Baker's Branch

  I am still alive. Recent events, more particularly a phone call from an old friend, have made me think it necessary to make the pronouncement. Susie and I hadn't talked in a good five years. The bumper sticker says, "stuff" happens. And so it does. End of explanation. We have loved each other for years but, so it goes. On the phone she said a friend of hers had read my column about the Great Creek County Fire of 2012 and determined that Pam and I had lost our home, and who knows what else. We didn't. It was my fault in writing the ending to that column the way I did, that apparently made it seem as if we had met with disaster. You may remember: A miracle rain cloud appeared, doused the fire line, and was immediately followed by a hard, north wind that drove the fire back upon itself right before it leaped Coyote trail and angled towards our neighborhood. I ended the piece with only that news. We were spared, but the reader didn't get that out of the story. That ...

  Who knows what a boy grandchild is going to do from moment to moment. It pays to be ready. Recently, I wrote a couple of fishing articles whereby my grandson and I fished with Leon Mears of Mannford over manmade, sunken brush piles Leon has marked all over Lake Keystone. You fish with Leon for crappie, and you will spend the day moving from pile to pile until you find fish (which you will do eventually), and then you will catch fish. Leon and Jack Seawright, of Sand Springs, are the two best at this I have ever seen. Whenever I watch these two at "work," I am reminded of that scene in “2001, A Space Odyssey” where Hal, the onboard computer for the spaceship, and the ship's captain get into an actual conversation, an uninflected, monotonal argument, really, at a critical point in the voyage as to whether the machine or the man is really in charge of the show. Jack and Leon are that "into" their fish locators while they are circling above and around a sunken...