~Brian Bondy
​
Humankind definitely has a penchant for forcing the world around us to change for our “benefit”. Sometimes it’s trying to bend the will of others to believe something different, like religion, science, or justice. It may also be to change the world around us to be more accommodating, building dams, clearing forests, plowing fields.
 
These changes can cause conflict, alleviate hunger, alter nature. It’s quite the mixed bag. Arguably, we wouldn’t be where we are without fossil fuels. It would be easy to see that as a positive and a negative. Sometimes maybe, we just don’t know when it’s time to quit. Nobody likes change, but really, nobody likes change unless it’s easy.
 
I wrote about how humans changed wild animals into domesticated cats and dogs. The same goes true for cattle, pigs, and chickens. This is the food we eat because this is the food that is served to us in grocery stores. When I was a kid, I got served squirrel and didn’t think anything of it. Today that seems odd, but I have a Better Homes & Garden cookbook from the 60’s that shows how to skin and prep a squirrel and a rabbit.
 
I was looking up ‘how humans have modified their food’ How humanity has changed the food it eats - BBC Future  and the results were fascinating. It also came up with articles on how humans have changed because of the food they eat. The first thing that caught my eye was how, since humans have cooked their food thus making it easier to chew, this evolved our faces to become smaller and our jaws less powerful.

Humans’ civilization begins with farming. Food supplies being localized meant that they did not have to continuously wander in search of something to eat. Groups could form to help with protection, education, food production, etc. And the food could be selectively bred to be more productive, larger, sweeter, whatever the needs. Read some on that HERE. How Humans Have Changed Fruit (businessinsider.com)
 
Forests were cleared, dams were built, pesticides were sprayed, wolves were killed. Unintended consequences happened.
 
Today, genetic modification is done to help enhance plant growth. In some cases, generous scientists have created rice that will survive longer periods under water. They donated this genetic modification to the world, which helped some starving nations to grow rice where their regular crops failed due to the new, unusual weather patterns occurring today.
 
Monsanto, of course, was famous for patenting their seed products, then selling them everywhere. They could then sue farmers that were not buying their product, but the farmer’s crops were contaminated with Monsanto corn from neighboring crops. That was likely a conspiracy theory, a story you can read about HERE. 
 
There is genetic engineering going on to help alleviate hunger, produce pest resistant food, and even to produce milk and meat in a lab, not from animals. It’s happening right now. The promise of solving food shortages, and maybe even vegetarian compatible meat, vegan compatible milk, that has some seriously great promise. And, like AI, artificial intelligence, it has some seriously scary possibilities.
 
Cats & Dogs, Cows & Pigs, Wheat and Soy, they are all genetically modified, some by selective breeding, some in a lab. Where do you draw the line? 

Finally the weather is perfect, goals have been met, my work is done and the weekend is here!

Great timing because this Saturday is also the annual Bondy yard sale. We love this sale. The prices are fair, the goods are plentiful and very well displayed. You can count on having many categories to shop for. You can also count on this field trip taking about three times longer than you planned for, as, likely, you will run into a lot of people that you know. Catch-up chats and quick hugs with a “gotta get going to buy things I probably don’t need, see you later”!

This year was the best year yet. I always follow my same routine by starting front left and working my way clockwise until I reach the Bondys’ front porch that’s usually so crowded with used stuff and people sifting through it, that you have to squeeze in with a lot of “excuse me, I’m sorry”. I pretend to be looking at all the laid out items on tall tables, but really I’m casually strolling to the back where there are always lots of homemade treats that I hope are for the taking. Brian Bondy could always fall back on a second career of candy making with that perfect toffee he makes fresh every year. It’s sweet, but not too sweet with the exact right crunch and chewiness. The nuts compliment it perfectly and one piece is never enough! Yum! But wait, this year I see that there is a whole new section of booths behind the porch with clothes and fun art temptations. Oh dear, this is gonna be hard to resist. Thankfully, I came with my wife and two dear friends and mostly succeeded in focusing my shopping urges on clothes and essential items for them. My wife tends to get grabby at these events and, later, I discovered that she had already made several trips to our car with arms full of very important things by the time we were saying our goodbyes to drive the short distance further down the road to the second location of the sale. I’m glad that we brought our small car this year, because this next leg of the sale had some temptations that were challenging my “less is more” philosophy. I will confess that it is fully my responsibility that we came home with a giant meditation bowl for our, yet to be finished yoga/ meditation space. Ah well, it’s good to treat oneself and to splurge every now and then.

