Truths and challenges ...

In many aspects of life, it helps to have a partner. Quit your giggling. I’m talking about a health regimen. Geez!

I had been at it for a little over four years now. I had gone from a 250-pound wheezing slug on the verge of cardiac arrest to a hunk. At least I thought so. I was pleasing the beloved country-doc in Brenda’s hometown of Lonoke. I was at what the experts called the ideal weight for a six-footer, around 190 pounds. He didn’t approve of my methodology, however. “You’ll ruin your knees jogging,” he said. It was his adult version of “You’ll shoot your eye out.”

Of course, I ignored him. He, his name was Byron E. Holmes, M.D. and he died four or five years ago. He was a wondrous man, maybe the last true country doc in our state. Other than his prejudice toward jogging, we got along fine. I think of him each morning now when I struggle to get my replaced knee functioning normally, but that’s another story for another day.

Back then, I only thought of three things on a constant basis. Work was going fine and my health was still improving. Each morning, around 5:00 a.m. my neighbor or I would call one another for confirmation and then meet on the sidewalk along South Broadway. It made it easier if you knew someone was depending upon you. We would normally make five miles, first east on 27^th Street, (this was pre-drug-gang days) and then through the National Cemetery up through Downtown and back on Spring Street. We would talk about the law, the military, literature, wives, and youth, among other things.

He would only speak of the law in generalities. Once I had a contract to appear as an expert witness on a zoning case and figured that he would enlighten me as to how I should act. No such luck. I don’t think attorneys like to give away “trade secrets” to Outlanders. The only advice he offered was, “Don’t live and die on every point. If you argue with the opposing attorney constantly, she or he will take it as a challenge and make your life miserable beyond belief. It also pisses the judge off.”

“What then? Just give up?”

“Hell no. Keep your basic kernel of truth inviolate. Just be willing to give up some worthless points. The opposing attorney will latch onto them like a dog on a burglar and then he will wind up pissing the judge off. Keep your truths inviolate and the meaningless worthy of debate.”

I’ve found that advice to be sound in many other aspects of life.

Anyway, speaking of life, mine was about to change. One morning, as we were running past the immaculately ordered rows of white tombstones honoring the dead who had served their country, he turned to me and made a suggestion that reverberates to this day. We were in a wondrously peaceful place, one most conducive to contemplating life's opportunities and failures.

“Let’s run a marathon,” he said.

Out earning today. Here's a couple of thoughts, though.

I know there are those who are horribly stressed and debilitated by having to live around others whose specific religious beliefs are not exactly the same as theirs, around people whose skin is a different color, or people to whom the vagaries of nature assigned a different sexual proclivity. I know each day is a trial of tormented anguish. But it’s nothing compare to me the day that they grabbed my ass, cut my hair off, and sent me to Vietnam. So suck it up, Buttercup, like the Senator says.

You'll get a chance, maybe soon, to feel the burn. Either directly or for your kids. They say John Bolton is getting ready to lead us into a ground war with Iran. Well, not lead us, no, send us, you know, the regular way. Not me. I'm too old and I know the way to Canada. Your kids better be picking out a branch soon. Knowledgeable people tell me that we've scraped the bottom of the barrel with our "volunteer" Wehrmacht. Here's my take on the branches.

I'm partial to the Navy, but I think they are a little more tight-assed than when I was in. And they were tres tight-assed when I was in.

I've great respect for the Marines, but hell, just jump in front of a semi-tractor rig It would be a lot faster.

The Army? It has some of the best leaders in the world and some of the worst. You have to ask yourself, "Do I feel lucky?"

Air Force. Uh, we're actually talking about joining the military, here. Just kidding. Just kidding. I kid the fly-boys.

Coast Guard. Great and brave folks, but I'd tire quickly of risking my life for rich daredevils who've gotten themselves in trouble.

Best choice? Hell, after all these years, it's still Canada.

Pride going before all ...

