Coming Home

       Driving home tonight after the sun had gone down I was mesmerized by the darkness of the open countryside. Vast empty pastures with only the occasional light winking from farmhouse windows and distant cabins across the blackness. Peyton and I met this afternoon in Blairsville to go see the movie, “Robocop” and have our evening meal. The movie was quite entertaining and dinner at Dan’s Cuban Grill was excellent as usual. The thing was the drive home from Blairsville by way of Skeenah Gap Road. It must be at least forty five or more miles to our house from Blairsville and I only passed a handful of cars which seems unlikely. Hard to believe that so little traffic is even possible in this day and age but we are way out in the country in the hinterlands of Gilmer and Fannin County. The night was so dark and the stars so brilliant and perfectly arranged in the firmament I could hardly keep my eyes on the road. I managed to steal only quick glances up at the immense black sky and blinking stars above me. Cassiopeia, Vela, Gemini, Orion and even Betelgeuse were up there beyond heaven doing what they have done for thousands of years before I was born and likely before there was an earth to look up from. The illusion of wonder was overwhelming for me in my little car zooming along the dark country side on a cold February night, all alone with no sounds but those coming from the car and the pavement. It all most made me dizzy.

      Coming around curves my head lights illuminated the fields and pastures sweeping out into the impenetrable obscurity revealing the occasional deer looking like frozen sculptures with glowing silver eyes.  The interior of the abutting woods beyond the asphalt awoke with the brilliant lights from my vehicle as I drove down Black Ankle creek Road to the t-bone intersection of Big Creek Road. I turned left, drove a quarter of a mile and crossed the bridge over the creek by the church and the cemetery above on the hill. Just beyond Big Creek Baptist Church I stopped and stepped out of the car into the night to observe more fully the expansive sky and the vast innumerable stars. A small ghostly opossum secreted in the dry grass within a few feet of me panicked and skittered away down the bank toward the creek rattling the dormant weeds and making certain his escape down the hill into the anonymity of the night with his naked tail hysterically spinning circles in the air behind him.

We moved here nine years ago from our home of thirty years in Clayton County which was just south of Atlanta not so far from 285 and the Atlanta airport. The night sky here, without all the ambient light of Atlanta and the urban sprawl still fascinates me and I can gaze at it for hours. All those years living in the urban environment the night sky was lost to me except for weekends at Big Creek.

                                                                                                         tbd

                                                                                                 

Night Visitors

            Tonight I walked down to the chicken house to close and latch the door before it was completely dark. Locking the door prevents the midnight varmint marauders from coming in for a chicken dinner later in evening. The barred rocks heard me coming tonight and knowing that I always bring the day’s vegetable parings and scraps of uneaten bread from the kitchen with me to feed them. They raced out of the coup and ran up the walkway towards me in the near darkness. After some luring and urging I managed to get them to return to their nightly domicile. The small chicken house and cage offers scant protection from the varmints hunting a midnight treat but it is at least better that nothing. Opossums have gained entrance in the past and have taken their share of the chickens with impunity. Patching the entrance holes around their run has been a daunting task because when you stop up one entry way they invariably create another one, by tearing through or digging under. It has at this point been over a year and a half since I have lost a chicken to the night visitors. I am getting smarter than the night visitors, at long last, or so it seems.

             The chickens all have names even though I can rarely tell them apart. There is Pauline, Margaret, Annice and Brunice. All named for my aunts, who are now diseased. Aside from laying eggs, (which is an excellent attribute) they weed my garden every winter after I harvest all the fall vegetables. They are my cleanup crew and what a job they do. By spring and planting time the garden will be completely weed free. If you are a gardener you will appreciate the benefits of having unpaid garden assistants devouring every winter weed that comes up, uninvited and unwanted. There are many weeds that thrive in the winter months and become quite the pest when planting time arrives. In addition the chickens turn over every leaf, rock and branch looking for the abundant bugs, beetles and worms. In their pursuit of the tasty morsels they also scratch much of the soil in the garden area, almost roto tilling it. The chickens forage so well they require much less food than when they are enclosed in their house in milder weather busily laying eggs. Their food is not cheap, (as in cheap as chicken feed) but all in all they are worth it.

