Outlaw Chickens

  The Lady of the House and I once had “outlaw chickens.”

  They were outlaw chickens because we kept them in our back yard in the city limits where you weren’t supposed to have chickens.

  Now chickens weren’t totally banned in our little ol’ New Mexico town.  If you lived south of the rail yard near the livestock auction house you could have a few in your yard, but God forbid NOT north of the rail yard.

  The Lady of the House loves fresh eggs and that was her whole point of having the hens in our back yard.

  People are funny about chickens.  Got a neighbor whose dogs bark non-stop?  Got loud music in th’ hood?  Have a war zone of fireworks around the 4^th of July?  Stuff like this often is tolerated.  But put a rooster in your backyard and John Law will be breathing down your neck to get rid of it in short order.

  I reckon chickens present a threat to folks who are all about image and stuff, probably afraid their property values will go down, I don’t know.

  Some folks tried to get chickens allowed in the city limits a few months ago.  For a few weeks it looked like it would be allowed then some skinflint, or maybe it was a few of them, bitched to city commissioners and the idea went swirling down the toilet of politics.

  Outlaw chickens ain’t no big deal….as long as your neighbors don’t care or animal control doesn’t come a-callin’.

  It never made sense to me that chickens were outlawed…I mean we live in “The Golden West” with all of it’s wide open space and stuff.

  “The Girls,” as we called the two hens Ethel and Lucy, gave us really great eggs and manure for the organic garden.

  We started out with three chicks from the old feed store on the east side of town. We were assured they were all hens.  So we named them Ethel, Lucy and Henrietta.

  We watched them grow.  Kept a heat lamp out with them when they graduated from a big cage in the house to a small area of the back yard.  Months later we set them loose in their own big chicken yard complete with a coop that The Lady of the House built.

  One morning as I was getting ready for work I heard a noise like a squeaky chair, but then not quite like a squeaky chair.

  “Aw-ahh.”

  This was like 430 in the morning so I thought our big ol’ 20 pound cat Tom had jumped down from our rocking recliner.

  “Aw-ahh.”

  There it was again.

  I looked at the chair I thought was making the noise.

  Nothing.

  “Aw-ahh.”

  Where was that noise coming from?

  I stood in the kitchen and waited for the next noise.

  “Aw-ahh.”

  It was coming from OUTSIDE.

  “Aw-ahh.”

  I stepped out on the back porch.  It was a foggy spring morning.  Standing out in the middle of the chicken yard was Henrietta in all of “her” glorious white feathers.  “She” stretched out her neck….

  “Aw-ahh.”

  Well Henrietta was a crowing hen…I thought.  After all, my grandmother had once told me a little ditty:  “A whistling girl and a crowing hen both come to the same bad end,” so I figured there was such a thing.

  That wasn’t what was going on.

  Henrietta was a Henry.  And Henry was “getting his pipes,” firing up his crowing on that foggy spring morning.  It also explained why Henry had always been such a bossy chicken.

  As it turns out a co-worker knew of a farm that would welcome Henry and they did.  For a year or two after we sent Henry away I would see him out there as I passed by occasionally, a huge white rooster out in the farm yard.

  That left us with Lucy and Ethel, named in honor of that famous television redhead and her pal.

  Once The Girls started laying eggs The lady of the House was overjoyed.  When she fried up the first ones she called me over to the frying pan.

  “Look at these glorious eggs,” she said.  “See how the yolk is a deep, rich orange color and how the yolk sits up high?  Now THAT’S an egg!”

  This was what was at the heart of having outlaw chickens…The Lady of the House wanted eggs that she KNEW came from cage-free hens, hens who were allowed to roam around.

  Lucy was kind of shy but Ethel liked to have her back scratched. She would’ve made a good pet but I’ve heard that chickens don’t use litter boxes.  I’d walk up to Ethel, start scratching her back and then she’d stomp her little feet and hunker down close to the ground while I rubbed her feathers.

  Ethel also liked to fly.  I never actually saw her fly but there would be times I’d find her outside the fence of the chicken yard.

  Because some people say chicken’s aren’t the sharpest thinkers in the bird world I imagined that Ethel just started flapping her wings, lifted off and moved her head around as if saying, “What’s going on?  What’s happening?  Where am I going?”

  This happened one time when The Lady of the House and I were off on vacation.  We found a High Plains debutante to house sit for us. 

  One evening we got a call….

  “One of the chickens is out,” reported The Debutante to The Lady of the House.

  “Just pick her up and put her back in the pen,” said The Lady of the House.

  There was a long silence on the line.

  “It won’t attack me?” asked The Debutante.

  Everything turned out okay because when we got back from vacation both of The Girls were in their yard.

  All good things come to an end. So it was with outlaw chickens.

  Over time the chicken feed attracted a flock of sparrows that chowed down on Lucy and Ethel’s feed.  Soon we had a flock of super-sized sparrows that made our backyard their messy home.  

  A year after we got them we shipped Lucy and Ethel off to a guy outside of town who was seriously impressed at how big our two “girls” were.

  After that I’d look at the empty chicken yard and get a little sad.

  An empty chicken coop.  A big pile of chicken manure.

  The next year we spread our bumper crop of chicken manure all over the garden. Part of what we fed “The Girls” were the leftovers of store-bought watermelons and homegrown tomatoes.

“Volunteer” tomato and watermelon plants popped up all over the garden patch that year, a parting gift from Ethel and Lucy.

  We let some of them grow.

  The watermelons didn’t do so well, but then we’ve never had much luck with watermelons.

  But the tomatoes were pretty good.

  I didn’t spend too much time thinking about the plant’s origin…from a chicken butt.

  But then I do eat eggs, and you know where they come from.......

