EVIL

 Sometimes I feel like I'm beating a silent drum but, hey … a malignant dictator has been ruling my beloved country since, as he promised, the day he took office. He has continually trashed and degraded every promise of hope and tradition we have built in this country of such promise. He is a nasty, vile, and degenerate person who rules the country for which I gave up four years of my life.

That bothers me.

There are six elected officials, elected to national office, in my state who have chosen to become politically “joined at the hips” with this creature, enabling each of his antics with their silence. A majority of our state officials frolic behind him shouting hosannas.

This bothers me.

But, people I once knew as kind, generous, patriotic, and righteous souls laud his every act because he has attacked, or promises to attack, people they don't like or ideas they don’t agree with. Many of those ideas come straight from the mouth of the Galilean. Cult members support each destructive move as long as their enemies are in the line of fire. Good people now praise evil and worship the evil one.

That's what really bothers me.

WOODEN SHOES

 Lately I have travelled a good bit in my state. I've seen things.

I've seen cities that were not blessed by the vagaries of history drowning in despair. I've seen blessed cities drowning in traffic congestion and their own refuse.

I've seen individuals suffering from debilitating illnesses abandoned by an uncaring government.

I've seen sign of an impending drought of maybe biblical proportions descending into some of the richest farmland on earth. I've seen interstate highways that will become parking lots in five years.

As water may become our most precious commodity within a few years, we are allocating it to large data centers, not to humans.

At our state level, the top priorities are the construction of a monstrous prison to house who knows whom yet and the destruction of the public school system.

At our national level, the top priority is world domination through military invasion. Yes, it has been tried before.

My ancestors had a saying: "Wooden shoes to wooden shoes in three generations."

Over my lifetime, the generations since the promise of post-WWII America have marched by like gray horses moving into a morning midst. It is becoming increasingly painful to watch.

GETHSEMANE

 Last week I travelled through the forgotten part of our state, the Arkansas Delta. I passed through a community named, of all things, Gethsemane. Folks there pronounced it “Gessymane,” as in, “He’s from over ‘bout Gessymane.”

Years ago while travelling through I would see homes scattered around and even two grocery stores. One would see neighbors visiting, children playing, and machinery serving family farms. Over the years the stores disappeared, then the homes and people, and then the farm equipment as corporate farming reduced the work force and equipment required to feed the world. Eventually, all that was left was a road sign noting “Gethsemane.” On this trip through, the sign had disappeared.

The Garden of Gethsemane holds deep significance in the Christian religion as the place where Jesus Christ experienced profound emotional and spiritual struggle.

It is important in the Christian religion as it represents anguish, sorrow, resolve, human weakness, but spiritual resolve.

For Christians, Gethsemane serves as a powerful symbol of prayer, obedience, and perseverance in times of trial.

It dawned on me as I travelled that lonely stretch of highway, that my America has lost, sadly, the physical reality of Gessymane and now seems bent on abandoning the spiritual value of Gethsemane.

A SHORT STORY

 

MEMORIES OF A COUNTRY CHURCH

By Jimmie von Tungeln

Mama used to say us girls picked on Eula Faye or else egged her on, but I can tell you that she gave about as good as she got. Like the time we stole her Bible verse. We all had a good laugh out of it at the time but we didn’t get ahead of her. No sir. Not at all.

Now there are those who wouldn’t think this little episode was important. They have never lived out at the end of the world where everybody you knew was either direct-kin or step-kin, or sometimes both. It didn’t take much to create a story that would last forever. Particularly if you were as poor as we were.

After Daddy died, Mama raised us as best she could. While she didn’t hold out much for preaching, or churches in general, I think it had something to do with the hardness of her life, she did send us off to church when we got to aggravating her.

Ever third Sunday Brother Elmer Tisdale would ride out from Caldron with his old mare pulling his wagon and hold services in Pleasant Grove Church. I guess this must have been about 1930. I couldn’t have been over twelve or thirteen, I reckon since I was married and gone by the time I was sixteen.

The church was nothing but a little frame building set off from a cemetery that went way back almost to the civil war. My granddaddy had been a charter member but he had died young so Mama could barely remember him. The church building rested under the shade of three enormous oak trees. We kids called them “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” but not around any grown-ups for they had no sense of humor whatsoever about religion.

We would gather up around nine-thirty in the morning and have an hour of Sunday School before the services began. Mama made us leave early to get there to serve the complete sentence. Naturally she didn’t trust us as far as she could spit and I can still see her on the porch as we took off, threatening to cut a switch and wear us out if we didn’t get there in time.

The older ones were gone by then and it was just Sister and Jim and me had to go. Mama made us because she said it wouldn’t do us any harm and might do us some good. She was welcome to her opinion. We had our own, but we went just like she told us to.

We dawdled around as much as we could. Jim would usually cut us off some grapevines to smoke on the way and we would make up all sorts of imaginary trips that we were really going on. None of them included a church house. Hog Eye Bend Creek would be the River Nile and a clump of oak trees would be a pyramid. We used clouds for the Alps and the road we were on was the main street through Paris. For a bunch of country kids, we weren’t bad at making things up.

Anyway, Hattie Ruth Turner taught school up at Armistead so they had her teach Sunday School to the girls on preaching day. There were about seven or eight of us. Eula Faye was distant kin and her daddy had a pension from World War One. They also owned a grocery store out on the state highway, so they was about the richest family in the community. She was a round-faced thing with freckles ever place they had a spot to be in. Her mamma kept her hair done up in curls to tight I bet you could have played music on them. She kind of had this little bounce when she walked and we would giggle that someday she might just bounce off like a rubber ball. She would hear us and say that rich women in the city walked like that. We liked her okay, I reckon. We didn’t mistreat her. It was just that she would sometimes create the opportunity for a laugh or just create one on her own.