            On the short walk back to the house I noticed in the near darkness a large, drifting blue cloud of smoke coming from the top of the chimney. It gave me pause to see the beautiful azure cloud hovering, slowly quaffing upwards like a great wandering apparition just above the house. The blue smoke ascending and melding with the darkening sky above gave me comfort knowing that the fire I had prepared earlier was still busy heating the interior of the house and beckoning me to come back in. Looking back toward the garden after I reached the house I noticed a huge full glowing silver moon gently peeping through the trees rising over the top of the mountain just across the road from our house.

A Beautiful late Winter Day

                A glittering blue sky today and a temperature pleasant enough to make you start thinking about spring sanctified us here today at Big Creek. After all the cold temperatures snow and ice, a day like today feels and looks like a gift from God. Or, if you do not believe in God it was a delightful bequest from Mother Nature. I suppose if you don’t believe in Mother Nature you could bless the meteorologist on which ever station you watch on television. It was a squinty sunshiny, gentle breeze kind of day that makes me start hunting my shovel and other garden implements that have secreted themselves somewhere unknown since I used them back in the diminishing fall days of 2013.

                 Checking whether or not I have fertilizer for the garden and thinking about the rotor-tiller and wondering whether or not it is going to crank this spring has occupied much of my time today. As I walk past the now rusty tiller down by the chicken house I give it a furtive glance. I speak gently in its direction, soothing tones meant to placate the gods of rusty tillers, hoping to start a kindly, pleasant and humane relationship with it for spring of 2014. This may or may not happen. Sometimes it cranks on the first or second pull after adding a gallon of fresh gasoline and a cocktail of new oil, sometimes not. Occasionally since the battery no longer works, I have to pull the cord till my arm aches while fouling the air purple with profanities, all to no avail. Like a stubborn mule it coughs and sputters but will not cooperate at all. The tiller is a Troy Built machine and worked for fifteen or twenty years, diligently cranking by turning a switch hooked up to a battery every single time, every single time for years and years. It is just like everything else it ages and cannot do what it once could. There is no way I am considering buying another one because of the cost and aggravation of everything involved in replacing it. While it is detrimental to my blood pressure and my eternal soul I will have to continue in this love hate relationship with my tiller and tolerate whatever harm it causes to my health and soul. But for today rather than hassle with the lost garden tools, the tiller, the gasoline, the fresh oil, the shovel and everything else perhaps it might be wiser to go into the house and have a short nap before happy hour gets here.

Besides in just a few days it will again be freezing ass cold and all these thoughts will be for nothing.

                                                                                                                                                                                               tbd

A Fistful of Lies

1959

            Things happen! Events over which you thought you were in control sometimes years later reveal themselves to you in something like a dream. Upon remembering events that happened in your youth that seemed allowable, innocuous, maybe in some way justifiable, are redefined to you as you grow older and you examine them from an adult's viewpoint. They play over and over in your mind in the middle of the night in slow motion while you are trying to sleep. The whys are unanswerable but still you lay there in the dark pondering the questions. Things neatly tucked away suddenly and inexplicably float to the surface and confront you again. Why did you do what you did? In your head you often can’t explain it in any reasonable way.

           One such event that I have wrestled with on and off for 53 years have been waking me up recently at night for the past few months. It was a lie I told.  I was one of two witnesses to a terrible traffic accident.  This lie I told was in collaboration with someone I thought was a friend.  No one in my immediate circle of friends would have understood why I lied to protect a black woman who was at fault in what most certainly was a serious crime.  Certainly no one in my family would have understood my actions.  The fact that I lied to protect a stranger whom I had never seen before or since would never have been accepted or even believed in my family. "We raised him better better than that!" I am sure they would have declared.

