Last fall, I received an email from a man in South Mississippi who wrote
that his brother had published a book, a collection of short stories remembering his
childhood and some of the funny circumstances of his adult life. I read the
first two chapters and immediately call the man back and I told him I would
narrate the book. I think these stories were initially posted on social media for
fun, but with a growing list of readers, he was prodded to publish
the stories. And it's my understanding that the writer resisted for a time and
finally gave into peer pressure and published the book. The author's name is Beau
Ray. The title of Bo's book is as per y'all's requests. The book
You Were About to Hear is available to buy on Amazon, and the audio
version is available on Audible. I'll paste the links in the description. Thank
you, Brad and Beau for allowing me to read this and share your memories
with this audience. It has been one of the most enjoyable projects this amateur
and unpolished narrator has done. This reading is about three and a half hours
long. It's not a monster story, it's a people's story. Mostly you
will laugh, you will identify with some struggles he has as an adult male,
and you'll be moved by a tribute to Bow's brother who he lost a
while back. And if you were born like me at the end of the
boomer generation, you will remember and now as per y'all's requests written by Beau
Ray. Author's note, I currently reside on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I'm
just an ordinary guy with ordinary but unique memories. I've lived a charmed life
with great parents and great brothers and a perfect wife. I've collected and written
these stories over the years, with friends and family encouraging me to assemble them
into a book, and so here we are. The poetry comes to me
spontaneously and without warning, and there's nothing I can do to stop it,
and I'm compelled to write it down. Some people have attacks of gout.
I have poetry attacks. Mark Twain said, I like a good story well
told. That's the reason I'm sometimes forced to tell them myself. So if
you're in the market for a well told good story, you should pick up
a copy of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, because the following is a collection
of mediocre stories told with a fourth grade level mastery of grammar. For years,
people have been pestering me to put all these stories in a book.
Well, now look what you've done. I hope you're happy with yourselves.
I hope you enjoy reading these stories as much as I enjoyed living them.
As per y'all's requests, Reader Reviews, best book I've read this year,
Bo's mother, January two. It was the perfect thickness to put under the
leg of our wobbly kitchen table. Bigger than Old Man in the Sea,
yet smaller than War and Peace, Bo's brother. If I could read,
I bet he'd be really good. Several of Bo's friends. I never thought
he'd amount to much. Apparently I was right, Bo's fourth grade English teacher.
There seems to be a disproportionate number of poop stories. Homeless guy behind
the Exon if he spent half as much time mowing them is writing these silly
stories? We could find the other El Camino in the front yard, Bow's
wife. Did I mention the unusual number of poop stories? Homeless guy again
behind the Exxon? Chapter one? Mima also and popaws. Even though we
resided in Jackson, Mississippi, we lived on the Gulf coast, and Jackson
is where we went to school, to the doctor, and to bed on
time. The coast is where we fished the bayous and hunted bob white quails
and the tall pines, and guzzled Bark's root beers by the wooden crateful.
Life for a boy was good down there. Many a Friday and nearly every
holiday throughout the year, we'd load up in Daddy's nineteen sixty two Chevy Biscayne,
affectionately known as Choka Boom and head for long beach off weed sputter,
Mama, Daddy, Me and my brothers, Brody and Brad. In boytime,
the drive was longer than a trans atlantic voyage, but in real time
it was about three hours south down Highway forty nine. The stretch from Jackson
to Hattiesburg was nearly intolerable, mile after mile of cow pastures and thick woods,
with the monotony occasionally broken by the glow of a neon oasis as we
passed a motel, a truck stop, or a restaurant. Southward, we
drifted down the asphalt and concrete river in the Chocapoom. You could tell by
the changing landscape when we were getting close to our destination. Lying on the
floorboard in the back seat, I was hypnotized by the vibrations of the car,
the rhythmic thump of the tires hitting the expansion joints in the concrete sections
of the highway, and the warmth of the exhaust passing under me. Looking
up and out the rear window, I saw the canopy of the woods turned
to tall pines. There was hardly any undergrowth except for sage grass, a
coastal pine savannah I believe the scientists call it. The Chugga Boom rumbled south
into the northern fringes of Gulf Port, marked by rows of tiny pink howses
with happy little black children playing in the dirt yards. This portion of the
trip was especially exciting on any Christmas morning trip, as it seemed every kid
there had gotten a bike for Christmas, and the shiny spokes flashed like tensil
in honor of the season in the bright, clear morning sun. A few
blocks further south, we whizzed by the Coca Cola plant a few blocks more
and the air became fragrant, scented with the smell of salt water sea life
and sunshine. Once you hit Highway ninety, you were there the beach,
heaven, Nirvana, Valhalla, or whatever you call the good place your chosen
deity sends you after you die. We were at that good place Memo's House,
Chapter two, The Magic Truck. Mam and Daddy were originally from Long
Beach, as were their parents and my grandparents. My mama's parents, Ralph
and Mary, were known by the grandkids as Memo and Paupaul. Me ma
A worked in the school cafeteria, and Paupaul was a carpenter and worked for
Roy Anderson. To hear Paupo describe it, you'd believe he single handedly built
every structure on the Mississippi Gulf coast since the last Biloxi Indian crafted a tepee.
Now, I don't know for a fact that the Biloxis actually built tepes,
but of course, as a kid, you just assumed all Indians lived
in teepees. If one brick were set atop another anywhere in Harrison County,
Paupaul either did it or supervised it. We had no idea who this Roy
Anderson fellow was that Paupaul worked for. We just knew he worked for him
because his name was on the side of Paupaul's truck. Paupaul's work truck was
the totor of all things good. Like most work trucks, it had a
gun rack in the back window that held an umbrella a level in blueprints.
It also had a toolbox in the bed and a ladder rack on top.
The toolbox wasn't shiny metal like the ones today. It was wooden with galvanized
tin on the top and sides. A simple wooden box covered in metal,
very similar to the arc of the Covenant, I imagine, only with better
things inside. Popaul had built a toolbox himself right after he had gotten back
from beating the Germans on Guam. He was a sebee in Worldorld War II
and had been sent to Guam. Drawing on my vast knowledge of history,
I knew he had defeated the Germans in World War two, and thereby deduced
that Paupaul, having participated in the war and having been sent to Guam,
must have killed every German on Gwam, probably with his pocket knife. Anyway,
I was sure that he built his own toolbox, as well as a
lot of other amazing things surely we thought there must have been something much better
than tools in that toolbox, because he kept a padlock on it. In
our minds, a padlock wasn't a security device so much as it was an
invitation, an invitation to enter at all costs. On the rare occasions that
it was opened in our presence, we'd strain our eyes rapidly taking in all
that was inside before it was snap shut and the padlock again secured. All
we ever saw, of course, was tools. Why on earth would anyone
want to keep someone us out of their tools. It just didn't make sense
at all. Our dad didn't lock up his tools, though admittedly the few
he had were rusty and spread all over, generally because we left them outside.
The ability to use tools is, after all, what separates us from
the monkeys, and since we couldn't get to Paul Paul's tools, that left
us right smack dab there with the monkeys, toolless and stinky, millions of
years of evolution rendered senseless by a simple padlock. It makes perfect sense now,
though, why Paul Paul didn't want us meddling in his tools. Besides
the fact that they were expensive and he used them to make a living.
Idle hands may be the devil's workshop, but busy boy hands with tools can
become his global manufacturing facility. Welcome to Beelzebub Co. Inc. Makers of
Mayhem and all things unholy. A shudder at the thought. From dawn until
three pm Monday through Friday, that latter rack carried pipes, ladders, and
lumber, and on Saturday mornings before dawn, that truck carried a fourteen foot
aluminum john boat atop the ladder rack, a nine point five horsepower Johnson outboard,
and three very sleepy boys to the swamps of the Pearl River. Until
the day he died. Papaul carried the warranty card for his outboard and his
wallet, even though it had expired more than forty five years ago. You
can never be too safe when it comes to warranty issues. We always took
egg sandwiches and fishing cookies with us, as well as enough Bark's root beer
to live on for a year should we for some reason become stranded in the
swamp. Papaul bought Barks by the case and we consumed it by the case.
He believed it had medicinal purposes. After all, it said right there
on the carton good and wholesome. A product may be good, or it
may be wholesome, but a product that is both is indeed a rarity.
Fishing cookies were really just nut or butter cookies, not particularly marked to anglers,
but since we took them every time we went fishing, from that time
forth and forevermore, they shall be known as fishing cookies. I mean,
while would pack a brown paper a and p sack full of eggs, sandwiches,
and cookies, and pour up a thermos of coffee for Paul Paul and
wish us good luck as we climbed into the truck and she climbed back into
bed. I have no idea exactly where we went in those swamps, because
it was always dark when we left the house, and it was usually still
dark as we left the dock and motored at terrific speeds up and down the
foggy byues Pau. Paul wasn't a big believer in modern fishing equipment and anything
invented after the stick he considered modern. We used cane poles because they were
not susceptible to the problems of mechanical contrivances that had a higher than average failure
rate in the hands of young boys. The cane poles were fool proof and
easy to operate, and had no moving parts except the butt in where it
connected to one of us, and that part moved plenty. I guess a
boy could technically be considered a moving part, but probably more accurately, could
be considered an energy source like the Sun or un nuclear reactor. We weren't
fueled by hydrogen or uranium, though, but by pure sugar pumped into our
bloodstream by root beer and cookies. Papaul would, however, occasionally abandon his
lyddite ways and bring his wind up rigs, as he called them, was
a beautiful gem like Swedish made ruby red and Ambast five thousand, or his
fly rod with a Martin automatic reel on it. These were not mere fishing
poles, no sir, but magic wands, as far as we could tell,
shiny and mechanical. They needed input from the fishermen to conjure fish from
thin air or brackish water. As was the case, these things caught fish
without bait. A few twinkling twirly gizmos, the snagless sally, the jitterbug
or the cork bodied, rubber legged bug was all it took to pull green
trout and bluegills from the slick black water as vapors rose from its surface like
a simmering cauldron in the wheat pre dawn light. It was indeed magic.
We heartily lusted for such things, but were forced to make do with the
cane poles and worms. Fetching the worms was generally as exciting as anything,
though they were usually purchased the day before our outings from the apply. Named
a worm man, he lived in a little white house, just like all
the other little white houses on his street, except his had a poorly hand
lettered sign out front that proclaimed the availability of both red worms and nightcrawlers,
a veritable ichthological buffet. I believe he may have sold crickets too, but
my Pau Paul was not a cricket man, and on occasion when Paul Paul's
tree had some on it, we'd use cataba worms, but as a general
rule we used regular old worms. We drive into town, meaning gulf Port,
somewhere off twenty fifth Street, and Pau Paul would pick up a couple
of round cardboard containers full of worms he'd open them and poke them a bit
with his finger to make sure they were lively and juicy, and we'd concur
on both of their liveliness and juiciness, and he'd pay the man make a
little small talk, and then we'd be on our way. The next day,
under a warm summer sun, deep in the swamps of the Pearl River,
we'd catch shell crackers and bluegills in the old green trout, and even
a lost wayward crab until the worms coffee or root beer gave out, and
then we'd head for the truck with a rusty metal comb and ice chest full
of fish, bellies full of barks, and a lifetime full of memories.
Chapter three, The Great White Hunters, Strange crops, and honky talk quail.
As summer cooled into fall and fall darkened into winter, Popaul's magic truck
transformed yet again. It became a hunting truck, a bob white quail hunting
truck to be exact. This simple transformation was accomplished easily enough by placing the
dog box in the bed of the truck. Now, the dog box was
basically a wooden doghouse type of fair that fit in the back of the truck
and was used to transport the dog to and from the hunting grounds. Paupaul
always owned Britney Spaniels, although nowadays I think they're just called Britney's. The
two we hunted with were Buttons first, and after she died, Brent sniffed
out our birds. We knew coail season was fast approaching when the dog box
was loaded into the truck. On more than one occasion in the late fall,
when returning from one of the last fishing trips of the season, Papaul
would pull to the side of the road near any wooded pine prairie and blow
his quail call. Now I call mimicked the call of a female quail,
and Old Bob White, hearing it, would reply, Bob White. I
knew Old Bob's days were numbered. As Paul Paul made a mental note of
the place and we'd return several weeks later. And one of Paul Paul's favorite
places to hunt was the Penal Farm of Town. Now I know it was
land owned by one of the timber companies that bordered the penal facility on which
the prisoners operated a farm, But then we had no idea what a penal
farm was nor what grew there. We knew a cotton field yielded cotton,
and a cornfield produced corn, and a cow pastured Gray's cows. Paupaul told
us what a penal farm grew? What else but penises? Now that was
terribly funny to three little boys. Heck, it's still funny. Buttons and
later bred flush many birds from the fields and marsh bottoms near the penal farm.
Paupaul would often lament the fact that there were fewer and fewer birds and
more and more people in these woods. But we didn't understand. We would.
Later one day, after hunting several of our usual spots, Paupaul decided
to try a new place. We pulled off the road near an old,
deserted, run down honky toll, surrounded by encroaching woods. Paupaul was right,
there were quail there. Before we got out of the truck, we
saw a covey of birds at the rear of the dilapidated building. Paul Paul
swears they were flying up under the eve of the building to pluck wasp from
a large nest hanging there. As the diffused light of the warm late autumn
sun waned. We sat and watched the birds for a few minutes. I
don't recall if we even left the truck cab that afternoon. I don't think
we did, as it was late and by the time we unloaded the dog
and loaded our shotguns it would have been too dark to shoot. But I
think I understood the lesson of a honky tonk quail. Paul. Paul was
right again. There were more and more people in these woods. I don't
remember hunting quail much after that season Chapter four A lot like camelots lot,
A boy's neighborhood was his kingdom, and like real kingdoms, they varied in
size and natural resources. Some contained wooded sections and some had creeks or ditches,
while others had schools or parks within their borders. Now, most borders
were determined by large thoroughfares, which, like the rivers or mountain ranges and
real kingdoms made ideal borders. Any advancing hordes bent on pillaging and plundering a
nearby kingdom were generally stopped by a four lane thoroughfare and their moms warning not
to cross such. A boy's social ranking in his kingdom was determined much like
a real kingdom, again by the dangerousness of the items he owned. Simple
kid logic dictated that the more dangerous an item was, the more we desired
it. Had it been allowed, we'd have ridden around the neighborhood with a
twelve gauge and a half dozen hand grenades trapped up our handlebars. But alas
our parents were killjoys, most boys had some sort of pocket knife. Your
first one was usually a worn out or broken one passed down from your daddy
or some older male figure. Mine, as you would assume, came from
my Paupaw. I think one of its three blades was broken off when I
got it. I was pretty sure he had broken it off. Stabbing hitler
on guam. Gradually breaking off the remaining blades of your hand me down cutlery,
honing your knife, throwing skills, and stabbing pine trees and such afforded
you the opportunity to upgrade, and in our neighborhood, this was usually accomplished
at the Stop and Go convenience store. They had a first rate knife display
case. Every visit there would result in my asking for and the accompanying parents
denial of the purchase of the mother of pearl handled subject of my life lust
the slim Gem that was a fine five dollars oriental made knife as a boy
was likely to find anywhere. It was perfect as it had all three of
the qualities I was looking for. It was big, it was shiny,
and it was cheap. The giant bowie knife was also always attractive, but
the mother of pearl handle on the slim gem really sold it. Much like
the persistent drip of a Chinese water torture. My begging eventually caused about a
temporary insanity, and my mother relented. That beautiful slim gem was mine,
my own excalibur. My supremacy within the kingdom was then well established, as
all the other boys gave me the stink eye as I lorded my elegant slim
Gem over them, till the next week when some other kid would get a
Samurai sword, and not just any old sword, mind you, but his
dad, he's real, honest to God, took it off a jat and
chopped his damn head off with it. Samurai sword, Now that's hard to
compete with. Right there. Edged weapons fell out of favor, though,
as more powerful and lethal projectile weaponry was acquired Archery was dabbled in by a
few, but wasn't taken seriously because of the difficulty of the accuracy placing shots
and the expensive arrows which were easily lost. We only knew one kid with
a bow, so he was an oddity. Even without the bow, he
was an oddity. Most bows were far too difficult for a boy to draw,
owing to the fact that they generally belonged to their dads and had to
draw a weight greater than the kid wielded it wide, but that didn't stop
them from using them any more than our dad's golf clubs, being too long
and left handed, kept us from hitting rocks with them. One kid,
however, was particularly taken with archery and persisted in the use of his dad's
bow despite the sixty pound drawway. Naturally, in our minds, bows had
one purpose and one purpose only, and that was the shooting of cowboys.
