Jul29

The Thunder Rolls

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A sight you don't want to see in the middle of a large lake in a small boat.

It’s been the week for late afternoon thunderstorms around here. The last four days, around 6ish in the evening, thunder starts growling around and the wind picks up. Eventually, a log-floating, frog-choking deluge descends from the sky. The whole affair lasts about an hour to 90 minutes from beginning to end and when it’s over, the air outside is either much cooler or much more humid depending on the whim of the weather gods. It’s the price we pay for living in the South.

I hate it.

I am irrationally, completely, and utterly terrified of thunderstorms. As far as I know, I always have been. I don’t really know why. I’m intelligent enough to know how they start and what they are going to do. I know that thunder’s just a noise; lightning does the work. Doesn’t matter. Storms put knots in the pit of my stomach. It’s not the lightning or the rain. It’s the wind. I don’t mind lightning streaking everywhere and I can tolerate huge booming rounds of thunder.

I don’t do wind.

Once the trees start swaying, I look for a place to hide.

Of course, it would stand to reason that some of my most vivid memories from childhood involved storms of one caliber or another. I recall sitting by candlelight when I couldn’t have been more than four or so. The storm had knocked out power to our trailer. I remember standing outside with Papa Wham when I was still in single digits and a massive streak of lightning turned night to day for a brief second. I remember a little grey tree frog that rode out a particularly nasty storm squatting firmly on one of the sticks we used to hold our trailer windows open. I remember Mama trying to calm me down by singing “Keep Me Safe ‘Til the Storm Passes By.” Lots of storm memories. Two stand out incredibly strong.

I was four or five and playing in the backyard at my great-Aunt Betty’s house. As usual, I was completely oblivious to my surroundings until I looked up at the cotton field and saw Uncle Raymond coming down the dirt road leading out of the field like all the imps of Hell were behind him. He skidded the old red and white Ford truck to a stop in a outburst of dust and pebbles and when he jumped out, he was running and shouting, “Shannon, get in the truck quick.” I got scared for three reasons. One, Uncle Raymond NEVER came out of the fields before near dark. He always worked a full day as a sharecropping cotton farmer. Two, Uncle Raymond NEVER ran. A fast mosey was his normal top speed and he didn’t hit it often; and three, and most worrisome to me, Uncle Raymond NEVER called me by my given name. He always called me Cottontop or little man or some other pet name. Never “Shannon.” I didn’t have time to wonder much as I climbed into the truck because Uncle Raymond was already on his way back with Aunt Betty in tow. He was explaining as he hurried her along, but all I caught was one word — tornado.

At the time, I had no idea how he knew a tornado was coming, but I found out later that one of the “big men” who owned the field and drove the big cotton harvesters kept a weather band radio on loud at all times. Storms come up quickly in these parts and the last thing anyone wanted was to be caught in the middle of a cotton field with lightning striking everywhere. Lightning tends to strike the tallest object around and if you’re a six foot tall man in the middle of an open cotton field, guess what the tallest object around is?

We took off in the truck and Uncle Raymond drove us to a culvert or tunnel under the highway. He parked in the middle and I guess he could tell I was terrified, because he patted me on the head then he fixed my “linus blanket” over the back of the seat like a tent. From inside that tent, I heard the twister pass over us. You’ll hear people say a tornado sounds like a train rushing by, but that day, it sounded like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. After about an hour, we went back to the house and other than a few limbs blown down and a shingle or two off the house, everything was fine. Uncle Raymond dropped Aunt Betty and me off and went back to the field like nothing had happened. Like he ran his family from tornadoes every day.

My second storm memory involves Daddy. I was ten, maybe eleven, and he and I were out on Lake Moultrie fishing for catfish. He and Teresa, my stepmother, took me to the Santee-Cooper lakes every summer on a fishing trip for about six or seven years that I remember. Usually, all three of us went out fishing. It wasn’t unusual for Teresa to outfish us all. This particular run, though, she’d stayed in the room at the landing.

If you’ve never seen Lake Moultrie, it’s basically a big, deep bathtub. Lake Marion, at the other end of the Diversion Canal, is bigger in area, but it has a lot more islands and is generally much shallower. We were in the middle of Lake Moultrie and I couldn’t see any land. Anyway, Daddy and I were having a good afternoon of fishing and I was enjoying one of the rare occasions of him and me just being together.

All was well until Daddy looked behind us. After he did, he turned around to me and said, “Shannon, put your life jacket on.” I usually asked many, many questions, but, like Uncle Raymond, Daddy never used my name. He mostly called me “Son” if he called me anything. I put my life jacket on before I turned around to see what Daddy saw. It was a squall line all the way across the sky. In front, the sky was robin’s egg blue, but behind, it was black. Really black.

