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.

http://www.nojazzfest.com  http://www.ericwilder.com

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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Frequent readers of Musings already know that I'm not a perfect person.  Here is a story that will extend my less-than-perfect persona to the point that there is no doubt.

For years I bowled on a bowling league.  I never carried much more than a one-forty average.  Part of the reason was because we all started drinking beer the moment we walked into the bowling alley.  One night, not quite ready to go home, two fellow bowlers and I went to a local bar, the Samurai.

The Samurai was owned by a Japanese man with a passion for rock and roll.  A live band played there almost every night, the place almost always filled with revelers of both sexes.  We sat at the bar, ordering shots and sushi from a very friendly bartender named Patty.  Half past two shots, the devilment inside me began to overcome my inner angel.

Patty had long brown hair that draped her bare shoulders.  She had big brown eyes and a smile to match.  She also had something else big and her scanty tank top highlighted them to their best effect.  Finally, I made some crude comment and offered her a twenty to show us her breasts.  When she eagerly complied, we practically fell off our bar stools.

It was Friday night and I was having a party the next day following a 10K race being run through the neighborhood.  I pulled out my wallet, a business card and a hundred dollar bill.  After drawing a map to my house on back of the card, I gave it to the pretty bartender, along with the hundred dollars.

"I'll pay you a hundred dollars, in advance, to come lay out at the pool - naked that is.  All you'll have to do is drink, sun and have a good time."

I fell asleep from over indulgence shortly after reaching the house.  The next morning, I filled chests with ice and beer in preparation for the party.  After completing the 10K through the neighborhood, I climbed in the shower, surprised when Anne banged on the glass door to tell me that a girl named Patty was on the phone.

Oh my God! I thought, suddenly remembering the previous night.  "What does she want?" I asked, praying it would be to tell me she wasn't coming.

"She said you gave her a hundred dollars to lay out by the pool naked?  Is it true?"

By now my head was throbbing.  Grabbing a towel, I went to the phone to talk to Patty.  As I dripped on the tile with phone in hand, Anne stood glaring at me.

"Look, last night was all a misunderstanding.  I'm having a party but there will be families here, kids and everything.”

Anne took the phone and said, “You're welcome at the party but bring a bathing suit."

I watched her hang up the phone, wishing I could transport myself to a different universe.  Instead, I blurted the whole story to her.  Frowning, she just shook her head.  The party went on as planned with fifty or sixty guests.  Yes, Patty showed up in a very revealing bikini.  The males guests were happy, their wives less so.

Anne was a real lady and realized that I had done little more than make a total fool of myself.  It had embarrassed her. Still, she forgave me when I apologized and promised it would never happen again, and it never did.  That brings me back to the part about being less than perfect.  Anne knew me well enough to know that there would always be something else to try our marriage.

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Born on the day before Halloween, I seem forever destined to be connected to that holiday.  Anne and I married early in 1980 and decided to host a Halloween party that year.  Halloween was on a Friday, so we planned the big bash for Saturday.  Not all of our guests got the message as three revelers showed up for the party Friday night.  Jakob, an Israeli expatriate that was doing stonework around our house for us, came as a cowboy.  He was soon followed by Nancy, a geologist, dressed, strangely enough, as an Indian princess.  John, another geologist, came a little later, his only costume a black mask.  Making the best of the situation, Anne and I broke out the alcohol and we all began to party.

There was a championship boxing match on television that night - Oklahoma City's own Sean O'Grady versus James Watt, a Scottish boxer.  The fight took place in Glasgow, Scotland and to say that there was a bit of home cooking going on is but a mild statement.  After a few rounds Watt head-butted Sean resulting in a horrible cut over his eye.  Watt should have been disqualified and O'Grady declared the winner.  Instead, the local judges ruled the cut caused by a punch rather than a head-butt.

Those days there was no rule about excessive bleeding.  To say that there was a little blood strewn around the ring would be a true understatement.  The ring looked more like the inside of a working slaughter house, all the viewers, myself included, in total shock.  The fight was soon called and Watt proclaimed the world champion.