The boy with the bow was by default an engine, while the rest of
us were cowboys and assorted pale faced Western figures that needed a good killing.
Now, we cowboys would run around hiding behind trees and out buildings while the
engine would launch and retrieve his lone arrow. This was a real bow and
a real arrow, mind you. And this went on until one day Squanto
connected with one of the cowboys. Luckily he was hitting the head, so
nothing important was damaged, and penetration was limited due to the badly worn and
blunted arrow and the fact that the engine could only draw the bow a few
inches. On TV, the arrows would rarely actually hit the cowboys, but
would most times lodge harmlessly in the tree or building behind which the cowboy was
hiding. Should you be hit, you'd simply pluck the arrow out of your
guts, or break it off if it had penetrated your whole body, plug
the hole with a filthy bandanna, and poured some whiskey on it. And
by next week's episode, instead of the maggoty festering, perforated colon painfully killing
you, you were fit as a fiddle and shooting engines again. I surely
had worked this way in real life, too, we wrongly surmised. I'm
thankful to this day that none of us was familiar with the story of William
Tell, so archery, while both deadly and fun, never really gained much
of a foothold in our kingdom. The BB guns were next up the list
of enviable deadly weapons. Every boy eventually had a BB gun. We were
very respectful of the power of our BB guns and for the most part,
used them safely. We rarely shot at each other and seldom caused any property
damage to speak of. All the kids in our neighborhood became adults with two
functional eyes, even if they didn't become much else. I'm sure one kid
had a BB lodged under the skin an inch below his eye, but as
they say, a miss is as good as a mile plus years later,
it made for good theater when he made the girl squeal when he'd moved around
with a magnet. Bottles and birds were our preferred targets, though, and
we roam the neighborhood stalking the wary sparrow with the same intensity and concentration as
any legendary African big game hunter, rhino or sparrow. There was little difference
in the stalk and the shot and the kill. Some may not agree,
but I believe the predator instinct is still within us, deep in the basic
programming of our brains, leftover for when our ancestors hunted the wooly mammoth,
the predator instinct, like our appendix was more necessary for our survival. I
think the instinct is still there even for those of us in which the appendix
isn't. Moving up from the bb gun was the more powerful pump up pellet
rifle, the Benjamin pellet rifle to be exact, or the Sheridan if you
didn't mind a wonky communist sized five millimeter pellets that were hard to get and
expensive. Now, these pneumatic rifles were just one step down from a real
powder burning gun. It's still suitable for suburban neighborhood usage. Any excess energy
that might have been wasted on mowing grass or washing windows or some other type
of nonsense was expended on pumping up one of these beasts. We all looked
like Johnny Wisemeller from pumping these things a thousand times a day. The Benjamin
could break the strongest of bottles, bottles that at red riders and deflicted bebies
like bullets off of Superman's chest. It could also handily dispatch any neighborhood game,
including the squirrel, which was the ultimate neighborhood trophy. A kid might
occasionally take a slow, puny, sickly squirrel with a daisy spitting image if
you had an incredibly lucky shot, but the Benjamin would knock them from the
top of the tallest pine tree deader than disco. If you had a Benjamin,
you may as well have had a bazooka or a full auto Tommy gun,
as you were the unquestioned king of the neighborhood. Chapter five Fishing Royalty
and Sparkly Major Awards. The rigs we used to fool our wary saltwater prey
were the exact same poles we used in the rivers, but instead of a
big water worms on the hook, we used a big water shrimp. Over
the Labor Day weekend, in nineteen sixty eight, Long Beach held its first
fishing rodeo and in the biggest, most blatant disregard for the rules of boyhood.
Whereas the older brother always got to be first at everything, Brody went
and won the whole shebang. He caught a fourteen ounce speckled trout that won
him both the Largest Fish Award and the King Fisherman Award, not one,
but two giant, gleaming silver trophies with the brilliant blue annidized name plates that
shone like sapphires at the bottom and leaping fish atop them. They were the
most fabulous things I had ever laid eyes on. No king had ever owned
anything as splendid, and the treasures of Solomon paled by comparison. I was
certain that God had one of these trophies on either side of his throne.
I learned the meaning of jealousy that day, for I was green with envy.
Mama still has those trophies, but now they kindle fond memories as opposed
to a blinding jealous rage. You see, a trophy was among the ultimate
possessions a boy could have, next to a pump up pellet rifle or possibly
a shwin stingray. What you did to win the trophy didn't really matter one
whit as its size and reflective properties were the most important thing. Your trophy
could have been for fishing or baseball, or a Nobel something or another.
Regarding physics or the pinewood derby, it didn't really matter as long as you
had one or better. Yet, several pen on metals were a weak substitute,
and it took quite a volume of metals a dozen or more. Something
akin to the number and assortment on a ten horned dictator's uniform to equal the
shine value of even the smallest of trophies. I would dare say that had
there been a choice between those trophies or a check for ten thousand dollars,
that Brody would have taken the trophies. I know I would have, And
fifty years later I occasionally fish from that same rock piled jetty in the Long
Beach Harbor, perhaps standing on some of the same rocks that burned our bare
feet in those award winning days fifty summers past. Chapter six. The white
trash at the end of the street. Our prisons are full of murderers,
thieves, crooks, kidnappers, politicians, and various other forms of undesirables,
but apparently the lowest form of human life known to exist freely wanders are streets
that would be white trash. According to Mama, there was nothing lower.
She never threatened bad behavior by saying, you boys better behave y'all want people
to think y'all are politicians. No, she'd say, y'all better straighten up.
But these people are going to think y'all are white trash. We'd have
rather died than been thought of as white trash. Unfortunately, however, the
family that lived at the end of me Mall Street was white trash. White
trashiness must not be a visible malady, since they all looked very much like
us. They too, ran around barefooted and shirtless from the day school let
out until schools started back the day after Labor Day. Our summer wardrobe consisted
of cut off blue jeans and dirt. Anything else was strictly optional and left
to the discretion of the wearer. We would occasionally put on shoes, but
the soles of our feet were generally much harder and blacker than the soles of
any shoe and could likely draw sparks from concrete. There were two boys around
our ages and an older sister that comprised the spawn of the white trash family.
I hesitate to mention their names because those that aren't in a correctional or
rehabilitative institute, or have it been killed in a our fight, may seek
retribution. I believe in hindsight that it was the older sister that garnered them
admission to the realm of white Trashtom, but I'm not one to start rumors.
We were forbidden to play with any of them. Play, by our
definition, meant to engage in pleasurable activity. Therefore, we felt free to
merely interact with the white trash family as long as we didn't enjoy it.
The white trash boys rode their bikes up and down me Mall Street, knowing
I believe that we were not to play with them. It was during one
of these taunting rides past me Mall's house that I decided to interact with the
oldest boy. It was spring or early summer, so thick tufts of wild
onions sprouted everywhere in the yard. If you've ever pulled one of these up,
you know what. A large water of dirt comes up with the stalks.
When grasped by the stalks and throne, this botanical whistle flies like a
dark dirt first stabilized by the trailing stalks. I thought it would be very
sporting to toss one of these onion darts at the white trash of velocipede jockey
as he sped past. After several passes, he was feeling quite confident of
his skills, and he rode by on the near side of the street.
An I let fly a particularly accurate onion projectile. It was on a perfect
trajectory for his head, and sensing the unavoidable, he took evasive action,
which consisted of rapidly ducking and slamming his forehead into the handlebar stem. Now
this would have been incredibly hilarious had he not opened a sizeable gash on his
head. As the blood began to flow, he pedaled to his house and
I ran inside Memo's house. I felt horrible, not particularly because I'd kill
someone with a clump of onion grass, but I really didn't want to be
locked up for the rest of my life, because I was only seven and
I had lots of plans Paul. Paul assured me that he probably was not
dead, and I was feeling a little better until the police car pulled up.
It might not be possible for a seven year old to die from heart
failure, but I came very close. Apparently, White trash Boy had gone
home and told his mama that I'd thrown a brick at him. I wish
that, at seven, I had had the strength to throw a brick any
appreciable distance, but alas it was merely a wad of dirt. White trash
Boy had lied to his mama and sick the police on me. You just
can't trust White Trash. Chapter seven, God Bless America and Chinese Fireworks.
Another interaction with the White Trash family involved fireworks. Fireworks are the kid equivalent
to corn liquor. Nothing good ever came from a misuse of either one of
these products, and generally a story rapidly deteriorates after the uttering of the words
liquor or fireworks. As in this story, we weren't allowed to have fireworks
and bottle rockets and Roman candles or any other pyrotechnic device that launched a projectile
of This effectively ruled out most fireworks. We were stuck with the most mundane
of all fireworks, sparklers and snakes. Snakes were the worst, because after
lighting them, you were done. You simply watched as a small black pellet
became a stinky, fragile, black, twisted cylinder of ash. Now,
this may have been a neat parlor trick before the Civil War, but was
hardly worthy of the moniker of fireworks. The sparklers were nearly as boring,
but at least you could wave them around wildly in circles, spewing hot sparks
in every direction, and as they spoke ut out, you were left with
a glowing red, hot metal rod. After several boxes of snakes, the
boredom was intolerable. The sparklers were our only hope, but we knew their
destructive powers were near zero, and so we held out little hope. Being
the oldest and the leader of our band, I quickly sprang to action and
devised a plan. We would use the sparklers in the usual fashion, running
around at full speed while twirling one in each hand, But when they were
just about to go out, we would throw them into the air and watch
as they cut a fiery trail through the night sky like Haley's comet. Well,
it was a brilliant plan, and timing was everything. You didn't want
to throw them too soon and waste valuable sparks that you could have waved in
wild circles, looking like a doomed helicopter. You also didn't want to throw
them too late, only to see the boring, faint dog glow of a
hot metal wire arcing through the summer sky. Ideally, your sparkler would sizzle
through the sky like a shooting star and die shortly after impact. The White
Trash down the street were apparently prouder of our nation's independence because they had real
firecrackers. Not to be outdone, we inched closer and closer to the property
line so they could see our jubulation and national pride as we tossed our sparkler
skyward in an attempt to make them look fun. The White Trash had been
celebrating for several days and had even camped out the night before in a tent
in their sideyard. After several minutes of this impromptu pyrotechnic competition, night suddenly
turned to day. One of the White Trash kids yelled fire, and we
all quickly realized that their tent was, as professional firefighters say, fully involved.
By the time a hose could be pulled from the house to the camp
site, which was fifty feet at the most, the tent was, again,
as professional firefighters might say, gone, nothing but a smoldering black spot
in the grass, surrounded by charred ropes attached to stakes. Now this was
before the days of government mandated fire retardants. In fact, I believe this
particular tint was actually manufactured by soaking canvas in gasoline and gunpowder. At any
rate. It was the most exciting thing we had lit the whole night.
I'm not trying to escape blame, but the fact that I had thrown a
sparkler in the general direction of the tent right before the blaze is hardly proof
that I in fact had destroyed their tent. I suspect being white trash and
all that the older sister smoked, and that smoldering cigarette which she had left
in the tent hours earlier, had caused the tent to burst into flames at
exactly the same moment I threw my sparkler. The white trash had we already
called a law on me twice, so thank god. The tent blaze was
over in a matter of twenty seconds, and the fire department wasn't needed.
Everyone stood around, stunned and astonished that a tent could disappear so quickly.
After a brief period of lamenting and finger pointing, the festivities resumed, but
were much calmer and more subdued than before then. The celebrations sputtered to an
inn like a wet sparkler. The hot summer night was thick with the smell
of sulfur and tin smoke. As we dragged ourselves inside and chugged one last
root bear and fell into bed as black and grungy and smelly as snakes.
Chapter eight. I must go down to the sea again. Wanderluss must be
genetic, a natural desire to explore and go new places. If not,
I guess everyone would stay where they were born, and there'd be an awful
lot of people in just one place. As kids, we first walked everywhere
we wanted to go. Then bicycles expanded our range greatly, like the horse
did for the earliest explorers. Imagine if our prehistoric ancestors had had bicycles when
they crossed the land bridge of the Bearing Straits, instead of wandering around the
frozen northern plains eating woolly mammos, they could have gone straight to Florida and
bought a condo and retired by passing one hundred thousand years of human history.
Theoretically, with a bicycle and a boat, you could travel every square inch
of the globe. Our family didn't have a boat when we were real young,
but Paul Paul did, and it soon became apparent that a boat could
take you places you couldn't otherwise go. We always wanted Pauppal to launch his
boat in the Long Beach Harbor so we could fish the waters of the Gulf
and be on We may as well have asked him to juggle flaming chainsaws,
as that was probably more likely to happen. As we got older and more
confident and a little more independent, it dawned on us that perhaps we could
go fishing on our own. Pop All seemed to be wasting a significant portion
of his life working, and we were sure that fish would buy it on
other days than just Saturday. We had nearly everything we needed, fishing poles
and a desire to catch fish, and Papa had a boat. The only
thing we liked was a way to transport the boat other than the aforementioned bicycles.
Our planning eventually led us to the obvious conclusion that if we intended to
use Papol's boat, then it had better be in a body of water nearby.
The closest water, the Gulf of Mexico, was, of course,
at the south end of Jeff Davis Avenue, and we could practically from me
Mao's house. It was decided that the golf would be the scene of our
next piskine harvests, and we just needed to put a fine point on the
details. At this stage in our journey through life, my friend Todd Wallace
usually accompanied us on our adventures, providing extra muscle and brain power. What
we lacked in one we more than made up for in the other, although
the particular trait found lacking, whether muscle or brain power, varied from task
to task. With our plan finalized, we approached Paul Paul about dropping us
off at the harbor early the next morning as he left for yet another wasted
day of laboring in the hot sun. Now this was not met with the
level of enthusiasm we had hoped it would be. He was pretty emphatic that
he did not want his outboard used in salt water, and really didn't want
us to operate it in any water, whether salt water, from water or
holy water. Luckily, our plans made allowance for such inconveniences. We said
we'd be willing to paddle if he'd just give us a lift to the beach.
We knew that paddling versus motoring meant we'd probably be limited to twenty miles
or so offshore, as opposed to say, having lunch in Havana, but
it was a compromise we were willing to make. Our counter offer to paddle
wasn't met with any more enthusiasm than our original suggestion, and was instead rebuked
with the seemingly impossible, sarcastic reply of if you can get it there,
you can use it now. I'm sure this statement was made with the same
intent meant by when pigs fly, but in only the way boys can.
We actually took this as not only permission, but a challenge. The next
morning, we were out in the yard loading our stuff from the boat Paul.
Paul had long since left, headed out to build a new hospital or
orphanage or some such nonsense. Me Ma asked just what we were doing,
and we explained that we were taking Paupaul's boat to the harbor to go fishing.
She expressed disbelief, but we assured her that he did indeed say we
could use it. The naval architects that designed that fine fourteen foot aluminum craft
had wisely foreseen just such as scenario where boys would be forced by stubborn adults
to carry their craft to the water, and they had wisely placed handles on
the boat, two aft and one at the bow. That's an auticle talk
right there. There were four of us, so we could trade off as
we grew tired, and in short order should be joining the golf breeze and
productive fishing. I briefly longed for my shepherd's coat hang Glider Sea chapter thirteen,
to ashing a sail from old Man in the sea style, but soon
dismissed such tangential planning as detracting from the current endeavor. The boat by itself
was pretty heavy, and the paddles and fishing gear and the root bears didn't
do anything to make it any lighter. But we didn't have but three quarters
of a mile or so to go, and we were eager to get going,
so off we went. The first ten feet or so was easy,
got a little harder after that. We had all day and not so much
else to do, which was a good thing, so we plotted on.
Now. I believe most of the root beers were gone by the time we
had reached the railroad tracks just to block away. Now. Our task was
not made any easier by the fact that the pavement was only slightly less hot
than free flowing magma. We probably ate the egg sandwiches just south of the
tracks. It's a good thing we brought the life jackets because the boat seats
got hot in the sun, and sitting in a boat on a sidewalk along
Jeff Davis Avenue eating egg sandwiches would have been unbearable had we not had the
life jackets to sit on. Now I realized that that is a run on
sentence that ended in a preposition, but rules aside, I think it conveyed
the scene nicely. By about three o'clock we had made it to Elix barber
shop and about a third of the way to the Gulf. We were tired
and hungry and out of root beer. We also learned a valuable and undeniable
truth of life, that being that while on a road trip, at whatever
point you decided to turn around, you are exactly halfway done. There was
great consternation and much brain power expended in solving our predicament. We discussed just
how we could get the boat in the trunk of a car, or lay
it on the railroad tracks and allow passing train to push it to New Orleans.
