the falcon perched atop the dead tree,
a sentinel surveying the river valley for prey;
red tail hawk mates had occupied the perch
for a long time
but
disappeared a couple of years ago.
i spotted the falcon while teeing up on the ninth tee;
the course is straight down from our house
where
the ensign flies at the top of our hill,
where before first light this morning;
the neighbor’s small dog had managed to escape
from the fenced back yard,
little tike, yappy mean,
growling at me when i emerged for the newspaper,
still growling and yapping when i left;
three houses down, two walkers espied a coyote
in the corner of a yard, nearly trapped;
the coyote escapes and darts back into the canyon;
after pausing to determine an escape path,
had he headed up the street,
the mean yappy dog would have been breakfast:
we share this land with the wildlife
but
often forget the two, us and the wildlife
are entwined;
while the falcon scans the land
from his perch;
i am glad he’s there.

Against my religion since i have sworn off all movies, news, and most sports events except for depressing Padre baseball games — no, i don’t know why i watch Padre games — i watched a movie Monday night. Oh…okay, i do watch old oaters, and few special ones like “The Quiet Man,” “Silverado,” and anything produced by Mel Brooks.

“Elvis” was streaming. i don’t even really understand what “streaming” means except there are somewhere near 450 gazillion things i can watch if i pay to stream them. Incredibly, very few of them are something i would want to watch.

The movie was “Elvis.” i shall not critique too much here because i do not qualify for a movie critic. If it ain’t an oater, then i’m not qualified.

But “Elvis,” the movie, took me to many, many places, including writing a post. i have somewhere around 786 posts started, lying fallow in my notes and draft. But this book has morphed into a time bandit, requiring me to do some things i would never have imagined i would be doing at 78. Now, Elvis has called me.

i looked up Sun Records where Elvis’ career was launched. i had a pleasant wander through the annals of the Memphis recording studio. The first thing that struck me was there was this guy, old guy at 58, when Elvis cut “That’s All Right” for Sam Phillips, the founder of Sun. i have a a 45 RPM record of Mr. Yelvington’s stored in one of my empty Henry Weinhard’s 12-beer cartons — the emptied boxes, of which there were quite a few, made terrific storage boxes, that transition capability discovered when JD Waits and i shared the ultimate bachelor pad in the Coronado Cays in 1982-83 and screwed it up by both of us getting engaged within four and six months of moving in.

The old guy’s performing name at Sun Records was Malcolm Yelvington. i don’t have his biggest hit, a cover of “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee”  by Sticks McGhee & His Buddies, but i do have “Rocking With My Baby.” Haven’t played it in years. Now, i must dig it up out of one of those Henry Weinhard cartons.

But i digress, a common and often affliction of mine.

“Elvis” brought back memories. Like Lebanon Junior High memories. From that early prehistoric moment until college, i wanted to look like Elvis. Hell, i wanted to sing like Elvis. i wanted girls to like me like they liked…no, loved Elvis. i wore Levis with no belt, white socks, and shirts with the collar turned up and buttons unbuttoned down as far as i could manage. i pitifully combed back my hair to a woeful incomplete ducktail because my mama and daddy refused such foolishness. i must looked like one really goofy pre-teen. And then i went to Castle Heights Military Academy and the ducktail effort became more pathetic.

Recalling that now, i try hard, very hard, not to denigrate young folks for their choice of dress…except, of course, for this very strange fashion craze of jeans that look like my mama would have thrown away.

i recalled how Elvis captured me, not with hip swiveling, gyrating antics, but his voice, his range, his emotion. His rendition of Tex Ritter’s “Old Shep” still makes me tear up. i felt like i was him when his friend told him Marie was the name of his latest flame. Even Mrs. Gwaltney, my piano teacher who, when i was in the eighth grade, had driven me to a piano recital at George Peabody in Nashville, and as we drove back home, turned on the radio and told me how she liked to hear him sing.

Lord, lord, lord, how i wish i was so innocent again.

i was very satisfied with the movie. It was a bit too hip — Is that an operational description anymore? — and i suspect it made Parker a bit more of a bad guy than he was, but i don’t know. No, i don’t know, and neither do the directors and producers of this film.

