Author Archives: Mark P

On the trail with BD and Jesse

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I got Jesse from the pound in Atlanta in 1979 when I was bumming around after quitting work at the Augusta newspaper (That was the second time; that time it took, and I never went back.) Her cage had a sign identifying her as a Dalmatian named Sugar who was not good with children. She wasn’t a Dalmatian. I think she was mostly some kind of birddog. She was too smart to be a Dalmatian. She was not “Sugar”. There was no way I was going to step outside and scream, “SUGAR!!!” So she became Jesse. And I suspect that it was kids who were not good with her.

She went everywhere with me. When I brought her home to my parents’, she came inside with me, the first dog ever allowed to stay inside my mother’s house. When I decided to go to graduate school at Georgia Tech, a requirement for finding a place to stay was that dogs be allowed.

She was good company, much better, in fact, than any roommate I had while at Tech. Every day when I came home I changed clothes and walked her a couple of blocks to a vacant area where I could let her run free for an hour or so.

I ran too, but it didn’t relieve all the stress.

Graduate school is stressful. My brother, who also got his PhD from Georgia Tech, said several times he thought he just couldn’t take any more, so he went home and started packing. Me, too. Graduate school is like working full time and going to school full time. Coursework means you always take your work home with you, or, most likely, don’t go home until all the work is done.

School was not the only source of stress. I lived about three blocks from I-75. There was a railroad line just behind the houses across the street from where I lived. Jets flew over all the time to Hartsfield or to one of the local airports. The noise was constant: cars, trucks, trains, airplanes. Sometimes I would stand in the driveway and listen, and think, if I don’t get away from this noise I am going to go freaking crazy.

So on some weekends I would drive up to northeast Georgia where there were several places to access the Appalachian Trail. Saturday mornings I would pack my stuff, load Jesse into the car and drive a couple of hours to a trail crossing. I would walk into the woods at a leisurely pace, stop somewhere for lunch, walk on a bit and find a nice, level campsite not too far off the trail. We spent the night and then walked back to the car on Sunday morning. A lot of people consider backpacking a competitive sport. Their goal is miles. My goal was to get away from things for a while, so I almost never went more than six miles or so along the trail.

Jesse probably ran two or three miles for every mile I walked. She was kind of like our current dog Zeke, who runs wild when he’s off the leash. But Jesse was reliable; she always came back. She kept track of me. She would run off ahead of me, and then after a while, come running back to me and take off in the opposite direction. Sometimes she would disappear ahead of me and then show up behind me. She was always orbiting me.

I loved those hikes.

It took me five and a half years to finish at Tech. I went to work in Huntsville, Alabama, in June 1986. I still occasionally went backpacking in Georgia, but it was a considerably longer drive. I don’t think my father ever went hiking with me when I was at Tech, but he did after I graduated. These pictures are from a hike we made in the fall of 1987. My father was 70 years old then. He looked damned good, and he managed the hikes at least as well as I did. All of these pictures are scanned from my old 35 mm slides.

BD at an overlook. Look at the old Army canteen.

BD at an overlook. Look at the old Army canteen.

About “BD”. My brother and I called our father Daddy. Apparently as very small boys we started calling him Pop, but he objected, so he became Daddy from then on. Our mother was Mother, but our father was Daddy. At some time many years ago, we started calling him Big Daddy. I don’t know where it came from, or even exactly when it started. I must have been pretty young. “Big Daddy” became “BD”. Long after we had grown up, if we ever had to write a note to him to leave on the kitchen counter, we addressed it to BD. My brother got him a black baseball cap with BD embroidered in yellow. We still have that cap somewhere.

On the trail

On the trail

Setting up camp

Setting up camp. Jesse is thirsty.

On this particular hike, we lost Jesse for a while. We had been walking when we realized that we hadn’t seen her for a long time. It was odd, because she usually checked in with us every 20 or 30 minutes. So we stopped to wait for her. We called some, but mainly just waited. I was pretty confident that she would find us if she was able to move, because I had already had some experience with her scenting ability.