Duck, Cover and Kiss Your Butt Goodbye

  I grew up in a time when they told us "If you hear the air raid siren get under your desk and cover your head."  The idea was if The Russians nuked us we'd be protected.  

Um, yeah...about that.

  

  The Russian President was in the news a few days ago.  He announced that his country now had a new generation of “super nukes,” missiles that are so fast that interceptors are useless against them, undersea nuclear tipped drones that can travel fast and undetected to their target and long-range cruise missiles that can deliver their atomic payload accurately.

  “Sure,” I yelled at the TV, “Let’s blow up the passengers in one section of the spaceship, it won’t hurt the rest of us at all.”

  The Lady of the House put down her knitting.

  “What are you on about now?” she said.

  “Here we are in the future and we’re still coming up with new and creative ways to blow us all to hell,” I said.  “Doesn’t anyone appreciate where we are, how cool it is that we zip around the cosmos on this organic spaceship…this planet we live on?  We should just appreciate where we are and live in harmony.  But I ain’t stupid, I know how the world is.”

  “Oh, this Russian nuke stuff bothers you,” said The Lady of the House.  “That’s right, you went through all that ‘duck and cover’ stuff when you were a kid.”

 “You didn’t?”

  “Nope,” said The Lady of the House. 

  “You’re saying that because we had these atom bomb drills in school and you didn’t that that’s why nukes bother me.”

  “Exactly,” she said, returning to her knitting.

  The Lady of the House was referring to a time in America long ago and far away when we used to have nuke drills.  I thought it was across the land but as time has gone on I’ve come to believe the government carried out these drills in areas that were considered targets…or…some local governments saw no need to practice such a drill because if your town got hit by a Russian nuke you were going to die anyway.

  But “they” didn’t tell us that.

  The first drill I remember was when I was an itty bitty boy living in a big ol’ hotel in downtown Buffalo, New York.

  The air raid siren would go off and even though I was itty bitty somehow I knew the streets were supposed to be cleared and you were supposed to pull your shades down.

  The pulling the shades down thing was so that the flash of the atomic bomb wouldn’t ignite your draperies or furniture.

  I was too young to know that this stuff didn’t matter because if there WAS a flash just a few moments after that you’d be blown to smithereens.

  I think my mom knew this.  Mom was practical like that.

  Mom was never in any hurry to participate in the air raid drills in Buffalo.

  These things usually happened while my dad was at work and my brother and sister were in school.  It was just mom and me in our hotel apartment.

  “Mommy!” I’d yell.  “We have to close our drapes, the man on TV said that.” 

  “You go ahead, honey,” she’d say from the kitchen as the air raid sirens wailed outside.

  I’d go from window to window and lower the Venetian blinds.

  Then I’d peek outside.

  You weren’t supposed to do that.

  I imagined that there was someone watching somewhere who, if they saw me peeking out the window, made a phone call and the police would come and scold me for looking out the window during an atomic bomb air raid.

  Anyway I’d be looking out the window and there I’d see a lone vehicle driving down the boulevard several stories below where we lived.

  “Mommy!” I’d yell out, “There’s a car driving down the street.”

  “That’s not our concern,” she’d say from the kitchen.

  “Well, THAT’S WRONG,” I’d say.

  “Yes dear, I know,” she’d say, “But it’s not our concern.”

  Then the “all clear” siren would go off and I’d go around the apartment and pull up the blinds.

  “Mommy, I pulled open the blinds.”

  “That’s nice dear.”

  Then we moved to Hawai’i and air raid drills were part of school.

  “Now class,” said my teacher.  “When you hear the air raid siren go off you are to get under your desk and put your head between your knees.  Then wait for the ‘all clear’ siren.”

  Years in the future in college we would talk about the “duck and cover” drills and the preposterousness of thinking that if you got under your desk it would protect you from an atomic blast.

  “Seems like all our teachers forgot one thing,” said one snarky guy at the university.  “After you put your head between your knees you were supposed to kiss your ass goodbye.”

  When the family moved back to the states I don’t remember going through air raid drills in school in Virginia.  I never gave it much thought until recently when it occurred to me that maybe our city in the Blue Ridge Mountains wasn’t a strategic target.

  Buffalo might’ve been as probably a lot of the northeast for manufacturing and such.  Hawai’I for the naval base at Pearl Harbor, but our mountain city?  Probably not.

  The atomic bomb was real to me.

  There was that time while living in Hawai’i that the family was a-buzz about going to the beach in the middle of the night to watch an A-bomb test.

  I was just a kid but I understood that the blast would be about a thousand miles away.

  I went to bed.

  Next thing I knew my big brother was rousting me from a sound sleep and I was on the beach with the family and hundreds of other people.  Must’ve been 2 or 3 in the morning.

  Not long after I woke up there were “oohs” and “aahs” from the assembled multitude as the sky turned green in various hues and waves.

  I went back to sleep.

  It was good I was a kid.

  If I was older or smarter it might’ve occurred to me that hiding under a desk wasn’t going to protect you from something that could change the color of the sky from a thousand miles away.

My Introduction to Billy Graham

  Billy Graham died the other day.  He was 99 years old.

  The thing that struck me about Graham was he didn’t seem to be mean-spirited like some preachers on the national stage (like the late Jerry Falwell) or huckster-ish like some preacher-dudes on the TV (like Jim whathisname with the crying wife and eye make-up streaming down her face).  Graham seemed to me to be a man of faith.

  But in the hours after his death, and I do mean hours not days, in the hours after his death news reports started coming out that he was an angry dude behind the scenes, that he didn’t like these people or that group or whatever.

  NBC news ran a story that alleged that Graham lead the pack back in the mid-20^th century allegedly when American Protestantism’s focus switched from the teachings of Jesus to the teachings of Jesus PLUS a heapin’ helpin’ of American nationalism and involvement in national politics.

