“Today we fight. Tomorrow we fight. The day after, we fight. And if this disease plans on whipping us, it better bring a lunch, ’cause it’s gonna have a long day doing it.” ― Jim Beaver, Life’s That Way
Three and a half weeks ago we failed to draw two to an inside straight. An update on Linda Porter-Miller.
The oncologist confirmed that the biopsy verified our worst fears. Rather than let us sit in stunned silence the doctor prattled along telling us that it was his belief that we could get Linda’s disease into remission. There would be chemo, but surgery might not be in our future because of the way the disease has progressed.
Linda, my better half for nearly forty years, refuses to use the word that describes the disease, but oncologist and chemo are give aways to what we are facing. The disease has focused on her female parts, south of the border, and I will leave it there.
Those who played for or coached against Coach Porter-Miller know what a competitive little girl she is and will have no doubt in the belief of Jim Beaver’s quote, “And if this disease plans on whipping us, it better bring a lunch, ’cause it’s gonna have a long day doing it.”
Everyone who knows her knows too, she is a complicated individual who is not satisfied to battle just one disease. The Monday before we were to have a PET scan and begin chemotherapy, she decided to have a TAI stroke. Two days in the hospital and a battery of tests proved she had had more than one and we went into battling a two-front war, putting off the chemo for a week.
In typical Miss PE fashion, (Miss PE is what her elementary students called her) she has decided it was the best thing that could have happened. Better to know now than to find out in the middle of a war that your rifle was going to misfire. (I apologize for mixing metaphors from gambling to warfare)
She has recovered from the stroke nicely. She stumbles over the occasional word, especially when texting but still talks ninety miles a minute. She makes as much sense now as she always did.
So, we began chemo two days ago, three by the time this is posted. Linda has done well. The big challenge has been keeping up with and when to take the myriads of drugs we are forced to take or in my case administer. We also found out that Linda can’t tolerate the Claritin she was prescribed to counter bone pain. I am reminded of a college student hopped up on “Black Beauties” cramming for an exam.
She is hyper and restless, unable to sleep. I know this is temporary and she needs to rest. I expect her to go “bust” at any moment and wind down like a child’s toy. She needs to rest. This is the first of six treatments. I expect a hard fight and hope for a long fight.
Friends, family, former players, and coaching peers, Linda doesn’t “do” Facebook but if you want to drop a note, I’ll pass it along or if you want to send a card, our address is Linda Porter-Miller 3300 Highway 11, Travelers Rest, SC, 29690.
“There has never been a ‘New Year’ that has managed to become ‘new’ if the mistakes of the old years are repeated!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan
I’m not going to touch 2023 with a ten-foot pole unless the bomb squad says it is okay. A change in the House leadership, threats of retribution for perceived liberal evils, charges looming against a former president, Hunter’s laptop…and House leadership walking the halls of Congress with a gallon of gasoline and a Zippo. I hope that is metaphorical.
For the past six years I have had hopes that we would turn ourselves around as humans and strive to make the principles this country was founded on a reality. Well, enough about the ridiculous and on to the sublime. The sublime of course, is me.
When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, I have an affliction like Midas’ golden touch except instead of gold, my touch creates gooey, stinky, piles of cow poo.
After reading my posts from the past five or six New Years I’ve decided the New Year is a little like Monty Hall’s “Let’s Make a Deal” with a twist. Instead of “My whole life lies waitin’ behind Door Number Three” it is Door Number 2023, My choices are a smelly Billy goat, Uncle Cletus’ dirty underwear, or a live bomb.1 Should I mention the three wires leading to the bomb are all black?
I had great hopes 2022 would reverse the trend I have noticed since I began writing in 2014. That would be both personally and politically. Instead, 2022 started badly and finished worse with a few ups and many downs in between.
From the January 6th insurrection to a positive Covid test over Thanksgiving and what was characterized as a Covid carryover of vertigo and nausea on Christmas Day, 2022 has been circling the toilet for a while and refusing to flush. If I look closely, I see the ghosts of New Years past circling too. Seems little has changed. I’m a bit worried about what New Year’s Eve might bring.
As I reread my New Year’s posts, they followed similar pig trails. Lamentations of broken resolutions, self-reflection on why they were broken before listing the hopes I have for the next New Year. Hopes and dreams that quickly turn into pipe dreams, fantasies, or will-‘o-the wisp mirages.
