I went to church Sunday, for the first time in about a month. I’ve been out of town, for various reasons, several weekends in a row.

Frankly, I’d have been inclined to skip it, if I didn’t have absences to make up. I prefer to skip Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in church, for personal reasons. Please understand that I don’t object to the honoring of parents, just because I myself chose my mother poorly, and have not achieved fatherhood. Heaven preserve me from the kind of people who run around being all outraged all the time, because everything doesn’t include them.

But I prefer to let other people alone in their observances. I’d rather stay home in the bosom of my own bosom.

(Also, I think it would have been nice if Trinity Sunday had gotten at least equal billing. Just sayin’.)

But I went, and it was as uncomfortable as I feared. All the men were given numbered tickets as they came in, and then at a point in the service we were all asked to come forward. It wasn’t just fathers, but all men, so it was inclusive and all that. I stayed in my seat anyway, because I didn’t want to presume to patriarch status, whatever they said.

After congratulations and a prayer, they drew two ticket numbers and announced the winners of the Father’s Day drawing. I think the prizes were restaurant gift certificates.

In the cases of both winners, though, the claims came, not from the men up front, but from their wives back in the pews. Both winners had given the tickets to their wives to hold.

I think there’s some kind of profound lesson, or caution, there.

Don’t know what it is, though.

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I made a discovery lately, while in my Wild West mood, that clears up a mystery that’s bothered me, off and on, for most of my life.

My maternal grandfather had a few shelves of books in his home. One which I read with interest, and took as my own after his death, was the extravagantly titled tome, Capt. W. F. Drannan, Chief of Scouts, As Pilot to Emigrant and Government Trains, Across the Plains of the Wild West of Fifty Years Ago (As Told By Himself, As a Sequel To His Famous Book, “Thirty-One Years On the Plains and In the Mountains”). Published in 1910.

The frontispiece is a studio portrait of the old scout:

The book tells of the narrator’s adventures, first as a young protege of Kit Carson, then as a wagon train scout, and also as an Army scout fighting Indians. It’s an interesting book in the old style, with similar pleasures and difficulties as the Buffalo Bill memoir I reviewed the other day.

The books seem to have been fairly popular in their time. A source I’ll link to further along quotes a letter to H. P. Lovecraft by Robert E. Howard, who’d seen Drannan in a Texas town as a boy:

…wandering about the streets of Mineral Wells … trying to sell the pitiful, illiterate book of his life of magnificent adventure and high courage; a little, worn old man in the stained and faded buckskins of a vanished age, friendless and penniless…. what a lousy end for a man whose faded blue eyes had once looked on the awesome panorama of untracked prairie and sky-etched mountain, who had ridden at the side of Kit Carson, guided the waggon-trains across the deserts to California, drunk and revelled in the camps of the buffalo-hunters, and fought hand to hand with painted Sioux and wild Comanche.

Over the years, as I’ve read this and that about the West, I’ve looked for other mentions of Col. William F. Drannan.

To my puzzlement, there was never one. Not one. I think I recall a passing reference in an article in a Western history magazine, but nothing, ever, in a book.

I began to smell a rat. Continue reading Not exactly the code of the West →

“The liberal bias of the mainstream media tilts so far left that any outlets not in that political lane, like the Drudge Report and Fox News Channel, look far more conservative than they really are, according to a UCLA professor’s new book out next month.” writes Paul Bedard in a review of Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind