BIG JOHN SMITH
Every year at spring break, he drags his whole brood out to the Big Bend or the Guadelupe mountains to study honey mesquite or prarie flame-leaf sumac, spotted bats, desert shrews or some other bizarre and little known species. He's lots of fun to go camping with if you don't mind him stopping every fifteen seconds for samples. He's a compulsive collector, his entire garage full of unsorted plant specimens, a fact that brings him considerable grief from Variety. She calls him the "garbage man" and warns he's "talkin' trash" when he gets excited about a new species.
The truth is she dotes on her big black garbage man
and defends him like a cornered badger. She can pick on
him all she wants, but don't you try it...not that anyone
with a brain pan bigger than a thimble would be fool
enough to pick on a man his size.
