The Corn Field or The case of the missing Jeff

Summer of 76'...........................That was one of the best summers of my life. Everyone has "that summer", that one carefree period when the stars aligned with God to give you the perfect season. Maybe it was the first summer you came home from the Army or college, the first Christmas you were married or took your children on their first vacation to the beach. Everyone is different, but for me it was the summer of 76'.

My parents and Grandparents were all living, healthy and happy. The economy was good and jobs were plentiful. The country was at peace and Skynrd was coming to Pittsburgh! Best of all I finally had my license and my first car, a 1970 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, THE PARTY WAGON!

The car never stopped moving all summer long. Cheap gas and Blue Ribbon beer flowed through that car like a river. The clank of beer cans rattled in the back seat and when the windows were rolled down so much smoke came out it looked like a Cheech & Chong movie! When your 16 you don't think about DUI's or worse. Your invisible and bulletproof. Old people died not anyone your age. It took the death of a trio of classmates to dispel that theory. But that summer I was still innocent.

It was the end of August and the Jefferson County Fair was operating in Smithfield. The plan was to go to the fair and meet my parents that night but the day was all mine.

My friend Jeff and I were a lesson in contrasts. One dark-one fair, one big-one thin, but we found enough in common to feel more like brothers then friends. He was to be my Best Man at my wedding later in life. We hopped in the Caddy and rode in to the noon day sun straight to the local bar. Now we knew we were under age, they knew we were under age, and we knew they knew we were under age, But the $20 dollar bill we layed on the bar was at least 21 years old so it was Okay.

Adults think that teenagers can't find places to drink or have sex if they are in the park, but what they don't realize is that all teenagers are brain damaged and are naturally devious, a deadly combination. Because they don't expect to see teenagers sitting at a pic-nic bench drinking a case of beer they don't even notice them. The same goes for sex in a car in broad daylight. Most adults drive by oblivious to the fact that that white thing bobbing around in the car they just drove past was their daughters ass! "Was she a good girl? Man, she was Fantastic Mr. Smith!"

After making a very unsuccessful attempt at ruining the morals and reputations of a couple of local girls that we really didn't want anybody to see us with, we finished off the case of PBR to save our ego's and convince each other that we really didn't want anything to do with the girls anyhow.

Now by this time Jeff and I are shit faced, not drunk, not intoxicated, SHIT FACED!! And he is acting like a nut. What am I going to do with him? I can't take him to the fair with me, My parents are going to kill me! So I tell him to straighten up or I'm going to kick him out of the car and I pull over next to a corn field out in the boonies. Jeff gets mad and jumps out of the car and I take off down the road. Now I thought that I would go down the road around the bend and wait awhile till he calmed down. Then I would go pick him up and go to the fair. Back down the road I go to the corn field. No Jeff. Up the road-Down the road. Back and forth. I'm calling his name out the window like he's a lost dog. Now it's dark and I got to go home. I think that he must have found a ride home.

The scene opens on a hung over, still drunk Jeff waking up in a ditch next to the corn field in the middle of the night. He falls down and looses his glasses. Screams & cusses for about a half an hour as he grubs threw the dirt till he finds them again. He stumbles out of the field like he's auditioning for a part in Children of the Corn and starts running. He doesn't know if he's running home or to California but he wants to get there fast. To this day he doesn't know who picked him up but someone takes him home.

So what is the moral of the story? Teenagers that do stupid things eventually grow up to be normal adults that sit around and laugh at their own stupidity as teenagers.

Also God seems to protect Drunks and Idiots.

Just ask my wife.

My Father, The Fonz!

My father was the original Fonzie! D-A haircut, leather jacket, hot rod car and the works. Early in life Dad left school and went to live with his brother in Cleveland to find work. High school held no interest or challenge for him. And even though he had no great love for his eldest brother, he went anyway. It was either that or work in the coal mines like his father. And that didn't hold much of a future.

His middle brother lived in the same area but didn't have the room to have him live at his trailer. It was one of those tiny, rounded, shiny 1950's trailers that must of been built from left over WW2 airplane parts. Now this brother had a garage and my Dad found that he had a natural ability to do body work. So after working at a factory all day my teenage father would go to the garage so his brother Frank could teach him body work.

Unfortunately Frank also taught him to appreciate scotch. "If your goin' to be a body man you got to learn to drink!"Frank told him. There was only one thing my father's family liked to do more then enjoy a tall beer and a short drink, and that is fight. Frank would take my Dad to the bars and have him start a fight just so Frank and his friends could finish it.

