Contents -- Part One El Paso -- Earth-Life -- Rabbiting -- Dee -- Upper Valley Night -- What Hemingway Meant -- Along Mamie Road -- Plaza People -- The Barbershop -- Skateboarders -- Love in Smokey's Barbecue -- Rhythms -- Essence -- In Clint -- Bird-Life -- Earl -- Two O'Clock in the Heat -- Old Mesilla -- Late Afternoon -- Part Two Teaching -- The Page-after-Page -- Commitment -- Tuna Fish -- Vietnam -- "Hey, Prof, Why Don't You Set Yourself on Fire?" -- Iraq -- Chicanos, Hair, and Conscientious Objectors -- Requiem for a WASP School -- "Will You Hold Me?" -- Music -- Crash Montoya and Ivory John Doe -- Other Worlds -- Part Three Journals -- Part Four Central Texas -- The Spell -- The Unexpected Other -- Neighbors -- Home Town, 1943 -- Home, at Sundown -- Big Band Days -- At the Pavilion -- Grona's Crossing -- Shade -- Nobody Whistles Anymore -- Peas -- Byron and I -- The Ranch -- On a Hillside -- Hackberry Afternoons -- The Cabin Place -- Of a Mouse and Me -- The Sun -- Memories and Moments -- Outsider -- The House in Fredericksburg -- New Year's Day -- Grief -- "Tell Me Something" -- Home Town Revisited -- Plenty of Juice and Rest -- Fall Afternoon -- Meditation on a Photograph -- Partners -- In Center Point -- Remembering Carlton Stokes -- Home Again -- Looking for Byron.