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is for Noose by Sue Grafton, Fawcett Crest Book, 1998
Lies are always easier because the only thing you risk is getting caught. Once
you stoop to the truth, you’re screwed because if the other person
isn’t buying, you’ve got nothing left to sell.
The True History of Paradise Margaret Cezair-Thompson, , Dutton - Penguin
Putnam, 1999.
I remember them teaching me in school the difference between a noun and a verb:
a noun is, and a verb does. Well, love don’t count one rass unless it’s
a verb.
Rass - a derisive or curse - Jamaican word.
Black Elk and Flaming Rainbow by Hilda Neihardt, University of Nebraska Press,
Lincoln, NB, 1995. A personal reminiscence of John Neihardt and Black Elk interviews
and experiences in SD.
I am gaining a greater capacity to see, and perhaps more than a little strength
to understand, the meaning and the hope that lie within the simple idea of
the sacred hoop. For beautiful and happy and wonderful as this life undoubtedly
is, it remains true that it is not easy to live in this world. And where spiritual
understanding crosses - overcomes - casts light upon - worldly difficulties,
is not the crossing place truly holy in that it represents the triumph of the
highest and the best that is in us over the worldly or materialistic? The triumph
of courage over difficulty, of the spirit over the material?
Coconuts for the Saint, by Debra Spark, avon books, NY, 1994.
What she wanted was my first memory, and that’s what I tried to give
her. I liked her and didn’t mind talking, but it’s funny moving
when you’re little. You lose your old life before you’ve got anything
like a real mixture, so what you know to be true is really what you were told
was true combined with all the details your imagination provided on an earlier
telling
Solar Storms by Linda Hogan, Scribner Paperback Fiction, Simon and Schuster,
NY 1995
I was under the spell of wilderness, close to what no one had ever been able
to call by name. Everything merged and united. There were no sharp distinctions
left between darkness and light. Water and air became the same thing, as did
water and land in the marshy broth. Of creation. Inside the clear water we
passed over, rocks looked only a few inches away. Birds swam across lakes.
It was all one thing. The canoes were our bodies , our skin.
The First Eagle Tony Hillerman.
"
The feds stay at those three hundred dollar a night resort places with the
big golf courses. I went out with some FBI agents and knocked the ball in all
eighteen holes. It wasn't hard, but once you've done it, I don't know why you'd
want to do it again."
England, England - Julian Barnes
It seemed to Dr Max positively unpatriotic to know so little about the origins
and forging of your nation. And yet, therein lay the immediate paradox: that
patriotism’s most eager bedfellow was ignorance, not knowledge.
The Englishman's Boy by a Canadian writer Guy Vanderhaeghe.
"
For the first time, everybody, rich and poor, Northerner and Southerner, native
and
immigrant, found themselves pupils in the same history class. A class conducted
in
Philadelphia and New York, in little Iowa theatres and converted saloons in
Wyoming.
The movie theatre became the biggest night school any teacher had ever dreamed
of; one
big classroom stretching from Maine to California..."
Battle Creek, Scott Lasser
When your brother dies, there’s some pressure in that, sure, with the
attention and all. There’s like this unspoken comparison going on all
the time between you and your brother. Laurence is dead, so he just gets more
perfect as time goes on. But it’s not like I blame you or Mom for that.
I=’m not angry about it. I’s just the way it is.
tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom
Listen, I know what a misery being young can be, so don’t tell me its
so great. All these kids who came to me with their struggles, their feelings
of inadequacy, their sense that life was miserable, so bad they wanted to kill
themselves...
And, in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise. They have very
little understanding about life. Who wants to live every day when you don=t
know what’s going on? When people are manipulating you, telling you to
buy this perfume and you’ll be beautiful, or this pair of jeans and you’ll
be sexy - and you believe them! It’s such nonsense
Letters from Yellowstone, Diane Smith
In his book Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin wrote that “the day passed delightfully”but
then he goes on to say that delight is a weak term to express the feelings of
a naturalist who, for the first time, has been wandering by himself (or herself!)
