murder, or just a joke?

Rumor has it that Karl Rove wants to kill Todd Akin.

 

Actually, he made a joke that implied that he would not want to be investigated closely if Akin were found mysteriously murdered.

Ha, ha.

Actually, Rove as the assassin who actually carries the gun and pulls the trigger defies credibility, so let’s not even think of trying to pin physical violence on the rotund one.  I think his point is that what Todd Akin said about “legitimate rape” and the black eye it gave the Missouri Senatorial candidate is an embarrassment to the Grand Old Party as well as it is to modern, civilized society.

I know an artist who once did a series of sculptures based on angels.  He invited me to the showing of the sculptures at a local art gallery and, during the conversation, I asked him about his choice of subject matter and whether he believed in angels or not.  The conversation moved from whether or not he believed in angels to the subject of religion and faith.  He told me that one who has faith need not require physical proof. I thought about that conversation this morning as I read the story about Rove and Akin and I thought there was a point to be made about faith.  The definition of faith I found today is as follows.

Faith: belief that is not based on proof

I watched RNC coverage this week and I was surprised by a lack of specifics and I keep coming back to the statement by Todd Akin. What I heard from the Republicans this week were vague and flowery stories about a beautiful place they are going to take us, and they don’t know where it is or how we are going to get there.  We just need to have faith.  We just need to believe.  We just need to drink their Kool-Aid.

Akin was basically reiterating the position of the Republican platform when he inserted his foot into his mouth.  I think, however, since it is not a purely religious issue, and he does represent the show-me state, he was compelled to attach some cold, hard facts, rather than simply to rely on faith.  I think he got caught up in the moment and tried to explain his position by making up some cold, hard “facts.”  Unfortunately, his “facts” were more a wish rather than something he could prove.  His “facts” were based on his faith that his opinion had to be right, so he needed to provide proof for those of little faith.

He and his fellow Republicans are going to take us to a much better place:  A place where everything is pure and good.  And how are they going to get us there?

They’ll make it up as they go along.

walkin' on the water

I had a few momentary thoughts of terror yesterday morning when I read about Congressman Kevin Yoder skinny-dipping in the Sea of Galilee.  My anxiety was not because a fellow Kansan might have had one more drink than he should have, lost his clothes and tried to re-enact Jesus’ fabled walk upon those same waters.  After all, how many times have I and my fellow Kansans been somewhere near water where alcohol was served and one thing led to another?  Usually it is a lake, reservoir or farm pond and not a sacred historic site, but we all know how the story goes.

“Liquor?  Why, yes, just to be social.  Is the water warm today?  Oh, no, I won’t need a bathing suit…”

Yoder said that alcohol played no role and I have to accept that as the truth, but usually it takes me a few drinks before I will unharness the old package.

Well, you know the drill.  Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

However, my fellow rednecks and I are expected to get drunk and do stupid things.  Our representative is supposed to be a tea-totaler and not do stupid things.

Oh, wait!  Yoder is a member of Congress, and that group is famous for doing stupid things, so I can’t expect their behavior to be half a good as my fellow rednecks.  Please disregard my first argument that he should be held to a higher standard.

My terror, however, was two-fold.  I still can’t get it through my head that Yoder is not my congressman.  We moved a couple of miles west three years ago and either moved out of the district he represents or we were gerrymandered out when they moved the boundaries to insure that no Democrat would ever again win the district once represented by the highly respected, sober and fully-clothed, Dennis Moore.

Oh, good, Yoder is not my congressman. 

This should help the Democrat running against him, I thought.

Then I remembered.

Oh, great!  Because the district has been gerrymandered to insure a Democrat will never win, there isn’t even one running, just a Libertarian without a ghost of a chance, even though he thinks this will help put him over the top.  Despite the fact it will have no effect on the election it will be fun to hear the congressman explain this again and again.

day one

The question has come up a number of times the last few days: When is day one?