As he grew older the country boy turned into the Greaser. Brylcreame, the turned up collar and a car radio belting out a few Little Richard tunes. Then Dad met Mom. Dad met my mother at a bar where my aunt was the bartender. The first time Mom saw him my aunt was beating him with a broom for pouring a draft beer for his buddy. So don't always believe that first impressions are the best!

She wouldn't go out with him until he quit drinking. They dated, married, and were together till Mom past away. His brother Frank passed away in '63. Dad still tells me stories about the fights, bars, and cars. And for a few seconds I see him as he was then. Leather jacket, greased hair, and wilder then hell!

Vacation? What's a Vacation?

As I start my journey through the time of life that people with a sick sense of humor call MIDDLE AGE, though confidentially I don't see a lot of 100 year old men and woman walking down the street, I find myself growing nostalgic for the way things were when I was a child.
As I go through my work day I begin thinking more about my parents and my body feels more like my grandparents. So at the end of a long hot day I come home and follow a ritual that I have developed in the last few years. A ritual that comes to all middle aged men like the unstoppable desire to watch the Weather Channel and check the gas mileage of their car. Each night I cross out the next block on the calender and look longingly at the week that is marked out in red magic marker. VACATION!!
Now what is truly sad about the whole process is that I have begun to dread that week. When I was a kid my family would load up the car and hit the road for 2 weeks of middle class adventure. We would hit all the hot spots! Ruby Falls, Lookout Mountain, Luray Caverns, We even went to the exotic South of the Border and ate "real" Mexican food!
As a young kid I watched the whole of the Eastern United States fly past my side window at the then legal speed of 70 miles per hour, that was of course when my mother was awake. When she nodded off the big cruise control wheel that protruded out of the top of the 1960's Cadillac dash would strangely be rolled up to 90. After waking up one too many times to the eye level sight of a belt buckle attached to a state trooper, Mom made an effort to stay awake.
She always found a way to bring a little bit of education to me as we saw the sights. We toured plantations, walked the cobble stone streets of Colonial Willamsburgh, and saw Fort Sumter. At times I found it completely boring, but it wasn't until the next school year started and I was the only one that had actually seen the things that the history book was talking about that I realized how cool it actually was. (Thanks Mom)
Dad always liked the unusual side of travel. We went to alligator farms and Lion Country Safari and a hundred other tourist traps that I wouldn't have missed for the world. His Polaroid camera ate up film at a enormous rate and each evening was spent with the little sponge wiper and film coating that was needed to keep the pictures from fading. 40 Years latter we still have albums full of these pictures. (Thanks Dad)
Well to get back to my dilemma. The reason I dread my vacation is that somewhere in the past decades this leisurely wandering from motel to tourist cabin and slowly home again, has turned sour. It has become a frantic MOVE,MOVE, MOVE!!!! mad dash to your destination Get the hell out of the way!! I only have one week to relax and I'm not wasting any of it on that tourist crap!!! It has gone from 'Oh Great! The motel has a pool!" to "What the hell do you mean the hotel only has 6 Jacuzzis and 1 lazy river!! What a dump!" It has gone from the 30 unit motel you walked out the back door to the beach to the 20 story hotel that takes 25 minutes to get an elevator to the beach.
And forget the 2 week vacation, it has been condensed to a stress filled week that you manage to spend a month's wages on gas and hotel fees. And all the time you sit on the beach do you relax? Nope! You feel guilty for taking off the time and spending the money.
Take me back to a time when people were not so jaded and they were comfortable enough, wide eyed enough to enjoy a good road side tourist trap and were proud to cover their car's rear window with decals proclaiming to the world, like badges of honor, "I SAW RUBY FALLS!"

Christmas, The Semi-Holiday

I love Christmas. I really do!.......Well, I sort of love Christmas.

"Christmas has become so commercial" "It's just another day" " Christmas is for little kids"

Take your pick. I'm sure you have heard one of these phrases or maybe all of them. And they are all true and all wrong. When we were children Christmas time seemed to be the most magical time of the whole year. We would spend hours going through toy catalogs and browsing through the small toy ailes in the department stores making up our wish list to send to Santa. What free time we had in school was spent making Christmas decorations, singing carols, and practicing for the Christmas play. 30 ten year olds vainly attempting to sing on key and remember the words at the same time.