Just leave it there on the sidewalk in front of Elix and Hope Paul
Paul wouldn't notice it was gone. Our situation was growing desperate and there was
no resolution in sight. As we sat there in the brawling sun, dehided
brains of buzzing, we noticed a familiar vehicle approaching. It was Paul Paul
and a is Ry Anderson truck boy. Were we glad to see him?
I only wish that I could have said the same for him, but he
didn't seem as happy about the whole ordeal as we might have. Thank God,
one of the benefits of Paul Paul's inconvenient construction job was an early afternoon
quitting time. We never did make it to the gulf in Paul Paul's boat,
and had I known how to type, I might have sent off a
sternly worded letter to the manufacturer of the boat, advising them of the waste
of time and money it was putting handles on a boat. But instead we
went home and had a root beer or twelve, Chapter nine, Our Narrow
Escape from the shallow end of Davy Jones. Locker Yachting is a leisurely pastime
enjoyed by the wealthy, and on the odd occasion, dangerously dabbled in by
the underclasses. We were the occasional dangerous dabblers, having never owned a boat
of any size, My daddy decided we had to make up some time.
So we by passed the starter boats, you know, the small outboard powered,
center console trailer boats, and we went straight for the thirty three foot
twin engine offshore fishing boat. Now, I'm sure in my dad's mind the
decision went something like this, Well, it has a steering wheel, a
couple of shifters, and a couple of throttles. I can drive a stick.
Plus it's cheap. How hard can it be? Of course, that
same question could be asked of a Saturn five rocket minus cheap part. In
those days, Daddy did something at the bank. I'm still not sure to
this day just what it was, but it involved credit and credit cards and
a knowledge of win. Certain things like boats way beyond your nautical capabilities became
available due to the lack of payment by their original captains. Thus was acquired
the bees Hive. It was a thirty three foot Silverton a few years old,
sporting twin Chrysler V eights that just loved that in Bargo era marina gasoline
like a hobo loves ripple. Navigating was not really that hard, since anywhere
you wanted to go with Southish, and returning from wherever you went was always
Northish. Assuming the compass work, we could always get reasonably close to home.
At worst, we could possibly end up in Mobile Bay or in the
Louisiana Marsh, but mostly we made it back to the Long Beach. Harbor.
Ship Island, Cat Island, Horn Island were the only real obstacles and
all highly visible. Also, allowing a fourteen year old kid to plot courses
for a day's adventuring pose little risk. There was no GPS in those days.
You worked off a paper chart with parallel rules and dividers. You decide
on a heading and hammered down for the predetermined amount of time and eventually arrived
within about plus or minus twenty miles of your intended destination. Nautical navigation is
dead simple, and frankly, I'm flummixed by how long it took to discover
the New World. There was never a time I remember that we went out
without some event. Even the day we picked the thing up was exciting.
It was at Diamond Head Yacht Club we all boarded for our maiden voyage out
to the Jordan River and into the Bay of Saint Louis, and back leaving
was simple enough, as Dad idled forward out of the slip and headed for
the briny blue or in this case, the brackish Brown. Returning a few
hours later from our maiden voyage, found that the wind had picked up considerably
and we were to enjoy our first docking experience. Trying to back into a
slip and a stout wind is a tough thing for an experience captain and downright
impossible for that Jackson Banker with the new boat. After several tries and bouncing
off numerous sail boats, Daddy finally drove it up a small canal and grounded
it, and one of us leapt off the bow the boat and got the
harbormaster. He kindly backed our boat in for us, and I'm certain to
this day the folks dining in the restaurant over the harbor still remember that incident
and that their Thanksgiving dinner conversations begin with you remember back in nineteen seventy four
when we were eating at the yacht club that Saturday, and that guy and
that silverton hit every single boat in the harbor. I wonder if he's still
alive. Well, Lord knows he's lucky he still is, but it ain't
from lack of trying to die on the high seas and kill his whole family
with him. God does indeed watch over fools and children, and fools with
children. Our talking improved with time, not so much because Daddy's abilities improved,
but we devised a method where we'd liso the pilings and then manhandle the
boat into the slip with the lines. And what we liked in seamanship we
more than made up for in rodeo skills. One of our last trips out
was one of the most adventurous. My Paupa and my friend Rodney were along
for the experience that day. Up until the point that we thought we were
all going to die, it had been a fun, uneventful day, but
as I said, they never remained uneventful. We were somewhere between Ship Island
and Long Beach when my dad noticed that, even at full throttle, the
boat just wasn't moving very fast. The engine RPMs made it sound like we
were really moving, but we were barely making headway. Now, boats are
made of mostly corrodible materials and operated in a highly corrosive environment, and they
require constant, meticulous maintenance. We would have no truck with such tomfoolery.
Our way was such that you used things until they broke, and then you
repaired it with whatever you had on hand. Well, this philosophy worked fine
with lawnmowers and bicycles and even cars, but it's less than idea when it
comes to boats and especially airplanes. And thank god we never got one of
those. As in aside, and on a somewhat related note, let me
say that Jaguar xkes of the era were actually manufactured defective, so in our
defense, it wasn't really our fault that it was constantly in the shop.
But I digress. My Paupaul left the flybridge to go down and have a
look at the engine compartment. He was a CBE in World War Two,
and even though his specialty was construction, we reasoned that seb's were part of
the navy. Thus he was the most experienced sailor on board, and what
we needed was a Navy machinist mate, but we had a first class carpenter
and that would have to do. Upon opening the engine hatches, he discovered
the bilge was flooded and the motors about half submerged, but still running,
and Papaul suggested that Daddy point the boat at the nearest piece of land that
he could see, and had that way, and then Paul Paul jumped down
into the warm water to look for the problem. Daddy passed the wheel to
me and said head for the Gulf Port Harbor, which was just a nondescript
lighter spot on the horizon when viewed through the atmospheric haze. I'm sure at
this time Rodney was thinking he never should have gotten involved with these crazy people,
but now it was not the time for regrets. Now. Daddy rushed
to the radio and the salon and frantically issued a may day, we were
sinking. Time after time he repeated mayday, may day, may day,
but with no reply. It eventually became obvious, even though Daddy had no
formal nautical communications training, that the microphone attached to the radio that wasn't turned
on would not work with the radio that was turned on. He eventually sorted
out that problem and shortly had the coastguard and bound, and in the meantime
pap Paul had figured out the problem in the bilge through the whole connection feeding
the engine cooling water had broken. I can't imagine why, and it was
flooding the boat. He simply closed the seacock and allowed the bilge pump to
evenly remove the water from the boat as we waved off the coastguard and limped
home. I was glad to learn what a seacock did, but couldn't help
but think it'd be a cool name for a Marina restaurant that served fish and
chicken. They say heroes aren't made, that they are born, or perhaps
the other way around. I don't really know, but what I do know
is that memories can be foggy under situations of duress, and I suspect that
may be why some people remember that day differently, and some may have You
believe that when I was passing out life jackets, I held one back and
secured it around my fishing poles that I had gathered up in the frenzy of
sinking. Whether that's a result of the brain fabricating things under stress or the
truth, we may never know. The way I recall it was that I
passed out life jackets to the women, Mama and Case, and the children
Me Brody, bred and Rodney, leaving the captain in the ship's carpenter,
doomed to go down with the ship, and by down I mean eight or
possibly ten feet. In reality, they could have both probably remained seated on
the fly bridge with the rest of the boat sitting on the bottom of the
sound, and not gotten their shoes wet and waited on rescue in the shade
of a beemony top while we and my fishing poles all bobbed around in the
boat and life jackets. We eventually made it home, tired, sunburned and
smelling like a chum bucket and hungry. I sure could have gone for a
number five combo fried shrimp and a chicken leg down at Seacock's Fish and Chicken.
But alas, some dreams are not to be Chapter ten, The Ghosts
of Christmas' Past. Even though I was only in my second year my former
education, I was pretty sure there were twelve months in the year, or
such was the government propaganda being spewed at Iola Tapley Wilkins Elementary School in Jackson,
Mississippi in nineteen sixty nine. We could recite the months in order and
even spell most of them except February. February the second month. It didn't
matter that the year had twelve months, since kids really only cared about June,
July, August and December, summer and its blissful ignorance free from organized
learning, and Christmas. All those other months were just filler put on the
calendar by some monks to make the time between summer and Christmas some type of
character building experience. If it wasn't fun, it was always said to build
character, put hair on your chest or make your bone strong. Lord,
we should have all been calcified, Harry pillars of virtue. Any other time
that wasn't actually Christmas Day or summer break was merely time spent waiting for them
post Christmas awaiting summer, or post summer awaiting Christmas. We weren't completely oblivious
to the passage of time, and would have agreed with Einstein if we had
known who he was, that the speed of time can indeed very since recess
went much faster than did math. The first memories I have of the marking
of the passage of time, other than the large molasses fill malfunctioning clocks that
hung over the blackboards, was noticing the changing covers on the Ladies' magazines by
checkout stands at the local grocery store in July. As you hung on the
outside of the Liberty Supermarket buggy filled with snacks of sugar, packets of kool
aid, and pounds of maloney and weenies, you didn't care too hoots about
how today's modern housewife hosted a backyard summer gathering. Heck, we were living
it eventually, though, those publications featured covers filled with yellow leaves and orange
pumpkins and brown pie crusts. The turkeys they sliced next month on the covers
were always juicy, and if it took extra long for Wanda to ring up
your mama's grocery purchase, retrieve her Virginia slims from the rack behind the register,
and dispense the S and H green stamps, and then relate her weekly
trials, you could actually begin to smell that turkey from memory. The absolute
best covers, of course, were the upcoming Christmas specials. They touched every
soul, greens and reds, and silvers and gold and tensil and lights,
and every imaginable tasty treat. Those particular magazine covers and ads within were captivating.
Just close your eyes and you can see them too. A late winter
sun sets behind a claborate country church, offering just the faintest smudge of pink
through the dark woods. In the distance, stars already filled the darkest part
of the sky, and snow blankets everything. A pair of cardinals snuggle on
a frosty limb in the foreground, as one horse, open sleeve filled with
presents, makes its way down a narrow lane toward the warm glow issuing forth
from the church windows. The quintessential image of Christmas, all neatly wrapped up
in one image, inviting you to sample the smoothness and the flavor of America's
favorite cigarette or Kentucky Bourbon. These ads were so beautiful and powerful that,
even though I was only eight, I thought of asking Sanna for a fifth
of Old Granddad and a carton of pall Mall's, you know, for their
flavor and smoothness. To this day, there is but one Christmas magazine cover
memory that haunts me, not in a Jacob Marley type way, but in
what a bunch of line bastards type way. I remember being particularly enthralled by
a cover photo of stained glass cookies. They were just simple sugar cookies with
openings cut in them, and were filled with crushed life savers that supposedly melted
to fill the opening with beautiful transparent colors, producing cookies that rivaled the windows
in the cathedrals of France. Or so the blurb on the cover said.
Exceedingly accurate timing was necessary to produce these cookies, accuracy apparently achievable nowhere else
on Earth except the Betty Crocker NASA Atomic Time Keeping Cookie Production Facility, located
deep underground in one of the Rocky Mountain States. Try as she might,
Mama could never coordinate the melting of the life savers to coincide with the cookie
part being the perfect dunness. One or the other was all overdone or underdone.
You either had perfect cookies with bumpy glass in which some of the letters
from life savers could still be read, or if you got them hot enough,
the life savers would flow nicely filling the opening of your now black cookies.
And as far as I'm concerned, there should be no statute of limitations
for prosecuting cookie fraud. Chapter eleven the Wish Book. You'd think the stained
glass window cookie debacle would have soured a youth on the commercialization of the entire
Christmas experience. But you'd be wrong. There was, in fact a printed
assemblage that embodied the entire Christmas experience neatly and holy within its shiny, soul
altering pages. To this day, I can remember its arrival in the mail,
the way it smelled, the way its newly sheared pages and static attraction
and offered slight resistance upon first opening it. Oh the things it contained.
And I'm speaking, of course, of the Seers Wish Book. It usually
arrived in a timely manner, in keeping with the season, and as best
as I can recall, it wasn't delivered with the Labor Day half off all
barbecue grill circulars like today's first holiday advertisements. At the time, my daddy
actually worked for Seers, which, with the popularity of the Wishbook, you'd
have thought was tantam out to working for Santa Claus himself. Besaus was not
the case, and he had very little to do, nothing at all really
with the Wishbook, unless, of course, you'd like to set your purchases
up on a ninety day easy payment plan. You see he was an account
executive in the finance department and calculated interest payments on Missus Lewis's new avocado green
Ken Moore refrigeration. On our frequent trips to Sears in downtown Jackson, we
learned a lot. I don't actually recall seeing exactly where my dad conducted his
daily tolls, but I do know it wasn't at the popcorn machine, at
the candy counter that filled the store with the aroma a fresh popped corn,
or even in the automotive department where men changed tires on loud, hissing,
clanking machines that a boy could watch for hours. He didn't even work in
the basement that could function as a fallout shelter should brash Nev get a little
deep in the vodka and grow bored with just looking at the big red button,
the very same basement that was transformed yearly into a Christmas toy wonderland.
I'm not sure what Daddy had done to deserve such a poor job as credit
manager, as opposed to running the popcorn machine, or changing tires, or
even helping set up the toy land, but he managed to keep us in
kool aid, weening and space food sticks the day the mailman left the wishbook
in our mailbox until we actually unwrapped the presence selected from within its pages were
heady times. Indeed, Brody, Brad and I would each select a unique
color of crayon to circle the particular booty we desired from the wishbook. We
were usually relegated to colors such as burnt sienna, raw umber, and the
like, since all the real colors had long since been used up or broken
into pieces too small to even use. Even brick red was unusable, having
been just weeks ago used to nub in a Thanksgiving drawing which depicted a large
number of semi nude Indians. Some items had multiple circles, while some had
single circles, and there were even portions of the Wishbook that remained a pristine
Now you'd see these silly sections as you flip past them heading to the toyes
and wonder just why on earth anyone would have any interest whatsoever in receiving underwear,
a hand carved Meershan pipe, or a vacuum cleaner with twice a suction
of the next best selling model, or, for that matter, a pair
of tusskin jeans are. We poured over our copy of the wishbook for hours,
like scholars studying the Dead Sea scrolls, only with more intensity. We'd
work ourselves into a frenzy with anticipation, sometimes even to the point of sickness.
Our cardboard fireplace roared with imitation flames, and the fake aerosaw snow piled
up in the quarters of the windows as we daily circled more toys. Thumbtacked
and tape to our front door was the full size image of Sanna holding the
door wide open and showing off all the goodies under the tree. Within the
tensil twinkled on our tree, and the pieces that got to the giant multicolored
bulbs wrinkled in the heat, the same bulbs that threatened to burn the whole
season to the ground, but for just one more degree caused the Scotch pine
to release it's heavenly scent. It is a shame that today's kids have no
idea what a wishbook is, and an iTunes gift card is a far cry
from weeks of joy circling creepy crawlers, evil knieval daredevil figures, incredible edibles,
and verty birds and Strange changed machines and hot wheels, supercharger sprint sets.
Chapter twelve, The Christmas we all became criminals. I'm not sure what
the statute of limitations is for pillaging government property, but I'm betting it's not
forty five years. Hence the burden lifting confession and telling of this tale.
Back in the seven in ease, my family and I were quite skiers.
I know it's difficult to imagine snow skiers from Mississippi, but such was indeed
the case. In fact, though, I became so proficient that one year
I placed third in a Saint Patrick's Day slalom competition against bonafide, long haired,
rocky mountain bred fogelbird listening hippie kids. I fancied myself the hillbilly version
of Jean Claude Kelly, a Dixie land of Franz Clumber. I was to
skiing what Jamaican's were of Bob's letting. It was indeed a glorious day for
the Confederate ski team. One year, we decided to spend Christmas vacation in
Breckenridge, Colorado, and my brothers and I eagerly agreed to forego any Christmas
presents in exchange for the trip. As Christmas Day approached and began to register
with us that there would be no tree, no presents, no prey lanes,
and no Christmas curls at my aunt Martha's church on Christmas Seed, This
Christmas was shaping up to be just like any other of the three hundred and
sixty four days that weren't Christmas Day. It became obvious what we needed to
do. We needed a tree, and that's where the pillaging comes in.