Was day one actually Friday night when I shook the last hand and signed out for the last time? That would have, theoretically, been just another Friday night when Jimbo would have left work for the week, just like he has countless other times over the last five decades.


Or, would it have been Saturday, the first day off work after a long career? One could argue both sides. On one side, the argument is that, although Saturday is a typical day off, that it was a different Saturday, since I left the job at work and was not thinking about the previous week or strategizing about the week upcoming. I think I disqualified Friday and Saturday as day one because I still strategized in bed Friday night and wondered what I had failed to impart upon my replacement and what I needed to communicate to him.


Sunday as day one would have been a lukewarm argument. The pro-day-one argument was that the elimination of Sunday night mental preparation for the following work day was not necessary and therefore a relaxed Sunday night. However, the strategizing continued. What did I forget to do? What did I leave out? What did I fail to give emphasis in my last week of training the new guy?


Therefore, I assert that Monday was day one.


The strategic planning and the “what if” and “if then” scenarios were beginning to move to the recesses of the brain. The realization that total release from a career that demanded 24/7 attention will not happen in one day or one weekend had begun to set in. The realization that I am not free and won’t be for a week or two—or maybe more—had become reality.


However, I was as free as I had been in any time in recent memory. In an era where the day off no longer exists, where holidays are a time to be with the family and sneak in some work time and when the definition of vacation is doing ones work outside the office, being retired takes on an unfamiliar significance. I am not complaining, though. I am good with it—very, very good with it.


Yeah, Monday was day one.


And if you were to argue that my first day of freedom was spent doing laundry, cleaning house, cooking and doing dishes and that doesn’t sound like much of a way to enjoy oneself, I can only suggest you try it some time. It’s about as good as it gets.


Now, let’s see what kind of a ball we can have on day two.

Coming Soon

Coming soon will be more exciting and more frequent content. Just be patient for another couple of weeks. Thanks for your continued support

ghost of christmas past

Back in an ancient time, my Cub Scout leader lived in a house on the block behind our house on Alden Street. The shortcut there and home was through their back yard, over the fence into my next door neighbor’s yard and then over another fence into my own yard. On that particular December cub scout meeting, I was wearing the shirt with my badges and a good pair of jeans. I was wearing a coat, so the shirt was safe, but I didn’t want to snag the pants on the fences, meaning the next shortest route was not much longer. I would walk from the scout leader’s front porch and twenty yards down the street and then up a driveway that once led to a garage that had been demolished at some time or other. With no garage at the end of the driveway, it led directly into my back yard. That driveway route was to be the route I selected that night.

But, while on the short sidewalk I heard chimes: Christmas songs.

It wasn’t some out of body experience. There weren’t any angels that appeared to me and it was not a Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus kind of thing, What I heard was just the organist at Quayle Memorial Methodist Church playing chimes through the loudspeakers on the outside of the building.

So, instead of making the left turn down the driveway and toward home, I continued to walk down the sidewalk, north on 17th street, toward where the music being played. Seventeenth Street made a little ninety-degree hook to the left where the big stucco house was (and still is) and then a couple of hundred more feet to the corner of 17th and Yecker. That was where Quayle was. There was a stained glass window on the Yecker side of the church, if my memory is correct—and it may not be. I believe last time I was by there, it was boarded over, so I could not confirm.

I remember on that ancient December afternoon, I stood for a while at the corner and listened. There was something back then about Christmas that piqued the imagination of a ten- or eleven-year-old boy. There was something about the songs of the season that re-enforced the connection.

They still do.

I remember after hearing a song or two, I headed west down Yecker, took the shortcut through the alley and back home on Alden.

It is strange how one can forget something someone said this morning or the name of someone met yesterday, but still have a fairly solid memory of hearing a song fifty years ago.

Like I said, there is something about the songs of the season…

Well, no need to repeat myself. I just said that three paragraphs before. And they are short paragraphs.

