Here is a recipe that tastes much better it sounds.  Yes it's Cajun!  Remember that New Orleans is a melting pot.  There are many people of German heritage there, and Irish, African, etc. - I could go on but you know what I mean:

2           pounds squash

1           small chopped onion

3           tablespoons butter

1/4 lb    ground sausage

             cracker crumbs

             water

In a skillet mix squash, chopped onion, sausage and a small amount of water.  Cook until squash and onion are tender.  Brown sausage and then combine with squash and onions.  Season to taste with salt and pepper, and then transfer to 1 quart greased casserole.  Cover with cracker crumbs and cook at 350 degrees in oven until brown.  Enjoy.

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March is trying to go out like a lion.  Cells all over Oklahoma.

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Tracks of a raccoon on the bank of a creek in Logan County, Oklahoma.

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Here’s a pic from the “Cities of the Dead” in New Orleans.

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My Grandson Braden has red hair, just like my brother Jack had when he was the same age.  Last night, we took my Dad to Bennigan's.  He is eight-eight and loves children.  Since Braden has red hair, just like he and my Brother had, he has taken a particular shine to the lad.  Last night, my daughter-in-law Taffy asked if we were Irish.  Well, my Dad's grandfather was named O'Rear, about as Irish as you can get.  It made me think about my other grandparents and my Grandfather Pittman.

Grandpa Pitt had some Irish blood but was probably more English.  One thing is sure, he liked potatoes as much as any Irishman.  He and Grandma Pitt lived in a tiny wood-framed house that sat about a foot off the ground on cinder blocks.  Grandpa Pitt always raised potatoes under the house and never failed to have a good crop.  When I was quite young, I asked him how he got under the house to harvest the potatoes.

"Well, boy," he answered in his best deadpan voice.  "It's all in how you do it.  I plant them all in a straight line, toward the center of the house.  When I dig out the first spud, the rest roll into the basket after it."

Grandpa never cracked a smile but even at my very young age, I knew that he was pulling my leg.  My Dad's side of the family was definitely Irish.  I'm not sure about my Mom's but I can positively say that my Grandpa Pitt must have kissed the Blarney Stone some time during his life because he could tell a story as well as any Irishman I've ever met.

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Today is the fifteenth of the month, mid march, a day the Romans referred to as the Ides.  In Shakespeare's play, Julius Caesar, Caesar met his doom on March 15.  Today's date caused me to think about my own Ides of March that happened ten years ago.  This time ten years ago, my second wife Anne had nine days of life remaining.  Suffering from lung cancer, she was in intense pain.  She didn't have long left on this earth and everyone seemed to know it except me.

In 1998, the Ides was on a Sunday.  I called Anne's doctor, trying to get her in to see someone.  It was no use.  Her doctors had already given up on her and she was a non-entity.  Anne wasn't a non-entity with me.  When I got an associate doctor on the phone, I resorted to begging.

"Please, isn't there something you can do?  I need some help here."

"Come by the office and I will give you a prescription for a painkiller," the doctor told me.  I left Anne alone for an hour while I retrieved the prescription.  "This is Oxycontin," he told me.  "It's the most powerful painkiller that I have."

I hurried home and gave Anne a pill.  It seemed to help and soon she felt good enough that she asked me to draw her bath.  Our bathtub is large and deep.  When I took her clothes off and got her into the tub, she asked me to join her.

"I am so sorry that I am putting you through all of this," she said.

"There's no place on the face of the earth that I would rather be," I said.

Anne was on constant oxygen, but the following day she was in good spirits and breathing on her own.  She had a smile on her gorgeous face and I breathed a deep sigh of relief for the first time in many days.

"It's March Madness," I said, referring to the big year-end basketball tournament.  "And the first Formula 1 race of the year.  Whatever you do, you can't get too sick this weekend or you'll spoil everything for me."

I was kidding but I'll never forget how selfish those words now sound.  Shortly, Anne's condition grew worse.  I reluctantly compare myself to Caesar.  On his way to the forum he encountered the seer that had told him to beware the Ides of march, and he said, "The Ides of March has come."

