The Fifth Entry / Lander Texas

Lander is a quiet little town. We're in the Hill Country, a little northwest of San Antonio and a little more south-west of Austin. We have a nice little creek running through town, but not a river like so many other little hill country towns. As a result of that we have no real swimming holes. There's no tubing. Our tourist trade is mostly the antique and gift shops downtown. There are four or five bed and breakfast homes in the area. Our only other claim to fame is the dinosaur park (if you can call it that) just north of town right off hwy 33, and that's really just some fossilized footprints in a fossilized river bed. The footprints are still there, guess they will be for a while, but the park part fell into ruin years ago. It was never much to speak of anyway, just some swings and a slide, some picnic tables - the usual.
Things tend stay rather quiet around here. That suits everybody just fine.

The Forth Entry / I Heard it on the News

I heard this on the local “news” radio channel – the same one that carries Rush Limbaugh and Hannity – and I didn’t think too much about it at first. Then I got to thinking about it. Anyway, it seems there was an old lady went missing in Austin and they had put out an Amber alert. They think she just wandered away and got confused, couldn’t find her way back home. She was on medication and it was important that they find her soon, so if anyone had any information etcetera. But what stuck in my mind was something a relative said in a sound byte, sort of off handedly, kind of in the background. She said, “…need to find her pretty soon, don’t want her to die again…”. Okay. Maybe she had had a close call. Maybe she had even been revived. Or maybe she had died. Maybe she was dead. I mean out there walking dead. Nah. But I would like to hear how this story turns out.

The Third Entry / Danny

I heard this story from Oscar Flores, whose son is on the football team and witnessed the incident that I am about to explain. Oscar runs the Shell station on fifth street. I've known him for years. Probably most of the permanent residents of our little town have known him for years. Jimmy, his son, was at football practice last Thursday. It seems they had had a fairly intense workout, outside in the heat, when someone threw a line drive pass at Danny Osmud. Danny didn't see it and it hit him right square in the chest and I remember hearing a report about this on NPR radio a few years ago, about the disproportionate number of deaths of young male athletes and two things they all had in common were a intense workouts followed by a sudden, hard blow to the chest. Danny hit the ground. 'He's not breathing!' someone said. Well, a panic ensued and Jimmy ran to get the defibrillator and when he got back Danny was sitting up like nothing had happened. He said he was okay, just felt kind of funny. And he looked kind of funny, too. The coach tried to feel his pulse but couldn't find it. School hasn't started yet, so there's no school nurse and of course the clinic was locked. The coach had him call his parents and tell them to meet him at the hospital - the coach was taking him to the emergency room. Then Oscar said that his boy noticed something real odd. From the time Danny came to until he left with the coach, which about ten minutes, Danny never blinked. Not once. Oscar asked me if I thought this could be a sign of shock. I said yes, I think so. I have no idea.