Well, down in Texas visiting my family for the holidays and we're showing off our new arrival, Mary. How blessed we are with two healthy and happy children. I hope that everyone reading this has a wonderful holiday and a Happy New Year.

I'm from Beaumont and Hurricane Rita really tore through here. It's sad to see the damage to the trees especially. Beaumont has always had extremely beautiful trees, rich and green. They've now lost about 80% of them to the storm. There are lots of blue FEMA tarps on rooftops all over town, and, though I'm here several months after the storm, the damage is still visible all over. Mounds of debris, stumps peppering yards, mounds of earth tipped from the land pulled by the roots.

My brother was showing me some of the photos tonight that he'd taken right after the storm, when they were allowed to finally come back to town. It looked like a war zone. The town that I grew up in was not recognizable in those images. Scary. But the town has bounced back and the people that I've seen are in good spirits, generally, and so many are just thankful that it was not worse than it was.

My mother had lots of damage to her home. Flooding in the house destroyed new wooden floors and carpets. An 1800 lb. branch fell on her roof, damaging it and creating the holes for the water damage, what didn't seep in from the backyard, that is. We had a storehouse in back where I did a good bit of my early scribbling, it's now a total loss. It will have to be totally rebuilt. The fence was destroyed, and the backyard was a tangle of overlapping trees and detritus. Mom feels lucky though, and knows she is certainly more fortunate than many. If it weren't for my brother living close by and helping run interference for her I don't know how she would have fared.

But it's wonderful to be surrounded by family. My son gets to play with his cousin's, my brother's two boys, and everyone is just enjoying each other's company. All the old stories come tumbling out and there's lots of laughter and good feelings all around.

I love coming here and revisiting my old haunts. Beaumont was a fantastic place to grow up in. My buddies and I used to ride our bikes all over the old oil fields, picking our bikes up to carry them over the cattle guards and slide them through the barbed wire fences with the "No Trespassing" signs. We were kids, what were they going to do? The shell roads beckoned and we answered the call, riding hard in the shimmering Texas heat. We'd hang out on the old railroad tie bridges, our bare feet dangling over the edge, and toss shells at the pancake turtles lounging on the rotted logs in the river.

We once built a tree house atop a great ancient oak that stood alone in the middle of the oil field. We hauled in whatever lumber we could rustle up from wherever, usually from the various homes being built in the area, and everyone brought nails and hammers from home. It was a pretty crude structure, to be sure — hell, the final "floor" was a rusty spike nailed deep into a very high branch. You'd shimmy up the branch and then stand on the spike. Scary and invigorating. But it was all ours and we loved doing it.

While we were working feverishly on our fort we saw a lineman's truck rumbling in the distance, a great plume of dust billowing behind it. The lineman pulled up and got out, head covered by a pith helmet and and his eyes shielded by dark sunglasses. He looked like one of those guards from Cool Hand Luke or something. We knew we weren't supposed to be out there and he knew we weren't supposed to be out there, but we all sort of forgot it in the shared moment. He thought it was cool that we were building a tree house and gave us pointers on the construction. I guess we reminded him of stuff he did as a kid. Who knows? He gave us paper cups from his truck and let us pull water from the two large, tin sweaty water coolers on the front bumper. It was one of the best cups of water I've ever had. He told us to keep an eye out for other linemen because they might not be so forgiving. He told us to be careful up in the tree and, most important of all, to have fun. Think how that might go down today in this over-cautious world we live in. Would never happen.

Anyway, all that is gone now. The oil fields are gone and are now subdivisions with look-a-like homes scattered to and fro. The pond that used to be in the woods directly in front of our old elementary school is gone too. We used to tramp through the woods off the shell road and stand by this pond which we thought was actually a large footprint left over from some dinosaur. We believed it.

I wonder how kids today can have anything like that sort of childhood with the fear that has been sown in all our minds about the terrors of today's world. How much of that is true? How much of that is fear-mongering to keep us in line? I suspect that a lot of it is just the availability of the information today. We hear about things quicker and have them repeated ad-infinitum, so it seems like it's worse. I don't think it is. But I'm just as paranoid as anyone else about it all, and sad that things aren't somewhat like they were when I was a kid. We walked to school and rode our bikes everywhere. If you stepped out of line any adult could reprimand you without fear of getting sued or worse. We played outside at night, running all over the neighborhood playing flashlight tag or guns. I don't think I ever heard a serious cuss word until I was just starting high school, now I hear 5-year olds spouting things that would have curled our ears back then.

Well, rambling. It's late and I got my son to bed with news about Santa being tracked on radar, nearing Beaumont. He went immediately to bed, all aquiver with excitement. That's pretty neat.

Happy Holidays!
George