My 1986 Dodge Ram pickup truck—the aging Rambeaux—sits at my buddy Fred’s house in Texas most of the time. When I show up stateside for a visit, as I recently did, I renew Rambeaux’s registration, make sure he’s inspected and insured, and rely on him to get me around for a couple of weeks. If it’s one of those trips where Katka and I head down into Mexico for a year or two, I depend on him even more.

You might say Rambeaux is for me what Rocinante was for Don Quixote—a noble steed, a bit beyond his prime, but still reliable.

I bought Rambeaux from friend John Yearwood back in 1996 for $1,800. That was 17 years and about 130,000 miles ago. And he’s still got legs. He must be the best bargain on a ride I ever got.

Rambeaux has taken me deep into Mexico at least a dozen times, including trips into the Copper Canyon and all around the Yucatan Peninsula and down into Chiapas to the Guatemalan border. He carries a low cover over his bed and sometimes I park up under the jungle canopy and crawl inside to sleep for the night. He’s also hauled me all over the western U.S., including several months in the southwestern deserts of Arizona and Utah.

But after all these years, Rambeaux is showing some wear and tear that worries me a bit. Over time, I’ve replaced parts of him: alternator, radiator, starter, solenoid, muffler and tailpipe, brake pads, various hoses and belts, battery (several times), and of course tires. Several years ago, in Mexico, I put in a rebuilt transmission. Once in Arizona, when I was low on money, I had to borrow a library book on carburetors (1986 was the last year Dodge put carburetors in its trucks, switching afterward to fuel injection), and by carefully following the instructions, I took the carburetor apart to clean out the fine desert sand that had sifted inside. It was quite a chore. But I even got it put back together without any pieces left over.

Considering the tough demands I’ve put on him, Rambeaux has held up well. He’s suffered only one minor traffic accident. That was in Mexico and it twisted his front bumper to the pavement on the right side. I had to bend it back up to drive away. He managed that mishap without missing a step. I think he’s much like the bionic Six Million Dollar Man, only a lot cheaper. His air conditioner never has worked.

Whenever I show up with Rambeaux, certain folks invariably ask me why I don’t get a new vehicle. They think I should sell him or trade him in, that he’s just too old. Any ride that age has got to be unreliable, they say. And probably unsafe.

That attitude strikes me as awfully cold-hearted. What sort of person ditches an old friend just because he’s getting a bit stiff, a little fickle, and sometimes need professional attention?

Last month, during my most recent trip to Texas, Rambeaux served me admirably. He only quit on me twice, and one of those times he started right up again after half an hour and ran just fine. No explanation, though it happened in the middle of a huge rainstorm and I figure he simply felt too soggy to run and needed to rest for a while. I certainly recognized the feeling.

The other time he quit was a bit more serious. But he did have the foresight to do it right on the outskirts of Tyler. That’s up in northeast Texas. I was on my way to Jefferson to visit Kathy Patrick and the Pulpwood Queens Book Club. That’s another story and maybe I’ll tell it sometime. The main point is, my good buddy Randy Mallory lives in Tyler and he came to our aid. We were able to get Rambeaux to Randy’s mechanic, Bruce McDow over at the Firestation Service Center, and Bruce fixed us up in short order. Turns out there’d been a short in the electrical system and a couple of wires burned through causing the voltage regulator to melt down. That poor voltage regulator looked like one of those clocks in a Salvador Dali painting.

In the end, I lost about four hours of travel time. And it cost me about $150. But as anyone knows, that’s a very low price for recovery from a breakdown. I figure Bruce was a Good Samaritan doing a generous deed for a stranger from out of town. He and Randy rescued us like they’d been planning for it all along.

Rambeaux finished the rest of my stateside trip without a hitch. Well, his windshield wiper motor did freeze up, so I had to use Rain-X to get through a shower or two. And his right headlamp eventually went out after that earlier rainstorm but that was easy to fix. Those are the sorts of things that can happen to any ride at any time and you just have to expect them. Anything made in a factory breaks now and then, that’s a fact. It’s explained somewhere in laws of thermodynamics, I believe. So I didn’t take it personally, and neither did Rambeaux.