So we sat and waited. I don’t remember how long it took, but she eventually showed up. She was very tired. I think she might have come back to the trail and somehow decided to go back towards the car. I think she ran all the way back to the car, saw we weren’t there, and then turned around and ran back to us. I don’t know that for sure, but that’s always been what I thought.

Another thing I have thought all these years is that Jesse had caught and killed something. I saw the blood on the side of her face and assumed it was from another animal. It was only recently that I had reason to rethink that. As I posted before, on one of Zeke’s unauthorized, wild romps through the woods, he snagged one of his ears on something and the flopping ear left blood all over the side of his face within the radius of his ear. If you look at Jesse’s face, you can see a similar pattern. Her ears were longer than Zeke’s, so it left a bigger trace. So, after all these years, I finally know that Jesse didn’t kill something, she just snagged her ear. Not that she never killed anything; she was pure hell on possums. But not this time.

Jesse, recovering, with blood from her ear

Jesse, recovering, with blood from her ear

I guess it was not long after this that I took another hike with Jesse. She did her usual wild running, but this time it was different. We were about a mile from the car on our way back on Sunday when she ran up behind me, came around ahead of me and laid down across the trail. The message couldn’t have been clearer: she needed to rest. I sat down and gave her a while to recover. Then I said, “Come on, Jesse, let’s go.” She got up, walked about 20 feet, then laid down again. This time I had to make her get up. We had to get back to the car, and I knew she could rest as long as she wanted once she got into the back seat.

Jesse, at rest

Jesse, at rest

I thought she was tired because she had not been getting as much exercise as she used to, and she was at least eight years old. Now I think she must have already had the cancer that killed her the next year.

When I look at these pictures of Jesse I feel a strong urge to reach out and stroke her knotty head. I would always put my hand on her head and scratch it. Sometimes she closed her eyes when I did that.

I could physically feel her head under my hand for years after she died.

I can still feel it if I try.

Getting stoned

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When I was planning to build our house, I thought that T1-11 siding would be fine. It looks, or at least is intended to look, like vertical boards. It’s used as a finish siding in lots of applications, but most of the books I read to prepare for construction recommended against that.

But of course I knew better.

It turned out that the T1-11 siding was OK for the short term, but over the years was beginning to show some weathering. I also had allowed the siding to be too close to the ground at the northeast corner of the house.

This is what the house looked like about two and a half years ago, before we had new siding installed and before I solved the problem of having siding too close to the ground. I had already made a horizontal cut at the height of the lowest masonry wall and started to pull nails from the siding.

Just getting started

Just getting started

Here is what I found after I removed the siding. The dark edge at the lower left part of the front wall is water damage. I removed the old sheathing from the corner and put new sheathing up to cover the insulation you can see. Then I put up two layers of roofing felt, or tarpaper as I used to know it. I then screwed a layer of cement board over the roofing felt as a base for my next planned upgrade. As you can see, the new siding went up during this process.

The big reveal

The big reveal

Roofing felt and new siding

Roofing felt and new siding

Here is what I have been working on for about a year. We decided on a cultured stone product. It’s actually a cement product that is formed in molds and colored to look like stone. It is convincing if it’s installed properly. This shows the elevated front walk that I have mentioned before.

stonework in progress

In the meantime I also started some additional landscaping. The two hollies are transplants from the other side of the house. The stonework around the hollies uses native stone I find around the lot and here and there on the mountain. The wheelbarrow is not a part of the permanent landscaping, although it does make frequent appearances.

I finished the north-facing walls except under our front walk about a year or so ago. I have been having trouble motivating myself to finish the wall under the front walk and along the foundation of the garage, but I finally prodded myself into it. I expect to have this part of the foundation finished by the end of next weekend. Then I start on the other side of the garage foundation and out to the rear of the house. That will be a substantial amount of work, at least as much as I have already done.

