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.