  I’ll stick with my initial impression of Graham as a dude of faith.  My grandmother thought so anyway.   She’d watch him on the TV.  Graham’s trip seemed to be, “Get your act together, Jesus can help.  Let him be your Lord and savior.”  He’d do some preachin’, the big ol’ booming voiced singer George Beverly Shea would sing some hymns and then the whole shebang would wrap up with Graham’s choir singing “Just As I Am” as people who had been moved by the service-in-the-stadium would make their way up front.

  The Billy Graham Crusade would come on the tube and there’d be my grandmother, sitting, watching and listening in her easy chair, smoking her filterless Raleigh cigarette.

  But I never saw all of this stuff until years after I started hanging around my grandmother’s house a lot.

  My introduction to Billy Graham came from a preacher’s daughter who lived down the street from my grandmother’s house.  Her name was Audrey Adams*. 

  As a kid who had grown up living in hotels (because that’s where my father worked) I hadn’t really had neighbors before.

  When we moved from Hawai’i to my dad’s hometown in Virginia we lived at the hotel but we also spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ house.

  I spent so much time at my grandparent’s house I ended up going to the nearby school and getting to know kids like Audrey.

  “My daddy is a friend of Billy Graham’s,” Audrey announced one summer day from the front of her house, two houses down from mine.

  “Who’s Billy Graham?” I yelled back.

  “WHO’S BILLY GRAHAM???” Audrey practically screamed, “WHO’S BILLY GRAHAM???  YOU DON’T KNOW WHO BILLY GRAHAM IS?”

  “Nope,” I said in all my 7 year old nonchalance.

  “You’re going to go to hell!” said Audrey, walking closer.

  I was a kid and I had no idea who Billy Graham was or even what Hell was.  All I knew of Hell was it was a word my dad said a lot, along with “damn.”

  At that point in my life I was more afraid of sharks than Hell.  Sharks were out there, somewhere, ready to rip you to shreds with their sharp teeth.  I’d seen them in “National Geographic” magazine.  For a kid playing in the surf in Hawai’i, sharks were real.

  I knew more about Pele, the bare-breasted Hawai’ian goddess of volcanoes than Jesus.  I mean I KNEW who Jesus was, but our family really didn’t go to church much in my early years.  And Pele looked a LOT more interesting.  So you see I REALLY had no idea who Billy Graham was.

  “Who are you, eh?” I asked.

  “I’m Audrey Adams and my daddy is Ronald Adams, evangelist,” she said, raising her chin and puffing out her chest, “And we’re Baptists, we’re going to heaven.”

  Soon, Audrey Adams, daughter of Ronald Adams, Baptist evangelist who no doubt was on his way to heaven and taking his family with him, was standing in front of me and looking at me square in the eyes.

  “Who are you and why do you talk funny?” she asked.

  “I’m Grant McGee, yeah.” I said.  “My daddy is the new manager of the big hotel downtown.  We just moved here from Hawai’i.”

  I reckon she thought I talked funny because I must’ve picked up a bit of Pidgin English out there in the middle of the Pacific.  Her Southern drawl didn’t sound strange to me, it’s how my grandmother talked.

  Two years earlier I had spent the summer with my grandma.  When I got home my mom went to my Kindergarten and told the teacher she should not let me get by with saying “ain’t,” something I picked up while down south.

  “I ain’t never met anyone from ‘Huh-why-yuh’ before,” said Audrey.  “I’m six years old.”

  “I’m seven,” I said.

  And so my brief friendship with Audrey Adams began.

  We didn’t play much together.  Looking back that’s probably because we didn’t have much in common.  She mostly showed up in her front yard, overdressed in a dress and shiny black girls shoes that looked like nothing was supposed to get dirty.  She and her little brother Ronnie would be in the yard playing.

  I don’t even remember Audrey in school.

  What I do remember is that her daddy, Ronald Adams Baptist evangelist, would be seen outside his house every now and then.

  I never saw Ronald Adams dressed casually, he was always in suit and tie and always seemed to be getting into or out of his Cadillac car.  Us neighborhood kids would call out to him and he’d smile and wave.  He was a striking man with thick black wavy and seriously tall, I heard someone say he was 6 foot 10…a giant of a man.  He didn’t ever point a finger at us kids and tell us we were going to Hell like his little girl did.

  And then one day the Adams were gone. They moved away.  The neighbors said they moved to Texas...or was it North Carolina?

  After we moved to my father’s hometown we seemed to go to church more.  We went to the big Methodist church downtown.

  Well, mostly I went.

  My parents would pack me off to my grandparents’ house and I’d ride to Sunday school and church with my grandfather.  Sometime later my mom started teaching Sunday school to teenagers at the big church and my sister started going too.  My father never went, my grandmother didn’t go either.  My brother had graduated high school and was off to college.

  The lessons I learned with the Methodists were about God being a loving deity, Jesus’ big message was “Love one another” and there wasn’t much talk of Hell, if at all.

  As I grew up I began to notice the streetcorner preachers in my town, each one promising Hell and damnation for those who didn’t believe the things about God and Jesus that they did.

  One day when I was 17 and in a mood I stopped in front of one of those guys, crossed my arms and stared at him.

  In the middle of his rant he turned, his arm shot out and he used his Bible as a pointer, pointing at me right between the eyes.

  “SON, DO YOU KNOW JESUS CHRIST AS YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR????” he yelled.

  While the city swirled around us it was just the two of us in this encounter.

  “J.C. is a close personal friend of mine,” I said.

  “J.C.????” He yelled, “YOU BLASPHEME!  YOU MOCK THE LORD!  YOU’RE GOING TO HELL!”