I think my depression has taken hold. Thank goodness the daylight hours are lengthening.
Rather than choosing to avoid making resolutions, I’ve decided this year to use the “Kiss” principle. “Keep it simple stupid,” the old naval design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960 that I attempted to model as a coach…. I was 13 and 27 as a varsity head football coach. I’m already rethinking that choice.
So here it is, my resolution for 2023. “Ta…ta…ta-taaaaa.” Do one positive thing daily, other than getting out of bed in the morning. That is as simple as I can make it. I mean aren’t the chances good that I’ll do something positive whether I’m trying or not? I do take daily showers, that’s positive, right? I know, it’s like giving up calf liver for Lent, something I give up the remainder of the year too.
Happy New Year, Friends. To you I make this toast, “May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early! My own plan is to swear off every kind of virtue so that I triumph even when I fall!” – Aleister Crowley
1The game show referenced earlier was “Let’s Make a Deal.” Created and hosted by Monty Hall, it premiered in 1963 and featured crazy people with signs, in crazy dress hoping to get Monty’s attention and a chance at the brass ring. The ending segment pitted a previous winner who was given the choice of trading their winnings for prizes of varying worth located behind one of three doors, one featuring a prize of worth, a car possibly, the others not so much.
The song “Door Number Three” referenced with the reframe, “My Whole World Lies Waiting Behind Door Number Three” was a song written by Steve Goodwin in 1975 and most famously performed by Jimmy Buffett on his A1A album. The tune is now circling my brain like 2022 circled the toilet. So, with the video below you can join in along with Monty Hall and the crazies from “Let’s Make a Deal.” Make sure you watch till the end.
I’ve awoke with a start. Another one of those dreams that I usually reserve for nights after too many Margaritas and seafood tacos. I can’t tell you the last time I had a Margarita…or a seafood taco. It wasn’t last night.
This dream was too vivid, and it wasn’t the first one. Good news, it wasn’t a nightmare…maybe.
There was once an old man who walked the two-lane road in front of my house. My dream included him. His name was Bap. My guess…Bap was a nickname. Being young I referred to him as Mr. Wolfe. After rubbing the sleep from my eyes I remembered what the old folks said about Bap, “He ain’t right in the head.” Maybe I’m not either.
Dressed in bib overalls and a dusty, sweat-stained fedora, he would walk until approached by a car. As the car drew near, he would recoil, clearly fearing the car might suddenly lose control and run him down. His eyes were dark and brooding, boring into the driver as if Bap could somehow create a visual barrier that might protect him from being squashed flat like an unlucky possum. His head followed the movement of the car until it was well past. Thankfully there were few cars during those days but I don’t think Bap had much to do anyway.
There were stories told around campfires by preteen boys that claimed Bap had been kidnapped by nefarious teenagers up to no good, taken on a wild ride in someone’s jalopy and let out far from home. Somehow this had translated into a fear of cars instead of a fear of nefarious teenagers.
When I asked my father about him my dad simply replied, “Ole Bab is just a quare bird. Don’t worry, he’s harmless.” I guess he was, I remember him only as a reluctant and fearful walker and no threat to society.
I dreamt about him last night. Bap, not my father. I’ve had a series of dreams that, while none are exactly the same, my series follows the same theme. I’m lost and as the dream progresses, I get more lost and quite anxious about it.
Last night was the sixth in the series since the beginning of this month, a variation on a theme once or twice a week. Having reoccurring dreams is not new to me but I feel something is amiss, I’m a bubble off plumb. More so than usual I should say.
Why am I dreaming in psychedelic tangerine and blue paisley? Why am I having a dream that includes a man long dead, a man I haven’t thought about in decades? Why am I having dreams that include unicorns and oiled up body builders hitting a bell with sledge hammers.
In the dream I can see my destination clearly in the distance even though I don’t really know what my destination is. I just know it is there. I’m on a high hill under a haze filled sky with a brightly lit city spread out below. I see my destination but somehow, I get lost. I see it again and again from different vantage points.
I see it over and over and over and over again its location changes and I’m further away. Short cuts avail themselves, but they turn into lengthy long cuts as I find myself in mazes that include textile mills, construction sites, athletic complexes, even a cruise ship.
