Category Archives: A Story

Oct30

Me and Freddy

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Tomorrow is the celebration of the ancient Celtic feast of Samhain. For the less pagan among us, it’s All Hallow’s Eve. Most of us folks around here just call it Halloween and it’s a time to dress up in a silly costume and eat way too much candy (if you’re a kid), dress up in a silly to slutty costume and drink way too much alcohol (if you’re a typical college student), or dress in the most comfortable things you own to walk / drive all over town so your little goblins and their friends can load up on carbohydrate laden loot (if you’re a parent).

One time-honored tradition for Halloweiners of all ages, though, is the Fright Fest Movie Marathon. That’s when normal, sane folks cut the lights out and cut the DVD player on to watch the craziest, goriest, and scariest movies available to modern man. What results is everyone trying to scare everyone else and lots of jumping and general mayhem. Most people think it’s a terrific way to spend an evening.

I am most emphatically NOT one of those people. When it comes to cinematic terror, I am the most lily-liver coward in the room. You could launch aircraft from the yellow streak down my back. I simply don’t go to or watch horror / thriller / scary / suspenseful movies unless I am tricked or forced (and by forced, I mean you’d better bring the BIG boys) into watching them. My reason is simple — I have bad nerves, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and an overactive imagination.

In other words, I’m jumpier than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs at the BEST of times. I don’t need any more terror in my life. This seems quite strange, I know, coming from someone who grew up with Michael, Jason, and Freddy. In some ways, my tween and teen years were the golden age of slasher flicks. All my friends ate them up.

Not me.

The focus of this particular fiasco is the time I got tricked into going to the first “Nightmare on Elm Street” at the old Oaks Twin Theater in Laurens when I was around 13 or so. Now the Oaks, like a lot of theaters back then, had heavy velvet-like floor to ceiling that hung about a foot or so from the cement block walls of the building’s outside. That space was just wide enough for the theater employees to slip into and go up and down the side aisles unnoticed.

This provided ample opportunity for mischief.

Well, most everyone knows about Freddy Kruger and that stupid bladed glove of his — NOW.

We didn’t THEN.

I’m sitting with three other guys two rows down from the mom who brought us and I’m hunkered down as much as my tubby little frame would let me, watching the movie through my fingers and it’s barely past the opening credits. Then, as if my nerves weren’t already shot, random screams started erupting from up and down both sides of the theater. We were down front, so all the screams were behind us. I had no idea what was going on and I was scared poop-less.

I was stuck next to the wall; this turned out to be unfortunate.

At a terrifying moment where Freddy jumps out from nowhere, the curtain next to me parts and a bladed glove come slashing down towards me, followed by an arm in a stripped sweater and a grotesque, hat topped face and head. I screamed like a little girl. Thankfully for my pride, so did my compatriots.

Now, I knew deep down in my psyche that this was a theatrical stunt because things like Freddy didn’t exist, but at the time, the part of the brain tasked with relaying that information to the rest of my mind was on lunch break or something so the message didn’t get out and the more “primitive” sections of the old gray matter took over.

Now folks, I learned early on in life that white boys can’t jump and fat kids can’t run. Whenever my “fight or flight” reflex kicked in, I knew it was root hog or die. Running just meant I’d still get the wedgie and I’d be tired and sweaty in the bargain.

So this arm is coming at me and I’m screaming and my buds are screaming and the folks in the rows in front and back of us are screaming and I’ve got no where to go and nothing to do and I’m terrified and trapped.  Just so you know, a terrified fat kid backed into the corner of a movie seat is a dangerous and unpredictable thing.

I wasn’t sure if the wetness on my pants was from a sudden loss of bladder control or sudden loss of 48 ounce Big Burper slushie control. (It was the slurpee I discovered later) All I was certain of was I was going to die and I determined not to go out like the chumps on the movie screen so when the blades brushed my cheek, I reached up, latched on with both hands, and proceeded to chomp down amidships of that sweater clad arm like a mule eating corn. I swear I felt my jaws lock and my teeth touch bone. I was like Ricki-Ticki-Tavi fighting Nag the Cobra; if I was going to die, at least let me be found with my teeth sunk into my adversary.

At that point, the arm started to shake violently and another whole set of shrieks got added to the surrounding cacophony which just caused me to bite down even harder. Suddenly, the grimace on the masked face was real, actual pain. That’s when my buds started banging me on the back and trying to get me to let go because they’d realized that it was all a stunt. I guess that’s when the message relaying part of my brain decided to return from the potty and I understood what was going on. The poor guy who’d been going up and down behind the curtains scaring people was holding his arm and cussing a blue streak. We didn’t see the rest of the movie.

Just so you know, if they cut the lights on in a movie theater and the show isn’t over, that’s not a “good thing.”

That’s just one of many incidents of my bad reactions to a horror movie. Later on, maybe I’ll tell you about why I was banned (much to my relief) from the campus haunted house in college or perhaps about the time I dislocated my then-girlfriend’s shoulder during Pet Semetary.

Til then, though, Trick or Treat; love y’all and keep those feet clean!