However, we sometimes repeat ourselves in Jimbo’ world.

the north forty-forth street sidewalk surfing association

Most of the things we used to do in ancient times—back when I was growing up—have slipped into history. Kids today don’t do a lot of the same things we did two generations ago. One of the few, however, that seems still to be in vogue, is the skateboard.

Back in 1964 a group called Jan and Dean had a popular song on the radio called Sidewalk Surfin’ and we loved the song. Perhaps it was because we were riding sidewalk surfboards at the time, so it was something with which we could identify.

Either we were too poor to buy them or skateboards were not widely commercially available at the time. Anyway, we made our own.

I took a scrap piece of 1” X 8” pine, cut it to a couple of feet long and then penciled lines on it—a pattern that came to a point in the front and tapered to about four inches wide in the back. Then I took a hand coping saw and cut the board to the configuration I drew. Afterward, I sanded down the edges, removing any sharp corners and then smoothed out the top surface with fine sandpaper. I managed to find a skull and crossbones decal at the hobby shop and spray painted a thin blue stripe at a diagonal across the board, just behind where I applied the decal toward the front of the board. Then, I took a steel wheeled roller skate and used screws to attach it to the bottom side of the board. I put a coat of dark shellac on the board to give it a light brown color.

I was then ready to put my life on the line.

Forty-forth street had a gradual incline to the North of our house and it was a good hill to walk up and then ride the board back down. However, to the south, there was a very steep hill and, once we knew how to ride the board it was always the South hill we rode down. All of the neighborhood kids built boards or had their fathers build boards for them, and we would attack the hill as a group. There were a lot of bruises and skinned elbows and knees, because the hill was fast and we didn’t wear any protective equipment.

Because interaction in society requires that we belong to something and give a name to that something, we called ourselves the North Forty-forth Street Sidewalk Surfing Association. It was better than joining a street gang, I suppose.

Even though we are sure that you can go to You Tube and hear Jan and Dean sing,
“Grab your board and go sidewalk surfin’ with me,” Jimbo has reached the point in life that falling off a skateboard would require some time to heal, so he won’t be joining in.

But it is good to remember how it was forty-seven summers ago on Forty-forth Street in Jimbo’s world.

alden street

Fifty years ago, two old men pulled up to the curb on Alden Street, got out of their car and began to point at things and talk. The child playing in the side yard of the house in front of which they were parked, walked up to the street to see who they were, figuring they were friends of his grandmother. They told the little boy they had lived in the neighborhood many decades before. The old men pointed to the houses and debated who had lived there and when.

“Do you know there was a community well where the entire neighborhood got their water?” asked one of the men.

“I’ll bet you can’t tell us where it was,” stated the other.

“Down by that peach tree,” said the boy, pointing toward the back of the yard in which he had been playing. “Under those concrete slabs.”

“Yessir,” intoned one of the elderly gentlemen. “That’s exactly where it was.”

“Still is,” said the boy. “Put concrete slabs over it to keep the cats from fallin’ in. You can pull the slabs apart and drop stuff into it, like peach pits and rocks. Then you slide the slabs back ‘fore momma sees ya’ and whups ya’ good.”

To that little boy, Alden Street stretched out in each direction almost as far as you cared to look. One time, when he ran away from home, he reached the end of Alden Street, up by the alley that ran through to Yecker Street, and stopped. That was as far away from home as he cared to go. And, when he stood at that end of the street and looked back at the entire expanse of Alden, it was so very far to the other end.

And when that boy stood on the front sidewalk and looked back through his side yard and all the way to the chicken wire fence on the back property line, he could imagine no wider expanse—no further vista of green. It was the yard where he had matured from infant to child.