I find myself in dimly lit corridors or brightly lit shopping malls. In one I open a door to a disco lounge complete with shiny disco ball, swirling women in dresses made of ethereal fabrics, and John Travolta in his white suit. At least the Bee Gees aren’t singing in the background, “Staying alive, staying alive, oh, oh, oh….” Instead I hear Jimmy Buffett singing, “My whole life lies waiting behind door number three.” Great, Monty Hall may be in my next dream.
I open doors and am led further from my destination or to rooms with no exits. In one, Bap stands against the wall staring at me with the look he reserved for cars, no white suit just bib overalls, a dark stare above a mouth formed into an “O”.
All along the way there are people, in many places there is a crush of bodies. People from my far past like Bap or people from my near past. Friends long dead, others quite alive. Family members galore. Folks I haven’t spoken to in decades and others I talked to yesterday including the little blond runner with the bouncing ponytail. No rhyme or reason in psychedelic colors.
If I were an electrical media device, I’d attempt a hard reset. For some reason an engine seems more appropriate. I think my timing gear is off and I might be missing on a couple of cylinders. I’m in need of a tune up, BIGGLY!
Despite so much color in the dream I have awakened feeling like a threadbare cotton tee shirt, its logo faded from view.
I awake and remember the dreams vividly…and the colors I dream in. The colors are psychedelic. Tangerine and pink acrylics in a swirling paisley and that’s just the unicorns walking around an azure blue lake in the middle of a football field. Did someone sneak LSD into the corn salad I made for myself last night? The oiled up body builders beating the bell with sledge hammers? Turns out my alarm was going off. I don’t know why the resemble Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris.
I don’t know what the dreams mean…do they mean anything? I’ve always believed dreams to be the discharge of random, unneeded data…a cleansing of unneeded (unwanted?) memories. Freud and Jung would disagree, I guess.
Most of my dreams fade over time. Not this one. The tangerine is still quite bright.
I should be happy. They are not nightmares…at least not yet. My concern is probably much to do about nothing and I am actually looking forward to meeting up with people I haven’t seen in a while…even in a dream. I should take the stance that you really can’t be lost if you don’t have any idea where you are going anyway. Maybe I should go ahead and have a spicy fish taco and a tequila drink…or three. Who knows how lost I might get or who I might meet up with.
Door Number Three sung by Jimmy Buffett on the album AIA.
As soon as I read the headline and before I read the article, “Trump Announces, ‘Patriotic Education’ Commission”, I thought of Colonel Jessup’s tirade in the movie, “A Few Good Men”, “You Can’t Handle The Truth!” I felt no different after I read it.
It seems our President and a good part of our population can’t or won’t handle the truth. Worse, I believe a portion of our population knows the truth, they just don’t care to acknowledge it. They like things just the way they are or rather they would like to cycle them back to those thrilling days of yesteryear. Am I cynical much?
I read the article but my thoughts continued to collide with the force of a cue ball breaking a rack. Dark thoughts of a time past that seems to be determine to resurrect itself.
“Trump Announces, ‘Patriotic Education’ Commission”. Hummm…I was a product of “Patriotic Education”. It was called Civics, taught in the backdrop of the Civil Right struggle and the Cold War. There was a lot of wrapping the Bible in the Red, White, and Blue to boot. “Our God is better than your god,” with Biblical quotations to prove it.
Civics wasn’t pure propaganda but there was propaganda. I did learn about our constitution and our federal system, but I also learned that the self-evident truths of “All men are created equal” were weak aspirations in my part of the world, not necessarily a truth.
As my blond haired, crew cut sporting instructor explained, “We have the retarded, the dummies and mute, ni@@#*s and Indians.” Yes, he said that. My memory is faulty, it could have been in US History rather than Civics.
One of the more troubling thoughts among many is how much this person meant to me. How much I wanted to be just like him. How I followed his lead to college and then on to teaching. How I majored in history and taught it for most of forty-one years…most likely, because of him.
It was the Sixties and as I have found in most men, there is good, there is bad, and I hope, there is change. Don’t you hate it when your heroes prove to be mere mortals?
In the article I read, President Trump decried what he called a “twisted web of lies” being taught in U.S. classrooms about systemic racism in America, calling it “a form of child abuse.” He made similar comments at Mount Rushmore in July.
“Teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse, the truest sense,” Trump said. “For many years now, the radicals have mistaken Americans’ silence for weakness. They’re wrong. There is no more powerful force than a parent’s love for their children. And patriotic moms and dads are going to demand that their children are no longer fed hateful lies about this country.”