 

Oct28

Shannon and the Orange Lipstick

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My Apologies to Mr. Johnson and Harold

I have stated on several occasions that I grew up in a ’68 model 15 x 50 single wide trailer with no heat and no central air conditioning. This is not completely accurate. I spent my most memorable and formative years, until I finished college, in the aforementioned dwelling that Mama and I lovingly referred to as “The Little Barn.” Strictly speaking, however, my earliest home was a 1970 model 15 x 50 single wide trailer WITH heat, but still no central air. We lived there from the time I was brought home from the hospital until I was 8. Then we moved into a double wide and then we began what I’ve always referred to as mine and Mama’s “Nomadic Period.”

For today, though, I’m concerned with that first trailer and my early childhood. When I was small (well, small being relative. I’ve always been on the plus size side) I enjoyed three things above all else: eating Purina Puppy Chow Puppy Food, “painting” on the inside of the cabinet doors with Mama’s cosmetics, and climbing. This particular incident involves the latter two pastimes.

I spent hours with Mama’s late ’60s version of a Caboodle laid out in front of me using her eye shadow make up as pastel paints and her rouge brushes as my paint brush. This being the early ’70s, my palette ran to the vibrant blues and pastel browns common on the eyelids of women in those days. Mama wasn’t extremely happy with the way I tended to use up her stuff, but it wasn’t terribly destructive and in my pre-literate days, it was the best way to keep me quiet short of Sesame Street and Mama didn’t like me watching much TV.

One particular color, unfortunately, was always off limits to me and, consequently, NEVER left within my chubby little hand’s reach. I’m speaking of Mama’s orange lipstick. This was one of those colors that ONLY came out in the ’70s (thank God) and has never been seen since (ibid). Now when I say it was orange, I don’t mean burnt orange or Tennessee orange or even my beloved Clemson orange. This was closer to International Hunter’s DayGlo Orange.

It was bright.

I was totally fascinated with the dazzling hue and the smooth oily consistency and Mama, knowing this, kept the verboten lipstick tube in  her pocketbook (“purse” for the yankees in the crowd) into which I was forbidden to reach on pain of my life . . . at least that’s what she told me and, though she’d never raised a hand to me in anger, I wasn’t interested in pressing my youthful luck.

But it sure was bright orange.

So, on the fateful day in question, Mama and I had lain down for a nap in the “cool room” — our name for the master bedroom where the sole window unit A/C was located to help Daddy sleep when he came home from 3rd shift at the glass plant. This day, however, Daddy was working 2nd shift and wouldn’t be home for quite a while.

Under these conditions, something Mama never expected happened. She slept longer than I did. Mama ALWAYS woke up before me.

Not today.

Now I tottered down the hall, closing the bedroom door behind me to conserve the coolness for Mama, and made my way to the kitchen. As God is my witness, my only intention when I got up was to get my glass of Bosco laced milk from the fridge and finish drinking it as I sat at the table thumbing through my Little Golden Book copy of “The Pokey Little Puppy.” That’s how it all started, until I saw Mama’s pocketbook sitting OPEN on the table.

Now I’d like to say I wrestled with my conscience and did the whole angel / devil on the shoulder spiel, but I’d be grossly misrepresenting myself. I was too young for such moral quandaries. I simply looked down the hall to make sure Mama was still in the bedroom before reaching in and snatching out THE ORANGE LIPSTICK TUBE!!

Man, it was ORANGE.

Well, this was way too special an occasion for just painting on a cabinet door. Nope, this required a canvas as close to the Sistine Chapel ceiling as could be found in rural Upstate South Carolina in the early ’70s. I chose to make a mural.

Did I mention the lipstick was orange AND I loved to climb?

Nebulous plan in head and lipstick in hand, I went to the kitchen sink at the farthest end of the house and clambered up onto the counter. Then, I uncapped my ill-gotten booty and, reaching as far as my chubby little legs could push up my chubby little arms, I drew an orange line from the ceiling down the middle of the wall between the two small windows. Then, I ran the line across the sink’s middle divider, across the countertop, and, jumping down, straight down the center of the sink cabinet.

I was so pleased with the beautiful orange line that I decided to extend it, so, dropping to my knees, I crawled backwards across the kitchen linoleum leaving a flourescent trail in my wake. I was careful not to bear down too hard because I wanted the color to last and so far, I was doing quite well.

From the kitchen, my orange lipstick and I extended our line across the dining room linoleum and stopped at the edge of the living room. Had I stopped at that point, things might have been different, but I looked behind me and there lay a vast, virgin floor of genuine 1970s vintage Powder Blue Extra Long Shag Carpet.

I felt the blue could use an accent color, and so the line ran on. I made a nice curlicues in the middle of the floor and, never picking up my color, zigzagged my way to the hall. I was halfway down the hall making lovely swirly orange shapes when I heard the bedroom door open.

Mama isn’t her best when she first wakes up. Never has been.

Now I should point out that neither Mama nor Daddy has ever spanked me despite my needing it more than once. I have my Granny Wham to thank for a lot of that. Today, though, it was Granny Wham’s sister, my Aunt Mary, who was my savior. Aunt Mary lived a football field away from us and kept her doors and windows closed against the heat.

She still heard every word Mama said clearly as a bell in cool mountain air.

She hurried out to the house and found me in the floor at Mama’s feet, orange lipstick in hand, and Mama’s face rapidly turning to match that shade. It didn’t take Aunt Mary long to size up the situation, especially after she noted the bright orange highway running from the kitchen ceiling to where I sat.

