Deer do not eat Burford Holly. Or at least they don't enjoy it, Burford Holly being sharp, overly chewy, bitter, poorly paired with red wine and generally deer-resistant. Every piece of landscaping advice I have sought in my career as a homeowner lists Burford Holly in the deer-resistant column. The deer in my neighborhood are poor readers. Or smartasses, one. They have chewed through a few hundred bucks worth of plants over the last few years, which they digest and then deposit back on my front lawn in an effort to screw up touch football games and my ability to retrieve the paper in bare feet. They sleep just outside my front door, sometimes four or five at a time. When I start out the front, they all look mildly surprised to see me, then irritated, like insolent teenagers awakened too soon on a Saturday morning. "What?" they seem to ask. Like any good parent, I begin the lecture.

Climbing hills taxes a man. I'm speaking physically, not metaphorically. The aptly-named Mountainclimb Drive bisecting my neighborhood provides such a test. I need about six minutes to get up it at a decent pace. By "decent" I mean fast enough to think well of myself at the top, but not so fast I suffer cardiac arrest. One Saturday this summer, Mae the Boxer and I passed a man on our ascent. It was about 85 on the way to 117 in Austin that day. In his mid-fifties, this man wore khaki pants, a long sleeve dress shirt and a tie. The yarmulke gave him away; he was going to Temple. I'm guessing his destination had to be the conservative congregation, Agudas Achim. That meant he had another two miles to go and a couple more major hills to climb in the Texas heat. That's commitment. Faithfulness.

The Duke sweatshirt went missing years ago. The last tangible proof that I went to grad school there, other than the diploma I guess, it was classic old school style with the white cut-out block letters in all caps sewn onto the dark blue front. I don't know if they make them like that anymore. One night about a decade ago, the shirt attracted some attention at the Tavern (you're never too far from 12^th and Lamar). A bunch of us were shooting pool when a girl took notice of me, or the shirt anyway.

"That's so cool, did you go to Duke?"

I was interrupted by my friend Trey Campbell, who was always quicker than me.

Boss and Charlie should be two characters in a Howard Hawks movie. Instead, the two boys, ages four and three, sit quietly at the bar with their dads. Reasonably quietly anyway; there is only so much quiet a Sonic kid's meal can guarantee. Boss goes by "Boss" because his full title is entirely too complicated (he is a fifth; I'm guessing his parents don't favor "Quint" as a nickname). Charlie is simply a Charlie. I know this because I have a Charlie. This cotton-topped version gives himself away by crawling undetected under my stool, three seats away from his dad. The two dads to my right and the childhood friend to my left have watched a lot of college football together over the years at various venues. This one boasts Guinness on tap and formidable pizza, not bad. We used to watch these games among friends. Now, more often than not, we watch them among children. There's not really much difference.

If, as I believe, God has a sense of humor, so then does Steve Jobs. Some in our culture think that they are the same person, but I will leave that rather complicated sociological exploration for another day, week five perhaps. The divine God/Jobs humor sings to me, literally, through the vagaries of my iPod. On a random drive to work last week, Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" with all of its rambling invocations of Texas medicine, railroad gin and debutantes who know what you need but not what you want, was followed by the monks of Taize singing "This is the Day that the Lord has Made (let us rejoice and be glad in it)" with all of its invocations to, well, invocation. This brings me, naturally, to southern football fans.

Remember when you could smoke cigarettes in football stadiums? I liked the world better that way. I am neither virulently libertarian, nor am I a member of any sort of modern day Christian temperance movement. My vices are documented in these pages, for better or worse (they include caffeine, Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey older than at least two of my three sons, tacos al carbon, Earth, Wind and Fire and, well, the fact that I took Chris Simms's side most of the time during a certain stretch of Longhorn history, but that's another matter entirely...). I don't believe the world needs to be protected from the likes of Kinky Friedman. I am glad, however, that brother Friedman does his part to protect the world from politically correct namby pamby nursemaid types of various shapes and sizes. Anyway, none of them want you to smoke in public, especially during an athletic event.

by Adam Jones

"There must have been some magic in the old felt hat they found, for when they placed it on his head, he began to dance around..."

OK, so the holidays are long over. Frosty has melted away and, unless you are spiritually tuned into Twelfth Night, you have by now packed up the tree, the wreath, the lights and returned (or re-gifted, you know who you are) all the sub-standard merchandise. Now we start over with new resolve that usually lasts until at least the second week of February (eh, maybe MLK Day). Once the workaday life begins you take magic wherever you can find it. Even in a dilapidated old dome that not too long ago was the epicenter of misery. There may still be some magic left in the Louisiana Superdome. I kind of had the feeling that once the Preservation Hall Jazz band played the national anthem, the Buckeyes were cooked...

by Adam Jones

Our dreams vary, but they come from remarkably similar places. Most of us are about four maybe  five-years-old when we first remember a campout or working on a project with dad-maybe carpentry or an old car; in my dad's case it was always plumbing (sometimes successfully). You play your first team sport, help out in the kitchen, trudge off to kindergarten. In some families you can still remember the first time the relatives sat around the piano and sang, in others maybe you remember when you strapped on skis the first time and someone pointed you dangerously down a slope. Something in these nascent experiences-for better, for worse-inform the kind of adult that you become. One of the gifts of fatherhood is that you get to see the cycle repeat. We infuse our own kids with a set of memories and experiences and we wait to see who they will become. It's a hell of an experiment.

by Adam Jones

I have been assigned to watch the shrimp pot boil. Decent duty, it comes with cold Dos Equis and the SEC title game on a 13-inch television dragged out to the backyard. These old tube sets have terrific pictures; I begin to wonder if they will become the historical equivalent of the vinyl LP. The shrimp boil is locked in culinary combat with a rack of pork ribs on the smoker behind it. There are beer brats on deck. I feel like I am walking through the International Food Pavilion at the State Fair of Texas (all that's missing is six-dollar beer in plastic cups). On this Saturday I consumed, in rough order: Texas caviar, guacamole, red tomatillo hot sauce, hot pepper dip, shrimp, corn-on the-cob, potatoes, pork ribs, a perfectly cooked hot dog (took a bite from my four-year-old's leftovers-father's prerogative you know), potato salad, a second set of pork ribs and two chocolate brownies. That's just a mess. A wonderful, over-the-top, tasty, uplifting, satisfying, happy, delightful, delicious...

by Adam Jones 

Someone sent me a thank you note on Wednesday night. It was a friend spending his first Thanksgiving away from Texas and the note reminded him of things past. Remember a few years ago when we were all at my house? No one had any family in town and we ended up playing cards all night. That was a good day. Thanks for that.

It's really one hell of a life isn't it? I mean when one can be thanked for basically accepting a Thanksgiving invitation. For arriving on time, for eating food someone else prepared, for drinking beer, laughing, playing cards...for this I am thanked. My friend had the gratitude all backwards. I was the divorced dad with no place to go. Someone had to take me in, didn't they? Actually, no one had to. There are no guarantees in life. Fast forward eight years and I am being thanked for being fed. Hell of a life isn't it?