At best, our President has an uncomfortable relationship with the truth. Most often, the truth and the President do not reside in the same zip code. I question what “hateful lies about this country” he is channelling. It seems to me we are again wrapping the flag around our racism and using a religion to support it.
I do not want to beat a dead mule; I have written to this theme before. Until recently, and even that depends on where you reside in our great country, we have never taught history from an all-encompassing point of view. We have never taught history “warts and all.” We seem to be afraid of the truth.
Most teachers try, but standards and textbooks have only recently begun to change, attitudes even less. Those teachers who don’t try should not be teaching. I still see a type of history being taught accompanied by cheerleaders sporting red, white, and blue pom poms. “Go, Fight, Win!”
Why would we not want to teach the truth? Does truth somehow undermine our love for our country? Am I wrong to believe we can be patriotic and love our country despite knowing we committed travesties along the way? Can we not wish to correct those ills and make ourselves an even better country? Is it unbearable to admit to the wrongs of our forefathers?
Change. The word seems to be the truth we can’t handle and the resistance to change seems to come from my own contemporaries…those of us who were indoctrinated to believe “My Country, Right or Wrong” not that our country ever did any wrong. Worse, many are not contemporaries but are those I taught.
Many former students have taken to pointing out, “We are not a democracy we are a Republic.” To what end? Why do you make this argument? Is there an ulterior motive? Am I being cynical to believe people pointing this out have an agenda and a need to undermine?
The word “republic” has the same meaning as the term “representative democracy.” A representative democracy is a form of democracy in the same way that a ‘purple top’ is a form of turnip. We wouldn’t say it’s inaccurate to use “turnip” to describe a purple top turnip, so it’s OK to follow in the footsteps of many founding fathers, along with Webster, and Chief Justice Marshall and simply call our “representative democracy” a “democracy.”
I would also want to point out, at the local level many of our decisions are made as a ‘direct’ democracy. Again, I wonder about motives. I wonder about truth. I feel to the depth of my bones, many would rather have a more autocratic form of government even if it is led by a former reality TV star.
My brother will now say, chill. Go out and walk, smell the flowers, have a beer, watch a football game. He is right, and I will, but my cynical petty coats are showing cow poo and it stinks. I have hope in our system, but it is being undermined. My truth is becoming, “We are what we are. This is who we’ve been and we ain’t gonna’ change.”
We are being taken advantage of. I’m not the world’s most intelligent guy but even I can see the seeds of division that have been planted are flourishing, both within and without. The far right and the far left are not our friends. Neither are any of the autocratic leaders our President seems to want to cozy up to.
No, not our friends. Neither is the media attempting to sell advertising, a President attempting to sell blivits, and congressmen and women attempting to sell themselves. (A blivit is two pounds of manure in a one-pound bag. The origin is from Kalamazoo College around 1960.)
The President’s initiative to create “Patriotic Education” is a blivit and he is sowing more seeds of discord and playing to a base that includes those who believe equality for all is somehow taking their own rights away and an affront to God.
Watercolor by John Coffee. Line from The Green Mile
Before social distancing became the in thing, I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in thirty years…jeez…more like forty. I was excited to see her…considering our history excited is not the best descriptor. Thrilled is a better word. I was thrilled to see her.
We had a short-term tryst back in the day…just scratching certain itches. Nothing heavy, a “friends with benefits” kind of thing before “friends with benefits” was a thing…it was the “free love” Seventies after all. As I think back, I realize there was nothing free about love or even its unreasonable facsimile, lust.
She didn’t recognize me, even when I tried to explain who I was. Despite the empty feeling in my stomach, I didn’t push it. She seemed anxious in a bad way. I think she’s had a stroke or is self-medicating…am I being narcissistic? Maybe it was my beard, the balding head? No, I believe there was something wrong.
She seemed frail and infirm. A woman who once strode through the world confidently was reduced to little shuffles reminiscent of a Chinese woman who had had her feet bound. The strong alto voice lacked volume and power. The tall, long-legged, pleasing body seemed to be collapsing in on itself. Always slender in a good way, she was much too thin. Maybe it was me looking back on memories through my rose-colored reading glasses.
We remained friends after we both moved on to other places and people…at least I thought we had. At some point, she seemed to disappear…but, not from memory. I’ve thought of her often over the years wondering what happened to her. Wondering if she was happy. Remembering how foolish I had been.