My Daddy is, and always has been to my knowledge, utterly fearless. I’ve never known him to be scared of anything. I’d never even seen him acknowledge a situation might require a little worrying. Well, I still don’t think he was scared and if he hadn’t had me with him, he probably wouldn’t even have been worried, but he knew that I hated storms and tended to panic AND he knew that I swim like a 1940 Packard Super Eight Touring Limo. I wasn’t panicked yet. I was with Daddy and Daddy wasn’t scared of the Devil, much less a puny storm . . . that was already making whitecaps on the lake’s surface. I did get a little concerned, however, when Daddy put his OWN life jacket on. It was the only time in my life I’ve ever seen him do that. Still, I was with Daddy and he was just being cautious. What he did next though, pushed me right to the edge of meltdown. He cut the rope off the anchor and lashed one end around his waist, then he took the other end and tied it snugly around my right foot.

The wind and whitecaps were picking up when Daddy started the 70hp Johnson outboard and spun the boat around. Luckily, we were running before the wind. It helped some. Daddy never drove the boat fast as a general rule, but this day, he had the throttle wide open. We were aiming at for the Diversion Canal, which was very sheltered. We’d get wet, but we wouldn’t have to worry about capsizing or hitting anything and we’d gotten wet before.

It had been a ten minute boat ride out to where we were fishing. The race to the canal took twenty, even with the wind at our backs. The last little bit, the rain hit us and, if you don’t know, raindrops feel like BB guns shooting you when you’re in a boat moving 30mph. We made it to the mouth of the canal, though and as soon as we got about a hundred yards in, the water smoothed right on out. It rained buckets and we got soaked, but we were safe. I knew the danger was passed when Daddy reached down and took the rope off my foot and smiled at me.

So there you go. I hate storms. Panic in them all the time and I’ve gotten to panic a lot lately.

Love y’all. Sorry this one was so long. I got carried away since Budge isn’t here for me to talk to!

Take care, and wash your feet, but not in the tub if it’s lightning outside!

🙂

Jul20

It All Changes

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It is an eye-opening moment the day you discover your parents are real people. You actually didn’t appear in a cabbage patch, but YOUR PARENTS had . . . sex!  Ewww. You realize that a time existed when you were not the center of their universe and life did not revolve around getting you to practice on time or refereeing sibling shouting matches. Something happens and you see through the parental veneer to the man or woman responsible for giving you life. They do something “normal” and it makes you realize that, “My parents are actually PEOPLE.” It marks a transition from parent as abject object of worship to parent as person who loves me but still has issues of his or her own. A bitter divorce will bring this particular realization about real quick and in some more of a hurry. Sometimes it’s simple; sometimes . . . it’s a bit more complex. No matter how it happens though, your relationship with your parents is never the same.

It is a heart-warming moment the day your parents treat you as an equal. Maybe Dad offers you a beer or Mom doesn’t ask you to leave the room when the gossip topics get R to X rated. Whatever the case, you know when it happens. It’s a subtle shift in how they look at you and how they treat you. You’re not just their child anymore, you’re a member of the club of adults. To use an image from the “olden days,” it was when you were allowed to be heard and not just seen. Sometimes, some truly glorious times, you end up having not just a parent but an incredible friend who already knows all your stories because they were at the center of so many of them. No matter how it happens though, your relationship with your parents is never the same.

It is a gut-wrenching moment the day your role switches with your parent. Mama wants your advice or asks if you will, “just handle this.” Maybe Dad can’t go all day in the yard and you need to come over and take care of trimming the holly bushes. Often, it around the time the folks don’t insist on everyone coming “home” for the holidays but instead let “one of the children host this year.” Sometimes, you catch a grimace of pain or come in unannounced and find Mama taking a breathing treatment you didn’t know she needed. Sooner or later, you’ll taste the hideous, coppery tang of fear when you realize that this once invincible tower of strength and safety is beginning to crumble. Instead of drying your tears when you skinned your knee, you you dry their tears when they can’t quite remember the recipe for your favorite cake. We laugh and joke during the good times about how our parents had better be good to us because we are going to pick out their nursing home one day. The joke isn’t quite as funny when the day actually comes that you have to leave them and when you look at the expression on their faces and they tears in their eyes, you know EXACTLY how they felt looking at you on your first day of school. Unfortunately, a big yellow bus isn’t going to bring them home to milk and cookies and maybe a nap or a game before homework and supper time. In place of the big yellow bus will be a long black limousine and you will have a new standard of loneliness to measure things against in your life. No matter how it happens though, your relationship with your parents is never the same.

Once the changes start, your relationship with your parents is never the same.

Love y’all and don’t forget to wash your feet.