It was back in the late 1970s and my exercise phase showed real progress. I had entered an affair to run around the state capitol in Little Rock, each lap being a kilometer and people had pledged so much for each one I ran. I finished the whole 10K. First time. I remember that then Governor Bill Clinton came out and ran a lap or two. Just as he climbed the biggest hill in the course and was panting like crazy, a TV crew came along in a golf cart wanting an interview. That was pretty funny to everyone except the Governor.

Anyway, I ran a couple more 10Ks after that, 6.2 miles each. Remember that I was at stroke-level blood-pressure when I had wandered into the Downtown YMCA in Little Rock a couple of years before to seek help. I was at my “fighting weight” by now, 50 pounds or so down from the bulk I had gained after I quit smoking in the Navy.

At any rate, I thought I was hot stuff, all new clothes, a practiced strut, and I was having my hair “styled” and not cut. My neighbor and I were hitting five miles a day. In bad weather, I used a 16-lap running track at the “Y.” Ready for the big time, I was. I was certain that a modelling contract lay in my future.

Then an awful thing happened. Not a disastrous awful, but an embarrassing awful. I had to go and invite my wife to watch me perform. To my surprise, she agreed. She always was the one to spot premonitions and avail herself of them.

It happened this way.

Someone announced a 5K race at Burns Park in North Little Rock. A 5K? A mere 3.1 miles? Child’s play. Come on Baby.

First thing she said when we got out of the car at the race site was, “There’s an old boyfriend of mine.” I felt a shard of dread until I looked at the object of her pointing. It was, well, how can I put it? It was seriously out-of-shape looking guy, resembling more Lou Costello than Bill Rogers. “Him?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “We dated in college.” Then she left to talk to him as I registered. When I came back to them, they were deep in conversation, ignoring me completely. No problem. I took one look at him and determined that he would probably expire after the first kilometer. He left to register. She turned to me and smiled that little smile she uses when she knows something I don’t.

“Can he run three miles?” I said. “He doesn’t look to be in good shape to me.”

She just smiled and turned back to him as he returned from registering. I ignored them and walked over to visit some friends from the “Y.” I’d finish as he was having his first heart seizure and get her away from here long before they carried him to the finish line. I did happen to notice that he was well-tanned, though. I also noticed he was standing closer to her than before. Just before I turned toward the starting line, they both laughed and she touched his arm with a hand.

“I’ll enjoy watching him suffer,” I thought.

“He lined up beside me without saying a word and the race started. This old boyfriend took off ahead of me with wads of stomach fat flopping from side to side with each stride. He was soon out of sight, but this just heightened my anticipation at seeing him kneeled over at the side of the path retching violently as I passed. I readied myself for the pleasure.

But, I didn’t see him again until I crossed the finish line. There he was, under a tree and standing even closer to my beloved than before. Now when they laughed, she put her hand even higher on his arm. I wandered over with, I’m sure, a great deal of puzzlement clouding my face.

“At last,” she said. “Finally finish, did you?” It was only at that point that she introduced us and returned to the act of ignoring me.

We’ve never mentioned that day again, even after all these years.

"The past is never dead.

It's not even past."

- William Faulkner

Change ...

One of the things I’ve noticed about urban problems is the immediate tendency to blame someone or some individual group for them. While study sometimes proves this to be justified, it’s not always true. Sometimes things just happen and we have to act wisely. I think that some of us who matured in the turbulent 1960s when we suffered the indignity of being uprooted from whatever life we were leading and then thrust into a war halfway around the globe, a war that no one understands, or can justify, even today. Worse still, we are blamed for it.

We understand that sometimes stuff just happen. Survivors accept and adjust. Losers bitch and moan. But there are those who must suffer.

Some cities, including Little Rock, are now facing revenue shortfalls. Someone has to accept the blame. Who? Is it the previous Mayor who might have pursued policies that we didn’t like?

Is it a board member who once torpedoed a wise policy or program?

Is it the present mayor who should have soared into office on a wave of exuberant economic enthusiasm?

Is it the policy-makers of past years who worked hard to make the regressive and unreliable sales tax the basic revenue source for Arkansas municipalities?

Is it the local citizen who, having been denied learning how government works, during high school, no longer comprehends the need for municipal services and the cost thereof?