We decided to carry on splurging the next day to treat ourselves to a Mother’s Day breakfast at The Artesian Restaurant in Ojo Caliente. We love coming to this restaurant, it’s so peaceful and beautiful. The gardens were literally sparkling and shining, probably due to the 1.11” of rain torrent that we had received the night before. What a gorgeous day! The bustling dining room was not as crowded as we feared it may be considering the holiday and we were sat quickly at one of the many pleasant tables lining the walls. The menu has a nice variety of delicious sounding items to choose from. We were starving, so, started with the avocado toast as an appetizer. I ordered an omelet, choosing my own ingredients. It comes with cubed potatoes and toast. I chose house cured bacon, goat cheese and spinach. Asked for my potatoes crispy, always, and rye for my toast. My wife went for the French toast.

The avocado toast was all that it boasted to be except for a pet peeve my wife and I share, that avocado should be avocado. Not guacamole! It’s no different than assuming tomato on your BLT, but getting salsa. Come on people, know the difference! Besides that, the sourdough toast was a perfect vessel for the piled high guacamole, sautéed spinach and over medium egg drizzled with a nice zesty sesame chili oil and surrounded by flavorful cherry tomatoes. My omelet was very sizable and topped with a lot of bacon, spinach and goat cheese. At first, I was worried that that was their style, to have the ingredients on the outside of the omelet, but quickly comforted to find the fold was stuffed with much more bacon and goat cheese and spinach. Dare I say too much??! The potatoes were good but nothing spectacular and the toast was bland and room temp. I do appreciate a restaurant that still serves cute, soft butter balls in a ramekin, a rare sight since COVID and was happy to receive this and small sides of ramekin-ed ketchup, syrup and a delicious homemade strawberry jam that I wish they sold jarred and to go.

My wife’s French Toast was some of the best I’ve ever had. Texas toast soaked in a delicate egg batter and fried to a slightly crunchy golden brown, dusted with powdered sugar and surrounded by a generous portion of sliced strawberries, a velvety maple syrup and a mountain of whipped cream. We ate the French toast last thankfully and were not tempted, for a change, to order dessert.  All this, a cup of decaf and a lot left over, came to $55.

It was a truly lovely weekend. As I sit writing this article on a comfortable chair on my new screened in porch on the river, listening to the beautiful song of the Western Tanagers, I am so very thankful to be lucky enough to live in such a beautiful valley surrounded by kind and generous folk.

Now to face all the new tasks on my to-do list, I am rejuvenated and ready to go.
I think that we might make this Bondy-ing with Mother’s Day breakfast an annual tradition!

​

~Jessica Rath

​​After an extraordinary long winter which started with freezing temperatures in the first days of November and lasted all the way through April, spring has finally arrived. And, even faster than in other years, spring is almost gone! Just in time for summer, for swimming and kayaking, Abiquiú Lake has nicely filled up with plenty of water. Something that most of us have sorely missed for the last few seasons.
 
Before I moved to New Mexico in 2000, I lived in Berkeley/California. When I told people of my plans, the common reaction was: What?! You’re moving to the desert?! Well, I had visited friends who lived in Santa Fe, and they had taken me to Taos and other gorgeous places in the north, so I knew that I wasn't going to live in a dry, sand-blown desert. But I certainly didn’t expect that I’d end up close to a splendid lake. It didn’t bother me that it is an artificial lake, with a dam to store the Rio Chama water. It was just perfect for swimming, other people were kayaking, sometimes there was even a sailboat. The speed boats – well, one just had to ignore them.
 
But for the last few years, the water level steadily sank until it was too low for the boat ramps. Swimming became dangerous because of blue-green algae. What was going on? I looked at the history of the lake to find out more.

​The work on Abiquiu Dam started in 1958. It was created to control the amount of water which would flow from the Rio Chama into the Rio Grande in Espanola. When it was finished, it was considered to be the fourth-largest earth filled dam in the world: 325 (now 340, raised 15 feet in the 80s) feet high, 1,450 (1800 now) feet across from one edge of the canyon to the other, and 2,770 feet from the upstream to the downstream edge.   A mile-long conveyor belt had to be installed to bring fill dirt from the borrow areas to near the dam, from where it was transported via dump trucks to wherever it was needed.
 