In a forest. Darwin’s forest was in Brazil. Mine is closer to home. But
that overwhelming feeling must be very similar, and not unlike what primitive
believers must experience when overcome with what they believe to be God, but
which, at least for me, is the first and full appreciation of the wonders of
the real, physical, living, breathing world. It is that moment in a naturalist’s
life, and we are all naturalists if we open our eyes, when the curtain lifts
around us, and it is good, so good, to be alive.
The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, by Christopher Moore
Description of bar - the morning regulars
Morning was the darkest part of a day at the Head of the Slug Saloon. It was
so dark that the dingy confines of the bar seemed to suck light in from the street
every time someone opened the door, causing the daytime regulars to cringe and
hiss as if a touch of sunshine might vaporize them on their stools. Mavis moved
behind the bar with a grim, if wobbly, determination, drinking coffee from a
gargoyle-green mug while a Tarryton extra long dangled from her lips, dropping
long ashes down the front of her sweater like the smoking turds of tiny ghost
poodles. She went about setting up shots of cheap bourbon at the empty curve
of the bar, lining them up like soldiers before a firing squad. Every two or
three minutes an old man would enter the bar, bent over and wearing baggy pants
- leaning on a four-point cane or the last hope of a painless death - and climb
onto one of the empty stools to wrap an arthritic claw around a shot glass and
raise it to his lips. The shots were nursed, not tossed back, and by the time
Mavis had finished her first cup of coffee, the curve of the bar looked like
the
queue to hell: crooked, wheezing geezers all in a row.
Chocolat, Joanne Harris, Penguin books, 1999
People all have their own characters, and returning to an old city where you
have lived before is like coming home to an old friend. But the people begin
to look the same; the same faces recurring in cities a thousand miles apart,
the same expressions. The flat, hostile stare of the official. The curious
look of the peasant. The dull unsurprised faces of the tourists. The same
lovers, mothers, beggars, cripples, vendors, joggers, children, policemen,
taxi drivers, pimps. After a while one begins to feel slightly paranoid,
as if these people were secretly following from one town to another, changing
clothes and faces, but remaining essentially unchanged, going about their
dull business with half an eye slyly cocked at us, the intruders.
A Tribute to Dad, a gift from Julie
The child you want to raise as an upright and honorable person requires a lot
more of your time than your money - George Varky
Amsterdam, by Ian McEwan Anchor books
Outside the compartment window, unseen by Clive, a deciduous woodland slid
by, its winter geometry silvered by unmelted frost.
The Night Inspector - Frederick Busch - Ballentine 1999
An oceangoing vessel underneath a cloud of canvas was my Yale. But I have read
the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, through whose mouths
he so craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to
be so terrifically true.” He leaned closer and, although we were of
similar height, he reached around me as if to loom down the back of my coat.
I shivered with the cold of it as he said, almost into my ear, “ Those
things he says, shipmate. Those true, terrible thing, he tells through the
mouths of his characters. Do you see ”For it would be all by madness
for any good man - Shakespeare or Bartholomew- in his own, proper character,
to utter or even hint of the truth. Remember Lear! I feel so close to him,
Billy! That frantic king tears off his mask and speaks the sane madness of
vital truth. But, Billy, it is Shakespeare behind him. It is Shakespeare
who wears his face, his soul. Lear is, you understand me, Shakespeare’s
mask! How else might we tell the world our terrible thoughts except through
these masks?
THE VINTER’S LUCK, by Elizabeth Knox, Picador USA
People are so devious! Their weakness makes them astute. Think of it - it was
men, not angels, who were able to discover that the planets orbit the sun.
Only someone with a telescope can see that planets orbit the sun. Nobody
would invent telescopes who hadn’t needed spectacles. Disadvantaged,
needy, so devious – that’s humanity. As if to illustrate the
differences between people and angels Xas rearranged the fire. He put his
hands into the flames to shuffle burning logs, then brought them out, sooty,
and wiped them on his wings.
Dumbing Us Down, by John Taylor Gatto, New Society Publishers 1992
“
When I am at my best I plan lessons very carefully in order to produce this
show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings I insist they drop whatever it
is we have been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station. They must
turn on and off like a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in
my class nor in any class I know of. Students never have a complete experience
except on the installment plan.”
