Don’t ask me how I knew this. I don’t know, either. And I am not and never have—well, until this year, with their sensational rookie quarterback, C.J. Stroud, a Californian—paid the Houston Texans much attention.

But I always had the sense that this huge, powerful man, a defensive end, loves children. Of course, he loves his own: JJ and his wife, Kealia, with their son, Koa.

I love my sons, too, who are ever-so-much bigger than I am. But Watt’s love for children has always been obvious. That’s what made me first notice him.

You have every right to be cynical. Visits to children’s hospitals soften the image of what is admittedly a brutal sport. But I am reminded of these photos, too:

You can’t fake some things, PR opportunities or not. Justin Turner was Ryan Texeira’s friend. They enjoyed being together, in the same way that Watt so transparently enjoys being with children.

Here’s the best part, for me, at least currently: I asked Elizabeth the other night if I could watch the news at the top of the hour. I could only take about thee minutes of it before I turned the channel.

But, courtesy of Tribune editor Joe Tarica, we got this image of a tweet—or whatever they call them—that Watt posted earlier this week at Louisa’s Place in San Luis Obispo. It should be noted that Elizabeth and I taught a batch o’Sweeneys, the family that owns the restaurant, and we loved them. That does not detract from the glory of this image: A Louisa’s omelet is about the size of a fleet submarine and what’s inside them (my favorite is the avocado and bacon) can lead you to Glory.

He evidently was in town for a wedding, and he wrote of how excited the bride was and how happy that made him.

Righteous brother. He makes me happy, too.

What does that mean, younger folks? This beautiful young woman is French. Watch her face as she hears a Righteous Brothers song—Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield—from about 1965.

I guess, in losing Alexei Navalny and then watching the video of his beautiful, tiny, and immensely courageous widow, Yulia, I needed a Righteous Brother to comfort me because I fear so much for her, my Righteous Sister. This song is perfect for her.

I just never expected to find my Righteous Brother at Louisa’s Place.

Today’s blog post title shows you how much I like working without a net. I will now attempt to tie all of those elements together.

Let me start with my brother Bruce. Bruce is meticulous, precise and gifted in many ways. He builds stuff. When we were kids (he’s four years older), he built a scale model of the CSS Alabama, a sloop of war that played hell with Yankee shipping, especially with whaling ships, which I mind not very much at all. Bruce’s Alabama, a Revell kit, was gorgeous down to its copper-plated hull and including its monster swivel gun, a 110-pounder mounted amidships. (The Revell kit’s gun was somewhat smaller.)

Since yesterday marked the anniversary of the Confederate submarine Hunley’s first successful mission in attacking a Union ship—it was also her last, since the sub sank with her crew—thinking about Alabama today seemed natural.

And then we come to this Edouard Manet painting, Luncheon on the Grass.

I like Manet because he threw out this style, brightened his palette, and learned from young Impressionists like Renoir and Monet. That takes courage, humility and, conversely, a good deal of self-regard.

This painting baffles me. The young men are so full of self-regard—look at that one guy staring smugly at the artist—that they have failed to notice that one of their party is, to borrow a term, buck nekkid. How could anyone be so obtuse?

And what is the other lady doing, anyway? Pulling up watercress for their sandwiches? Trying to catch polliwogs? Has she lost a contact lens? And she’s in peril of losing her clothes, too.

In a trial-and-error process, I discovered that I like the French, especially those north of Paris, from Metz to Normandy. I just don’t understand them. This painting only confirms that.

Anyway, here is the original Revell model kit and a model that looks very much like the one my brother built, except I think his was under sail, not uncommon to 19th-century steamships. Again, his model was gorgeous.

Hang on. We’re almost getting to the point.

In 1864, off the coast of Cherbourg, France, citizens watched as the Union Navy finally caught up with Alabama. After a one-hour gun duel during which over 200 shots were exchanged, a hit at the commerce raider’s waterline sent Alabama to the bottom.

Edouard Manet painted the battle; below is his painting and a detail from it. A little rescue boat heads for Alabama as she begins her final plunge.

The rescue boat’s important, because Capt. Raphael Semmes, seen below next to the Big Fella during an 1863 visit to Capetown, South Africa, survived this battle. He had little Semmeses who had more of the same until…wait for it…I had the pleasure of teaching history to a direct descendant, Travis Semmes, at Mission Prep. Ta-daa!

By the way, Cherbourg has ties to San Luis Obispo County history, too. In June 1944, Jack Langston of Shandon lost his life over the city when German batteries brought down his fighter, a P-38 that would’ve looked exactly like the one in the photo. He was never found. Far below, the 79th Infantry Division was fighting street to street, a terrible thing for a foot soldier to endure. One of them, a San Luis Obispo County farmworker, Domingo Martinez, was there; the 79th secured Cherbourg but Martinez was killed in the bocage beyond the city in July. My students and I found his grave at the American Cemetery above Omaha Beach on a 2010 visit.

We wanted to thank him.

Raphael and Travis Semmes made up the first coincidence. The second has to do with the fact California mandates the teaching of state history in fourth grade. That included, in 1962 and still in 2024, the construction of a model California mission. It’s a rite of passage in California, like road rash from falling off your skateboard, Senior Class Night at Disneyland or getting lost on the 405.

Of course, this tradition of building a model of a California mission devolved into outbreaks of Helicopter Parenting, wherein in Mom and Dad “helped” their fourth-grader with their mission project, which might turn out to look liked something architect Julia Morgan had turned out in her studios.

Mine didn’t.