Then the big night finally arrived, CHRISTMAS EVE! There was always family dinners and visiting your parent's friend's homes. The smell of pine trees being dried out by 200 degree Christmas lights filled the air, slowly mixing with the smell of Black Label Beer as Dean Martin sang Christmas Blues on the Hi-Fi.
Eventually you would go home, Head buzzing from too much Christmas candy and the couple swallows of beer that your dad would sneak to you before your mom saw and gave him hell. And some how you would fall asleep. Now any other morning you would sleep till late in the day if your parents didn't threaten you to get out of bed, but on Christmas morning there is a special and seldom used alarm button in kids heads that would bring them out of a sound sugar coma at the crack of dawn.

And so you would start your rampage through layers of gift wrap and yards of ribbon to find your treasures. All morning you would play with your new toys as your parents exchanged their gifts. The same gifts they had told each other they didn't need and didn't expect. After you ate and dressed you would grab this years favorite toy and climb into the back of the car to visit the grandparents and family where if you were lucky you would open more presents, though grandparents never seemed to get the idea that Christmas gifts should be fun....not practical.

After a long day you would goto bed happy and exhausted. For the next week or so you would play with your new toys and visit the neighbor kids and see what Santa had brought them. Finally you went back to school and did the same thing with your friends.

Now, where is all this going your probably wondering? Well the fact is that Christmas as an adult SUCKS! And WE are the ones that make it that way! We kill ourselves working like mad to make the extra money we think we need to buy presents. We spend every spare minute at the mall up to and including Christmas Eve. On Christmas day if you are a male and the Dad of the family. You are elected to be the toy version of General Motors. You cut apart & assemble hundreds of small plastic pieces while following a set of instructions that were translated from Chinese and a lot was lost in the translation. And then there are the damn decals! Hundreds of them! I swear if I ever meet a graphic designer from Mattel I am so going to kick his ass!
The 26th you go back to work or if you are really unlucky to return things to the store. And Going to the mall is just what you want to do after spending the last 24 days there.

Possibly one of the most irritating Christmas carols ever written is the 12 Days of Christmas. But there is a lesson to be learned here. The world that the song describes is several hundred years ago and they would at that time celebrate Christmas for 12 days. Think about this. 12 days when you could relax and talk to your friends and family. 12 days to slow down and take stock of your life as you head into a new year. 12 days to say thanks to God for allowing you to make it through the past year and to ask him for a little guidance in the next year.

12 Days. Isn't that what we did when we were children? Maybe the magic isn't all gone. Maybe in our instant access, minute rice world we forgot that Christmas magic just takes a little more time.
Merry Christmas!!

Who Took My Country!

Once upon a time in Land called America, boys and girls were taught by their mothers and teachers that if they worked hard, played fair and obeyed the law, they would live long happy lives.

The freedoms that we enjoyed were won for us all by the fighting men of the army and navy. And only the Godless Communists could not trust their governments. Only the Reds spied on their citizens or arrested them without just cause.

The Communist system was doomed to fail because the citizens of these countries did not own anything, everything belonged to the state and no matter how hard you worked you could not get ahead. Men and women risked their lives to get to America, to enjoy the freedoms we had. To raise a family and own a home for the whole world knew that an American man's home was his castle.

That was then.....................

What the Hell Happened to My Country!!! Who stole it?? This is MY country and I am sick of politician and a million special interest groups stealing and warping my freedoms. I will defend my land and my country with my heart and sole, but where did we go off the rails?

Today, Thanks to our Supreme court, read that as Republican court, most of the rights that we have taken for granted for two hundred years are slowly being legislated out of existence or at least weakened to the point of being useless. Each of the Rights contained in the Bill of Rights are under attack by one group or another.

Many of these assaults can be gathered together under a banner that reads " The Patriot Act".
Essentially this one law suspends most of the Bill of Rights as the government or King George desires. If they don't have a law that has been broken then the Patriot Act can cover any of their actions against any citizen. Wire taps, reading of your mail, and back ground checks are all becoming common place. (Can you say KGB!)

American politicians are getting fat in deals with major corporations by issuing laws that allow American jobs to be out sourced to cheap foreign labor in other countries. They have recently put through a bill to raise the minimum wage. But in order to get that through they traded major tax breaks for the rich.

Every evening the newspapers and the television news tells us how wonderfully the American economy is doing. Well fellas if a company lays off 30,000 men and shows a great profit this quarter that does NOT mean that the economy is doing great!

You want to know how the economy is doing? Use this method:

1. Go to Walmart and count the cars in the parking lot. Every car you see in that vast asphalt waste land is owned by an American worker struggling to make his paycheck stretch out enough to be able to fill his gas tank and get back to his job with no benefits.