She rushed in and scooped me up saying, “Um, Lawana, hon, why don’t I take Shannon out to the house and feed him supper while you work on this? I’ll bring him back when Frankie gets home.” Because of Aunt Mary’s quick action (may God rest her soul) I am still here with you today.

That carpet was Mama’s favorite thing about the entire trailer. She worked for a week trying to leech the orange from the powder blue fibers with no success. A month later, she made Daddy rip the whole thing up and put linoleum throughout the entire house.

Even then, though, Mama knew a day would come when she’d miss that orange stripe so somewhere in one of her keepsake boxes is a hand sized square of Powder Blue Extra Long Shag carpet with a blaze orange stripe right down the middle and from that day to the day I left home, Mama never slept longer than me again.

Love y’all and keep those feet clean!

Oct25

A Toy Never Played With . . .

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I was looking through the weekly sales ads yesterday afternoon and making out my shopping plan for the coming week when I stopped at the Toys ‘R Us spread. Right on the front was one of the most elusive creatures I’ve ever encountered . . . a for real Play-Doh Playset.

I, like so many of my generation, love Play-Doh for its comprehensive sensory buffet. It feels wonderful squishing between our fingers. The colors (except the baby poo yellow) are vibrant and alive. Of course, most of all, is the SMELL. Nothing on the planet smells like Play-Doh. It is one of the most distinctive smells known. In one of those polls “they” always talk about but no one ever really sees, Play-Doh was supposedly the most recognizable smell among Westerners. Okay, I’ll go with it.

Now, I can’t verify any of this information. Everything I know about the wonder toy that is Play-Doh has been gathered third and fourth hand over many years of ardent and tiresome research. The reason I lack any empirical evidence on the toy of the gods is quite simple — I, nor any of my friends, have ever managed to hold a ball of Play-Doh long enough to form any lasting opinions.

As a child, I craved the Play-Doh sets I saw on Saturday morning cartoons. The Holy Grail for me was that dude that you stuffed the Play-Doh in his bottom and pushed a lever and strings of the stuff came out of his head as “hair” and you could cut it!! Unlike my cousin Josie’s Barbie dolls, apparently this “hair” could “grow” back after I scalped the plastic skull with a plastic razor. Alas, I was never to find out.

My mother is a saint. Growing up, she doted on me like a chosen lamb. She did, however, have one fault that threatened to slip a wedge into our relationship. She adamantly refused to allow me to have or receive as a gift ANY Play-Doh. In this stance, she was not alone. NONE of the mothers of my circle of friends would even think of entertaining the thought of allowing this dreaded substance into their houses.

No amount of reasoning could sway them. The stuff was non-toxic and biodegradable. Didn’t matter.

It provided hours of creative fun. Didn’t care.

No, Play-Doh was banned from my childhood for one simple reason.

Carpet.

My mother was convinced that any Play-Doh she allowed past her picket line into the house would inevitably be slurped into the powder blue shag (it was the ’70s, get off me) she was so proud of. Mama LOVED her carpet, even after I took a tube of bright orange lipstick . . . well, let’s leave that story for another time. Mama loved her carpet. Therefore, I was not allowed to play with Play-Doh. Every one of my friends got the same story, “you can’t have Play-Doh because it’ll get all in the carpet!!” My childhood passed never getting to enjoy the sweet fragrance of petroleum distillates on my hands all because of carpet.

I was not alone in my misery, however, as Budge related to me her trials and tribulations upon getting a nice 4-pack of Play-Doh for a birthday. Her mother relented and let her play with it . . . provided she sat at the table, which was over a linoleum floor and covered by three layers of newspaper. NEWSPAPER! Has anyone ever seen what happens to Play-Doh that comes in contact with newsprint? It’s not pretty.

It seems nothing has changed over the decades either. I was tending my next door neighbor’s house last week while they were all on vacation. The only child of the family is a wildly intelligent little boy who loves to play with blocks and trains and everything else. When I was scooping out some dog feed, however, I noticed — high on a shelf in the utility room — a Play-Doh Play Factory. It had a sticky note on it from the little fella’s mom to his dad that said,

“Don’t let Carson have this because he’ll get it on the carpet!”

Some things never change 😦

What about any of my two readers out there? What were your experiences with Play-Doh? Did you get to make the little hamburgers with the slice of cheese on top and the molded bun? Let me know in the comments if you got to have “hours of educational creative fun!”

Til then, love y’all and wash those feet!

Oct17

On Outdoor Nuptuals

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Yesterday, my exquisitely multi-talented wife reached back for one of her former professions and created two beautiful bouquets for one of her fellow teachers who was getting married. Budge attended the wedding; I did not. I have told Budge — and anyone else who would listen — that it was all I could do to endure my OWN wedding, 35 minute marathon that it was, much less sit through someone else’s ceremony. Don’t misunderstand me, my wife planned a gorgeous wedding for us in a very short time on a even shorter budget, but the fact remains that am not a wedding fan. Of course, that is one of the few areas I am like many other males. I’m not certain I’ve ever heard anyone in possession of  an unsullied Y-chromosome say, “Oh wow! My buddy Glenlivet is getting married!! I’m not in it, but PLEASE let’s go!!”

That is not to say we of The Brotherhood of Men will not, on occasion, be dragged kicking and screaming from our spot on the sofa in front of The Game to be shoehorned into our most uncomfortable set of clothes, forcibly shod with shoes designed as medieval torture devices first and footwear second, then marched, nearly at bayonet point, to some relative or friend’s wedding.

