Some Things I Did

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Some Things I Did covers the experiences Roxy and Judy had while going through orientation for working in project VISTA back in 1968. While others searched for revolution, social order, or whatever else a person can search for, Roxy and Judy already had what they were looking for and could afford the time to take in the scenery and paint their world with eyes unclouded with judgment or ideology. The result is a friendly, affable, and ultimately honest commentary on America.

Some excerpts from the book:

"On a warm bright Sunday afternoon Karen said, 'Do you really want to go into VISTA and make middle-class Americans out of everyone?' I really hadn't thought much about an answer, but it was easy, I said, 'No. It just seems like maybe a good way to live for a year or so. And if I don't, I'll get drafted.'"

"Once I wrote a story that had Jim Gillett in it. I didn't expect anybody to know who Jim Gillett was. He was a silly old egotistical Texas Ranger who wrote Six Years with the Texas Rangers. At an old Rangers' Reunion in 1936 or so, he said he helped kill Sam Bass. Another old Ranger sitting beside my grandfather -- who'd brought his father, a one-time member of the Frontier Battalion -- said, "That lyin' old son-of-a-bitch. He was scratchin' lice at Menard with the rest of us when they got Sam Bass.'"

"Robert Hale and I for a reason known only to our twelve-year-old minds and certainly forgotten now, cut a wagon trail over the hill fiftey years after wagons disappeared from Texas. Except the wagon Willis Tate, my grandfathers' neighbor, left. Willis was a dirty old man who lived on the next section and went to live with his daughter where he drowned in a flood. He gave his farm wagon to my grandfather. My grandfather left it under the point of the hill where it sat and rotted. Until finally, in my hysterical need to find the past, I wired it together and by hand pulled it around the pasture on the lonesome summer road. I pulled it damn near a mile to a grassy draw where it still sits."

Critical praise for Some Things I Did:

Roxy and Judy Gordon are two very nice people with an open and perceptive way. Reading Roxy's book is to meet them.