Treasures

Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, the Galilean tends to throw gems that slip past us in the modern world, particularly modern America. As a comedian of years back would say, “They plumb evade us.”

Chapter Six, verses 19-21 provide an excellent example. Almost like an ambush, between telling us where and how—then what—to pray, he springs this on us.

19 Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:

20 But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:

21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

It’s almost as if he remembered he wanted to say it and make sure he provided it to us lest he forget.

What a statement for us as we set forth to meet another day in our beloved United States.

Where are out treasures?

We need to know that. The Galilean told us so.

Apparently, the TV evangelists, for the most part, hold their private jets, mansions, and costly clothes as their greatest treasures.

Politicians, on the other hand, treasure the power they accumulate over others.

Some of us treasure knowledge. (Guilty.)

Our families. The Galilean has some rather strange things to say about this in other passages.

Our superstitions. This is a “bigee” among homo sapiens. One modern author credits their use as the only method of controlling large multitudes of people. (See: “Politicians,” above.)

Our investment accounts, corporate size, and the square footage of our homes where we rest and purport to worship a man who had no place to lay his head.

Among some, it’s almost impossible to ascertain where their treasures lie. They shift from day to day. One day it’s monetary accumulation. The next day it’s their corporate “brand.” Then comes power. Next day might feature control or self-aggrandizement. Then come bizarre notions oozing forth like dark tar emanating from barren land. These people frighten. They are, far too often, the ones who possess the power to claim and protect their treasures above those of all others.

Sometimes it is easier to know what they don’t treasure than what they do. For some, it danged sure isn’t the care and nurture of “the least of those among us.” And it surely isn’t our planet, which according to almost any mythology, some figure like the Galilean (or his father) provided for our succor and joy.

“… where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”

Why on earth did he have to slip this admonition into the mix? Who knows? It is, nonetheless, a worthwhile passage to contemplate on this day of rest and meditation. Maybe we’ll discover the answer as to the location of our treasure.

Perhaps it won’t be too much of a shock. At any rate, if you truly trust the Galilean, as do so many claim, remember one thing.

He already knows.

Which side?

We were talking, seriously I thought, B and I, at one of our classic Happy Hour chats a few days ago. We spoke of many things. Somehow the talk got around to people we know. It turned to good people we know. I’m talking about really fine people, the kind who provide foster care for babies that no one else would have, and then adopt them. I’m talking about the kind of people who will get up in the middle of the night to go and care for the ill and needy. I’m talking about people who bear nary a blemish on the record of their life.

“Oh well,” I said. “I try but fall short.”

She comforted me. She’s good at that.

“No, really,” I said. “I try to be good but the bright lights and alluring colors of sin have always had a strong attraction for me.”

She comforted me again. She’s very patient.

“If I were to have it to do over, I’d try to do better.”

She looked off, then back at me. “You know,” she said. “You were just a big lump of dough and we all just had to wait and see if the yeast would make it rise.”

I’ve been thinking about that all week. I seem to think it was a compliment. She refused to elaborate. She’s like that. Once she makes a decree, there is no “instant replay.”

I guess there is room in a person’s life for redemption, if they don’t wait too long. That’s why I have hopes for the so many of the politicians we have in our state. Thomas Becket found it. Saul of Tarsus found it, redemption that is. Can you imagine the impact it would have on one of those who have voted for every piece of hateful and mean-spirited legislation in recent years to say, of a sudden, “I once was blind but now I see?” Gosh, how the Galilean would smile. How the Forces of Darkness would wail and gnash their teeth. I can only imagine.

People like Libby Phelps-Alvarez did it. As the granddaughter of Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) founder Fred Phelps, she was raised to picket soldiers’ funerals, carry homophobic signs, and rain down fire and brimstone on anyone who didn’t agree with the WBC’s extremist ideologies. But since leaving in 2009, Phelps-Alvarez has publicly apologized to the family of a dead soldier whose funeral she picketed. Now she also supports Planting Peace, an LGBT organization whose rainbow-painted headquarters is located right across from the WBC.

Right across the street? Get that? You know, it seems that the step from the wrong side of history to the right side is a short one. It can be as short as right across the street.

Today, I’ll concentrate on the good. First thing I’ll do is go wake her up and tell her that the dough is rising. She’ll be glad I did, just you wait.

Seeking health and knowledge ...

Back when I was younger, so much younger than today, I used to jog a lot. After a couple of years, my blood pressure was a steady 120/80 and my weight was down close to what it was supposed to be, 190 pounds. I was cool stuff … or thought I was. I was a “hunk” or thought I was until my trophy wife just laughed at me. Everybody else though I was obsessed. The country doctor in Lonoke, Byron E. Holmes, M.D., said I was crazy and that jogging would ruin my knees. That’s the last thought that went through my mind on the operating table recently as they prepared to replace one of those knees.

Anyway. I had a running buddy by then. I’ve mentioned him before. He was a little shorter than I and maybe 30 pounds lighter. He had run track in high school and had never smoked. That should tell you something.