  “There you go,” I said.  “Threatening people with something you have no power over.”

  “WHAT?” he said.

  “You don’t decide who goes to Hell and who doesn’t,” I said.  “The Lord does, that’s the way I heard it at my church.”

  “What denomination is that, son?”

  “The Methodists.”

  “METHODISTS ARE LOST SOULS,” shouted the streetcorner preacher.

  “You know chief,” I said.  “I wonder if you might win over a few more followers if you were nicer and spoke a message of love.  I can’t imagine J.C. standing on a corner in Jerusalem berating people passing by.”

  “YOU MOCK THE LORD AGAIN!  YOU’RE GOING TO HELL!”

  “Man,” I said, “You’re not even listening to me.”

  I turned and walked down the street.

  No, I don’t think Brother Jesus would’ve railed against people walking by, nor would Ronald Adams Baptist evangelist or Billy Graham.

  I think they just laid out the details for you and you needed to figure it out as they saw it.

E P I L O G U E

  I thought I’d look and see if I could find the Adams family on The Internet, Great and Powerful.

  I found an obituary for Ronald Adams, Baptist evangelist.  There he was in a picture with Audrey.  He looked old, he was 86 when he died last year.

  It gave me hope that tall guys can live to be old.  I’m 6 foot 3.  I heard-tell that the odds of a long life are stacked against us tall guys.

  Audrey had grown up, married a dude a lot older than her and had four kids.  Her little brother Ronnie ran his own church in a run-down section of Nashville, Tennessee.

  I found it interesting that it wasn’t a Baptist church.  It was non-denominational.

 

*Name changed along with those in her family…..

Thoughts on "National Shower with a Friend Day"

  The other day it was “National Shower with a Friend Day.”

  I don’t know who comes up with these “National Days.”  Does someone have to come up in front of Congress and say, “We want a National Day for thus-and-so.”  Then congress argues about it, agree on something then a proclamation is issued?

  Or is it somebody just says, “I want February 5^th to be ‘National Shower with a Friend Day’” and so then they have dibs on that day?  Now that’s a possibility, because February 5^th was not only “National Shower with a Friend Day” but also “National Weatherperson’s Day” and “World Nutella Day.”  So I reckon weatherpeople and the chocolate breakfast spread people also had dibs on February 5^th.

  Questions came up in my mind:  Who was this for?  Was this for couples who have trouble with intimacy...giving them an excuse to get intimate?  You know, they’ve been out on dates like 17 times and still haven’t kissed because neither one knows how to bridge the gap…so on “National Shower with a Friend Day” one turns to the other and says, “You wanna take a shower together?”  Then love blossoms in the air and rainbows and dancing unicorns appear…or whatever.

  Do you shower with or without your clothes on on “National Shower with a Friend Day”?  Maybe you’re supposed to wear a swimsuit.  Maybe you’re supposed to be buck naked.

  What crossed my mind on “National Shower with a Friend Day” was the time a Belgian lesbian barged in on me in a shower in Bisbee, Arizona.

  It’s not out of bigotry or xenophobia that I tell you Franziska was a Belgian lesbian, it’s just statement of fact: Franziska* was from Belgium and she was very emphatic that people knew she was a lesbian.

  If you’ve never been to Bisbee I’ll describe it to you as a former copper mining town about 90 miles southeast of Tucson, about a rifle shot from the Mexican border.  In addition to everyday folks who work in county government, the town is populated by a significant chunk of artists, neo-hippies, alternative lifestylers and people with no visible means of support.

  You knew you were in an alternative type community when you passed by a sign reading, “This section of highway cleaned by The Southeast Arizona LGBTQ Alliance*.”

  While I worked 30 miles away at a radio station in Sierra Vista, the woman I hung around with…Muriel*…ran the town dance studio.

  Consequently our house was frequented by a parade of colorful characters:  The topless breastfeeding mom, the couple frequently covered in scratches and bruises because they fought with each other but insisted the marks were from a bar fight they were in…often.  There was the lesbian couple who had asked Muriel if I could “help them make a baby” and then there was Franziska.

  Franziska and her partner Camionelle had a dog grooming business.

  One summer Muriel went away with the two to a beachside resort in Mexico on the Gulf of California.  At the time I didn’t think much of it, didn’t think anything weird of the three of them traipsing off to Mexico, didn’t have a problem with Muriel calling me and saying she was going to spend an extra week down there with the two dog groomers.  But after Muriel and I had split up I looked at this particular time as one where after she came back there had been a palpable shift in our relationship.

  Then there was the time that there was a party at Franziska and Camionelle’s.  Muriel said I was invited too because, after all, to many of her friends I was known as “Mr. Muriel.”

  I showed up at Franziska and Camionelle’s, walked through the door and suddenly the house, full of only women, went silent.

  “What?” I looked around and smiled, “Do I smell funny?”

  “No,” said Camionelle, “You’re just the first man who has been in this house in probably 5 years.”

  I was surprised at how anti-male Franziska and Camionelle were, after all, I had moved to Bisbee from Phoenix after hearing that the town was an alternative utopia.  Back then I still naively believed that somewhere there was a place where folks all got along.

  Dumbass me.

  It was in Bisbee I learned that there is no such thing as utopia.

  I learned that no matter what side of the political spectrum you fancy yourself on, the left…the right, both sides have their extremes.

  I had a glimpse into the anti-man trip Franziska was on when she gave a talk at one International Women’s Day celebration.

  It was another one of those Bisbee things where I was one of a handful of men in the audience made up mostly of women.  I was there because Muriel was there doing a dance presentation in honor of the occasion.

  Then it was Franziska’s turn to speak.

  And speak she did.

