May 15, 2003
Not to belabor the past three weeks of my life but here’s a few sobering statistics. I got 29 shots in the stomach (Rabies shots? Ha! Bring ‘em on!), I got blood drawn almost every day (missed maybe four days), I drove 1,334 miles and lost 60 hours of time on the road, plus another 50 plus hours in the hospital. On the other hand I could be dead of a blood clot to the brain. Sometimes life leaves some nice choices, eh?

On the other hand, my daughter says I’m not nearly as grumpy today as I’ve been for “a long time” and I cut out most of my bread intake and all sugar and I’ve already lost 18 pounds. My pants fit, I feel svelte (for a 56-year-old) and clear headed. As John Brown said as he sat on his coffin on the way to the gallows, “I never noticed how beautiful the world is.”

The History Channel is doing a new series called Old West Tech and they called today and asked if they could tape an interview with me in New Mexico next week at the Hubbard Museum’s premiere of the Gunfighter Museum Exhibit which opens May 23. I am one of the featured speakers and quite a few of the True West crowd is going, including Dave Daiss, Bob McCubbin (many of his photos are being featured in the exhibit), Leon Metz, Richard Ignarski, Robert Ray and Bea and my whole family. We are staying in Lincoln at my favorite B&B in the whole world.

Henry Martinez called from Reserve, New Mexico and informed me they have bought the land for the Elfego Baca Memorial. He wants me to come up with a statue design. We plan on meeting him on the way over to have some adobada (pork in a red sauce) at the tiny Mexican food place there and I’ll show him my sketches. It’s really an honor and I want to make it a memorial that I would want to see (so somehow I’ve got to get breasts on Elfego).

“Sometimes a noble failure serves the world as faithfully as a distinguished success.”
—Edward Dowden