June 25, 2006 Floresville, famous as the Peanut Capital of Texas, is surrounded by other little-known but noteworthy places, like Elmendorf, home town of Henry Thomas (who starred in the movie E.T.), and of a once-celebrated brick factory (eventually purchased by a French company that destroyed the kilns to eliminate it as a competitor). More unusual for this part of the world is the "naturist ranch" (nudist colony) that sits between Elmendorf & Saspamco (a company town whose name is an acronym for San Antonio Sewer Pipe and Manufacturing Company, the chief employer there); what drew the unclad to this corner of South Texas is not to clear to me, but they've been here for decades (I keep meaning to visit, but haven't been there yet; finding the right season for a social call in the buff is not so easy here in South Texas).

To me the most unusual facet of Elmendorf's notoriety is the story that I recently heard of the serial killer who owned a tavern there during the early part of the twentieth century. This assassin would apparently offer employment in his beer joint to young women who got off the bus at the Elmendorf looking for work. Those who would take him up on his offer would work there for some time, then disappear; the story was always that she had "moved on." Back in those days no one paid much attention; times were hard, and people were always "moving on." One day, though, the killer's sister's neighbors called the law to investigate a stench that seemed to be coming from some barrels behind her house. When she reported that the barrels belonged to her brother, the lawmen opened the barrels, and found a dismembered body. Off went the officers to the tavern, and when they walked in to tell the owner that they needed to ask him some questions, he is said to have pulled a pistol out of a drawer & shot himself in the head. The ensuing investigation relied heavily on his black hired hand, who helped him dismember the bodies, then drive them almost 200 miles to the beach to bury them there. The assistant (who had previously kept his mouth shut because the killer had threatened to pin everything on him; back then, black men were guilty until proven innocent) led investigators to several of the remains. Rumors persist, even today, that some of the victims were fed to the alligators that the murderer kept in a pond on his property...

On a happier note, June 25, 2006 marked the completion of my mother's 90th year. She was born at about 6 am (a mockingbird sang) in Stockdale (15 miles from, and less than ¼ the size of, Floresville), a fact that her two brothers (both born in Floresville) never let her forget. She was delivered by Dr. Ella Ware, the first woman to practice medicine as a graduate of the Texas Medical College at Galveston. Born May 13, 1870, Dr. Ware was reared near Stockdale; after graduating with high honors from Texas Medical College in 1899 she turned down an offer of a professorship in favor of general practice, which he carried out in & around Stockdale for half a century, traveling the roads by horse & buggy until automobiles came into vogue. During this time she delivered 6000 babies (an average of 120 per year that she practiced, one every three days). Thousands came to Stockdale on Oct 24, 1954 from all over South Texas to fete Dr. Ware, popularly known as "the Country Doc." She died Oct 29, 1958 in San Antonio, and is buried in the Stockdale Cemetery (these details courtesy of the Stockdale Progress).

After nearly forty years of living outside Wilson County my mother & father retired to Floresville in 1982, and rejoined the First Baptist Church there, which is where my sister & I hosted a party for her on the big day, to celebrate her milestone. Happy birthday, Miss Laura!

June 10, 2006Two large buzzards opened the month, roosting on the old collapsing barn just across the street from my mother; later, a report of chicks. The nest was not in plain view. After a late night snake sighting as I drove toward the Mission de las Cabras ruins to get a better look at the spectacle of Spica + Moon + Jupiter + Scorpio, I proceeded to rural Montana, then rural New Mexico, whence comes this comment (contributed by a local resident):

One sunny Santa Fe day, as I headed back across the parking lot after emptying my wallet at Whole Foods, I noticed a fat and rather endearing country packrat sitting quietly near my truck's rear tire. Loathe to drive over the poor creature, my attempt to encourage her in the direction of the landscaped median by means of waving my hands in crazy circles and shouting "Shoo! Shoo!" succeeded only in inducing her to leap coolly onto my truck's axle and hide herself from view. With no means to lure her from her hiding place, I drive slowly away, imagining her leaping safely from her perch and returning to her residential niche or cranny.

Weeks later I am heading across another parking lot when I see a scrap of paper flapping on my windshield, a good Samaritan's note: "Hi. I just saw a packrat leap from under your car, grab a leaf, and run back under your car. I would recommend you check your engine for a nest." Peering under the car, I spot her sitting quietly again by the rear tire. When she sees me spot her, she leaps back onto the axle and into hiding. I now realize that I have been taking this little stowaway on regular shopping excursions to town, enabling her to make clever selections from parking lots all over Santa Fe, possibly for months!

When I arrive home I pop the hood, and discover a beautiful nest, a perfect half-sphere the size of a large grapefruit, nestled against the engine. She has kindly kept the gnawing of wires to a minimum, but has collected a little store of bottle tops, shiny metal scraps, and small plastic items (including a latex glove) as an adjunct to her nest of cloth, string, leaves, twigs and lint. Feeling somewhat guilty about dismantling her artfully constructed home, I am however relieved by  the knowledge that disturbing her nest will cause her to abandon my vehicle and go in search of some other unwitting rodent chauffeur; and I don't in fact see her again after removing the nest. One more proof of how ingeniously species find ways to adapt to changing conditions...

Kudos to ABC, for televising the finals of the National Spelling Bee in its entirety on the night of June 1. The winning word: Ursprache, a parent language, especially one reconstructed from the evidence of later languages. Others included:


aubade = a song or poem greeting the dawn

austausch: literally, "exchange": a meteorological exchange coefficient dealing somehow with turbulent atmosphere

clinamen: spontaneous, unpredictable deviation of atoms (e.g. turbulent flow arising spontaneously from laminar flow)(from Lucretius)

coryphaeus = the leader of a chorus, or a party, or a school of thought

esquisse: a rough design or draft for a bigger work

heiligenschein: literally, "holy light"; a faint white ring surrounding the shadow of an observer's head on a dew covered lawn

hukilau: a Hawaiian seine-fishing party, replete with revelry

izzat: power to command respect (a Hindi word that I know well; the dictionary maven mispronounced it in English)

kef: (1) in caps (KEF), an acronym for Key Ecological Functions, the major ecological roles played by a species in its ecosystem (2) in lower case, a state of dreamy tranquility (from Arabic, probably related to kif)

koine: a dialect or language of a region that has become the language of a larger area

kanone: an expert skier

kundalini: !

maieutic: pertaining to the Socratic method

poeisis: to do something particularly creatively

psitticism: automatic speech without thought (parrots are psitticine); in humans, saying something solely to appear clever

recrementitious: from recrement = dross, waste

sciolto: in music, in a light, free manner, without direction

shedu = an Akkadian demon who also acted as a protective spirit; depicted usually as a human-headed winged bull (or, less commonly, lion); the female version is known as lammasu (I'm familiar with the shedu from Parsi fire temples, where they serve as doorkeepers)

sphacelated: necrosed; gangrenous, related to gangrene

tmesis: separation of the parts of a compound word by the intervention of one or more other words, e.g. 'what place soever' for 'whatsoever place')

weltschmerz: "sentimental pessimism," comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state


Guilloche, machicotage, and paillon all also made it into the Bee list; you can look these up yourselves (also see caitiff, and meretricious). And, as a salute to the full moon that ended this fortnight, two Word Fugitives from The Atlantic Monthly, March 2006: moonglade, "the reflection of moonlight on water and the way it follows you as you are walking down the beach or a dock"; and moonwake, a word that "mariners use to describe the moving path of light leading to the moon because it looks like the white wash of a ship's wake" ...

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