All the girls had to have a Bible verse memorized to recite first thing in Sunday School. This was supposed to help us into Heaven in some way, but it wasn’t real clear to us how and we didn’t care much for it. It might have been due to the lack of scriptural resources available to a bunch of little country kids. Some of those girls were from families that couldn’t even afford a Bible. We had one but our step-daddy wouldn’t hardly let us touch it. So we were in a constant of agitation about it. It sure wasn’t our favorite part of this whole salvation thing.

Miss Hattie, since she was a regular school teacher too, had to remember what side her bread was buttered on so she would always let Eula Faye go first. We would start to snicker even before she stood up. We met in the back of the church house and the boys in front. Eula Faye would make sure the boys were watching her and then when the room got real quiet, she would brush a hand across her hair and say it just like some movie actress.

“Jesus wept, John 11:35”

She got away with it ever Sunday.

Then we would have to stand up and quote some regular verse. And you weren’t allowed to repeat someone else’s choice. It got to where it played on our nerves.

Well this one Sunday, we fixed it up so Sister held Eula Faye up outside the door on some pretense and she hadn’t come in when we started. So Eloise Covington jumped up and asked if she could go first. What could Miss Hattie say?

Eloise was in on it, see? She stumbled around until she saw Eula Faye come in then Eloise shouted out loud enough for the whole church to hear: “Jesus wept, John 11:35”

You could just about see the color drain out of Eula Faye’s face when she took her seat. We swallowed our giggles until our stomachs started to swell, expecting to see Eula Faye have a nervous breakdown. But she didn’t miss a beat when Miss Hattie called on her. She stood up and took a deep breath. The boys knew something was up and had all stopped talking and were watching like a bunch of hounds at hog dressing time. She nodded to them as if they were her audience and then gave us her best “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet” look. Then she announced to the world, as if she might be telling the Red Sea to part.

“Moses crept, John 3:15.”

She said it real loud and then just set back and smiled the same as if she had just recited some long-winded psalm. We all broke up laughing until Miss Hattie stared it out of us. The boys didn’t know a Bible verse from a horse-collar so they mostly just stared with their mouths all open. Then it was all over and we re-commenced our recitation period. Miss Hattie never let on like anything unusual happened at all.

That was the day we knew it wasn’t going to be easy to get something by Eula Faye. But Sister and I laughed all the way home over it anyway. Jim just smoked a grapevine and looked puzzled over the whole thing.

THE ELDERLY PLANNER

 Notes From The Elderly Planner: Walking with the young dog who rescued us and now manages our house, I thought about some ideas that young urban planners have. Some involve parking automobiles. They’re “agin” it. Some suggest if we eliminate parking requirements, world peace will descend upon us. I’m not so sure.

Truth is, cities do often over-require commercial parking. That’s a topic for another day. Today I’m stuck on residential parking.

On each day’s walk, we often have to take to the street because a car, actually usually a pickup truck, sits athwartships to the sidewalk (when there is one.) This is one of those problems that didn’t plague us so badly 50 years ago. Why? One reason is that people had more concern for their neighbors 50 years ago. Another is that a modern middle or upper middle-class family now with two teenagers may possess four automobiles and a hunting jeep. Visitors usually come in cars.

As Mayor Furlow Thompson of Pot Luck, Arkansas says, “Where the hell you gonna put ‘em?”

It's gonna get worse. Our state just passed a law that requires allowing accessory dwelling units in all residential districts (good idea) but prohibits cities from requiring parking for those extra units (what the hell were they thinking?) Somehow, things will work out. It’s called “pixie dust planning.” That’s the same thinking that allows if we build enough trails, people will walk or ride bikes to work. (Today here: 95 degrees F and 97 percent humidity.)

As Ernest Hemingway said (not about urban planning but it often fits) “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

THE ELDERLY PLANNER

 Notes from The Elderly Planner: Years ago, many years ago, I was present at a public meeting in my hometown. The room was packed. I forget what the original topic was, but the discussion turned to affordable housing, back then called "decent, safe, and sanitary" housing.

As public input progressed, a woman in her late 20s, known about town as a "neo-hippie" rose at one point and said, "I don't think anyone should profit from providing an essential human need like housing."

Everyone in the room laughed. I'm sure I did. With each passing year, I have found the statement less funny.

YOUTH

 Sometimes I miss the America we are discarding.

Next door to our country grocery in south Arkansas was the shop of a man (long deceased) who did body work on cars. Each day, he would wander in when the delivery man for a local bakery and selected others showed up. They would gather around on nail kegs in the back of the store and solve the world's problems. The gatherings were genial, and what one might expect from a disparate group of southern rednecks.

Some were veterans of WWII. All were survivors of a devastating tornado in 1947 that killed 32 people in the community. All, to a man, were yellow-dog FDR Democrats.

Sometimes during deer season, they would all bring ingredients and cook a "Mulligan's Stew" on the old wood-burning stove. A FB friend is the daughter of the man mentioned above. She was a young girl, quite pretty as I remember, at the time. She says they used to tell her that the stew wasn't complete unless it contained an old sock.

What I remember, since our kitchen connected with the store, was when my mother would notice that the conversation had suddenly gotten very low. She would lay an iron aside, look at me and say, "They're telling jokes in there now, ain't they?"

I don't think things like that go on at the local Walmart.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 In 2024, an estimated 41.7 million Americans were receiving food stamps, also known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. This represents approximately 12.3% of theU.S. population.

Let’s suppose, just for fun, that someone on high directs us to find ways to reduce this number.

A Christian (one of the old love and grace ones, not one from a cult spreading a scorched-earth spirituality) might say, “Care and assistance,” then quote the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 25, verses 31-46.

A Capitalist might say, “Make them work,” although many do already and some are too young, except in my state where child labor is allowed.

A Teacher might say, “Education.”

A Sociologist might say, “Address the root causes of poverty.”

A Labor Organizer might say, “Address income inequality.”

A Billionaire might say, “Cut my taxes and I will help a bit.”

In the end, though, a psychopathic narcissist who became a millionaire when the doctor slapped him on his ass will say, “Cut the SNAP program out. That will get the number down.”