I wondered if she had moved to a distant part of the world. Whenever I asked friends, “Have you heard from….”, the answer was always in the negative.
In the mid-80s she decided she was gay and fell under the influence of a “stereotypical” lesbian woman. You may substitute whatever “stereotype” you wish. This woman is much more than a stereotype and stereotypes are such oversimplifications.
Still, the time was the Eighties and I was shocked and full of questions. I’ve often wondered if she crossed over because she was truly lesbian or was it because she had been wounded so many times by people of my gender…or was it I was such a bad lover and friend I drove her to it. Insecure much? Ah…yes!
She stumbled and fell over several relationships during those late Seventies and early Eighties. I wonder if I helped to trip her up as she attempted to recover. An unwanted splinter under the fingernail of life. You can tell she is an enigma, she always was.
Are my concerns more about me and my own guilt? Is it about my own narcissism? Is it my over-inflated self-importance? Questions I can’t answer. Maybe questions I fear to answer. My greatest question, “Are you happy?” I hope the answer is yes.
There are questions I can’t even ask. My friend has dropped off the face of the earth even though she lives exactly where she has always lived.
I think about the crowd we ran with during those thrilling days of yesteryear. Those days we were lucky to survive. Those of us still alive have remained in touch. More so as we have gotten older. It is as if she has cut all ties with those days and the people who inhabited them with her. Maybe she wanted to move forward while the rest of us are pulled toward the past. I know I once did the same thing when my own mistakes became too much of a burden. Memories too painful to remember…except you do.
I’ve been outside three times this morning…and it’s not yet seven-thirty. The puppies woke me way too early.
I am troubled by the silence…the sounds I don’t hear. I seem to be drawn to the quiet like a moth to a flame. Everything is muted, even the vehicles climbing up the grade toward Hendersonville.
I don’t understand the silence and I am a bit disturbed. Usually, the birds and bees are active by this time, chirping and buzzing. But nothing is moving…just the toad that keeps trying to find a way into my house and the mosquito he must be chasing.
I don’t really mind the toad and admire his persistence. I wish he would nab the mosquito. The blind puppy dogs seem to mind, picking up his scent and leading me to his location. Waiting patiently for their “good dog” treats after I remove the interloper to his normal habitat. Where is that damn mosquito?
Now I am looking at the bird feeders and they are not attracting any kind of activity…squirrels included. I squint into the pre-dawn light to see if they were emptied during the night.
Did some spaceship descend from the heavens and abduct my wildlife deciding they didn’t need my toad? I’ve seen too many end of the world movies.
My murder of crows has been quite active recently but not this morning. Why I wonder? Why are gatherings of crows called murders? As I ponder, I realize I really have seen too many horror movies and am crazy as a loon.
It is as if the very air is absorbing sound. Not a leaf moving. The citronella torches I just lit are burning straight up, reaching toward heaven. The heavily scented smoke defies gravity, swirling neither left or right as it disappears toward space.
It has been hot and dry…for us. I think that makes us all crazy…wildlife included. Mid-nineties in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Pre-dawn has become after dawn and there is no dew on the grass at all. We need rain badly and a break from the heat. It is as if the wildlife has already hunkered down in a cool place for the day. Maybe that’s why the toad continues to break and enter.
Maybe it just my diminished hearing or my increasingly bad mood. I find myself anxious and a bit depressed. Am I depressed because of…or is because of why I am depressed? I don’t know. I don’t know if I even make sense.
What I do know is the silence is as oppressive as the building humidity and heat.
According to the local weather guru, there is hope on the horizon. Rain chances increase late in the week. Nothing for sure…just like life. Maybe what rain we do get will wash away the silence…or maybe I should get off my ass and make some noise.
“Yea as I walk through the shadow of the valley of death…” I hear nothing.
I first wrote and posted about Silence in December 2015. Here it is May 2019, and the silence persists when I talk to my God. The silence reverberates even more loudly than before as more hatred floods the airways sweeping up more and more in its wake.
My God doesn’t answer me. Daily I give him an opportunity. I usually converse with him as I perform my walkabout. Out in the open, in the elements, in his creation…it should be a good time to talk, a good time for answers. Wish he or she would answer a few questions…maybe it’s the way I frame them…I’m sure it is my fault. Sometimes my questions to him just pop out from nowhere…or from everywhere.