As in, he wore my ass out most mornings.

In all though, he was interesting. He knew lots of things, some of them useful, some of them fascinating. For example, one morning, while I was puffing like a freight train while we were negotiating a particularly vicious hill, he turned, ran backwards, and related, in great detail, the history of the Battle of Majuba Hill, back in the first (I think) Boer War. I was terribly interested, but lacked the breath to speak at the time so he never knew, not that he would have cared.

He had one annoying habit. He insisted on choosing our route each run. He could, and I’ll swear this is true, choose a route that was uphill going and uphill returning. How he did it I’ll never know.

All in all, he was a nice fellow. I think I mentioned that he was a graduate of Harvard Law School and sometimes he would tell me interesting things about the law, as long as he was sure that I wasn’t trying to pry legal advice from him. He would clam up if I dared ask what he called a “say a man question.” For example, “Say a man were to claim his new stereo system as a tax deduction because it relaxed him while he was earning?”

His advice, “Nice try.”

No, he would be more likely to tell me fascination stories about when he worked with a group on a new criminal code for the state. For example, once they were dealing with the question of bestiality. When someone cited an old case about a farmer and his mare, the room went silent. Then, an old legislator who was assigned to monitor the group couldn’t forbear asking the question, “What breed of mare was it?”

I thought that was pretty funny, although I didn’t have enough breath to laugh at the time. There was another question emanating from a lawsuit involving a woman, a supermarket, a cucumber, and what legally constituted a “vegetable,” but I can’t go into details about that one.

He told another story, supposedly true, about an actual legal defense based on an incident with a well-known state representative. He was accused of some shady deal or other (this was back when they actually charged politicians for engaging in shady deals). He assured the jury that (1) the crime for which he was accused was really a stupid thing for a person to do, (2) that it would take a really stupid person to even think of doing it, (3) he had two college degrees and had passed the state bar exam, (4) his constituents had voted for him to be their state representative for years, (5) he could not possibly be a stupid man, and, ergo, ipso facto, or whatever, could not possible have committed the malfeasance in question.

He got away with it and the defense is still in practice, bearing the name of its inventor.

Who says physical fitness can’t be fun?

The man never met
a hill he didn't love.

Living With Lies

At my age, re-calibration of the brain requires effort. Take the weather for example. I recall the days when my late father-in-law was farming in the Arkansas Delta. When the crops lay parched and withering in the summer heat, a “weather-man” might predict an 80 percent chance of rain for the area next day.

Yay.

What it would mean, though, was there was an infinitesimal chance that a late afternoon shower might bring a fine mist over an adjoining farm, not enough to settle the dust by any stretch of the imagination, just a thin, teasing, cruel cloud that knew exactly where property lines lay.

Farmers like him learned to live with it.

Fast forward. The abuse of our planet by us homo sapiens changed things. We might call what we experience now the monsoons except for one thing, and I speak from experience. Monsoons end. They may seem to last forever, but they ultimately end. Our climate-induced "rainsoons" don’t end, though

No, what we are experiencing now requires recalibration. Now when the “weather-person” says there is a slight chance of “showers” producing less than and inch of rain, prepare for five to seven inches. Farmers lean on their tractors staring at the lake that used to be their best bean field wondering what the next "shower" will bring.

Do the weather-people lie with evil intent? Probably not. I think that prevarication has just become so popular among some politicians that a segment of the population takes it as the normal.

This doesn’t bode well if you ask me. It has all the earmarks of a national emergency.

My Redacted Life: Chapter 24 (Cont._4)

We left Fayetteville on Sunday morning, saying goodbye to Mike, Wayland, and their pet python, still sequestered in his closet. We agreed to avoid the narrow, twisting, and nerve-racking drive known affectionately by Arkansans as the “Pig Trail.” We wanted to relax after a fast-paced couple of days. We chose, instead, the standard route on Highway 71 from Fayetteville to Alma.

On the last rise before descending into Alma, we passed the spot where, on June 23, 1933, members of the Barrow Gang, Buck Barrow and W. D. Jones, killed Alma City Marshall Henry D. Humphrey during a gunfight. Bonnie and Clyde waited in a tourist court near Fort Smith and had sent the two gang members to Fayetteville to rob a grocery store. Buck Barrow, on his deathbed, admitted doing the actual killing.

We didn’t know all this at the time. Back then, our immediate history consisted of weeks, not years.

The ride back found us in good spirits. She told me about adventures she and Vernell had participated in while in college. I told her about the gang I had shared a house with at 369 Gregg Street in Fayetteville in the 1960s. Mike and I lived there with an odd assortment of characters, all with varying degrees of aptitude. One achieved status as Ph.D. in zoology. Another became a prominent surgeon in Little Rock, while yet another became a designer of stage sets in New York City. A particularly funny little guy who went by the moniker "Eunuch Shoehorn" simply disappeared one day.