We went on to drink, carouse and to celebrate into the wee hours, neither Anne nor I in much shape for the real Halloween party that continued as planned the next day.

A few years later I met Sean O'Grady at a Christmas Party in Oklahoma City.  The room was crowded and I was standing against a wall, sipping my whiskey.  When O'Grady spotted me, he pushed his way through the crowd, looked me straight in the eye and said, "You look just like "Little Red" Lopez."

He wasn't smiling and I could tell from his expression and the clinch of his fists that he was getting ready to slug me.  Having seen his devastating punching power on more than one occasion, I immediately raised my right palm.

"Believe me, I'm not "Little Red" Lopez.  I'm one of your biggest fans."

Sean's expression thankfully changed and we proceeded to have a nice conversation.  Lopez, it seems, had beaten the then teen aged O'Grady badly and he had never forgotten, or forgiven.

That was the first Halloween party that I hosted, eventful like everyone else that followed.  I have another Sean O'Grady story but I will save it for another day.

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The protagonist of my first novel, Ghost of a Chance, was Oklahoma cowboy detective Buck McDivit.  A mysterious lake in east Texas was the backdrop for the novel that highlighted lost Confederate gold, Indian artifacts, the ghost of a girl, and murder.  I’m presently working on a sequel to Ghost of a Chance, this time with the action occurring in Oklahoma.

The working title of my new book is Panther Stalking and the story involves modern-day cattle rustling, a compound populated by female pagans, and of course, murder.  I’m about twenty thousand words into the novel.

Before starting on Panther Stalking I wrote a Buck McDivit short story to reintroduce myself to a character that I haven’t visited in almost three years.  Prairie Thunder plants McDivit back in his home turf of central Oklahoma.  Moonlighting as an assistant medical examiner, McDivit helps investigate the death of an American Indian artist.  The story leads him to Oklahoma City’s historic Paseo District.

Anyone who read Ghost of a Chance and is interested in reconnecting with Buck McDivit is invited to visit my website http://www.ericwilder.com.  Sign my list and I will email you the short story in PDF format.  Thanks – Eric.

Here is another recipe from my Aunt Dot's wonderful new cookbook All the Foods We've Loved Before.  The recipe is a classic recipe from my grandmother Lela, also a great cook.

1     package yeast

1/4  cup warm water

1/2  teaspoon sugar

1     teaspoon salt

1/4  cup sugar

1     cup milk, scalded

1     each egg, beaten

4     cups flour

Moisten yeast in 1/4 cup warm water.  Add 1/2 teaspoon sugar.  Let stand.  Add shortening, rest of sugar and  salt to hot milk.  Stir until sugar is dissolved.  Cook, then add egg.  Stir in softened yeast.  Next add flour into liquid until will mixed.  Turn dough onto lightly floured board; knead quickly until smooth and elastic.  Form into a smooth ball.

Place ball in a well greased bowl and turn over once or twice to grease entire surface.  Cover and let rise in warm place until double in bulk.  Knead well again and shape as desired.  Place in greased pan, cover and let rise for one hour more.  Bake at 400 degrees for fifteen to twenty minutes.

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The sixty four dollar question.  Which is the devil and which is the angel? I think I have a clue.

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I thought Oklahoma was too far north for alligators.  Guess not!  This is what I found when I checked my pool this morning.

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It rained yesterday in Edmond, a late winter storm resonating with the sights and sounds of booming thunder and flashing lightning.  It reminded me of a damp trip my then wife Gail and I took to New Orleans, via Vidalia, Louisiana.

Like today, it was late winter.  Gail and I had finished work at our jobs and decided on a whim to visit her parents in Vidalia before continuing on to Chalmette.  Gail's father, Harvey was the foreman of a large cattle ranch just outside of the far eastern Louisiana town just across the mighty Mississippi River from Natchez.  We planned to spend the night there and then head south for a little respite from our college drudgery.

