Deliver Me From Daffodils

My almost-daily run takes me alongside a cow pasture, where the inhabitants look at me as though I am possessed, and then go back to stretching their necks through the barbed-wire fence, or the “bobwar”, as we Southerners call it, so that they can munch on the green, tender grass that grows alongside the road.

Soon I reach a stretch of woodland, and I see a squirrel or two, and a wren or a mockingbird will accompany me for a few steps, with me pacing along as he flits from bush to bush. Then there is an almost-clear area where a mobile home inhabited by a family with small children once sat. A rope swing and a rundown play house give evidence of this.

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Fame is Fleeting……..

Yesterday was not a very good day for me. I am not yet recovered from “whatever is going around”, as the doctors diagnose it. I finished my Z pack and my steroid treatment, then started on an antibiotic that makes me feel fully as bad as the “whatever” symptoms. I have not been able to walk my miles each morning, much less run them.

I picked up the two daily newspapers from the box at the side of the road, returned to the galley (that’s the kitchen to you landlubbers), prepared to breakfast and read after threatening the cats with a spray bottle to keep them off the table/

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The Female of the Species

I have been pondering some deep thoughts lately.

I understand that there has to be a difference between men and women. If there were not, we would have no little folk lying around needing clean diapers, and my Pampers stock would tank.

When we adopted Meredith the Baseball Coach I managed to be missing each time a diaper needed changing. It took time for my wife to catch on… but she did, and I could not avoid this onerous task when Ashlee the Nutritionist came along.

Rudyard Kipling was an English writer who left home as a teenager, and traveled over the world. He wrote many poems, novels and short stories. The one thing he penned apropos to this topic is: “The female of the species is deadlier than the male”. He learned this early on, and it is the reason that he left his mother as soon as he was weaned. Some believe that he was referring to cobras and tigers and maybe even black widow spiders. Not so: old Rudyard could cope with those beasts. It was women who put him on the run.

Kipling also penned: “But til we are built like angels, with hammer and chisel and pen, we will work for our self and a woman, for ever and ever, Amen.” This is just another way of saying that behind every successful man there is a woman…….with a credit card.

My IQ is way up there, according to Stanford and Binet and my grandson Stuart. Regardless, this does not put me where I can understand females until it is usually too late.

Only once in my adult life did I react in time. I was very much in love with a nineteen year old beauty who lived in Alabama. I was twenty six at the time, and had a new Thunderbird. Almost every weekend I would drive the four hundred miles to her home town and we would hold hands at the drive-in theater. One day I was sitting in the kitchen, waiting for my date to get ready to go out. Her mother casually mentioned that her daughter had suddenly shown an interest in LEARNING TO COOK!

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Let Us Now Praise Famous Teachers

It is not too difficult for my thirteen regular readers to get the point when they read this column:

I like teachers.

My mother was a teacher for one year in a one-room schoolhouse over near Monticello. The building burned down at the end of the first semester. She had some strange stories about her experiences there. I really don’t think that she was responsible for the fire.

I was in love with several female type teachers throughout my time in grammar (that dates me, doesn’t it?) and high school. My number one love was a nineteen year old brunette who showed up to teach at Chattahoochee High School as I began my senior year.

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What I Wish I Had Said!

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Now that I have the award, I am returning it to our new Chairman. I ask him to place it before the Board of Directors at each meeting throughout the coming year, and when there is a decision to be made, I want them to look at it and ask this question of themselves: ‘Is this action good for Jackson County?’.

Thank you for this great honor.”

From My Family to Yours

There are some folks that take Christmas as an opportunity to send out a family newsletter. It is good when it is just to the family. When it reaches out to casual acquaintances, it borders on, at the very least, a puzzlement. You read it; after all it is from the person to whom you gave your business card in the Branson Regional Airport just after you had been to see Yakim Smirnov and Andy Williams……… and you were feeling pleased and all was well with the world. Then, in about the third paragraph you realize that you do not know Aunt Millie and her thirteenth grandchild, or Sammy or Joelle or any of the others.

I have never had the urge to produce such a missive, or perhaps it should be called a missile. My family is somewhat mediocre when it comes to interesting folks, although I may get a challenge there.

But this year the urge descended upon me. I acknowledge that it is a bit late, but I did my Christmas column and got chided by my friends and relatives because they considered it improper for the Season. Claude Reese quoted the Bible and got front page exposure. I can’t blame Claude. At our age we should both boning up on the Book. St. Peter may have a few questions of us when we try to tell him why we should be allowed to stroll through the Pearly Gates. Sid Riley put my writing near the back of the edition, but still ahead of “Partners for Pets”.

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It’s Time to Prognosticate, not Prevaricate

We have a year before us, a year fraught with whatever may be. Our President did his State of the Union speech, and the Loyal Opposition said that what he said is really not so. Governor Rick Scott decided that state spending should be cut, so he immediately put the state’s two aircraft up for sale, and his critics say that this is false economy, because he will be using his own planes and charging their use off on his personal income tax.

But these problems are minor when it comes to deciding what the subjects for my columns for the rest of the year will be.

I know that I will recognize the Navy and the Marine Corps birthdays, and I truly hope that my readers have forgotten what I have written before. I may sneak the old ones in. That takes care of two of fifty columns. I have promised to take up the bagpipes, and in my “I love a Parade” I told about chatting with some pipers and being encouraged. And today the proprietor of The Wooden Nickel in Chattahoochee admitted that he has the same desire, so we may be on the way to beginning a pipes band. We will probably rehearse in the back room of his emporium. He has excellent coffee and ice cream. At the very least I will have something for a column, if it is nothing but “well, I tried”.

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