Jul11

I Hate Summer Passionately

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I Hate Summer!!

I don’t know how long it’s been since I mentioned this fact, but I hate summer with all my heart; I have two perfectly excellent reasons for despising this godawful season that everyone else apparently loves so dearly.

First of all, I am not a small man — not by a long shot. To be quite honest, I’m fat, large, obese, and several other words of varying denotation and connotation all pointing to the fact that I was born 10 pounds and 5 ounces and I haven’t looked backed or missed a meal since.

Summertime was not meant for fat people. We sweat. Now some of  you more proper individuals may “perspire” and some ladies may even develop a “delicate sheen.” Well, honey, I sweat buckets and right now, I’ve got the Zambezi River flowing from my hairline down my back to eventually puddle in and around my nether regions. That’s with the A/C “givin’ ye all she can Cap’n”. Any more strain on the venerable Trane and the dilithium crystals will probably blow and we’ll have to eject the warp core. If I go outside for long in this 100+ heat, you could render lard off my backside.

I hate to sweat. The only time I’ve ever CHOSEN to sweat is when I wrestled four years in high school. Then, sweating seemed to serve a purpose. Any other time, it just makes me miserable. Fat people were built for Arctic conditions. If you don’t believe me, when’s the last time you saw a skinny Inuit? (Nota Bene: Eskimo is a derogatory term, which I didn’t know until an exceptionally large Inuit man told me) Inuits live in the Arctic. Ever seen a svelte whale? Know why? It’s freaking cold in the ocean depths where they swim! Nature has selected against fat mixing with heat. Fat goes with cold; skinny goes with heat.

My second reason to despise summer is I am known as “The Man The Sun Forgot.” I don’t want to say I’m pale or anything, but people afflicted with albinism stand next to me to feel good about their tan. The few times I’ve gone cave exploring, my glowing body was the third emergency light source. Folks are always asking me why don’t I take off my shirt when I’m outside. The simple answer is when I did that last summer, I got a call from Houston Space Center asking me to please cover myself because I was blinding the crew of the International Space Station and they couldn’t conduct their experiments.

You think I’m joking, but I’m not. I am WHITE and I am FAT. I went to the beach several years and pants sizes ago and when I took off my shirt just for kicks, a big guy in a frock coat started chasing me down the beach waving a harpoon and screaming, “I’ve found ye at last! Thar she blows! A hump like a snow hill!” If the beach patrol hadn’t grabbed him I hate to think what might have happened.

So, lay out a little and tan, right? Um, did you even read the first section about heat? An ex of mine once asked me to lay out in the sun with her. I told her if she wanted to break up with me, just say so. Even if I didn’t mind roasting myself like a suckling pig with pineapple rings and a Macintosh in my mouth, there’s the little matter of blistering sunburn.  When I was a child and into my early teens, the strongest SPF sunscreen was 15. I would get COOKED right through 15. If I want a decent chance at remaining non-boiled-lobster color, I have to wear Bullfrog 55 SPF and, no lie, I get pinkish through that after a couple of hours. Oh, and when I do burn, it doesn’t turn tan. Nope, most people are burn, tan, burn, tan darker. I am burn, peel, burn worse, get sun poisoning, peel some more, risk drowning in an oatmeal bath.

I’ve got a ton of sunburn stories, but I’ll tell one and let it go at that. When I was six, we had the first above ground pool I’d ever seen. Of course, Daddy didn’t bother to hook up the filter, so we had to drain it once a month to get the slime molds out of the bottom and refill it . . . but I digress. Two friend of mine and I happily splashed around in said pool from 11:00 AM to 3:00 PM. I hadn’t put ANY sunscreen on, but that was okay because I had my FAVORITE shirt of the moment on just like Mama had told me to do. (Well, she did tell me to wear a shirt.)

This shirt was a real, live reproduction football JERSEY complete with HOLES all in it! Now, I have a genius IQ, but as one of my best friends used to point out, I lack the common sense to get out of a shower of rain. I figured that moving around would cover my whole body with the fabric at some point in time and it would keep me safe from the ravages of the sun.

It didn’t.

When Mama came home from shopping, she called us in the house (trailer, whatever). She took one look at me and burst into tears. I couldn’t see my back so I had no idea what was wrong. This was one time ignorance was not bliss. I had developed a water blister through each one of the hundreds of holes in the shirt. The shirt was literally fastened to my back and shoulders by water blisters poking through the holes. I went and stood in the shower under straight cold water for thirty minutes trying to get the blisters to go down.

They didn’t. Mama finally had to take off that shirt and every one of those blisters broke open. If you’re wondering, yes, I cried. I cried like a baby. My back looked like steak tartare.

