In my mind Houston was as big as the city, but he wasn’t named after the city. He may have been named for the man for whom the city was named with a comparable free spirit. A lot of people would agree that Houston was a free spirit.
He was a young cousin that I first got to know when he was in Menard High School, barely, because his mind wasn’t there, it was somewhere else. I was retired from the Extension Service and doing some odd jobs at the ranch when his Mom suggested that I might find something constructive that he could help me with. I had just finish tearing down some old chicken houses with my grandsons that would have been suitable, but destructive.
I had just started rebuilding a tumbled down wall that my father had built 60 years earlier. The rocks were big and heavy and needed to be fitted in place because it was to be rebuilt without mortar. I was making it wider and taller than the original, and soon we needed more rocks. We had plenty in the pasture, but we had to look for ones with the right thickness and flatness. At times he preferred catching fence lizards and looking out for scorpions under the rocks, which he called rock gnomes, but I usually got a lot of work out of him.
He helped at the orchard also, removing flooding debris and downed trees, planting clones of Eastern gamagrass and a peach tree, shifting a few rocks around, and he kept my mules running. He wanted to buy the orchard for hunting deer from across the river, and just to keep it in the family.
We could work at the orchard longer because we could take a break for lunch at Ojeda’s, not like working all day at the ranch, or cutting it short to eat. We were eating hotdogs at a little joint in North Menard, and on the second visit, the owner, seemed like his name was Chue, asked if he was my grandson. No, we both said, but that’s a good idea, so we adopted each other. Seems like that cemented a bond.
He and Roy got me out with his 4-wheel drive pickup when I was stuck in the field at the ranch. With his potential girl friend he got Paul out of the pasture with his 4-wheel drive (his was in the shop with his cluster of invalid pickups) to get me unstuck from the ranch pasture where my brother’s pickup was stuck and abandoned for a week. Dumb and dumb, but he didn’t say so. He got Franklin with his power tools to come get a tire loose when I had a flat halfway to the ranch. He was more than a real grandson, both of whom were too far away.
He loved animals, or should I say he tolerated all kinds, and loved a few dogs. He was good with snakes and ate a few. We appreciated him at Youth Range Workshop with regard to rattlers.
He was a genuine hugger. It’s hard when you are in a wheelchair, but he could do it. After my early 90th I gave him my pickup with the wheelchair hoist, in case he could use it for skinning a deer, and the agreement with a good hug was for him to get rid of five junk pickups in his yard.
The last time he gave me a hug was when I was on my way to Iowa, saying “I won’t see you again in Texas, but to plan on seeing me buried here in a few years. You’ll have to come to Iowa next summer in a dependable pickup and I’ll show you some Prairie.”
Now it will be easier for you to get here, anytime, good spirit.
Your adopted grandfather, Jakie