YOUTH

 Pardon the Repeat for long-time readers, but it is that time of year again for one of my favorites.

No Vacation for a Pirate

By Jimmie von Tungeln

             The following happened in different times. Not ancient times, just different times. Most mothers were home all day then. Most fathers were away working. Children followed their own instincts and must have been particularly annoying. Mothers missed no opportunity to be shed of them for a few hours, or even all day. As I was to learn, it was also a time set aside for my religious instruction, specifically for a consolidation of my vague images of Hell, in form of a particularly nasty institution known as—one can still almost hear thunder and the neighing of horses at the mere mention of the word—Vacation Bible School.

            Perhaps the ill-timing of it all fueled my extreme reaction. They seem always to plan these things in summertime, and this was a particularly bad bit of scheduling. It seemed to be set out purposely to interfere with the duties of a group of ten-year-olds who had no other mission than protecting both the physical and reputational well-being of their community. We had, over the last few months, coalesced into the sort of group about which folk songs were written during the Dark Ages. We were heroic. We were virtuous. We were protective of our lands and people. In short, we had responsibilities, and they didn’t include religion.

            A group of invaders from north of Bayou Bartholomew, for example, was in the process of building a raft with which to ravage the settlements to the south. This was the established territory of our little band of privateers. Who would stand between the invading hordes and our men and women folk if we were to be called away? There were forts to be built, traps to be laid, and counter-offensive craft to be built.

            The alternative spelled utter disaster. Ben Shannon explained it to us as we gathered around a hastily built campfire near the bayou’s edge. He was not our leader, per se, just older and more educated. “They’ll come rapping and pillaging our women,” he said. “At tar’s pure histry.”

            We shuddered at the thought as our blood ran hot and fired our anger like an open circuit suddenly lighting a darkened room. Rapping and pillaging indeed! (As adults, when we absorbed the difference between rapping and raping, many of us would come to think we would prefer the latter, but that’s a story for another day.)

            Pirates were only a part of our problem. At the same time, a group of rustlers from the Union Community had begun to range perilously close to our hideout on Ferdinand Thompson’s land. We had to settle affairs with them once and for all and it wasn’t going to be a sight that innocent folks should witness.

            On top of that, a group of semi-professional baseball players from the Hog-eye Bend area was threatening to descend upon the field on the edge of Ridgway’s dairy land and issue a challenge to any locals brave, or dumb, enough to meet it. We weren’t the type of fellows to back away from anyone, even from a team that reportedly fielded a player who could re-wrap a baseball with electrical tape so tight that it hit almost like a new one. We’d knock his fancy ball right back in his face.

            In the midst of all this, the two Hester boys, O.G. Stanford, Bobby Joe Benson, his brother Robert, and I all heard the sentence pronounced.

            “Unity Baptist Church is having a two-week Vacation Bible School and I have signed you and your sister up,” my mother said. She said it so softly and matter-of-factly that she might have only been stating we were having leftovers for supper. It failed to even register in a mind that was filled with sword-fights, running gun battles and strikeouts.

            “That’s nice,” I heard myself say, not realizing the doom to which I had just sentenced myself.

            I forgot it all until the next Sunday evening. I had lived through another Sabbath and was preparing to assume my duties as the gang’s quartermaster the next day. In my kit, I had packed a penny-box of matches and a book of cigarette papers filched from my father’s grocery store. Eddie Holland had been swiping pinches of Bull Durham from his daddy for weeks now and we had the goods to provide a swell smoke for the entire gang. I also packed away a five-cent package of firecrackers left over from Christmas and a picture of a Marilyn Monroe in a bathing suit that I had torn from a Parade Magazine. I had my Uncle Jack’s survival knife from the Korean War and a magnifying glass that was useful for starting fires, and also for frying ants. It was going to be a good Monday.

            Then I heard my mother yell from the living room, “Jimmie get in there and lay out some clothes for Bible School in the morning. Misses Cochran’s coming at 8:30 and you better not make her wait.”

            My blood froze. Bible School? Was she kidding? I answered back immediately in my best pirate voice. “Huh?”

            “You heard me.”

            “Did you say something?”

            “Now don’t even think about opening that little smart mouth of yours to me. You get ready.”

            “Aw momma.” Did she want to be rapped and pillaged?

            “Don’t you ‘aw momma’ me. I gave them a love offerin’ and you’re goin’.”

            “But Sonny Averitt has a new snake and he said we could come over and look at it in the …”

            “Don’t make me have to come in there.”

            So, the gang of prisoners dutifully reported outside the church next morning. There were five of us—Bobby Joe had rubbed some mustard in his eyes and convinced his mama that he might have the “chicken pops.” True pirates are born to embrace suffering.

            Anyway, we lined up as if we were awaiting the boat to Devil’s Island outside the church door. They let all the girls in first, including my sister who was older than the rest of us and ended up being a sort of guard for the duration, in addition to her normal job of reporting my every movement and utterance to the authorities at home. There were about 10 of us boys in the group, and not a happy face among them.

            Finally, our teacher, a Misses Krebbs, appeared at the door and bade us enter the foyer. Once that far inside, she stopped us and, as we huddled in a tight bunch near the coat racks and tables piled with offering plates, taught us the daily prayer we were to utter before we entered the church each morning.

I am a sinner, let me pray,

God has given me this day.

At every step, I’ll stop and say,

He will guide me all the way. Amen

            I think she made it up herself because she seemed mighty pleased with it. After a dozen or so tries, we got to where we could say it together and she allowed us in the church.

            Miss Krebbs was a stout little woman with reddish hair pulled into a bun. She had obviously been through this before, for the first thing she did after she sat all the boys down in the back of the room—the girls were already up front singing songs—was to single out the baddest looking boy in the room. He was a big boy, older than the rest of us, named Terry Clayton and was from the east side of town where they raised the tough ones. We learned later that he was in Vacation Bible School as an alternative to reform school, so he was prepared to endure a good deal of unpleasantness. It started immediately. Miss Krebbs brought him to the front of our little group. He turned and faced us with magnificent defiance, and we all envied his “look.” She then presented him as the type that would reap great benefits from the coming experience. She patted his back. He turned a crimson red, and those of us who were experienced in the ways of the truly fearsome saw dead bodies and raw bloody veins swirling in his head.