  Franziska gave an emphatic talk on “The Hysterectomy Conspiracy.”

  I can’t remember the whole thing but basically she launched into a diatribe against the American medical profession, that the removal of women’s uteruses was a power play by men to rob women of their strength and rightful place as the true leaders of humankind.  She went on to say hysterectomies are totally unnecessary, that when hysterectomies are performed the surgery disrupts women’s internal organs by taking out necessary balance and connective tissue rendering women weak.

  I sat in the audience with furrowed brow pondering her points.  I was fresh from a gig in Phoenix working at a talk radio station where conspiracy theories were their stock and trade.  At this point I was still two years away from tapping into the internet, still 15 years away from a cell phone with internet access, so I had no way to check the veracity of all the supposed facts she was spewing out that night.

  I had trouble imagining a secret cabal of powerful doctors directing other doctors to deliberately rob women of their strength by removing uteruses.

  The next year Franziska gave a talk on “The Gendercide of the Middle Ages:  Details of the Holocaust No One Talks About,” in which she described the wholesale slaughter of women from about 1200 to 1650 as a move to unseat women from their natural position of power.  The women were branded as witches and 6,000,000 women died.

  As I sat in the audience I pondered a loss of 6,000,000 women at that point in human history…that would’ve been a helluva dent in the population.  Wouldn’t that have been about most of the women in Europe?

  Oh well.

  I was in no position to argue.

  And Muriel danced on.

  Sometime later Muriel had a bunch of women over to the house for something or another, I wasn’t paying attention.

  I had to work the next day and so I had to take a shower and get ready for bed.

  I walked into the living room.

  “Excuse me,” I said as I looked over the 10 or 12 women there, “I have to use the bathroom for about 10 minutes.  Does anyone need to go in there before I do?”

  There was a general shaking of heads to indicate “no.”

  Except Franziska.

  “You just came in here to announce that in hopes that we would imagine you naked in the bathroom,” said Franziska.  “I can tell you none of us are interested.”

  I had to stifle a laugh at Franziska’s idea.

  “No, Franziska, that’s not why I came in here,” I said.  “I came in to see if anyone needs to go in there before I tie the room up for a few minutes.”

  “I’ll bet,” said Franziska.

  And so I went into the bathroom, brushed my teeth then hopped in the shower.

  About a minute later the bathroom door opens (there was no lock) and there’s Franziska heading for the sink.

  “HEY!” I yelled, gathering the shower curtain around me.  “I’M SHOWERING IN HERE.”

  “Well I’m certainly not coming to join you.  I’m washing my hands,” said Franziska.

  “HOW ABOUT USING THE KITCHEN SINK.”

  “You Americans and your false modesty,” said Franziska.  “You men thinking about sex all the time.”

  She turned around and left, slamming the door behind her.

  And I never saw her again.

  Well except for that time I came over to the house after Muriel and I split up.

  I came to pick up some of my stuff.  Muriel had said to come on over so I did.

  I got some stuff from the house and remembered some things I had out in the garage.

  Walking outside in the evening dark I heard some voices, looked over toward the hot tub and there was Muriel with Franziska and Camionelle, all naked in the hot tub.

  “Keep on walking, Mr. Man,” Franziska said loudly.  “Nothing to see here, and you have nothing we want.”

E P I L O G U E

  They had a fire in Bisbee some months ago.

  Seeing the place in the news brought back a flood of memories.

  I took to the Internet and looked up people I had known.

  The woman who had once been editor of the paper moved home to Houston.  Nermala who had once asked if I could help her and her lover have a baby had died…and when she died she had a new partner, not the one I had known.

  Many had moved away from the town “Where normal is weird and weird is normal.”

  But Franziska was still there.

  I looked her up on The Facebook.

  In that section where it says “Studied at” Franziska wrote “None of your damn business!”

  And in the other education section where it said “Went to” Franziska wrote “Also none of your damn business!”

  Ahh, Franziska was still the Franziska I had known.

  And a part of me still wondered, after all these years, why Franziska seemed so pissed off at the world.

*All names changed because people get upset over the slightest thing these days……

Dead or Unplugged...I Wonder

  If you say you’ve NEVER wondered what an “ex” was up to you MIGHT be a fibber.

  I’m giving you an old-fashioned knowing wink here.

  I think Muriel is dead.

  I hung around with Muriel in the 90’s.  We hung around with each other for 7 years, lived in a few places in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona, went on a few adventures and then it was over.

  And I’m just sensing that she’s “gone on to Glory.”

  Have you ever had a sensing like that about someone?

  It’s like that time there was a school shooting over a thousand miles away, a place where I used to live and when I heard the news I knew an old friend of mine hadn’t made it…knew it because I felt she was gone off this plane.  Turns out I was right.  In a school filled with a few dozen teachers she was one of the three who died.

  From time to time a thought of Muriel would cross my mind, wonder if she’d come back to her page on the social media, her page where her last entry was March two years ago.  I mean she used to be really active on it, railing against the establishment, trying to get people to sign a petition to stop a horse slaughterhouse that was proposed for her home town in New Mexico, protesting the war in Afghanistan, stuff like that.

  I typed her name into The Internet:  “Muriel Auzermann.”*   Her last entry in cyberspace was an entry the next month where she was offering one line of condolence to an old friend who had just become a widow.

  Do I care?

  I suppose not.

  I just wonder.

  Because I want to see if there’s anything to this feeling, this feeling that she is gone.  I believe we have senses we ignore, that once upon a time we were told to ignore.

  Now and then when she crosses my mind I search obituaries.  I search county files.

  Nothing.

  I told The Lady of the House that I thought Muriel was dead.

  “Why do you care?” she asked.

  “Because she hasn’t been on the social media in two years,” I said.