It was two days before Christmas, so any trees remaining at the grocery store,
a grocery store that had never even heard of grits, by the way,
were just broken, twisted sappy sticks with most of the limbs gone.
And as luck would have it, Breckinridge is located in the Arapahoe National Forest,
there are literally millions and millions of Christmas card perfect trees just there for
the knifing. We were staying in a condo that was very well equipped with
everything necessary for a ski vacation, but with hardly anything at all suitable for
lumberjackerie. Our quest for a chainsaw or axe was fruitless, finding only half
a bottle of peppermint snops, a fair of fawcet poster and an Ozark Mountain
Daredevil's eight track tape in the closet. The best we could do was a
large butcher knife from the kitchen drawer, and that would have to do.
We all loaded up in our nineteen seventy two International travel All, a metallic
moss green marvel of modern mechanization with the imitation wood side paneling, and cranked
up Jackie Blue and headed to the forest. Since Breckinridge is wholly located within
the forest, we didn't have far to go. The best I recall,
we went about two blocks off the main street and basically just chose the tree
closest to the street. They were all so perfect it was hard to go
wrong. Really, I just couldn't believe everybody wasn't out harvesting a tree with
their own butcher knife or corkscrew or garlic press. I wanted to shout,
do y'all not see all these perfect Christmas trees? What on on earth is
the matter with you? People? Don't buy those gooey sticks at the grocery
store with no grits. But they had trouble with my southern accent, and
they wouldn't have understood me anyway. Besides, that just left more trees for
us. We made no particular effort at stealth when acquiring our tree, all
dancing about in brightly colored ski wear and throwing snowballs while Daddy beat the tree
down with a dull knife. We dragged our freshly butchered tree back to the
vehicle and tied it to the top with all the pride and revelry required for
such an occasion. It was an exquisite tree. Several years later we learned
that it is illegal to just will and illy shank a Christmas tree in the
national forest. But I'm almost sure nobody missed that particular tree. And eventually
the grocery store started selling grits. So really everything turned out good in the
end. Y'all keep this under your hats, though, if the g men
come snooping around, I'll deny everything. Tree coppers will never take me alive.
Chapter thirteen, Angels we have heard on high and my plans to soar
amongst them. In December of nineteen sixty seven, on the stage of a
small elementary school somewhere in Little Rock, Arkansas, a Christmas play was taking
place. I was a shepherd in that play, and my lines were as
Luke related. And Lo, the Angel of the Lord came upon them,
and the glory of the Lord shown around them, and they were sore afraid.
As I spewed forth my memorized scripture and nearly two my breakfast. I
truly doubt that anyone, shepherd or not had ever seen any soreer afraid than
I was at that moment. I'm sure I was quite the dash shepherd.
Since Mama had made my shepherd's garb. My costume was not very elaborate and
consisted of a drab brown and orange rectangular piece of heavy course upholstery type cloth
that was secured around my neck with a headband and hung low to about my
knees in the back. If ancient shepherds had shopped at the same fabric store
as Mama, they likely would have picked this very same fabric, perhaps even
altering scripture. And Lo, the Angel of the Lord came upon them,
And the Angel confusedeth greatly, saying, verily I asketh ye, do ye
wear it upon thy heads? The coverings from the cushions of thine davenport The
rest of my costume was just what I'd have normally worn a school, probably
blue plaid pants and a blue twill shirt. I think this is what I
wore every day for about three years, without the head dress, of course,
because every picture we had from that era sh me sporting the same trendy
plaid pants and blue shirt, and this ensemble did little to boast her belief
in my sheep herting abilities. For several years after my theatrical debut, we
always had that very large piece of coarse fabric in the hall closet. It
really wasn't good for anything, but was too good to throw away, and
then one day, like a bolt from the blue, I had a brainstorm
or perhaps an aneurysm. This piece of cloth was big enough to allow some
type of flight, and it was large enough for a small parachute, even
though small isn't necessarily a desirable quality in parachutes. But with a parachute you
still had to get up into the wild blue yonder, and I didn't know
anyone with an airplane, so that pretty much ruled out a parachute. That
really only left one option as far as flight was concerned, a hang glider.
Now, I had seen them on TV in their construction seemed ridiculously simple.
So I decided a hang glidder it would be, and my plan practically
formed itself. I had the covering and some material for the frame. I'd
have this knocked out by lunch and be airborne by early afternoon. Centers of
gravity in Bernoli's principles of flight be damned. They meant little to me at
this point, as I could not be bothered by such technicalities. I had
a flying machine to build, and building the frame was just as easy as
I thought it would be. I formed a giant V by nailing together two
eight foot long pieces of leftover one by two molding, and this formed the
outline of my machine. Now I needed a good comfortable handle to hang from
and to steer with, so I cut the head off a hole and nailed
it to the handle across my frame. And I used extra nails here for
safety reasons. I'm just guessing, but I bet this is where the saying
fly off the handle originated. What other twelve year old glider builders probably have
used too few nails. At this point I was practically finished. All that
was left was to cover the frame with the shepherd's cloth, and I was
ready for takeoff. I stretched the cloth tightly over the frame and tacked it
into place every few inches, with roofing nails done, and man, did
it look good. I couldn't believe how easy it was to construct a first
rate flying machine. And why didn't everyone else have one of these? Oh
well, it was their loss, And besides, that left more room in
the skies for me. Seeing how quickly this was coming together, I already
loosely formulated a plan for launching my machine, and launching off of the house
would only allow for a very limited flying time, so I had to locate
somewhere much higher. On TV, the glider pilots launched from cliffs overlooking the
Pacific Ocean. The closest thing to a cliff in our neighborhood was located on
the grounds of Wingfield High School. The campus was comprised of three terraced levels,
the faces of which sloped at about thirty degrees, and from ground level
to the second level was about fifteen feet, and about the same between the
second and the third levels. There was a place there, however, that
went from the first level to the third, a thirty foot cliff with a
thirty degree face, just perfect for glider launching. Why this place wasn't covered
up with glider enthusiasts was beyond me, but I viewed it as merely my
good fortune. Wingfield was about a quarter mile from my house, and I
decided to walk there with my glider instead of trying to carry my machine on
my bike, which would have been very difficult given the size of my flying
machine. It also would have meant another trip back to the school to retrieve
my bike once I had flown home. Walking that far while carrying my glider
gave me plenty of time to plan my flight. I figured I'd first circle
the school a couple of times to get a feel for operating my glider,
and then I'd set out over the neighborhoods and over the houses of a few
friends, finally landing at my house. I was both excited and proud as
I walked along Scanlon Drive, carrying my machine and dreaming of places to visit.
I can only imagine what passing motorists and earthbound homeowners thought as I walked
past with my glorious flying machine. So great was there envy that their mechanical
laughter was probably the only way they could express jealousy of that magnitude. Arriving
at my departure site, I made ready for flight, which was not an
involved procedure. I firmly grasped the hoe handle about to way away from the
edge of the hill a few feet to allow for a running take off.
I took a deep breath and tightened my grip and ran as fast as I
could over the edge of the drop off. And it worked. I was
flying, not as far or as high as I had hoped, but I
was flying nonetheless. Actually, I flew no higher or no further than I
would have had I not had a flying machine. Truthfully, I guess I
was just falling through space with a whole handle, molding, nails, and
several yards of fabric, temporarily buoyed by dreams and ignorance. The ghosts of
two great thinkers were relieved that day. Their laws held hard and fast,
undeniable, unwavering, and unforgiving. Bernoli's laws of flight would not be challenged,
and Galileo's laws governing falling bodies proved true. Yet once again, I
didn't bother to carry my creation back home, since it had somehow become heavier
after testing Chapter fourteen six mini bikes and a micro bus. With apologies to
Beck, my memory of Christmas past is the warm, intoxicating elixir that sues
the spastic seizures of any current Christmas season. With the revelry of Christmas present
comes visits to Christmas's past. The selection of the family tree was always a
special occasion. Now I'm sure everybody all over the world has a memory of
just where they bought their trees. As a South Jackson boy, anything we
bought, if it didn't come from Sears downtown, was bought from some merchant
on Ellis Avenue between Highway eighty and Westland Plaza, And so it was with
our Christmas trees. At the northwest corner of the intersection of Highway eighty and
Ellis Avenue stood Gibson's Department Store, and every year in their parking lot appeared
a Christmas tree huckster right after Thanksgiving. I vividly remember one particular outing to
buy our tree. It was some year in the early seventies, as we
all loaded up into our nineteen sixty eight VW van and headed to the Christmas
tree lot. The van was an acquisition from the prior Christmas, when my
Daddy came home with it loaded with six mini bikes. We didn't ask questions.
He was a wheeler dealer and it wasn't unusual to come home and find
new things a boat, a motor home, a Jaguar, the car not
the animal, although alive jaguar would have not been all that surprising, either
a pile of rifles, or, in this case, a micro bus jam
full of mini bikes. The little bus had been a boring white, but
at some point Daddy took it and had the van painted a bright yellow.
It was fantastic, like a rolling Beatles album, and since we hauled all
the tiny motorcycles in it, the bus smelled perpetually like gasoline. The previous
owner had glued turquoise colored carpet to the floor and walls, making for a
garish color combination, and we loved it. We always had a Scotch Pine,
so like the ten or so years before, my dad bought another Scotch
Pine. But this year we also bought a wreath with a red bow that
fit perfectly around the VW logo on the front of the little German bus,
and with our Scotch Pine tied atop the van and the wreath on the front.
It was a bell bottom scene straight out of psychedelic hippie versions of Norman
Rockwell paintings. Here half a century later, when I passed a Christmas tree
lot anywhere, I think back to that Christmas with the little yellow micro bus
outfitted with its wreath for the season, and I can smell the lingering fragrances
from that Christmas. Most folks remember the sense of evergreen, gingerbread and peppermint.
I remember evergreen and gasoline. Chapter fifteen, the dance of the sugar
alternative plum Fairy. We've all seen the bumper stickers lose weight. Ask me
how well it's really no secret. Calories in must be less than calories out.
It's a very simple mathematical equation. Calories in must be less than calories
out, or for the dyslexic, calories out is greater than calories in.
With the existence of Little Debbie's Christmas tree snackcakes around at yule Tide, that
simple formula isn't as simple as it appears. But take heart, as there
is another holiday treat that can help. Did the claws cleanse while sitting around
the outside fireplace. One evening near Christmas, I was lamenting, that's a
better sounding way to say, whining that I sure missed having a big old
mug of hot chocolate and that there ought to be a Keto low carb version.
Jennifer, being the good wife she is, knuck off to the kitchen
to make my wishes come true. She mixed vanilla almond milk cream and cocoa
powder and a saucepan and brought it to a boil, and to sweeten it,
she added several of the sugar alternatives we use, along with a new
one we're trying. And oh my, it was delicious, so delicious,
in fact, that I had two very large mugs of it. About thirty
minutes after it was invented, the Claws cleans was named. That's common knowledge
that some of the artificial sweeteners can have a laxative effect. Well guess what.
That newest sweet we tried didn't just have a laxative effect. It bordered
on what I call propulsive. This was not a passing thing either, at
least not in one sense. For about twelve hours, my enters sounded like
you'd put billiard balls in the clothes dryer. During my ensuing hours in the
bathroom, I had plenty of time to work on my marketing plan for the
Claw's Cleans. Water is approximately eight pounds per gallon, and with conservatively five
gallons of ejective produced, I ciphered that I had easily lost at least forty
pounds in one night. Now I'm thinking that the marketing sales pitch for the
Claw's Cleans would cause a consumer to forgive the process considering the amazing results.
And I'm thinking a festive, glossy brochure with maybe some gold full highlights or
glitter of some sort, and then some catchy prose. How does this sound?
Enjoy our rich, hot, delicious holiday Claws Cleans, and after a
short, pleasant, seven hour bathrooms day, you'll be a new forty pounds
lighter U, just in time for the holiday office party. Maybe have a
photo of a skinny model in a slinky party dress sipping cocktails at the bottom
of the brochure, or cousin Eddie with a moose glass full of Claws cleans,
exclaiming it's the gift that keeps on giving Clark. There will of course
be assorted small print disclaimers at the bottom, warning not to drink Claws cleans
before doing strenuous exercise, to wear an extra large adult diaper for twelve hours
after consuming product, and that we are not responsible for repainting your house should
you sneeze. You know, just the typical legal stuff. If anybody would
like to try some, I can provide free samples. If you'd like to
be able to squeeze into that sequin to party dress, or if you'd just
like to make room for a few boxes of Little Debbies Christmas tree caches.
The results are guaranteed. Chapter sixteen, The Gods of Rock. At one
point in my life I thought I needed to know how to play a guitar.
A few guys that I knew that could play were considered cool, and
Hendrix and Page and Townshend seemed to be doing okay, too well. Actually
Hendrix was dead, but other than that he seemed to be doing okay.
Brody decided that he'd like to play too, so off we went to Worland's
Music, where we bought a couple of Japanese made les Paul copies. Mine
was black and his was sunburst, and we bought a small peevy amp.
We had all we needed to conquer the rock world, except the ability to
play. We solved that little problem, too sweet by signing up for six
lessons. I figured the last three lessons would be just a waste of time
since the first three would be all we'd really need. Plus we'd probably be
out on the road somewhere touring with the band. The first lesson was a
real eye opener. We showed up with our new axes, ready to rock.
We were led to a tiny little soundproof room where we were instructed to
take our guitars from their cases. We nailed that first step. I figured
we were well on our way to start them so easily mastering our first instructions.
Now, I was skeptical of our teacher, what with her being a
lady and all. But if Anne and Nancy Wilson could do it, I
figured maybe she could too. My hopes, however, were dashed when she
pulled out something she called a tuning. For Law was baffled, thinking,
what the heck is she trying to pull? I want to play guitars,
not work on them. I mean, I had just spent three hundred and
fifty dollars on a brand new guitar, he's telling me it isn't even tuned.
Furthermore, she went on, it would have to be tuned periodically for
the rest of its life. Well, I was a little dismayed but humored
by her following her instructions in tuning my guitar. This took nearly half the
lesson time, and I was beginning to have doubts about this lady. But
after the excruciating, extended tuning session, I was certain my guitar was ready
to gently weep, as if to intentionally delay my ascent to rock stardom.
She next launches into a lecture on notes and chords and measures and such.
While every good boy may indeed do fine, it seemed a bit tangential to
what I was seeking, like with learning golf and having to use all those
other clubs in the bag as opposed to just hitting the ball in the hole
off the tee. Perhaps she had misunderstood exactly what type of lessons we wanted.
I didn't want lessons on how to teach classical guitar. I was looking
to learn how to play songs, you know, smoke on the water and
walk this way, assorted Van Halen tunes, or even Johnny B. Good
in some Freebird or Stairway to Heaven for the slow dance sections. It was
inevitable that I had to ask, just to prove her abilities, can you
even play Stairway to Heaven? Well, sure, she said, and she
took my guitar and launched into the Zeppelin classic. Great her bona fides assured.
Now we could get down to business. I'm thinking, surely, the
next thing she'd have us do is practice our star spangled banner Hendrick style with
our teeth, or at least some Pete Townshend style wind milling exercises clockwise or
counter clockwise, it didn't matter. But nope, not even some old school
chuck Berry duck walking or lighting. Even the tiniest amount of lighter fluid squirted
on our new guitar yours. This was turning out to be a nightmare.
Eventually this torture ended and we were sent off to practice scales or chords or
some such nonsense until our next lesson. I don't remember going back, so
let this be a lesson to all you guitar teachers. When a teenage boy
shows up with an electric guitar, the first thing you do is show him
how to plug it in and turn it up to eleven, and then slide
the pick up and down the strings while working that whammy bar like a chimpanzee
freebasing red bull. And if he's agreeable, I'm sure he will be light
it on fire and swing that new Chinese strat over your head like a sledgehammer
and smash the heck out of his tiny little amp. If the amp should
spew sparks and catch on fire too, then so much the better. He'll
be back next week, I guarantee you. As for me, I quick
league grew bored of tuning and trying to make chords and all the other tomfoolery,
and I sold my guitar and put the money towards something that didn't require
all that silly musical knowledge. I bought a giant set of drums. You
don't have to read music. There are no chords, and tuning is optional.
All you need to know is how to hit things and count, and
usually only to four. The only things simpler is a kazoo rock. On
chapter seventeen, verily doth thy smoketh thy swine. Barbecue joints are about as
ubiquitous throughout the South, as are cracker barrels, yet each is a unique
entity in its own right, the barbecue joints. That is, because the
cracker barrels country fried steak is the same in Tuscaloosa as it is in Tallapoosa.
