Michelle was riding the other morn when she noticed a large fish flopping
in the grass.
After the rain of the past week he had gotten stranded and now was
on his side and if asphyxiation didn’t get him that day, a coon would get him that
night. Michelle fetched a bucket,
managed to get him in, then took him to a nearby arm of deep, brackish water. He eventually swam away. He was a large freshwater blue gill, maybe a
pound or more. And BTW: I am so proud of my good-hearted wife.
I performed a similar act once. I
saved a large carp. He had gotten stranded
in a bean field after a small creek had flooded at my father-in-law’s farm back
on the Kansas-Missouri border. As I’ve
learned, fish are the ultimate wanderers and they will explore virtually
anywhere if only a trickle of water allows it.
In this case, after the water rapidly receded, the poor carp was left hanging
out there to dry, literally, in the field, to slop and flop impotently in the brown
mud. I saw this from the house and
walked down the steep hill to rescue him.
As I mucked through the mud and made ready to toss him back into the now
tiny creek, my father-in-law boomed from afar, “Mike, bring him back here. We’ll have him for supper tonight. Mike, no, don’t do that! Bring him up and we’ll eat him tonight. Mike, no. . . . Oh, why did you do that?”
The carp was back home where he would be safe until the next little
flood and his next opportunity to run aground again in a Kansas farm
field.
BTW—There was no chance my father-in-law would be mad at me very
long. We were buddies. We did everything together when my first wife
and I went up there for weekend visits.
Claude Ronald Eads was an ex-Navy man, about average height but rotund
and always out of breath. He had served
in the Pacific War and had gotten his lungs scorched during a fire aboard a
flattop. Kamikaze attack, I think. Later, with nautical tattoos on forearms, Claude
was a tug boat captain in Japan. Still
later, he was a Navy recruiter and womanizer for years throughout the Midwest. Claude loved the water. Even in Kansas he found ways to indulge. When we went fishing on ponds he always had
to put his little two-man electric motor boat in, even if the puddle was so
small that one could easily cast a line clean across it. He just had to float his boat on water.
Claude loved to belly laugh long and loud at stale or corny jokes but he
was terrible at telling them himself and often forgot how they went. Nevertheless, he persisted. He also loved to watch TV on Saturday nights
and those dreadful live wrestling matches that emanated from St. Joe,
Missouri. He loved to bellow and rage at
something that angered him but he was over it in a minute and with a laugh he
returned to the genuine softy that he was.
Despite his sometimes gruff, hard-shell exterior, Claude was really a
weak man inside, and we all knew it. One
time he openly sobbed to his daughter and me as he pounded a wall complaining
about being nagged and bossed like a fool by his wife. As a child he suffered from what passed for discipline
back then—severe beatings and long hours locked in dark sheds. I have seen photos of Claude as a kid and
indeed, there is a rather haunted and hurting look on his handsome young face.
I do believe that I loved Claude about as much as any person or pet in
my life. Although he died nearly thirty
years ago of lung cancer, emphysema and complications from his war wounds, I
miss the man to this very day.
___________________________________________
Up Pensacola way, a young woman was spotted shoplifting wholesale from
Dillards. When the thief reached the parking lot and her car brimming with kids
she was suddenly surrounded by cops, one pointing a Buck Rogers Stun Gun,
though in the dark it looked like a pistol.
“You will have to shoot through the baby to get me,” said the desperate
woman as she grabbed one child still in its car seat. When that failed, the woman flung the
rock-a-bye baby, cradle and all, at a cop, then fled for it.
This gal was caught of course.
And what can one say? What can
one say? She’s a bad mother? Yeah, okay, that goes without saying. Drugs made her do it? That also goes without saying. It just wasn’t a good day? That’s an easy call too. But what of it? What about this young woman before drugs made
her a bad mother making bad decisions on a bad day? Back then, before this all happened, she must
have been a decent, normal person of sorts or she would not even have had
kids to begin with. Had she been a
terrible person back then she would have been in prison and that would have
been all the natural birth control necessary.
No need for pills, or IUDs, or abortions.
So it would seem the awful slide began well after the kids came. Such a pity.
I have no answer; at least no answer that sounds smart in thirty seconds of thinking. Sorry to take you
down a rabbit trail like that, but sometimes life, like this woman, seems to
have no meaning to it; no purpose, no explanation . . . no hope.
___________________________________________
Meanwhile down the coast a few at Ft. Myers, Donna Lynn Brown was
totally hammered one night not long ago.
How hammered was Donna? Well, lovely
lady Donna Lynn was so loaded that when she made a sudden u-turn on busy US 41
in her SUV, she didn’t even realize that she had just run over a man on his
motorcycle. Indeed, Ms. Brown, age 55,
was so plumb plastered that despite the noise, screams, sparks, and trailing smoke,
she just continued on her drunken way oblivious to all the flashing high beams
and horn honks from passersby as she dragged the man to death down below. It was only after three miles and five
minutes, and with her vehicle engulfed in flames, that the lady was finally
pulled over by cops.
The fire was put out, Donna was hauled away, and, of course, there was
almost nothing left of fifty-four-year-old Carl Patrick and his Harley except some
sizzle and steam from what looked like a large burnt steak. They might as well have just scrapped up Carl
and his beloved bike and planted ‘em together since man and machine were melded
into a solid blackened mess, one and inseparable.
And as for dear drunken Donna? After
posting bond, she was out of the can in a jiff; out and back at her favorite bar
almost before the last bits and pieces of Carl had been hosed off the
road.