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver, Harper Perennial, 1998
I married a man who could never love me, probably. It would have trespassed
on his devotion to all mankind. I remained his wife because it was one thing
I was able to do each day. My daughters would say: You see, Mother, you had
no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s
own.
Trumpets of Silver, Norma Harris
And what was it cousin Chaim had said? Some Silly remark meant to comfort.
“
God sends us only what can we bear.”
“
And he answered, ;What are you saying? That if I were weaker, my wife and son
would still be alive?”
Gap Creek, Robert Morgan, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1999
I set there on the cold ground feeling that human life didn’t mean a
think in this world. People could be born and they could suffer, and they could
die, and it didn’t mean a thing. The moon was shining above the trees
and the woods was peaceful. I could hear the creek down the ridge gentle as
a dove, and the mountains was still as ever. The ground under me was solid,
but little Masenier was dead. There was nothing we could do about it, and nothing
cared except Papa and me. The world was exactly like it had been and would
always be, going on about its business.
The Mishomis Book, Edward Benton-Banai, The Little Red Schoolhouse.
The boy traveled through the part of the Moon that we cannot see - the part
we know is there but which is dominated by the bright, shining crescent. The
Moon is only whole when it is taken in its totality - that which we see and
that we do not see. So is it with life. Life is not whole until its totality
is comprehended. When the physical part of life that we can see is taken with
the spiritual part of life that we do not so easily see, then life can be full
and complete for each of us.
Liberty Falling, Nevada Barr, Avon Books
and a dog named Taco, whom she’d inherited. Taco was a golden retriever.
A good enough dog, but a dog for all that. Thinking of him, Anna felt an unpleasant
twinge. All dogs were Catholic at heart. It was in their eyes, liquid brown
accusation. Taco had watched her pack her suitcase as if she were digging a
doggie-sized grave.
Sudden Mischief, by Robert Parker
We sat and looked in to the fire and were quiet together. I liked it. It wasn’t
the absence of conversation, it was the presence of quiet.
Where You Once Belonged, Kent Haruf, Vintage Books, 1990
She had reached full bloom now. She had attained a kind of pinnacle of home-grown
loveliness. I do not mean that she had become sophisticated in any way; it
was not that at all; it was simply that she was even more warmhearted and utterly
devoted to Jack. At tweny-one she had reached that brief moment of physical
perfection. The baby fat was gone, her strawberry blonde hair grew long and
full to her shoulders, and now each morning when she walked to work at the
phone company she wore nylon hose and heels and a nice skirt and blouse. Consequently
it was at about this time that some of the men in town began to make it a point
to be drinking coffee at the front tables at the Holt Café so they could
stare out the windows and watch her walk across Main Street. The men hoped
that a sudden gust of wind would rise and lift her skirt to reveal more of
her legs, or that a sudden breeze would come up and blow her skirt tighter
against her thighs. Failing these, they were there every morning anyway, to
watch her mount the curb when she reached the other side of the street. For
she was something to see. But she was still a very nice girl, still entirely
innocent and guileless, and she herself cared only about seeing Jack Burdette.
The Call of Solitude, Ester Schaler Buchholz, Ph.D
Charles Darwin wrote about the indelible stamp of early origins embedded in
the human mind and body. Maybe well before adulthood, children sense that,
in nature, exploration and freethinking interlock close to animal origins,
removed from people=s demands.
Down the Long Hills, Louis L=Amour
Just as the eye of the trained tracker can see a disturbance in the dust invisible
to the casual eye, so anything that does not fit, that does not belong, is
quickly seen by the man trained to the wilderness.
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler 1953
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few
entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like,
what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody
abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell
and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing
to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism. All the
stuff you read about men yelling and screaming, beating against the bars, running
spoons along them, guards rushing in with clubs-all that is for the big house.
A good jail is one of the quietest places in the world. You could walk through
the average cell block at night and look in through the bars and see a huddle
of brown blanket, or a head of hair, or a pair of eyes looking at nothing.
