GUNS, NOT ROSES

I love to shoot a gun:  it's fun.  What's more kick-worthy than pulling a small trigger and hearing the glorious response, then seeing a bull's eye put out, not a real bull but a target one.  When I was an adolescent, my father took me to the backyard (which had 30 acres) and showed me how to fire a shotgun and a .22 caliber rifle, which became my weapon of choice right after I picked myself up off the ground after firing the shotgun.  He laughed knowing that hard lessons stick.

My Dad as a Young Gun

Over the years, I have used a gun exactly 0 times, having no real occasion to take a life, but there's always tomorrow when the Chinese attack.  

I guess the state of Virginia has special affection for the Second Amendment and the NRA (National Rifle Association); they rank right up there with God's forgiveness and possibly incest.  I postulate that the writers of the Second Amendment did not envision a strong accommodation of mass murder.  We country folks are a patriotic lot and we love our country's flags, both of them.  Mathews even has the Confederate Flag Tour, should you have time on your hands, which is a subset of the Elevated Chassis Pickup Parade.  (I just made those up, but I could conduct a sightseeing tour of those places.)

If memory serves, Virginia has moved hard right in the places we allow guns to be present.  Thank goodness we can attend state parks fully-armed and know that going to a night club is more exhilarating with the added danger of not only getting a STD (sexually transmitted disease), but of being shot by a stray bullet as well.  I like dancing, but hot music should be the motivator, not a sadistic gunslinger.

No Guns Just Queen Anne's Lace

A Member of the Carrot Family

Events of the last few days bring home the reason we should not be accommodating gun lunacy, and yet you know we will.  That is the definition of insanity:  knowing you're driving off a cliff and accelerating.  What would sane people do?  We can only wonder.  

Meanwhile, we oil "Old Betsy" and the familiar amnesia sets in until the next mass shooting by a dissociative miscreant brings us back to reality.

GALS WITH ASPIRIN BETWEEN THEIR KNEES

Events of recent days have unearthed old feelings, deliberately buried, remnants of the natural abhorrence of the bridle of second-class personhood jammed into our mouths by those who sought to prepare us for our role of woman in society:  a surrender to what the Bible reinforces in many ways, a sad acceptance of being born a disappointment and a constant call for atonement for our prenatal sin and shortcoming.

These instinctive reactions can't be extinguished or moderated after cooking, under fuming pressure, for so many years.  So when a gentleman casually mentions on public media that birth control in his day was cheap:  "...a gal put an aspirin between her knees...,"  well that is where the rip cord gets yanked and the parachute from Hell deploys.  How vulgar a reminder of how inherently a "piece of meat" a woman is regarded.  And how lascivious an old wag the speaker of such stomach-churning opinion must be.

And Now A Word From Our Sponsor, Mother God

Dear Daughters, You Are A Full Person

 Andrea Mitchell should have been wheeled off by paramedics if looks are any clue to her reaction.  When she resumed her interview, she might have suggested he should put his Viagra between his knees and enjoy the ride.

When I was a child, I was told little boys and little girls played by different rules.  "Why?" I asked.  "Because they do," I was informed.  That was the end of my understanding.  As a teen, an atmosphere developed around me which, as far as males were concerned, forecast every day as Sunday and me as the chicken.  I was never comfortable with being the main course of a man's lust.



Every Woman Is Strong, Sweet and Capable

Any way you view it, Underdog should be Woman's mascot.  Not only have we been short-changed, tainted as sin-inducing temptresses, we are the ones left high and dry in the unintended pregnancy dilemma, and birth control is being discussed as somehow wrong.  We have come a long way, Baby?

War on women, is that what you want?  In the words of Dirty Harry, "C'mon...Make my day!"  I'll just vote for the candidate with healthier opinions of women.  I'll just vote to keep the government out of my underwear.  I'll just vote for a candidate who trusts me to make my own moral decisions, which can only be superior to that of the average politician.

GUSTAV GETS A VALENTINE

Yesterday out of the blue, a female Canada Goose made herself at home in Gustav's fenced yard next to our house here on Waverly Lane.  He was euphoric and going through his list of "How to Please a Lady" tricks, which is extensive.  I kept a watchful eye to be sure she didn't tempt him to escape to the icy waters of Queen's Creek, which his white goose genes haven't adequately equipped him to survive if met by a predator.  He can't fly like his Canadian cousins.