            Only recently I had turned 16. It was a Thursday afternoon and having nothing to do I drove my father’s car over to a friend’s house to see what he was up to. The thing to do on the many sultry summer afternoons in small town south Alabama was to go to a drug store/soda shop called Northcutts’s about 5 blocks from my home and get a fountain drink. Red Northcutt was the owner and proprietor of the store and was an adamant Auburn fan. He was inevitably in the store, a heavy man who always had the juicy wilted stub of a cigar wedged in the corner of his mouth. The favorite drink of the time was something called a lemon sour. It consisted of an ice filled cup with soda water and lemon juice added. When it was served you salted it with a provided shaker. The cherry cokes were a close second in popularity. Rarely did you go to Northcutt’s by yourself. It just was not the thing to do. You always took a friend if one was available and had curb service in the relative steamy comfort of your car. This particular afternoon the friend I took was a boy named Milton. He was an only child who was a master manipulator even at such an early age. I knew this because I had seen him driving around with a guy that was well known to be a homosexual. Milton was anything but! Why did he ride around with this boy? Because he had a car and offered free transportation. He used people to his own personal ends and did it callously. His father was mayor of the town and he was a year or two younger than I was. I had a driver’s license and almost always had a car available, either my mother’s or my father’s. This made me very popular in the small town I was from. Most of the boys had no license and those who did, had no available car. Milton was one of those boys. He singled me out because he was younger and had no transportation. We became friends, sort of. I was  between fifteen and sixteen, younger when we first met. He befriended me and we were frequent companions.  Milton was a handsome boy that had already, at age 15 begun to lose his hair. That in no way diminished his charm. Even though he was younger and less experienced than me, he was very popular with the girls.

            After picking him up we headed for the soda shop. We came to the intersection of Burdeshaw Street and Oceola just above his house when a car sped past in front of us going really fast, maybe 70 or 80. This was, of course an approximation as we were stopped at the corner for the stop sign. The speed limit there was 35 mph. Milton upon seeing the speeding car, a two toned green colored older Chevrolet driven by a black woman racing down the street. He immediately said, “Quick chase her down! She can’t drive that fast in a white neighborhood! She must have been doing 90 miles an hour of more! “He exclaimed, “Chase her down and pass her. We’ll show her!” I pulled out into the intersection and pressed the accelerator to the floorboard in pursuit of the car. “Hurry, hurry,” he shouted, “She’s getting away!” We raced after her! She was flying and had already gone out of sight over a small distant hill in the road.

            The old ford, I was driving was not a fast car. In fact it was pretty slow and smelled like a cigar. My dad bought the car from his half brother who worked at a Ford dealership in a small town 15 miles away. The uncle always had a cigar in his mouth (like Mr. Northcut) and had used this particular ford as his personal car to drive around the small town in. It had been a demonstrator car and was lower priced because of the high mileage as well as the cigar stink that permeated the interior of the vehicle. It was likely purchased by my dad with me in mind. I needed a car to learn to drive in and since it was likely I would have a number of fender benders and other assorted accidents; why not get something that was not so high priced. This car was my principal mode of transportation except on the rare occasions when I drove my mother’s Cadillac.

            Milton and I raced down the street at a prohibited speed and passed over the gentle rise in the road. Upon topping the rise we witnessed an unthinkable scene. The woman’s green Chevrolet  was stopped still, at a slant in the middle of the road.  The smell of hot motor oil and heated rubber from the tires filled the air when we came to a stop. She was down on one knee beside her car crying! “Oh my God” she screamed!” Oh my god they will kill me, they’ll kill me for sure!” At first we had no idea what had happened until I noticed a crumpled form on the side of the asphalt road. A child who looked to be about 8 or 9 years old lay perfectly still with his legs strangely awkward against the curb. His head was oddly asymmetrical. Immediately I saw that the front right headlight had a head sized indentation just back from the front bumper on the side of the car before the wheel well. The woman kept screaming.  A running man broke through the privet hedge surrounding the yard on the immediate side of the road. A look of horror appeared on his face and he turned and raced back towards his house. As he raced through the hedge he called back over his shoulder, “I’ll call the police and an ambulance!” the woman’s screams took on a pitiful whimpering sound as she sat down on the hot asphalt with her flowered dress splayed out around her. The little boy lay perfectly still and silent, adjacent the woman’s car. Except for the woman's crying it was very quiet.

            In what seemed an eternity we heard a siren in the distance. The man had returned to the scene after calling the ambulance and said, as I neared the little boy wanting to get a better look,  “Don’t touch him!” Of course I had no intention of touching what I thought was a dead child but I intently looked at his sad crumpled little body. Many years before I had seen the corpse of a woman who was killed in an accident in front of my parents home at a very dangerous intersection. She was very still, like this child. The police came as did the ambulance. After some examining of the child they carefully loaded him into the emergency vehicle and exited with the sirens screaming in the steamy afternoon heat. The police helped the woman to her feet and to the shade of a nearby pine tree. They began to question her as to what had happened. She answered through sobs and hysterical pleadings as tears streamed down her face. Milton and I stood there as the only witnesses to the scene. Although we had not actually seen the collision; what had happened was pretty clear. The little boy, playing in his neighbor’s back yard had burst through the privet hedge running directly out into the path of the speeding vehicle.  The woman had not had time to brake at all until the damage had already been done. She had stopped.

