I just tucked Budge in after an adventurous first day of Summer Vacation for her and the rest of the county’s teachers. Now I’m sitting here mulling over what would have happened if my plans hadn’t gang agley, as dear Robert Burns says. I know this much; if Plan F had managed to grow from seed to fruit, yesterday would have closed out my second full decade as a teacher. I was an emergency hire at Woodmont High School in October 1994 for the 94-95 academic year. A teacher who moonlighted at a retail store in the mall got a sweet promotion to full time district manager in another state and my resume’ was the one Dr. Susan Hoover-now-Achilles picked, I think at random, from a pile on her desk.
I realize now I’ve started in medias res so to catch everyone up, Plan A was to follow my dream to become a Midshipman at the US Naval Academy, marry my high school sweetheart at the USNA Chapel after graduation, make rank, win medals, and have pretty babies. As to the first part, I had the grades. At that time, I had the fitness ability. I had a sweet 1380 on the SAT (back when that meant something). What I didn’t have was an appointment. Ignorant babe that I was, I didn’t know one does not simply walk apply and get accepted into Mordor The United States Naval Academy; one must be “appointed” by a US Congressman from one’s home state. A few other shortcut ways exist, but I didn’t meet any of them either. Apparently, I didn’t impress either secretary enough to even get an interview with the august men so, NO NAVAL ACADEMY FOR YOU!
So, I did what I always did. I dropped back ten and punted to Plan B which was to enlist in the United States Marine Corps after graduation, marry my high school sweetheart after basic, get deployed, make rank, win medals, come home, and have pretty babies. Unfortunately, I’d wrecked my ’79 Mustang the summer before my junior year and a piece of bumper went through my left quadriceps right down to the bone. The wound got infected and turned into a cantaloupe sized subdermal hematoma which I delayed getting taken care of until it had seriously messed up the muscle surrounding the wound, the end result being a 5″x5″ puckered, sunken spot on my thigh with a direct tunnel of nasty scar tissue running right down to the bone. I went to my Armed Forces physical (MEPS) at Fort Jackson and was doing great until one of the doctors did something no one else had ever done . . . he put his finger right in the center of the scar mass and pushed. I hit the floor like a crack dealer during a Saturday night SWAT raid. He pointed out any enemy who captured me would do the same AND that spot was going to swell up tight whenever I ran, which he was right about — the swelling, not the capture — because my junior year wrestling i had to ice that spot after every practice. So, I spent the longest five hours in history on a bus back to Greenville from Columbia just to tell my very unhappy Gunnery Sgt. recruiter I was a medical washout.
So, dropped back ten more and punted to Plan C which was to go to college, marry my high school sweetheart, get a degree, and have pretty babies. Well, Plan C went down in flames one day in the spring of my senior year when my high school sweetheart announced to me at my locker on a Friday right after final bell, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you. The good news is, ‘IT ISN’T YOURS'” then turned and walked out of my life forever to become the wife and punching bag of an odious Georgia redneck. On the positive side, once I finally woke up Monday morningish, I understood with perfect clarity what a “Lost Weekend” is.
So, dropped back ten more and punted to Plan D which was to go to college . . . and after that things got a little hazy but, as you can tell, I’ve never been one for planning the details. So I went to college, became an engineering major for a total of two hours, and came out on the other side with a degree in Secondary English Education. I and my country bumpkin accent and grammar were off to become a high school English teacher. That was in 1993 and by the end of the summer, I’d lost any hope of getting a teaching job so with the aforementioned Plan D in tatters, I took the aforementioned job at Kufner Textiles. That year of 93 to October of 94 was a long, strange trip involving lots of adventures I may tell some other time, but not here.
Welcome to Plan E. Here, I worked as many hours per week as I could doing whatever, but mostly dyeing cloth dark blue, jet black, or sometimes whorehouse red. Whenever I changed lots, I had to climb into the dye vats and wash down the rollers and flush out the tanks. It was hot, wet, and absolutely miserable work, but those adventures I was having made it bearable for awhile. Then, on October 10, 1994, while in the middle of a change from blue to red, I got called to the public phone in the breakroom, Dr. Hoover of Woodmont High School wanted to see me for an interview as soon as I got off that afternoon.