But we don’t have to like it!

Yesterday, though, I was excused from the ceremony. I will say, however, that for someone having an outside wedding as this couple was, yesterday’s weather was hard to beat. The sky was a radiant azure with nary a cloud to mar the canvas of heaven and the temperature was quite mild, even if the ladies were obliged to leave off the shawls originally planned for the occasion. It was verily the perfect day for an intimate backyard hitching up.

This meteorological perfection stands in rank contrast to the only OTHER outdoor wedding I attended, and that against my will. That marriage ceremony, early in Budge and mine’s own tenure of wedded bliss, provided the single, solitary time in — to date — fourteen years of marriage when the two of us very nearly had “words.” It is also the only one of a veritable plethora of  incidents of my being an ass for which I have steadfastly refused to apologize ONLY because I STILL maintain that I was in the right.

Allow me to present my case and ye may judge.

First of all, I barely knew the bride as one of Budge’s college classmates and I had nary a clue as to the groom’s identity. Next, the wedding was scheduled for 3:00 PM on a Saturday. The hours of 2:00 to 4:00 PM on Saturdays have been marked out on my calendar as dedicated time for studying the backs of my eyelids for structural imperfections at least since I was in college. I was being dragged to a wedding when I was supposed to be sleeping.

Then was the matter of the time of YEAR for this debacle. Yesterday’s wedding was in the relatively mild weather of an Upstate October. The wedding to which I refer was in AUGUST. For those of you who may live in other parts of the world than the Blessed Land of Dixie, allow me to explain — AUGUST in South Carolina has two temperatures: blast furnace and Hellish. Sane people do not leave the safety of air conditioned houses in “The Burning Month” except to go to an air conditioned car and drive to another air conditioned location.

Which brings me to my next point. This wedding was not only outside on an August afternoon that would have melted car tires on green grass, it was in the middle of a church lawn. NO SHADE. NONE. NOUGHT. NADA. NO TREES. Not even a canopy. The heat was only broken by the breeze generated when one of the BLACK TUXEDO clad groomsmen fell out from sunstroke and made the air move by his descent. Finally, the wedding lasted nearly AN HOUR and these people were NOT Catholic. No Mass or other sermon was involved.

So, allow me to sum up. For over an hour, I was standing in slip-on toe-pincers with WOOL socks under a pair of navy pants topped by a royal blue polo in the middle of a forty acre pasture on the hottest day since the Earth cooled from it’s fiery formation watching someone I didn’t particularly know or like get married. For those who don’t know, I am NOT a small man. I am large. I am fat, nay I AM OBESE! Fat men were never meant to endure those types of conditions. Within five minutes of leaving the comfort of the car’s excellent A/C, I had an Amazon Rivulet of perspiration running from my bald spot, through my hair, down my back, cascading in a cataract of sweat around my nether regions thence to trickle down into my toe-pincers and form two puddles of lukewarm misery.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I was HOT as the HINGES of HADES and my body was literally rendering into lard as I stood there watching this slip of a girl in her WHITE, SLEEVELESS, BACKLESS wedding dress get married.

Then we had the reception, which, thanks be to God the Father of All Things, was indoors. Of course, the A/C was having all it could do to pull down the temperature from somewhere near boiling since, as I think I’ve mentioned before, it was the HOTTEST FRICKING DAY OF THE YEAR and 400+ people were packed into the space somewhat smaller than the Apollo command capsule. Didn’t matter to me, though. A stroll through the depths of Mauna Kea in Hawaii at full eruption would have been cooler than outside.

It was at that point that the final straw was applied to this dromedary’s spine. A caterer waitress set a plate of GRILLED EGGPLANT down in front of me. Turns out the bride was a VEGAN.

I am not a vegan.

I was hot, I was hungry, and I had missed my nap. This was not going to end well.

It was at that point that I looked — just looked — at my lovely wife and something on my face made her run to the ladies’ room, friends in tow, to cry about how mean I was and folks, at that point and for the only time in our marriage, I really DIDN’T CARE!!

We laugh about that day now, as much for the reactions of our friends who were with us as anything else, BUT that also remains the LAST outdoor wedding I ever went to with Budge.

Now, as you go to wash your feet I ask you, “WAS I WRONG OR NOT!!!???”

Love y’all!

Oct16

Latest News on Chloe

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Chloe Aurora Lowe, age 2 days

 

I appreciate everyone who has been checking with me on Chloe’s condition.

Travis is terrible at keeping us informed, but I can hardly blame him. He’s trying to work three part time jobs, look after Danielle, and be strong for Chloe all at the same time so it’s little wonder he doesn’t have much time for phone calls.

He did call Mama yesterday, though and this is what we know to this point. Chloe is still in NICU. Danielle was able to nurse her for the first time on Thursday, but she and Travis are still the only non-medical people allowed to touch Chloe.

Doctors now estimate she’ll be in NICU for at least another month. She isn’t eating well. She spits up a lot of whatever she eats and she doesn’t show much enthusiasm or appetite when it comes to food. According to the doctor, this is because her body is devoting so much energy to repairing the damage from her birth that she has nothing left in the tank when feeding time comes.