There's nothing wrong with consistency, and cracker barrel has that down pat But
barbecue joints, true barbecue joints, are the very essence of uniqueness. About
the only thing they have in common other than delicious smoke assorted barnyard animals is
their name. And even that topic is particularly ornery, what with all the
barbecue versus barbecue versus barbecue, on and on. One common trait most good
barbecue joints have is that at one time they've all been burned down. The
really good ones have burned down several times. Most all of them are just
ramshackle, wobbly wooden structures, built of light or not pine and infused with
years and years of pork fat smoke. Honestly, I'd be more surprised if
they didn't burn down. The combination of fire and wood and grease just has
the structure is fully involved written all over it. Heck, the first chickens
to come out of a newly rebuilt joint, or probably cooked with the charred
remains of the previous building. A tasty bird smoked for hours over the charcoal
made by the fire of the last structure is a delicious Southern phoenix of sorts.
Barbecue is a very personal thing too, like religion. Some like sweet
barbecue and prefer the King James version of the Holy Word, while other blasphemers
prefer Carolina style barbecue and the trendy NSV or some other hippie perversion of the
Good Book. But the truth be told, all barbecue is good. Unfortunately,
most of the heathen or heathen, as my memo said, non Christian
religions like Judaism and Islam. For example, consider a pulled pork sandwich was
law on top on one way ticket to Shoal in succulent sliced brisket with a
perfect pink smoke ring and a side of beans insureds reincarnation as a dong beetle.
For the Hindus, the Buddhists are a little more culinarily tolerant. But
have you ever seen real Chinese food? About half of it should technically go
to the gut pile. I'm sure all these other religions have their beloved delicacies,
but I'm sticking with Jesus in a pork but cooked fourteen hours over pecan
wood. Hallelujah. Chapter eighteen, A Briefer History of Time. Time has
always fascinated me. It really only has importance to mortal beings. We only
measure it because we have limited quantity of it. Next to a creator who
inexplicably loves us. It is the most precious thing in our lives. In
the hereafter, a clock will have as much use as a blind man has
for the really big boxes of crayons, the one with the sharpener on the
back, and all the good colors like Rasmataz silver and gold and Coarellian blue.
So, to borrow a partial title from Stephen Hawking, Here's a briefer
history of time. I find it amusing that TV producers have seemingly settled on
twenty years as being the threshold for nostalgia. Take Happy Days, for instance.
It came out in the seventies, and it was about life twenty years
prior. In the fifties, as a fifth grader, I was enthralled by
the antics and rituals in everyday life of these most ancient of peoples, and
as far as I'm concerned, the nineteen fifties, in the eighteen sixties,
and the Jurazic era were all relatively about the same place on the timeline,
and I doubt I'd have even questioned it had Phonsie ridden up on a triceratops
as opposed to a motorbike. I was also totally oblivious to the fact that
I was watching a show about my parents' teenage years, as I envisioned them
as possible Civil War participants. What I viewed as ancient history were there yesterdays.
There was, however, a huge difference between nineteen fifty five and nineteen
seventy five, far different than between two thousand and twenty and twenty. Between
nineteen fifty five and nineteen seventy five, we went from straight leg Levi's to
elephant bell bottoms, from hot rods to oil embargoes, from white T shirts
to Paisley's psychedelics, and from chastity and Purity to the Summer of Love,
and from Sobriety to LSD, from Spotnick to Beatnicks, and from the Cleavers
May Feel to the Moon there was indeed a vast difference in those two times.
Now about the only thing to change in the last twenty years is that
all electronics now have more memory, and the world has gotten smaller, while
cell phones have gotten larger, and China now manufactures everything on the planet,
and there are a few more fast and furious movies. I think, in
keeping with the twenty year nostalgia theory, each decade since the advent of TV
has had its tribute twenty years later. As we've already covered, the fifties
were honored in the seventies, and the sixties were relived in the eighties by
the best show ever to oscillate across the airwaves, the Wonder Years. The
seventies were a flashback in the nineties on the imaginatively named That Seventies Show.
There was even a short lived spinoff of That Seventies Show about the eighties called
Astoundingly That Eighties Show. As the decades since have all become so similar,
the twenty year theory looks to be less and less like a hard fast rule
and maybe just a chronological anomaly applicable to the late twentieth century, and as
a current resident of the timeline near the dot mark twenty twenty two, I
can't, for the life of me think of anything appealing about the turn of
the century, other than being relieved to mark that milestone, Remembering that as
an eighteen year old in nineteen seventy nine, I noted I'd be a decrepit
thirty nine years old at the stroke of two thousand, and I wondered if
I'd still be able to choose solid food or walk, or if I'd like
my new nursing home. But other than the fact that Princess Song nineteen ninety
nine finally had a use, and that the number two thousand made cool eyeglasses
for New Year's Eve, what with the two o's as eye holes, I've
essentially become stagnant as a species. I think we truly peaked in the fifties
and sixties, and I'm truly glad to have lived it. Chapter nineteen,
the probe ning there are certain things we do as humans that occur seemingly simple.
For completing so many trips around the sun, complete thirteen trips, and
if you're a Jewish boy, you break in the booty at your bar mitzvah,
make sixteen round trips and you can operate an automobile. And after fifty
round trips, the medical establishment tells us that we need a colonoscopy. Now.
Colonoscopy is a word derived from the Greek terms colon meaning poop tube and
scapi means look up, hence the modern medical term colonoscopy, literally meaning look
up your poop tube. Now, my Greek is limited, so I may
be a little off base, but not much as lost in the translation at
fifty two. I'd dodge the button bullet for two years, but I'd given
into the pressure of conventional wisdom, and I've grown weary of waiting on the
aliens. Honestly, I was hoping for an alien abduction by now, and
since by most all accounts, a thorough probing is part of the standard alien
abduction exam, considering their advanced knowledge and tools, that the alien procedure would
be more pleasant and they would be kind enough to just leave a notarized written
document with the test results for an inclusion in my medical record and any insurance
reimbursements. I'd also imagine that should they find any anomalies in my bowels,
they'd have the technology to instantly cure any maladies, and I'd be deposited back
in my bed, none the worse for wear, and with a good story
to boot. It does seem odd, though, that any civilization that has
mastered interstellar travel would do so simply for the opportunity to look up the backside
of any new life forms they discovered. Who knows, maybe we did that
to aliens we found at Roswell and this is just payback. Imagine Kirk traveling
the galaxy only to peer into the nether regions of triples and then zooming off
at warp speed in the USS endoscope to probe the Gorn. Knowing what we
know now, I'm sure mister Sulhu would have been a proponent, but I'm
not sure about the rest of the crew. I'm not real versed in interplanetary
species interactions, so maybe, unlike just sniffing each other's butts like dogs,
the standard protocol throughout the universe involves a good probing. Now, I don't
know Stephen Hawking can figure all that out anyhow. The aliens let me down,
so I'm left to be probed by mere human doctors. Luckily, the
doctor doing my procedure is older and has done quite a few of these,
and I would dare say that he's been up more backsides than the village people
and Fredick Mercury combined. But like Captain Kirk, he's going where no man
has gone before. Actually, since you're unconscious for the procedure, you really
don't expect any discomfort. And frankly, they could just insert a twelve foot
long section of three foot covert and crawl in like coal miners with pickaxes and
carbide lanterns on their hard hats, and you'd be none the wiser. The
catch, and there's always a catch, is what they euphemistically called the prep.
Prep is a common word short for preparation, and we all know it
means to make ready for an event. Prep can involve everything from simply making
a phone call to reserving a seat for dinner, to years of organizing a
program to send a man to the moon like the Apollo missions. The prep
for dinner is obviously less involved than sending a rocket into space. Prep is
relative and its intensity equal to the task being undertaken. In this particular instance,
where you are prepping for a flanking mission, prep means that your entire
eleimitary canal from your wisdom teeth down to your exit sphincter must be as clean
as the day you first drew breath, squeaky clean. Actually, my examples
of prep involving dinner reservations in space travel is more illustrative than I thought in
this situation, since it involves ingesting something and then expelling it like a Saturn
V rocket. To give you a visual, not that you ask for one
nor want one, let's enlist the help of the amazing Guido, the sword
swallower at the local carnival. Imagine Guido goes to the local pay and spray
car wash. He inserts his one dollar and twenty five cents into the slot
and he chooses hot foamy soap from the selection dial. Goes into his act,
his sequined robes sparkling in the sunlight. He inserts the wine fully down
his gozle and pulls the trigger. A three thousand psi burst of foul foamy
fluid flows freely from the flamboyant freaks, flapping floodgates like flatulence through a flashy
flugelhorn. And while it bordered on being Sussian, you've got to admit that
was some first rate alliteration right there. Guido's demonstration and my eighth grade English
experiment give you some idea of the prep. Movie Prep is the brand name
of the heinous witches brew responsible for the cleansing, and I'm sure that the
makes of movie Prep are allied with Satan, because only through the dark arts
and sorcery can one lid of liquid be magically converted within the confines of the
human gut into twenty gallons of the violess substance. Only demons can now they
sure missed the boat. However, when it came to naming the product,
most products have a name that somewhat describes what they do. Hamburger Helper,
Mister Clean, and Ultra Bright toothpaste are all good examples. I suggest Movie
Preps seriously reconsider naming their product something like Mount Vesuvius Intestinal polish or General Will
m t. Sherman's Cleansing Elixir. The catchy advertising copy practically writes itself the
suvious the power to destroy civilizations, or Pintubo feel the pyroclastic flow of cleanliness,
or the General's Elixir. We go through you like Sherman through Atlanta.
But enough of that they can write their own copy. I'm given to understand
that the current medical dogma says that one should have a colonoscopy every ten years.
Assuming that that doesn't change in the next few years, my math puts
the next violation occurring in the year twenty twenty four. Surely, within the
span of a decade, the aliens will step up their game and maybe partner
with Google or Apple and offer their eyegut services or Google Probe free with the
purchase of the iPhone twenty seven, unless socialized medicine puts the aliens out of
work too, in which case we're all doomed to an existence of polypy colons
and solid bowel movements. I'm pulling for the aliens. PS postop nine thirty
am Wednesday. All went as scheduled, and I have a colon and an
esophagus as clean as a polished alabasterer. I'm still under the effects of the
drugs and I was told I'd be gassy, but no such luck. And
after I'd practiced farting freebird for the last few days off for nothing. It
was a holy enjoyable experience, except for the prep. So if you're over
fifty, you get your wrinkly old butt out there and schedule your own rectal
violation. The proper fall alone is worth it. Chapter twenty Monkey Shines.
Hurricane Katrina left us both homeless and officeless, So after a few years of
renting, it came time to build my wife a new dental office. As
the male spouse, it fell upon me to organize and oversee the construction of
a modern, efficient medical facility. It's not that I'd ever done anything like
that before, but it seemed a manly thing to do, and Jennifer was
too busy doing dentistry, and the autumn flounder run was all but over.
I figured I was way in over my head, and I reckon that commercial
could instruction would be akin to rocket scigns. Being the perceptive sage I am,
it didn't take me long to come to the conclusion that most construction workers
are illiterate cretans with rusty out of pond tools and severe substance abuse problems.
I surmised it wouldn't take more than a few days to train monkeys to do
most of their jobs. After calling all the local pet stores, it became
obvious that the fatal flaw in my plan was the actual acquisition of the needed
semion laborers. A few stores had some of the smaller varieties, but what
I really needed was about a couple of dozen of hearty chimpanzees, not a
handful of pygmy marmosets that could barely pick up a hammer and let alone well
to red iron. They'd probably just grow tired and lazy after a few wells
and start throwing poop at one another, just like the human welders. But
at least I could shoot the monkeys. Plan really started to unrival when I
learned the cost of monkeys. Since no one had the number or type of
monkeys I required in stock, I was left to import them or get the
leftovers from the medical testing labs. The lab monkeys were mostly sick or dying
or had three arms, which should have been an advantage, but alas,
instead of hammering with the extra arm, they merely flung twice the poop.
I had a really great follow up plan to offset the initial purchase price of
my labor force by having a big fundraising barbecue at the conclusion of construction.
A feeding monkeys pulled port wouldn't have really netted me a return on my outlay.
So my ingenious plan was to barbecue the monkeys and sell the sandwiches to
the folks in the area. Monkey sandwiches may not sound appetizing, but I
planned to sell them for only two dollars, undercutting my competition and making it
up in volume. The whole monkey business sort of fell apart before it got
started, so I was left to deal with the only other animal sporting opposable
thumbs, or, in some cases, due to drunken circular saw fights,
just a single thumb. Now, I'm not going to go so far as
to say all criminals are manual laborers, but I can say with some certainty
that all manual laborers are criminals. In Mississippi, contractors must be licensed,
and I suspect it's for the same reason sex offenders are required to register.
They need to know where the criminals are. The requirements to obtain a contractor's
license are pretty stringent. One must have a truck, preferably twelve years old
or older, and a magnetic sign attached to the door displaying your business name
and the disconnected cell phone number of your last girlfriend. The truck is the
workman's best friend, like the cowboy trusty paint, and unfortunately, most workers
trucks are far less reliable than the cowboys mount The monkeys would have lived on
site and totally done away with the transportation problem. But I digress. Most
workers trucks operate only intermittently. On cold, rainy, wet days when work
is called off, I'd see them motor by the job site with their deer
rifles in their window racks and ice chests full of malted aiming fluid bouncing in
the beds of their trucks. Of course, on the next sunny, temperate
day, the farthest they can coax Old Blue is to the corner tavern,
where they go in and discuss for the next twelve hours what could potentially be
wrong with their trucks. Despite all the setbacks, our nine month long project
was done well ahead of schedule, taking a mere fourteen months and going over
budget of paltry thirty five Percent's office turned out beautifully and has worked flawlessly for
her. She, her staff, and her patients love the new office.
Plus I learned a few very important things about commercial construction when importing monkeys,
always poke holes in the shipping container and never lend a drywall hangar twenty dollars
for beer, Chapter twenty one. God save the Queen's fine china. There
are some things that seem to endure well past their usefulness. Heck, that
might even be the definition of tradition. One of those useless traditions was,
and I'm not sure if it still exists, but it did thirty plus years
ago when I got married, the buying of fine dinnerware. My mama obviously
skipped that tradition, though, because as a child most of our glassware originally
held jelly and was made by Bama or Gorum. Most every other prospective bride,
though from Eve up through those in the nineteen nineties, mine included beat
the trail to the local department stores either Gafers or McRae's to pick out a
fine china pattern and sterling, as well as their everyday plates and forks.
The fine china was meant to be enduring and added to or pieces replaced throughout
a lifetime of entertaining, visiting potentates and such. You'd never know when you
might be mowing the yard and the Queen of England stops by for a spot
of tea, and you'd better have a full lead crystal Lady Anne iced tea
glass at the ready, her Highness could eat her scones whatever those are off
the wedgewood, strawberry and vine pattern scone plate. I'm just assuming they make
a royal scone plate, since there is apparently a specialized pea for nearly everything
else. I mean, what kind of barbarian would serve the queen some sweet
iced tea from a gravy boat and offer up fresh scones from a soup to
reen? You can never be too prepared, hence the enduring tradition of owning
a compotier. Should the Queen also request compote with her scones. Although I'm
not one hundred percent sure what either of those two things are or whether they
would ever even possibly be served together, that doesn't preclude one from owning such
pieces, though as similarly, I own a giant wrench big enough to twist
the lugnots off a locomotive, although like an accent salad plate, I suspect
I'll never really need it, and no wonder one needs a butler. The
sterling can be mighty complicated, should the Queen wish to put butter on her
scones, and again, not knowing what that is, that may make as
much sinse is her buttering her hat. She could choose from about eight different
butter knives. Don't mistake the master butter knife with the individual use knives,
lest the queen think you a ghost. Some of the less used pieces include
the lemon forks, the sardine spoon, and cracker spoon. But there is
the possibility, however, slim, that a Norwegian print suffering with scurvy could
have a flat in front of your place, and it would be kind of
you to offer him a lemon and some sardines and crackers. The larger of
the two tomatoes servers, in addition to serving tomatoes in grand fashion, does
just as good a job serving tiny little pancakes or getting the last pickle out
of the jar, assuming your butler doesn't have time to find your pickle fork.
I suspect the single time butter pick was just made of leftover parts as
a joke, and some southerns soon to be bride just had to have one.