            In years afterwards I wished she had sped away from the scene because it would have made her an obvious villain and things would have been more clearly defined.  It would have been so easy to say, “Yes officer I saw her! She was hauling ass and killed the little boy and raced away not even stopping for a second look. Not caring about him at all!” Then I would have added, “Throw the book at that bitch, she deserves it.” But she stopped. She did not leave the scene. Eventually the police came over to my friend and me and asked, “Did you see the accident?” We responded “No but we were following her.” “Was she speeding? “He questioned first. Milton looked at me the very instant I looked at him. The black woman was partially lying across the hood of her car but jerked her head up to stare intently in our direction with a pleading look. Tears and sweat covered her face. I saw something like a shadow pass across Milton’s face. I shook my head and we both responded simultaneously saying, “No, she was not speeding.” The woman seemed to go limp across the hood of her car as a small moan came out of the side of her mouth, “Oh God, oh God!”

            Milton and I drove away after everything calmed down and the police officers said we could leave. “What the Hell did you say she was not speeding for?” he asked me. “She just looked so sad,” I responded. “Besides there was nothing it would have changed and little she could have done to prevent hitting the little boy no matter what”, I responded. “Anyway”, I insisted “You said the same thing that I did! Only because you said I first,” he returned! “OK, we both lied to the police and what the Hell difference would it have made to send that poor black woman to prison where she certainly would have gone for killing a white boy while breaking the speed limit?” I countered. “Who was that boy anyway?” He asked. I told him I had no idea and felt a drop of perspiration run from the back of my hair line down through the collar of my shirt tracing the contours of my spine as it trickled down my back. “Man is it hot!” Milton muttered.

            Later that night on the evening news the woman who announced for the local television station channel 4, was not there for the evening news. A different person came on and said that the regular announcer’s son had been hit by a car and was in the hospital in critical condition. He said that there would be more information later in the broadcast.  I chilled right down to my socks. I immediately ran to the phone and called Milton and said,” That little boy that was run over this afternoon was the newscaster’s son on channel 4!”  He responded with, “Oh no! We’re in some deep shit man!” We agreed that although we had lied, there was nothing we could do about it at that point and we had best keep it a secret for the rest of our lives; no matter what! We did just that. At dinner that night my mother looked at me and asked, “Did you hear anything about the child that got run over just up the street, Tommy?” I said, “No!  I haven't heard anything.” David, my brother responded with, “That’s funny because I passed by in the car this afternoon and saw the police talking to you and Milton on the side of the road. I guess that didn't happen either?”

             Thirty or more years later when Milton’s father died I took his mother a pot of flowers. She was very sweet and appreciative. I didn't see Milton and hadn't seen him for all those many years. That was all right with me because as it turned out he was not a friend, only an opportunist. I had not understood exactly what he had needed me for. 

             There are two kinds of friends, those who inspire you and those who just use you.

 

