Leaky Buckets

  The outlook is gray for Pinochle today I sit across the table from my future father-in-law attempting to read his mind. He squints back at me, trying to ascertain my intentions. To my left, my fiance squares off with her mother on my right. A couple people clear their throats, hem and haw, look around the table and back at their hands. It is the moment of truth; I raise my hands and make a bet. Audible sighs from around the table, some of agreement, others of dismay. The pinochle table cements the newbie’s place in the family.  It is Black Friday, we are gathered at the kitchen table as the Red Lodge sun squeaks between the curtains, cutting a sharp line across the playing surface. The FIFA World Cup squawks from the television in the next room. I have positioned myself so that I cannot see the TV because I have to focus. This is a family tradition and I feel pressure to acquit myself well.  The stories fly back and forth across the room from various family members as T...

  “Years are just moments in a great big pile” I tugged that lyric out of a Zach Bryan song on this sentimental snowy morning. Wood stove fires do that to me; watching the sky brighten from gunmetal to blonde and back to silver, listening to a random mix of morning songs, a toasted English muffin with peanut butter molten on top, a quart of orange juice and the dogs claiming as much of the couch as their furry bodies can cover, paws outstretched towards the crack of the caboose stove. Sentimental indeed.  Not all things are good. The Check engine light is on in the car. Snow on the roads means an extra hour of driving. Power company wants to replace a couple poles and I am worried they are going to tear up the not yet frozen ground of my driveway with their trucks. My wrist is bothering me again, lumps of scar tissue don’t want to stretch. The tile project at work was not my best work; I was impatient and the walls were out of square.  But most things are good. Warm house...

  A monument, national flags, Anytime Fitness and Rancho Grande Mexican food... perfect We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. So says the preamble of the Constitution. I read it on the back window of a passing pickup truck. Well actually, the sticker that stretched across the entire back window only said “We the People” in large curvy font, followed by a lot of tiny scribbles meant to imitate the remainder of the Constitution. As it passed, I had to think for a second what document it was that they were referencing. I won’t claim to have the Bill of Rights or the extensive remainder of the Constitution memorized but I understand the gist. I have since re-read them numerous times, and researched th...

  Making Vegan Food... It was early summer of 2021 and I felt like a garbage pile. I felt bleh. I assume that most people know that feeling. Every day felt the same. I had a feeling of wanting to do something exciting but not having that much motivation. I needed to shake things up. When I feel this way, I get very angsty. I act like a grump until I come up with some wild idea to chase.  In a fit of anger, a self-delusion of self-betterment, I decided to try something radical. I turned to Sam, riding in the passenger seat of the truck and blurted, “I want to go Vegan.” Yeah, I know, huh? To my surprise, she agreed without hesitation. To me, veganism was a personal challenge. I was not doing it for any social justice or crusade. I was not doing it because I believed the animal products were bad for the planet or unhealthy. I just wanted to see if I could do it; if I could control my appetite and achieve a personal goal. We set a length of six months for our experiment. Short en...

  Cue Alan Jackson's Livin' On Love as we build our house... I’ll admit I found the gospel of Alan later in life. My first forays into country music canon were slightly more alternative. The outside lanes; the Western and Texas scenes of country music. Corb Lund. Turnpike Troubadours. What got played on the mainstream radio always seemed too much like pop, even in the so-called glory days of country music. It was impossible not to know who the greats of country radio were, and their songs rotated through my iPod playlists. George, Garth, Reba, etc. But it was not until my late twenties that I found my patron saint of country music. His name was Alan Jackson.  One snowy day at work, I was hanging drywall and pondering my feelings for the lady who is now my fiance. Livin’ on Love came on the radio. Hearing Alan’s words about the endurance of a life-long love grabbed onto me. While I knew the song wasn’t about me and my love, it felt like it could be. The song spoke to me in the ...

  Just another family of moose trying to beat the cold snap I live for this weather. I take some sort of sick pride in my thermometer reading -30 when I wake up. Neighbors posted photos of -40. Farmers in central Montana shared pics of -71 with wind chill. One of the best parts of the internet is commiserating about the frigid weather. Everyone is saying the same thing below their picture of a thermometer; maybe this will drive out the so-called invaders from California and elsewhere. It might kill a few pine beetles too.  Alas, I found two pine beetles crawling across my living room this morning. Like anything smart, they found a warm place indoors. It occurred to me that anyone moving here from California can afford to heat their houses. Their houses are also big enough that they won’t go insane sitting inside for a couple days. That’s why the Californians invented the internet, so that they wouldn’t get bored indoors. They literally invented Facebook where all these tough M...

  Cookie, Paddy and Paul and me, Ireland 2019 As we tottered out the front door of Hegarty’s Pub and Hotel well after midnight to slurp down some fresh Irish air, Sam was like an anchor on my shoulder. For the past eight hours, she had downed round after round, sacrificing her health for mine, surreptitiously swapping her empty glass for my full one so that I could keep singing country music classics to our new Irish relatives. We were both completely pickled and managed only one lap of the park before stumbling into our room above the pub.  Both of us fell asleep instantly, proud that we had lived up to the title of being from Butte, America, even though we weren’t.  We had pulled into the village of Carrick, in County Donegal, Ireland, in the late afternoon. Like everywhere else we went in Ireland that week, it was a comfortably sixty five degrees and breezy. I have never encountered such consistently pleasant weather anywhere else in the world. Sam firmly decided that ...