Baker's Branch

  I take the dogs down to the water two or three times a week, sometimes everyday when it’s hot, to swim.   They like it, and I like watching them, particularly when the two older ones, a lab and a mutt, dunk the pup, a German shepherd now six months old. It’s my way of giving them a bath, something Pam insists on for no apparent reason, and judge them done and the water romp over by the length of their tongues hanging out. When their tongues are dragging, I marshal the troops for the walk back through the woods up to the house where I get to watch them shake all over the grandkids causing them to squeal and jump around like popcorn in a popper. It doesn’t take much to entertain an old person’s brain. I hardly ever watch T.V. I feel certain that over the years I have owned upwards of a hundred dogs, most of them hunters of one sort or another, but I am an equal opportunity employer: If you can do something besides licking a hand or jumping up into a lap, you can live out...

  I'm 67 years old and have a lot more sense than you could ever guess just by looking. Wait a minute: I might have that backwards. In any case, I gave up noodling about the time I got a fulltime job, and well before I started raising a family. I fell off the wagon one time in my early thirties when the late Alan Moguin and I took a group of teenagers canoeing on the upper Illinois over in wild Cherokee County. Somehow, the word had gotten out that I used to be a redneck, and I was challenged to demonstrate that I could, and would, put my hands into a dark hole deep under water and pull out a fish with my bare hands. Truth is, I wondered if I could still do it as well. So, I did it, and everybody shut up about it. End of story. The fish wasn't all that big, about a three-pound channel cat, but if I had caught a bird out of the air with my bare hands, not a farfetched analogy in my opinion, those kids couldn't have been more surprised. On the surface of it, it has to b...