The seer answered, "Yes, the Ides of March has come, but it has not passed."

Anne lasted another several days but that day, on her back on an ER table, she looked at me, and without speaking a word, she bade goodbye with her eyes.

No one before or since has ever penned a tragedy like Shakespeare.  Knowing my own pain, I can only imagine what he must have encountered during the Ides of March of his life.

In Oklahoma, there is no rule for naming an oil well.  Many companies use the name of the mineral owner but there is no law that says you have to.  Because of this, the well name is whatever the operator wants to give it and this has resulted in some whimsical monikers through the years.

Toward the end of the last oil boom there was a Kansas operator named Wild Boys Land Cattle and Oil Company, and they were often more whimsical than most when it came to naming their wells.  Here are some of their well’s names:

Face the Fire #2

Rock Salt Blues #1

Nose to the Wind #1

Slapping Leather #1

Muddy Streets and Dollar Baths #1

Against a Crooked Sky #1

Rawhide #1

Out on Bail #1

It’s Just Crude #1

Saddle Sores #1

Shotgun Rider #1

Fistful of Dollars #1

Shootout in Lake City #2

Having a Few Beers #1

On the Rocks #8-C

Riding Thunder #1

Whiskey Hills #1

Snake Bite #1

Riding into Hell and Back Again #1

Hell Ain’t Ready for Us Yet 2-2

Eatin’ Dust and Drinkin’ Whiskey #1

And my own personal favorite:

Holdin’ Five Aces #1

Oil drillers are generally a superstitious lot and some say it is bad luck to use any name other than that of the mineral owner.  There may be some truth to this superstition as many of the above wells were completed as dry holes.

Maybe, but what I’ve always heard and believe to be true is never name a well after your wife, your mother, your daughter or your girlfriend.  Why?  I haven’t a clue.

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When many people think of New Orleans, they think of Mardi Gras, wild parties, parades and pretty girls baring their breasts.  The old city actually hosts many celebrations.  The biggest of these celebrations, after Mardi Gras, would be the Jazz Fest.  I attended my first Jazz Fest more than twenty years ago and it has only grown bigger since then.

I can't remember which artists were playing during my first Jazz Fest but it is safe to say that every recording artist performs there sometime during their career.  This year there are hundreds of acts, headlined by Billy Joel, Robert Plant and Allison Kraus, Al Green, Dr. John, Tim McGraw, Keysia Cole, Stevie Wonder, Jimmy Buffett, Diana Krall, Sheryl Crowe - the list goes on.

I checked out the agenda today at nojazzfest.com (I'll give you the link at the bottom of the page) and I ended up buying a couple of the signed, limited edition 2008 Jazz Fest posters.  I bought one years ago on a whim and now it is worth lots of money.  Yes, they are more collectible than Mardi Gras doubloons.

During my first Jazz Fest, my friend Ray and I were wandering through the French Quarter.  It was pretty much deserted because almost everyone was at the Fairgrounds, attending the Fest.  We were browsing in a gift shop and there was an old woman sitting at a small table in the back.  She had a deck of Tarot cards and asked if I wanted my fortune told.

It was a bad time in my life.  My little oil company had just gone "belly up" and I was struggling to find some answers.  "Okay," I said, putting twenty dollars on the table.

I seriously doubted that the old woman could tell fortunes any better than I, but when she began dealing the cards and telling my fortune, I truly felt that she was reading from the master account of my life.  She accurately told me things that had just occurred in my life and continued to tell my future.

"Everything will work out for you.  You will be redeemed."

Well, everything did work out for me.  As far as being redeemed, well, that's open to interpretation.

Marilyn and I have decided to attend this year's Jazz Fest, the last week in April.  If you are there and see an old fat man with a permanent grin etched on his face, and yammering to someone as if he had something important to say, please tap me on the shoulder and say hi.

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I wrote a story called Chicken Fries that I published in my newest book Just East of Eden.  The story is largely true and recounts one summer when my then wife Anne and I, and our friend Ray, watched a drilling well in Grant County, Oklahoma from the interior of a rented former motor home of Country singer Wanda Jackson, a one-time girlfriend of Elvis Presley.

