Here...Hold My Chicken

Dearly Beloved….

I lost two friends I went to high school with this week.  One died as a result of a tragic accident, the other from an illness. Both were classmates and the same age as I am which got me to thinking.  I’ll not be able to attend either funeral, but I wonder what family and friends will say as a eulogy?   That led me to start thinking about what people will say about me at mine.  I know what some of them would like to say, but I would hope that they will keep quiet.  I may actually have some family and friends in attendance who don’t know about some of the things I’ve been involved in.

My youngest daughter once brought up the subject and asked what I though should be said.  I mentioned what a great father and husband I had been, how I was always nice to small children, liked puppies, cooked a mean pancake and could flip it in the air and catch it in the frying pan as it came down.

She laughed and said, “Not on your life.”  Which I thought rather inappropriate under the circumstances, but I digress.  She said, “I’m going to talk about the 4^thof July picnic!”

I knew exactly what she meant.  Several years ago, I was the Liaison between the White House and the Dept of Veteran’s Affairs to put on the National Veteran’s Day Ceremony at Arlington Cemetery. As such, I became friends with the Director of the Cemetery and he invited me to his 4^thof July picnic.  At Arlington. At Robert E. Lee’s homeplace.  To watch the fireworks over Washington.  THE prime location to see them.  Sit on the grass.  On a hill.  You get the picture.

My wife could not join me in DC, so I had a small apartment not far from the entrance to the cemetery. My daughter was spending the summer with me, so she and I planned to go.  The morning of the 4^throlled around.  It was a hot, muggy day so I decided to wear shorts.  And a tee shirt.  With a penguin on the front.  It was a picnic.  Be comfortable. And tennis shoes.

Since it was a picnic and I’m from the South I thought I needed to bring something. What better than a bucket of Popeyes?  Bucket in hand, we walked to the entrance where I told the guard where we were going and showed him our ENGRAVED invitation.  Was that a smirk on his face as he waved us in?

We got to General Lee’s house and saw a bunch of men in black pants, white shirts and 

cut-away jackets moving through the crowd with silver trays.  I was asked for my invitation by a man in a tuxedo.  I asked him to hold my bucket of Popeye’s while I dug it out of my pocket.  By that time, my daughter was ready to defect to the Russians.  We were in the midst of a very formal, like with waiters, a wine bar, those little sandwiches on the silver trays and a very large pig roasting over an open pit 4^thof July picnic.

I found a place beneath one of the catering trucks to stash my bucket.  We got in line, penguin shirt and all and had massive amounts of food. We watched the fireworks and when it was sufficiently dark, I retrieved my bucket of chicken and we walked home.

It took her almost a year to speak to me again, but we had chicken for a week.

REpeat.. REturn…REtreat….REeunion…

It seems to me the prefix “re” means to do something over again.  You can repeat a statement.  Return something to Costco that you stood in the express lane…”700 items or less” for an hour to purchase, or in the case of the military who absolutely never use the phrase retreat, it just advancing in the other direction.

I recently found another “re” word that had an impact on me.  I went to a high school reunion.  In this case the “re” meant that we got to see people whom we had not seen in years. We got to see who was still around and talk about those who were not.  We whispered about those who had gone off the deep end in some way since we terrorized the city as teenagers.  Some had passed away at, for us at least, a much too early age.  Some had been married to “that person…you remember what they said about him/her when we were in school.”  Nobody thought it would work and they have been married fifty years.

This reunion was a lot of fun for me…not like that one several years ago when “the incident” happened.  I can’t mention any names here but there was a girl in high school that I had a case of the screaming scorchies for.  She never knew it. We never dated and hardly even spoke, but it didn’t matter.  In my fantasies, she was the One.

At a reunion several, well…many years ago I was sitting at a table with an old friend and my wife when he said, “There she is.”  I didn’t have to ask.  I knew who “she” was.  “She’s over by the bar.  Let’s go see her.”  He knew of my case of the hots for her in high school.  When I looked at the bar, my first thought was “Please dear God. Don’t let that be her.”  There was only one woman at the bar.  My friend grabbed my arm and led me to the bar where I found out that God, does in fact, have a sense of humor.  My friend called her name and she answered.  Not only that, he invited her to come sit at our table. I couldn’t speak so he did all the talking.

She took her drink (more about that later) and followed us to our table.  Once we got there, he asked my wife to dance.  “I’ll let you two catch up,” he said as he left me alone with my former dreamboat.  We sat in silence for a few minutes while she drank and I looked at her.  She had gained a LOT of weight, but most of it was muscle.  She looked like a lineman/linewoman for the Green Bay Packers.  She had a fresh buzz-cut and it looked like she had bleached her mustache so it hardly showed.  I knew this would probably be my only chance to speak to her so I took the plunge.

I poured my heart out to her.  I told her of my passion for her in high school.  She listened patiently as she drank from her long-neck bottle of Budweiser, occasionally flexing her arm as she did so. Was that a tattoo on her bicep that said “Death before Dishonor?”  I couldn’t read it to be sure.  After reliving those high school days and my broken heart, she took another drink, looked me dead in the eye and made her comment on by broken heart.  Her comment to my confession of my undying teenage love for her?  Two words I’ll never forget.  “No shit!”