I finally got curious enough to google scone. Well, it turns out
it's just a biscuit. You can throw a handful of blueberries into the mix
too, if you like. And I'm sure there is a dedicated sterling silver
blueberry biscuit making fork somewhere in your pantry. Ask your butler, and if
the Queen does drop by, just call your biscuits scones. She'll be impressed.
I know I would be Chapter twenty two something odd in the punch Bowl.
It started innocently enough, as most disasters do, with a simple conversation,
like when JFK said, Jackie, I'm thinking about visiting Dallas, or
when Lincoln told his wife that he had tickets to a new play over at
Ford's Theater. My ensuing escapades didn't get me shot in the head, but
there was a moment where I wish it had. You see, my wife
had several of Robert Saint John's cookbooks, and I enjoyed reading his pieces in
the newspaper. So when my sweet mama got when that mister Saint John was
going to appear at the Great Southern Club, she called and surprised us with
the gift of a couple of tickets. That's where it all started going wrong.
It was a typical weekend night in downtown Gulf Port. There was no
one about except at the eating and drinking establishments, so we were lucky to
park up front since we were running a bit late. We spoke to the
security guard and took the elevator to the top floor, and we were greeted
at the door of the club, and we told a nice lady that we
were there for the Robert Saint John's event, and she ushered us to a
private dining room. We were met there by a couple of very prim ladies
attired in eveningwear and sporting gloves. No less, I didn't know mister Saint
John at that point, and I still don't, but I assume he must
be one classy guy if he has women of his caliber working the door and
collecting his loot. I was sure, if the commercials were correct, that
he enjoyed gray poupon at every meal. The elegant ladies looked us up and
down in a quizzical manner, but I just assumed they were admiring my red
and white, vertically striped polo shirt and a fairly fresh pair of deck shoes.
Now, we've all heard of the fight or flight reaction when placed in
a stressful situation. Although I'm not sure it's ever been tested in this exact
situation. That situation being that we've now entered a dining room filled with people
in formal attire. Jennifer looked at me, and I looked at her,
and I think she had already made the flight decision, but I, for
some explicable reason, had decided to fight abed her hand and assess the situation,
and chose the table in the middle of the room. We walked over,
and I pulled out a couple of chairs and proclaimed, the good evening
ladies and gentlemen, would you all mind if we joined you. Remember,
these fine folks are in evening wear, and I'm in that shirt that I
described earlier. It looked for all the world like a war's waldo goes to
the Penguin hatchery image, or possibly a clown in a mob funeral. And
I admitted that we were apparently under dressed, but that I had no idea
that mister Saint John commanded such hyebrow audiences. One of the kind of elegant
ladies at our table explained that this was the annual formal event for their private
supper club, and I'm sure in her mind she was wondering just how Waldo
and his plus one were able to get tickets. Honestly, I was wondering
the same thing at that time. About this time, a very fortuitous break
in the unpleasant and presented itself in the standing and pledging of allegiance to the
flag. Heck, I looked half like a flag myself, so maybe that's
why many of them were looking at me. I don't know. One lady
remained conspicuously seated, however, and this was long before the whole Colin Capernick
thing, so I didn't figure she was protesting anything. One of the other
ladies at our table, who had apparently arrived early so as to extract maximum
benefit from the open bar, loudly proclaimed, well, I see someone doesn't
know how to respect the flag. The seated woman then stood up and spat
back in an obvious British accent. I'm a British subject and I don't pledge
to your flag. Now this is getting fun, I think, hoping that
the limey chick would break out a cricket bat or a spotted dick, whatever
that is, and things would get real. But such wasn't the case,
and we return to our civil chit chat. Eventually, mister Saint John did
take the podium, and it turned out to be a pleasant, enjoyable evening
after all, complete with an invitation to join their club and directions to several
formal wear providers. I replied, with the same enthusiasm I use on the
Jehovah's witnesses, that I'd be thrilled to join their ranks. Should mister Saint
John ever be in your neck of the woods, I could highly recommend that
you see him, but I'd enquire about the dress code just to be sure.
Chapter twenty three He sent Quail. Two thousand and eight was a year
of leaving. In February, Brody left us suddenly, and seven months later
Paul Paul left to go see him. Jennifer and I moved into our little
house on the Bay that October. Not long after that, maybe with a
year, I heard a pleasantly familiar but wholly unexpected sound, the call of
a Bob White Quail. This call was followed by another, but from a
slightly different location. There were two Bob White's calling, and memories came flooding
back from years before, when Paupaul, Brody, Brad and Eye hunted the
tall pine forests just north of the smell of salt air, where the rivers
turned sweet. Wild quail were hard to find forty five years ago, and
even harder to find now, which was why it was so surprising to hear
their familiar call so far from their usual haunts. I call my quail,
Brody and Paul Paul, and after five years, they are still here.
Early one morning, when I went down to the pier, the toss'es ara
spook about to see if any trout were interested. I heard them call.
Anyone else hearing them would hear the same, Bob White, But I hear
more. I hear We're here, and all is well. Some people may
think it sacrilegious or bordering on the occult, to think that wild animals may
bring comfort from beyond, But I'm not so sure. God used birds many
times to bring comfort. Noah sent out a raven, and then the dove
that returned with the olive leaf. God directed the ravens to feed Elijah,
and when the Israelites were fleeing Egypt, they asked and he brought them quail.
I asked for comfort, and I too was brought quail. I've enjoyed
my quail for the last five years, and I've not mentioned them to anyone.
So when I received this text from Brad, I laughed out loud as
I read it. Haven't heard a real Bob White call outside in years.
I just heard one outside Mama's house, and he gave me goosebumps. It
made me think of Paupaul. I called and told him of my out of
place quail too, and we both agreed. It was indeed odd to hear
the Bob whitecall within the suburban environment a stone's throw from the Gulf, but
for both of us it stirred memories of happy times, and people passed and
joy at the thought of the visit. Chapter twenty four. The summer of
sixty nine nineteen sixty nine was only fifteen years distance when Brian Adams waxed nostalgic
about it. Fifteen years is nothing. I have socks older than that,
really, But the summer of nineteen sixty nine, currently fifty years distance,
did indeed have some sort of magic about it. It was a summer of
deeply embossed memories. I was only eight, so the summer of sixty nine
really didn't mean to me on Catalina Circle in South Jackson, Mississippi. What
it meant to the doped up hippies in the height Asbery neghborhood in San Francisco,
or for the kids on Max Gasker's farm. It wasn't the Summer of
love that was nineteen sixty seven, but it was summer and I loved it,
so that was close enough. I wasn't totally removed from the hippie scene,
though, since my mama and Daddy were, although ancient, seemingly only
in their twenties, and when we weren't listening to an old miss football game
on the radio, we listened to Jimmy Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, Big
Brother and the Holding Company, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and occasionally a
little Johnny Cash on a brown plastic eight track player. The fashions and wild
colors of the era were particularly appealing to me, as I remember, on
occasion dressing like my mama had shopped for me at a second hand discount clown
clothing store. Stripes worn with plaids of totally contrasting palettes were completely acceptable.
My absolute favorite thing of the hippie era, however, was, bizarrely enough,
the psychedelic pencils with which I scribbled my way through the third grade.
I smile when I think about those pencils. I love those pencils. I
still do. I vividly remember writing with them while sitting at my desk in
an unair conditioned portable classroom outside of a OLDA Tapeley Wilkins Elementary School. The
smell of the freshly mimograph tests, still damp from the reproduction process, was
intoxicating, while the sweltering heat of September and the muffled, hypnotic droning of
a large fan dulled our senses. The trance was occasionally broken, though,
when a kid would vomit after lunch and the fan would disperse the fragrance of
milk, Salisbury steak and green peas and sheet cake throughout the hot classroom,
leading to a few other kids wasting their thirty five cent lunch too, until
the waves of st and the janiture arrived with his bucket. But the swirls
of colors on the floor paled by comparison to the colors on my pencils,
which thrilled my soul as I vainly struggled with numerators and denominators and the smell
of vomit. The pinnacle of mankind's technological achievements occurred in nineteen sixty nine.
Two. That was, of course, the July twentieth moonlanding. One small
step and all that, it is difficult to accept the fact that in the
following half century weave as a species have done nothing even remotely as amazing.
We've rested on our lunar laurels and failed. The social experiments have been all
the rage for the last fifty years, and only the invention of the wheel
could weakly compare to the moon landing. And I suppose that taking the wheel
with us to the moon on Apollo fifteen was the best of both achievements.
I fear America's best days are behind her, as the pride we felt when
our flag was planted in the lunar dust has now been replaced with hatred of
anything American, the worship of mediocrity, and the normalizing of evil. And
I'm glad to have lived through the best of our existence as American men rode
rockets to the moon. On returning to Iola Tapeley Wilkins Elementary School in the
fall of nineteen seventy there was a new plaque on the wall outside the principal's
office commemorating the moon landing. I'd like to think it is still there,
and would one day like to look at it again. Given the current trend
of destroying history. As such, I'd not be surprised to see it having
been removed. There is no way to mention nineteen sixty nine and not mention
the muscle cars of the day, just like space travel, cars reached their
zenith in nineteen sixty nine, had Mustangs and Terrenos, and GM had Camaros,
and Corvettes and GTOs and Firebirds. Mopar had their Kudahs and Roadrunners and
super bees. Muscle cars ruled the earth. They were everywhere, and they
were fairly cheap too. Imagine pulling up to school in a nineteen sixty nine
Boss three O two Mustang in Grabber blue, or a four to twenty seven
Corvette convertible, although as a two seater a couple of us kids would have
to ride on the luggage track on the trunk, not that that would have
been any big deal as the school was fairly close, but alas we had
a nineteen sixty two Chevy Biscayne with holy floorboards, and in nineteen sixty eight
Olds ninety eight. Now sure of the Olds had a super plush navy blue
velure interior and lighters and ash trays and all four doors, but we rarely
had a reason to smoke a cigar on the way to school, so such
a luxury were lost on us. The closest we got to a muscle anything
was a Seers Screamer bicycle or a handful of hot Wheels cars. We eventually
did step up our automobile game, but in nineteen sixty nine, in the
lap of luxury as opposed to on the luggage rack, it seemed that the
most enduring memories of nineteen sixty nine all took place over a twenty nine day
span, just a few short weeks after the moon landing, as the hippies
were gathering at Woodstock, the clouds were gathering in the golf as Hurricane Camille
began to form. While Hendrix the Who and Jefferson Airplane rocked Woodstock, Camille
rocked the Mississippi Gulf coast. I recall returning to the coast with Memo and
Paul Paul to the surreal world after Camille, a side i'd see again as
an adult after Hurricane Katrina. As a child, the devastation was fascinating.
You knew nothing thing of insurance and rebuilding and lives lost. You just thought
it was cool that there was a ship in the highway. Years later,
I'd get to experience total devastation through the eyes of an adult, and I
can honestly say the view through the eyes of a child is far less red
and blurry. But we lived through both storms and came out changed and probably
for the better. As God's plan is confusing at times, yet always perfect,
the summer of sixty nine was indeed special, eventful, and memorable,
although I'm sure I'm the only one who will sum it up as the summer
of pencils, spacemen, and devastation. Chapter twenty five tep grave, H
two, HDL extras and cold fusion two out of three ain't bad. After
observing the phenomenon for years, I finally decided to postulate a theory. It's
what I call the theory of enhanced personal gravity. You may call it tep
graph from here on out, since it sounds cool and if I'm to be
known for something, the father of tep graph sounds especially cool. My theory
states that an individual's personal gravity increases proportionately with regards to the specificity and uniqueness
of said individual's quest to make a retail purchase, and such increase is inversely
proportional to the size of the establishment and the number of other individuals within the
structure. For example, I go to the world's largest Walmart in search of
synthetic chartreuse left handed helical ball bearing oil. It is three o'clock in the
morning, and there are only two other shoppers in the establishment. My theory
says that my personal gravity will increase to a level of irresistible force, and
the two other shoppers will immediately be drawn to the exact same spot in the
store where I'm standing, right in front of the synthetic shar truce left handed
helical ball bearing oil. Of yet to work out the specifics, but just
like cold fusion, something is going on and I intend to get to the
bottom of it. Another phenomenon I've observed, and one that is very similar
to the tep graph theory, is known as the hank Hill Home depot Low's
theorem or H two HDL. That theory suggests that the likelihood of finding a
knowledgeable and helpful employee diminishes with the specificity and technical complexity of the item sought.
For instance, if you come in just looking for something general like hardware
or lumber, then the helpful female clerk with the six inch nails who doesn't
know an Edison based light bulb from a survalve can point in a vague direction
and mumble some indistinguishable aisle number and gets you close enough that you can wander
around until you find the empty peg upon which what you came for generally hangs.
If, on the other hand, your request is for a particular item,
like the theorem's namesake quest for some WD forty and a tap and die,
then the likelihood of your being directed to a location within the store,
even remotely near the item you see, falls to practically zero. At that
point, the helpful, well trained professional usually deploys the often concurrent reaction known
in scientific circles as the extra task revelation an alternate solutions maneuver extras, whereby
the helpful professional, who has no idea what you're asking for, queries you
on the task that you are trying to accomplish. And then directs you to
the products he used to solve the problem. For instance, if you have
a titanium joint that needs welding, and you ask for argone shielding gas and
some one sixteenth two percent serrated tungsten electrodes, the helpful professional has no idea
what you asked for, so he quizzes you, what are you trying to
do? You reply, well, I'm trying to weld titanium. The helpful
professional immediately initiates the extras maneuver and says, with all certainty, Oh,
you don't need all that stuff. You just need some JB WELLD and some
duct tape. It'll work just as good. The extras maneuver is rarely successful,
and the proper response to the usual query of what are you trying to
do is I'm trying to get out of here? Where's the exit? The
helpful professional then points you down an aisle blocked by a beeping perpetually in reverse
forklift, surrounded by seven people with flags and exquisite nails, and, as
luck would have it, as you wander around the store looking for a way
out, you find an entire pallett of synthetic shartrus left handed helocal ball bearing
ole for fifty percent off Chapter twenty six, Operation Holy Turkey. Mission prep
is critical to mission success, and I'm sure somebody famously said that, but
I don't know who, so we'll just go with Abraham Lincoln or JFK for
now. My mission to buy six turkeys for our churches Boys and Girls Club
Thanksgiving dinner was thwarted yesterday badly. I went to two different Walmarts, one
of them twice and to win Dixie. My first Walmart trip was nearly successful,
as they had the required number of turkeys, but I did a poor
job of acquisition. As I was loading said turkeys into my buggy, a
large man who looked just like mister T walked between me and my buggy as
if I weren't even there, and snatched up the last turkey as I was
reaching for it. I kid you not, As these were essentially holy turkeys
meant for a church function, I felt it was inappropriate to go upside his
head with a twenty pound frozen turkey. Plus he was really big, so
I bent my tongue and I left turkeylus. Next, I went to one
of the little neighborhood Walmarts, thinking i'd fare better, but such was not
the case. While they had the required number of turkeys, they were somehow
different and were twice the price, And since I was buying more than one
hundred pounds of gobbler, that was a substantial difference price wise, sixty eight
cents per pound is one thing, A buck seventy eight is another thing.
Now, I'm not trying to cheap out on these underprivileged kids, but I
et sixty eight cents per pound turkey and I enjoy it. Thus Plan B
fails miserably, and on to Plan C. I was within spitting distance of
when Dixie, so I decided, what the heck, I'll just take a
look, see and evaluate the situation. Bingo, plenty of turkeys in just
ninety eight cents per pound with the card. I briskly loaded the bountiful,
big beautiful butter balls and the buggy. I love alliteration, and I made
my way to the checkout stand. That's where the mission met resistance. Well,
I'm sorry, sir, but you can only buy one turkey with a
card. Drafts foiled again. I consider just leaving them there in the checkout
line, But remember these are holy birds, so I politely returned them from
whence they came. So far I had loaded and unloaded eleven twenty pound birds
and it wasn't even arm day. I don't really have body parts days.