There are many times when I wish the voices in my head would shut up, this is not one of those occasions. I’m waiting for a Saul/Paul moment. Maybe it is the voices in my head asking the questions instead of me or my road doesn’t lead to Damascus.
I grew up in the church…and then like so many young people wandered down a divergent path. Later I would come back and then diverge again…a couple of times. I fear I might be in the divergent mode again.
During those divergent days, my issues weren’t with Jesus, it was with organized religion…it still is. I have problems with the “My God is greater than your god” group.
I have problems with people who are so sure of their beliefs whether it is a minister, layman or political pundit. My issues were or are with Christians who spread their hate in the name of God, seemingly forgetting the love of Jesus, many masquerading as political pundits. Is it hate or am I missing the point of Christian generosity? Can you quote from Leviticus and the teachings of Jesus?
My first divergence occurred because of a young minister who was so sure that if my mother truly believed she’d be cured of her terminal disease. Well, she wasn’t cured, she did believe, and I was an angry young man whose religious beliefs had been shattered.
Now my confidence is being tested by the hatred I see…good people pulled to the fringes of their religion while I, if anything, seem to move in the other direction. Hellfire and brimstone seem to swirl about me as I ask my questions. The smell of sulfur hangs in the air of my head. The punishing God of the Old Testament seems to be loading up his burning stones and aiming them at anyone not toeing the fundamentalist line…I should be ready to duck.
If you believe in a fundamental, punishing god that is your right. I will not attempt to convert you. I just can’t believe in or worship that kind of god. I promise I won’t attempt to transmute you to my way of thinking. Please give me the same consideration.
Generally, I’m not very open about my religious beliefs…nor outspoken at all. Writing this is an unbelievable stretch for me. Yesterday I stretched even further as I engaged a very good friend, metaphorically laying myself bare. She is a non-believer…maybe, sometimes I wonder. She has better than a good heart.
After laying myself bare, she attempted to apply a soothing balm, “(You are) a caring human being and a spiritual soul. The goodness I see in you doesn’t require a grand biblical gesture or event to validate or verify what and who you are.”
Her comment lifted my spirits but this morning I wonder. I don’t feel very spiritual or validated but I do keep asking myself questions and mulling while waiting, hoping for an answer.
Rewritten From December 2015
I worry. Worry for family, country, and friends. Friends of all races, creeds, sexual preferences and colors. I pray. There is no answer, nothing but silence.
I ask, What happened to “live and let live?”
I agonize over students having to face death in what should be one of the safest places in the world. Students giving their lives to protect others when the people we entrust with their safety seem to only to offer “thoughts and prayers.” While we have plenty of suppositions, we offer little else other than “It is God’s will.” It’s this, it’s that, it’s not something else but we do nothing. The silence is becoming oppressive.
I worry about worshippers of all religions, unable to praise their god for fear of bombings, burnings or the sound of rapid-fire weapons echoing in the foreground. There seems to be no answer from above or here on earth. Does God help those who help themselves? We might try that.
I wonder. Wonder at how the world has come to this. I pray and then I rage. Rage at Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Atheist, Liberals, Conservatives, anyone in between and any religion I failed to mention.
I pray. Again, there is no succor, only silence.
I hate. Mostly I hate myself for hating. I pray for the hatred to be taken away. From myself and from people I don’t even know. It does not relent. The silence swells in my mind.
I ask for enlightenment. Understanding, Wisdom, Awareness, and Insight. Why do we do nothing but debate? Why do we do the same things over and over again, expecting a different outcome? It is insanity.
Why do we do nothing but wait until the next episode of terror…? I pray. There is nothing but deep, dark silence.
My grandmother instructed me to “lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.”
I pray to look “unto the hills” but the silence has become a deafening roar in my ears.
I must keep looking unto the hills. I will keep praying…hoping God will take the silence away.
If watching the local news didn’t worry me enough my throbbing knees do. Bone rubbing on bone from too many years of athletic abuse, I am usually able to control the pain with Voltaren gel and Tylenol Arthritis pain relief…not this morning. My aching knees are much better predictors of impending violent low-pressure weather than any meteorologist.
My little piece of heaven is hunkering down awaiting a little piece of hell. Violent weather has already killed two and it is on the way here. Long lines of thunderstorms with predicted high winds and a worry that they may become circular in motion.
