Hi. I’m Erik.

As I was changing the date above to begin writing a post about what’s happening now, I mistakenly starting typing 1925 and immediately it came to me how different my life would have been 100 years ago when my great great grandfather was about my age. Here’s a picture of him in his 90s.

In 1925, Charles Lafayette Reid would have been 66, 7 years older than I am now. He lived his entire life in Texas and died there in 1958 at the age of 99, nearly 6 years to the day before I was born. Here’s what I know about him, thanks to Jon Krampner who wrote a biography of Charles’ granddaughter and my great aunt, Kim Stanley. Here’s an excerpt from that book.

(My grandfather, J.T.) “lived in a fertile area of South Texas between San Antonio and Houston. The third of eight children of Charles Lafayette “Big Red” Reid and the former Nan Pauline Knowles, J.T. lived a frontier life. His family’s ranch was on rich bottomland along the Guadalupe River, with rattlesnakes and panthers living in the nearby woods. When floods led to an explosion of mosquitoes whose bites gave most family members malaria, the Reids moved to a ranch on higher ground.

There, J.T. happily spent the years of his early adolescence as a young cowboy, riding the pastures with his older brothers, doctoring calves for screwworms and bulldogging them in the corral for branding, marking, and castrating. As evidence of the Reids’ growing status and success, they had a surrey with fringe on top pulled by two bay horses, Bob and Kim.

In addition to Big Red, his wife, and their eight children, the family consisted of Big Red’s father, J.T. Reid (for whom Big Red’s third son—my grandfather—was named), and his wife Ellendea. Although a native of Alabama, the elder J.T. Reid had been a captain in the Fiftieth Tennessee Infantry, which fought in the Civil War at Vicksburg and Chickamauga. He lost his left arm in the war and, in later years, was known to rub his stump and mut-ter, “Those damn Yankees!” Despite this injury, he lived to be ninety-five.

Longevity was a trait of the Reid men: Big Red would live to be ninety-seven, Kim’s father ninety-two.”

I can’t imagine what that would have been like, yet I’m amazed at all the synchronicities and connections to these people I never met. They had just lived through a civil war in the US. I wonder if I might be heading into the first of my lifetime. They lived a quiet life in the Texas countryside. I grew up in Rhode Island dreaming of living in a cabin in the woods—a dream I’m now living. My great great great grandfather rubbed his stump and bemoaned the “Damn Yankees!” only to wind up being the reason this queer damn Yankee is here at all.

Yet, despite all this, the strangest of these synchronicities lies in the names of my great great grandfather’s horses that pulled his surrey with the fringe on top. Bob is my younger brother’s name. Kim was my dad’s name, and his aunt was Patty Reid until she became Kim Stanley when she took her stage name from him.

So that’s what I’m thinking about right now. In other news, my first book will be out in March of 2026, and I’m exploring new ways of being a content creator. But not content as in contents. Like content as in contentment.