And THAT, gentle readers, is why I don’t go outside OR get into a pool unless it is DARK O’CLOCK!

Keep cool and wash those feet!

Love y’all! 🙂

Jul5

Manny and the Possum

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My! What big teeth you have!

Manny (that’s what we’re calling him) and I attended the same church for several years and one Sunday between Sunday School and preaching service, he asked me about replacing a door in an oven. Now that was a bit of an unusual request and he could tell I thought as much once he saw the look on my face. Before I could ask why he needed to replace ONLY the door, he added, “All I really need is the glass.”

Apparently, Manny had engaged in some sort of mayhem and when I pointed this out, he turned beet red and spilled the beans.

The previous Friday night, in the wee hours of the morning sometime after dark o’clock, Manny’s new lovely wife Vicky (not her Christian name either) shook him from a sound sleep with news of an intruder of some stripe currently invading their home. Wide awake now, Manny lay still listening and, from the kitchen of the double-wide, came the sound of someone knocking over items.

Manny is not an especially brave man and he’s not an especially big man, but his wife was looking at him with big doe eyes that begged him for protection and, it WAS his house so, after a bit of deliberation, Manny reached under the bed where he kept his Ruger Single-Six .22 pistol. He cringed a bit when he remembered it only had the Long Rifle cylinder installed instead of the much more powerful .22 Magnum cylinder. He felt a bit cold as he realized he was going to be facing down a crazed and hardened, albeit toothless meth-head with little more than a pop gun. Still, he WAS the man of the house and this was one of those times he could shine in his new wife’s eyes.

He eased down the hall with his 6 D-cell Maglite in one had and his Ruger cocked and ready in his other. He could feel sweat sliding down his back and puddling atop the waistband of the ridiculous silk boxers Vicky had given him on their honeymoon. Entering the great room, he cursed the open floor plan he had insisted on buying, and dropping to his stomach, did a reasonable imitation of a commando crawl around the perimeter of the room until he reached the entrance to the kitchen. Then, adrenaline coursing through his veins; his heart pounding in his ears and throat, he leapt to his feet and brought the pistol up and switched the Maglite on, aiming both at the spot it sounded like the noise was coming from. At the same time, he bellowed out in his best NYPD Blues voice, “Freeze, you scumbag!!” He later told me “scumbag” hadn’t been his exact word, but he was relating this story in front of two deacons when he told it to me. Anyway, the tremendous beam of the Maglite struck the intruder squarely in the face and lit up two alien green glowing eyes.

It was a possum. A really, really big possum. It had apparently entered through Max’s doggie door, knocked over the trash can, and now was sitting on the kitchen table eating potato chips and leftover crusts from Little Caesar’s pizza.

Folks, at this time I need to bring two things to your attention. One, contrary to everything you’ve ever been told about North America’s only marsupial, “playing dead” is NOT the possum’s first line of defense. Her first line of defense is to suck in poop-tons of air to puff her body up nearly twice its normal size before letting out an unearthly sound of hissing while simultaneously baring some pretty impressive teeth. Two, she often waits to put on her defiant show of force, preferring to see what YOU are going to do first. Well, Manny’s first reaction was panic. He didn’t grow up in the country and pretty much thought possums were born dead in the middle of the road. Still, it WAS his house so he took a step forward and gave a strangled squeak intended as an intimidating war cry designed to send the toothsome creature scurrying back out the doggie door.

Apparently, the possum felt this was a threatening posture and so she did the suck-in-the-air deal with the open mouthed hiss, and she added a little twist of her own — she leapt off the table in Manny’s general direction.  Fearing for his life at the onslaught of this ravenous possum, Manny swung the Ruger up to shoot but in his panicked state, his fire discipline left something to be desired, so his shot flew low . . . into the oven door glass which responded as glass in oven doors usually does when shot and exploded into millions of pea-sized balls of tempered glass.

The possum, being no great fool, took the moment to ease on out the doggie door and disappear into the gloom, leaving Manny, silk boxers now wet on the back AND the front, to sweep up the glass of the shattered oven door while figuring a way to explain the preceding proceedings to Vicky.

Take care, y’all.

Love you and remember to keep those feet clean. 🙂

Jul3

How I Learned The Beautiful Game

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All across the South, daddies place a football in their sons’ cribs hoping to inculcate a desire to excel on the gridiron. By the same token, all across South America, padres place a futbol in seus filhos cribs hoping to inculcate a desire to excel on the pitch. The former is knowledge gained from personal observation; the latter Brenno told me.

Brenno was an exchange student from Rio de Janerio. He was a natural athlete and a fabulous kid to boot. The year he wrestled for me, he made the state quarterfinals having never seen a wrestling mat before he stepped onto ours. He was region champion and placed in every tournament we entered. As amazing a natural wrestler as he was, his real sport was futebol — what we Americans call soccer. In “The Beautiful Game”, he was phenomenal.

