Farewell to Marble Falls. Again.

It’s funny, the roads life takes you on. You just never know where you’ll wind up.

Over the years, I’ve run a drug store, sold life insurance, stereo gear and radio advertising; newspaper advertising, too.

I’ve published four different newspapers and worked for five others. I even ran a radio station that only broadcast during daylight (we called it “solar powered radio”).

I’ve helped raise a couple of kids — and the daughter of the woman I love. I’ve trod the boards of several community theaters. Played guitar, spades and Risk.

I’ve seen a counselor and talked privately to several preachers. I’ve studied Zen, but not very hard.

I’ve argued with my Dad and tried to be a good one.

I’ve reported on ghastly traffic accidents that killed little kids. I’ve had to take the pictures for the DPS troopers.

Over my lifetime, I’ve lived in Harlingen, Elgin, Palacios, Corpus Christi, Victoria (twice), Taylor, Belton (twice), Austin (three times), Temple, Cameron and Marble Falls (twice). And that doesn’t count the year I spent in Alpine most of one spring.

I’ve been a Cub Scout, a Lion, a member of a church choir and I marched in the Cotton Bowl and in the Rose Bowl Parades.

I’m a Texan. I have a pair of cowboy boots and I played football in high school (but not very hard).

I’ve been through a divorce. When I married again, my new wife and I held the ceremony at the local VFW Hall. In all the pictures, a bingo sign hovers above our heads.

I’ve camped out at the top of a mountain and walked the streets of London at 2 a.m.

I’ve interviewed congressmen and a governor who became President, and slept in the home of an oil tycoon on the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lohman.

I saw Frank Zappa at Armadillo World Headquarters, Stevie Ray Vaugh at Auditorium Shores and ZZ Top at Memorial Stadium.

I was a lifeguard at a church camp and bagged groceries and pumped gas.

I volunteered for Sissy Farenthold’s campaign for governor and helped park cars at LakeFest.

I actually planned to have very few of these experiences. Certainly, I’ve planned and executed specific events (you can’t fly to London without some advance preparation, not on my income) but, looking back, the grand sweep of my life’s major events have been somewhat spontaneous.

John Lennon was right when he said, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”

It’s both the sublime beauty and ridiculous curse of this mortal coil. You may think you are driving toward a simple goal when life jerks you up by the short and curlies and reminds you that, sometimes, you’re simply a passenger on the journey because, this time, someone else is driving the bus.

So, I’ve learned to be flexible because few plans survive contact with the gears of life. Life is more than the plan. It is the journey. (Any good Calvinist would recognize the irony in these thoughts, especially as they are expressed by a lapsed Presbyterian.)

We didn’t plan to leave Cameron. Life presented us with an opportunity and we took it. We didn’t plan to live in Marble Falls (for the second time!) only six months. One of life’s other aspects – in this case, a teenager’s immutability combined with a mother’s love – re-focused our attention on life’s paramount claim.

So, Tia Rae and I are going back to Cameron, she to be her daughter’s mother and the Feature Editor of the Temple Daily Telegram, and me to be a supportive husband and step-father and — well, I don’t really know yet but something will turn up, I’m sure.

I don’t regret our decision to come to Marble Falls. I learned a lot and believe I made a difference for some of the people working at this newspaper. I’ll miss the friends we made here and dearly wish we could have stayed longer.

I do regret the opportunities we missed to reconnect with old friends. We were able to see a few of you but not enough, and not for nearly long enough.

But the road we’re on has taken a direction different from the one we’d planned to travel. Not because that’s what we planned, it’s just one of those funny things in life.

This was originally published in the River Cities Daily Tribune, August 2006.

The Ragged Edge: Coping with directional challenges

I’d like to thank all the sharp-eyed readers out there who went out of their way this week to point out to me what a lousy sense of direction I have.

Like I really needed this reminder that entropy’s effects are inexorable.

If you’ve been following my stories about the annexation of the old Stone Hill Shooting Ranch property, you’ll have noticed that I placed this 109 acres of land somewhere north of the Marble Falls city limits. In two stories.

If you know anything about Marble Falls, Burnet County or the general Highland Lakes area, you know that this land is actually south of the city.

That’s SOUTH of the city limits.

But, since I’ve obviously taken leave of my senses, I placed the property north of town.

It started several weeks ago when I wrote my first story about how the city intended to annex the property SOUTH of the La Ventana development. This annexation process is only one chapter in a complex story that pits a developer against a major local industry and would take more space than I have here to adequately explain.

So, while searching for a way to describe the property and where it is, I turned the map upside down. It remained that way while I wrote the story. You can see the problem.