Okay, I didn’t go to medical school because I don’t deal well with blood, but it seems to me a baby’s body and instinct would be intelligent enough to know that food is critical to the repair efforts. Whether or not this latest development is a result of her oxygen deprivation or not, I don’t know. Luckily for her, her hefty birth weight (9.5 lbs ish) is keeping her going. She can afford to lose ounces where a smaller infant would be in immediate danger.

That’s pretty much where we stand at the moment. Travis and Danielle are moving into the Greenville Ronald McDonald House either today or tomorrow and that will help cut down on gas and travel and general wear and tear on their one car AND their bodies. I’m sure at least some of you out there know how much sitting in a waiting room or crouching by an unringing phone can wear on nerves, soul, and body after a while.

Again, thanks to all who have been asking about her and just keep her in your thoughts. I’ll post more when I know more.

Love y’all.

Oct13

A Layman’s Observations of Applied Herpetology

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Image is to scale and quite accurate I might add.

 

I just wanted all of you to know Budge has a final goodbye post from me in the event of my unforeseen and untimely demise. I thought y’all should know that because she almost had to upload that document Monday morning.

I dropped Budge off at school and returned home before 8:00 AM. It was quite cool Monday morning so I thought it would be the perfect time to tear down the pool pump and filter for its long winter’s nap. It’s usually a dirty, unpleasant job and, given my large man propensity for sweating, not something I like to do in direct sunlight.

So, beginning the task, I went to my ManCave workshop for the tools I would need for the job minus — of course — the obligatory “wrench-that-I-knew-I’d-need-but-swore-I-wouldn’t”. I walked to the pump, sat the tools down, used the screwdriver to remove the intake and outlet hoses, tried to take the filter seal loose with a wrench that was close, but not the right one because I didn’t want to walk back to the workshop, let that wrench smash my hand between the filter housing and seal, cursed loudly, went back to the workshop to get the aforementioned forgotten correct wrench, returned, and removed the filter from the mounts. I took the filter around to the hose to wash it and went back to get the pump. I unplugged said pump, reached down, grabbed the pump, heaved it up, glanced down, and nearly soiled my undergarments.

Right where my hand had JUST been engaged in lifting the pump,  lay coiled the unholy hybrid offspring of an anaconda and a king cobra. I’m quite certain he also had some western diamondback rattlesnake somewhere in his family tree because I’m positive I heard a buzzing rattle as he coiled to strike me down where I stood. He was no less than 25 feet long, big around as my sizable thigh with six-inch sabertooth fangs dripping with neurohemocytotoxins heretofore unknown to man.

How such a huge serpent managed to squeeze under a filter platform barely 2′ x 2′ square, I’ll never know. He must have had some sort of extradimensional space-time altering mind powers.

Confronted with this massive specimen of reptilian death machinery, I did what any red-blooded American male would do in such a circumstance — I screamed like a little girl at a Justin Bieber concert. Afterwords, I turned to run, forgetting that I still had the pool pump — all thirty pounds of it — in my hands with the cord still dangling between my feet. As I turned, I managed to step solidly on this particular cord. This action, true to Newtonian physics, caused the pump to jerk out of my hands and land — all forty pounds of it — directly on the top of my Croc-clad left foot. That would be the one with the badly ingrown toenail. Twenty five pounds of the filter crushed my instep while the other twenty-five pounds found that very toe.

However, at the time I was dropping the sixty pound pump onto my Croc-clad foot and severely ingrown toenail, I was in the process of turning AND accelerating to Warp Factor 9 like the Starship Enterprise running from an Imperial Star Destroyer. All this pain, acceleration, and torque had the effect of causing the thought-producing portions of my brain to say, “The hell with this, I’m going to Florida” at which point my lower limbs, now leaderless, tripped over the seventy pound pool pump and came crashing to the dew-soaked grass in a heap of agony completely at the mercy of Kaa the Python.

Luckily, no one was around to witness this debacle except Jack, my beloved dog, who had watched the whole scene with typical canine stoicism. Seeing me in distress, he promptly did what he always does when I nearly break my neck and end up on the ground, like the two times I flipped the riding lawn mower over on top of myself. He sauntered over and licked me on the cheek that wasn’t plastered to the ground.

The faithful dog saliva had the effect of breaking the mind control spell force field cast on my by the 18″ long, thumb thick Eastern Dusty Pine Snake still curled up in the depression where the eighty pound pump had been seconds ago. As I climbed unsteadily and extremely painfully to my feet, the little fellow began to very slowly try to make an escape. He was sluggish with morning cold and probably terrified at the surreality playing out before his bright, beady little serpentine eyes.

I figure his cold-induced torpor was what made it so easy for Jack’s doggie kiss to break the formidable illusion the poor thing had obviously cast as his first line of defense.

I’m not the reincarnation of Steve Irwin by any stretch, but I refuse to kill anything that is not actively attempting to harm me or someone (human, feline, or canine) under my care. If I had to kill my own meat instead of buying it from the insulating safety of the supermarket, I would be a vegan or, more likely, starve to death. If I accidentally run over a frog hopping across the road after a downpour, the rest of my day and a good chunk of the next one is ruined.

With that in mind, I went BACK to the workshop and got my six foot long rod with the crook on the end I keep for just such an occasion. Returning to the narrow fellow in the grass’ burrow, I gently lifted him up with the crook and carefully deposited him over the back fence near a large brush pile that he will likely find much quieter and safer than a burrow under a ninety pound pool pump.