  “Big deal,” said The Lady of the House.  “She wouldn’t be the first to have unplugged from Facebook or whatever.”

  “Yeah,” I said.  “But I just have this feeling.”

  Most of the time The Lady of the House is right about stuff, she’s real smart like that.

  But I still had a feeling.

  So I consulted with the lone member of Clan McGee who can plug into the “Cosmic Electric” as I call it.  Maybe she could tell me if she could sense anything about Muriel.

  I texted Cosmic Daughter (C.D.) a bit about Muriel, told her about her whereabouts on social media, told her about her last known location in the southern Rockies.

  A few minutes went by after I texted C.D.

  “I kinda get the impression she’s dead but I’m not seeing an obituary,” she wrote.  “Then this scene came to me from ‘NCIS’ where Ducky talks about what happens to the dead when no one misses them.  After 30 days they’re cremated and the county scatters the ashes.”

  More minutes passed.  Then more words.

  “Something about it was sudden,” wrote C.D.  “She’s ghosted pretty hardcore.  It’s a little disconcerting.”

  “Yeah, it’s like one day she’s there railing against this horse slaughterhouse then she’s gone,” I texted.  “No goodbye, no ‘Adios my friends’ (wink), nothing.  What do you vibe about her character, her personality?” I texted.

  “Seems mischievous, wry sense of humor,” wrote daughter.  “Carried something inside her that made her really quiet and weird sometimes.”

  “She never found peace after the death of her mother and sister in a car wreck when she was a kid,” I wrote.  “Drunk driver hit them head-on.”

  “She’s upset about a necklace,” wrote C.D. “Oooh, wait, it happened in a room with white walls and a tan floor.”

  “What happened,” I texted.  “Is that where she is on the ‘other side’?”

  “No,” wrote C.D.  “The room where she died.  It’s like an empty kitchen.  Now she’s holding this silver necklace as if she wants someone to see it.”

  “Interesting,” I texted.

  “Hot and dry there,” she wrote.  “Now she’s yelling at the sunset and she’s not looking at me.”

  C.D. was silent for a few minutes.

  “She may have had cancer,” she wrote.  “Something in her eyes in the last picture on her social media.  She keeps showing me the right side of her head and gesticulating pain, like she had a stroke.”

  “She was fighting,” C.D. went on, “She woke up that morning to fight whatever it was.  Something happened in that kitchen.”

  “A partner?” I texted, “A burglar?”

  “No,” she wrote, “No one’s there.  The room kinda just topples up and something breaks.”

  “So,” I texted, “You perceive she’s dead?”

  “I do,” daughter wrote, “I may be wrong but I do.  She grins and says she’s not dead.  The space where she is now is open but it’s empty.  She didn’t have kids?”

  “No,” I texted back, “She absolutely wanted no kids.  She loved other people’s kids but wanted none of her own.”

  “Interesting,” texted C.D., “She regrets that now.  Oh, and she misses coffee.”

  I remember owning an electric coffee bean grinder when I hung out with Muriel.  She always wanted her coffee to come from freshly ground coffee beans.

  So I really didn’t get a solid answer about Muriel.  I think there’s a 55% probability she’s “gone on to Glory” and a 45% probability she just abandoned The Internet, after all, when she and I were together she’d have nothing to do with computers and cyberspace.  Then, like a switch got thrown in her brain, she was “all in” when it came to the cyberwebs.

  Long ago, wow, has it been 27 years?  Long ago Muriel told me a story about a cat she had.

  “I had an orange cat named Tuna,” she said as we sat in the living room one evening.  “I changed apartments and couldn’t keep him.  My brother was teaching in the Hopi Nation in Arizona and he said he’d take Tuna, take care of him.

  “So I drove to Arizona and left Tuna with my brother,” Muriel went on.  “About a year later we were at a family thing in Roswell and I asked him about Tuna.”

  “Tuna disappeared from my apartment, it was the weirdest thing,” said Brother.  “He didn’t slip out, he just wasn’t there anymore.  I looked around the neighborhood.”

  “Some time later I was telling the story at school on a Parent-Teacher conference day,” Brother said.  “There we were in this room and there was this Hopi elder, part of a family who came that day, this Hopi elder sitting in the corner.”

  “Your cat is still here,” said the elder.  “Tuna has moved on, he wears a mantle of stardust and walks the nation scaring coyote.  That gives him great pleasure.  He laughs a cat laugh.”

  “How did you know his name?” Brother asked the elder.

  “He drops by my home every now and then in the evenings and we talk.”

  Maybe Muriel just moved on too.

-End-

   *Name is made up to cover my ass in this litigious world….

Girls Pass Gas Too

  

  I was 18 years old when I first heard a girl fart.

  It was an amazing thing to me, I have no other way to describe it.

  I mean being as I’d never heard a girl do that before when I first heard it…it was a big moment.

  Guys fart, it’s what we do.  But a girl?  I think “amazed” is a good word to use the first time I heard it.

  It was during my first quarter in college.  I don’t know how I met Kirsten but there she was in my dorm room on a fall Saturday afternoon.

  And we were just talking.

  I’m not cleaning this up or anything.

  “Swar t’God” as my old dead friend Mark might say, we were JUST talking.

  It turned out that even though her dad worked for the U.S. State Department and she had been to Europe and stuff and was from the D.C. area she had been born in the mountains of Virginia, not far from where I was from.

  “We oughta go on a road trip,” I said to Kirsten.

  “Next weekend,” she said.  “Say, I need to use the restroom.”

  Hit pause here.

  Remember, this is a dorm room we’re sitting in.  An all male dormitory.  To use the restroom you have to go down the hall where there was a restroom with 3 toilet stalls, a couple of urinals and a shower room with 3 or 4 shower heads.

