That’s What Keeps Your Daddy Up There So High (Including Self-Publishing Stuff #3)

Let me preface this by saying that the man I’m writing about in this blog entry told me he’d fly to Boston and kick my ass if he found himself in my third book (the book I said I might write about this trip).

The man I’m writing about is a large man, from Texas, a Vietnam veteran, with a large (at least to me) collection of guns.

He didn’t say anything about blogs, so I’m hoping he won’t buy a ticket to Boston on account of what I write here. He is, however, tentatively planning a visit to Boston in October, so if this blog entry really makes him angry, I guess he won’t even have to buy an extra ticket.

That being said—here goes.

My father e-mailed to say his friend from an online Vietnam War discussion list was interested in meeting me. I didn’t know until well into my visit with this man, but he’d been reading my blog entries.

I’d heard of him before. Despite the fact that he and my father have VERY different views on a great many things, they seem to share a mutual respect for each other. While visiting T, the man from Texas, he told me a number of times that he respected my father too much to argue with him. He described my dad as a lucid writer, a perceptive man. He also said he didn’t argue with my dad because he’s sure he’d lose.

In my father’s e-mail about T, he told me that T wanted to meet me so I could spend some time with a real Texas redneck. My father assured me that, whatever T might think about himself, he is not a redneck, but a very well-read and thoughtful man.

Neither of them was for invading Iraq. And I’m not sure about my father, but I think T might be very surprised at how similar some of their views are.

T warned me that driving from Dallas to San Antonio would be very difficult, that the traffic is bad and the drivers make it worse. I prepared for the worst as I exited Dallas (pulled my straw hat down on my forehead, put Sunrise (the fatboy slim sampling of some Jim Morrison poetry or singing or something) on repeat on my mp3 player, and stowed my fanny pack safely in the rear of the Odyssey (I don’t wear it when I drive because it pinches my paunch)).

T has never driven in Boston or New York, and I think he’d probably find that both those areas of the country are much worse than the Dallas to San Antonio stretch, but then again, maybe I just got lucky and the traffic was light on the day I was there. I did have to cut off one dude in a MASSIVE pickup truck who wouldn’t let me into his lane when an exit I needed to get over for was just a couple hundred meters ahead. I’m not sure if he saw my MA license plates, or if the words “America or Burst” painted on the back of the Odyssey pissed him off, but he was bent on not letting me into his lane.

When I finally did cut in front of him, he had to slam on his breaks and turn slightly into the breakdown lane. After this, he pulled alongside to yell obscenities (he wasn’t even turning off where I was). He didn’t bother to open his window and ended up resembling a dog frothing behind a screen door. I gave him the finger and smiled and continued slowly forward (there was a fair amount of traffic) to my turnoff. Of course, the smiling made him even madder and his window started to steam up, but nothing came of it (thank god since he was huge, his truck was huge, and he had several US Marine stickers on the thing).

In San Antonio, I met my mother’s cousin and his wife for lunch at a Mexican place. We prayed before we ate. I talked to them about the graduate program I’ll be beginning in the fall and it was very nice—I hadn’t seen them in years.

After lunch I went to the Alamo. It’s a weird place, right in the middle of the downtown across from the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and Guinness World Records museums. I’d always thought it was in the desert.

I only went to see it because T had told me, over the phone, that visiting Texas without seeing the Alamo is a sacrilege. I’m glad I went. Watching the reactions of various types of visitors to the inscriptions and plaques is quite an experience. And the Alamo is a great story, with a great monument. When viewing that stuff, being surrounded by it, it’s hard to avoid wishing your own life didn’t have some sort of great purpose (or at least end) the way those men’s did.

In addition to telling me that not visiting the Alamo was a sacrilege, T told me he had a story about a relative of mine whose demise was intertwined with the struggle that took place at the Alamo.

I arrived at Corpus Christi in the early evening. T opened the front door of his house and invited me in before I had a chance to knock. I met his wife and their small dog (a new addition) and they took me out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant.

Back at the house that night we discussed all sorts of things about the upcoming election, about the Iraq war and the Vietnam war, things about my father, and border issues. The border stuff really interested me since I hadn’t discussed these things with anyone yet on my journey. I’ve heard about the border problems on the news, but it’s not one of the issues I pay very much attention to. Of course, people in Corpus Christi pay lots of attention to this issue.

Our discussion on politics and Vietnam was kind of disjointed and I didn’t press too much for details. T was an infantry officer whose platoon suffered the sort of casualties that I can’t even imagine on more than one occasion; he was injured three times and the third time sent him home for good.