You might hear a snore. Once in a long while you might hear a nightmare. The
life in a jail is in suspension, without purpose or meaning. In another cell
you might see a man who cannot sleep or even try to sleep. He is sitting on
the edge of the bunk doing nothing. He looks at you or doesn’t. You
look at him. He says nothing and you say nothing. There is nothing to communicate.
The Voyage, Philip Caputo, Vintage Books, 1999
A sailor can no more hide his sins from the sea than a killer can hide the
stain of murder from God. You cut corners, leave something done halfway to
right, say to yourselves, “Ah, that’s good enough,” and
the sea will find you out, boys, she’ll be a different god from the
God of our fathers, because she’ll show no mercy, nor forgiveness either.
The Mirror, Lynn Freed, Ballantine 1997.
I wondered how I could tell anyone my whole story even if I wanted to, since
I was still there in the middle of it. And maybe there never could be a happy
ending, I thought, not even at a wedding, although it was all over the place
in songs and books, and everyone seemed to believe in them.
The Hiding Room, Jonathan Wilson, Penguin Books, 1995
There, in his mind’s eye, was the face of a rabbinical student who had
sat next to him in classes twenty years ago: a boy called Rabinowitz, whom
Mendoza had liked very much. They had studied together in a small, dimly lit
room off the Mile End Road. The harsh, discordant cries of barrow boys hawking
their wares came through the open window, along with the smell of rotting vegetables
and cidery odor of spoiled apples. Rabinoswitz wasn’t cut out for the
rabbinate; he as too radical and impassioned, tortured by the presence of injustice
in the world. Rabinowitz wanted to understand God’s part in it all, to
challenge him, and smoldering with the resentment of a peasant, he drove the
rabbis wild.
One week, after a discussion of infanticide, Rabinowitz failed to appear in
classes, and by Friday the rumor spread that he had hanged himself. The rabbi
teaching the Talmud class addressed the students: “A man who takes his
own life denies the Godliness inherent in his own person, just as the man who
kills another denies the Godliness in his fellowman. God has given his divine
attributes, mercy and compassion. The suicide casts aside these gifts.” Mendoza
had thought: I will never believe in God so much as to kill myself over his
failures.
My First Summer in the Sierra, John Muir
We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making
every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone
tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly
an inseparable part of it....
Hanging Curve, Troy Soos, Kensington Books, 1999.
Once off the bridge, the trolley crawled through a maze of tracks and sidings.
An enormous billboard welcomed visitors to the city and boasted that More
trunk line railroads pass through East St Louis than through any other town
of its size in America! - proving that, with a little effort, every city
can find something to brag about.
Larry’s Party, Carol Shields, Penguin books, 1998
A mistake that led to another mistake that led to another. People make mistakes
all the time, so many mistakes that they aren’t mistakes anymore, they’re
just positive and negative charges shooting back and forth and moving along.
Like good luck and bad luck. Like a tunnel you’re walking through,
with all your pores wide open. When it turns, you turn too.
O is for Outlaw, Sue Grafton, Ballentine Books, 1999.
The Honky-Tonk had expanded, incorporating space formerly occupied by the adjacent
furniture store that used to advertise liquidation sales every six to eight
months. There was a line at the door, where one of the bouncers was checking
Ids by running them through the scanner. Each patron, once cleared, was stamped
HT on the back of the right hand, the HT of Honky-Tonk apparently serving
as clearance to drink. That was the waiters and bartenders didn’t have
to card each cherubic patron ordering rum and Coke - the drinker’s
equivalent of the training bra.
The Ferguson Rifle, Louis L'Amour
“
We are all on the way,” I commented gently. “A man is born beside
the road to death. To die is not so much, it is inevitable. The journey is
what matters, and what one does along the way. And it’s not that he succeeds
or fails, only that he has lived proudly, with honor and respect, that he can
die proudly.”
Billy, Albert French, Penguin Books, 1993
Nighttime be hot too, but different than the days, pickin time be over, everybody
be sittin outside, too hot to be inside them shacks, bugs be just a bitin.
Some folks be sittin, hearin all that music comin from down LeRoy’s
place, that music be just a jumpin. You be over LeRoy’s place you be
seein everthing. Lucy Mae, she be dancin, she be movin her butt all up in
Shorty. Shorty be happy, just a smilin and dancin too. Seat be thick on folks
it be lookin like slime, be shinin too.