Love y’all and don’t forget to check the tub for Mr. No Shoulders before you wash those feet!

Oct9

Update on Chloe

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Chloe Aurora Lowe, age 2 days

 

If you are ever having a really bad day and you want some cheering up, do not go to a pediatric intensive care doctor. Those people make me look positively googly-eyed optimistic by comparison. I always though oncologists were bad to paint an exceptionally bleak picture, but Chloe’s doctors make the most dire predictions of a cancer specialist seem cheerfully hopeful.

Don’t get me wrong; I understand their reasons. Hope is all fine and good, but it is also paralyzing and dangerous as well. When the doctors prepare us for the absolute worst, it makes anything above that seem like gravy. False hope doesn’t help anyone and I’ve actually seen it make matters worse.

Thankfully, though, we are dealing with real hope based on scientific test results now.Since Monday, Chloe has had an overnight brain wave test, a CAT scan, and an indepth MRI performed on her little brain. So far, every single test has come back completely normal. As of this moment, her brain shows no sign of tissue damage and her neurons and synapses seem to be firing just as they are supposed to. While the family and I see this as a tremendously positive sign, the doctors are warning everyone against overly optimistic predictions. Apparently, she is not out of the woods yet, but she’s moved considerably closer to the edge of the trees.

Danielle and Travis have been allowed to hold her and Danielle has bottle fed her. It even looks as if she may get to come home far ahead of earlier predictions of two months. She will have another MRI early next week to make certain nothing was missed in the first test, and then, once she shows she can eat four straight meals out of a bottle on her own, she’ll be headed to the house. Considering this time last week we hardly expected her to make it through the night, I’m taking this as a positive sign.

The doctors have warned us, as they are wont to do, that damage may still show up later on as she begins to use more of her brain for other tasks like speaking and walking. She will have to have a monthly MRI for the next two years or until she shows signs of an issue — whichever comes first. Still, even though we are taking the warning to heart, the family is very happy at this turn of events.

I don’t know what to call it. She was definitely not breathing for a documented five minutes. By all rights, something should show up damaged. Miracle? I’m not discounting the possibility. Lots of people today don’t believe in miracles anymore. Diehard atheists like the Richard Dawkins-es of the world discount everything they cannot see, touch, or at least measure. I admit that I no longer boast the blind, childlike faith of my youth, but then I don’t think God expects that of us. This is a real world with real issues. What I do know is this, my niece was born blue and not breathing and a week later she’s growing and responding normally. Medical folks might point to the fact that she was a hefty 9.5 pounds at birth and so had more blood with more oxygen in it to carry her little brain through those few critical minutes.

I don’t know. If I knew, I’d go to Vegas and get rich as a gambler. As it is, I’ll just be glad to see little Chloe leave the hospital.

Love y’all and keep those feet clean.

Sep21

Seriously Embarrassing Moments I

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Really shouldn't be playing FreeCell in church!

A great many people are surprised to learn that I am an ordained minister.  Strange as it may seem to those who know me, I, in fact, possess not one, but two ordinations.

In one of the churches Budge and I attended while courting, and for a long time after our marriage, I was an unpaid associate pastor and technical support. I knew more about computers and A/V technology than anyone else in the 200 member congregation so when tech issues came up, I was in charge of fixing them.

When I first started attending, we sang off the wall songs — literally. We had the lyrics printed on transparencies. During service, a praise team member would place a transparency on an overhead that projected the words onto a side wall of the choir loft. On a good day, the transparency would be the correct song AND in the correct orientation (i.e. not upside down or flipped so the words were mirror written.) In the name of progress, however, the church council decided to ditch the overhead and jump the digital divide by installing a first class media projector on the 50′ ceiling of the sanctuary and connecting this marvel to a computer in the back balcony.

Here my troubles began.

One of the duties of my ministry to the church was to run the PowerPoint presentation of songs that replaced the overhead sheets. I would flip back and forth between songs or between verse and chorus. I don’t know how many of you have ever attended a true Pentecostal service, but  if you go to a service and don’t know the words to the song, hymn, etc . . . don’t fret, you’ll know it just fine by the 17th time you sing it — while standing . . . and clapping.

The new system worked great during regular services. My conundrum came about the initial “First Sunday Night Singing” we used the new projector. Sunday Night Singing, for those who aren’t baptized in the Holy Ghost and Fire, is a once a month Sunday night service devoted to singing. We’d have solos, duets, the Ladies’ Ensemble and the Senior Men’s Quartet. You get the idea. I fixed up a set of slides in the order of the singers with the singer or group’s name. If I found out what they were singing, I’d put that underneath their names.

Because of that design trait, I almost got a double barrel blast of embarrassment because Dee and Kristie Gail were singing that first night. They are sisters from Harlan County Kentucky and universally known as “The Kentucky Sisters;” however, “The Kentucky Sisters” wouldn’t fit on the slide in the 125 point font I preferred so I decided to abbreviate it. As a result, I very nearly shot a slide onto the 15′ x 15′ screen in 8″ high letters that said, “The KY Sisters and ‘He Touched Me'”. It might have given Sister Molly Spell, the eldest member of the church, a heart attack . . . provided she knew what KY stood for besides Kentucky. At 92, I doubt it, but you never know. Anyway, I digress.