The dam was completed in 1962, but – surprise! – there  wasn’t a lake at all! The dam was used strictly as a flood barrier. Apparently, in the 1970s there were conflicting attitudes about the development of a recreational lake which would flood the area on the north side of the dam. Much of the land was private, and there was concern that the dam wouldn’t be strong enough to hold so much  water. On the other hand, the Espanola Chamber of Commerce petitioned for the construction of recreational facilities because of the obvious benefits for local businesses. I don’t know how it happened, but I’m glad they won!
 
With the higher water levels, this summer looks promising as far as swimming and other water activities are concerned. But what about the coming years?  Will the water stay high? I wanted to find out and made an appointment with John Mueller, Operations Manager at the Abiquiu Dam (which is part of the U.S.Army Corps of Engineers), who kindly agreed to answer my questions. 

First of all, I wanted to know why the water was so  low for the last two years – was it just the drought or were there other reasons?

John explained that it was usage, primarily. The purpose of the reservoir was to control flooding from the dam down to Espanola, where the Chama meets the Rio Grande. Initially, there wasn’t  much water stored – not enough for  swimming etc., it was just a puddle at the bottom. In the spring there was more water, but it was slowed down for flood control, the water was released at a controlled rate.

But, in the mid-70s the San Juan Diversion Project changed things. (He shows me on the map). The headwater of the native Chama River is southeast of Pagosa Springs, it flows along the Colorado border, and then into Rio Grande. The Bureau of Reclamation Tunnel is 26 miles long, it collects water from the headwaters of the San Juan River, flows through a tunnel underneath the Continental Divide,  and comes out east. It is placed in Heron Reservoir where it connects with the  native Chama River. The water is purchased by contractors, municipalities, and  water authorities including  the City of Albuquerque. They can store it in Heron Lake, and they can store it in El Vado Lake including native (natural Chama, not San Juan-Chama) water. They use it for irrigation and drinking, mainly. In the 70s the water was stored year round for the contractors. They can ask for it whenever they want or need it.
​
“We can’t STORE native water like El Vado does. We can only hold it, slow it down, and eventually release it. The only water that is stored is the San Juan-Chama water, for these contractors, to be sent down when they request it. In the 80s and 90s and early 2000s they were not calling for it, but then when they did ask for it, our water level kept dropping. This is partly related to the drought, and also, Albuquerque is growing and needs more water. For the last 10 years the water level has been reduced.” There is currently legislation and a process that is being developed for Abiquiu Lake to have the ability to store native water in addition to San Juan Chama imported water up to an elevation of 6230 feet, although it is uncertain when this may be implemented.
 

​I asked about the blue-green algae. It’s actually NOT an algae John corrected, but a bacteria. It grows in warm, stagnant water with high nutrients such as nitrates, sulfates, etc. from agricultural run-off.  Less water, higher temperatures, more nutrients: the perfect growing conditions for algae.

“Last year we had more water because the El Vado Dam is being worked on. To do the maintenance, they had to drain their reservoir and we took that water. Also, the snow melt is a contributing factor for the high levels. We have to hold off releasing the water like we normally would at this time of the year, because there are other tributaries like the Ojo River. We have to reduce our release because at the Chamita Gate down there, at the Chevron Station where the Ojo comes in, there would be too much water otherwise. We’re only releasing about half of what comes in. But we’re going to release that water eventually, for agricultural purposes etc.”

​And good news for this summer: “On July 1st whatever we’ll have over will be locked into storage until the end of the season, that’s going to help us keep the water up here. Because of El Vado and the snowpack we have a higher storage through November. Potentially also next year, depending on when they complete the maintenance at El Vado. Right now, it’s a foot and ½ going up every day. We’re at the level of 2013 I think. We're probably gonna come up another 6 feet. However, it will not last. This year and next year, we’ll have a lot of water! Definitely this year, and it’s looking pretty good for next year.”

​I thanked John for his time and the interesting information and went to the overlook and then to the main boat ramp to take some pictures. There were already some picnickers, some kayakers, and one speed boat. It’s still too cold for swimming, but we can look forward to a glorious summer! 

Read More
Taos News 4/28/1960
Albuquerque Journal 7/22/61

Reies Lopez Tijerina – even today opinions are divided. Was he a communist agitator or a selfless proponent of the poor and underprivileged? Let’s start at the beginning and explore.