Sometimes Cinder be over LeRoy’s place, get some of that corn liquor
in her and dance too. She be twistin and turnin just like a snake, have her
hands all up in that long black Indian hair she got. Folks stop watching Lucy
Mae, start watchin Cinder. Everybody be watchin her, but she don’t smile,
just have that evil look in her eyes like when she sittin in the back of that
hot pickin-wagon wit all that dust gittin on her.
Human Voices, Penelope Fitzgerald, Mariner Books 1980.
A story of the people in the BBC during WWII
The truth was that she was almost too well trained in endurance, having draw
since birth on the inexhaustible fund of tranquil pessimism peculiar to the
English Midlands. Her father’s friends, who came round evenings and sat
in their accustomed chairs, speaking at long intervals, said, “We’re
never sent more than we can bear” and “ You begin life helpless,
and you end it helpless”, and “Love breaks the heart, porridge
breaks the wind”, and when she worked at Anstruthers”hosiery counter
they hadn’t asked the customers whether they wanted plain knit or micromesh,
but “Do you want the kind that ladders, or the kind that goes into holes?” These
ncompromising alternatives were not intended to provide comfort, only self-respect.
Deep Water Passage, Ann Linnea, Pocket Books, 1993.
Lake Superior is well named. No other body of water on the continent even approaches
the size of this inland sea. The lake is about the same size as the entire
state of Maine. To paddle around it is the equivalent of hiking three-quarters
of California’s Pacific Crest Trail from the California/Oregon border
to just north of Los Angeles. Because it is more than a thousand feet deep
in some of its trenches. Superior contains more water than the other four
Great Lakes combined. Lake Baikal in Russia contains more freshwater by volume,
because it’s deeper, but in terms of sheer size Lake Superior is the
biggest lake on the planet.
Wildstream, Thomas F Waters, Riparian Press, 2000
Unfortunately, the search for order may lead to dangerous categorizing. The
late English stream ecologist, Professor T. T. Macan, warned us thirty years
ago against confining ideas within a rigid framework, because “....a
framework makes a cage.” A cage, we must agree, is not the point from
which we can extend knowledge through creative scientific exploration.
Longitude, Penguin Books, Dava Sobel, 1995.
Ptolemy himself had only an armchair appreciation of the wider world. A common
misconception of his day held that anyone living below the Equator would
melt into deformity from the horrible heat.
Siberian Light, Robin White, Delacorte Press, 1997
Poverty increased in direct proportion to the distance from the old In tourist
Hotel, renamed the Siber. The Lena was a kind of economic demilitarized zone:
one side rich with dollars, the other with envy.
Dead Above Ground, Jervey Tervalon,2001. Pocket
books.
I nodded and sat up front in the white section. I didn’t feel uncomfortable,
because I knew I fit in. That wasn’t the problem. The only thing that
could cause a headache is if somebody I knew got on. There would be that awkward
moment when they’d see me and wonder what was I up to. They’d think
I was intending on jumping ship and trying to pass. I didn’t give a damn
about looking white. I would have been a lot happier if I was Adele’s
share, where passing wasn’t so easy an option. Darker people sometimes
judged me as if I was proud to be near white. Mother raised us to be what we
were - colored and proud, never wanting to be something we weren’t. Whites
wanted us to believe they were pure and those of us colored who looked like
them were closer to being pure, but I didn’t believe it. They were no
different from us. As long as we wanted their purity, we would be less than
they were, even if we were as white as snow. I didn’t want it, and because
of that I knew I was their equal.
Charlotte Gray, Sebastian Faulks, 1998. Vintage International
She was driven upside down, the sideways, by the blast; she had no breath,
no sense, then she felt the straps of the parachute dig into the flesh on the
bottom of her thigh-bones as the canopy opened and the straps took her weight.