  “But,” I said to Kirsten, “There aren’t any girls toilets here.”

  Kirsten stared at me for a few seconds.

  “You go check and make sure no one’s in there,” she said, talking slow like she was talking to someone with diminished mental capability, “Then I go in and you ‘stand guard’ outside so no one goes in while I’m in there.”

  “Oh!” I said, having a lightbulb-over-my-head moment.

  “I’m the first girl you’ve had in your room, aren’t I?”

  “Sure,” I said.  I didn’t see any reason to lie, besides I’m sure she could tell.

  So we went on down the hall to the restroom, I checked to make sure no one was in there, she went in and I stood by the door.

  Then the noises began.

  And more noises.

  Noises of explosive flatulence.

  I furrowed my brow, standing all alone outside the bathroom.

  This was something I never heard before.

  And so Kirsten emerged from the restroom, we went back to my room and made a date to go on a country ramble the next Saturday so she could see the mountain town where she was born.

  Then she was gone.

  I sat on my bean-bag chair in my dorm room pondering this new experience.

  In walked my roommate Dax.

  “You have a dumbass look,” said Dax.  “You stoned?”

  “No, man,” admittedly the next words I said…I should’ve run them through the word editor in my brain, because I really didn’t say what I meant…

  “I just found out girls fart,” I said.

  Dax burst out laughing.

  “WHAT?” said Dax.

  “I mean I just heard a girl fart for the first time,” I said.

  “You’ve…never…heard…a…girl…fart?” Dax was still laughing.

  “No, man,” I said.

  “What’d you think?  They save them up and then once a year they go out in the woods and blow out one gigantic fart?”

  “No, man, of course not…I…I just never heard a girl cut one before.”

  Me and Dax shot the breeze about it for a bit and resolved that a really great relationship with a girl was one where you could freely pass gas in front of each other.

    Now there was that time that my grandmother and her sister, Aunt Maude, were out in the yard and Aunt Maude bent over and let one fly.

  I laughed and laughed.

  Aunt Maude turned, pointed at me and said, “Now boy, when you’re old that’ll happen to you and you’ll be embarrassed.”

  Yeah, there was that time, but I guess I didn’t relate to Aunt Maude being a girl…she was Aunt Maude, she was like…from another branch of the human family tree.

  After that fall day, when Kirsten came by, it seems like I heard girls passing gas all the time.

  One memorable time was the next summer when I went out with Nancy who would go on to be a doctor.  I just mention that because it’s kinda funny thinking about a farting doctor.

  We had gone to a movie and returned to my grandma’s house where we sat on the back porch shooting the breeze, telling stories.

  I reckon I told a pretty funny story, Nancy started laughing hard and then……..

  “FFFFRAAAPPPPPP…” Nancy farted.

  Nancy promptly jumped up, ran out in the yard, turned around, pointed at me and said, “Don’t you EVER tell anyone I did that.”

  “What?” I said, “It’s perfectly natural.”

  “Girls aren’t supposed to fart in front of boys,” said Nancy.

  Well, Nancy has “done gone on to Glory” so I reckon it’s okay to tell you she farted in front of me on that summer night over 40 years ago.

  It would be years later that I would understand why, as a young boy, a farting woman was a mystery to me.

  It was in the 80’s and I was hanging around with a woman I’ll call “Darcy.”

  We were out on the town and decided to go pay a visit to my mom who lived nearby.

  Darcy had been enjoying a few alcoholic beverages that afternoon so when we got to my mom’s house Darcy was talky, giggly and flat-out drunk.

  So as we sat in mom’s living room talking Darcy began to pass gas.

  Loudly.

  And every time Darcy did she broke out laughing.

  “Come help me in the kitchen,” my mom said to me.

  I got up and left Darcy on the sofa farting proudly and laughing at herself.

  In the kitchen my mom turned and pointed an index finger at my nose.

  “I just want you to know that in the 40 years your father and I were together we never did that in front of each other or in front of you children,” said mom.

  I stood there and smiled.  I started laughing.

  “You don’t know how much you’ve cleared up a great mystery in my life,” I laughed.

  “FFFRAAAPPPP,” came the noise from the living room and more laughter.

The Last Boarding House

  The thing about a lot of towns is there’s a lot of history about each town that folks will never know about.

  I got to thinking about this the other day while I was riding my bicycle home after work.  I was pedaling through an old section of town looking at old run-down, boarded up houses that surely dated back a hundred years, maybe a little more.

  With a 21^st century eye I looked at some of the bigger hulks, the two story kind, and thought of the cost to renovate them, the cost to heat them.

  Then I wondered why they were so big.

  I wondered if these big, old, rambling hulks had once been boarding houses.  I mean, it made sense…Clovis, New Mexico started off as a railroad town named Riley’s Switch.  So there’d be all these railroad workers who’d need a place to live.

  I’m kinda getting ahead of myself here because you might be one of those folks who doesn’t know what a boarding house is. 

  A boarding house is a place where people rent rooms…like someone might rent an apartment….and part of the rent goes for “board” or meals…it’s where the term “room and board” comes from, if anyone still uses that term.  The room might come with breakfast and dinner or just dinner.  The meal would be at a set time, the boarders would all sit around a big table and have a meal.  If you missed the meal  you were just shit out of luck.

  I remembered my encounter with an old-fashioned boarding house many years ago back east.

  I had taken a job selling advertising in bowling alleys:  Ad space on the scorecards, ad space in the lobby, ad space at the end of the lanes above the pins.  I had thought that with a wide-open field I could make a million bucks…later it turned out if I averaged out my pay over the time I spent hustling local businesses in a three-state area I was making about 4 bucks an hour, about minimum wage back in the day.