Gustav Shows the Lady Around

They spent the day digging roots, eating chicken feed, drinking water, and taking naps in the sunshine.  Until I looked and he was missing, though she was still there unperturbed.  Panicking, I searched every inch  of fenced yard and shoreline, in case he had felt the call to wander.  No sign of him.  I searched the neighboring shorelines and scanned the distance for his white outline.  Then I went back to his fenced yard to see if I overlooked anything.  I noticed one of his plastic swimming pools upside down.  When I flipped it over, up rose Gustav from his dark confines.

Gustav Celebrates Being Liberated from His Pool Prison (behind him)

I surmised that in his eagerness to show off his equipment to the new lady, he planted a heavy webbed foot on the pool's rim and, being empty, it flipped over and cost him an embarrassing moment and a few minus points on the Love Scale with the lovely bird from the North.  To be sure, Gustav is not a gifted thinker, and so he accepted his fate and sat patiently in the dark waiting for a miracle, which I was happy and relieved to provide.  When darkness fell the two were enjoying mutual company.

 Valentines Day Comes Early for Gustav

Surprisingly, this morning the lady friend had departed leaving him only a memory.  Evidently it was only a one-night stand.  For a while he was upset, blaming himself for appearing klutzy with the swimming pool; but you can't keep a good goose down for long.  Still time before Valentines Day!

After All, There Are Lots of Fish in the Sea!

I HOPE I DON'T GET TO HEAVEN BY MISTAKE

Heaven on Earth (My Backyard)

I try to be an honest person and it occurred to me I still have faults I deny and obscure.  Hidden in the bushes of my lifescape are some or most of the following (or possibly all):

1.  I have crooked teeth and am hatefully ugly; now add to that, wrinkled and old.

2.  On occasion, I drink way too much.  (Probably to forget the crooked teeth, ugly and old)

3.  I love being alone.  (Saves loads of money on deodorant, breath mints, and unnecessary grooming)

4.  I am coarse (See #3) and uncultured (My last book cover to cover was Silver Chief, Dog of the North)

5.  I have the weirdest fascination with changing identity, as in "Sleeping with the Enemy."  What's up with that?

6.  Sometimes I secretly root for the villain.  (Evidently I played the "robber" in childhood games of "Cops and Robbers" once too often.)  And while on the subject, Jimmy H. should be held accountable for rooking me at the game of football.  It seems he got a touchdown by crossing the goal line; while I had to run around the house before crossing the goal line.  I finally smelled a rat and knew our friendship was weakening.  

There are many more, but why flay yourself open like a mackerel for the world to devour.  Answer:  Because you're perverse, and self-defamation is the ultimate perversion.  Like picking at a scab or pouring flaming iodine on an open wound, I enjoy being harsh with myself.  Students of psychiatry should go fly a kite now.

My Garden in Spring is Heaven

Having cleaned my ugly closet, I feel ready to deal with Heaven. Will I get there?  Heaven only knows.   Failing to pay the dues of institutional righteousness, I must somehow achieve grace by running a heroic final marathon to salvation.  If Heaven comes, it should be deserved, not bought in the collection plate or tax-deductible donation. It should be helping those no one else cares to help, and getting no thanks in return.  It should be taking an unpopular stand against a very popular wrong.  It should be loving all the people, all the world and all the universe and trusting our self-interest to rise with that particular beneficent tide.  

Jolene was going to be destroyed because not one person had answered the pound

ad in the paper.  Not one.  I asked for her sight unseen and was not disappointed.  She provided years of love and companionship until her death last year.  I felt she understood Heaven.

TALKING TO MYSELF

About this time of year, cabin fever sets in and we exhibit the telltale signs of our growing mental illness, like talking to ourselves.  We're a year older and entering the arena of sanity annihilation known as senility.  Sooner or later we'll all be babbling our shameful secrets to total strangers at the "home."

Being caught in the act of lone conversation is mortifying, especially when the question comes, "Who are you talking to?" and the answer follows, "Myself."  Even worse, sadistic people remain silent and enjoy the expanded soliloquy, you turn and realize you've been providing great amusement with your one-man dementia show.

Me Thinking About What To Say To Myself

The most shameful episodes are the times when things go wrong and you give yourself a profanity-laced critique employing theatrics worthy of Shakespeare.  Example:  "Stupid f'*#ing (female dog), you can't hold onto a @*&+  thing!  (This usually said after dropping an egg at your feet and watching the slime head under the refrigerator at the speed of light, reaching hairball land just ahead of your paper towel.)  Hopefully no one hears.  I usually keep the TV on loud when I'm cooking.