Darkness had already fallen before we pulled out of our Fayetteville, Arkansas driveway, drops of rain beginning to dampen the windshield.  Somewhere in central Arkansas, the light rain turned into a serious storm, the wipers on our old 62' Ford truck barely keeping up with the tempo of the downpour.  As we neared the rice fields of southeast Arkansas, the wipers halted altogether.

The downpour and our lack of wipers rendered us suddenly sightless and I cautiously pulled the truck to the side of the road until we could assess the mechanical failure.  After groping around under the dash, I soon learned that the cause of the malfunction was a missing "C" clamp.  We searched on the floor of the truck with the dim illumination of a flashlight with nearly spent batteries but it was to no avail.

The rain continued and we realized that we were either stuck on the side of the, or we would have to improvise and carry on.  Experimenting, I learned that I could manually manipulate the wipers by driving with one hand while using the other to work the mechanism.

The storm did anything but abate.  Southeastern Arkansas is flat.  Very flat!  Water was pouring across the highway in waves and I quickly learned the old saying "raining cats and dogs" was rooted in reality.  Fish from the rice fields and drainage ditches flowed across the road in our path.  It was quite an experience, steering with one hand while working the wipers with the other, all the while trying to avoid wildlife pouring across the road in front of us.

We finally made it to Vidalia, mostly unscathed.  The deluge continued as we said a late goodnight to Gail's parents and claimed a deserved rest in an empty room in the ranch's rustic bunkhouse.

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It’s raining in Edmond today and here’s a pic I just took with my new Panasonic Lumix.  I doctored it a bit with Roxio Photosuite.

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Yesterday's story about my old Triumph TR4 reminded me of another story.  When I quit Texas Oil & Gas, I gave up my company car, a maroon Plymouth Fury that I dearly loved.  I owned the TR4 that I had bought from my friend John, and a Triumph Bonneville 750 motorcycle that I had yet to sell to him.  Neither car nor motorcycle was the picture of reliability.  I left TXO to pursue fantastic riches as an independent oil man.  Being young and naive I only had about a thousand dollars, most of which I had borrowed from Carol, my girlfriend of the moment, to sustain myself until my first big break.

The Triumph served me well around town but I had not ventured far from my digs at the old Woodlake Apartments where I had moved after my first wife and I finally divorced and sold our house.  When my mother got sick and needed a medical procedure, this all changed.  Packing a suitcase, I tossed it in the trunk, threw caution to the wind and headed south.  My mother survived her procedure in the Atlanta, Texas hospital and we enjoyed a good visit.  I was feeling bulletproof when I finally headed toward OKC along winding Highway 1.

Shortly after leaving Louisiana and entering Texas, a sweeping curve appears that you can easily make doing sixty.  I was tooling along at a considerably higher rate of speed when I reached the curve.  How fast?  I have no clue because, like many of the other electronic devices on the Triumph, the speedometer didn't work.  When I hit the foot peddle, I got a very big surprise.  I had no brakes.  The sickly weak peddle went straight to the floor board and remained there.

I thought that I was going to wind up in the ditch.  Instead, the tires on the little car gripped and I ended up accelerating out of the curve, my heart in my proverbial throat.  That was it!  I had no brakes.  Doing what any other testosterone laden young man would do, I decided to keep going and worry about any potential repercussions later.

The Triumph had a strong motor and excellent compression.  When you let off the gas, the car decelerated rapidly.  The car's old tractor engine had enough torque to pull a tree stump and growled like a lion on the prowl.  It made me feel vital and alive.  Don't ask how, but I made it safely back to OKC - 362 miles in less than five hours.

I made no money during the first five months of my independence.  Finally, I earned a pittance for a consulting job.  On impulse, I bought an expensive Guild guitar with a bright red finish I somehow felt that I couldn't live with out.  It was the last straw for my girlfriend Carol and idiot was the nicest thing she called me that night.  She also called me a hopeless dreamer.  We broke up shortly after the guitar incident but I went on to make more than a quarter of a million dollars before the end of the year.