Is it the citizen who supports politicians from a party that starts wars on credit and requires its members to sign pledges never to increase public revenues, no matter what the need?

Is it the citizen who orders goods on-line for the convenience, then chortles about not paying sales tax on the goods as a delivery truck, protected by municipal fire and police, ambles along streets maintained by the city, to deliver those goods to homes whose mortgages are protected by public largess?

Is it the cult member who activates against birth control while unwanted children wander our streets with career options seemingly limited to pro sports or criminal enterprise?

Today’s social media drippings are rich with answers. Everyone has one and they are all true. So far though, no one has mentioned simply raising taxes to meet the demands of our brave new world.

Heck, I know only one thing: two plus two equals four. Always has. Always will. As my old college pal, John Keats would put it, “That is all you know on earth, and all you need to know"

Pure of heart ... ?

Theology Time: Still stuck on the Beatitudes I am. I suppose it’s because they suffer these days from being so “bigly” ignored. I can’t turn anywhere without having the stricture from Leviticus against homosexuality thrust in my face. Pretty explicit it is. The writer called it, a man laying with another man as with a woman that is, “an abomination.”

The writer was from a group just emerging from the Stone Age, so he wrote without the scientific knowledge of biological descent through modification, or of genomic organization and the modifications possible. Still, he allowed his strictures to be quite explicit.

But so were the commands by Moses concerning the fate of the Midianite women and children captured in war—explicit that is. Seems he commanded his victorious soldiers, “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.” - Numbers 31 (NIV)

How can we, if we are to accept every sentence in the Old Testament as coming directly from the mouth of the Almighty, supposed to reconcile all this? Last time I visited a church full of evangelicals (the ones who hate the differently genomed the most), about half those under 40 years of age had violated a direct command from Himself. In Leviticus 19:28, the Bible says, "Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am Lord."

I am sure that he didn’t mean to include faded nautical tattoos on the shoulders of aging vets, just the flowers and snakes crawling from the bodices of beautiful young women and the hateful sayings on the arms of swaggering young men. But, anyway …

Do I stand as the only confused one? I fear that many (so-called) Christians seem to have abandoned the words of Yahweh and, instead, follow the words, written by poet Paul Simon, and sung with his pal Art Garfunkel, “Still, a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.” How are we supposed to maintain a purity of heart in these times?

That brings us to today’s Beatitude, the sixth: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.”

Oh dear.

Are you afraid, dear reader, as am I, that our national leaders of today would consider the act of striving to be pure of heart as a sign of weakness? If you aren’t, carry a person who is dying of a curable disease to one of our leaders and seek succor for this example of the least of those among us. You’ll find out real fast (dare I say “bigly”) who shall see God and who won’t, at least according to the Galilean. (Someday, we’ll get back to what he had to say about divorce. That’s a real hoot).

The Sermon on the Mount is a marvelous account of purity in thought and heart. I only wish someone could get the haters to read it. Maybe some have. That possibility makes me think of Exodus 9-12, (NIV) “But the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart and he would not listen … .” The Lord? Surely not. That makes me think of a college experience. A nationally-known sociologist, Dr. Grant Bogue, assigned me a reading back in the 1960s called Our Schizophrenic Society. It as all about how the disparity between the teachings of adults and their actions must have been adversely affecting the minds of the young.

If that was true in the 1960s, what would we make of it today? Pure of heart? Give me a break.

Flashback Saturday ...

Going through old notes on a Flashback Saturday.

There’s an old South Arkansas Proverb, at least my notes say it is. I may have just made it up: “A mallard will land in a baited hole, and ducks are way yonder smarter than people.” For some reason it came to mind this morning while I watched it rain out the window and wondered what’s going to happen. It’s a “free-thought” sort of day, so here goes.