Now in most of South Carolina, soccer is ignored at best and denounced as communist at worst. Our program was five years old and had seen six coaches. This year, no one had volunteered to coach. Coach Candler stopped by my room one day and asked, “Wham, will you please take soccer this year?” Gentle readers, please note you could inscribe every jot and tittle of my soccer knowledge at that moment on the back of a postage stamp with wide margins all around, but Budge and I had just moved out so the bit of extra money would help. With a furtive nod, I began my year as a soccer coach.  Luckily, I had yet to meet Brenno.

I was sitting next to Brenno on the bus ride to a match when he asked, in the accent that assured him a gorgeous prom date, “Coach, You gonna coach futbol this year.”  He followed up with, “We gonna run a 3-3-4 or a 1-6-4 or what?” Brenno read my panicked, dumbfounded look and said, “Coach, you doan know a ting about futbol, do you?” I shook my head. He smiled and said, “Is okay, Coach, I din’ tink you looked like a futboler. How ’bout I put dem in de rat places, an’ you make dem roan? ‘K?” I suddenly felt a little better about spring.

First day of soccer practice, I met the team in the parking lot so we could walk together to the field. Brenno asked, “Dis where we gonna play, coach?” I laughed thinking he was having a joke at my expense.

He wasn’t.

We walked to the stadium and Brenno saw the field. We had a typical field for a 2A school with no budget for capital improvements; it was two pies and a barbed wire fence short of a cow pasture. I was looking over some drills I’d found on the ‘Net when one of the guys said, “Coach, something’s bad wrong with Brenno.” I walked over and he was teary-eyed, staring at the field as if he’d just discovered El Dorado. I put my arm around his shoulders — well, more like the middle of his back — and said, “What’s wrong, dude?” If I live to be ten centuries old, I’ll never forget how much I’d taken for granted all my life when he asked, “Coach, we gonna play on grass?” The last word came out reverently.

Brenno had never played on grass. The one grass field he knew of was used ONLY by “AAA League,” — a pro league. He and his friends played on a dirt field free of stones but hard as slate. He had scars on his legs from falling while playing.

He was amazed that we had FIFTEEN perfectly round leather regulation soccer balls. He was used to kicking made up balls of tape wrapped around twine or some such concoction. I asked him what would happen if he had that bag of balls in his neighborhood. He said, “Oh, Coach, I could never keep such a treasure. My friends and I would take them to the priest to keep safe and give out when we played; our children and grandchildren would play with them.”

Brenno took that bag of treasure home with him. I told Coach C. to take it out of my pay if he had to. He didn’t, but it would have been worth it to see the look on Brenno’s face when we gave the full bag to him at the end-of-the-season banquet. We’d  had the best season in the program’s history — we only lost one more game than we won. Brenno scored every goal and was co-MVP of the conference along with a Mexican exchange student at our rival school.

As much as he taught me and the others about “futbol,” his real gift was teaching us how much we have to be thankful for and just how much we take for granted. I miss him and I hope he’s okay and still playing with those balls.

Love y’all and wash the soccer field dust off your feet! 🙂

Jul1

Godspeed Little Grey Ghost

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My Two Fuzzy Angels. Thomas (L) and Loki (R) Requiescant in pace, boys.

It’s never good news when the vet calls herself instead of letting the assistants call. Those girls — in their late teens and early 20s — are spared the trauma of having to tell someone part of his soul has been ripped out and will never be replaced. Knowing this, my eyes were already brimming over when I heard our vet, Dr. Keller, on the other end of the phone Tuesday afternoon, June 29, 2010. Before she said anything, I said, attempting to project calm and failing miserably, “It was to widespread, wasn’t it?” She replied, “Yes, sir, and it wasn’t in his intestines like we thought. It had gotten his pancreas and spleen.” I managed to get out, “Have you . . .?” before my voice and composure failed me and she said, “Yes sir, I just let him go. He went with his chin and belly being rubbed, just like you asked.”

Barely two years after losing my beloved Thomas O’Malley to the rainbow bridge, our Loki, our little grey ghost, was gone.

He was a little grey ball of fuzz when Budge brought him home April Fool’s Day eleven years ago. We didn’t name him right off, but watched to see what his personality would be. Thomas walked over and sniffed him, then promptly bopped him on the head and proceeded to pin him to the ground and groom him to our household’s standards. Pecking order thus established, he then allowed the newcomer to roam the house at will. When the grey ball of energy finished turning over what could be turned over and getting into what could be gotten into, I dubbed him Loki, after the Norse god of mischief.