And then I need to do the east foundation wall, which is only about three feet high. I want to get all the concrete covered by the time I finish.

And then I need to work on the front walk. It needs stain, and the handrail is in bad shape. I’m thinking man-made materials here, too.

Zoe’s dilemma, and ours

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Such a cute little kitty

Such a cute little kitty

I don’t make a secret of the fact that I’m a dog lover, and not so much a cat lover. I think I understand the appeal of cats, and I certainly understand and respect that Leah is far more a cat lover than a dog lover. So I have tried to accommodate, if not welcome our cat overlords.

But Zoe has stressed my accommodative powers, weak as they are, to the limit.

Zoe is affectionate only under very limited circumstances. If he’s hungry, he will purr and rub up against your leg. He looks and sounds oh, so affectionate. So you put his food down, he eats a little, and he walks away. Once you have served your purpose, you are no longer a part of his universe. One time he escaped from my truck at my mother’s house and disappeared for two weeks. I helped Leah search for him, and we eventually found him hiding under a neighbor’s deck. When we took him to my mother’s house, he was absolutely in love with Leah, me and my mother. For a while. And then we fed him.

He lies on the couch with us sometimes as we watch television, but that’s just a coincidence. He was going to lie there anyway. He does not seek out petting or cuddling; in fact, he actively rejects it.

"Your feeble skills are no match for the power of the Dark Side."

“Your feeble skills are no match for the power of the Dark Side.”

So the first problem is that he provides no emotional benefit to Leah, his loving owner. She tries. Oh, yes, she tries. But it does no good. He is just not interested.

The second problem is that he’s a mean cat with the other cats. He bites them and jumps on them and generally gives them a hard time. Based on my observations of some of the other cats, that’s not particularly unusual, but in his case, it seems to be more than purely feline instinct. He seems to pretty much just hate everyone.

The third, and most severe problem, is that he’s mean with Leah. He’s a biter. A few years ago he bit Leah on the arm, and she ended up with an infection severe enough that she had to make daily visits to an urgent care facility for antibiotic injections (in the butt) for a week. She was so sick for the first visit that she had to call a friend to take her to the doctor.

And then, almost a year to the day, Zoe bit her again. This time she ended up in the hospital for IV antibiotics.

And now the fourth problem, the one that precipitated this post: It’s his bathroom habits. It’s not just that he spends all day outside and then comes in to use his litter box. It’s not just that he tracks litter everywhere in the house; I know that’s a problem for many cat owners. It’s not even that he seems to make a circuit of the entire house to make sure there’s litter in every room. The real problem is that he is apparently oblivious to his own excrement once it leaves his body. He steps into the littler box, squats, pees, and then turns around and walks directly through it to leave the box. So he walks around with wet litter on his feet, spreading in throughout the house.

That’s not the worst of it. The worst is that he does the same thing with his poop. Last night, when he came into our bedroom and plopped onto the floor, his hind feed had poop on them. Our bedroom is the only room in the house with carpet, and the only place I walk barefoot. So I (we) walk across a carpet that has cat pee and poop residue on it.

And sometimes he jumps up on our bed to nap. He likes to lie on my side.

I have said to Leah in the past that Zoe is not fit to be an inside cat. It’s not that I don’t like cats. He’s just too mean and too dangerous and too dirty to have inside. I have suggested that she get a good cat, one that will be affectionate and, possibly, hopefully, reasonably competent at using a litter box. Maybe even one that likes to ride in a car with us. But Leah has had Zoe for around 10 years and can’t think of him as anything but the cat she wishes he was. She doesn’t want to just toss him outside, never to come in again.