Still, now that I’m back here in Prague and Rambeaux is parked at Fred’s house in Texas taking a long rest, I’m wondering whether he’s up to another long trip down into Mexico. Katka and I are thinking of going there later this year. Come this autumn, should I ask Rambeaux to cinch up and get ready? Would that be asking too much of my faithful friend?

After all these years and all our adventures, it would feel strange to be down there below the border without him. I recall once in Chiapas, when we were traveling to San Cristobal de Las Casas and were snaking our way up a jungled mountain road, how we came around a sharp bend to find more than a hundred rebel Zapatistas holding machetes and blocking the road. Most steeds would’ve turned right around at that sight. They’d have fled. But Rambeaux just kept moving forward to see what the ruckus was about. That kind of fortitude would be awfully hard to replace.

Woody Allen famously said he wouldn’t belong to any club that would have him as a member. I’m not that picky, but I’m not really a joiner, either. I belong to very few self-identified groups. PEN International, the writers’ organization that promotes freedom of expression and literature around the world, is one of them. The Big Thicket Association, an environmental advocacy non-profit trying to protect ecologically sensitive land and water in East Texas, is another. I contribute to a few other non-profits and probably am counted a member of them by default, though I don’t actively participate in the groups’ business.

All that said, I am very pleased to have been recently elected a member of the Texas Institute of Letters (TIL). One doesn’t apply for membership to the TIL. One is inducted to it. A writer is selected to belong to the TIL based on literary achievement. In short, it is an honor to be invited along.

And I do feel honored, very much so. And deeply appreciative. While any writer wants his work to be appreciated by readers, it is especially gratifying for his work to be recognized by his colleagues in the writing craft.

If you go to the web page of the TIL, you’ll learn that the group’s purpose isn’t merely to bestow honors, of course. The page says, “The Texas Institute of Letters is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to stimulate interest in Texas letters and to recognize distinctive literary achievement.” The TIL also gives awards for published works each year and, in partnership with the University of Texas at Austin, supports the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program for writers.

Those are great causes, in my view, and I’m very happy to be able to support them now as an official member.

One result of all this is that I’ll be hopping a plane here in Prague and traveling to Texas for the annual TIL conference on April 5-6. I don’t think there’s a special ceremony for inducting a new member, but the weekend meeting is being held in San Marcos this year and there are several events to which I’m looking forward. Among them is a Friday evening reception hosted by the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University. The superb Wittliff Collections is home to the literary archives of many TIL members.

When I heard about that event, I decided to take a look at just who belongs—and has belonged in the past—to the Texas Institute of Letters, which has been around now for 80 or so years. What I learned is properly humbling. There is J. Frank Dobie himself, and Roy Bedicheck, Horton Foote, Molly Ivins, Bill Brett, James Crumley, Fred Gipson, and Larry L. King. There’s John Graves, Bill Moyers, Larry McMurtry, James Lee Burke, Pete Gunter, Francis Abernathy, and Leon Hale. Wonderful writers, all of them. And the list goes on and on, among them fine writers I am pleased to call my friends, including Jan Reid, Kip Stratton, Debra Monroe, Joe Lansdale, Gary Cartwright… well, I just can’t list them all, there’s too many and I’ll surely embarrass myself (or insult a good friend) by leaving someone out.

As I look at the schedule for the upcoming activities, I’m especially pleased to see that my friend Stephen Harrigan, a wonderful writer of novels, essays, magazine pieces and screenplays, will be the recipient of the Texas Institute of Letters’ 2013 Lon Tinkle Award for Excellence in Lifetime Achievement. Well done!

So, I am excited. And honored. And gratified. Thanks to all my readers, and thanks to all my brother and sister writers. Everything we do is based on those simple signs we call letters: the alphabet. And that’s what I think of when I think of the Texas Institute of Letters—an organization based, ultimately, on crafting the letters of the alphabet to tell stories. And that is, indeed, a club to which I am very proud to belong.

It’s snowing in Prague today. It’s been falling for two weeks and there’s more snow to come. The world is white. And cold. Well, it’s winter here, so that’s to be expected.

This is the time of year when I feel most like sitting by the hearth, so to speak, in the cozy warmth of my home, in the big comfortable reading chair beneath the lamp, my feet up, with a cup of hot coffee and a good book.

