Eight hundred posts.

So, here's a new milestone: I've now been blogging for five years, and in that time have done eight hundred posts (this is officially #801). Not all of these got posted (perhaps one-in-ten never gets finished, or I do finish but think better of sending it out -- esp. those having to do with politics), but still it's a pretty substantial amount of material, and a pretty sustained effort for me.

I'm on my way back home now from a weeklong trip that's included a visit home, a family celebration, guest-of-honor-ing at a new small SciFi/fantasy convention, spending a day with the Dunsany manuscripts in Austin, seeing a few hundred thousand bats, and much more. But for now, it's nice to just sit back and reflect on time passing -- nieces growing up; old friends going grey; research trips revisited a quarter-century later, and the like.

current reading: AMERICAN CAESARS by Hamilton (FDR to GWB), THE HUNGER GAMES by Collins (both as ebooks).

--John R.

Zach Garrison, Life Master

So, yesterday I visited five different Starbucks and one bookstore, and bought thirteen copies of the same newspaper-- the Monday edition of THE NEW YORK TIMES.

The reason? The story about my great-nephew, Zachery Garrison, becoming the youngest-ever Life Master among Bridge players has now spread beyond Bridge circles. Last Friday it appeared in the HOUSTON CHRONICLE (Spring, where they live, being a suburb to the north of Houston), in a nice piece which not only includes a picture of Zach but also quotes from his parents, Kristy and David. Here's the link:

http://www.chron.com/business/press-releases/article/9-Year-Old-Texas-Youth-Becomes-Bridge-s-3154405.php#src=fb

When she learned there was also to be a piece in THE NEW YORK TIMES, I got commissioned to go buy some copies -- "as many as you can find". And I even got a follow-up call on the big day, when I think my sister was horrified to find that it was 12.30 here and I hadn't even started on my paper run yet, Kristy having only been able to find a single copy in her neighborhood.

So, I put aside the book review I'm working on and, amid a number of other errands, visited five of the six local Starbucks I know about ('local' as in 'within a ten mile drive'). Three here, two there, four there: in the end it added up to thirteen in all. Since I'd aimed for ten to twelve, that seemed about right. I'm keeping one for myself,* sending one each to my mother and sister, and boxing up the other ten for Kristy to keep as souvenirs or distribute among the various Garrisons, Rateliffs, Hutchins, Sladaritz, et al.

As for those who failed to buy a paper copy, here's the relevant article, with a point-by-point analysis of a particular hand played, from the upper righthand quadrant of page C4. Enjoy!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/crosswords/bridge/zach-garrison-9-is-a-bridge-player-to-watch.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=Zach%20Garrison&st=cse

And, once again, congratulations, Zach.

--Uncle John

..............

*slowly reading through it, I've already learned of an Off-Broadway production in which a fictionalized C. S. Lewis is one of the two main characters, FREUD'S LAST SESSION -- presumably based on the book about Lewis & Freud from a few years back, which I never read because it looked like its subtitle shd have been "why Lewis was right and Freud was wrong about everything". From a little online digging, the play itself sounds good though.

The Youngest Life Master

So, yesterday my great-nephew* became the youngest-ever person to achieve the status of Bridge Life Master. Nine years, two months, and seven days: a new record.

Congratulations to Zach, and to his parents (who did a lot of driving him around and re-arranging their schedule to make this possible), and his sisters for their patience while all this was going on. Here's the announcement:

http://www.acbl.org/news_archive.php?id=718

I don't play Bridge myself, though I relatively recently discovered that I know the basics of the game from so many games of Rook in my youth --a favorite game of my grandmother Smith, specially designed, I now realize, so that people with religious objections to playing cards cd still enjoy a Bridge-like game. It is interesting to see another gamer pop up elsewhere along the family tree, even if with a v. different game than the rpgs I've devoted so many hours to.

--John R.

--still in Magnolia, but now with reliable wi-fi, as of about this time yesterday.

*yes, I am old as the hills. Why do you ask?

Forty Years Ago Today

January 17th, 1969.
R. I. P.
John D. Rateliff Sr.

My Father's Birthday

Today would have been my father's seventy-seventh birthday.

I'm proud to share the name of the smartest man I ever knew; a songwriter who could never get his work recorded, a natural-born teacher who helped inspire my love of history, a parent who no matter how overworked was never too busy not to read us a bedtime story. Some people have trouble imagining their parents or grandparents as young; for me it's hard to imagine what he'd be like in his seventies, now that he's been dead for forty years after only living to the age of thirty-seven.* I do know he'd be deeply interested in the current election: I remember trying to make sense of the tv coverage of the 1968 Chicago convention he was watching, and that he was disappointed by Nixon's defeat of Humphrey just weeks before his first heart attack; my first date-able memory is his deep distress while watching the news (Huntley-Brinkley?) about JFK's assassination.** A war veteran himself (a radio operator in Korea) who hated war and whose best friend in the army was black, he'd be fascinated and proud we'd come so far as to nominate an African-American as one of the two candidates for president. His field was American History, and he was years ahead of the Dee Brown revolution in his admiration for Chief Joseph, and Geronimo, and the other American Indians leaders of the late nineteenth century. His favorite president was Jefferson; having recently come to consider Adams the better man of the two, I wish there were some way to have a conversation with him about the two men's respective merits. His death left a hole in our family that nothing ever filled, but I'm grateful to have been old enough to remember him.

From all of us who still remember you, rest in peace Papaw.

--John D. Rateliff, Jr.



*especially since none of his brothers lived past their sixties, no doubt in part due to heredity (Uncle J.W. had a stroke at 56, Uncle Aubrey an aneurism at 62; Uncle Trig and Uncle Curtis both died in their late sixties), and in part to smoking -- my father smoked three and a half packs of Pall Malls a day, or about ninety cigarettes.

**I was actually taken to see Kennedy when he came to Texarkana in the 1960 campaign, but of course I was too young to remember anything about it. I do remember seeing Johnson speak there when he was running for re-election in 1964 -- the only time I've seen a President while he was in office (I've shaken hands with Clinton, but that was while he was governor, and with Carter, but that was while he was on a book tour as ex-president).