The singing was in full swing and I was changing slides every five to fifteen minutes depending on how much “the Spirit fell” during each song. During one of the longer stretches, I discovered the “FREEZE SCREEN” button on the projector remote control. To test it, I shot the projector and cued up the next slide and, sure enough, the monitor changed, but the screen didn’t! I thought I was in Fat City because, to be honest, it gets right boring alone in the balcony just pushing a button every now and again.

So, without another moment’s thought, I froze the screen and pulled up FreeCell — the King of Time Killer Card Games! I was on a roll that night. I’d won seven straight games and was immersed in game number 8 when I learned something about our particular model of Hitachi LCD projector — the “FREEZE SCREEN” function only lasts for 15 minutes at a time. After that, it releases and goes back to showing whatever is on the computer at the time. You haven’t lived until your FreeCell game suddenly appears behind the music pastor and his wife like Moses parting the Red Sea in DeMille’s “Ten Commandments”.

As one, the congregation turned towards the balcony. The shot only lasted MAYBE five seconds, but one can die a lifetime in five seconds. What’s worse, I could hear Sister Molly asking her granddaughter what was going on. Unfortunately, Sister Molly didn’t think her granddaughter had understood the aforementioned question and, being somewhat hard of hearing, she figured everyone else in the world shared her infirmity as well. So, with the church still silently stunned at the intrusion of the Devil’s handiwork into a worship service, and at the hands of the associate pastor no less, what did I hear loudly and clearly, along with most of the town of Fountain Inn a good twelve miles away?

“I SAID, ‘WAS THE YOUNG FELLER WINNIN’ OR NOT?!

The next Sunday, I noticed FreeCell had been deleted.

Love y’all!

Keep those feet clean 🙂

Sep17

They Shall Run and Not be Weary

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Requiescat In Pace, Mi Amo.

As years go, 1995 sucked rocks big time.

My great-grandfather died New Year’s Day. Two of my favorite cousins were killed in a huge car wreck in March. One of my wrestlers was killed in July and while I was on the way home from his visitation, Mama called and told me to go to the hospital where Granny Wham was recovering from a stroke. I broke every speed limit possible getting to Hillcrest thinking the whole time that Granny had died. She hadn’t . . . Papa Wham had. That was enough to send my world reeling, but the year wasn’t over yet.

On this day 15 years ago, my buddy lost her long brutal fight with cancer. She was just shy of turning 20. She was one of the very best friends I ever had and she’s the only woman, besides Mama, that Budge doesn’t mind me having a picture of on my desk. Budge knows what my buddy meant to me. Not many others do because I’ve never told that many people about her.

I met her when I was doing my student teaching in 1993. She was a senior which meant at that time, she was just over three years younger than me. I won’t say we had love at first sight, but we definitely had chemistry at first sight. The crutches made me curious.

She got around on crutches better than I could get around on two legs. Her left leg was gone. Once I got to know her, the story came out. She’d been a first rate cheerleader and volleyball player up until her freshman year of high school.  One day after practice, she had a cramp in her left leg behind her knee. When she sat down on the bleachers to rub it out, she found a knot. The knot didn’t go away in several days. She went to the doctor, the doctor did some tests, and the next thing you know, Jed’s a millionaire and she’s being diagnosed with acute lymphoma.

They took her leg with a saw; her health and hair followed with chemotherapy. None of it ever broke her spirit though. She just threw up and rocked on. That’s how she rolled, as the saying goes today. When I met her, she’d finally gotten a full head of hair back, even though it was short, and she was in full remission.

We started calling and hanging out together. She had a Corvette she drove with hand controls and in those days when I had more courage than sense, she was one of the few drivers who could put me in the floor with terror. She was utterly and finally fearless. She said cancer couldn’t kill her so she wasn’t going to worry about anything else.

I graduated in May; she in June. We met up at the beach and hung out some. She loved the beach. I was over 21 so I kept her hotel room supplied with party lubrication. Yeah, it was illegal. Sue me. We had a great week before I went back to find a teaching job and she went back to get ready for college.

She never made it to college though. She called me two weeks later. I went to see her at the hospital. The cancer was back. In her lungs this time. They took out the offending lung lobe, gave her more chemo and again pronounced her in remission after six months. I called her daily and went to see her every chance I could. One day while we were laughing and cutting up driving around the hills around her home blasting out Skynyrd, Hatchet, and Duane and Gregg,  I even asked her if she’d like to get hitched to a redneck like me. After all, it was obvious we were a perfect match.

I’ll never forget her reply. She reached up and cut the radio off, suddenly all business. She locked eyes with me and said, “I’d love to, but I’m going to die before long and you won’t be able to bear it if we were married. It’s going to be hard enough on you as it is.” I nodded. She turned up “Tuesday’s Gone” and we took off again.

Turns out, she was a prophetess. Less than three months later, I went back to the hospital to see her. It was in the right lung this time, but this time things were different. She wasn’t a minor anymore and she made her own decisions. To the abject horror of her mama, daddy, friends, and me, she announced she had no intention of leaving the world one piece at a time. She was done fighting. She was tired.

I kissed her on the cheek before I left her room that night. It was the last time I saw her alive. In the end, the big C sucked her dry. She weighed less than 50 pounds at the end. Her hospice nurse called me when it was over. My number had a heart around it in her contact book. I heard it was a closed casket funeral. She wanted everyone to remember her as she’d lived, not as she’d died. I went to see her mama and daddy but I didn’t make the funeral. No way I could. Hard to go to a funeral fifty miles away when you can’t get your eyes dry long enough to drive.

