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Home of Michael Perry – Author, Humorist, Singer/Songwriter, Amateur Pig Farmer

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Archive for July, 2010

All You Need To Know

Regarding the state of my agricultural endeavors: For Father’s Day, my tots gave me a gift labeled “Dad’s Favorite Fencing Tool.”

Inside the wrap was a packet of bungee cords.

Off For A Run

Supposed to participate in a very brief road race today.  Although I’m typing this the night before – so there’s always the possibility I’ve overslept.  The race begins at 9 a.m.  This is uncivilized.  Why not, say, 2 p.m.?  Or 5 p.m. if I needed a nap?  Then I could run the race and go straight to supper.  That’d be nice.

UPDATE: Made it.  Wasn’t pretty, but I made it.  This was a race of one mile.  In high school I ran a mile in 4:48.  Two years ago I ran the mile in 5:58.  Today, I ran it in 5:50.  So I figure another ten years of training, I’ll be right back at those high school numbers.

I placed third in the 40-49 year old category.  This was so unexpected that I missed it when they called my name at the awards ceremony and only figured it out later when I looked at the results.  When I told my wife I placed third in my age group, she said, “Well, how many people were in this race?”

I call my wife the Great Calibrator.

Sad, True, Maybe Perfect?

Driving around listening to the new John Prine tribute album including Justin Townes Earle’s version of “Far From Me” and thinking it might be the most perfect breakup song ever.  Something about the combination of specific details and understatement that nails that quiet, deadly, sinking feeling you get when you know it’s over.  Just a taste:

Well, ya know, she still laughs with me
But she waits just a second too long.

Complete lyrics here.

This Man Changed My Life

Perhaps some day I will be able to write the piece that adequately explains the debt I owe Jim Harrison.  For now, it is enough to say that when I read Just Before Dark sometime around 1995, it blew my writing to bits.  How clearly I remember sitting in the old green chair on Main Street in New Auburn, reading and reading and reading and marking and making notes and then reading everything else he had written to that point, and hungrily attempting to apply everything I was learning to my own constrained typing.  And the stuff I wrote after reading Harrison was different.  Different enough that it finally caught someone’s eye somewhere, and now five books later every time I hear Harrison’s name I tend to babble on, but it’s a heartfelt babble.

The man has a reputation as a nettlesome handful.  Watch the video and you will draw your own conclusions regarding the nature of his mileage.  These things are irrelevant to me.  We have never spoken.  Never been anywhere near each other, far as I know.  Although I believe we were in Jackson, Mississippi, on overlapping nights.  I was offered the opportunity to meet him then.  I declined.  Couldn’t imagine what I’d say that would amount to anything more than useless pudding.  I don’t regret the decision.  It is his work, you see.  It broke something loose in me.  If I can’t express it clearly here, I can’t imagine how I would explain it to him.

If you decide to watch the clip, note what he says from 5:08 to 5:40.  I think of my mother surrounding me with books, I think of my father taking us to the farm, I think of the blind luck chance that dropped me into this…and I hope he feels my gratitude somewhere in the air.

The New Coop

We still have to paint it.  Working on that this week.  But the chickens are installed and happy.  More info in the captions.

The night before we allowed the chickens in, my eldest daughter and I camped out in it.

Thanks to cousin Ivan, a professional home builder who will likely never build one of these things again.

Miscellaneous Book Notes

First, this.

Then, briefly:

Charles Rice is 80 years old.  For 30 years he served as a volunteer firefighter and he helped usher in the age of the EMT.  I’m glad he captured this history in Last Call.  There is a very helpful review here (scroll down).  More info here.

I met Tom Rivers in a blur on one of my book tour stops, and he handed me his Farm Hands.  It’s a front-line report from the fields where he worked side by side with immigrant laborers.

And finally, because I always tell folks you just have to keep shoveling, I’m happy to report that when I met Kathy Bricetti at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference many years ago, she said she was working on a memoir.  Blood Strangers is out now, and Kathy, I’m proud to say we workshopped together way back when.