For the next eleven years he was a constant companion to Budge and me. He would move from lap to lap, occupying whichever space Thomas had not claimed. If no laps were available, he’d find a beam of sunshine and fit himself into it for as long as he could. If someone was in bed, Loki was with him or her. He loved sleep. For the first several years, he would curl into an arc atop Budge’s head and sleep all night, but when Budge went to Hawaii for two weeks a few years back, he abandoned his usual spot and until his last night with us, he slept at our feet. He was an absolutely amazingly extraordinary cat and we loved him dearly. When Thomas died, Loki could tell how sad I was and he spent hours in my lap trying to comfort me. He is currently the only cat I’ve ever personally known who was delighted to have his belly rubbed.

Then he started getting skinny for no good reason.

Then we went to the vet and had x-rays.

The ugly dark area was plain as day.

Dr. Keller scheduled surgery.

Budge and I took him in at 7:30 that morning.

Dr. Keller called at 2:00.

He was gone.

I do not handle death well. I was alone in the house so I did what anyone who just felt his heart torn in two would do, I curled up in the fetal position on the floor and squalled like a baby with colic. In between waves of unbearable anguish, I managed to call Budge and tell her, call Mama and tell her, and text message two of Loki’s favorite people — our buddy, Laura, and our niece, Kayla. Then I gave myself over to grief.

Budge found me in the floor clutching the shirt I’d worn that morning when we took him in. It still had bits of his fur stuck to it. Gradually, eventually, I subsided into quiet sobbing and then I dried my eyes. We talked about the wonderful times we’d had as a family of two humans and fuzzy babies. We had no doubt we made the right choice. Doing nothing would have sentenced our beautiful sweet boy to wasting and pain in just a few more weeks. As it was, we can remember him bright eyed and precious. In a few days, I’ll pick up his ashes and place them, along with his picture, next to Thomas’ remains and, at least, I’ll know where he is at all times.

Part of me, the part that abhors agony and emotional outburst, sometimes wishes I didn’t have to deal with the loss of such a dear friend, but the other side of me knows Loki won’t be the last. If the world should stand long enough, Beau, Jack, Milo, and Ares will follow Thomas and Loki over the rainbow bridge. I know if I should make it to Heaven I will find them there and if any armchair theologian should question my belief, I’ll tell him the same thing a cat loving pastor told me once: “Of course our pets will be in Heaven . . . without them, it won’t BE Heaven.”

So, as bad as it hurts, I know in my heart that I couldn’t trade the pain of losing them for a life without having had them in it. Dr. Seuss, that precious and beloved writer for children said it best:

“Don’t weep and frown because it’s over; laugh and smile because it happened.”

Love you, my fuzzy angels.

Love y’all, too.

Keep those feet clean now. 🙂

Jun16

KeeKee Goes Postal in The Walmart

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"Your day is about to get a whole lot worse!"

KeeKee, my beloved sister-in-law on Budge’s side has been under a wee bit of stress lately. Her job as a substitute organ donation coordinator is stressful in the best of times. She travels around the southeast filling in for coordinators on vacation or maternity leave. Her job consists of going into a waiting room in a hospital and ask a family if she can harvest their brain dead loved one’s organs. That’s a tough job. Very important and rewarding, but seriously difficult. The travel schedule doesn’t help much either and she has a rather interesting traveling companion — my 18 month old nephew. To top it all off, her God-I-hope-soon-to-be-ex-husband, my wife’s older brother, is a rotating SOB. (he’s an SOB any way you look at him.)

Well all this week, KeeKee has been subbing at a big hospital in Jacksonville, FLA. She’s also been staying with some of her friends who have twins Ry-Ry’s age so they help by babysitting. Oh yeah, she’s been on call for seven straight days and coming home to a two bedroom house with seven people in it. KeeKee is just about at the end of her rope. So, last night, she and one of the girls take Ry-Ry to “The WalMart” just to combat cabin fever.

Cut to the clothing section about twenty minutes later. Ry-Ry is in his buggy seat and KeeKee gets just a tiny bit too close to a table of t-shirts. Ry-Ry, being the curious and exploratory tyke that he is, reached out and grabbed a t-shirt and yanked.  It happened to be the BOTTOM t-shirt. That particular stack promptly ended up in “The Walmart” floor. Now KeeKee is a very conscientious and neat person. Not wanting to cause any undue work for the sales clerk folding clothes two tables away, she bends down, picks up the pile o’ shirts and starts to refold them. That would have been the end of it, but she happened to glance at the clerk to give a little smile . . . and saw the clerk look at Ry-Ry and ROLL HER EYES. Time for Mama Bear to make an appearance.

