Memorable moment in 2020. Under sentence from Stanford of blindness (with at least one enucleation) and death from lymphoma, hastening to make (first) holograph wills and (in next days) more formal wills, driving myself with eye-patch to organize ORNERY PEOPLE so it could be preserved and made available somehow---at that time a wonderful comment on my work arrived and I said at once, "I want to keep this!" Then I laughed and laughed because there was no future in which I could keep and treasure something as a souvenir. I still have blood clots to worry about, and am giving myself shots morning and night. If I had thought it through I would have planned to draw an outline of the contiguous states, but now I see how hard Maine and Florida would make the job, not to mention southernmost Texas. Anyhow, after the impact of George Floyd's death and Black Lives Matter I have reduced ORNERY PEOPLE (for now) to a book about one family's racial encounters, 1600s on through 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s. Story is what's important to me, having known almost no stories about kinfolks. Still, on New Year's Day I found a description of a first cousin before the Revolution surviving a massacre by lying down in his rye field--a first cousin a few times removed. Enough of research, enough. I have to put the emphasis now on an introduction, which will be about stories. And many of them are horrific. Who caused the great Houston riot of 1917 and ruined the Buffalo Soldiers? Why, a thug of a cousin . . . .
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