That interview was a hoot.
Dr. Hoover forbade me from going home and changing so I walked into her nice spiffy office looking like the bastard love child of a giant Smurfette and Hellboy. As always happened when I cleaned dye vats, I had blue dye in my hair, on my face, and all over my clothes. I splashed red dye starting up the second lot so I had red mixed in all over as well. I tried to get her to let me stand on the sidewalk outside her office, but she knew nothing about how strong industrial cloth dye is and I knew nothing about what a raging, control freak, diet obsessed hellcat she was so I came in and plopped my happy dye covered ass down on her brand new office couch and crossed my legs. When I stood up again, I had the job, starting the next day. So that led to Plan F where I would teach like some of my favorite high school teachers had taught and stay in the same room teaching two and a half generations of children for thirty years and retire with a luncheon and a cake shaped like a book of Shakespeare Plays to write the great American novel. Somewhere along the line, I’d get married and we’d have pretty babies.
Well, I got my Budge, several ex-students now friends, but only ten good years of memories rather than the thirty I’d planned. I could go into detail and I have in a previous post as to what led to Greenville County Schools and me parting ways in a most unfriendly fashion, but I don’t feel like digging up those bones tonight. It’s in the archive. So ended Plan F. Funnily enough though, the day I left the school ten years later, you could still see the outline in blue of someone sitting, legs crossed and arm extended on the arm rest as clear as a mountain stream on that office couch. 
An old proverb, maybe Jewish, says, “Man plans and God laughs.” I’ve fought my way through a few more plans until Plan I finally took over after I was unceremoniously let go from my last chance teaching job six years ago now. Still, IF things had worked out, I’d be two thirds of the way to retirement today along with some of the best friends I’ve never heard from again. Funny thing my daddy used to say about that word “if;” he said, “If a frog had wings he wouldn’t bump his ass every time he took a step either.” Ah the plans of mice and men . . .
Love y’all and keep those feet clean.
My life has slowly gone to Hell in a cheap Dollar General handbag for the last twelve years. It started with getting fired from Woodmont, but it’s steadily picked up speed until now I feel like I’m riding with a one way ticket on a runaway train, and to make matters worse, I haven’t had the foggiest idea why. I haven’t done anything that differently in my life, but stuff just keeps coming faster and faster and faster down the years. Now, I’m standing on top of my metaphorical levee, it’s leaking like a sieve, it’s going to break, and I know two things I didn’t know before: 1) This levee’s gonna break and 2) I know why. Let me enlighten you with what I’ve figured out.
Next to my Mama, Granny Wham was the most formidable woman on this earth. She had an iron will that would not break even though it bent precariously a time or two, but she prayed Papa Wham home from Europe during World War II without a scratch on him and she prayed Daddy home from Vietnam without a scratch on him that anyone could see. If Granny Wham said she was going to pray for you, she wasn’t making idle talk. Your name was going on the list she would quietly and calmly review before her Lord every night before she went to bed. Everybody else on this page except for Budge and Granny Wham were all Pentecostal. Granny was a sprinkled Methodist turned dunked Southern Baptist Sunday School teacher and when she got on her knees she wasn’t talking to hear her brains rattle. She had every scrap of faith in the world that whatever she was praying for would come to pass no matter how improbable. Granny Wham was a serious prayer warrior.
Blue Schofield Reference Bible laid out on the seat. She was praying and crying. I walked over and laid my hand on her back gently. She looked up towards me through pouring eyes and I asked her whatever was wrong. She said, “I had a dream I was in a wide open field and in the middle of the field was a mound of logs with a white sheet laying on it and as I walked closer to it I saw it was on fire, and when I got closer still I saw a body was under the sheet and it was on fire as well. Then I got right up to it and I was scared to pull back the sheet but I heard a voice telling me to.” Here she broke down for a minute and when she could speak again she said, “It was Frankie (my daddy). He was dead and burning and I don’t know what it means so I got up and came in her and I’ve been praying ever since.” When she reached a level of care need Cathy couldn’t give her at home, Granny moved to Martha Franks Retirement Center and even though a stroke left her barely able to speak intelligible words, God didn’t have trouble understanding her I know. Every time I went to see her, which was so very much less than it should have been, she was either napping in her bed or praying in her bed with her hands laying softly on the last bible I bought her to replace the Schofield that fell apart. Granny prayed.
