dual personalities

It snowed in our flyover town over the weekend!

As an antidote to the cold winter weather (and because I had no real interest in the Super Bowl), I watched Lonesome Dove (1989) on Netflix Watch Instantly on Sunday and Monday nights. I had not seen it in a very long time. I read the book about two retired Texas Rangers who decide to take a herd of cattle on a 3,000-mile trek north to Montana in 1876 when it came out in paperback back in 1988 and loved it. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. (Various sequels and prequels by Larry McMurtry are, in my humble opinion, unequal to the original, due to their being way over the top in grossness and violence. But the original LD got it just right.)

The miniseries I associate with the year after my mother died when solace in any form was welcome and hard-to-come-by.

Gus McCrae and Captain Call were a balm to me–at least for the four days in February 1989  the series aired. Gus was even a bit of a philosopher, handing out good advice right and left, such as this:

Lorie darlin’, life in San Francisco, you see, is still just life. If you want any one thing too badly, it’s likely to turn out to be a disappointment. The only healthy way to live life is to learn to like all the little everyday things, like a sip of good whiskey in the evening, a soft bed, a glass of buttermilk, or a feisty gentleman like myself.

Thank you, Gus and Woodrow. And thank you, Pea and Dish and Deets and Newt and July and Roscoe and Lorena and all the rest. It was nice to see you again.