Reading Recommendations:

A Widow's Story

On a February morning in 2008, Joyce Carol Oates drove her ailing husband, Raymond Smith to the emergency room of the Princeton Medical Center where he was diagnosed with pneumonia. Both Joyce and Ray expected him to be released in a day or two. But in less than a week, even as Joyce was preparing for his discharge, Ray died from a virulent hospital-acquired infection, land Joyce was suddenly faced, totally unprepared, with the stunning reality of widowhood.

A Widow's Story

This moving tale of life and death, love and grief, offers a candid, never before glimpsed view of the acclaimed author and fiercely private woman.

Steve Dyer brought a book to me recently. The book is written by Rayzor Dent, a former classmate to Steve at Monterrey High School in Lubbock. Rayzor Dent is a Texas writer, a master story teller, one, I think the reader will appreciate as a fellow Texan.

The book is, Vaulted Eagles and I'd like to quote briefly from Rayzor Dent...

"You and I are the last ones in our family," Partner said. "The lives our people lived and the things they did cannot disappear: cannot be forgotten. I gotta pass some things on to you, son."

In Mesilla, New Mexico, an old cowboy chronicles the family history to his Eastern raised grandson. He describes the hero's journey to a brother, sister, and a freed black slave beginning at the Battle of the Alamo. As the story unfolds, a secret bribe to Mexican dictator Santa Anna is revealed.

Vaulted Eagles

Thank you, Steve. How fortunate you are to have Rayzor as a friend.

Texas Monthly Guidebooks

Ten Car Tours through and around the sights and cities of Central Texas, by Richard Zelade.

What a wonderful aide to traveling this summer. With price of gas, try several day trips and see our beloved Texas.

See you at Rylander.

, Hill Country, Completely Revised 3rd Edition, Discovering the Secrets of the Texas Hill Country - Area History and Points of Interest, on and off the beaten track - from Columbus to the Lost Naples, Enchanted Rock to Dime Box. is a great American novel of the Southwest. Rayzor Dents' fiction weaves a distinctive blend of true events, real people, and actual places into a riveting story. The saga's backdrop is the seventeen years in which Mexico descended from it's stature as the second largest country in the world, and the American West was born. illuminates one woman's struggle to comprehend a life without the partnership that had sustained and defined her for nearly half a century. As never before, Joyce Carol Oates shares the derangement of denial, the anguish of loss, the disorientation of the survivor amid a nightmare of "death duties", and the solace of friendship. She writes unflinchingly of the experience of grief, the almost unbearable suspense of the hospital vigil, the treacherous "pools" of memory that surround us, the vocabulary of illness, the absurdities of commercialized forms of mourning. Here is a frank acknowledgment of the widow's desperation, only gradually yielding to the recognition that "this is my life now.", a memoir, Joyce Carol Oates