Recently by Richard Dobson

I was reading a book by Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove and probably Texas’ best known living author. This book is called Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, subtitled Reflections at Sixty and Beyond. I’m not sure who Walter Benjamin was, some kind of literary critic. But more to the point, McMurtry’s grandparents were land hungry Texas pioneers who lived a life characterized by hard work and perseverance… and the same was true of his father, a cowboy and small time rancher who worked his whole life fighting mesquite and prickly pear cactus. McMurtry said watching his father gave him the idea that work formed character… he spent all those years chopping back the mesquite and it kept growing back…working against impossible odds…it was a Quixotic thing. He said that the cowboy life…

“I mean, it’s…so retro.” Browsing through a Rosanne Cash interview a couple of years ago this remark caught my attention. She was talking about a song on a new record she had coming out with the line “I would change for you,” a point she felt needed explaining. A modern woman, she seemed concerned about a testament to a love so strong she was willing to go against her very modernity. I wasn’t a big fan of Rosanne’s music—certainly not the worst among the sons and daughters of famous fathers—but her choice of words struck a chord: retro, a word indicating something backward or passé. I thought of retrospective, as in an art show looking back over a career; and retroactive, more like a legal term referring to the past or previous conditions; retrofit, as in installing new or modified parts to an older piece of equipment; and retrograde. I liked that one, going backward, or contrary to the usual order. Contraries were fearless warriors who rode their horses backwards. I suspected myself as being hopelessly, irretrievably retro, if not fearless.

Packing on the afternoon of the 17th we knew it would be a short night, with the alarm set for four, and I’m not sure we slept more than two or three hours before it went off. Wolfing down toast and coffee, we walked to the Bahnhof in a howling rain storm that turned Edith’s umbrella inside-out. We wouldn’t see daylight for another two hours. A conductor checked our tickets that read: Diessenhofen, Schaffhausen, Zürich, Basel, Paris. We were going as the crow flies. Another high-speed train called the TGV runs from Zürich to Bern, swinging way around to Geneva before heading north to Paris. They have a sleeping car you can take at night and arrive fresh in the morning. We were trying to save ourselves a hundred Francs. As it was we weren’t expecting to come home with a lot of money, especially after staying over an extra day and night. But it was Paris, after all, with all that the name implied. We wouldn’t mind changing trains, we said.

January 4. The clouds sweeping low across the southern horizon, you can just see the peaks of the Alps. We never see them spread in their full immensity from our aerie under the eaves of this old house, itself sitting atop the old city walls of Diessenhofen am Rhein. To get the full panorama you need to climb away from the river. Sometimes we don’t see the mountains for weeks on end, but it’s a good feeling to know they’re there, looming across the southern rim of Europe, with the Mediterranean world beyond. I always feel like I need a geographical fix in my head, an internal GPS, to know where I’m standing. I don’t think I’m alone in this; I believe this is why we like to watch the monitor screen tracking our progress when we fly across the Atlantic. I’m trying to get such a fix now, I guess, though it is time as much as geography that concerns me. The year is young but the hour is late. Where do we stand, and where do we go from here?

“What you make?” I knew she had me, I had been found out.

“I was just coming around by the Rodenberg when a panther sprang out of the woods and knocked me off my Velo.”

“You are a Luftgucker.”

“That means my head’s in the clouds?”

“Something like that.”

“No, it was a panther, I swear.” I didn’t want to tell her I had fallen in the full dazzle of light, in a fresh rain-washed sky, drinking in the sweet air… when Hans-Ruedi passed and honked; when waving back, regaining my attention too late to adjust, I hit the curb, spilling ass-over-teakettle in a heap up on the sidewalk. Disentangling myself from the bike, I was okay; not even shaken, really, with only a leaking silver-dollar sized strawberry on my elbow to show. The bike seemed fine. I wasn’t going very fast. But Edith would notice; that was for sure.

Last Monday Hans-Ruedi and I practiced out on his terrace, as we frequently do in warm weather. The day had been hot and still, and as we played we could see thunder clouds and occasional lightning flashes to the north over the Hegau across the Rhine, a plateau studded with ancient volcanoes. Hans-Ruedi and I have been playing together for two or three years now, more since Thomm Jutz moved to Nashville. A landscape gardener by trade, he plays upright bass in the Western Store country band from Schaffhausen, and in several Swiss folk music ensembles. We were remarking on the departure of our young friend, Tabea who used to join us for Monday night practice, recently departed for a job in England. “I’m afraid our friend, my neighbor Alfred is also gone. The family has been here since yesterday.”

“He came home from the hospital?”

“There was nothing more they could do for him. He was working until two weeks ago; and now…”

“That fast.”

“He was a good friend to me since I came here seventeen years ago. I’m going to miss Alfred. He may be gone already.”

I was raised on matinees on Saturday afternoons
Looking up at Hoppy, Gene, and Roy, oh boy
I grew up a thinking the best a man could do
Was to be a rootin-tootin straight-shooting
cowboy buckaroo…
Mason Williams

An article in the International Herald Tribune caught my eye the other day and I clipped it out to save. Titled “Moody, snooty artists? Blame the Romantics,” by Alan Riding who asks when did Western societies start venerating artists “…as sensitive misunderstood geniuses?” (Thursday, July 20, 2006)