This just floated to the top of my cesspool of a mind. Don’t know why. But in his will, George Washington Parke Custis stipulated that all the Arlington slaves belonging to his daughter should be freed upon his death if the estate was found to be in good financial standing or within five years otherwise. When Custis died in 1857, Robert E. Lee—the executor of the estate—determined that the slave labor was necessary to improve Arlington's financial status. The Arlington slaves found Lee to be a more stringent taskmaster than his predecessor. Eleven slaves were “hired out” while others were sent to the Pamunkey River estates. In accordance with Custis's instructions, Lee officially freed the slaves on December 29, 1862. It seems Lee was never quite able to understand why the slaves weren’t eager to “just do their duty.” Hmmm.

I get tickled over this “medical marijuana” thing. I heard on a news report last eve the list of maladies one could cite for “medical” access. Right there with them all was this thing called “PTSD.” I just shook my head. See, that is a self-diagnosed malady. No, really. A nationally recognized physician-author told me once that I could drive by a building on fire and claim cause. So we have, for all intents and purposes, legalized “herbin’ renewal” as the young folks used to call it in United States Navy of old. Oh well. Es macht nichts to me.

Wait. Must press “enter.” Oh dear. I don’t remember this from some dream or other:

Last night I dreamed I was drinking wine with Matthew, Mark, and Luke at a little pub called “The Chi of Galilee.” Matt and Luke were ribbing Mark about finding this neat search engine called “Quizzer.”

Matt: Too bad you didn’t know about it before you published your stuff.

Luke: We tried to get you to wait for us, but … noooo!

Mark: (Sullenly) I did okay.

Luke: (Mockingly) “I did okay.” (Sips his wine)

Mark: Just because I wouldn’t tell you where the white colt came from.

Matt: Want to know the real funny thing?

Mark: What?

Matt: I was talking to Himself, and want to hear something really interesting?

Luke: Blessed are the rumormongers.

Matt: As soon as we are all finished, He is taking back the computers.

Mark: Get out of Capernaum. Non vadis.

Matt: Vadis. I heard it with mine own ears.

Luke: Taking away our computers?

Matt: Yep. Says they ain’t coming back for 2,000 years or so.

Mark: Bummer.

Mark: Don’t tell John about this Quizzer site.

Luke: No way. He thinks he is such a favorite. Let him figure it all out by himself.

Matt: Suits me. By the way …

Luke: Yes?

Matt: Speaking or His favorites. Did you read the neat stuff about Mimi?

That’s when I woke up. And you know … I’m sorry I did.

Got to go now. I’m starving all of a sudden. Oh, see a friend. Later.

Fact, fiction, of both ... you decide.

My Casper the Friendly Ghost Summer

By Jimmie von Tungeln

            What a summer. One hesitates to speak of it with any degree of levity whatsoever as it began with a family tragedy of deep proportions. A cousin, one of those people who traveled through life beloved by all who know him, a smiling sort who never raised a voice or started an argument, died in a freak automobile accident. He was hitchhiking from Pine Bluff, Arkansas to his home near Rison and caught a ride in a delivery truck, one those with open doors on either side. The truck veered of the pavement, hit a bridge embankment, and threw the lad into the air. He landed badly and died instantly. He was still in his teens, and his name was nearly the same as mine save for the middle names. Even they rhymed. 

            After the mourning, the funeral, the remembrances, and other traumas that death introduces into the mind and imagination of a 12-year old, the affair would have drifted into family folklore for me except for one fact, a fact that followed me like a lost puppy. Our names were so similar.

           Aside from that, I lived away from town and had little contact with those in the city during the summer. Our name was an odd one but well-known one around both city and countryside.

            Now I didn’t connect these facts when the brief account of the tragedy appeared in The Pine Bluff Commercial. A sense of it came to me a week later at my father’s grocery store south of city. It was before daylight and the whole family had turned out to accommodate the first truckload of cotton choppers for the summer. There was a thick fog that morning that wrapped the store in an eerie glow and gave it a gloomy aura as if it had been set down gently in place by the fairy people. At least that was what I was thinking as I returned from carrying out a load of trash.