​Tierra Amarilla, just a few miles north of Abiquiú on Hwy 84, is a sleepy little town. It almost looks like a ghost town with a number of closed business buildings and abandoned houses. It is somewhat surprising that it has been the Rio Arriba county seat since 1880 when the town got its current name (“Yellow Earth”; before that, it was called “Las Nutrias”). When the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad constructed lines that connected Chama to their vast network, the area around T.A. must have experienced a cultural and economic expansion that just as quickly ended when the railroads stopped running.
 
The current courthouse was built in 1917. I have visited it a few times; once because I was called for jury duty, another time to attend a meeting of the County Commissioners; always totally uneventful trips. I was therefore utterly perplexed when I learned that there had been a raid on the courthouse in 1967, the National Guard was called in, and one person got shot!

About 20 members of a group which was founded in 1963 by Reies Tijerina and which called itself La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants) assembled at the courthouse on June 5, 1967, in order to place the district attorney Alfonso G. Sanchez under citizen’s arrest. They also wanted to free a few members of the group who had been arrested a day or two earlier. The Alianza had planned a meeting in Coyote, and Sanchez used police force to break up the gathering, and several members were taken into custody. However, the county judge had already freed the imprisoned people, and Sanchez wasn’t in T.A. at all but in Santa Fe mobilizing police forces. When they couldn’t find Sanchez, the Alianza group took a sheriff and a reporter hostage; they also shot and wounded a prison guard and a police officer. The event caused national attention; Governor David Cargo called in the National Guard which descended with tanks and helicopters, state police, and local sheriffs for what probably was the biggest manhunt in New Mexico history. The Alianza members and their leader, Reies Tijerina, fled to the near-by mountains where sympathetic ranchers protected them. Only after Tijerina’s wife (who was pregnant) had been arrested, did they surrender to authorities in Albuquerque. 

​By now, you’re probably curious what this was all about: WHAT did the Alianza want to accomplish? WHY was the district attorney so set to arrest its members?
 
The name of the group gives a clue: it was all about land grants. An issue that even today can cause heated debates. It goes back to the time when the land here was a colony of Spain. The governors who were accountable to the King of Spain granted the land to people here. A person would petition with the governor or his representative; when the petition was granted, the person would receive a document which would guarantee that the person could occupy and use the land. Actually, that was a condition: the person HAD to occupy and use the land. Something like developers was not allowed. Communities could apply for land grants as well, in order to establish settlements.
 
When Mexico gained independence from Spain, they continued with the customary land grant system. An essential part of this system was the fact that the people didn’t really OWN the land – it was theirs to use and to live on, but if somebody would find gold or some other valuable substance, this would belong to the King. (I learned this from a video produced by New Mexico State Historian Rob Martínez; if you want to learn more, here is the link). 

​Things changed when New Mexico became part of the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. Although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo confirmed the legitimacy of land grants under Mexican law, in practice many people lost their rights. Americans had a different understanding of land ownership, and communally held ownership was a foreign concept – Ejidos (Community-owned land) were not recognized under U.S. law and fell into private hands. Much of it became National Forest or was assigned to the Bureau of Land Management. People didn’t have their original copies any more, and lost their land. They were not prepared to deal with a complicated legal system and especially with unscrupulous speculators. The Santa Fe Ring, a powerful group of corrupt lawyers, businessmen, and politicians, swindled land grant holders into selling their land. One of them, Thomas B. Catron who became a U.S. Senator, managed to acquire 3,000,000 acres of land. Compared to these individuals who often hired assassins to eliminate their opponents,  Reies Tijerina looks almost like a choir boy.
 
Well, not really. Reies Tijeria was no angel, he wasn’t perfect. Born in 1926 in Fall City, Texas, he experienced from a young age the discriminating treatment of poor, migrant families with Hispanic/Mexican origin. After he became an ordained pentecostal minister, he founded a little community of some 20 families in the southern Arizona desert, The Valley of Peace, in 1955. He moved with his family and a few of his followers to New Mexico in 1957. That’s where he learned about the land grants and the injustice he perceived when he learned about the many families who had been dispossessed of their lands. This became his new passion: to bring justice to people who had lost their land, and to highlight the unequal working conditions that so many Native Americans and Hispanios had to endure.
 
This led to conflicts with lawmakers and the police who branded him as a communist agitator, and eventually to the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse raid.
 
After being convicted of charges related to the raid in 1970, the federal government sent Tijerina to a prison for the mentally deranged where he was forced to take psychotropic drugs. When he was paroled two years later, he was something of a broken man. He died in 2015 in El Paso, Texas.