            Next, she looked at him and asked, “What do you expect to get from coming to vacation bible school,” she asked.

            Well, she might have just as well asked him what he thought of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Here was a boy who had never planned even a half-step beyond his immediate existence in his life. He turned even redder and finally looked at the floor.

            Miss Krebbs made him suffer for what seemed like minutes before she sat him down, broken and humiliated. Then she asked, “Who in here loves Jesus?”

            Every hand shot into the air.

            I won’t go into great detail about the ordeal that followed. As the remnants of our little band proceeded, without us, to build a raft capable of transporting the band all the way across the bayou to intercept the interlopers, we were cutting out pictures of the prophets to paste on large poster boards. The only part of our day that offered any chance of relief for our tortured mind was singing. It didn’t take long before we discovered that we could change the words of songs ever so slightly without drawing the attention of Misses Krebbs or one of the other guards. Of course my sister was a little more worldly-wise than the adults so we had to be extra careful. She knew the easy ones such as Gladly, the Cross-eyed Bear. We did manage, though, to slip by her such gems as Flour in the Mud.

            But our pleasures were few, all in all. Once, we had to study the Book of Job, which consisted pretty much of a story about how God and the Devil took bets on how this poor guy named Job would act if they played tricks on him. I guess they thought it pretty funny. Actually, we had done the same thing a few times with our gang’s favorite jester, Buddy Austin. We would, for example, twist him up in a bag swing and let it twirl him around a bunch of times and then take bets on how far he could walk before he fell. It was a kid’s game, at best, but I still think we showed more decency than the other two I mentioned.

            The study of poor Job did provide one bit of drama. Toward the end, when the unfortunate man had endured almost more than humanly possible, Misses Krebbs stopped the discussion and asked who could provide an explanation for it all. Well, old Terry Clayton just sat there for a few minutes. We were ten days or so into the sentence by then, and I suppose the imagined peace and manly freedom of reform school were beckoning him like the Sirens of Phorcus.

            He all of a sudden blurted out, it was the first time he had spoken since his opening day humiliation, “I guess it means that when you have nothing to lose, it’s better to be the shooter than the dice.”

            It was the last I saw of him until a number of years later when he stopped me for speeding. He was five years in the police force by then and let me go, a favor from one victim to another.

            On another occasion, they brought in this carpenter who was going to show us how to work with wood. We thought this was going to be really neat until we found that the project would consist of building crosses and not anything useful.

            I immediately got crossways with our instructor because he didn’t like my choice of wood. I was, and still am, partial to the darker woods like walnut. He claimed we should use lighter wood to symbolize the purity of Christ. Jesus!

            After a few days of sawing and bending a number of nails, our crosses began to take a number of shapes, few of them recognizable as the stated intent. On top of it all, the man refused to answer any questions of a practical nature, such as tips on building rafts or stockades for a hideout.

            As the end of our cross-building approached, O.G. Stanford finally asked Misses Krebbs what the finished products would be used for. She didn’t hesitate a second. “You are building them to be donated to the poor colored churches in town.”

            We just looked at one another. Hadn’t these people suffered enough already?

            The absolute most idiotic thing about the experience was that Misses Krebbs never even learned my name. She knew my sister’s name, and she knew our relationship. But for some reason, she insisted on calling me Jimmie Valentine, for the pure sadistic pleasure of it I suppose. I still have, among my clippings about the Tet Offensive, my photos of a storm at sea, and the results of a tornado which I survived, a small folded certificate stating that Jimmie Valentine had, indeed, survived (it actually says “graduated from”) Unity Baptist Church Vacation Bible School.

            Ten week days passed like turtles doing the shuffle and the worst ten years of my life neared its end. In this case with “Boo-Hoo Day.” That’s the day they wrap it up with a children’s sermon from the church’s preacher and, traditionally, all the girls get “saved,” some of them for the fourth or fifth time, boo-hooing louder each time. All the boys declined the honor except for Johnny Staples and that is a complete story in itself. Let’s just mention he later went to California to become an actor and salvation probably held him in good stead.

            For the rest, we returned to our gang to learn that, in our absence, the remnant members had discovered that rafts made from green pine trees don’t float well enough to support the weight of a pirate gang. To make matters worse, Ferdinand had discovered our cowboy hideout on his land, torn it up, and reported the discovery to my father to whom he handed over the bottle containing a half-inch of bourbon that someone, we denied any knowledge, had been carefully collecting from throwaways for months. Of course the baseball game had to be forfeited and our team was forever known and “The No-shows.”

             A pretty sad experience? Yes, in many ways. The gang never reorganized. The next summer my father secured me a job working on a milk truck and a succession of summer, then part-time, and finally full-time employments followed until one day I awoke to be staring at the face of a grown man in the mirror. Sadly, it was not the face of a pirate. It was a face, however, honed to some degree from raging along the banks of Bayou Bartholomew, once, with a ragtag gang of fierce warriors, protecting an imaginary group of innocent women from the prospect of rapping and pillaging. So I am glad of my youth, even with that summer’s terrifying experience. Outdoor freedoms such as we enjoyed back then seem to have disappeared along with pirate gangs and second-hand baseballs.

Were there lessons learned? There was one, After enduring Misses Krebbs, and vacation bible school, there was never any doubt in our minds about the true horrors of Hell. That has always provided a little touch of religion in the night.

We could have been playing with piglets.

Urban Planning

 Still on my mission to review thinking about urban planning since our legislature made such of an issue this time around. One thing that emerged to, perhaps, focus our attention. That is the new realization that there is more to urban planning than bike paths, pickleball courts, and roundabouts.