I made and lost lots more than that during the years that followed, but I also spent many of those years at a level of near poverty.  Still, I survived and I had lots of fun along the way.  Carol was a great person and she was there for me when I needed her.  She is long gone from my life but a few things from that era still remain - my Guild guitar, my Triumph TR4, and my hopeless dreams.

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Here is a pic of my eighty-eight year old dad Jack and my four month old pug Princess.  Yes, you can see from both of their faces that they hit it off.

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My Aunt Dot Pourteau is a wonderful person and a wonderful cook. She recently published her second cookbook titled ALL THE FOODS WE'VE LOVED BEFORE that features recipes collected through the years from family, friends and various publications. I was drooling as I read through the recipes and happy to see that many were provided by my uncles, aunts, cousins, my grandmother and, yes, even my own mother. Here is one of Dot's personal recipes for southern pecan pie. I can't wait to try it!

3 eggs, beaten
2/3 cup sugar
1 dash of salt
1/2 cup white Karo
1/2 cup dark Karo
1/3 cup butter or margarine, melted
1 cup pecans, chopped or whole

Beat 3 eggs throughly with sugar, salt, dark and light Karo, melted butter. Add one cup of pecan halves. Pour into 9" unbaked pie shell. Bake in moderate oven (350 degrees) 50 minutes or until knife inserted halfway between center and edge comes out clean. Cool.

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I've talked about my maternal grandfather many times before.  I remember him as a big, strapping man with coal dark eyes that could stare holes straight through you.  He also had big earlobes that seemed to increase in size the older he became.

Grandpa was not a bad person, far from it.  He was generous to a fault but he believed that you should earn his generosity.  Moreover, Grandpa was an entrepreneur.  He owned his own gas station in Vivian.  When war broke out, he opened a gas station in Leesville, the home of Fort Polk, a place that has trained soldiers for almost forever.

Being an entrepreneur must have run in the family because my grandparents had a neighborhood grocery store right behind their house.  My Grandma ran the store but my Grandpa sliced meat in the butcher section when he wasn't running the gas station.  The store seemed huge to me then with aisle after aisle of canned goods, bread and candy.  It was actually quite small.  When they finally closed the store, they converted the building into a stand alone two car garage.

During the summer of my second year in college I attended a geologic field camp that I serialized in the story called The Summer of Bologna.  There was still a month of summer break remaining when I returned to Vivian from the camp at Batesville, Arkansas.  All the good summer jobs were all already taken but Grandpa got me a job at the ESSO station that he once had owned.

Mr. T, the new owner was a crotchety sort with a heart of gold.  I worked from six in the morning until eight at night, six days a week, for a salary that amounted to less than $40 per week.  Those were the days of the full service filling stations and I pumped gas, washed windows and put air in tires.  Mr. T even taught me how to lube a car.

The person that I worked with at the station was named Major - his first name.  He didn't like coffee and always had an RC Cola and bag of peanuts for breakfast.  Working for Mr. T was the zenith of his existence and he truly had no further aspirations in life.

The hours were long and the pay was low but I managed to have some fun.  A pretty girl named Tammy worked at the Tastee-Freeze, the local ice cream, teenage hangout just across the street from the ESSO station, and we flirted the entire summer, culminating with a date to see James Brown in concert in Shreveport.

When I got older, I started my own company.  Through thick and thin, mostly thin, I've managed to make a living on my own for almost thirty years.  I'm almost positive that I inherited my entrepreneurial spirit from Grandpa Pitt but unfortunately that's not all. Glancing in the mirror the other day, I noticed that my ear lobes were now even bigger than his had been.

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I got to thinking about this event in my life.  I was twenty-two years old and working for the summer in New Orleans for a company that is now defunct.  I was only making two dollars an hour and I was an hourly employee.  When the 4th of July came around, Darris, my boss told me that Steve and I (Steve was also a college student and an hourly employee) would have to work July 4th to earn our money.  Fine, we thought.