  It was a traveling salesman’s gig.  I spent many a night in cheap motels in small towns.  I needed a place to crash when I was done with the work week.  I was in a rebuilding phase of my life so I didn’t have much in terms of cash reserves to put down a deposit on an apartment.  I scoured the local paper for maybe a room someone was renting out of their house or something.

  Then I saw it:  “Room for rent, bathroom privileges, comes with dinner daily.  $200/month.”

  I decided to drive out and have a look.

  The address was out in the country on an old US Route that had seen better days after the interstate opened up and most everyone was zipping from town to town along the new highway.

  I pulled up in front of a run-down, ramshackle, two story, old farmhouse.

  I got out of my car, stood and stared at the house.

  A spry old woman came out of the front door.

  “Can I he’p you?” she asked.

  “Yes ma’am,” I said.  “I saw your ad in the paper for a room with board.”

  “Well come on up here,” she motioned. 

  I walked on up the dirt path to the front steps.  The front porch railing was covered in honeysuckle and trumpet vine.  The plants wound their way up the columns in front.

  It wasn’t ‘til I got to the porch I noticed a sleeping old man slumped in an old weathered arm chair off to a corner amidst more vines.

  “Come on in,” said the old woman.

  I walked in the house and was taken back to the 1930’s.  It was clean but everything was from another time.

  I walked past an entryway to the living room where two old men, maybe in their 70’s, were sitting back and watching some soap opera on the TV.

  She started walking upstairs.

  “Let me show you the room I have for rent,” she said.  “I’ll be honest with you, the man who was renting it died in his sleep two weeks ago.”

  I smiled and said nothing.

  She stopped at the top of the stairs and turned around.

  “You didn’t say anything,” she said.  “That doesn’t bother you?”

  “No ma’am,” I said.  “We’re born and we die, that’s the deal of life on Earth.”

  She chuckled.

  “You ain’t a hippie, are you?” she said smiling.  “That sounds kinda hippie-ish.”

  “I am what I am, ma’am.” I said.

  “What do you do?” she asked.

  “I sell advertising in bowling alleys,” I said.

  “Oh my,” she said, “you’re a traveling salesman.”

  I laughed.

  “Yes ma’am,” I said, “I reckon I am.”

  We continued down the hall walking on a runner rug that was probably new 50 years earlier.

  The old lady opened the door to a room and there it was:  Just a room with a single iron bedframed mattress and box springs, a small desk and chair, an old easy chair and a dresser.

  “New mattress?” I asked.  It sure looked like it.

  “Well yeah,” said the old woman.  “You know when people die things kind of cut loose.”

  “Ah,” I said.  “Yep, yep that’s what happens.”  I thought to myself how good it was she replaced what was probably a stained mattress, that she didn’t just flip it over.

  “The bathroom’s down the hall,” she pointed, “You have to catch it open when you can catch it open and I just have to insist that you not take too long in there ‘cos there’s three others here who use it too.  Oh, and that you rinse the tub out when you’re done.”

  I looked at the simple room.  It had an appeal to it.  Simple.  A window that looked out across a field that no one tilled anymore, a field where scrub trees were starting to reach for the sky.  Off in the distance was the Blue Ridge Mountains.  It would be a good place to rest, a good room where I could write.

  “You’d be the youngest in the house,” she said.

  I paused and pondered.

  To be surrounded by four old folks might be a good thing, I might learn something.  But then it might be seriously depressing too.  And if perchance I had a social life I’m sure a visitor in my room would probably not be tolerated.

  And me using a tub used by 3 other dudes…I mean, I’m sure that’s how people did it in bygone eras but I didn’t know if I was ready to go back to ancient times.

  I turned and looked the old woman in the eyes.

  “I appreciate your time, ma’am,” I said.  “I have a couple of other places I want to look at.”

  “Well now this might not be available soon, people’s always looking for places to live,” she said.

  “Yes ma’am,” I said.  “But if it is to be it will be.”

  “You sure you ain’t no hippie?”

  I laughed.

  “I’m a traveling salesman,” I said.  “Now I might’ve been a hippie in college.”

  “I knew it,” she pointed a finger at my face.  “Well now I’m a pretty good cook.”

  “I’m sure you are, ma’am,” I said as I walked down the steps, past the two old men watching TV and out the front door to the porch where I paused, looking at the fellow asleep off in the corner.

  I stuck my hand out and shook the old woman’s hand.

  “Thank you for your time, ma’am,” I said.  “It looks very nice.”

  I ended up living in town, sharing a ramshackle old house with a young woman who had a very active social life and the offices of a telemarketing vitamin company.

  I got the house’s old living room with French doors furnished with a double bed, a big desk and chair and a dresser. 

  I knew the girl upstairs had an active social life because from time to time there’d be a banging on the front door of the place at 1 or 2 in the morning and there’d be some drunk guy hollering, “JENNIFER!  JEN….IFFF….FERRRR” and she’d come down the stairs, I heard her, there’d be the opening of the door and quick, hushed talking.  There’d be footsteps back up the stairs.  Sometimes I’d hear rhythmic thumping coming from up there.

  I reckon Jennifer had her own bathroom because I seemed to have the downstairs bathroom all to myself.  To get to the bathroom I had to leave my living room and walk down a long hall.

  Sometimes I wondered if I missed anything by not taking the room at the boarding house…the window looking out across the field to the mountains in the distance.

  Sitting down to a meal with folks from another time.  Would there be macaroni and cheese?  Homemade yeast rolls dripping with sweet creamery butter?  Would there be good stories told?

  Or would it be stuff quickly whipped up out of boxes and eating in silence.

  I'll never know about the boarding house experience.

  No, I was in the noisy town, a busy street right out front.

  But at least I had a shower.