It just sounded good. But now on to Plan D. At the rate
I was using up plan letters, I feared running out of them by the
end of the day, but I realized, like the hurricane namers, I
could resort to the Greek alphabet should the need arise. I felt better about
the mission naming plan, but not so much about the actual mission. Okay,
I'll just go back to the big Walmart and have the courteous associates retrieve
me the required turkeys from the back wherever. That is sure enough. I
saw a man near the turkey freezer who was unable to avoid making eye contact
with me and quickly sprint away as they usually do, so I asked about
obtaining six turkeys from the back. He said the turkeys were in the freezer
truck outside and that he couldn't access that particular area. I pointed out that
it was a mere ten days until Thanksgiving and their turkey cooler was completely empty,
and that probably was a good thing. But he assured me that in
just sixteen short hours the next day, at seven am, they would indeed
move numerous turkeys from where they were currently located on the property to the turkey
cooler. Now, I no Sam Walton, but if I had folks wanting
to buy turkeys, and the turkeys were actually there on the property and Thanksgiving
was just days away, I'd have someone doing nothing but moving turkeys from the
back to the cooler where folks could actually buy them. On to plan Epsilon,
I mean e As I said, mission prep is critical to mission success.
So I girded my loins, saggy as they were, and hopped in
my truck early the next day and I headed to Walmart, hoping to find
turkeys stacked to the ceiling. To put me in the proper mood, I
listened to mercy mees I can only imagine, and this boosted my spirits and
made me confident of success. The closer I got to Walmart, however,
the less confident I became in success. Mercy Me just wasn't cutting it.
It was time to take the gloves off. Kids were counting on me.
Nothing would do but five finger death punches bad company. I turned it up
to about thirty two maybe thirty five, and I rolled into the parking lot
and victory was mine. I threw my truck into park and I jumped out
while yelling cover me. I wasn't talking to anyone in particular, and there
was virtually nobody else in the walmart to hear me, but it just kind
of spontaneously came out. After listening to five FDP, I donned my useless
paper mask, I grabbed the sun sanitized COVID freeze, square wheeled buggy from
the parking lot, and I strode in, singing Bad Company under my breath,
just like you just did. Yeah, I heard you. I was
pleasu surprised to find a very helpful young man replenishing the turkey freezer, and
I told him what I wanted, and he even helped me place six of
the largest birds he had in my buggy. It's possible he heard me singing
Bad Company and didn't want any part of that, but who really knows.
Anyhow, the mission was now complete, at least the acquisition part. The
cooking part comes next Sunday, so stay tuned for perhaps another exciting mission.
I'm thinking Oreo's riding the storm out might be useful. Chapter twenty seven,
A Puka lips well I experienced the first recently, I changed my first dirty
diaper, and by mind, I don't actually mean I was wearing a diaper,
but that I changed my little nephew, Dalton's diaper. Jennifer and her
mama left to run an erin and they warned me that he may make poopy,
and that should he do so, I could just wait for them to
return, and they changed him when they got back. Well, they had
been gone for all of forty three seconds, and he decided to blow.
There was no way I could stay in the same room with that vile odor
emanating from Junior's huggies. I knew that I was in for an event,
so I got creative and decided to change him in the bathtub. That way,
any errant duty could just be hosed down the drain. Dalton didn't understand
my plan and refused to cooperate, so a conventional changing was in order.
Once that first velcrow tab is loosen, it's on and there's no going back.
I was convinced the apocalypse had happened. In Junior's drawers. It was
full bore ww F style, no holds barred mud wrestling extravaganza. I would
have guessed the infant's entire elementary canal could maybe half a cup, but apparently
they're just descending colon holds enough to fill a milk pail. When someone says
they have a twenty pound baby, I now know what they really mean is
that they have a five pound baby and fifteen pounds of poorly digested, strained
turkey. I had not seen anything that disgusting since the dump hose on our
FEMA trailer busted loose when Jennifer was emptying it. Now, that was funny,
but karma has a way of getting you back. It was traumatic for
both me and Dalt, and he cried and I gaged, and it was
truly an event to behold. I now have to ask who the heck designed
the baby wipes. They should not be six by eight. They should be
at least the size of a standard bathtowel. It was like trying to clean
up the Exon Valdez spilled with a water Burger napkin. And as first go
I'd have to rank this one weigh down on the scale. I don't think
I'll be doing that again without a respirator and salad tongs and an incinerator.
I think the stinct molecules actually sended my old factory nerves since it took several
hours for the smell to leave me. And it's been a while now and
I'm almost back to normal. But thanks for asking. Chapter twenty eight,
Hunter Gatherers. There are two vastly different schools of thought in the Ray household
with regards to grocery shopping. The first method, which we'll call Method A
or the Right Way, and Method B, which we'll call the crazy Lady
way. Method A involves keeping a running list of needed items on your shopping
app on your smartphone and systematically and with economy of motion, gathering those items
and then getting the heck out of Walmart. One of the biggest problems with
Walmart is that they'll just let any in there. I'm a big proponent of
Method A. I get my multi meal Captain Crunch knock off cereal, a
gallon of fat free milk, a case of bottled water, and the biggest
sized package of megastuff Oreos they have, and maybe pick up a rotisserie chicken
at the register, and then I blow that pop stand A Jennifer is a
practitioner of Method B or the Crazy Lady way. A Method B involves gathering
a seemingly random assemblage of items procured on multiple trips down the same aisles over
and over again. It usually takes a minimum of three circuits through the grocery
side of the store, with occasional forays into hard goods and pharmacy side of
the store. I call these three trips the initial random pass, the filling
pass, and the clean up loop. Magellan went around the world in less
time than it takes to make a Method B trip through w The initial random
pass is just what it sounds like. Imagine if you were standing at the
front of the store and let loose a double alt load of buckshot. The
nine random items that were struck by the blast or put into the buggy with
no thought whatsoever as to why you need them or how you intend to use
them. Now you understand the initial random pass. An example of items picked
up in the initial random pass could be tofu, baloney, bananas, cocktail,
toothpicks shape like little swords, a hammer, charcoal, a twenty four
pack of Glow in the Dark condoms, a yellow cake mix, and a
file. You'll notice that none of these ingredients combine to make anything useful unless
you're providing the ord'euvs for the horny society of vegetarians with no sense of taste
HSOVSOT or foraging horseshoe user planning a prison break. This is where the fill
in pass becomes necessary. Now you make your own way back to the rear
of the store and you start over, and this time you try to pair
things with the assortment of things already in the buggy that can be combined to
make a meal, and maybe some bread to go with the tofu baloney or
with the bananas if you like, an Elvis style treat, a few hamburger
patties to make use of the charcoal, and a couple of containers of icing,
one for the cake and the other to eat while waiting for the cake
to bake. The fill in passes a little less nonsensical than doctor Zeus on
meth, but just barely. The cleanup loop is really just a method a
with an appetizer of chaos. Again, it involves going back to the rear
of the store, only this time to gather a handful of items you truly
need to complete the meal you've planned for the guests that are probably already at
your house. The clean up loop often includes stopping at wind Dixie, since
you have to pass it on the way home anyway, to pick up a
crucial yet forgotten ingredient for an integral part of the planned meal, for instance,
the green beans for the green bean casserole. If all goes well,
then when you arrive home you were still married, plus you have five hundred
cool little plastic swords. Stay tuned for the upcoming treatise entitled The Kitchens Sink,
Indoor compost Pile, or Impromptu Sterile Home. Surgical Sight Chapter twenty nine,
Target Sighted bombs Away. Nothing would do except that we attend the grand
opening of the new Target store, and thus begins the hilarity. I hate
crowds and would have sooner gouch my eyes out with a spoon, then go
to the opening of the newest purveyor of Chinese Jump. Jennifer was insistent,
so I put the spoon away and got in the car. We blended into
the river of people flooding into the store, and the automatic door slid open
to reveal the brand spanking new target, sporting that new store smell. That
was where the pleasantry of our outing ended. Unseen to Jennifer was a trail
of poo stretching from the threshold of the door all the way to the display
of roasted nuts thirty feet into the store. The length and breadth of this
bile hazard was quite impressive, and the sheer quantity ruled out an infant or
any service animal smaller than a service elephant. Jennifer did, in fact have
an encounter with the offensive leavings. She didn't really step in it, but
sort of kicked it in midstride as she flowed with the masses into the store.
Horrified, she panicked, and not knowing what to do, she froze
like a deer in the headlights. There she and the entrance of the new
target, surrounded by hundreds of people flooding into the new store, seemingly stuck
to the floor with pooh glue. While the mind layer was somewhere ahead of
us, headed to the depenzile. No doubt, she quickly evaluated her options.
Option one was that she would continue into the store as if nothing happened,
or Option two was that she should just leave the store, or Option
three was that she should create some sort of diversion by pointing at the Aunt
Jemima look alike in the Moo mooo on the writing grocery buggy and loudly say
ooh, and then run into the stores. Everybody was looking at Jemima.
Personally, I'd have chosen the Aunt Jemima option, but that's just me.
Others entered the store and began to become aware of the hazard and went around
the shah Nola like Johnson around Earnhardt. She chose option one. We quickly
merged with the other shoppers streaming into the store and beat a hasty trail deep
within the bowels of the store, putting as much distance between us and the
front door fecal festival as possible. I'm pleased to get to use the word
bowels in this story, but I digress. Once clear of the scene,
Jennifer was still faced with what to do with the stinker on her toe,
still attached and looking very much like a little dec dipped comb on the tip
of her brand new spears. Not wanting to spread the joy, she walked
like a peg legged pirate with the leg held stiff and the toe of her
shoe elevated. It looked to me like an uncomfortable way to walk, But
then I've never had a turn stuck to my toe and Target, so I
can't really speak from a position of experience. Our minds frantically sought a plan
as to where to drop the offending hitchhiker. I mean, what kind of
department store doesn't have a carpet somewhere in the store. Our options were growing
fewer as we go further into the store, dropping a pineapple on her foot,
and the produce department was starting to look good, except we ran into
some friends just as we approached the grocery section, so the pineapple wipe was
foiled. Just stepping out of her shoes and abandoning them in midile was an
option, but they were brand new sperries and appeared to be salvageable well.
She eventually just resigned herself to continue the pirate walk until she could hobble outside
to the grass, all the while shopping as if she were wearing two perfectly
good shoes. While our first trip to Target was certainly eventful, I think
I preferred the traditional greeterer at Walmart Chapter thirty oh la lah. Some things
can be learned by trial and error. Others can be learned by experience.
When the lesson is uncomfortable, it's always best to learn by the experience of
others. I suspect this tale will only benefit but a few souls, but
then so be it. It's a tale that must be told. I recently
installed a bidet in our bathroom. As I recall from my high school French
bidey pronounced beiday is French for butt washer. Actually I took Latin in high
school, but the Lattish people didn't have a word for butt washer, and
apparently they weren't big on personal hygiene tersus foreman is the best I can do
in lightin But that isn't a very pleasant name for a bathroom appliance. The
bidet is probably the only decent contribution the French have made to modern society,
excepting French fries and French bread. But how far can two side dishes really
take a civilization? The bidet is the crowning achievement of the French. Anyhow,
back to the lesson. Since our house is elevated, the plumbing is
exposed to the elements underneath, and the incoming water temperature fluctuates accordingly. It
is December, so cold weather is to be expected by this time. You've
probably put two and two together, and so as to not offend the sensibilities
of some, allow me to just say that a blast of thirty two point
three degree water to the nether regions could be described as brisk. It'll probably
be years before the long jump from a seated position becomes an Olympic event,
but until such time I can safely assume I currently hold the world record.
So in summary, as if you really needed telling, when you go to
buy your bidet, be sure to spring for the warm water model. That's
all for today's lesson, Chapter thirty one. Grinnin like a muse eating briars.
Everyone has a meuse, you know, that thing that drives you to
create something. To some is the traditional Greek goddess. To the people in
the caves of Lascal, it was the reindeer and mammos they hunted. I
discovered today that my muse is a forty two inch craftsman writing lawnmower. I
suppose that a forty eight inch or even a fifty two inch might work too,
But why mess was something proven I have a theory as to why certain
things come to me on my mower. I suspect that some part of my
brain is otherwise occupied, leaving the other parts wholly unsupervised, thus free to
wander around in unfamiliar places. Now, I'm sure there have been detailed psychological
studies on such things, and if not, there should be. So whether
your muse urges you to blow paint on your hand in a dark cave,
or string words together as you slaughter weeds, you just go where she leads.
So while the artists can create an image with pigments, it's possible to
do the same with words. Writing, however, is much cheaper than painting,
as you don't need all those brushes and chemists and paint and whatnot.
All you need is possibly a dictionary, and maybe not even that. If
you're bothered to remember a whole mess of words, they don't even have to
be real words. I mean, look at doctor Zeus Gredunza. Indeed,
Zeus does prove though that you need just a touch of crazy to string words
together in a manner others find pleasing. Not too eccentric. Minds you,
lest people start labeling your assemblages as to catch her in the riyosh or a
manifesto of some sort or other. That's not to say that you need to
hack off one of your ears while dying from an untreated case of syphilis,
but it is hard to argue with the brilliance of story night to little eccentricity,
however, and you'd do as well write an assembly manual or a cookbook,
which, if you think about it, cookbooks are really just food assembly
manuals. Nope, the trick is to find that perfect amount of derangement not
to my uncomfish, no hacking off of appendages, but also not writing cookbooks
or Ikia manuals either. It's a very fine line, really, So follow
your muse unless she says she knew vincent, and then wash your hands really
good first, and then go get a writing more. I recommend the Red
forty two inch model, Chapter thirty two, The Scent of Blessings. When
I ride my bike, it always gives me a chance to think and ponder
and admire, sort of a rolling worship service. This evening's ride started pretty
blandly, with overcast guys and weak failing light peeking between the dull colorless clouds,
not much of a sunset at all, with not much to look at
in the pale twilight, another sense took over, and oddly enough, it
was smell. One neighbor was just finishing up his yard and the scent of
freshly mode grass filled the thick, hot air. It is said that smells
can trigger memories more vividly than any other sense, and in this case it
did indeed, And for a moment, it was nineteen sixty nine and I
was in the third grade again at Iola Tapley Wilkins Elementary School, staring out
the open windows at the men pushing lawnmowers around the school as the teacher paused
her lesson while they passed. The roar of the mowers died as they continued
around the building, and the earthly scent of wet grass filled the classroom and
mingled with the other sense of chalk dust and floor wax. The lesson resumed,
but we were all in talksated on the vapors of fresh cut grass,
dreaming of summer and baseball and swimming in anything but math. Around the corner,
another neighbor was apparently boiling shrimp or crabs. The sharp smell of a
shrimp bowl that will take your breath away also means that there will soon be
a feast, for shrimp aren't really bowled as a snack. It is an
event, and there is always a gathering of some import when the boiling pot
hits the fire. Birthday's, mother's day, Father's day, graduations, marriages,
deaths. The pot is not fired up for just any trivial occasion.
Family is almost always integral to a shrimp bowl, as are corn taters,
sausage, and just like Shakespeare's witches brew, there is power in that building
cauldron, the power to conjure many things in stirfine memories and south the pain.
Saturday is obviously one of my neighbour's laundry nights too. As I rode
past, I smelled the flowery fragrance of drying laundry and was again transported to
my youth, where I slept under crispy clothesline dried sheets that, while they
didn't smell like my neighbor's perfumed laundry, had a feel in fragrance all their
own. And it was a cocktail of sense, mixing the smells of my
MEMA's house with the scents of nature and ivory, soap and salt air.
My mema was a very old lady before she ever got a machine to dry
her clothes, and her sheets may have thereafter been softer, but they certainly
weren't as memorable. As I pondered these smells, it occurred to me that
what I was smelling was the sense of blessings. These scents of shrimp,
laundry, and grass represented the blessings of food, clothing, and shelter,
three basic blessings that we probably all take for granted. So to mix the
axioms of counting your blessings and stopping to smell the roses, I was able
to roll by and smell the blessings. May we all be grateful. Chapter
thirty three, Deep Fried Parrot and Dolphin kebabs in a garlic IOLI. I
think anybody that knows me can agree that there are lots of people smarter than
me. Or I I'm not sure. See lots of people are smarter than
me. However, I have yet to be brainly tested by anything in the
animal or plant kingdom. The tic tac toe Playing chicken doesn't count, as
I was not at the top of my game and I suspect the chicken was
cheating. That happened in Mexico, and I didn't speak Spanish, and the
chicken didn't oblow much ingless, so there was a communication problem. Other than
that chicken, though, which we've all agreed doesn't count. I'm certain I
could mentally best anything else in the plant or animal kingdom, except maybe for
some of the great apes or the more cunning monkeys. They might come close
in a Sudoku tournament, but I'm sure I could take them in an arm
wrestling contest. The cunning monkeys, not the great apes. Those things are
strong. Also, minor birds and parrots, although they are no chicken,
might put up a good showing, but a little crisco and flour, and
just like the chicken, the competition is eliminated. So I think we've established
that there may be a few non delicious, crispy fried and mental competitors in
the animal kingdom, but very few. Just an FYI, pulled chimpanzee is
nowhere near as good as pulled port. I can, however, state emphatically
that there is nothing in the plant king them that can fool me, except
maybe that vine that has the thorns. The gallons of round up mixed with
gasoline and then let on fire can't even kill. I suspect there are some
of these vines growing in the core of the Fukushima reactor and that's what caused
it to fail. So other than this vine and possibly kudzu, I'm certain
I'm smarter than most plants, except maybe the venus fly trap. But at
each disgusting house flies on purpose, I just eat them if I'm asleep in
the hammock with my mouth wide open, and even then I don't really enjoy
them much. A grass is stupid, though, why just this morning I
outwitted it handily, and try as I might, I just can't get it
to grow where I want it. However, it thrives in my flower beds,
being marginally smarter than grass. It dawned on me that if I were
to cover the bear areas in my yard with mulch and then an ounce so
that the grass might hear me that I was putting in a new bed,
than grass would practically spring forth overnight. Mosilic grass now chuckle at my slightly
higher cunning than a capuchin monkey. Dolphins, dang, I forgot dolphins.
