Waylon! (and more) in These titles mean nothing.

Bell bottoms, a side part and it looks like the CBS makeup crew shampooed him.

In a rather strange hat, but he’s just kidding folks.

I wonder what happened to the suit - and the ascot?

And sharing Chuck Berry’s great truth.

I don't know why I feel the need to dredge up old Waylon videos.  It irritates a friend of mine.  She was too close to a Waylon-like figure.  I sympathize.  He would have been a hard man to live with, or be related to.

I've never had a Waylon-figure in my life.  The men I know are not Outlaws.  They behave themselves.  They can be trusted.  They come home at night.  

But I love Waylon just the same.  

It’s Saturday morning. I tried to call my bank but I have to wait for Monday.

I worked yesterday - got off at 1 pm - an ideal time to get off work - especially when it’s the beginning of the weekend.

It’s been cold. Winter is early this year. We’ve had dustings of snow, including baby drifts between the cars in the parking lot.

The drying bin has been full twice and there is still a lot of corn to pick. Crop is good this year. I forgot to ask for moisture numbers.

I’ve been providing meals for combine drivers. I alternate sun-dried tomato turkey, good lettuce and good bread, with a swipe of mayo sandwiches with thick stew-y soups in a classy new pyrex bowl with a snap on cover. I send some cheese out too.

I put on all my clothes and go out and watch the wagon unloading the corn into the auger sweep that conveys it into the drying bin.

I do a little (very little) truck driving and people ferrying.

We have some nice dry wood - not a lot, but some - and the house is warm. I brought in the cats’ camp chair and washed it and put it in the basement with the furnace. I tend laundry and drink white wine.

I have this perfect life. And I think fate very much.

I’m reading Salter at work - a lovely book full of lovely, deep, intelligent writing. It was written in 1975, the same year some of this Waylon stuff happened. It was an important year for me. It was the year we moved back home and I traded one life for another.

I want to share the blue marked passages in Light Years. I want to write an entry called My Lost Shaker of Salt(er).

I want to write about Saltillo, Mexico where my boss is going next week. It’s not far from Monterrey and it’s called the Detroit of Mexico. GM and Chrysler have plants. Forty percent of cars made in Mexico and sixty percent of trucks are assembled in Mexico. (wiki is my source)

My company makes components for them at a facility there. It’s funny how self centered we are. It’s true that foreign branches of American companies can mean loss of jobs here - tell me about it - but sometimes they are producing for foreign markets. It can be complex and not black and white as it may seem.

I have to town - to buy milk and meat and fruit and cookies and chips. My book on tape from last week is still going strong so I don’t have to go the the library. It’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon. It’s good, the idea of it is a Jewish settlement in the Alaskan panhandle (the southern coastal strip that the US somehow got away from Canada). In the book there is no Israel, so Jews are in Alaska - their time is running out - and the land is being taken back from them. It’s a police procedural, not my favorite kind of book, but it’s good. It makes me look forward to my commute.

Here let me leave you a sprinkle of Salt(er):

The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life - it was not worth much - not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had courage, he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that is important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching , until there is no one - we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.

I admit that is a bit of a downer but it’s the first passage I found marked.

OK, this is a little better:

Of them all, it was the true love. Of them all, it was the best. The other, the sumptuous love which made one drunk, which one longed for, envied, believed in, that was not life. It was what life was seeking; it was a suspension of life. But to be close to a child, for whom one spent everything, whose life was protected and nourished by one’s own, to have that child beside one, at peace, was the real, the deepest, the only joy.