Just as I reached the building, the truck pulled up. It was what we call in the south a “bob truck” that had been fitted with benches and a canvas top. It would scour the countryside of a morning and collect anyone wishing to chop cotton for a day and then deliver them home in the evening. It would stop at our store early so the hands could purchase something to eat for dinner (some of ya’ll call it lunch) and again on the way home so they could purchase something for supper that night and breakfast the next morning. It served those who led a hard life with few breaks.

But back to my story. It would happen that, as I reached the store, the first one to disembark from that vessel of despair was a man who lived a few miles down the road and was known locally as “Happy Bill.” He was considered “incompetent,” as my father would say but maintained a fair reputation as a cotton chopper and a better one as a picker. His name derived from his demeanor and, as far as I know, neither an evil nor covetous thought ever issued from his joyous soul. We rarely saw him other than during his brief work ventures. This morning he hopped from the truck with his customary good nature and stood peering through the fog looking for the front door of the store.

Instead, he saw me.

I won’t attempt to describe in full the events of the next few minutes. I will only mention that Bill sprang fully erect back into the truck without even bending his knees. He uttered a cry that I am quite sure had never been heard on his continent, followed by a stream of gibberish totally unintelligible to me but, apparently understood by his fellow travelers as eyes, white with fear, began to appear from within the truck’s enclosure. It took my father and the driver of the truck nearly 30 minutes to straighten out the misunderstanding, to the displeasure of several waiting cotton growers.

Happy Bill never came to our store again after that.

The second related experience occurred the next Saturday. I was enjoying the weekly matinee at the old Saenger Theater and had made my way to the concession stand. As I approached, I recognized a girl from school, paying the cashier for a box of popcorn and a soda. She was an extremely cute one, and I was arranging my best smile as a weapon of disarmament when she turned around and saw me. I saw her soft blue eyes, but what I heard was the sound of a cup of “Cocola” hitting the floor followed by the plop of the popcorn box. I looked and saw liquid spreading from the cup and popcorn kernels bouncing against my shoes. When I looked up, her blue eyes had turned a color more like that of a wet army blanket.

“You!” She said.

As a result of this mortifying experience, I finally understood the opportunities afforded by this confusion. In short, I began, and I am ashamed to admit this these many years thereafter, to have a little fun with it. I would purposefully sneak in behind classmates spied at baseball games or at parks, and be waiting plaintively until they turned. A little talcum powder was found to heighten the impact, as were a couple of smears of my sister’s eye-shadow.

I particularly enjoyed the time I caught, Benny “Belcher” Bohanon waiting outside the Boys Club early one foggy morning. I approached him from an alley and when he turned, I asked in a vapory voice, “Do you remember the time you greased my eyeglasses with your filthy fingers during math class?”

It went well until the day we had to register for school. I don’t remember whether I planned it that way or not, but Miss Womble was alone in the room studying a list as I walked up to place my name among those thirsting for another year of knowledge. Not wishing to afford a student the dignity of immediate attention, she continued for read for another full minute. Then she looked up.

The color drained from her face like gasoline falling from the bulb of one of those old overhead dispensers. I’ll swear the temperature in the room dropped a degree or two. She opened her mouth to speak, but her dentures failed to respond to the crisis and merely stayed in place, obviously not wishing to participate in this horror.

I gave her my most winsome smile.

“I thought you were …,” she said. “I thought you had been ….”  Finally, “I thought you were dead.”

I knew better, but something came over me—one of those wild, youthful impulses that tramples one’s better judgment like a raging bull on the streets of Pamplona. “I am, I said,” then I paused for effect. “I only came back to haunt you.”

Up until that point, it was my worst mistake of my life. After the parent calling, the threats, the exhortation, the promise of a front row seat in Hell, and the writing 100 times of “I will not dishonor the dead, I will respect my teachers, and I will not try to be cute,” I was exonerated. At least I graduated from my seat among the penitentiary-bound, to a more elevated one among those with simply no apparent redeeming qualities.

I feel quite sure the experience prevented me from ever going to medical school.

At any rate, I have assiduously attempted to honor the deceased to my utmost ability since that sad episode. I have also treated my teachers as gods and goddesses. Sad to say, thought, I do fall prey to trying to act cute from time to time.

Even at my age.

Boo!