My home has weathered storms since 1892. I have been privy to them since 1987 and we have dodged several weather bullets. Whether tornadoes or straight-line winds, we have been a near miss or a glancing blow on many different occasions. I haven’t cleared all the downed trees from our last brush with fate, this past winter’s ice storm.
The floors and cabinets found in the newer addition came from our first near miss. An ancient pecan came down next to the house…followed by an ancient black walnut that blocked traffic for hours on Highway 11. Later our renovator would turn them into pecan floors, black walnut cabinets, and countertops now gracing our home. I’d just soon have left them upright and in the ground.
I just stepped out on to the porch. The air is humid and the breeze tropical. Every time the wind ceases, I wonder if this is the calm before the storm and check the color of the western sky.
A couple of decades after our first brush with fate, I arrive home one evening to thick, hot and humid, still air and a sky that had turned a brassy, sick green. I took my bike off my car as nearby thunder rolled; I heard a locomotive coming over my western hilltops…there is no railroad beyond my western hilltops.
I barely made it inside and hunkered down in a hallway with my bride and two puppy dogs before all hell broke loose. Thirty or so downed trees stacked like Pick Up Sticks in the nearby ravine greeted me the next morning along with a storage building ripped open by the falling top of a tulip poplar and a fence line smashed by a persimmon tree.
On the eastern side of the high rim of hills, the local camp, Lookup Lodge, found themselves trapped with their charges and spent a night without power, their escape routes blocked by downed trees. My little piece of heaven had dodged another direct hit.
We have a wildlife wilderness filled with pecans, persimmon, black walnuts, hemlocks, tulip poplars, and oaks. That’s just around the house. We love them…most of the time…but not during the season of spring and summer storms. Big tall trees that could easily reach us if they were to come down. I can’t help but wonder if this will be the big one.
So, we are hunkered down watching the line of thunderstorms march from Atlanta on tv, keeping up with tornado alerts, making sure our cellphones are charged and water is taken up…just in case. Sometimes I think I liked it better when we didn’t know…days before Doppler radar and other improvements in weather forecasting.
Those thrilling days of yesteryear when forecasting was “Red sky in morning, sailors take warning” or a falling barometer meant “Batten down the hatches matey, we’re in for a blow.” Days when my knees didn’t ache so much…or at all.
I don’t wish ill on anyone so I don’t know what my prayers should be. I guess I’ll pray for it all. “Please keep everyone safe and undamaged.” Just in case, make sure all of you in the line of fire are hunkered down someplace safe. Wise men have said, “God takes care of those who take care of themselves.” Please, “Take care of yourselves.”
I was told to wake up by a former student. I hold no ill will toward him and am happy he gave me a topic and a reason to vent.
I realize I don’t know everything, but I am awake. Sometimes I wish wasn’t, just caught in a bad nightmare or watching bad horror movies.
I was young, but I wasn’t asleep during the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, used to stoke up war fever against Vietnam and communism. I watched Cronkite describe the Tet Offensive and the destruction of any belief in victory. I cringed at the Mai Lai Massacre and its attempted cover-up. I read the Pentagon Papers which uncovered the secrets of our clandestine involvement in Vietnam and its neighbors from Truman to Nixon.
I watched hollow-eyed veterans come home to a disrespect they didn’t deserve. I saw the aftermath of the student massacres at Kent State and Orangeburg…something we the people didn’t deserve. I viewed the Vietnam protests on my black and white TV.
The evening news showed protesters threatened with thirty caliber machine guns in Chicago and journalist Mike Wallace thrown to the floor for asking a question before being escorted out of the Democratic Convention. Carnage raged outside the convention center as Daily’s minions used batons and tear gas to disperse protestors.
I experienced the Civil Rights era with government attempts to discredit Black leaders and the Black Panthers…something we still attempt to do today unless we need a good quote to make a point or someone to focus hatred upon. 1968 WAS a time when we really shouldn’t have believed our FBI. No J. Edger Hoover probably wasn’t a crossdresser, but he was a paranoid racist at his best.
In real time, I watched people of color marginalized, beaten, bombed, and their buses set on fire. Their votes suppressed by men who looked like me flying a flag from old time’s there not forgotten. With reports from several states, how has that changed?
I lived through the assassinations of two Kennedys, a King and attempted assassinations on two Presidents. I don’t believe Oswald or Jones did their evil alone but have no definitive proof, so I don’t spout off about it or embrace conspiracy theories. I don’t believe in conspiracy theories about bombs being sent through the mail.
