The Beautiful Guess Girls Remembered & Thomas McGuane Nails My Immaturity

 November 25, 2021

   Today marks my 74th Thanksgiving on the planet. I don't remember much about the first six or seven but I do have some scattered, specific memories of some of them. I fondly remember Thanksgiving at my Aunt Doris's stately home in Osage, Iowa where I graduated from the kiddie table to the adult table. I must have been 22 or 23 years old at the time. No, that's just a joke, the kind my grandpa, Carl Bell, was fond of making. Of course, I remember many Thanksgivings at Grandma Guessie's house in Kingman when the house was full of cowboys and their feisty women (my mother was one of five beautiful sisters and most everyone in Mohave County knew them as the Guess Girls). They have all since passed, but the memory of their persistence, their beauty and their humor lives on.

My mother, Bobbie Guess, on horseback

1939, Hilltop (outside Kingman), Arizona,

when she was a senior in high school

   And you wondered where I got my taste in hats.

   Today I am thankful for many things, mostly my family and their familes, and, of course, all my friends who have put up with me longer than I would have put up with them if they acted like me.

The Cold Eyes of A Cartoonist

    I know. I have never really grown up. I wonder what the guy who co-wrote "The Missouri Breaks" has to say about that?

"In real psychological terms, your life is half over at ten."

—Thomas McGuane, "Not Here You Don't"