Now I'm Re-reading "Design With Nature" by Ian McHarg. The result? Reading it at my age makes me wish I had paid more attention when I read it in my 20s. For example, he wrote:

"Show me a man-oriented society in which it is believed that reality exists only because mean can perceive it, that the cosmos is a structure erected to support man on its pinnacle, that man exclusively is divine and given domination over all things, indeed that God is made in the image of man, and I well predict the nature of its cities and their landscapes. I need not look far, for we have seen them—the hot dog stands, the neon shill, the ticky-tacky houses, dysgenic city and mined landscapes. This is the image of the anthropomorphic anthropocentric man; he seeks not unity with nature but conquest. Yet unity he finally finds, but only when this arrogance and ignorance are stilled and he lies dead under the greensward. We need this unity to survive."

Hard to argue with that.

DEFEAT FASCISM

 Read Rebuke Resist

This morning, our statewide newspaper ran the headline "Lawmakers to weigh end to hiring laws." In short they will prevent state agencies from considering affirmative action. It will pass without a hitch.

Some of you may say, "It's about time."

Some may say, "It's the end of the world."

I just say it's a sign of the era upon which we have embarked.

Here are couple of my memories.

The first professional job I had was in a small consulting firm head by three bosses, two not bad and one a blinking asshole. We'll call him "BA."

Our secretary quit. As we began to look, a friend told me of a young woman on the look for a job after a restructuring ended her department. She came highly recommended, and I mentioned her to my bosses. They invited her in. She was poised, erudite, highly qualified, and anxious. After the interview, BA walked into my office, frowned and said, "You didn't tell us she was a n****er."

Yeah. I did that.

As my career developed, I assisted cities in obtaining HUD grants for municipal improvements. The department began seriously requiring affirmative action efforts as a step to receive grants. I informed a local mayor of this, and the conversation went like this.

"You mean we have to put a black in charge of something?

"If you want this grant."

"We don't have anyone."

"No one at all?"

"Not a qualified black."

"You are telling me that in your entire city government there is not one black worker qualified for promotion?"

"Not unless you consider John in the Sewer Department."

"Been with the city for a while?"

"Some 15 years or so."

"Knowledgeable?"

"I guess so. We rely on him when Fred, the supervisor is ill. Fred's in bad health now and ready to retire."

One can see how it went. In more recent times, a city with an African American population of some 19 percent welcomed its first black city employee. Progress? I guess. It was when he was elected mayor.

Don't let them kid you. It's going to get worse.

Share at will.

THE COMING STORM

    What kind of America will emerge from this tragic decision she has made? Damned if I know. I know one thing. It won't be based on educating the masses for critical thinking. One can obtain a preview of that from our little state just west of the Mississippi River.

    We have enjoyed (?) a two-year head start. We've already started dismantling the public school system. Oh, it won't be completely destroyed. It will stand ready to educate that segment of society Orwell called, in 1984, the Proles. They will receive just enough education to perform the necessary common labor work and be able to find their way to the pubs.

    Real education will rely on private schools partially funded with public tax dollars. They will teach everything from nuclear physics to proof that the Universe is 6,000 years old and resulted from simple thoughts over a six-day period.

    Not much room will exist for literature, history, philosophy, or art.

    Our marriage didn't produce offspring, just one miscarriage and a normal amount of effort. I, therefore. will enjoy a tragic gift of curiosity. I can simply observe since we have no children or grandchildren to make us mourn. I'm far enough down the list, just after teachers and librarians, that Death will likely beat them to me. I won't see it all, but maybe a portion. For example:

    Hitler came into power in January 1933.

    The first state-supported book burning took place in May 1933.

    I may live to see those.

    No children or grandchildren, but may I please mourn for those of my dear friends who don't deserve what's coming?

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 THE SOUTH

Novels and films set in the American South, take lower Arkansas (LA) for example, love to picture southern neighborhoods as containing one eccentric but colorful character. It adds color and commands attention to the dull parts. Those who have lived in such places know better but take it in stride.

It’s better to laugh with than acknowledge being laughed at.

If I, though, were to be able to write a novel about such places, I’d try to include at least one person partially based on reality.

Take “Turnrow Thompson” for example. I’d say of him that he was known for his concentration. His acquired middle name honored, as Jimmie Buffet said of a character, his ability to "stick right to the task." It made him popular with football coaches, young women, sergeants, and bosses.

Folks claimed that the attention to duty was inherited, even resulting in the name Turnrow carried through life. Rumor had it that his mama was so dedicated to helping produce a bale of picked cotton a day that she had delivered him on a turnrow, deposited him under a cotton trailer and had gone right back to picking. No one had ever gotten her to verify the rumor. She would just answer inquiries with, “He never was no troublesome baby.”

A child with a reputation like that never found himself destined for greatness.

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 SCIENCE

My life has turned out to be an interesting one. I’ve seen things my great-grandparents couldn’t have imagined. One example comes to mind.

A particular horror of my youth was polio. According to theMayo Clinic, “Polio is an illness caused by a virus that mainly affects nerves in the spinal cord or brain stem. In its most severe form, polio can lead to a person being unable to move certain limbs, also called paralysis. It can also lead to trouble breathing and sometimes death. The disease also is called poliomyelitis.”

In school, we suffered through films featuring youngsters like us confined to “iron lungs” that allowed them to breath despite the ravages of polio. Epidemics would spread through our world on occasion and the fear would come home, even into our kitchens. Someone told mothers that a test for early stages of polio would be to place the child face up on the kitchen table, the head hanging down over the edge. When instructed to raise the head to be even with the body, failure to do so was a sure sign of polio.

It's impossible to explain the terror that accompanied that simple command, “Now raise your head.”

Let us give thanks to science. Again, from the Mayo Clinic “A vaccination effort throughout the world has led to only a small number of cases to occur around the world in recent years. But poliovirus still spreads within areas with low vaccination rates.”