The story includes details of Satanism and cattle mutilations.  In the summer that Chicken Fries occurred, such stories dominated the headlines in newspapers throughout the country.  During this period, most Oklahoma newspapers and news stations considered a sheriff in Grant County the expert of choice on Satanism and he was always consulted when a mutilated cow found or newly formed crop circle was found.  Pundits were torn between pointing the finger of guilt at Satanists, or extra-terrestrials.  In my story, the Satanists were actually pagans, members of the Southern Death Cult.

It was an interesting time that seems behind us now.  Maybe, but in my novel in progress, Panther Stalking,  Buck McDivit encounters an all-female sect of the Southern Death Cult at a compound in Logan County, Oklahoma, and more than cattle mutilations and crop circles are involved.

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Robby Gordon – NASCAR racer

John Mellencamp – Recording Artist

Sean Penn – Actor

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The oil business is either the world’s worst addiction or an incurable disease.  There is nothing that hurts more than learning that the prospect you tried for a year to get drilled is, in fact, a dry hole.  Conversely, there’s nothing more viscerally satisfying than hearing oil pour into a frac tank after perforating a zone you had doubts about.

During the last oil boom, my wife Anne and I had a mom and pop oil company.  We had leased enough acreage to drill a single well but had taken options on the offset leases just in case we were successful.  The problem is our options were ready to exercise before we managed to raise the money to drill our first well.  When we finally raised the money, we had a week or so to make a decision that would cost many thousands of dollars if we guessed incorrectly.

We were looking for two elusive zones, the Misener and, or, the Skinner Sand.  Either zone a company maker, we had a lot riding on the well’s outcome.  We finally drilled the well and it was late at night when we pulled the final electric log to the surface.  Anne and I were heartbroken when we learned that the Skinner was structurally low and nonproductive, the Misener nonexistent.

We set pipe anyway because there is a massive carbonate in the well called the Mississippi Lime in the well bore that almost always produces, albeit sometimes in less than commercial quantities.  A full moon lit the sky as Anne and I drove away from the location late that night.  Anne was sobbing softly.

“I can’t believe our first well is such a disaster,” she said.

“Don’t give on her just yet.  You never know what a Mississippi well will do until you frac it.”

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” she said.

Maybe I was.  Still, when we fractured the well a week later, it began producing 400 BOPD, along with lots of natural gas.  The well was a monster and we needed four oil tanks to handle its rate.  Unfortunately, I hadn’t believed my own hype and had let the offset options expire.  Another company picked them up and eventually drilled four wells as good as ours.

We went on to drill thirty more successful wells in Oklahoma before the oil bust finally caught up with us.  Our first well continued to produce, as did the others we drilled, but Anne and I were already on the outside looking in.

Somehow we managed to survive and I have drilled many more wells since then.  I’m still just as blown away when I drill a dry hole and just as elated when I hit a big one.  I don’t really know if it’s an addiction or a disease but I do know that I have a bad case of oil fever, and there is no known cure.

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Marilyn and I had brunch at the new Pearl's yesterday.  Pearl's is OKC's answer to New Orleans cooking.  There were two Pearl's, the original and Pearl's Lakeside.  The original Pearl's moved because the land where it sat was purchased by Chesapeake to expand their campus.  The new Pearl's is located a few miles away, adjacent to the huge Belle Isle Cemetery.  Matt, the waiter, told us that all the waiter's and waitresses call it Pearl's Graveside.

From Pearl's we went down Western to have a beer at VZD's, a bar and restaurant created from the old Veasey's Drug Store.  Many of the original drug bottles and boxes are still in the glass display case on one side of the restaurant.  We drank a beer, took some pictures and continued down the road.

We made our way to the Paseo District, an old art district in Oklahoma City.  There we visited an ecclectic gift shop where we bought some incense and ear rings before sitting on the patio of Galileo's Bar and Restaurant.  We met lots of nice people and here are a couple of the pics we took.

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