Mine, consisting of cut-up grocery store cardboard boxes, strips of newsprint that became gobs of papier-mache (the goo doesn’t taste all that bad, I found out), looked more or less like Richard Dreyfuss’ s mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Contrast that image with the companies who figured out how to make a buck off modern fourth-graders by selling them manufactured kits (“Insert Bell Part 36a into Belltower Part 12”). This kit depicts Mission Santa Ines, my Mom’s favorite mission and my fourth-grade project.

Mine really shouldn’t have been named for little St. Agnes, who’d already been martyred once. It instead wound up looking like Our Lady of the Mashed Potatoes.

I passed fourth grade, despite that project. The historic coincidence? Here are Mom, Roberta, Bruce and me visiting Mission Santa Ines about 1960. Twenty-six years after that photo was taken, and twenty-four after my Mission Santa Ines fourth-grade project, my wife Elizabeth and I were married there.

The end.

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;

Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,

But leechlike to their fainting country cling

Till they drop, blind in blood…

–Shelley, “England in 1819”

Donny reminds me of those July 4th fireworks that became ashen black worms once you lit them.

All the worm—billed inaccurately on the box as a “cobra”—left behind was a black smudge. 

It was, of course, a classless social media post, expected from a classless man—“mud from a muddy spring.”

What does class look like? Thank you for that rhetorical question. I have several answers.

Sometimes I think, and for good reasons, that the Good Lord dislikes me. Then I reflect on the two Basset hounds, Wilson and Walter, who are so important to me, and I realize that I’m wrong.

Losing Wilson, a rescue from Baskersfield, wasn’t unexpected; he’d lived to great old age. But with dogs, even the expected breaks your heart.

When we found Walter, in National City, near the Mexican border, the trip down to pick him up was a long one, but it was one of the happiest days of my life.

Another blessing has been the friendship between Walter, now two going on three, and the latest addition to our family, Winston the barn kitten. So make that three blessings, after all, in three marvelous lives, all of them part of my family’s lives, too.

Happy Birthday today to Margaret Logan Gregory (Feb. 7, 1766), my 2nd great-grandmother, and to her son George Washington Gregory (Feb. 7, 1808), my great-grand uncle.

Margaret’s husband and GW’s father, Godfrey Gregory, claimed to own the human beings in the 1850 Kentucky census below. They have no names, of course.

By extension, and in Black History Month, Happy Birthday to these unnamed people. If there’s even the slightest chance that the slightest amount of their blood flows in my veins, I’d be proud beyond imagination.

They Gregorys are all buried in a family cemetery in Washington County, Kentucky.

When Elizabeth and I visited Stratford-on-Avon, we noticed that the churchyard is bounded by a fence made up of black granite tombstones from which time has erased the names.

There’s a good chance that the Gregory family cemetery and its tombstones’ names have vanished, too. History has a way of getting even.

I think that we leave behind is intangible. Godfrey’s grandson was my grandfather, the Kentucky-born John Smith Gregory, the man in the chair in front of his farmhouse.

What Mr. Gregory left behind was a legacy of kindness, service to others and the indelible reputation as the most graceful waltzer in Texas County, Missouri. Maybe the most graceful waltzer on the Ozark Plateau. He made the teenaged girls who shyly lined up for his dance card believe that a sawdust-strewn barn floor was made of polished glass.

So there is, indeed, is slightest chance that my grandfather and I share a common ancestor—one I might meet someday meet–who had his or her origins in Africa, not in Lowland Scotland or the English Midlands.

I read a rant on Facebook on Critical Race Theory, which is not taught in any California high school, despite the ranter’s insistence that it is. Willful ignorance seems to be seductive nowadays. It was in 1861, too. My namesake from another branch of the family, Confederate officer James McBride, led his Confederate into battle under this flag. They knew what they were about: States’ Rights, the defense and extension of slavery, and Jesus Christ.

I am fond of the Bogart line from Casablanca, when Rick informs Major Strasser that he came to Casablanca for the waters. “I was misinformed,” Rick says.

I do know this: I took a year of the History of the American South in college and, I, the namesake of two Confederates, was entranced. That led to me teaching Black History to my high-schoolers for thirty years.

So they learned about Harriet Tubman and Maya Angelou, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong (they instinctively loved Armtrong), osh Gibson and Satchel Paige,  Brown v. Board and Loving v. Virginia.

They were entranced. Learning this history made my kids proud to be Americans.

Immensely proud, you might say.

Black history’s part of their history, after all:

–The ferocity of the assault of Black soldiers on the Confederate center as Nashville in 1864 guaranteed the success of an the Ohio regiment’s assault on the Confederate left a few hours later. That’s where Arroyo Grande farmer Otis Smith earned his Medal of Honor.

–Huasna Valley rancher Adam Bair, a Mankins ancestor, watched the Black troops descend into the Crater outside Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864, where they were slaughtered like sheep. That’s because they knew what they were doing and should have gone in first, instead of the White troops who preceded them, chosen because they were White.

–The all-Black 54^th Coast Artillery had barracks in Shell Beach. The audience demanded three encores when a 54^th octet sang spirituals at a 1943 Christmas concert at the Army Rec Camp in Monarch Grove in Pismo Beach. Sometimes those GI’s played baseball against the AGUHS Varsity.

My students, nearly all White or Latino, loved learning about these Americans.

During World War II, “these Americans” were not allowed within the Arroyo Grande city limits after sundown. Black History month means learning the painful parts, too. Learning them only makes us stronger.

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