1. If he were still alive, today would have been Raymond Harold "Pert" Woolum's 96th birthday. This year marks thirty years since he died a few months shy of his 66th birthday.
One of the fun aspects of having moved back to Kellogg is to experience how alive Dad continues to be for people around town who knew him. I am not the boisterous man Dad was. I don't charge a room with electricity and charisma when I enter it nor am I as funny as Dad was. Therefore, people who knew Dad and find out I'm Pert's kid always seem surprised. "Jesus Christ! No shit? You're Pert's kid?"
Some people think I look like my Dad and that often spurs people to tell a Pert story or just shake their heads and laugh and say, "God I loved your Dad! I sure miss that fat one-eyed son of a bitch." (Dad often referred to himself this way -- I think it was a paraphrase of a line from the John Wayne movie, True Grit.)
If there's a Silver Valley area in heaven, more and more of Dad's friends have joined him there over the last several years: Donnie Rinaldi, Ted and Jerry Turnbow, Chicken Legs, Don Knott, and many more. I'm hoping the song "In Heaven There Is No Beer" was wrong and that Dad is still popping open cold crisp cans of Heidelberg and loving his reunions with his many friends as they leave life here and join him in the next realm.
2. I started my day in a dentist chair and was very happy to be under the care of Kathy Mercato. She x-rayed my mouth, cleaned my teeth, and talked with me about the challenges of our dental health as we age.
I'm very aware of these challenges and was a little bit nervous when the dentist looked at the x-rays, hoping that a bunch of new problems hadn't popped up over the last year or so since last he examined me.
A bunch didn't pop up.
One did.
It's early detection of some decay under a crown.
I'll return in December to deal with this problem early and, I hope, be done with such things for another year.
3. Debbie agreed to sub today and tomorrow at Pinehurst Elementary.
When she returned home, I leapt into the Camry and rocketed through rain and wind and some low visibility to the Bing Crosby Theater in Spokane for another Northwest Passages event.
This evening's featured writer was Michael Connelly.
Tonight's interviewer, Donna Wares, asked questions that led Connelly to talk about his history as a newspaper reporter, most often on the crime beat, and how that work led to him working as a full-time writer of crime novels.
She prompted him to talk about his work habits as a writer and how other writers, like Raymond Chandler, have influenced his work.
Michael Connely also talked about his work on the Netflix and Amazon productions of his novels, with special emphasis on the Bosch franchise and the series The Lincoln Lawyer.
I was most fascinated by what he had to say about the book he was promoting tonight: The Hollow.
It's another Bosch book and takes its readers back to the harshness of Bosch's life as a child and teenager and tells the story of Bosch deciding to look into a case that's been cold for over sixty years involving the death in 1965 of a fellow orphan, Charlie Lamb, found beaten to death in MacClaren, the orphanage where they both lived.
The Bing Crosby Theater holds about 750 people and the house was full.
While Michael Connelly wasn't greeted with Beatlemania-like screams of ecstasy the way Rick Riordan was at Ferris High School by his young readers, Connelly's more seasoned readers filled the room with appreciative and joyous energy.