Science also gave us penicillin, antibiotics, x-rays, plastic surgeries, clean water, weather reporting and countless other benefits of modern life.

Sadly, in my state, we have applied the brakes to such progress. As I said, I’ve led an interesting life. Two college degrees, four years of military duty, a marriage in its 53^rd year, and a long career as a fairly well-respected professional brought me to a comfortable retirement, well … a comfortable semi-retirement. I still putter.

After all this, my family’s tax dollars go to schools that teach young Americans that science is not only suspect, but also false, and even evil in the sight of imaginary deities.

A White House spokesperson even coined the term “alternative facts” to justify lying to the American public and threatened loss of access to reporters who didn’t accept them.

Powerful groups, aided by media nonchalance are undermining the use of vaccines such as the ones that have diminished the horrors of smallpox and polio.

It is possible now for a child to complete college believing that the universe is no more than 6,000 years old and science that eliminated polio is the work of some imaginary demonic force.

I've lived and interesting life but not always one that made a lot of sense.

The Evangelical's Dream

 I BEGIN MY CAREER

Somehow, in January of 1971 I landed an office job in Little Rock, Arkansas. It had nothing to do with my credentials or abilities but much to do with my ethnicity, connections, and the fact that I would work on the cheap. It promised to beat carrying a rifle for a living but didn't presage as much fun as riding a warship through a storm in the Atlantic. I'd give it try. I found a cheap apartment at State Street and Capitol Avenue from which I could walk to work and from where I could flee if things didn't work out. I dropped anchor.

 The first payday at my new job came and I was able to pay bills but not much else. I hated to delve too deeply into savings. Who knew what necessities lay ahead? I didn’t. I paid what I owed and obtained one of the world’s greatest treasures without spending a cent.

 I did it this way.

 The main library of the City of Little Rock sat only two blocks from where I worked. Can you imagine that? It was like an eight-year-old living a few hundred feet from the city’s largest free candy store.

 Before starting work, I’d gotten an updated driver’s license. With that, they, the nice folks at the library, gave me what appeared to be a card but which really was a key to an entire universe of delight. I augmented the assigned reading foisted on me by my mentors with masterpieces by the likes of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Dickens, Eliot, and Frazer. When I wasn’t off with one of the bosses at a planning commission meeting or such, the evening offered a soft blanket of calm and reflection.

 At work, I was getting along okay. At least they talked to me. There were some semi-good-natured pranks. One that I remember involved my trying to find Cantrell Road, one of the most popular and well-regarded corridors of the city, gateway to glorious entertainment and shopping venues.

 “Oh,” said the head drafter. “You live near it. Just go north on State Street a few blocks and you will run right into it.”

 I did. No Cantrell Road. Just a series of streets before State Street ran into the Arkansas River. I asked again next day.

 “Don’t see how you missed it. State Street intersects with Cantrell just a few blocks north. The other drafter smiled and nodded in agreement.

 Well, the joke was on me. Little Rock, Arkansas was the worst city I’ve ever known for situational nomenclature when it came to naming streets. Consider this example. Arkansas Highway 10 exited from Interstate 30 and headed west. After a few blocks, it became La Harp Boulevard, named after one of the early explores making harbor at La Petite Roche. I had found La Harp each time I headed north from where I lived, no problem there. But where the hell was Cantrell?

 What I didn’t know was that a few blocks further west, La Harp made a curve and headed up what is known from history as “Carpetbagger Hill.” The name was foisted on a subdued city by incoming northern victors following the insurrection of the 1860s. They built nice homes atop the hill, overlooking the train depot, and forced a stretch of the street to change from La Harp to Lincoln Avenue. That's Yankees for you.

 After descending from the posh neighborhood atop the hill, Lincoln Avenue became Cantrell Road. At some point, the exact location and impetus unknown, the corridor became Arkansas State Highway 10 again, a classic case of “where you are depends on where you’re at.”

 And so it went. There was some unknown giggling going on behind my back due to my discomfiture over being unable to find my way at times. I ignored it. I did that also when I found out about the advice I was getting, that I could probably find cheaper and better lodgings in the historic Capitol Hotel. A handsome structure, it is now a locally famous five-star hotel, proud of the fact that President Ulysses S. Grant and wife once stayed there and that he even gave a speech to city residents from its balcony.

 In 1971, it was pretty much a whorehouse as I found out to my great embarrassment when I mentioned, to a native of the city, the advice I had gotten from my co-workers about finding an apartment there.

 I took it all in stride. The jokes. The misleading advice about where one could find office supplies. The catty questions about why I wasn’t married and jibes about the joys I was missing. The still smoldering concern about why I chose to walk to work. The disdain about the age and condition of my apartment building. The insinuations about being a drug-crazed sociopath like my fellow veterans.

 I smiled through it all. Along with my nightly readings, I was teaching myself to type and trying to learn to read French. One phrase still lingers from those days:

  La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid.

 Was the advice le français useful in the end?

 Bien sûr que oui.

 

 

The Assignment

By Jimmie von Tungeln

           

Truth be known, I didn’t want to do the piece in the first place. Hell, I wasn’t even a journalist. I was a consultant, a pretty good one, and should have stuck to it. But I had been doing these modest little columns for a Little Rock quarterly that promoted historic preservation. I was acquainted with the editor, I lived in a so-called historic district, and I knew most of the people who lived there. So, I agreed to help.

 It was a good fit. People associated living in historic neighborhoods with eccentricity back in those days. Things that supported that viewpoint were always welcome. So, folks liked my little “human interest” pieces. As for me, I was happy to stick to them. There was no chance of running out of characters, and I didn’t have to travel.

            Then the editor called me one day and asked me to stop by. When I got there, she up and gave me an assignment. Just like that, like I was some cub reporter or something. This posed a noticeable departure from the usual process whereby I just picked out some local oddball and wrote about how they had adjusted to living in an old house.

This time she picked the subject. Why? Beats me. Maybe I was getting stale or she was trying to sell more copies or something. Rather than speculate, I went along with her for the moment.