Punishment For Cussing Is Time In The Bag 

I remember Mother being lost in a daze of problems, tuning me out, and discussing things with herself.  I always swore I would never do that, much in the same way I would never get wrinkles, a pot belly, blue veins, or wear anything larger than size 10.  Although I have broken these promises, I could work on improving.

The truth is sometimes you just need to talk when there is no one available.  Perhaps the next time I'm caught, I'll answer, "Would you mind not interrupting, I'm talking to God."  Of course that won't work when I'm "Cussing and Cooking," as I'm calling my new uncensored cookbook of white-trash cuisine, featuring Husband's favorite "Bacon-Double-Cheese Meatloaf Before You Die," which guarantees a coronary occlusion.   As he says, "You only go around once." 

THE OTHER SIDE (She Gets All Philosophical)

After we reach a certain age in life, we wonder about our eventual (or not so eventual) disposition.  I tend to step "out of the box" so often that I entirely disappear on occasion, invisible and silent - like someone dead.  Now that I have lifted spirits with that blissful imagery, I must assert that my brain doesn't have a parking space for the concept of 'beginning."  While I began at conception, I was also present in the two cells that merged to make me.  By logical thinking, the potential "me" resided in many living cells before my time.  Pull that perspective back to all of humanity, and we are collectively carriers of all humans who have ever been and who will ever be.  So why are we so hateful to each other?

A Picture of Me Lost in the Big Blue Sky Realm

If beginnings are unfathomable, then endings are equally confounding.  To die, to end, to be extinguished in a flash of violence, or an eternity of diseased agony, seems a harsh price for the so-called beginning we experience and our mostly uneventful lives of varying length.  So, what of Heaven? 

When as a child I asked adults about the particulars of heaven, they featured a morosely insipid place where we had beautiful new bodies, sang hymns (on key unlike church), and praised God endlessly.  No trouble, no evil, no pain, no hunger, just low-key merriment in moderation (I concluded).  That might be fine and a preferable alternative to Hell, the infinite damnation and suffering place.  No pretty, no happy, no food, just Medieval torture.

A Picture of Me Lost in the Beauty of Sunrise Realm

Really?  Those are the options?  Then I choose the "no pain, no trouble" place, I guess.  The "it feels so good when it stops hurting" reasoning applies.  More importantly, looking forward to afterlife is waiting for something vaguely veiled in fog, while life (the ultimate gift) spills out of our container and true Heaven, ours to make, evaporates.  LIVE!

A Picture of Me Lost in Big Red Wild Trumpets

FRANK AND EMMA

The View from Our Mobile Home Love Nest

After our marriage in September of 1963, Husband and I settled into our pretty new mobile home at the very end of Waverly Lane.  Our neighbors were all older people, particularly our closest neighbors John and Alma as well as their adjacent residents, Frank and Emma.

Home of John and Alma (as it looks today)

Alma Made the Best Christmas Cookie Tin Imaginable

Both working, Husband and I slept in on weekends, sometimes waking up unnaturally to the harsh beckoning of Emma to Frank.  Either one or both  of them had a hearing problem because Emma had her volume fixed to reach Helen Keller.

After hearing his somewhat agitated muttering response, she would order the moving of shrubs - all of which must have been relocated many times.  It isn't difficult to see why he chose "Lighthouse Keeper" as his life's profession.

Home of Frank and Emma Taken Today

Frank and Emma were devout church goers and Saturday on Waverly Lane was devoted to hair-do preparation for Sunday's grand exhibition.  Emma was most ardently searching for perfect hair without a big price tag, and so my mother-in-law offered her amateur abilities as a favor.

On occasions when Mother-in-Law was away, I filled in for her with my humble skills as a hairdresser.  With Emma, you never quite got whether you did well or not.  She would gush compliments and then find fault - give a little, and take back a little.  I was alternately saying "thank you" and "oh, sorry."

There was definitely competition between the two neighbor ladies, as women can sometimes do.  Husband's girth increased as they outdid each other baking him treats.  If one invited us to dinner, the other would likely do the same.

Now sometimes when I awaken with a start, I could swear it was Emma calling, "Frank, Frank...," and I halfway expect to go to the window and see John, hat on, sleeves rolled, a cigar in the corner of his mouth, placidly hoeing his peas over near the silo.

The Back View from our Mobile Home Love Nest

Neighbor John's Pea Patch

(where blue-green vines, in double rows, with white blossoms thrived)

Time changes everything but our minds, still seeing and hearing the past in the present and thinking about, almost longing to see, those good people now gone.