I found the border conversation very interesting. T seemed to have a great deal of respect for Mexicans, a people who he described as extremely patriotic. I was told one story (which I guess made national news though I wasn’t aware of it—not surprisingly since I don’t watch nearly as much news as I should) about an anti-abortion group that began a campaign of protesting at the funerals of fallen soldiers. Although neither of them knew for sure, both T and his wife suspected they chose this particular venue for their protests for the sole reason of drawing attention to themselves. But anyway, some biker gangs began showing up at these protests to protest the protesters. They’d rev their engines to drown out the chants and cries of the anti-abortionists.

This anti-abortion group showed up in Corpus Christi, and so did the bikers, but both were pretty ineffectual because of the Mexicans who showed up at funerals, in the thousands, to prevent any sort of protest at soldiers’ funerals. As T described it, they were there to kill anyone who disrespected a dead soldier.

T told me that Hispanics have suffered an inordinate number of casualties compared to other groups of people in Iraq. As a group, they sign up more frequently than other groups for the combat positions, the jobs and situations where they’re more likely to be injured and killed.

The next morning we went to breakfast at a Mexican restaurant. I asked if there was any Texas cuisine left down where we were. T’s wife quickly said no before kind of amending her statement and listing a few non-Mexican, more barbecue type places.

T asked if I had a gun with me for the trip, and I told him I had bear spray. He and his wife seemed to think this was a suitable alternative. Then he told me that he carries a gun with him whenever he drives south. His wife was quick to add, “But don’t worry, not all Texans drive with guns.”

And then T said, “Yeah, it’s probably only about 50 percent.”

I was about to laugh, but then his wife said, with complete seriousness, “Yeah, probably about 50 percent.”

I thought back to the man I’d flipped off.

While taking me out to eat and entertaining me in his home (with the help of his wife), T told me the story of my distant relative in Texas.

Olwyn Trask went down to Texas looking for his sister Frances (kind of a bold hussy, I guess). Somehow he got involved with the Texas military and ended up being killed in the battle of San Jacinto, a decisive battle of the Texas Revolution in which General Houston’s men defeated General Santa Anna’s men. This battle is where the phrase “Remember the Alamo” came from.

Olwyn was injured by some sort of cannon fire in the beginning of the battle and died about three weeks later.

T went on to tell me that I had another distant relative who fought for the confederates. His name was Harry Trask.

When I asked my father about all this stuff he told me he was aware of Harry (because of T). He also informed me of another one of our ancestors who fought for the confederates, W.L. Trask. I also learned from my father that my great-great-great grandfather, Charles Augustus Trask, fought in a Maine regiment for the Union in the Civil War.

One other thing T said to me that I thought was interesting—he’s pissed that the KKK ruined the image of the confederate flag, a symbol that he’s not ashamed of.

When he said this, I told him the confederate flag symbolized some bad stuff to me (and I think pretty much everyone from MA). T just nodded. I wasn’t informing him of everything new, and that’s probably true of the entire time I spent with him, other than when I described bean-hole-beans and duck-boat tours to him and his wife.

I think it’s kind of funny that I had to go to Corpus Christi to learn all this stuff about my family from especially hospitable Texans who I’d never met before—and this isn’t because my dad has neglected to tell me, I just haven’t been listening.

Another genealogical note: While doing some research in San Antonio, I learned that I’m also related to Gallowspole Trask, the man who was put in charge of digging the basement of the Alamo. For some reason, he’s largely forgotten by history.

I have a reading in Albuquerque on Monday.

Self-Publishing Stuff # 3 – Formatting and Printing!

Just some quick stuff. Feel free to e-mail if you have questions.

For My Dog The Meat Eater we originally tried Print On Demand (through Booksurge, the company now linked with Amazon). Donald Davidson of Peninsula Press helped us with the formatting (it would've cost more to have Booksurge do the formatting). But we were unhappy with the customer service and the quality of the book, so for Harry's War, after formatting the book with Cutepdf Writer, we brought the files to a short-run printer and skipped working with the On-Demand company. The results with the short run printer were far superior, so we pulled My Dog from Booksurge, and brought the files to the short run printer. The books from the second printing are much nicer and more durable.

For DMR we formatted the book with Quark. It was difficult to use, but I think the end result was much better than either of the first two books. It’s a much longer book and costs a little more to print (hence the higher price) but it’s still very affordable to print only a few hundred books at a time.

We print the books at Country Press in Massachusetts and save a lot of money on shipping by picking the books up ourselves. If you're wondering about a particular printer's quality, ask them to send you some samples.