To be fair, there are some considerations about this. He is on a special diet (no, not human arms) because of his delicate digestive tract. He has to eat canned food, and the other cats would eat it all if we fed him outside. He has to have eyedrops twice a day for his glaucoma, and that’s a two-person job (if one is not a lion tamer) and one most easily accomplished inside on a countertop. With newspaper spread to keep his feet off the countertop. So if we did toss him outside — I mean if we set him free to be the outdoor cat he is truly meant to be — we would probably have to bring him inside sometimes. Under careful supervision, and without access to a litter box.

So that’s out little dilemma.

That’s my view on the subject. Now heeeeere’s Leah!

I will admit that he’s the cat from hell*, but I just can’t toss him out to become an outdoor cat. I really shouldn’t care, I don’t guess, but I do, and I don’t know why. This has been a problem through our marriage, and we wish and hope that we can resolve it. If anyone has any advice, please feel free to give it.

* Mark again. Zoe was found as a tiny kitten wandering in the parking lot at a Piggly Wiggly grocery store. We don’t know who his mother was, but I have often said that his father was the devil.

Birthday thoughts

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The most important event of August 2, 1917, at least in my view, was when my father, Grady V. Paris Jr., was born in the little town of Cave Spring, Georgia. I was thinking about my father and his birthday, so I looked back at some of old pictures I scanned a while ago.  Here are a few of them.

I think this is a high school picture. He was probably a senior, which in those days meant his was in the 11th grade, since high school went only as far as that.

Grady V. Paris -- the teen years

Grady V. Paris — the teen years

My father was a happy man. He maintained a child-like enthusiasm for almost everything for his entire life. He loved kids, but most of all he loved his kids.

My father, Henry and me

My father, Henry and me

He spent a lot of time working around the house, so he ended up in worn, paint-stained clothes a lot of the time. When my brother and I were old enough, my father started taking us to the same places he had gone when he was a kid. I think he enjoyed those outings as much as we did, and as much as he had when he was young.

I like this picture. I’m not sure what his expression means here, but it was unusual for him. The car in the background is a 1949 Buick that I remember pretty well, considering that I was only one model year newer.

Bow ties were in

Bow ties were in

This picture was made around Christmas, probably in the early ‘70s. That’s me and my brother Henry flanking our parents. Everyone was a lot younger then, but for some reason when I think of my father, I tend to picture him at about this age.

The Paris family

The Paris family

My father’s health declined fairly rapidly over the last year or so of his life. He suffered from pulmonary fibrosis as a result of gastroesophageal reflux. It was not diagnosed early enough to really do anything about it. Between the low blood oxygen levels and the bone-destroying effects of long-term steroids to help with the lung inflammation, he became an old, stooped man. He said that one day he saw his reflection in a store window on Broad Street and couldn’t believe that man was him. When he died early in 2000, the only way I could see him in my mind was as a much younger man.

And that’s the way I remember him today, not as a near invalid but as an active, vigorous, happy man of late middle age. I miss him a lot.

This would have been his 96th birthday.

Tom gets his feet wet

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“A whole new world can open up if you’re just willing to get your feet wet.” (Tom M., c 1988)

My friend Tom said that one day when I was visiting him with his brother Errol and Errol’s wife Cookie and daughter Debra. Tom has always been good at that kind of epigram.

At the time I was living in Huntsville, Alabama, and Errol and his family were living just outside Atlanta. Tom was living in Espanola, NM, and we liked to go out to visit as often as we could. We had taken a run up into Colorado, and had stopped to look at a stream that ran near the road. On the other side of the stream, there was a dark hole that we thought might be an old mine entrance. The stream was not too wide, but it was fast and cold. We worried a little but decided to jump the stream to investigate. Tom and I jumped over safely to the other side. Errol didn’t. He landed in the stream. He was OK, but he was drenched. That’s when Tom said it.

I have known Tom for a long time. I first met him in 1971 when I was attending Georgia State University in Atlanta and he was at Georgia Tech. I met him through my brother, and we ended up sharing an apartment. We lived near Piedmont Park in a neighborhood that was a center of the hippie and drug communities. It was an interesting experience. We should write a book. Tom had recently returned from Viet Nam. He told me some stories about that experience. He should write a book.