KeeKee walked up to the clerk and calmly said, “I’m sorry my son pulled the shirts off. He’s just a little boy and didn’t know better.” At this point, the clerk COULD have just smiled and nodded and that would have been the end. Nope. This lady must have had some sort of death wish because she turned slowly towards KeeKee and ROLLED HER EYES AND SUCKED HER TEETH!! Something deep in KeeKee that had been brewing for weeks on end snapped just then. She locked eyes with Mrs. Death Wish and calmly said, “You’re having a bad day, aren’t you?” Without waiting for any response, she continued, “Well, sister, it’s just about to get worse!” With that, KeeKee returned to the t-shirt table, stuck her arm under one end of the shirts and with one graceful movement, swept the entire table of shirts into the floor.

Then, shaking with a mixture of emotions, she marched to the front of the building and asked to speak to the manager in charge. “Mister,” she began, “you have me on video pushing a table of shirts into the floor. I did it because YOUR CLERK is rude and ROLLED HER EYES AT ME!! I’ve got a good mind to go BACK over there and TAKE MY LITTLE BOY OUT OF HIS SEAT SO SHE CAN SEE WHAT HE CAN REALLY DO!!”  The manager stood there obviously stifling a nervous titter and assured KeeKee he’d take care of it, at which KeeKee said, “WELL SEE THAT YOU DO AND I’LL BE BACK TOMORROW NIGHT TO CHECK!!!” Then she spun on her heel and swept regally out the door and to the car to break down in a deluge of nervous and angry tears.

The take home point of this story? Don’t mess with a Mama Bear on the edge!

Love y’all. Keep those feet clean!

Jun14

Good Directions

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Turn off the paved road . . .

If the US Navy should, for whatever reason, wish to deposit a Tomahawk cruise missile on my front door a la the First Gulf War, they will be, as the teens say, S.O.L. because Tomahawks are guided by GPS navigation and GPS will not get you to my house. The crazy thing is, I don’t even live up in Montana or North Dakota where they go ahead and TELL you GPS won’t work. I live in South Cackalacky, BUT I live in The Sticks, The Boonies, BF Egypt, etc. Yep, GPS is pretty useless out here.

Well, I guess I should say that “civilian” GPS is useless out here. Main reason? Two words: road names. Two More? Turning directions. See, to give directions to my home place, you must have at least a passing knowledge of the history of my particular dot on the map. For example, if you don’t know where the Old Williams’ Place that burned down once stood, you’re going to get lost when told by one of my erstwhile neighbors that you need to “turn by the Old Williams’ Place that burned down a while back.”

Likewise, if you aren’t sure which of the seemingly endless monolithic boulders dotting the pastures around my rural homestead is “Dove Blind Rock,” the knowledge that you have to turn left two miles past “Dove Blind Rock” isn’t going to be much use to you. Also, as I alluded to earlier, most of the roads around my house don’t have “official” names and the “unofficial” names can vary slightly depending on which generation of folk is giving you the directions.

Finally, sheer distance will defeat all but the most intrepid adventurers who seek Wham land. The citified term “block” as in “go two blocks” has no meaning at all around my stomping grounds. Our addresses don’t change at the whim of a side road. Mama’s house address (or 911 address, since she gets her mail at the post office) is 526 Darby Circle. Meanwhile, my grandmother and great-aunt’s childhood home, which is Mama’s closest related building is 498 Darby Circle. No houses lie between. Out here, the addresses tell the distance in feet from the nearest intersection.

One person who followed me home from the school where I taught told me, upon getting out of his car that I, “lived in another Twilight Time Zone!” Despite having made believers of some, most people laugh when I tell them, turn off State Highway 14 and drive until you are CERTAIN you have gotten completely lost and at that point you’ll go about another two miles and turn right by Dove Blind Rock onto Old Hog Pen Road.

They’re the ones who just laugh and say, “I’ll just punch your address into my Tom-Tom.”

Yeah, good luck with that one, Goober.

Love y’all! Stay cool and keep your feet clean!

Jun10

Thoughts vs Ideation

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Theodore just couldn't take it anymore.

One of my former students — I’ll call him Collin — married a woman for love who was marrying for money. The results have been predictable. They have a beautiful house, two beautiful cars, two beautiful children (only one of which is Collin’s, but that’s another story) and plenty of maxed out credit cards. Collin has stress related angina, carries nitro tablets, works a minimum of 50 hours a week, and is one missed paycheck away from bankruptcy and divorce. I told him to take the bankruptcy and divorce. He laughed, but I wasn’t kidding.

Did I mention he JUST turned 30?

