be one of those. Like Mike is for Greyson. Like Vic was for us.