Here is a corrido about these events performed by Roberto Martínez and his group  Los Reyes de Albuquerque who was a friend of Tijerina. It was played on all the local radio stations and was featured in the Smithsonian touring exhibition Corridos sin Fronteras / Ballads Without Borders. 

​

​A quick mention has to be made of Tijerina’s involvement in the larger Civil Rights Movement: in March 1968, he was elected to be the leader of the Chicano contingent of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and worked  with Dr. Martin Luther King to organize the Poor People’s March on Washington. After Dr. King’s assassination in April, Tijerina continued his work under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy.
 
When you decide whether Tijerina was a good guy or a bad guy, keep in mind that to stand up for minorities’ rights in the late Sixties meant to put one’s life in jeopardy. Justice seemed to be reserved for the privileged, and the punishment for acts of violence were hugely disproportionate, depending on who was the perpetrator. Maybe Tijerina was sort of in the middle, like most of us.

I wrote about the origin of cats last week, so how about dogs? Well, to me, dogs seem way more varied than cats, both in size and disposition. I’ve seen dogs that barely look like dogs anymore they’ve been bred so much. Again, there’s a discussion in there I’m not willing to touch, at least not today.
 
We have 3 dogs. I love having dogs and wouldn’t want to live without them. They are all mutts, and strays. They all 3 showed up and adopted us, on different occasions of course. They all 3 have very different personalities, and ways to be annoying. Generally, I think of dogs coming from wolves, originally. Healers were bred from the Australian Dingo, BTW. Just a fun fact.
 
The New York Times had an article describing domesticated dog fossils found in Europe from over 15,000 years ago. There is also speculation that dogs were getting domesticated at roughly the same time, in Asia, and in Europe and the Middle East. There may be DNA evidence supporting that theory.
 
For fairly obvious reasons, at least if you have a dog or are a dog fan, they can be quite useful. They can be trained quite readily, some say, I wouldn’t know, and they can then be helpful in hunting, fighting, and protection. That all makes sense for early mankind.
 
I think they make a fairly good friend and companion, if not a bit needy sometimes. It is speculated that all dogs descend from the Gray Wolf, though likely from two time periods. It is also suggested that it would take 130,000 years for the wolf to be bred into the modern dog, which implies that wolves were cohabitating or at least inter mingling with humans well before they were being directly selectively bred.
 
The genetics of dogs is far less mixed up than you might imagine though. Particularly with Pure Bred species. A great article to look at, if you are interested, is from the PBS, which you can find by clicking here.

By BD Bondy

A while ago I wrote something about a genetically modified something or other. I don’t remember what. But it had to do with how humans have been genetically modifying their food for a long time, basically, since humans have been farming.
 
These genetic modifications weren’t done in a lab, but through evolution, through breeding qualities that were desired. Cultivating the wheat that grew with bigger grain, or breeding cattle that made more desirable milk, or meat. Bigger, or more docile, or better color, or sweeter. Whatever it was, it was cultivated over the millennia to be more what humans wanted.
 
Not everything, of course, but chickens, pigs, cattle; those aren’t natural, they were bred to be what they are today. Same with corn, rice, wheat.  The discussion about scientifically messing around with genes in a lab is NOT in this article. Maybe some other time.
 
I’ve got all these feral cats showing up, passing through. They live under our porch for a time. Sometimes for a long time. They most often leave after they’ve been captured and brought in to be fixed. No doubt a traumatic experience for them, if not humiliating. I’m sorry, but it needs to be done.

​​I love the cats under our porch. They kill mice and rats. I know. I’ve seen them. We have a camera under there and I have proof. They’ve also killed birds. Also on camera. Oh yes, that’s what I wrote about before. They are the number one bird killer in the world. By far. Feral and domestic cats account for the top 2 slots of biggest bird killer world wide. Wind turbines are on the list, but not the top 10. Read about that HERE.  https://www.fws.gov/library/collections/threats-birds
 
So, as you can guess by the title, I was wondering where cats came from. They definitely aren’t ‘natural’. Don’t get mad, I’m not disparaging them. I think cats are interesting. They are sometimes adorable, and sometimes horrible, but they are amazing. Astonishing reflexes. Super fast.
 
I asked Google, and this is the short answer: Domesticated cats all come from wildcats called Felis silvestris lybica that originated in the Fertile Crescent in the Near East Neolithic period and in ancient Egypt in the Classical period.
 
