The Farm
November 23, 1998
4:39 a.m.
welcoming in the new site with Sarah McLachlan on the cd player this morning   My family had a talk this weekend. There's a farm, you see, up in northern Indiana, that my grandfather lived on and farmed until he passed away a few years ago. The place is worth a not-insubstantial number. Not Gatesian, mind you, certainly not enought to go retire on. But enough to catch your eye. Am I being obtuse enough? My Mom and Dad get the current proceeds of the place. My brother and I actually own the land via a terribly complicated trust. A bank runs the whole show. Believe me, it's a messy situation all around. The trust is a scary thing. It is a beast that hides in the shadows, laying silently at rest for long periods of time before raising its ugly head. It causes people do things that make no sense, embarrassing things, stupid things. A few weeks ago, I raised my voice at my parents for the first time in years because of it. But Lisa and Brigid and I went to Louisville this weekend, and Jeff had flown into town a few days earlier. Jeff and Dad and I went to see the Cards play football Saturday afternoon. We tailgated together, eating sausage and chips and drinking--well, whatever. We talked about past games we had seen. I threw the football with Jeff. Our seats were down at field level on the goal line where all the action happened at in the first half. The sun slanted at an autumn afternoon angle, and Dad wore a Louisville baseball hat that I had bought a few years back perched on his head at an odd angle to protect his face. Jeff wore LA-cool sunglasses. I wore my red jacket with Brigid's school's name embroidered in the left breast. Louisville won. It was a beautiful day all around. And we walked home together through a darkening evening that grew crisply chilly without the sun, the three of us talking the whole way back, strolling along railroad tracks like three High School friends, kicking rocks and making jokes about throwing each other in front of on-rushing trains. Later that night we had the talk. It was a good discussion. Nothing is completely worked out, of course. And there are still a lot of permutations--as there will always be, I suppose. The problem, you see, is that none of us really knows what we're talking about. None of us is an expert at trust how a trust should really work. But I figured out this weekend that we are experts at something else, and that that something else has a lot more to do with kicking rocks on the train tracks than it has to do with how to run a farm via remote control. Personally, I 'll take what we know over what we don't any day of the week. Welcome to the new place. I hope you like it. Obviously, there's a lot new here. So you may want to take your time and bounce around a little to get the hang of the place. First thing's first, I've reorganized to put the stuff most everyone seems to want right at their fingertips. And I've taken the journal and pared it out a little. You can go to the best of persistence if you want to see what I've done. You might, however, start by checking out my design philosophy page first, as it tells you a little about what to expect as you go. Then you might wander through my writing stuff and check out my author's bio and all the other redesigned material there. I've also included a new write-up on my efforts in writing "Stan" with Mike Resnick. Then there's some new material on Brigid's page, and a new essay I've written on my recent WotF escapades. Oh, yeah, if you're version 4-capable browsers, you can go to the playground and see a couple things I've done that exercise your browser's dynamic capabilities. Of course, you could piddle around some of the older content that I ported back over here--it's newly laid out, and hopefully a tad easier to read. And once you've been over-sated on me, you might proceed to the launching pad, where you can check out several other places that I think you'll really enjoy. Enjoy, spend a little time here. I've tested the place a bunch of times, and fixed everything I know is wrong. But everything here is new in some way or another, and I'm sure there are a few bugs to work out. So let me know if you find anything that doesn't work. I'm reluctant to say this, but I'm getting caught up on life. We've been working on the house like mad--something I may talk more about later--and I've had several work and personal/family issues to deal with in the past few weeks. And of course, I've been redesigning [innocent, wide-eyed blink]. But things are coming together. Tomorrow, I write again. :)  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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