My civil rights march, 1965

                Out of the corner of my eye a glint of light that I almost dismissed as a corneal dysfunction or some sort of aberration moved upwards. Perhaps it was reflected sunlight bouncing around from the store front windows or the passing motorcycles during the early afternoon sun. It appeared only once in my peripheral vision and seemed to be moving in a steep arch, somewhat towards me. It was hard to see because the street was crowded and people were screaming from the side walk, chaos, confusion. When I dream about this incident I see the coke bottle traveling upward tumbling end over end in exaggerated slow motion. From the time I saw the glint of light a few seconds passed before I heard a loud crack; an almost sickening thud of something hard smacking against flesh just to my right.  A coke bottle hit the black man in the head who was walking next to me. The grip of his hand loosened and slipped out of mine. He went down like a sack of potatoes. A geyser of blood spurted from the hair line on his scalp. Kneeling down beside him I quickly looked in the direction of the sidewalk where I assumed the thrown bottle had come from looking for someone to blame. Clustered together laughing was a group of boys I had gone to military school with. One of them had played football for the college team and had surely thrown the bottle. He always seemed like a nice enough guy at that time and in that other place. Who would have ever guessed he was capable of assault with a coca cola bottle on a stranger? Coming from a family affluent enough to have a son at military school one would think he would have known better. That was just not the case at that point in time in the deep south. This was in 1966 and just a few years before at the military school I attended with this group of boys a huge cheer rang out from the parade ground where the entire battalion was marching when it was announced on November 22, 1963 that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. I turned twenty years old on this very same day. Announcements were quickly and adamantly made over the intercom that all celebrations had to immediately cease otherwise great penalties would be imposed on the student body and everyone would be very sorry. President Kennedy had become the focus for all the racist hatred that stirred the people in the south. The president became a target for the frustrations of the many angry southerners who were experiencing their lives being irrevocably changed in so many different ways. Caught up in a maelstrom of social upheaval that swept them away into uncharted territory; they blamed who they could. The children inherited their hatred at parental feet. As he twig is bent.....

               The start of the march was from the First African Baptist church in downtown Tuscaloosa, Alabama. A girl I was in the art department with at the University of Alabama came to my studio and insisted I go with her to march in a parade in downtown Tuscaloosa.  She said, “Anyone can march in the parade and it will be fun!” There was no mention of it having anything to do with civil rights or flying coke bottles. She was somewhat of a free spirit and thinking it might be interesting to march in a parade I went along. Probably I was invited because I had one of the few cars in the circle of friends I associated with and nobody wanted to walk downtown.  A group of us went; arriving at the church I lined up with the group of participants, most of which were black. I thought nothing of it and prepared to walk holding hands with the girlfriend I had come with. One officious looking black man pulled me away from the girl and guided me between two black men. The man on my right grasped my hand and we started to walk forward. I was curious as to why I had to hold hands between these two black men instead of my girl friend but still I continued. Later I realized he wanted the few whites to be spread out and not so clustered together so that we would look more numerous; this I can only suppose. I had never held hands with a black man (or any other man before, other than my father or perhaps one of my brothers) and the sensation was unsettling. His hands were exceedingly rough and he seemed not to like holding hands with me any better that I did with him.

                It is not as though I didn’t sympathize with the southern blacks and their plight. I did. Growing up in south Alabama I was raised with Negroes who worked in our house most every day of my life as cooks, housekeepers and babysitters.  I knew one in particular who was, I suppose my nanny. Her name was Bera and I truly loved her as much as any member of my family. She was there for me during the first 12 years of my life. She worked for my parents as far back as I can remember. She and I went fishing together and I cannot express how much I cared about her even though she was a hopeless alcoholic. Bera was discharged by my parents after falling out in the middle of the kitchen floor screaming about huge spiders on the ceiling one morning. There were of course, no spiders only a case of the D.T.s. That was the end of Bera’s service for our family. I did go find her one time after I was home for the weekend from college and saw her for a brief visit. She seemed as she always did and I felt that she still loved me.

                I wish I could say that I stayed and finished the civil rights march but I would be telling less than the truth. As retroactively noble as that would be, my parents would have never understood and would have probably disowned me for even being there. Controversy was something they never handled well. There was also the possibility that the recipient of the flying coke bottle was suppose to be me. Had the military school boy seen me in t he parade and thrown the bottle at me instead of the black man at my elbow? He would have certainly hated me for being in that parade. Returning immediately to my car I noticed splattered blood spots on my shirt. I do not know what happened to the man that was hit by the coke bottle and there is now no way to find out. I do not know if Martin Luther King was there for the march but I heard later that Bobby Shelton, the grand imperial wizard of the Klu Klux Klan was.  In the perspective of many, many years it is obvious he was neither grand, imperial nor was he a wizard. He was just an ignorant redneck, filled with hate and bigotry. I was a coward who left when the going got tough and the coke bottles started to fly. The boy from military school who threw the bottle probably never felt any recriminations for his deed. I did!