2. Go to the mall down the street, get a $4.00 cup of coffee from Starbucks and sit for a few hours. Now count the people walking past you. Subtract from that the number of people that you see actually carrying a package that they bought in the mall. If the answer is larger then the second number then THINGS AIN'T SO FRICKIN" GOOD!

As far as a man's house being his castle, well he might find today that his castle is turned into a White Castle thanks to the Republican's courts ruling on eminent domain. Ranchers in the old west fought the elements, wild Indians, and rustlers to keep their land but their great grand children are finding that they are being out cut off at the pass by Heavenly Ham and Denny's. If a developer wants your property and has enough Bull Shit to convince the local government that they could build condos and strip malls that would bring in more taxes then your home or business does at the moment, they can declare eminent domain and force you to sell to the developer. Basically you are a tenant on the property and some one else has the right to decide if you will sell your property.

When I was a child adults told us about the conditions in the Soviet Union. Very little freedom, no property rights, secret police, people being imprisoned for being an enemy of the state. Today it feels just a little to familiar. At least they had job security, a pension, and health care.

Who Took My Country!

Human Spirit

Writers are very fond of writing about the human spirit. They claim that all the good and bad thoughts of mankind can be condensed and filed into two neat piles. Yin & Yang. You probably would recognize them. They look like two tadpoles curled up together, one white & one black.

Yin and Yang just doesn't sound American to me so I've created a third. I call it Y'ALL, The all American spirit! Y'ALL has an American slant in the way it looks at life. For example:

Yin says that America had over 20,000 murders last year because we lack understanding. Yang said it was because Americans are immature. Y'ALL says the reason that there were 20,000 murders in America last year is we take a Hell of a lot less crap off people then anyone else in the world!

Yin reads the obituaries and says that they went to a better place. Yang reads the obituaries and says at least they aren't suffering anymore. Y'all reads the obituaries and yells out "Hell yeah! It's about time somebody I know got in the paper!"

Yin reads about the poor Iraqi's dieing in Iraq and thinks we should all just get along. Yang says it's a shame that we have this war but we must catch the rebels. Y'ALL says screw it! Kill 'em all! Let God sort 'em out!


Yin reads the paper and says the President is an idiot. Yang watches the news and says the President is a fool. Y"ALL says the President is a boob without a nipple.

Well I guess some things everyone can agree with.

To be an immortal

March can be the most female of all the months of the year in our valley. She is forever changing her mind, one day warm and inviting, the next cold and frosty. But this past week she smiled on us, the sun came out and the wind blew warm. The kind of day that is made for old men to sit in dirty lawn chairs, their faces turned up to the light and dogs to lay groaning on the warmest section of the sidewalk. It was a mild winter and I knew that the weather would not last because March is a tease unlike her sister April, so I decided to go for a drive.

Taking a short cut down an old farm lane I noticed a bright green clump of plants set in the middle of the winter killed weeds. I stopped the truck and made my way to the edge of the ditch that bordered the dirt road. Buried in the weeds was the remains of an old farm house that had long ago fell in upon it's self. Even houses are subject to the laws of gravity. Next to the old porch the green leaves of daffodils had caught my eye.

How many times had these flowers bloomed in their life time? Who planted them? When did they plant them? Some people believe that immortality is having kids. That as long as your children live, a part of you lives too. Others believe that it our accomplishments that give us a measure of immortality. That our deeds and sins live long after we have past beyond the veil.

All people understand directions. We all have the normal directions, up, down, left, right, North, South, East, and West. But in the valley where I live we have directions that only the locals would understand. We have up river, down river ( not to be confused with down the crick) , up the hill, down the hill, and up over the hill. In my little town, over the hill, there is a lumpy old football field. The last remaining evidence that once upon a time this town had a high school with a football team. The goal posts have long since disappeared and the concrete stadium is slowly crumbling into the ground. The only living things to enjoy the view from the top seats are poison ivy vines and the mice that live under them.

At the far end of the field is a lone brick wall that has no use except to hold a chipped white marble tablet that was dedicated to a favorite teacher by the class of 1960 whatever. Buried in the uncut grass there is a final faded line, "You will be remembered forever" So much for deeds.

I believe that immotality was found by the farmer's wife that planted the Daffodil bulbs long ago. The pride that was felt for the farm and the love of the land is forgotten. The barn is gone, the house and the generations that lived and died in it are gone. The hard winters, hot summers, struggles to to make ends meet have all disappeared. But the faith in the promise held by those bulbs and the faith of a simple woman still grow. Every spring her hopes push their way up through the soil to meet the sun and prove to the world she was there. Her labors still bring beauty into the world. That is true immortality.