Papa John (Mama’s daddy) was a Pentecostal preacher and a loom fixer at a cotton mill. People laughed at him and ridiculed him and put him down as tongue tied and uneducated. They didn’t know the pain that seared Papa’s soul and mind. Papa fought his own personal demons all his life and even though they broke his body with multiple strokes and multiple heart attacks and a car wreck or two for good measure, they never broke his spirit. He preached God’s word on Sunday morning and Sunday night with all the fervor and fire of a John Wesley or Charles H. Spurgeon right up until he had a big stroke in the church parking lot that left him unable to speak above a whisper. People gave up on him and people thought he was odd and funny, but Papa never gave up on God. The last several years of his life, Papa couldn’t get out or get up much without help. Instead of watching the old westerns he loved with Roy Rogers and Lash LaRue, he’d sit from late afternoon until dawn with his father-in-law’s ancient family bible on his lap reading and praying, mostly for Mama and me. The last words I heard him speak were a prayer.
Of all the issues I have to deal with, and believe me I have more issues than National Geographic, the most pernicious and debilitating is what I affectionately refer to as “The Tape.” That’s the short name. It’s full name is The Grievous Recitation and Replay of Misery, Misfortune, Doom and Failure Inside My Head. So, see, it’s much easier to just say “The Tape.”
It’s all sitting up there waiting for the right time.
Harder than it seems it should be, isn’t it? That’s an imaginary thought exercise. Try REAL events that resulted in REAL negative consequences, sometimes physical scars, and always emotional scars and pair them with a mind that doesn’t seem to have a “Delete” function and see what you can do. In short, it’s not like I WANT TO THINK ALL THESE THOUGHTS!! I am not a masochist. I don’t enjoy misery or pain, so if it was as easy as “just thinking of something pleasant” don’t you think I’d have done it already? Do you not realize how many times I’ve tried in over 30 years?
By the spring of 1915, both sides in the conflict were desperate to find a way to break the stalemate on the Western Front because, while it hadn’t occurred to the top brass, others in and out of the military began realizing the carnage of the repeated forays into the meat grinder which was No-Man’s Land was ultimately unsustainable. The impetus for launching another front perforce came from outside the military because the highest generals in charge could not be swayed from their conviction that the sole path to Allied victory lay through the mud of France and Belgium. The idea came from a British politician, Sir Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. He proposed a campaign that nearly cost him the rest of his political career, launched three nations forcibly onto the world stage, and ultimately proved no less bloody than the bloodiest battles along the Western Front. What Churchill proposed was an amphibious assault aimed at bolstering the flagging Russians and knocking the Ottoman Empire out of the war. The place he picked was a small peninsula in modern day Turkey called Gallipoli.
Wer redet heute noch von der Vernichtung der Armenier?
At that point, a pang twinges in his head. He’s been married for years. He’s got three kids, a mortgage, and an IRA. Even as he laughs off his foolish worries, he knows it would be better to let this sleeping dog lie . . . but he doesn’t. He accepts the request and she happens to be online! Three hours flash by just like when they were two teenagers talking on the new portable phone for half the night. His wife — the mother of his children, the one who stood beside him when he lost his job in the disaster of ’08 — has already gone to sleep. She’s got a full day of shuttling kids, cleaning, shopping, and cooking to do. He stretches out beside her wondering why his conscience itches so, but he pushes the thought aside as he drifts off to a dream of yesterday.
For 250 years, the Ottoman Empire was a force of great power, influence, and expansion in Eurasian affairs. The sultans in Constantinople ruled over one of the ten largest empires the world had ever known. Her art was highly esteemed, her coffers awash with coin, and her military a mighty and feared corps of hardened fighting men. Unfortunately, those 250 years were almost another 250 years in the PAST in the early 20th Century.
"Granny Beads and Grocery Store Feet" 