I only knew my buddy a little while in the grand scheme of things — barely two full years — but she taught me a hell of a lot in that short time about loving life and what it was to show real courage. On her tombstone is the picture of a soaring eagle and her favorite Bible verse:

“They who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.”

I lost a lot of love in 1995 and love, especially the kind of love I lost, can’t be replaced.

That’s why I love all y’all so much.

Keep those feet clean and remember to live like you were dying!

Sep9

Always Right? Really?

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Were you BORN a jackass or did you have to take a class?

Recently, I was at Home Depot at the butt-crack of dawn so I wouldn’t have to deal with a lot of people. In and out in less than ten was the plan. All I needed was a small bag of mulch and soil to replenish Zelda’s habitat. I guess I didn’t come early enough.

This Cadillac driving old fart went in one door and I went in the other, but I ended up behind him in line. He had a folding ladder on a cart and LAST WEEK’S flyer in his hand. The young lady gave him the total at which point he flew into a rage, slammed the aforementioned flyer down on her counter, and began gesticulating wildly at a picture of a ladder similar to the one on his cart while screaming that the ladder was HALF that price!  I felt a familiar feeling creeping up my spine to the part of the brain that evolved when man had to kill big ol’ mammoths to survive. This guy was beginning to look awfully woolly to me.

The cashier tried to reason with the jerk by pointing out the flyer was for the TWO DAY sale that had ended days earlier and the ladder on his cart was NOT the ladder in the flyer anyway. Instead of acknowledging his mistake, Goober screams at her that he knows the flyer is outdated and the ladder isn’t the one advertised but he couldn’t come in during the sale because he was at the beach and now all the ladders in the flyer were gone  so he wanted the more expensive ladder TODAY  for the price in the flyer and he was the customer so he wanted it NOW.

I was just about to tap him on the shoulder and tell him people in Hell want ice water, and offer him a binkie so he’d leave and I could get my turtle’s mulch. Fortunately, a manager had heard the “debate” and asked the whining,  spray-tanned Baby Boomer to come  to the service desk. I paid for my $3.00 mulch, thanked the girl for being so incredibly patient with an obviously mentally deficient person and went on my way.

Driving home, the whole fiasco reminded me of an episode several years ago when I was on a date with Budge, at a eatery in Spartanburg. Our waitress was working the section alone because the other two girls called in “sick” and it was her FIRST night solo after a week of training. I told her to stay calm and not worry about us. Everything’d be alright.

The other patrons had some differences of opinion. One couple was on an early-in-the-relationship date and oblivious to time passing because they had so entranced each other. A family with two children in diapers got up and left without eating once the little ones began a full-scale meltdown. The three other tables didn’t say much.

That left one particular old fart who berated that poor waitress every chance he got. He sent his food back twice and his wife’s back once. His glass was never full enough. On and on and on for nearly two hours. Finally, he and his wife took their bill straight to the manager and began relating a tale of woe. I only caught snatches of the conversation, but the gist was the waitress was incompetent and an idiot to boot and he demanded a complementary meal or he’d “call corporate.”

The manager folded like a cheap lawn chair when a fat man sits in it, comes back to the section and starts apologizing and fussing over everyone and offering free desserts and all sorts of what not. Then she goes in the back where the waitress has just disappeared when the girl returned, she was trying hard to keep from bursting into tears. The manager reappeared and came over to our table and started her spiel about how sorry she was for the poor service, etc, etc.

I put my hand up and said, “Ma’am, sit down please. I need to explain something to you.” She looked funny at me but she complied and I told her what I’ve told several other jackasses in restaurants since then. I said,

“Ma’am, I’m sitting at a nice table with my beloved. In a little bit, that little girl is going to BRING food to me that’ll be hot, delicious, AND four times more than enough for one meal. We just sit her and wait. On the other hand, my daddy ate twenty year old C-Rations unheated and covered with flies and mosquitoes because it’s what he had in Vietnam. Right now, a gang of little boys and girls are scrounging a massive garbage dump outside Guatemala City for rotten fruit, moldy bread, and maybe a few bones with a scrap of green meat on them to eat. Finally, I could take you in my car not ten miles from here to a group under a bridge trying to fix a bit of stew that will be all they’ll eat tonight and most of tomorrow. I don’t want free dessert, I don’t want a complementary meal, and I surely don’t care what that ignorant jackass who just left said. That girl has worked like a galley slave doing the best she could and I guarantee that jerk didn’t even leave her a quarter for a tip. Thankfully, Mama and Granny raised me to be grateful and generous so I’ll make up for his lack of manners.”

You're not the King or Queen of England. Be nice to each other.

I had a lot more money then AND I’d just gotten my paycheck for the month so I laid a $100 bill on the table, told the waitress to keep the change, took Budge by the hand and walked our happy asses to the car.

I’m nothing special, but I do know one thing. Just because someone is serving you in some capacity, you do not have the right to make their life a little piece of Hell. Stick your thumb in your mouth, suck it up, be thankful for what you’ve got, and act like you’ve got some raising. We are all in this together. Some of us are just more blessed or just plain luckier than others.

Keep that in mind this weekend and make sure to keep those feet clean.

Love y’all.