Goodbye, Mr. Spike I offer, for your reflection, a painting of Spike, a fine little Peekapoo, who died at 1:30 p.m. Friday, February 04, 2005, after a lifetime of struggle against forces much larger than he. He was a found dog, brought to us by a lady on her way to work one morning in May two years ago. She found him out on the road in front of our place dodging traffic and looking worried...

No sooner had the car thumped over the body lying in the sandy rut in the West Texas desert, than someone yelled, “Hey . . . wasn’t that Turdy we just ran over?” “I believe it was,” came the whiskey-slurred reply from someone in the back of the car...

I captured him, so it was my job to hang him, Joe said.  As the rope snapped tight around Donny’s neck, my stomach and throat fused... I remember thinking, “This isn’t right.” His face turned blotchy, varying between red on his forehead to green and yellow around his mouth and nose...

“Here?” I shouted loudly, tapping the top of the box with my hand as though Donny, my cousin who was inside, could see where I tapped. “No . . . here,” he tapped back, as though I could see where he tapped. “Here?” Tap, tap . . . a little farther back...

“Be quiet . . . it’s coming . . . “ My mother said it so softly that I barely heard her voice. I couldn’t hear her above the radio. It had been on continuously for days. The announcer kept breaking in to say that it was almost over, that any minute now an announcement was expected from Supreme Allied Headquarters that World War II was over...

“Lincoln tower, Bonanza 473 Alpha Bravo, ready to go,” I said into the mic. It was one of those rare fall days when an airplane responds as if it were simply an extension of your body and mind. I couldn’t wait to line up with the runway and push the throttle forward...

“It snowed last night,” said my wife as I hauled myself out of bed. She was performing a daily ritual I silently called “the struggle.” It’s an unfair thing to say. What she’s really doing with her lotions, potions and nostrums is re-accenting for me the physical things I so like about her...

Or, The saga of how Harlan Wyrick broke his new meter stick killing snakes in the girl’s room and how, as a result, Dick Budig got to spend many an afternoon in the principal’s office waiting for his diploma  I’m not sure, anymore, whether it was the snakes, the beer, showing off for the girls, or the sudden realization that this event – the senior picnic for the class of 1956 — might be our last opportunity to act foolish and get away with it...

When space permits, the McCook Gazette will publish columns by Richard Budig. In his bio he writes, “I was raised in McCook. Arrived in 1936 as a month old child adopted by Arthur and Angela Budig. Always had a hankering to be a writer, and shortly after my discharge from the Air Force in the early 60’s, Al Strunk, then owner of the McCook Gazette, gave me a chance to write for the paper. ...

Physically, Blind Sam was mostly bones covered by a loose suit. It was a shapeless, dirty suit draped over an Ichabod Crane shape. Rarely did I see this lanky old man in clean clothes. He looked like a food-spotted, pin-striped, blue serge bag slung over a bent old skeleton. ...