With my two tacos settled in my stomach, I was ready to sing something. I would have never considered doing this in my youth for what would my friends think, but at my age now it’s become quite easy to pump myself up with one of my favorite sayings: “What you think about me is none of my business.”

I’m looking at the pen of unbranded calves, it looks like 120 or so have been worked and about 20 are left to be worked so I’m thinking I can’t cause too much havoc if I enter the fray and throw a few loops. When I was younger, I would never in a million years guess that I would still be around after 88 years, as my family tree doesn’t have longevity as one of its inherited characteristics.

Zee and I built a house big enough to entertain in, but history proved that we have been poor entertainers as I probably can count the get-togethers we’ve had since 1975 on my fingers. But this has all changed this year when Lilly said that she and Mike had invited 31 for Thanksgiving dinner and could we use our house for the celebration.

Our songs of the 50s as I remember were sung mostly by Perry Como, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby. The sounds came mostly from big bands with lots of horns, drums and a piano. “So what? Your era is no longer relevant.” Well, I think the songs of my era are still very important and we need a big dose of them right now!

A conservation Easement is a strictly voluntary agreement between a rancher, a farmer, or an absentee owner of land who want to see that the land they own will remain as one parcel and the right to subdivide will be extinguished. I think most all governments agree that maintaining open space on a permanent basis is a good thing. When my wife and I placed a conservation easement on our V6 Ranch the I.R.S. said that we had devalued the ranch by half, but that was in 2001.

So, as I see it right now, we earthlings have a Carbon based society and parallel to our society we have an emerging Silicone society and we don’t know how to manage it. My hope is that fair minded people will prevail and there will be a God that I can talk to every night and a Bill of Rights much like we have today. What lies ahead only time will tell. But I’m going to cast my vote for the leader who will choose the Sunny Side of the Street. 

My cell phone has Siri to tell me how to spell and define a word. It’s a word that I have heard of but have never used before, because it has a mean spirited sound to it. Narcissistic according to Siri means having an excessive or erotic interest in oneself and one’s self appearance.

But what I do know right now is, we need to be less dogmatic and self righteous. So let’s start by gobbling up a good helping of love and laughter, being decent to one another and restoring law and order. I believe if we are curious enough there is that place between obesity and skinny where nobody gets the whole loaf and we might find we don’t need so much stuff like the happy hungry children of Tanzania.

I awoke yesterday to what had all the trappings of being an ordinary day as my circle of life gets ever smaller. I’m still able to pull up my pants from the standing position and slide into my low top tennis shoes, no more cowboy boots.

I’ve just spent time walking down the main gravel street of our Little Cholame Creek observing all the goings on and it’s left me with a serious case of the “warm fuzzies.” Now that’s my kind of truth. 

It took 33 years for me to notice that my most important crop was always here and living here quite happily, but was in need of a little sprucing up. The V6 needed to wear its grass a little longer and any bald spots needed some extra protection. Most all of the ranch trees look very satisfied with their lot in life except for the Valley Oaks that have tried for years to compete with a farmer and his plow and his desire to grow a grain crop.

So are you ready now for our photo journey down The Little Cholame Creek? Look, look in every direction there’s so many different trees, willows, cottonwoods, a few valley oaks, cat tails, and an entourage of little frogs, bugs, birds, and many more.

Now that the citizens of the world mostly all have cell phones with built in cameras it’s hard to be incognito. Being a cattleman for the last 65 years I’ve learned to be a pretty good observer of what’s going on around me. From a water trough that has a leak to the quantity of grass in a particular area of the ranch. Anyway as I was observing I was also noodling which is my way of mostly just thinking about “off the wall” kinds of nonsense.

No matter what a person has for sale it’s necessary to understand what your selling. So for the first few years I knew I had cattle to sell each year in the early part of June. I also, sold a right to hunt on the V6 to a Chrysler dealership owner for a new Chrysler station wagon to use each year and that was my total income. But I didn’t realize that what I really had to sell was sunlight that made the Cholame valley brighten anybodys day with it’s, take your breath away beauty.

Just about a month ago (and it only took 450 million years to come to my attention) I learned that in many of our soils worldwide there is a living organic fertilizer by the hard-to-pronounce name of Mycorrhizal Fungi. Actually, it’s way more than a fertilizer, it’s a symbiotic friend to most plants.

I think that manners are necessary for all living things. Consider the Honey Bee. An average bee hive has 30,000 to 50,000 bees all living in the same house. Most all of the population is made up of worker bees that spend their time pollinating flowers and gathering nectar and pollen. Now can you imagine without manners how all these bees are going to get in and out of the hive through a very small opening many times a day with wings that flap up and down 12,000 to 15,000 times per minute.

It certainly made me think how lucky Zee and I have been to be able to spend a lifetime raising a family and to manage all the different kinds of livestock and nurture the many green growing things and doing it in harmony with Mother Nature. All near our town of Parkfield, population 18, in the heart of the Cholame Valley of Monterey County. So next year bring your horse and rope and we can all pledge our allegiance to the greatest country of all time and then we’ll rodeo.

Lily had parked her utility tractor that she was cleaning corrals with at the gate going into her yard then on into her house to get for me, two boxes of cereal that could only be bought at Costco in SLO. So with two big boxes of cereal that made me walk with my head up. Out the door I went but unbeknownst to me in just a few more steps I was about to be sent flying as one of the two forks that were designed to lift things that could weigh up to a ton and was about three inches off the ground that would grab my right ankle and send me on one of those

I firmly believe that our cattle drives bring out the best in people. Jack, how can you say that? Because I see our new Cattle Drivers arrive in Parkfield on a Thursday afternoon and most are wearing a look of anticipation and a little anxiousness about what comes next and by Sunday afternoon one is heard to say “I think I’ve done something extraordinary and next year I’m coming back to do it again.”

My wife Zee and our daughters Katy and Lilly moved into our newly built 1,100 square foot house with two bedrooms and one bathroom in the spring of 1962. We had bought 8,000 acres from Clyde Taylor and our new neighbors were all a buzz about how this new 27 year old kid could pay $50/ acre for a ranch that wasn’t worth a dime over $20/ acre.