Anyway, he’s been referred to a psychiatrist for evaluation because of some symptoms he’s been having, probably stress related, but the ER docs wanted to be sure. So his psychiatrist gave him a book of forms to fill out including various surveys and asking him questions about his various symptoms. Now I always liked Collin and he worked hard for me, but in plain simple matter of fact language, he wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box — and that’s the box of 8, not the new monster box of over 100. So he went to a mutual friend’s house to get some help. This proved to be a case of the blind leading the blind, so they ended up calling me. At the time, the sticking question was “have you ever had suicidal thoughts or suicidal ideation?” They didn’t know the difference so I explained it thusly,

Suicidal thoughts means you’ve just found out you aren’t getting a contract next year and you’ve got a wife at home and bills to pay. On the drive home, the thought crosses your mind that if you managed to have an “accident” before your group life insurance lapsed, your wife could pay everything off and live quite comfortably on her salary alone. BUT, by the time you reach your exit, the though has passed and you’re thinking about the grass you need to cut and about dusting off the old resume and getting set for the job hunt. That’s a brief suicidal thought.

Suicidal ideation, however, is when it’s been a year since you lost your job and even though you’ve managed to keep your head about water with unemployment checks and cashing in your state retirement, you have had exactly zero luck in finding a job and the outlook is grim. You have no prospects and hope is dwindling, so you start slipping into a little more serious depression. Then you remember that big oak tree that sits about ten feet from the road in the curve over on State 101 just inside the Woodruff town limits. You are aware that everyone knows you have several friends and acquaintances in Woodruff, including a step-uncle who lives about half a mile from said tree. You are also aware that you are well known for falling asleep at the wheel. Also, you know how to disable the airbags on your vehicle and it’s a widely reported fact that you detest seatbelts. You remember that once you timed out everything and figured you could easily be doing 60 mph when you hit that curve and if you “dozed off” and straightened out said curve, you would smack the tree at 60 mph and, with disabled airbags and no seatbelt, be ejected through your windshield and perish of massive blunt force trauma to your cranium. At that point, even though your primary insurance has lapsed, the obvious “accident” would enable the small life insurance policy your mother still has on you to pay off and that would be just enough for the simple pine casket funeral you always planned and you’d no longer be a drain on family resources.

“So,” Collin asked me, “thoughts means the idea just occurs to your and passes, but ideation means you actually have a solid plan?” I told him that was it exactly! They kept me on the line a little while longer with a few other questions then hung up.

Man, I hope that boy gets some help. He’s a good boy. He’s just in over his head right now and his wife is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

So, y’all say a prayer for him, keep your feet clean, and remember who loves you! 🙂

Jun6

One in Every Town: The Prologue

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The Heart of America = Small Town Main Street.

I’m a representative of a small town. I grew up in a dot (a very small dot) on a map off I-385 that existed only because of cotton and railroads. The town had a good cotton gin and the CSX railroad ran right next to main street, which was also State Highway 14. The gin and most of the farms that raised cotton were gone by the time I was old enough to know what cotton and cotton gins were. All that’s left of the old gin that was the heartbeat of the town is a square foundation with poles at the corners. It’s a great place to dig worms for fishing.

Towns like mine are the biggest part of our country. Sure, you’ve got your New Yorks and LAs, but for every big starred Atlanta, four or five Sugar Tits, Pleasant Groves, and Smithfields hold down their dots on the Rand-McNally.

In the South, we have a lot of textile mill towns. Back when “Made in America” meant actually created here instead of just assembled here from foreign parts, the South was the largest exporter of textiles in the world. Many bales of cotton rolled into one end of a plant only to emerge as miles and miles of cloth on the other end. Of course, once NAFTA and its corollary bills passed back in the ’80s and ’90s, the plants and mills started shutting down. It’s hard to compete paying $15 per hour to American workers when Mexican workers would do the same job for $15 a week. Of course, in a bit of irony, the Mexican factories that took the textiles from the South are losing their $15 a week jobs to Chinese who thing $15 a month is a royal wage.

The textile South isn’t the only small town area that’s hit hard times. The Rust Belt has small towns around steel mills and those mills started dying in the ’70s to cheaper foreign metal. Still, lots of small towns all across the country are holding on. Mining outposts in the West, farming towns in the Midwest bread basket, cattle towns in Texas and elsewhere. They are all places where life moves a little slower and things haven’t change much in many years. It’s the fishing towns on the coast and the orchard towns in the Citrus Belt that join the remote northwestern logging towns in making up the backbone of the country.

But what all these towns have in common is a set of individuals making up their population. Each has a cast of characters just as varied, but at the same time as predictable, as a Shakespearean play. I want to introduce you to some of them whom I grew up with and whose analogues can be found in pretty much every small town from Maine to California, Washington to Florida and all point in between. Look for them in some of my next posts.

Until then, keep your feet clean and remember who loves y’all!