I am feeling very much like a hobbit, it seems, for this agreeable scene—the cozy home, the comfortable chair, the hot drink, a good book—is what I imagine Bilbo Baggins would be doing if he was here in my place.

Maybe that’s why I was drawn to read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy over the recent holidays. The story of the ring quest—or, more precisely, the quest to get rid of the ring—is a wonderful tale, an exhilarating adventure, and exactly what I needed in the way of a holiday escape.

Afterward, I read Tolkien’s prefacatory book, The Hobbit, which isn’t nearly so good as the trilogy but a fine setup for it, and a biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, from which I learned that he was a longtime student (and teacher) of Icelandic sagas and Norse languages, the fertile northern soil from which he grew his own mythology and created the elf and dwarf languages for his ring stories.

Tolkien was himself a bit of a hobbit, one who lived inside his imagination as much as in the external world, and I found that encouraging for I do much the same. In fact, the older I become the more I prefer my imaginative world to the so-called real one. If this trend continues, by the time I die I will be living altogether in a dream world, much as I did as a fetus inside my mother’s womb. That would close a circle in time, I suppose, an idea that appeals to me.

Since the turn of the new year, having finished my epic journey to Mount Doom to dispose of the One Ring, I’ve continued the reading binge, perhaps as a way of staying close to my imaginary hearth as mid-winter snow piles up outside the door. One does cling to contentment. My reading choices have been eclectic.

I eased into the post-Tolkien reading with a fascinating collection called The Sagas of the Icelanders, with a preface by writer Jane Smiley, for a taste of what has fed so much of northern European literature (and music, too, if you consider something like Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, or The Ring of the Nibelung). Those Vikings were fascinating characters, I must say, and the sagas recount their exploits with a direct, concrete language full of powerful, emotive poetry even though the sagas are narrative in form.

And after that reading adventure I hopped the Atlantic Ocean and many centuries to enter the frontier world of Deadwood, the Dakota Territory, circa 1876, in Pete Dexter’s Deadwood. It was a bit of a shock, that leap, but one I enjoyed a great deal. I’ve never seen the cable TV series Deadwood but I understand many of the characters are the same because both the book and TV series are grounded in real historical events and persons: Wild Bill Hickok, who was murdered in Deadwood, and his pal Charlie Utter, and Calamity Jane, Sheriff Seth Bullock, Sol Starr, the notorious saloon owner Al Swearengen, and a host of others. Dexter’s novel is gritty and funny and sad and gripped my imagination. I could not help but think that the mythic stories of the Wild West are to U.S. Americans what the Icelandic sagas are to northern Europeans.

Then, having spent enough time in Deadwood, I recrossed the Atlantic and shot ahead several decades to visit the late 1930s and early 1940s in Europe, those years of secret intrigue and fiery conflict when a continent brutally cannibalized itself, as recreated in the suspense novels of Alan Furst. I’ve read all his books—they remind me of John le Carré’s work, or what Graham Greene might have written if he’d possessed Martin Cruz Smith’s talent for descriptive detail—so this was a return visit to four of them: Spies of the Balkans (very good), Blood of Victory (also quite good, though the ending is too abrupt), The Foreign Correspondent (another fine story that ends too abruptly), and Dark Star (surely one of his best books). The first three novels above are among his most recent work, and what with their abrupt endings I wonder if Furst isn’t getting a bit tired. Or perhaps he simply gets weary during the writing of each book and now quits when he can go no farther; I understand how that can happen, for writing a novel is a bit like running a marathon. In any case, the more recent novels are still juicy reads and I recommend them. But for a taste of Furst at the top of his game, I recommend earlier works such as Dark Star (1991) and Red Gold (1999).

Well then, enough. See how I’ve wandered about in my wintry dream world? But I suppose that’s what a hobbit does when the ground outside is covered with snow and the air is freezing while the reading chair inside beneath the glow of a lamp is so warm and comfortable.

Meanwhile, my writing desk across the room calls to me. It is feeling lonely. I watch it with a bit of trepidation. Writing, such a hard labor. While reading is such an easy joy. But seasons change, the snow will melt. So I must pull myself from the cushioned chair by the imagined hearth and sit myself in the harder chair at my desk.

Back to work.