I witnessed, in black and white, the murder of a sovereign Asian countries’ president and a military coup but didn’t know we were complicit until well after the fact. Complicit in attempted assassinations on Castro and the Bay of Pigs? Yeah, those two and others. Still, until the Seventies, I believed we wore the white hat in our gunfights at high noon and were better than assassinations, coups, and invasions.
Watergate and Contragate? I witnessed the hearings that followed, a President riding off into the sunset and a Marine Colonel falling on his own sword so another President didn’t have to ride off to California.
Wake up? Bullshit!
Gerald Ford told the nation their great nightmare was over. Bill Clinton comforted the people of Oklahoma City and the nation after a mad bomber killed over a hundred and sixty. George W. Bush left an elementary school reading to reassure a nation when planes crashed into skyscrapers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Yes, as we continue to point out, they were imperfect men, but they knew how to act in times of national distress. They knew how to calm and unify.
Why do I need to wake up? There is plenty of evil to go around, and I’ve lived through much of it, much of it created and covered up by our own government. I don’t need to embrace loudmouths who make a living spouting conspiracy and pointing fingers at the other side. Maybe we should wake up and realize they are nothing more than small-minded hatemongers attempting to make a buck.
When you share their hatred and conspiracies, you become a part of the problem. Maybe you should wake up and realize when you share hate you become the problem that is undermining the nation and your friends and neighbors. We need compromise, not a conspiracy.
More rants and musings at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM
The image was liberated fromhttps://www.lifehack.org/648887/how-to-detect-a-wolf-in-sheeps-clothing
I’ve never been on a trip in my life…a drug trip. I’ve abused alcohol on occasion, made a road trip or a dozen, but I’ve never dropped a tab of acid. For some reason, my mind is broken, and I now understand the description kaleidoscope eyes despite mine not being drug induced. Unlike the lyrics from the old Beatle’s song, there were no “tangerine trees and marmalade skies.” My scrambled and flaring neurons fired in black and white. It was just a damn dream!
I slept in my recliner. Upright to offset the post nasal drip exacerbated by our extended ragweed season and the sudden change from a long summer to the late arrival of fall. Undoubtedly my location confused my blind and aging puppy and sent me down a path that didn’t include “cellophane flowers of yellow and green”. It bewildered me just as badly as any of the lyrics fromLucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
Tilly pawed me awake begging for attention, a treat or both. The thirteen-year-old would not be quieted until she received her puppy treat and an extended belly rub while lying on her back on my lap. Finally satiated and bored, she left me for her mommy’s side. I looked at my watch and found it to be just a bit after three…maybe it was a little after three, now I’m not sure…of the time or the blind puppy dog receiving a tummy rub. Did that really happen?
I tried to return to sleep, my mind misfiring, sparking like an electrical short. My thoughts were on our aging puppies, their aging owners and friends I have lost or are losing and not on “the girl with the sun in her eyes”.
When you’re sixty-eight thoughts of your own mortality lurk nearby, no matter how much you try to push it out of your mind. There are fewer sands in the hourglass. I don’t dwell on those thoughts but they tend to explode unexpectedly. I pushed them aside, and they shoved back…hard. My thoughts seemed to be on a repeating loop, a loop flashing from scene to scene, person to person, my own version of Dante’s Inferno on rewind.
After fifteen minutes of futility, I decided I was beating a dead mule when it came to sleeping. I needed to get up and be productive or read or watch TV…something to remove the broken kaleidoscope in my mind or at least shade the sparking. Looking at my watch my scalp crawled. My loop had not lasted fifteen minutes, it had lasted over two hours. Every timepiece in my house told me the same thing, two hours had passed.
According to my newest technological marvel, my Fitbit, I had never been awake. I don’t know which is worse, a lost two hours or living a dream so real it doesn’t seem to be a dream. Was my puppy even there?
The dream has been lost. It’s memory rendered like a wind-torn fog. If it is truly gone why am I still under its influence. A four-mile walk and a church service later I am self-medicating with a beer…or five. Maybe I should just listen to Judy in Disguise. The words make no better sense than my dream or the old Beatle’s tune…but it does seem to be a happier song.
The image is from Deviant Art at https://www.deviantart.com/ninjahekla/art/Kaleidoscope-Eyes-114938033
For other gentle musings go to Don Miller’s author’s page at https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM
Ravings of a Mad Southerner 