They are smart and cute and athletic jumping through those rings is not at all
as easy as they make it look. Plus all the questions you have to
answer afterwards in the legal fees hardly make it worth trying. On an unrelated
note, dolphin kebabs aren't too bad. They taste like Mexican chicken. Chapter
thirty four. It's springtime and love is in the air, literally, and
it's disgusting. Well, I just mowed my yard for the first time this
spring. Notice I said mowed my yard as opposed to I mowed my grass,
because frankly, very little grass was involved in the venture. The mowing
did nothing to improve the quality of my yard. But I do now have
a broad assortment of weeds, all nearly the same height. It's sort of
like stacking empty beer cans in a neat pyramid as opposed to just leaving them
on the table or in the aquarium. It really serves no purpose but looks
marginally better. So it is with mowing weeds. While I was mowing,
I noticed huge amounts of pollen in the air, which got me to thinking
about what pollen really is. It's the reproductive matter of plants, and it's
everywhere which is kind of disgusting. It's in our eyes, it's in our
hair, We're practically covered in it. Just going outside is like using Hugh
Hefner's hot tub after a particularly randy party where the guests list included an assortment
of Kardashians. It's a veritable botanical orgy, what with the live folks getting
lively down by the water, and the crept myrtles are doing the nasty and
the flower beds and there's a pine tree three way going in the neighbor's yard.
Imagine it's nineteen seventy three and you've stumbled on to the set of a
drug fueled three day long art movie shoot in a condo outside Malibu. But
just replace the humans with various types of plants, and it's just non stop
tree on tree action until at least May. Ugh. I now have a
headache and Anita shower. Another bad thing about spring, besides the mowing and
the continual tree sex more an autumn person myself, is that the gnats come
out in full force. If you've ever experienced the torment of the Salt Marsh
gnat, just imagine millions of hungry, tiny little ghost vampires nearly invisible to
the naked eye, yet each able to drink a full pie of blood.
If they were twice as big as they are, they'd kill you. And
frankly, I think the Egyptians got off easy with the locusts and the frogs.
If God had really wanted to punish them, he'd have sent the gnats.
Pharaoh would have had the Israelites packed up by nightfall, and four Baptist
churches would have opened the next day, and the new Moses Land theme park
would be adding a red Sea flowme ride such as the Power of the Gnat.
Now I've got a headache and I need to close the blinds. The
Indian hawthorns are up to page thirty seven in the Kamasutra, chapter thirty five
and miles to mow before I sleep. When driving down Highway ninety along the
beach, the traveler just passing through might think that Hurricane Katrina was but a
distant memory, since the mostly healed scars that are left along the wall are
obscured by the flashing neon of casinos, gas stations, and fast food joints.
However, there are thousands and thousands of vacant lots just north of the
sparkling Gulf waters all the way from the Pearl River to the Alabama state line.
Of these vacant lots represent the dreams and lives of many families. Christmases
celebrated and birthdays accumulated, weddings performed, and Easter eggs hunted, and deaths
mourned. Entire lives lived in that one hundred foot by one hundred and forty
foot piece of dirt, and bent and twisted remains of chain link fences marked
the borders that contain these dreams. Not only trees were torn up by their
roots, but people too, just the same force. The people that lived
on these parcels have since created new lives, some nearby and others distant,
but their connection to their grassy plots cannot be severed. Most folks would drive
by the old man on the mower and not think twice about it. But
it causes me wonderment. Manys the time I've passed a pickup truck on the
side of a barren road and seen an old man on the mower while his
wife swelters in the truck waiting with cold drinks. These are the people that
used to live on that plot. Of ground, and although they no longer
have a home there, they seem oddly drawn to maintain an overgrown, vacant
lot. In the dog days of summer, they'll mow knee high parched grass,
as if to pronounce, Hey, this is still mine, and I
will not surrender. They tend it as the living tend to grave, and
they defiantly proclaim their attachment to that dirt. They mow where their kids played
with a new puppy, and they mow over the place where they buried the
same dog as a member of the family fifteen years later, while the kids
were off at college, and they mow under the tree their grandfather planted seventy
five years ago and still yields pe cons that they pick up from the dead
brown grass every autumn and use to make pies for their Sunday school class.
They mow around the concrete piers that once supported the porch where they sat and
cried when they learned that their son wasn't coming back from some jungle in a
place they'd never even heard of. And they mow over the broken concrete of
the driveway lost to time in the creeping Saint Augustine, and they can still
see in their mind's eye the brand new nineteen sixty nine Osmobile ninety eight gleaming
in the sun, a treat for the years of hard work and sacrifice.
They don't mow to make the grass shorter, They mow to make the memories
longer. Chapter thirty six. Lasts in the blink of an eye have a
sinister yet compassionate habit of sneaking up on you. It's for the best,
though, because if they didn't creep in covertly, you'd never forever be stuck
in a place on a timeline, last, come ephemerally with nary a hint
of their presence, and passing Only much later do you even realize what they
really were. Had you known that it was the last time your child would
reach for your hand in a crowded parking lot, you'd have stood there in
the cold for hours holding his hand. Had you known she'd never ask you
to read about the Red Fish and the Bluefish ever again, you'd have made
that story last as long as war and peace. Had you known your spouse
would never again return home, you'd have kissed her twice when she left.
If you'd known that it was the last fishing trip you would take with your
brother, you would have cast well past dusk into the night, and had
you known it was your last dinner together before they moved miles and miles away,
you'd have insisted that your friends have another piece of dessert. Had you
known it'd been the last time you pass through a town, you'd have driven
more slowly and waved at the old couple on the porch swing, perhaps experiencing
a last of their own that they'd only learned of the next morning when only
one of them awakened. I suppose that lasts often lead to first and the
excitement of the first salvesdy aches of the lasts. Being human means that lasts
you're cumulative, and eventually everything will become a last, up until the two
ultimate lasts, your last breath and your last heartbeat. So take lots of
pictures and cherish every single moment, because you never know which of those moments
might be a last. In disguise. On the Anniversary of Desolation, written
on the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the sun shone strong on the sparkling
waters and tanned the faces of Southern daughters who enjoyed their lives under the live
oak trees, whose branches swayed in a salty breeze. Their children ran down
a long sandbar, scratching in the sand their names and stars, as generations
before had done the same, until the wind blew and the water came.
The stately homes watching over the sound had witnessed much amid their grounds. Christmases
passed, colored eggs hid for hunting, fireworks and picnics with rails hung in
the bunting hot golden turkeys and sweet pecan pies, and even a rare flake
from steel winter skies. The old cypress swing creek on orange rusty chains,
until the wind blew and the water came. With sun baked skin and broken
backs. Men trawl, shrimp and fill oyster sacks, just like their pawpalls
and their uncles and fathers. They wrestle a living from these bountiful waters.
Old wooden boats made by men long since gone, work hard through the night,
and then bring their crews home. For decades prior, men have done
just the same until the wind blew and the water came. Blackwater rivers creep
down to the bays where sleepy gaiters bask, and warming rays where the egret
hunts, and the mullet jumps, and turtles lounge on cypress stumps. The
lazy bayous wind through the trees, and snails ride the grass that blows in
the breeze serenely flowed the rivers known by Indian names, until the wind blew
and the water came. She rowed ashore on her wicked broom, a whirling
mass, this gray typhoon. She waved her wind and cast her spells,
unleashing demons from beneath the swells. Both sinners and saints suffered in this mix.
When poker chips floated with the crucifix in the darkened, churning witches brew
When the water came and the wind blew. Time, our most precious gift
cannot be measured by balance, vessel, or rule. But with a mechanical
device we measure our lives. It ticks constant, cold, and cruel.
Luna Venus and Soul. Venus chased Luna across the sky, a celestial race
in the heavens high and al. The Baron followed closely by, while in
awe in silence, there said I Soul came to see such game. Then
Venus blinked and lost her flame. Luna continued her steady pace, her luster
dulled by soul's bright face. Sanity. The veil of sanity has but only
one side. So sheer is the shelter where within we hide. For beyond
its boundary lived the nightmares and dreams of hobgoblins and devils and all wicked things.
Should the veil be moved aside by a lilting breeze, allowing you to
glimpse all of these, dare not to linger in o terry too long,
lest they entice you to stay with the sirens song. They dispense a random
concoction of pleasure or pain. It's a toss of the coin when going insane,
six of one or a half a dozen of the other, an injection
of one tincture of another. What you will get is far from certain.
Should you ever wander outside the curtain, dog days in the delta and dusty
porch chairs, delta painters rock, where the august heat slows even the clock
ochre talk covers everything, and at night the frog and the locusts sing,
and lesser stars than Sirius let loose of the sky and fall toward us in
vast green oceans reaching out of sight, are desolate and depressing, though filled
with life. When the dog star rises, it brings such as these,
the hope of the harvest and the autumn breeze. Just the other day,
Twas just the other day, I said, When I was just beginning to
walk, I skinned my knee and bumped my head, and shortly after learn
to talk. Off to school, I went to learn reading Dick and Jane
and ciphering math, a questioning spirit with time to burn, exploring Frost's less
travel path. Then the child morphed into a man unlike Darwin's monkeys can I
learned Poe and Twain, and of pioneers headed west, and the traits of
moving bodies and those that are at rest. Some things made sense and others
not. But miles of roads still lay ahead, and scarcely looked up to
the clock, for we can sleep when we are dead. Now sign posts
appear along the way sooner than I would fear reading. But just the other
day, when the truth is, it's been so many years, life is
nothing more than memories. As we rush headlong toward the grave, Some discarded
instantly, and others bound and saved. And as the end drawls, still
nearer, will all be heard to say, For at that point our time
is dearer. Seems all my life was just the other day. The cow
I pull one tee, then the other, because one's for milk, and
one's for butter, one's for cream, and one's for cheese. I wish
my cow had more of these. A fisherman's view of life. A lone
gull cries, a mullet flies, A pelican sits and watches with an intent
gaze, and a crash in the waves. A hapless fish he catches as
an old man fishes. He sits and wishes for days that are long since
pasted. A second look at an empty hook, and he makes another cast.
The tide rolls in and then out again, as it has for untold
ages. Our lives are just books, and time is a crook that slowly
steals our pages. The ebbing tide makes small crabs hide among the drying rocks,
while shrimping men over diesels den make deals along the docks. The sun
sinks slow, and the wind it blows. Another day is pasted. It's
almost night, but in the pale moonlight there's time for one more cast an
ode to Poe. In the deepest part of the night, when the clock
runs slow, comes a velvet cloaked visitor who goes by Poe dread in fear,
phillis clutch hoping joy are gone. As such, there's no way back
from the sooty hell, my rapid heart. The tale it tells. He
is easily heard above the clock's two bells as the master prepares to cast his
spells an unwanted guest, though I feel strangely obliged to tolerate his visit from
the other side, the executioner of peace, the bringer of woe, this
tormented man, this man named Poe. The way is dark and rife with
crags. As the specter opens and unloads his bags, squeaky brass, latches
in creaking leather, and a palette hand withdraws one black feather from the carcass
of the raven, though I know not whether he is dead or alive,
as the scent of death would be masked by the heather from the vapors of
an earlier team made in the corner of the weather. Wicked, vile,
simmering potions, sickening salves, unduans, and lotions stirred and twirled, and
nauseating motions concocted of species from across seven black oceans. The sorcerer worked his
recipes slow this evil cook, this man named Poe, in hopes of avoiding
the fortunes of Fortunado, an expert vnor in wine aficionado. When pride drove
his quest for the Amantillado, I summoned up a whiff of false bravado.
Fearing the trial and mortar board, he wielded with weak, shaky breath.
My voice box yielded, and then asked my tormentor, shall I see dawn
upon my door? And then came his answer, So dread an answer,
no, never more, never more. Here and now and there and then.
There are only two places we all have been. That's here and now
and there and then. While here and now are the present tents, there
and then can be passed her hens then lives in our memories is known as
the past, but it's also the future, and the die yet cast the
then in there that are yet to be, or shaped by the here and
now You see the then and there's wise and hows are determined by your hear
and now spend them wisely do what's right, so that then in there you'll
sleep at night. Here and now is your chance to mend. And then
in there, at the very end, the preacher and the teacher. When
the teacher is done, she is said to have taught. But when the
preacher is done, has he not brought? Of course he hasn't. We
all know he's preached. So pray tell why the teacher hasn't teached? Autumn,
As your sky is filled with the orange butterflies, and narrow a cloud
is seen, A cooling breeze rustles the leaves that turn to gold from green.
A midnight haunting. The mind works differently in the dead of night,
slower the pleasantries fast as the fright. Once awakened, long before first light,
my mind torments me throughout the night, when fast my brain should be
asleep. Ghosts wonder its crevices, dark and deep, things long since passed
and deeply stored, or torn from their moorings. When the mind is bored,
while half awake yet half a slumber, the ghosts in my mind soon
grow in number. Though a twisted dream, they begin they're traveling a tapestry
of memories. They're soon unraveling. They open hidden boxes and spread all around
things that were never in tended, unbound. Fond memories tortured now are haunting.
The past is longed for, the future is daunting, an aching sadness
for things long gone yet waiting for no man. Time marches on outside my
windows. A wind chime rings, a random tune on a night's winds wings
away in the distance. A train whistles, moaning keeps ghosts in my mind
from roaming anymore on the sleepless night. As dawn approaches with welcomed light.
The artist and the poet. What the artist does is pigment. The poet
does with a pen. The artist makes us sea without, and the poet
see within dead reckoning over jagged waves. Are ships with captain think our course
alone. We steer, not decided by us. Our courses they happen,
yet not by chance. New ports draw near. We're only passengers, though
at the wheel, pretending control, we order hoist all her sheets full speed
ahead, goes brass, wood and steel, our luminous weight, changing the
courses of those we meet, just as ours was altered by the others.
We passed under billowing sail and creaking masts, each ship moves the other to
alternate ends, directing their course much more than the winds. The altering of
plot by just one tiny degree then brought our ship eventually alongside of me.
We think it is us who steer by the stars, when in truth it
is the maker of those very same stars who makes the winds blow that drive
us along. While in the rigging whistles a familiar song, an old time
hymn, and clanging ship's bell says to us that all is well, Yes,
all is well the purpose of life. I'm just passing through, though
I know not why. I breathe, love, live, and die.
For my purpose, I beg a glue to lead a nation, as some
men do, or silently pass my task unknown and sleep anonymously under a yet
quarried stone. Perhaps my task is a cumulative thing, not to strum the
heart, but merely pluck one string and then another in no recognized tone,
seemingly out of sync with the comic metronome, never hearing the sound of the
symphony complete but a few single notes without sustain. Fading fleet, Should the
smallest cog missing inside the clock then render its heart a tick with no talk?
The entire mechanism would then be of no avail other than to mark the
time that the small cog failed. The parts of the machine must exist in
the hole if we are to hear the chimes and the hours told. A
night's bright armor is but one rivet, shy of deciding whether the warrior might
live or die. So, whether cogg or rivet or vibrating string, we
all have our part in this mystical thing called life, where nothing is certain
except its end and the unknown links of the paths we wind. To believe
you've a purpose, yet know it not. Is to deny yourself and acknowledge
your God. This has been as per y'all's requests, written by Beau Ray,
read to you by Cameron Buckner. People for t