They came for me at 3:15 a.m. once again. I don’t know who ‘they’ are but its always about the same time that I wake up in the morning and then can’t get back to sleep.

This time ‘they’ came with a little more mischief in their hearts (if they have one or any.) Precisely at 3:33 a.m. my computer, which was turned off at the time, decided to crash.

The data log says so. Only lost four news articles that I had been working on and had not saved to the cloud or elsewhere.

Spent all day from around four in the morning till jus’ after 6 this evening resetting the thing. Could not get rid of that damned Microsoft Edge.

It’s like a cancer that infects everything. Finally, I’m back online.

But not before I forgot to bring my notebook and pens from outside – the ink in all of my pens has turned to sludge. Thank goodness for pencils and manual pencil sharpener.

go smoke a turkey
off behind the old wooden shed
tryptophan stoner

winter time fly
trapped in window sill
final survivor

How many times did Mary Greger run me out of the library? There’s no way to tell.

Mary is one of the many people that made high school, a place I thought of more as torture, a good experience. And I think she knew my dislike for school.

She was the head librarian at Del Norte High and that library was my hiding place. You see, I did a lot of skipping of classes all four years and when it was storming out, who wanted to go hang out in the woods around the parking lot and get soaked.

It was like a cat-and-mouse game. Why?

Because while working for the high school annuals, I could never get a photograph of her for the yearbook. Frustrating at 16 and 17 for sure, but well worth the chuckle at 60 years of age.

(While researching back ground information, I learned that she never had a photo of herself in any of the annuals from my time in high school. Sneaky!)

This morning I went to the online edition of the Del Norte Triplicate’s obituary section and I immediately recognized. I have nothing but warm memories of her catching me perusing the book shelves in the far corner from the main desk and her chastising me for missing whatever class I was skipping.

Oddly, she never tattled on me, not once. Instead, I’d go to the bathroom, then wait for her to go into the back and I’d slip in again, jumping the turnstile.

Oh, the look on her face when she’d catch me in that far corner, leafing through yet another book, once again!

Age doesn’t matter, not even at 94 years, it’s still hard to lose a person who has had any kind of influence on your life. That’s the way I feel about the loss of one of my most important high school English teacher, Doris Whalen.

This was a woman who didn’t pull punches. She said it like she meant it and meant exactly what she said.

“You can do so much better, Mr. Darby,” Mrs. Whalen would say to me. “You’re smarter than this, you simply don’t apply yourself and are lazy.”

And she never said it in anger or with any meanness — jus’ honesty.

Ouch, at first, but I she told me that so often I eventually let it go in one ear and out the other. And Lord knows, she was SOOO right about me and school work.

“I can’t stand the ‘Lord of the Rings, and I won’t read it” I told her one time, being rebellious.

“That’s fine,” Mrs. Whalen stated. “That’s the assignment and whether you read it or not is up to you.”

I didn’t and she promptly gave me the ‘F’ I had earned and deserved.

Her husband, Mike (yes, I was allowed to call him that behind closed doors as a kid, but never in front of other students) was easier to get along with. He was like a secondary counselor, who urged me to get out there and put my nose to the grind stone.

And he could take a joke, too. I talked him into letting me draw around his two pointer fingers using his coffee cup.

First, I did each finger separately, then slightly spaced apart, yet side-by-side, than the two fingers together. Finally, I set the cup on top of them and walked out of his office.

I can still hear him shout, “Tom!, Tom! DARBY!” as I closed his office door and walked down the hall.

Mrs. Whalen, on the other hand, would never cotton to such shenanigans. She was all business about teaching and we students, learning.

Waiting till the last minute to do, to complete, to turn in an assignment was something she could always tell I had done. And the one time I did do the assignment ahead of deadline – the only time – she gigged me for my spelling, my grammar and my inability to type.

D+ was the highest grade I ever mustered from her English class. Argh!