            Well guess what? You never know what dish life is going to serve up and what decisions are going to throw themselves in front of you, threatening your hemostasis like a group of western bandits with their pistols drawn and ready.

Here’s how it started.

            A local banker, known to us all as a neighbor and a nice guy, had bought one of the most historic homes in the city. It boasted such long-term ownerships that the house and grounds came with a caretaker who had worked there since the Depression. Mr. Pitts cared for the grounds and lived in a small apartment attached to the carriage house, a.k.a. the garage. He was a quiet little man of advanced age who lived alone and remained out of sight when not working. All the neighbors knew him to nod at, but none of us had ever talked to him.

            The editor explained the human-interest angle. Supposedly, a friendship had grown up between Mr. Pitts and the banker’s young son Alfie—Alfred Chidester LaRue was his full name—a little blond-haired kid from the high-rent side of life. Get it? Old black gardener and white heir apparent, the image of an odd couple as corny as it was appealing to our liberal audience. All I had to do was interview the old man, mine a few historic nuggets and take a picture of him and the kid together. It would produce enough “ain’t that cutes?” to make a tough man buy a round of drinks. There was no Pulitzer looming, but it would get me through until another deadline appeared, like a hungry tiger emerging from the mist. No problem.

Anyway, I didn’t have to. These columns represented a public service for me. In other words, I didn’t get paid. Seeing my words in print provided my only emolument. So, I had a degree of leverage unavailable to a poor inky wretch actually writing for a living.

I could have refused the assignment and interviewed, instead, a friend who was restoring a cottage near ours and who looked more like Charles Manson than Manson did himself. He played cello in the city’s symphony orchestra and would have been great material for a photo essay, the research being carried out over a couple of beers. Why should I spend a dry afternoon interviewing the town’s oldest gardener? It didn’t make a bit of sense. “To hell with the editor and her aspirations,” I kept telling myself. Was I my own man or what?

            Naturally, I took the assignment. I had to go through the banker himself and he pretty much outlined what he wanted the piece to say. Alfie was an only-child and, having few young friends in the neighborhood, he had taken up with Mr. Pitts. Followed him everywhere. Shared secrets with him. Even helped with the yardwork. Well, maybe a little. The important thing was the friendship that had developed between man and boy. That was the angle.

            Sure. One of the greatest and most persistent dreams of American Caucasians is that, someday, an African-American will love them. But I could pretend with the best, so I pressed on to complete the assignment.

            I set up an appointment for the next Saturday afternoon. It was a nice autumn day that welcomed a person outdoors like an old friend wanting to show you his garden. I grabbed an ancient Rolliflex camera that I used for such work, made sure I had pen and paper, and walked the two blocks to the house.

The house sat on a half-block facing one of the two main streets leading directly to downtown. When it was built, wealth had followed the topography. The larger houses were on the highest ground and homes fell off in size and value as the topography dropped. It was never more than a short walk from the mansions to the homes from which domestic help could be hired, for practically nothing, in the good old days. In other words, urban form followed economic function. Households weren’t separated by income as they are now. That’s how, thanks to the historic preservation craze, I could afford to live near a bunch of mansions.

            Anyway, I arrived. Mr. Pitts had dressed up a bit. He always wore neat clothes with a narrow-brimmed dress hat. Today he had added a tie. He stood at attention with his hands to his side and presented a smile like a boot-camper at inspection. Alfie was bouncing a ball against a tree and the parents stood by with pride. All was set for this to be a painless adventure. Wham, bam, thank you m’aam and I meet my deadline.

            I called little Alfie over and made him sit for a picture with Mr. Pitts. As I lined it up, I pulled a few grunts out of the kid to the effect that he liked Mr. Pitts and enjoyed helping him with the yard work. Mr. Pitts sat smiling through thick eyeglass lenses that distorted his face to where it looked like one of those cartoon characters that has just seen something either real juicy or real dangerous.

            So far, so good.

            Figuring I had about all out of Alfie I was going to get, I excused him with “Now Alfie, why don’t you let Mr. Pitts and me visit while you get back to your yard work?” In other words, “Scram, kid!”

            Alfie was more than happy to be rid of adults so he walked to beyond the garage. There, someone had dug a shallow pit from which smoke was rising. Within the pit, I assumed from the smell, were dead leaves, trash, and some sort of organic waste. Alfie amused himself by kicking more leaves into the fire.

His mother saw the opportunity and appeared from nowhere with a tray of cookies and iced tea. She sat them on the bench between us and asked, sweetly, and devoid of sincerity, the way a southern woman can ask, if we were comfortable. After receiving affirmatives, she then swished away amid a crackling of petticoats and an almost audible smile. I pushed the tray toward Mr. Pitts. He smiled and pushed it back toward me.

            “No, please, go ahead,” I stammered, fumbling for my writing pen.

            “Thank you, suh,” he said. He exaggerated the “suh” so I—so we both—would know he didn’t attach any meaning to it. Then he took a cookie in one hand and a glass of tea in another. He neither drank nor ate right away, though. He rested the arm with the cookie on his leg and wrapped a hand around the glass of tea as if to keep it from flying away. He smiled at me. His eyes looked even larger than before.

            A breeze filled the yard and blew smoke from Alfie’s fire toward us. As it did, Mr. Pits finally raised the cookie in a soft arc to his mouth and took a small bite. He lowered it and raised his glass with the same grand gesture and sipped his tea.

            Hoping to get started, I asked him how long he had lived around there.

            “Oh, I was born around here,” he said. “I been here for as long as I can remember. We lived on Tenth Street but it went for the freeway. House ain’t there no more.”

            He chewed his cookie with what I thought was a grim expression. As he did, the smoke circled us and I caught the pleasant smell of burning leaves punctuated by the sharp odor of the other trash smoldering in the pit. Mr. Pitts stiffened slightly and his eyes retreated behind his thick glasses.