The mistake somehow survived the editing process (typically three read-throughs) and made it into print.

I caught the error the next day.

That error was promulgated in the next story, which many of you caught.
The reactions have been … interesting.

One woman called and wondered if SHE was going crazy. I assured her that it was I who tended to drive south into Burnet when I visited Judge Jones about legal issues or Judge Kithil about county stuff.

Burnet is south of Marble Falls, right? And Austin is west of here?

No?

Drat!

Another fella e-mailed me and suggested I needed to replace my compass. … but I’d just turn it upside down, I’m sure, so that’s no answer.

This is odd. My sense of direction is usually pretty good. Left and right have not been a problem for me since about the first grade when I noticed that I had a callous on the side of the first knuckle of the middle finger of my left hand. I’m left-handed and the callous was created by the way I learned to hold a pencil. Whenever I got left and right confused, I rubbed my thumb on the fingernail of the middle finger of my left hand and the confusion left me.

I can usually navigate big cities like Houston and Dallas as long as I know where I am in relation to one of the major freeways. With two or three notable exceptions, I have been fairly successful with this method of direction-keeping.

Now, I have been known to become gloriously lost from time to time. It only takes me about half an hour to break down and ask directions when that happens.

Then there was the time that my wife and I got lost at Enchanted Rock. The rock is basically round, right? Just keep the great gaudy thing on one side of us and we’d circumnavigate the thing. How hard can it be?

Harder than it looks. We were lost for hours.

As dusk descended, we decided that we could guarantee rescue if we would simply light a fire … the park rangers are pretty peckish about that sort of activity and would have come running. The fine would have been a small price for our rescue.

So, though I suspect my affliction has as much to do with the effects of entropy as anything else, I admit my problem and I’m looking for a support group that caters to the directionally challenged.

I suspect I can find some help east in Llano or south in Burnet.

This column was published in the River Cities Daily Tribune June 5, 2006.

EDITORIAL: It's time to fix how we pay for schools

At last. Someone has finally come up with a sane and practical way to look at the debate on how we pay for public education.

Last week, John Sharp told Texas newspaper publishers that the problem of school funding is so complicated by interest groups who want to reform the way we educate our children along with the way we pay for it, the effort is as pointless as "watching a cock fight while a nuclear war is going on outside."

That analogy is quite apt.

The Supreme Court recently found that the way we pay for our school system is unconstitutional because it amounts to a statewide property tax. The court didn't order the Legislature to consider vouchers or to increase per student spending. It didn't really speak to how Texas educates its students or what it teaches them. It said that the way we pay for public education is unconstitutional and ordered the Legislature to fix it. By June 1. Or else.

The Legislature must stop worrying about the peripheral issues and make the school finance infrastructure constitutional. Those peripheral issues - vouchers on one hand and increased per student spending on the other - cannot be addressed until this state overhauls the tax code and reduces its dependence on property tax.

But the folks who want to use tax reform as a springboard to education reform muck up the works and make it impossible for the Legislature to accomplish anything regarding tax reform. Several failed special sessions and two regular sessions attest to this failure. We must save those battles for after we put a constitutional tax system in place.

Sharp pointed out that our tax code worked pretty well in the late 1950s and early 1960s but it is completely inadequate to the task of keeping up with our global economy and high stakes development. That's why, aside from the court mandated deadline, it's critical that the Legislature develop a tax code that is fair, makes sense, promotes our economy and doesn't balance that budget on the backs of our senior citizens, shrinking middle class and chronically poor.

Further, that deadline is important. Should the Legislature fail to come up with a constitutional plan, the court could shut off state money to the schools and do it in June. Sharp noted that, since she is locked in a bitter election campaign with Gov. Perry, Carole Strayhorn, the current Texas Comptroller, would very likely cooperate with that court order and that would create incredible havoc.

Now, the Legislature could duck the whole issue. It could put another band aide on the problem (like redistribution, the so-called "Robin Hood" plan) by throwing enough money at the problem that the court looks the other way for a couple of months.

But, that's not going to solve anything. That's not doing the job we hired them to do. Indeed, that approach guarantees continued ideological strife, taxpayer stress, expensive special Legislative sessions and legal battles.

That's not good public policy. It's not good tax policy.

The Legislature must divide the issue of how we pay for education from all the other issues, then take the deadline imposed by the Texas Supreme Court seriously.

"Don't let them do it half-way," Sharp urged. "Make them stick to this deadline."

It's past time for our leaders in Austin to quit squabbling like a bunch of spoiled 5 year olds and show some backbone and leadership.

This article was published Jan. 2, 2006 as an editorial by The Cameron Herald