Two became veterans of a foreign war, much to the discomfiture of their fellow Americans. Roads leading from college are strange and unpredictable.

Former Green Beret Mike
Dunkum, having laid
 down his sword and shield.

She was pleased in finding a new friend in Mike. I was pleased in what now appeared to be a new level in our relationship. As road trips go, it had been a good one.

I slowed the Green Angel to a crawl as we entered Morrilton, Arkansas from the West. Actually, it didn’t matter. The sheriff there, a legendary man named Marlin Hawkins, cared neither for the niceties of "probable cause" nor the protections of the Constitution. His deputies would arrest one for DWY (Driving While Young) as quickly as for anything else. He was a major member of a political cabal from that area that succeeded for decades in dominating the state legislature and preventing most efforts to move it forward.

It was rumored that he had a secret switch in a Main Street building that allowed one deputy to make the town’s only traffic signal turn red instantly if an out-of-state motorist, or an apparent college student, approached it. A second deputy waited a block up, in an unmarked car, or so the story went. I don’t know about this or why it was necessary. When I had been a passenger in a victim’s car, the law simply stopped them, gave them a ticket, made them pay, and dared them to complain.

At any rate, we approached slowly, making sure the “ticket trap” wasn’t in operation. Brenda seemed impressed at the degree of my worldly knowledge. We made it through town and I breathed a sigh of relief. Marvin didn’t charge a lot for his tickets. He knew, somehow, just the amount a stranger or student could fork over without causing too much of a ruckus. Still, I had no desire to contribute to his treasury. He never received more than a nefarious reputation for his perfidy. I’m told they even patterned a character on a TV show after him.

Like Ulysses and his crew, we had safely passed the “Straits of Conway County” and it would be clear sailing on to Little Rock, and a nice evening of resting and cuddling on my living room couch. We shared more stories and I kept her laughing, telling her about more of our Gregg Street capers.

I didn’t tell her everything. Hell, I figured we now had plenty of time, and there was this “Statute of Limitations” thing.

Growing Up Southern: February 22, 2018

Once, in a fit of anger, I made an obscene gesture to my sister in public. I had just entered my teens and she was nearly grown, seventeen or so—by Southern standards rapidly reaching “Old Maid” status. In all likelihood, she may have deserved my disrespectful action. She did know how to “pull my chain,” so to speak.

So up went the finger to the delight of my buddies. Not one to suffer affront easily, she reported the incident to our Sainted Mother.

Fearing for my life, I stayed outdoors that evening until darkness and hunger combined in a most insidious way and forced me to answer the call to supper. We ate in dread-fueled silence. Nearing completion of the meal, she asked me to remain after the others left.

She wanted to talk to me.

There it was, either a beating or reform school, or both. Reform school rose in preference as they had a swimming pool, they weren't too choosy about who they let on the football team, and Benny Colclasure was already there. He owed me money. I surmised that would entail some degree of protection against the bigger boys.

There was no protection from the wrath of Sainted Mother. Even my father feared her, in a manner much as I imagined that the Dark One feared the Holy Trinity.

As I mentally computed the most likely sentence for an affront to one’s sister, the others left the table. There was no doubt in my mind that my sister bore a smirk, but I wouldn't look her way. I simply braced for the onslaught.

Instead, Sainted Mother raised an empty hand and stroked her chin. Ah. A short sermon and pack your clothes. Not too bad. I might even make a “B” in math in prison school. There hadn’t been a ciphering whiz sent there from our school since the legendary Willie Lee Bohanon got sent up years before. He was a sergeant on the police force by this time.

“What?” she asked after thinking on the matter at hand for a moment like a lawyer questioning a witness, “would you do if someone called your sister a bad name in front of a bunch of other boys?”

Here’s where my superior intellect came into play. On the one hand, I knew what I would do—laugh my ass off. On the other, I knew the appropriate answer. “I would teach whoever said it some manners,” I said with an air of resolution that both surprised and intrigued me.

“I know you would,” Sainted Mother said, "I know you would, son." That made me feel like a pile of horse manure. My mind swung immediately to a diametrically opposite point of consideration that made me imagine how, Red Ryder-like, I would lay waste not only to the miscreant, but to his buddies as well. A mamma can exert that kind of change of perspective in a Southern boy.

She let it sink in for a moment and then said, “So you think your sister deserves respect?”

By now I did, for sure.

“Other boys should treat her like the lady she is?

Hell yes! I nodded.

“Then how could you expect them to show respect for her if you don’t?”

The feeling I now bore was worse than anything reform school had to offer.

I’ve thought about that lesson quite a bit, lately. I’d like to tell the story to our current politicians. After all, American citizens, even if they might be as opposed to your way of life as my sister was to mine, deserve respect. If we don’t give it, how will we expect other nations to?

Thank goodness for Sainted mothers. Perhaps we could bottle their wisdom and give it to the less fortunate.

Odd thing is ... my sister and I
are best friend now. You just never know.