I don’t have a lot of pictures from that time, but here is a fuzzy shot of me on the left and Tom on the right. We were goofing around in Piedmont Park after a light snow. I find it hard to believe we were ever that young.

Two very young guys

Two very young guys

I graduated from GSU in 1973 and took a job at a newspaper in Augusta, Ga. Not too long after that, Tom left Georgia Tech just shy of his architecture degree. He rode his bicycle over to visit me, a short hop of only about 140 miles. And then he rode up to Canada. He went across Canada and ended up in Seattle. And then San Francisco. And then Lake Tahoe. At Lake Tahoe he provided pretty much all the expertise for a group to set up a printing shop. Tom should write a book.

In the first half of 1976 I quit the newspaper, thinking maybe I would start writing. Instead I rode my motorcycle up to Pittsburgh, Pa, where my brother was doing a post-doc at Carnegie Mellon University. Sometime around then I heard from Tom at Lake Tahoe. I decided to leave Pennsylvania to visit Tom, so I rode my motorcycle to California. When I got there, it was so beautiful that I decided to stay. I ended up sharing a house with Tom there for a year and a half.

When I ran out of money, I rode my motorcycle back home at Christmas and, coincidentally, was offered a job back at my old newspaper. So I left Lake Tahoe, which for me was pretty much the American dream, for Augusta, Georgia, which is just no place to be. Tom and I kind of lost track of each other again for a while.

After a year at the newspaper, I quit again. By that time I think it was becoming a habit. And that time I had no idea whatsoever what I was going to do. So I visited Errol in Woodstock, near Atlanta, and we found a very nice Volkswagen bus. My father and mother helped turn it into a camper. In the meantime, Tom had ended up in Albuquerque working at Sandia National Lab, so I took the camper and headed west again. I visited with Tom and drove around New Mexico and Colorado for a while, and then came back home. Before too long I ended up in school again, this time at Georgia Tech. And, once again, Tom and I kind of lost track of each other.

Before I finished Tech, Tom was found again by friendly forces. When I finished my degree, I ended up in Huntsville, Alabama, working for an Army contractor. My degree was in atmospheric sciences, but by then Ronald Reagan had decided that atmospheric science research was a waste of money, and we should instead spend billions on a missile defense system, so that’s where the work was.

Anyway, Errol, Cookie and I took several trips out to visit Tom over the next few years. Tom eventually ended up at Los Alamos. Tom had decided that he wanted to sail a boat around the world, so, in the middle of New Mexico, he started reading about how to do it. He ended up buying a small but seaworthy sailboat in Florida and moved into it to learn how to sail. When he was confident that he knew what he was doing, he sailed off and ended up in Cuba. He stayed there for a while, and when he left, he ran into bad weather. I was at work fairly late one night when I got a call from Errol. Tom had contacted Errol to let him know that he was in the process of having his boat run into a reef in a storm off the coast of Cuba.

The short of it is that he did, indeed, lose the boat, and stayed in Cuba for quite some time afterward. He eventually traveled back to the US by way of Mexico. Tom really should write a book.

Tom is now living in Edgewood, New Mexico, living the life of a very successful retiree, seeing the world and doing whatever in the hell he wants to do. He is one of the most interesting people I have ever known, and has lived a very different kind of life from most people. Over the years our trajectories have intersected and then flown off in different directions, but we have remained friends. We are both old guys now. I’m 63 and Tom is even older than that. I thought we were pretty much confirmed bachelors and expected that to continue. And then in 2005, just after my 55th birthday, I dragged Leah down to the courthouse and we got married.

And now, this day, July 27, Tom will marry Kay. I guess he decided it was time to get his feet wet and open up a whole new world.

And so, from both of us, congratulations and best wishes Tom and Kay.