Month: October 2018

I guess by the end of  November in 2020, I will know if I’m going to have to put in a wood stove for heat, break out my shotgun for deer hunting, and my .22 for squirrels.

I’ll know if I’m gonna need to get my fishing rod and gear out to go down to  Chickamauga creek to fish for bream, bass and catfish. I’ll break into my stored up pinto beans, buy me some laying hens to go in the woods behind my yard, like the local country folks do. I’ll know it’s gonna be a hard candy Christmas, and a sad New year.

I’ll come up with enough to pay for food and gas if I can, but the rest of them can see “Helen Waite” who works in the complaint department, cause if they don’t like it cause they ain’t gettin paid….. they can go to “Helen Waite”

First person that comes near my yard with anything on which resembles a uniform, or with a look of bad intent gets both my mean little wienie dogs sic’d on em.

I don’t get blind mad about much, but not getting paid, or having my Social Security and Medicare cut is one of the things that’ll do it. I might survive without them, but if I have to start being thataway it’s gonna be hard to go back to being my kind upstanding self.

Nuff said, I reckon.

When you look at people who are mean, or mean spirited, you have to wonder…why?
Mean, as an adjective is defined as follows:
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Mean
mēn/
adjective
adjective: mean; comparative adjective: meaner; superlative adjective: meanest
1.
unwilling to give or share things, especially money; not generous.
“she felt mean not giving a tip”
synonyms: miserly, niggardly, close-fisted, parsimonious, penny-pinching, cheeseparing, Scroogelike; More
informal, tightfisted, stingy, tight, mingy, money-grubbing, cheap;
formal-penurious
“he’s too mean to leave a tip”h
antonyms: generous, munificent
2.
unkind, spiteful, or unfair.
“it was very mean of me”
synonyms: unkind, nasty, unpleasant, spiteful, malicious, unfair, cruel, shabby, foul, despicable, contemptible, obnoxious, vile, odious, loathsome, base, low; More
informal, horrible, horrid, hateful, rotten, lowdown;
beastly
“a mean trick”
antonyms: kind
NORTH AMERICAN:
vicious or aggressive in behavior.
“the dogs were considered mean”
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That’s a lot to take in I know. The actual thing about a person being mean, as opposed to being kind is that for the most part…it’s a conscious choice to be mean. People actually know it most of the time when they are being mean. At the very least, they highly suspect it, but don’t care.
As long as you’re not being mean to your own particular “group, clik, or associates” …well that makes it ok, doesn’t it? It’s ok to be mean to those who don’t look like you, think like you, act like you, are beneath your social class, are not as educated as you, or with whom you generally just don’t have anything in common.
It doesn’t count if you’re just a little bit mean to them.
It’s just my opinion, but I think it’s the one thing which is the most wrong with our country and our world.
I’ve been guilty of being mean. We all have. But I think more and more how much easier it is just to be kind. I want to try harder not to be mean.
It’s certainly a battle we all have to fight every day.
But I think it’s worth it. I think the world would be better for it.

The Ghost.

The ghost always seems to come upon me when my eyes, unwilling to close in sleep, because after all there are only so many hours left, and as my Grandma said “I’ll catch up on my sleep when I die” but yes the ghost comes drifting in like smoke off a cigarette into my sleepy eyes. It’s not insomnia, just the unwillingness to give in to the “the little death”

It looks like I would have been a drinker, and could have mellowed out and drifted off because after all the drink is in my blood something fierce, but I never give into it, never even finishing the samples they dole out at Olive Garden. I was drunk a couple of times in my early youthful days and just hated it, detested the loss of control while all the while knowing I was the fool.

So I write, I peck away. Trying to coax and coach myself into thinking of something worth saying because after all a writer defeats nothing more than an empty page or a blank line at the top of the page saying “what’s on your mind?” Well damn plenty is on my mind, but half nobody would want to hear and the other 50% just trivial. So I very much wish to wake up tomorrow after sleeping oh so gently to find this device laying on my chest in bed again with the cover open, hunting for something to fill the blank page, and to frighten the ghost away.

I was raised with bare incandescent lightbulbs in fixtures that had little chains affixed to them. You had to pull the chain to turn the lights on and off. If one of them stayed on a while and you touched it, woe unto you. A burned finger might be the outcome.

I remember my Mother’s first washing machine. The tub was automatic, and it ran off electricity, but you had to put the clothes through the top part to wring the water out by hand, turning the crank. Mom hung the clothes out on a clothesline using wooden clothespins to keep them up. I loved the smell of the clothes on the line as the breeze shimmied by, the faint odor of bleach on the white bedsheets, accentuated by the warm sun.

I used to listen every afternoon at four o’ clock for the giant air whistle at the mill to loudly signal that first shift was over, and then I’d run out and look down sixth street, watching for Daddy to come walking up that hill towards home. Most of the time to sit down at our little round, Formica top table to a meal of pintos, fried taters and cornbread.

I think now, I’m glad I was there then, at that time and that place with those people. I think now, I’m so lucky to have subsequently found the other friends and family with whom I have shared this life. Every direction in which I have turned there has always been someone there for me….with me.

I think now, there are still memories to be made and happiness to be shared. New relationships to nurture, and different paths to walk. There is always change. That’s the one thing you can count on.

If my life were a pond of water, being fed by the stream of time and my mistakes and sins were like pebbles hitting the water…then the ripples would never cease. I believe in the forgiveness of our maker for our trespasses, because if it were not so I could not live with myself.

I think of my poor Mom tonight and her lifelong battle with mental illness, and how I failed often to understand what to do. I was angry at times when I should have been serene. I was short sometimes when I should have stayed silent. I lived with the disguise which the disease enveloped her in, and battled it..forgetting at times the frail human inside. How can one be so unfeeling I wonder? Was it the shell I built around myself from the time I was eight years old, and that first breakdown happened? “His Momma is crazy!” They would whisper behind my back. They all knew it. They had heard about her running down the street, calling out after me for help that day I walked to school. Begging me, the little boy to help her, the adult. And the time at Milledgeville…the trips out and back. The fear of loss, the relief of temporary reunion, and the agony of leaving. Every weekend for eight weeks

Mom made a comeback. It was long and hard. Just that simple. Long and hard, with a life filled with powerful medications and several more breakdowns. She loved us, and we knew it, but we endured some sorrow. I could never completely understand the dark places where her sickness took her. I am sure she could not either. She was very strong in truth, to be able to keep those shadows away, where many would have given in to it. She kept her sanity through sheer force of will and the need to be with her family.

Momma didn’t deserve the hand she was dealt. She didn’t ask for it, and at times didn’t handle it well. I understand now though, at this age, how easy it would be to feel sorry for yourself.

So tonight I grieve a little.

I grieve for such an early loss of innocence for two little boys. I grieve for the loss of time for a Mother with her children. I don’t write this for sympathy, or to be lauded. To be truthful, most people know none of this, and it might be better if no one ever did. I’m writing it for myself, for my own sanity and for complete disclosure of the fact that many, many pebbles went into my pond because of this. And to expunge some of the guilt I still feel and forever will feel.

My Mom’s name was Evia Bowers, and she lived to be 82 years old and died with her two son’s holding her hands, and the rest of her family in the room in 2010. She was in this world, and she did the best she could with the hand she was dealt. Just wanted you to know.