            “I been here since when things were different than they are now,” he said. “Way different.”

Then, that far into the interview, he stopped talking. His voice didn’t exactly trail away as much as it fluttered beyond us like a feather caught in a whirlwind.

            I was losing him. I hurried back to work.

            “Different in what way?” I asked.

            He just looked at me. He seemed to struggle to respond and when he did, it wasn’t really to me but, it seemed, to the trees and the garden and maybe to the city itself with all its history and smoky secrets.

            “Way yonder different. Folks weren’t as good to you then.” He took another bite of cookie and drank from his glass. That energized him.

“My folks had it hard back then.”

            I tasted panic. Alfie had disappeared behind the garage and I felt as if I were on an asteroid hurtling through space with an alien. This affair wasn’t going according to plan. I nodded as if I understood and scratched on my pad without looking up. He continued.

            “The worse was what they done to Mr. Carter.”

            “Mr. Carter?” That was all I could manage.

            “Ain’t nobody should have had that done to them. Nobody. I don’t care if he was colored.”

            I gave up and stared at my pad. What was he saying, and where was he taking me? I stared right through my pad and into the ground. From therein oozed a memory. I met it halfway and solved the mystery.

Back in the 1920s, there had been a lynching in Little Rock, less than a half-mile from where we sat. It happened right in the middle of what was then the center of the “colored” commercial area, along Ninth Street.

“Oh my god,” I thought. “This is where he is going.” I tried to raise my head but it took three attempts to overcome the gravity created by that realization. When I did manage to look up, Mr. Pitts was somewhere far away, and scared. I mean really scared. His hand was shaking so much the tea was spilling.

            “I remember that day like it was yesterday,” he continued. They made us all go inside, for they knew there was to be trouble. I was just a child, but the oldest. My Momma put the youngest under the bed and made me watch after them. She said the white folks had done killed Mr. Carter and was draggin’ him down Ninth Street behind a car. She was scared and she made us all cry.

“We could hear people yellin’. They was honkin’ their horns and yellin’ so loud we could hear them in the bedroom. Wasn’t no colored folks on the street, except Mr. Carter and he was dead. They hung him and beat him and drug him up and down Ninth Street. We was all hidin’ and cryin.’ My Momma was tellin’ us to be quiet.” He stopped, looked away and back, directly at me.

“They shouldn’t have done that.”

            Here I was. It was a nice brisk autumn day and I should have been somewhere else, but I was sitting in someone else’s yard listening to an old man reciting his version of our city’s most awful moment and I couldn’t escape.

            “They drug him and drug him. All back and forth on Ninth Street. We could hear the cars and them horns honkin’, the honkin,’ oh my lord, the honkin’. Ain’t nobody ought to have that done to them. We was still cryin’ when they built a fire at Ninth and Broadway and burned him up. We could smell the smoke and that made us cry harder. My momma had some cookies in her apron pocket and she gave one to the younger kids to hush them up. She broke one in half and gave me a piece. She took the other half and then she started cryin’ too.”

            He looked at the cookie in his hand, then returned to that awful day.

            “Somebody said they broke one of his arms off and waved it at the cars going down Broadway,” he said. “I don’t know. Nobody looked out the window the whole time, for we was too scared.”

            I pretended to write something.

            “Too bad,” he said so low I barely heard him. “Them was bad days. Bad for us all.”

            The smoke circled us and I sat as still as I could. Mr. Pitts stopped talking and sat with his hand with the cookie resting on his leg. As the fog of remembrance cleared, he began to smile. He didn’t say anything. He was done talking to white strangers for the day.

            He sat there proud and triumphant, a black-skinned Cicero having had his say, needing neither accolades nor approval. I thanked him, not sure at all whether he even heard me, and then eased away and headed home. I was all confusion, trying to sort out what had just happened. I still had an assignment but what the hell was I going to write? The truth about what happened? That would be the honest thing. It might even be a good piece. Shake the readers up a bit. Let them know that history wasn’t all about cute Victorian houses. Hell yes!

            Back home, I sat in the kitchen and stared through the window. When I tried, I could hear the shouts on the street, feel the throb of the car engines running, and smell the acrid smoke of man and wood burning.

Damn that old man!

Outside the afternoon was dissolving into evening. The shadows got longer and darker the way our thoughts will as we doze. Beyond the kitchen window, the air was still crisp and clear. Inside, it was dark and gloomy. The evening sky changed purposefully that time of year like a lover moving from caresses to kisses, and then to the dark undertones of passion. My thoughts moved that way, too, as I reflected on the day and what it was trying to tell me. Maybe it was trying to tell me to be brave, or truthful …, or honest. Maybe it was suggesting that I approach what I was doing with something a little deeper than just seeing my name in print. Maybe it was just trying to tell me to say something else entirely, before darkness came. Maybe. Maybe.

After a time, I stood up and retrieved a beat-up Remington typewriter and package of paper from a closet and carried them, with as much gentleness as I could muster, into the kitchen. I placed the typewriter on the kitchen table so I could see beyond it into the deepening gloom. Then I slid a page of paper into it and turned the cylinder so the paper was position precisely across the top, aligned there neat and worthy of higher-level thought. I drew and released a long breath of sad air—air that had once moved through the city and down the streets and around the large oak trees past the moving cars and quaint old houses and had once even flowed around the twitching, smoking body of John Carter.

I didn’t want to, but I smelled that smoke.

Click, click, I advanced the paper.

I was ready. My mind was as clear as the way of a traveler making the last turn on the last curve before home. I rubbed my hands. I thought how funny it would be to make the Sign of the Cross.

Instead, I started to type: “Mr. Otis Pitts, age 70 and a lifelong resident of Little Rock, has a new best friend who is only five years old.”

 July 2009

Revised 2017

Misbehaving

 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 Jimmy Dale von Tungeln.

            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.

            My name is Jimmie Gayle von Tungeln.

            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 mile or so 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. 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 late on afternoon. 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 thirsty 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.