                Years later I was teaching in Columbia, Mississippi and my future wife was teaching in New Orleans; I went down for the weekend. One night while I was there we went for a night of celebration in the French Quarter. It was the occasion of the Sugar Bowl (Georgia Bulldogs vs. Arkansas Razorbacks, I believe) around New Years day and just for fun we went down to watch the activities. As we walked in a throng of celebrating people crowded onto Bourbon Street I saw a glint in the night sky and realized someone had thrown an empty beer bottle as high into the air as they could. It too came down (as gravity would have it) and cracked a man in the top of the head. He went down like a sack of potatoes as his female companion screamed hysterically.  When I, like everyone else pushed over to see what had happened his head was a geyser of blood, evacuating the wound at an alarming rate. His female companion cradled him in her arms sobbing and whimpering.

            Now as a man certainly in the last stages of what has unexpectedly become a long life; I am still expecting the see a third glint of light rising up towards heaven, sparkling in the sun. It will be coming from the hand of a thoughtless person and I fully expect it to be headed for me. It will be the third thing finally closing a paragraph of an inexplicable group of things that happened at different points and different places in my life. I cannot fully explain how or why.

*This was not the 1964 march the First African Baptist church in downtown Tuscaloosa that resulted in many arrests and much damage in Tuscaloosa but two years later.

Afternoons on the reading Porch

                There are things in life a person just cannot resist, sex, money, Food, drugs, alcohol, fame and a million other things I will not even try to illuminate. One of those things for me is an old single bed out on the front screened in porch of our house. It really is not the front porch anymore because what used to be the front of the house is now the side. What once was the side of the house is now the front. The bed too is not really a single bed because we bought it extra long for our oldest son who grew beyond our wildest expectations ultimately reaching six feet and four and a half inches tall. He never liked to have his feet sticking past the end of his childhood single bed, for some reason he thought he looked like Jethro from the Beverly Hillbillies, way over grown and not fitting into his now miniature bed. Not that any of this matters at all because really it has nothing to do with anything I am planning to write down in this story. In fact I am pretty sure this is not even a story. Random thoughts do not necessarily combine and become a story. In fact the bed itself may not even be the thing I am addicted to. The space the bed occupies may be the thing that appeals to me even before the bed. The porch it rests on is about eight feet wide and thirty five feet long; I know, nothing particularly unusual about that. It may also be the fact that just beyond the screen of the porch is a large overgrown bottle brush buckeye shrub, maybe a small tree. In the middle of July the tree is attacked by every manner of nectar eating creature for miles around seeking the tall nectar filled inflorescence the tree produces each July. The honey bees, the yellow jackets, the wasp, the hornets and many other insects as well as a rainbow of humming birds swarm the air surrounding this large shrub/tree working it from daylight to dark. Even after dark if you turn the spotlight on there are hundreds of night flying moths working the tree busily. Beyond the tree is a bevy of assorted trees and shrubs as the land slips downward to a small creek.

            A year or so ago I lay in this very spot almost asleep with the breeze from the ceiling fan washing over me. In a somewhat sedated state I listened to the quiet sounds coming from just beyond the porch. The lulling sound of the rustling creek lured me ever closer to sleep. It was just at the edge of our property, briskly rushing down the mountain towards the Toccoa River, Lake Blue Ridge and then to Tennesee. The soft clicking of the poplar leaves in the adjacent trees added to the softness of the afternoon. Nothing could have been more bucolic and perfectly tranquil, lying on the napping bed on the front screened in porch reading my latest book. Sleep would over take me as surely as the marauding squirrels would steal the sunflower seed from the bird feeder hanging just outside the screen wire. I noticed the silent hornets dodging around the hummingbird feeder as my eyes slowly closed. Sleep claimed me in its dark arms and unconsciousness enveloped me. I slept. 

            After some time of sleeping soundly I dreamed I was in heavy traffic coming through Atlanta on I-75 in my Jeep and someone behind me was insistently blowing the horn of their car. It was very regular and extremely annoying, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. The sound slowly roused me from a sleep that felt almost drug induced. Coming to I realized the horn being blown so regularly was not a car horn at all but an insistently barking dog. It was Jesse, my Dalmatian and he was hysterically barking as he usually did when a timber rattlesnake or a copperhead was in the vicinity. Groggily I rolled myself off the bed and started for the door. The book I was reading fell onto the small table by the bed and continued on its way to the floor overturning a half finished glass of sweet iced tea on its way. Looking through the screen and dense foliage I could see Jesse’s white spotted body dodging and lunging through the bushes, definitely in the pursuit of something. I saw no snake as the intermittent foliage was in the full flush of spring. I knew I had to go investigate anyway. Having no direct exit from the screened porch I walked through the house to the front door (which used to be the side door) and went down to the front yard, grabbing a hoe propped against the railing on my way just in case it was a poisonous snake that was causing all the commotion.