We’ll never know who those men were. They were just like thousands of people who walk through ones life. The boy, however, was a different story. We know he grew up and became known as Jimbo. And yesterday, the Labor Day holiday, Jimbo again walked that sidewalk and street and pointed out to Jimbo’s girlfriend where the home of his childhood had been. Things are different today. Alden is such a short block one could lay the newspaper at one end, walk to the other end and still read the headline. Jimbo’s old house is gone and the yard he remembered as being so large is just a postage stamp.

There are only a few houses on the street that appear to be inhabited. There are a few houses that are open and abandoned, but the majority of the houses are gone, replaced by empty lots.

Jimbo’s girlfriend frequently commented about the total decay and squalor. She questioned how people could live in neighborhoods like these. She questioned how these kinds of neighborhoods could still exist in the twenty-first century and in the United States of America.

Jimbo, himself, had a brief feeling of having come home, standing on the sidewalk and on the rock steps leading down to where his house used to be. It was much like the tales of the old African elephants who, knowing the end is near, wander back to their place of birth, to lay their earthly remains at the foot of their childhood memories. But, it wasn’t like that at all, because we were all happy as clams when we were able to move out of that house. And, I do not grieve it nor mourn its passing. It was a dump. On the road of life, it was a start, and that’s about it.

I would have liked to stay and reminisce a little longer, but one of the locals was walking down the street and Jimbo’s girlfriend insisted in locking herself in the car for protection. I can’t say as that I blamed her, but he passed by harmlessly and no one was killed.

We drove the neighborhood for a while and past my grandmother’s old house, which is also gone and past the Spanish-style house one street over from Alden, which was always the nicest house in the neighborhood. It is still standing, as is one of my favorite buildings, Quayle Memorial Methodist Church, which is still elegant, but boarded up. I wonder if the woodwork is still intact. I wonder if the stained glass is still unbroken under the plywood.

Most of all, I wonder whether the people who inhabit these houses are better off where they are, or if they would be better off using a bulldozer to set the neighborhood in order. My old house was a shack. It has gone to a better place. It was good, however, to stand over its final resting place.

And to walk the sidewalks and streets I had walked half a century before.

A long time ago in Jimbo’s world.

words to a truck drivin' song

“You a driver?” she asked.

“No,” I answered.

I knew why she asked. It was my hat. Jimbo has a black ball cap that says “Roadway” on it. I used to move castings in from Mexico on an almost-daily basis and the sales representative for the truck line we used gave me the cap one year at Christmas time. I’ve had the hat for a long time and it looks well worn. There’s an area on the right-hand side of the bill and another on the left-hand side that the black is dark gray from me taking it off and putting it on. The one on the right is more noticeable because I use my right hand primarily. However, I have the ability to do it with my left hand, too, when I am carrying something.

It isn’t the first time this has happened. Once, at a casino, a guy came up to me and said good morning.

“You drive for Roadway? Me too. Ain’t seen you around.”

I told him the story and said something like, “thanks for the business,” and wandered off past the slot machines.

My ex-father-in-law was a driver, and he told me the only way you could tell the difference between a truck driver and a cowboy was their footwear. Cowboys wore the boots; truck drivers wore sneakers. He wore boots, but it was legitimate. He ran a herd of cattle north and east of Lawrence, when he wasn’t on the road.

I have to admit, though, I have seen a lot of drivers wearing cowboy boots. Maybe they swung both ways. I don’t know.

What I do know, though, is that I have wandered off of where I was originally going. That happens more often now that I am getting older. Let’s get back on subject.

I was in Wal-Mart last Sunday morning.

A little shopping hint: If one needs to pick up some of the everyday items we all need to get through life—the kind of stuff that Wal-Mart sells—and one has no interest in fighting the crowds at ones local Wal-Mart, a good time to do ones shopping is seven in the morning on Sunday. The crowds are really thin at that time of the morning. There are probably a hundred people in the store, but they all work there, stocking shelves. If one can avoid getting run over by some teenager pushing or pulling a pallet jack, one can get in and out in a hurry. And, there will be some old man or woman to welcome you when you come in and tell you to have a nice day when you leave.