Interesting, but not really an explanation. The Library of Congress has quite a bit more to say on the matter HERE. 
 
Cat domestication appeared early in civilized humans, and apparently in two major periods, the latter being in Egypt. Also, it seems that a major selective breeding change happened during the medieval period pertaining to the coats of cats, apparently trying to breed them according to their coloring.
Cats are supposed to have been taken all over the world via shipping vessels, likely to help with the rodent problems on board. Cats clearly became useful and desired by humans and a symbiotic relationship has kept them going strong. I loved fostering our kitten which was made under our porch. And his father, whom we also caught, was a pleasant fellow. His elusive mother, still fertile, the cleverest of the bunch, remains under the porch.
 
Get your pet cats neutered, please, and try and keep them inside. They will live longer.

Zach Hively
Fools Gold

As a man with an advanced degree in English, I must say that few literary delights compare to building something tangible with my own two hands. Barring that, because in fairness I use English far more often than I use corded drills, very little compares to getting my dad to build things for me.

With me! I mean WITH me. Father and son, drawing up plans, watching instructional YouTube videos, buying carloads of hardware from every home improvement store in the county then returning everything because the hardware they bought was the wrong size hardware—this is as American a pairing as playing catch in the yard. It’s even more American if one of them is playing catch by himself because the other one has a job and responsibilities and doesn’t have TIME to do this right now, Dad.

But—I wanted a pergola. It would make me feel more retired, even though I’m not and (being an English major) probably never will be. So unless I can build a pergola out of a comparative analysis of magical realism in the collected works of Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, for which I would have to read a LOT more of both authors, I needed to suck it up and dedicate some of those endless working hours to helping my actually retired dad get excited about starting a new temp job, only for free. Because I sure can’t research all this lumber by myself.
And boy, is there a lot to consider with lumber. Such as: why is a two-by-four actually a one-point-five-by-three-point-five, yet when they say it’s ten feet long it’s actually ten feet long? Did the definition of an inch shift since the invention of lumber, while feet stayed the same? Or is this, as I suspect, a dark conspiracy backed by Big Wood to nullify all my lumbering calculations?

Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself. You see, before we even started with the lumber, we had to set the concrete.

The cardboard forms for concrete pillars, as you may know, are round; bags of concrete, on the other hand, are not. This set up Pops and me for doing some math. It being a word problem, I felt qualified to help:

“If a pillar is eight inches in diameter,” Pops began, “and we need to bury them thirty inches deep…”

“Are these real inches or lumber inches?” I asked helpfully. “And, how many inches equal a pound of concrete?”

Like a couple of smart fellas, we budgeted the entire first day of Project Pergola for buying concrete. This disappointed me somewhat; I had visions of pizza and margaritas under the pergola before sundown. But, Pops knows best that some things, like his son, take longer to reach fruition than you bargained for.

Day Two, Pops called in to his one-day-a-week volunteer gig, and I had to find a decent bookmark for the novel I was reading, so that we could dedicate ourselves to mixing concrete. You don’t want to half-ass mixing concrete—not if you ever want to use your wheelbarrow as a wheelbarrow again. But you might want to half-ass mixing concrete, if you have any desire to move your body without hurting ever again.

It turns out—despite suggestive adjectives to the contrary all over those bags of concrete—that concrete requires a great deal of force to mix. Strangely enough, this might have been the moment that Pops chose to disclose to me, in a moment of male bonding, that he had scheduled surgery for his hernia.

“I can handle the hose,” Pops said. “And I can poke the air bubbles out of the concrete after it’s poured. But you get to mix.”

So I did. I flexed every muscle in my body mixing concrete. And when those gave out, I flexed the muscles that aren’t actually muscles, like spotting an its when an it’s is needed, just in case they might help. They didn’t. But I mixed the snot out of that concrete, until Pops said, “Let’s call that good enough; we don’t want it to set before we pour it.”
​
He handled smoothing that concrete and setting some brackets with a master’s touch, and I made sure his dialogue included semicolons correctly. And that was the end of Day Two.
I’d like to say Day Three saw a pergola. Instead, it saw Pops drive home for some much-deserved R&R and a long session of researching bolt lengths. It saw me gazing proudly, for a great many hours, at the six concrete stumps sticking out of my back yard. Someday, I will have a pergola to enjoy. But even that cannot compare to the pride I feel today. It’s like I am standing taller. Which I am, if you measure in lumber inches.