I decided to stroll down Bourbon Street that night instead of going directly home to my tiny (now destroyed because of Katrina) apartment in Araby.  Strangely, I ran into a person from college that I knew.  I will call him Vincent because his real name has long since escaped the database of hard facts my feeble brain attempts to keep.

I knew Vincent from college in Monroe, Louisiana where I was attending.  Vincent was an ex-SEAL and to say that he had a double pair of kahones would be putting it mildly.  After Vietnam, he had worked offshore Louisiana, drilling for oil.  Once, when a hurricane was bearing down on his offshore rig, he had volunteered to stay through the storm and keep the hatches battened (well, he collected a few thousand dollars from the oil company for his bravery).

Vincent had another talent - he could chug a pitcher of beer in one swallow!

Anyway, I took it on myself to show him the town.  There is little that I remember of that particular night except being threatened by someone for flirting with his wife.  Also, I have the vague remembrance of watching an old black man play a bronze dobro at some club along Bourbon.  I think he was Lightning Hopkins but I can't really swear to anything that happened that night.  The old man let me play "St. James Infirmary" on his axe and shared some stories with me - all of which I have forgotten!

Next morning, I somehow managed to make it to my job.  There was no one there but me.  I felt so horrible, that I found a dark closet and went to sleep.  Steve came in around ten and discovered me.  He wasn't in very good shape either and, as I remember it, we both left early.

Many years have passed and I never saw Vincent again, nor did I see Steve again after that summer.  He joined the Navy, and, like me, was soon bound for the jungles of Southeast Asia.  Still, to this day I fully believe I played St. James Infirmary on Lightning Hopkins beautiful bronze dobro.  If I didn't, don't tell me!

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Happy Super Tuesday to all you political junkies and happy Fat Tuesday to all of you fun junkies.  Politics affects all of our lives and I watch what's happening with the same interest as any other concerned citizen.  Still, when it comes to being a junkie I fall into the latter category more than the former.

Many other cities celebrate the pre-Lenten season with both festivities and frivolities.  Most prominent, other than the Big Easy is Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.  Much of the year's income for many of Rio’s inhabitants is the direct result of Carnival Season.  Fat Tuesday is always the day before Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent.  Because this date, like Easter, is governed by the moon's cycles, it occurs on a different date every year.  This year, it is on February 5th, the earliest it has been in twenty years.

An official in Rio wants the date for Carnival to be on the same day every year.  This is because the earlier the event occurs, the less revenue it generates.  My close friend and fellow author r. r. Bryan, himself a devout Catholic, assures me that this will never happen.  r. r. wrote All the Angels and Saints, a novel about a Catholic missionary in Guatemala.

While a devout Catholic, r. r. is also a fun junkie who lived in and around New Orleans for many years.  His son Matt (whose birthday is today, incidentally - he as waited for this day all his life!) didn't believe it when we told him that crowds were often packed so tightly on Bourbon Street during times past that you could literally raise your feet off the pavement and remain suspended in the air.

I find it hard to believe that today is the third Fat Tuesday celebration in New Orleans since the devastation brought by the monster hurricane season of 2005.  While far from full recovery, NO is moving in the right direction.  It was 84 degrees in the French Quarter today and I sit in front of the TV watching the early voting returns, I am wishing I was there instead of here.

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Here is a picture of a crow captured with a wildlife camera and modified using Microsoft Digital Image Suite and Roxio Photosuite.

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Here are a couple of pics of the Penn Theatre located in a strip center near 12th and Pennsylvania in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.  Today, the theatre houses a junk store.  Check out the story at http://www.ericwilder.com .

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Here’s a pic taken a few years back at a motorcycle race in Houston at the Astrodome.  Pictured are Eric Wilder, friend John and a gorgeous model (I believe she is a Denver Bronchos cheerleader).

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