            Rounding the vegetation filled space just beyond the porch I saw Jesse jerkily attacking something. It took me a minute to realize that it was no snake but a fawn with spots covering his small body. Bambi! It was somehow hung in the fence surrounding the vegetable garden. The lumps on his head where antlers would eventually grow had been pushed with such force as he struggled to escape the dog that they had become wedged between two of the stiff rectangular parallel wires in the fence. Grabbing a handful of dirt I threw it into Jesse’s face. He briefly ceased his barking and retreated a few steps shaking his head. I looked at the small deer hung in the fence and tried to understand just what had happened. The bony humps had spread the rectangular wire opening with such force that they briefly allowed the apex of his head to slip through the small opening. They sprang back after that portion of his head passed through and held him fast in the grip of the fence, within Jesse’s reach. Moving to the head area of the now hysterical deer I carefully grasp his neck and pulled gently trying not to frighten him any more than he already was. He could not be extricated from the fence’s unexpected embrace by my hands no matter how hard I pulled. He would certainly be killed by the dogs or by shock if I could not remove him. Finally in desperation I moved to the back end of the small animal’s body and grabbed him by his spotted rump and began to pull. As it turned out this was not such a wise position to occupy on an animal with hooves, no matter how small he was. What followed is somewhat of a blurry conjecture to me but piecing it together following the incident this is what I assume happened. Suddenly and without warning the small apparently defenseless animal kicked me in the middle of the chest with such force that it propelled me backward into the adjacent bushes. This I assume because of the two perfectly round purple bruises I found in the middle of my chest later that afternoon, one on each side of my sternum. 

            Not knowing just how long I had been lying in the bushes I looked over at the place where the deer had been hung in the fence. He was gone and Jesse was sitting there looking at me intently. There was no sign of the deer, unless you count the dark purple stained places in the middle of my chest. Returning to the front porch I had visions of the Road runner and Wile E. Coyote and had a great deal more sympathy for him than I had ever felt before. Also that Walt Disney “Bambi” movie took on a whole different meaning for me and should be re-titled…."Bambi, the beast from Hell" or ”Bambizilla” or something more appropriate and not so misleading.

Many afternoons when I nap o n the porch I dream. Sometimes these dreams make perfect sense to me and even foretell hints about things pertinent to my life. Sometimes not!

             During one afternoon’s dream I was standing in the middle of a large group of singers (most of them very attractive women with their breasts pushed way up to an unreasonable high position) elaborately dressed in highly unusual costumes, sequins, tassels, lots of makeup  etc. Their clothing was plastic, shiny, stiff and brightly colored with wide collars and stripped pants. The group standing around me was on what appeared to be a revolving stage, carousel like. The music was from a calliope and very loud. The people in the chorus and I danced, sang, jumped and gesticulated in unison.  We sang the following song.

“In school I met a girl whose name was Nina and everybody said she came from Louisiana. She sang like a bird and she played the piano. Art was her major and French was her minor. She really used to love it when I licked her vagina. How I really loved that girl but she up and moved to China.”

            Nina was pronounced like the number nine with an ‘uh’ on the end. Louisiana was pronounced distinctly with five syllables. At the end of the words Nina, Louisiana, piano, minor and China the entire choral group and I stamped our foot twice, quite loud and it rocked the moving stage. This pattern continued and repeated until I was exhausted and sweating in my sleep. I woke up, startled for some reason, got up and wrote the song down before I forgot it. There were many strange words and misspellings when I looked at it later that afternoon.  The rest of the afternoon the song ran through my head and would not stop. The dream almost started up again last night but I made myself get out of the bed and wake up so I wouldn’t have to do all that dancing and singing again. I was still tired from the previous afternoon. Besides I thought I smelled smoke.

What can this mean?

tbd

EVERYTHING CHANGES