But, because she laid down the law, something I rarely heeded at the time, her words stuck to me like paste. I finally got my act together and stopped my laziness, I applied myself, I busted my ass in other words.

Twenty-years after barely graduating, I saw her for the first time. It was at the 20-year-class reunion and it was areal pleasure to see and talk with her.

Gone was the authority of the classroom. It was replace by a genuine desire to know how I was doing, what I had been doing with myself for all those years and if I had any plans.

She was nothing like the Mrs. Whalen who wouldn’t let me or others, as I found out that evening, get away with crap in class. She was happy to hear that all of us were doing well and were making lives for ourselves.

And though I’ve incarnated myself several times over the years from service member, paramedic, radio jock, cop, news reporter, cowboy, and such, I’ve always had a zest and a yearning to write and that is what I’ve done. And there has rarely been a moment that I haven’t heard Mrs. Whalen’s words echoing like a gentle whisper some where in my head, driving me forward, to do more and better with my words.

She believed in me when I had absolutely no clue what I was about. How did she know?

Simple. She was Mrs. Whalen.

And while I don’t know this for certain – I think she knew back during that 20-year class reunion that I still hadn’t read the book, “Lord of the Rings.” But I’m very certain that she knows now.

My Cousin Elmo says, “Figures rarely lie, but liars always figure.”

I know that we’re both tired of being okay with things that aren’t okay.

Any COVID vaccine should be tested on politicians first. If they survive, the vaccine is safe. If not, the country is safe.

Only a straight, unsuspected punch to the gut could be any worse than walking into our house and looking at the local television news for the first time in weeks, and then realize they’re discussing the death of a friend. That’s exactly how I learned of my long-time friend Brent Boynton’s passing.
They say he battled COVID-19 for the last couple weeks of his life. My heart breaks for his wife, Patricia.

The first time Brent and I met, it was 1998, and he was working for television station KTVN in Reno while I was working for the American Red Cross. He and his co-anchor Jennifer Burton were kind enough to spend an entire afternoon with the Sierra Nevada Chapter, teaching us how to communicate with the media.

We had a great time and Brent and I clicked right away. Later on, I went to work for Lotus Radio and he moved to KOLO, also a Reno TV station.

Our first opportunity to really work together came in 2005. He was U.S. Congressman Jim Gibbon’s Congressional Communication Director and I was reporting for the Daily Sparks Tribune.

Sadly, we didn’t have an opportunity to work at the same station, either TV or radio, but we did stay in touch. Eventually, he branched out teaching journalism class at University of Nevada, Reno, where he also earned his master’s degree in Mass Communications.

While he had a commanding presence, he also had a minute for everyone and a way of making people feel comfortable. Over 15 years years ago, I was at one of the lowest points in my life, having been fired from my job at the Tribune and the subject of some serious online bashing.

The morning after it happened, he called me at home. He had heard all about it and his first question was, “How are you was doing?”

He reassured me that it wasn’t the end of life and that the best thing I could do for myself was to turn off the computer and find a good book and read. He could have dismissed me, gone about life, but he made a conscious effort to show me that I mattered.

Unfortunately, I was able to return the favor when the TV station he was working for yanked him from the air and fired him. He was embarrassed and felt ashamed, but I reminded him that it wasn’t the worse thing that could happen.

Then in 2013, I got the boot again from my broadcast job and once again he called simply to see how I was doing. It’s those moment that mean so damn much to me.

Born in Pampas, Texas, in 1956, Brent got into broadcasting and journalism at the age of 15.  After high school, he got his bachelor’s degree from University of Texas of the Permian Basin, having studied both Education and Telecommunications Business Management. He was also a member of the Nevada Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame and an Emmy-award winning journalist.

The local media learned of his death after the news was posted on social media from his former KOSA-TV co-anchor and current Arizona state Sen. Victoria Steele. The two had a son together.

He jus’ turned 64, too.

My Cousin Elmo says, “Nothing says ‘I care’ like wearing your mask to the store then buying up all the toilet paper.”