But there was one thing missing:

“Thank yah, thank yah very much.”

This morning, Peter and Nancy Toennies, and Maureen and i are packing up, soon hitting the road, departing from our golf Mecca of Park City, Utah. Tonight, we stop at Nellis Air Force Base, hopefully spending some time with our daughter Sarah, and tomorrow going home.

It has been a crazy week of golf on some incredibly beautiful and incredibly difficult (for this duffer) golf courses and highly enjoyable with great dining in Park City.

It was four rounds of golf in five days. This old man is a bit tired, but i love golf, just wishing to have a more respectable game. i will keep at it, even though my mediocre skills are dwindling further with age. Golf is the only game i can really still play (or desire to play). i also have found joy in the occasional good shot, walking or even riding in a cart along any course, and the fellowship of other golfers who put up with my professional level profanity on bad shots.

It is a beautiful game and can still be competitive because of the handicap system. And, it always has been a game where the player calls his or her own offenses, aka penalties. Unlike today’s football, basketball, and baseball, golf frowns upon cheaters — The origin of “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying” is ambiguous as many sports claim it. i thought it came from a Southeastern Conference or NFL football coach in the 1960’s but no longer recall the actual coach. A search for the origin was confusing.

i’m not saying some golfers don’t cheat. They are out there. i don’t understand how they can live with themselves if they are sandbaggers, or cheat outright on the course. i think nearly all golfers despise such folks.

However, golf at the professional level is losing my interest. It, like the other sports, is driven, not by competition but by money, big money. This week, the FEDEX cup is attracting golf fans like flies in a box car full of garbage. Why? Money. It’s contrived.

When the FEDEX cup began its contrived money chase, the leader begins the final four-day tournament with a negative score because he is the leader in the “cup standings.” Max Homa shot a 62 yesterday but still trails the leader Scottie Scheffler by ten strokes because Scheffler began the tournament ten under par. Contrived. Yep.

Now, Tiger Woods and Roy McIlroy are creating games and the PGA is adding money to the biggest winners. Why? Money. Big Money. And they are trying to put down the “LIV” tour, created by Greg Norman and Saudi Arabia, which was contrived for what? Money. Lots and lots of Big Money. All contrived. The best golfers in the world are greedy. Poor folks can’t get a job, can’t put decent food on the table. We’ve got homeless problems. And these guys rolling in dough, more than i can imagine, and much more than i would ever want. are pissing and moaning about not getting enough. Money.

i whine constantly about athletic skill and competition going down the toilet because of all of the contrivances by media, coaches, colleges, pro organizations selling out for money, more money. Golf has had lots of money and now the elite golfers and those associated with golf have joined the tribe. College, high school, even Little League are all driven by someone making money, not by athletic contests.

Think i’ll go watch a sandlot baseball game or a touch football game on open fields. Oh, i forgot. We don’t play those anymore. And open fields are pretty much gone.

Yeh, i’ll still watch golf , baseball, football, and other sports. After all, i have been involved with sports all my life. But i won’t watch as much. Think i’ll go play a round of golf when i get home, with friends.

Park City and the Wasatch Mountains remain a magical place for me. Today, Peter Toennies and i played golf at the Wasatch Mountain Park “Mountain” course: majestic, powerful, beautiful, with deer everywhere, one bounding past Sean, one of our foursome who works at the course and John, who works at the Homestead course nearby. Turkeys roam across the fairways, and John told us deer crashing through the trees, to pass them nearby, running from a predator, a bear perhaps, or more likely a mountain lion.

It is the bitter end of the summer season here. The golfers, bikers, hikers, boaters, fishermen, kayakers, and canoers (my word) are beginning to pack up and leave. The resorts are beginning their preparation for the winter season when this place is white. It is a magic place either season.

