My Redacted Life: Misc.

Visited by phone with my favorite Mayor today, Mayor Furlough Thompson of Pot Luck, Arkansas. He was born in 1943 after his dad came home on leave and then went overseas to join up with the First Division. I knew, like me, he is a Vietnam Vet and was a bit of a rounder in his younger days. I asked him how he had avoided the sort of scandals based on revelations of long-ago sins, the kind that are ruining careers these days.

“It’s simple,” he said. “You got to pick you a good Salvation Date.”

“A what?”

“Salvation Date. The day you saw the light and your sins was washed away. Ain’t you never heard of that Bush boy, or Chuck Colson?”

“Yes, but …”

“Jist before I ‘nounced, I picked me a date far enough back to where I knew there weren’t no scandals buried.”

“What about before then?”

“Ain’t no before then if you pick a good Salvation Date.”

“What?”

“That’s the day you renounced sin, boy. Then there ain’t nobody can ask you a question about your life before then, not the press, not your opponents, not the pundits, nobody. You been born again and your life just started on your Salvation Date.”

It began to dawn on me. “So, unless you can change water into wine, that is to say you are without sin, or your ‘hidden years’ are really hidden, you’d better pick you one?”

“Hell, son,” he said. “If Bill Clinton had picked one and stuck to it, we’d have abolished the 22^nd  Amendment for him.”