Anyway, last Sunday I had made my shopping choices and was checking out in the express line when the lady scanning my purchases asked me if I drove a truck. Although I was tempted to say yes, I gave her the real actual synopsis. Almost immediately, it occurred to me that she probably had a brother-in-law or a distant relative who drove and probably had a beat-up hat like mine, and my story about being a supply-chain manager and having had a regular move from Mexico may have gone over her head. It didn’t. She caught it and threw it right back.

“I’m a freight broker,” she said.

About that time I was signing my credit card receipt, so I didn’t immediately respond. I guess she anticipated my next question, so she answered it without my having to ask.

“Cost of diesel, there aren’t a lot of loads out there.”

In my present job, I move a lot of sheet metal on flatbeds and we use freight brokers frequently, so I asked her the name of the company for which she worked, and made a mental note.

I put my receipt in my pocket, pushed my cart toward the exit and responded, “you, too,” when the lady at the exit told me to have a nice day.

There is something eerie about that morning that keeps wandering through my mind. It is a story about how good it was last century and about how far we have fallen. It’s the story of Robert Rubin and Bill Clinton and their strong dollar policy. It’s how their strong dollar brought the price of a barrel of crude to less than $12 and how Friday it topped $118. It’s how the Euro was worth $.75 back then and now it exceeds $1.50.

It’s a story about how our worst two problems as a country back then were so radically different than they are today. First, that we couldn’t find enough workers to fill all the jobs that went begging for someone to fill them. Second, that our budget surplus was on the verge of creating a situation that could only be resolved by eliminating income taxes.

I guess our current administration solved those problems and a third problem, too. That problem was that their OPEC member buddies weren’t making enough money.

As a man who is getting some years on him, I guess it is natural to lament the good old days. Those good old days sort of passed by me when I was looking forward to something up the line a ways that I anticipated would be the good old days.

Hell, there’ll be good times coming down the road, I used to think when I was a kid. Then, when I was an adult, I would look back at those summer mornings of my childhood when I was first waking up and I could hear the doves calling outside my window. I would think back to those warm summer evenings when daylight hung on long after dinnertime, until almost bedtime, before it grudgingly gave way to darkness. Those were the days when the last school year was a distant memory and the one coming up seemed so far away. Those were the days when responsibility and homework assignments and the school day didn’t even enter the mind. I would recall those days when I had matriculated through school and was working and remember them as the good old days.

I remember working two jobs and struggling to get along when my son was an infant and thinking there would be better days. Later, I looked back to when my child was growing up and the time we spent together and thought those were the good old days.

Now, I look back to when we were partying like it was 1999 and I think those were the best days. I hope to God I never look back at the Bush and Cheney years and think these were the good old days. I hope I never think back on the huge budget deficits we have in the first decade of the twenty-first century and think we had it good. I hope I never look back at when gas was as cheap as $3.50 a gallon and tell stories about how good we had it. I hope I never look back at the war, the recession and the dope problem we have at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and remember them as good times.

But, most of all, I hope I never tell grandchildren the “good times” story of the lady who was the freight broker whom the government’s policies gave the opportunity to run the checkout line at Wal-Mart when the freight business dried up.

I hope I have a better story than that.

At least, that’s today’s view from here in Jimbo’s world.

letter to boone

Dear Mr. Pickens,

I was delighted this week to hear that Bill Self has decided to stay at Kansas and that the large amount of money in your personal stash was not sufficient to hire him away.

However, after giving the matter some thought, it dawned on me that I have never mentioned to you that I know how to coach basketball. I coached my son's teams when he was young, and although we were more interested in developing talent than in winning games, we picked up some skills in coaching on the hardwoods.

I know you have money to burn, but I could be had for a contract in the low seven figures. Heck, even that is negotiable.

Please let me hear from you at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,


Jimbo

still champs after all these hours