Two words and she went back to the bar and out of my life forever.  No REpeat here.  I’ll never do that again. And I refuse to drink Budweiser .

If I Ever Grow UP

I began a new semester of teaching at a local state college this week.  It’s the first time I have been associated with this college so I didn’t know what to expect when my first class filtered into the room.  I was at a distinct disadvantage because I never went to college after high school but did it in the Army so my classmates were usually much older.  These were children!

Before moving back to Georgia, I taught at the University of West Florida, but my students were usually juniors and seniors and some adults, so they were older and had some idea of where they were or where they were going in life.  On the first day of class I always tell them what is expected of them, and ask a little about them.  This time I was not prepared.

“Let’s go around the room and tell me your name and what your major is or what you want to get out of college.”  I thought it was a good idea.  “I’m Barney Bazotz and I’m going to be an engineer.” Time for some humor, right? “Like on a train?”  Met with complete and sincere stare. “Huh?”  “You know.  The engineer…guy that drives a train?”  Blank look.  Let’s move on.

“Hi, I’m Suzy Cutesy and I’m a fashion design major.”  The fashion design major was wearing a pair of blue jeans that looked like they had been run through a hay bailer.  Several times.  I have more fabric on a handkerchief than she had on her body. “Uh, I didn’t know they have that as a major here.”  A squeal of valley girl laughter.  “They don’t. I’ll do that someplace else.  I just want to get all of the bad stuff out of the way first.”  Bad Stuff? My class?  Stand by for a ram!

I finished going around the class and found out I have future advertising executives, nurses, biologist, captains of industry, a couple of undecideds and a weatherman. The undecided’s I can relate to. I think I have gone through life making a list of things I don’t want to be when I grow up.

I have no problem with my students having a goal in life, as a matter of fact, I admire and envy them for doing so especially at that age.  For those of you who happen to read this and knew me at the time, know the only thing I wanted out of high school was ME.  I planned to go to work and await the letter that most men of my age got saying our services were needed by Uncle Sam.  With a draft hanging over our heads, unless we went to college, maintained a good average or got married and had children, long range plans were not something we made.

I hope everyone in my class is able to fulfill their life goal at some point.  I don’t think they will keep the plans they made to me this week. Life has a way of getting in the way of the plans we make, especially if those plans are to take place in the future.

Someone left a brochure for a job fair in the classroom so I’m going to check it out and see if there are any openings for rodeo clowns.  That’s something I always wanted to be when I grow up.

The Good ‘ol Days?

The Good ‘ol Days?

No matter when you were born, it seems what you had or what you missed those times or things are now considered the Good ‘ol Days?  Occasionally I see something that one of my friends on Facebook sends me that tell me I grew up in a time when we had it made.  We rode bicycles and didn’t wear helmets, played outside without the benefit of electronic devices, watched black and white television if our family was able to afford one, went to double feature movies on Saturdays for a quarter and drank, usually hot water, in the summertime from a water hose laying in the yard when we got thirsty.

            Our parents told us of their Good ‘ol Days. For mine, it was when they weathered the Great Depression and World War Two.  I never saw anything particularily good about the country going down the tube financially or going to war, but different strokes for different folks, I guess. Their point was they were forced by circumstances to make do with what they had and everybody pitched in to keep everyone else afloat.

            Now that I look back on it, maybe they had something after all.  As I write this, there are several police cars, a fire truck, an aide vehicle and three power company trucks in front of my house.  Earlier this morning I was watching a television news program when I head a very loud BANG and my television went black and all my lights went out.  I immediately thought the end of the world had come.  No television!  No lights! What am I going to do?  My first thought was “duck and cover.”  If you have to ask, it will make no sense, but then I checked my service panel and all my breakers were still in the right place, so it had to be an outside source.

            By this time I realized my electric tea kittle where I was heating water for tea for my wife was not working and that was definitely not a good sign.  She is from England and if she doesn’t get her morning tea, she wants to call the Queen and have her send the Redcoats to put the Colonist’s in their place. Stroke of genius.  I’ll heat water on my gas stove, right? Wrong.  It has an electric spark igniter for the pilot light. I’ll just get on the city’s website and see if they have posted anything about a power outage.  Wrong again.  No Internet. Not even on my laptop which, by the way is what I’m using now at the kitchen table with only the light from an open window to see with. I did look down the street and saw someone ran into a light pole and it was down in the middle of the road.  Fortunately no one was hurt.

            My grandmother always told us about how tough it was for her growing up.  Her family did not have electricity.  They used oil or kerosene lanterns for light. They had to cook on a wood stove or in the open hearth of their fireplace.  They kept milk and other things cold or at least cool by putting them in the spring that flowed on their land.  If they wanted a fresh tomato or other vegetable they just went out to the garden and picked it.  I doubt she ever heard the word computer or Internet or Facebook or microwave and she lived to be almost ninety.

            Still waiting for my modern life support systems to come back and save me from myself.  As that great philosopher Yogi Berra said, “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.”