The parts of her body, which seemed to have been dispersed about the sky, head
there, legs far behind, stomach somewhere back in the fuselage, began to reassemble
themselves about one central point provided by the pull of gravity on the webbing
between her legs. The momentum of the plane meant that the parachute was still
oscillating in wide, sickening arcs, but beneath the nausea and the fear Charlotte
felt the exhilaration of the drop and the safety of knowing, from the pressure
of the straps, that she was safe. The ground hit her while she was still swinging,
much before she expected, and she cracked her elbow as her legs, -irreproachably
together- could not stop her hurtling sideways on impact. She felt earth and
grass smacking into her face and entering her mouth. For a moment she lay still
unable to move or breathe. Slowly she gathered herself, bit by bit, and climbed
to her feet. As she breathlessly took in the solid facts of her arrival, smacking
the disc on her belly to release the parachute, looking round at he beams of
torchlight in the darkened field, she felt no fear, only the irresistible uprising
of happiness.
Hunting Badger, Tony Hillerman, Harper Torch, 1999.
“
I have a theory not yet endorsed by any sociologist,” he said. “You
city folks have so many people crowding you they’re a bother. So you
try to avoid them. We rural people don’t have enough, so we’re
interested. We sort of collect them.”
“
Out here, everybody looks at you,” he said. “You’re somebody
different. Hey, here’s another human, and I don’t even know him
yet. In the city, nobody wants to make eye contact...”
The Essential Confucius, Thomas Cleary, Castle Books, 1992.
Good People should be slow to speak but quick to act.
Exemplary people understand matters of justice; small people understand matters of profit.
In hearing complaints, I am like others; I would have it such that there be no complaints.
If a country is just, one speaks independently and acts independently. If a country is unjust, one acts independently but speaks conventionally.
Star of the Sea, Joseph O’Connor,Harcourt, 2002.
Everything about the Famine is indeed complicated. Everything except the agonies
of those who are its victims: the old, the young, the defenseless and the
poor. Their labors have supplied a gracious leisure to the gentry of Ireland,
who like their siblings in England languish in bed half the day. Their Lordships
and Ladyships are so understandably weary. A look though the Illustrated
London News for the last several years will reveal how hunts, balls, and
other fatiguing diversions of elegant country living have merrily continued
in disaster-struck Ireland, while the hungry have the temerity to die on
the roadside.
To where might they turn for assistance now, these people cruelly abandoned
by those who had squeezed them dry? To our esteemed colleagues in the British
Fourth Estate, perhaps. Here is a recent editorial from the London Times (a
publication in which Lord Kingscourt holds considerable shares): "We regard
the potato blight as a blessing. When the Celts once cease to be potatophagi,
they must become carnivorous. With the taste of meats will grow the appetite
for them. With this will come steadiness, regularity and perseverance."
Buffalo For the Broken Heart, Dan O’Brien, Random House,2001
Almost all the pastures I looked at were overgrazed. But some grazing is necessary,
both economically and in the interests of wildlife habitat. I learned that
the health of the pasture is not only a function of grazing pressure, but of
how that pressure is applied. Ten years later, when I got the chance, I divided
my new ranch into nine pastures and rotated the cattle through them quickly,
because, being domestic, and thus deprived of the virtues of selective evolution,
they weren^t suited for grazing the pastures evenly. They didn’t utilize
all the grasses and forbs unless forced to, and when allowed to wander freely,
they concentrated on—that is to say, ruined— huge quantities of
grass that wild species need. On the Great Plains grass is synonymous with
wildlife habitat. When healthy, grass supplies food, shelter, escape cover,
and a place to reproduce for almost everything that lives out here. Humans
are no exception.
Being a wildlife guy, I was never comfortable with domestic cows. I always
found the taste of beef inferior to wild meat. We, as humans, evolved eating
wild meat, and our success as a species is, at least in part, a result of that
evolution. Perhaps it is knowing that truth that consecrates such meat for
me. Perhaps it is knowing about the chemicals, hormones, and feedlot conditions
that makes beef taste—to me—like something from another planet.
Back in the late seventies, when I was trying to buy the Broken Heart, the
economy was booming and the forecasts were for nothing but roses. I borrowed
money at the going rate of 21 percent to buy thousand-dollar beef cows. When
prices crashed and it quit raining, I was forced to sell them for four hundred
bucks. Whaap—that was my ass passing through my mind. I took it the cowboy
way, chin up, grinning the best I could.