hombre horible.

I was moved to tears twice this weekend. Well once Friday morning and once Sunday afternoon.
I'll stat with the pleasant one. I held a baby that was less than 24 hours old. A squashed up hideous thing. She belongs to one of my crew. Over the years I been the first non-family member to hold 12 newborns. It always gets me.
I will do the Family Leave paperwork and send the woman on her way and usually within the week I get an excited phone call in rapid Spanish about the new baby. I'll swing by Target and get a couple of ones-es and a stuffed animal and then swing by Publix for a fruit tray the next day and head over to the Hospital at lunch. Then I'm holding a squashed up red new person and crying.
It's the complete innocent look on the babies face and knowing what's coming that bothers me. The horror of potty training just snowballs into school, dating, jobs and on and on.
Then it's back to work!
Friday's boo hoo session was a horse of a different color. Another woman on my crew to see me alone. As soon as the office door closed she started crying and begging for 2 days off to take her daughter to the hospital for some tests. I said "No problem, sweety, you can have all the time you need. Get the test done so you can figure out what is wrong." Then she started in on how wonderful I am and she was so sorry that her daughter's illness was keeping her out of work so much lately. She apologized for taking the poor thing to the Doctor.
I had to stop her and tell her the truth. "I am the worst son of a bitch you will ever meet." After she left I shed a tear or two with the door locked. How bad can life be when you look up to some one because he did not fire you for getting a 3 year old medical care? How horrible must it be when the person who gave you a 3% raise takes on a paternalistic roll?

I'm Back again.

Technology and my lifestyle aren't a good match.

I made up a name for an old friend who died in the early '90's. Ed King. I was driving and saw two stores that had the two names and voile' Ed King has an assumed name.

Ed was a very careful man. He was also the only person I've ever met who died under mysterious circumstances.

Ed was missing three months before he was found in the Talladega National Forrest that he loved so well. He was an outdoors-men's outdoors-men. He was the same generation as my Grandfather and I never saw either one out of Khaki's. Ed was very careful because as a kid he had lost most of his left ear to a water moccasin. In the Navy in WWII he lost two fingers to frost bite and a big chunk of calve muscle to another snake bite.

He always carried a sawed-off 410 shotgun. It was a single shot breach loader with a home made pistol grip and a mini flash light duct taped to the fore-stock. When I say he carried it, I mean in his hand everywhere. He lived in a little town outside of Monroe and everybody knew him, and nobody noticed the shotgun anymore. I saw him go in a Bank and a Liquor store with a sawed off shotgun in his hand and nobody batted an eye.

Once Ed, My Grandfather and Me were in a John-boat fishing. Ed was working the little electric motor in back, My Grandfather was working about 15 poles in the middle and I was taking fish off the lines and re-baiting and the most important job of passing back beer from the cooler. I was an over worked preteen.

We were pulling in a ton of crappie and they were drinking a ton of beer and I was thinking I would get to drive home. As they say in all the books, SUDDENLY the afternoon was ripped apart by Ed's .410. Having lost big parts of his body to snake's Ed had a shoot first and ask questions later outlook on life. But right after the shot something fell out of a nearby tree and sank. I pissed myself almost simultaneously to the little guns blast. I was 11 after all.

Ed reloaded in the blink of an eye and asked for another beer.

I jumped in the lake and washed myself off and spent the rest of the afternoon naked with my clothes laid out drying, taking fish off the hook and passing beer back from the cooler. Once my Grandfather caught the seventy five crappie that was our boat limit and a couple of big catfish we turned the boat toward the dock and I got dressed.

Ed explained that you saw off a shot gun so you get a bigger shot spread real fast from the end of the barrel. The power is lost after a few yards. He used a .410 so he could sit in one end of his aluminum John-boat and not blow a hole in the other end. He said he carried to church and check under his pew until they asked him to leave it at home. He decided that God was everywhere and easier to find on the end of a fishing pole.I get very melancholy when I think that no one talks to kids that way any more.

I was 11 and did drive home. I was always driving my Grandfather and his friends home.

Oh, Ed's death. It wasn't strange to me he died in the woods. He was closing in on 80 and drank and smoked like a Sailor on leave. Come to think of it, he pretty much lived his life like a Sailor on leave after he survived destroyer duty in the Pacific during WWII.