It’s more expensive now from when we began coming here over thirty years ago. There are more houses and more people. Favorite haunts have grown beyond the comfort level or simply been replaced by fancier establishments. But it’s still magic.

i wrote this many years ago. Cy Fraser, a close friend, told me i captured the way he thought of the area.

i ‘m way up in the Wasatch Mountains:

way up in the Wasatch mountains,
Utah where Mormons claimed
their way was prevalent,
snow covered the pretense
one hundred, fifty years or so ago.
passes to the left coast were few
except in the warm months;
only the hardy would climb so high
with mules, packs, jerky, coffee
to mine the silver,
hunt the plentiful game
in the cold deep white of the mountain.
now the heights are a playground,
cleared groomed slopes skied down after
rides up the mechanized chair
where hunters and miners
persevered in the hard months,

now playtime in the rockies
for the masses.
the old town street running up and down
the hill called Main
was general store, haberdashery,
gin mill, assayer,
probably a red light house or two,
amidst the good, lord abiding citizens;
now
pizza joints butted against
boutiques, fashion salons,
restaurants with high cost haute cuisine;
only the Egyptian theater and saloons
bear some resemblance to their former selves:
instead of grimy miners
swigging down the swill,
home brew out of pails,
rot gut whiskey.
now movie stars,
dressed to the nines
sipping wine
at the festival of cinema
named after an outlaw;
town and tourist drunks
drinking the trendy micro brews
Still, in the quiet after a late winter storm,
there are tracks
of rabbit, mountain goat, even elk,
if one dares to climb so high.

We are on another Toennies-Jewell adventure. We are in St. George, Utah en route to Park City and golf, lots of golf. A comment on the trip was made about “we are family.” Might as well be. This is somewhere around 15-20 adventures the four of us have experienced, not counting what Pete and i have done sans spouses. And here we go again.

If you have never driven into St. George from the south, you should.

We stopped for lunch in Primm, just before Las Vegas, not wishing to stop and experience the glitz, baubles, neon lights, music noise at decibels in another stratosphere, folks intent on winning, losing, and cigarette smoke, but found it all anyway in Primm’s casino where we went for a burger to find the burger diner had been hijacked into just a bar, while the signs claimed the whole place was half smoking, half non-smoking — reminding me of the restaurant on Magsaysay, the main street of Olongapo outside the Subic Naval Base in the Philippines with the sign painted on the window claimed it was “50% Air Conditioned” — when at Primm’s the undeniable fumes of cigarettes defied the efforts of division and the smoke penetrated our senses and our pores before we escaped to the Mexican diner.

And then we went where you should go, at least once, to the high desert vistas with soaring cliffs with mesas on top and precipitous falls to the canyon floors. Rock, nothing but rock and some pockets of scrub vegetation, opening up to St. George. And then, the drive north opens up to the canyon surrounded by more subtle but still impressive buttes and mesas, even more breathtaking than the earlier precipices because the flat-lying layers of red sedimentary rock, capped by black lava rock, called basalt, lava actually, but that was…er, from 2.3 million to 20,000 years ago, resulting in striated rock formations blending the color of the earth with feelings of ancestral grounds here and wondering (again) how those pioneers heading west reacted when they first ran into this beyond grand beauty and even wondering how they could have reached here with mules, oxen, horses, wagons, on foot even into a desolate though beautiful land searching for a bountiful nirvana, and at seventy-five, eighty miles an hour in the back seat, i take it in and breathe deeply.

After settling into the hotel, we drive to the Cliffside Restaurant located on the strangely named South Tech Ridge Drive, to dine on top of bluff looking over the valley and yonder buttes, mesas but with the homes of the descendants of those pioneers and more recent invaders nestled in the valley, more than this land would allow if the land had its way. And the food was very good while we watched the lightning show at sunset and twilight. Impressive.

Now, the next morning, the view out our hotel window remains spectacular in spite of the ubiquitous franchise eateries and stores you now find everywhere like Home Depot, Target and on and on and on. Soon, we will depart this strange land and head north to another wondrous part of this world above the Great Salt Lake.

‘Tis a nice place to pass through, but i don’t think i’d want to live here. You see, i settled in the Southwest corner and don’t plan to move.