She Painted Skeletons on the Walls

  I wouldn’t’ve had it on my walls.

  But someone thought it was the “hot” thing to have.

  The house was done in leopard skin wallpaper.

Actual factual pic of wallpaper in question...

  I saw it while out yard sale-ing at an estate sale.

  Estate sales afford the unique experience of just walking right into a stranger’s house to see what’s for sale.

  “What are you looking at,” asked The Lady of the House.

  “This wallpaper,” I said, “It’s intense.”

  “The word I’d use would be ‘garish,’ she said.  “I find it interesting that it bothers you.”

  “It overwhelms the rooms,” I said.

  “This from the man who didn’t mind skeletons painted on his walls or that each wall was a different color,” said The Lady of the House.

  I should explain.

  Muriel* painted skeletons on the walls of the house we lived in in the hippie town of Bisbee, Arizona back in the 1990’s.  Muriel made sure that each wall was a different color.  In the living room, for instance, there was a blue wall, an emerald green wall, the mustard yellow wall and the Chinese red wall.

  Each wall featured a full-sized skeleton painted by Muriel.  Not on canvas or in a frame, right on the wall.

  Muriel said the different colored walls in the house were for variety’s sake.  The skeletons were to pay tribute to her arthritis which had a big influence on her life.

  That’s what she said anyway.

  I had no reason to doubt her.

  It wasn’t until after Muriel and I had parted company that it occurred to me that I should’ve questioned a lot of her stories, a lot of her reasoning.

  Muriel told a lot of stories.

  Muriel’s stories weren’t about “A list” people, places or things.  Nope, her stories had more “B-list or “C list” subject matter.

  For instance, Muriel said she should’ve gotten credit, gotten paid for the Sara Lee cakes slogan, “Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.”

  “I was on a flight from Atlanta to Dallas back in the 80’s and I was sitting beside this woman who was trying to come up with a slogan for a bakery company, that’s all she told me,” said Muriel.  “So I said, ‘Most people don’t like something, but everyone likes our cakes.’”

  “Next thing I know I’m watching TV some months later and this Sara Lee ad comes on with people singing, ‘Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.’”

  I mean why would I doubt Muriel?  So what if her daddy was a Southern teller of tall tales.  It would be a few years in the future before I’d fully understand the old saying, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

  Muriel said she was in a car wreck in Denver in the mid-80’s.

  “I was bedridden for a year,” she told me.  “I wasn’t supposed to walk ever again.  I willed myself to walk again.  Then a couple of years later I developed arthritis in my back.”

  The arthritis was why Muriel had me walk up and down her back from time to time.

  Yes, walk up and down her back…me and my size 12 feet and 180 pound frame.  I’d walk up her back a couple of steps, turn and walk the other way…each step brought a weird crunching sound and vibration through the soles of my feet.

  “You sure this is okay?” I asked her during one of our first “sessions.”

  “If it bothered me you wouldn’t be doing it,” said Muriel.

  So after being exposed to Muriel’s taste in art, her own art, her own projects like saving dog fur to make a dog hair sweater or broken mirrors and glass to make mosaics and stuff like that I didn’t find it odd to have her paint skeletons on the walls of our newly acquired house in Bisbee.

  This after she painted the walls all different colors.

  After she painted the metal furniture black and white striped.

  After she was done she painted individual bricks on the outside walls of the cinderblock house…one by one.

  I never knew why Muriel was always painting.  When we lived in Roswell she painted the walls of her dad’s house blue…thing was she hadn’t consulted her dad, he was not amused.  She painted the paneling emerald green in the house we rented, much to the surprise of the landlord.  The walls of the condo in Phoenix got painted bright orange...when we moved we finally sold the place when we agreed to knock off a thousand bucks for an interior repainting.

  Muriel and I hung around with each other for seven years.

  Then one day the energy ran out of our little arrangement.

  It was time for me to go and leave Muriel to do things her way in the little Arizona town.

  One afternoon my buddy Ernesto came over to help me move out.  Muriel had excused herself to her business a few blocks away while I took care of getting my stuff out of what was to become her house.

  “Dios mio!,” said Ernesto as he walked into the house.  He crossed himself in that old school way that some religious folks do.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You live in a house of death,” he said.

  The two of us stood in the living room.  We were both looking around.  I was looking at the place now with I reckon what you could call “new eyes.”

  “Well damn,” I said.  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “How could you live here with all this death around you?” 

  “I never saw it as death,” I said.  “I saw it as Muriel’s creativity.  I saw it as art.”

  “Oh, you didn’t paint this shit?  She did?” asked Ernesto, “Bro…I want you to imagine a realtor coming in here to show this place.”

  I laughed.

  “Well,” I said, “That sort of happened in Phoenix with orange walls.”

  “Orange?  Dude.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “Orange like road construction orange barrel orange.”

  Ernesto laughed.

  “Damn, bro.  This chick has issues.”

  “I didn’t see it before,” I said. 

  I looked around and smiled.

  “I see it now.”

 

*Name changed

The Dead Guy at Work

  I saw a post on social media the other day…

  BOB:  I just heard a man die on the air today.  

  Bob had been listening to a sports talk radio station in his town.

  He continued...

  .It made me sad.

  Then the comments started coming in…

  RAY:  This, of course, would make it no longer “live radio.”

  TOM:  That’s how I want to go...doing what I love. Don’t give me any warning.

  JORDY:  Live radio in Heaven.....

  AVERY:  … but he still hit the traffic & weather on the 8's...

  ANDY:  For real? Died on the air?  What did it sound like?

  BOB:  He stopped mid sentence and you could hear the chair fall over. Then the guy with him started asking "are you all right?" Then commercial.

  FAT MAN:  This must be fake news. There's no mention of it anywhere.

  BOB:  Keep checking, Fat Man, it happened.

  HARRY:  It just seemed odd that someone would drop-dead on the air and nobody would report it anywhere. In this day and age, you can’t take anything at face value. It’s truly nothing personal. Condolences to all those who knew and worked with the deceased.

  BOB:  Well, it happened.  I was listening.

  IRENE:  Anything to get ratings!

  BOB:  Not funny, Irene.

  IRENE:  Bob’s a snowflake.

  HARRY:  Sorry for doubting you, Bob. I spoke with people at the station where you said it happened, and they confirmed that a member of their staff passed-away on-air yesterday.

  BOB:  Thanks for verifying that I'm not a liar.

 

  We die.

  It’s part of the deal of coming to Planet Earth…we live, we die.

  People die in many ways…some people would like to die in their sleep, others surrounded by family and friends, still others would like to check out doing what they love doing.

  Me?

  I love my job but I sure as hell don’t want to die at work.

  I know of three guys who did.

  There was that guy at a radio station across town…it was just another morning…this particular dude was the news guy and he was in the news studio so when it came time for the morning show guy to go to news there was silence.  The morning jock put on a song and ran down the hall to the news studio to find the news guy slumped over the control board.

  Another one I heard about from co-workers.  He was a radio station advertising salesman sitting at his desk when he suddenly pitched forward, head hit the desk and didn’t move….dead from a massive coronary.

  The third fellow?

  I was there.

  I won’t tell you where or when it happened out of respect to the dead guy.

  It was just the beginning of another day at the radio station.  I had ridden my bicycle to work, came through the door, put my bike up and was ready to get ready for the morning show.

  I had seen that Boss Man was already at the station, his car was parked out front.

  “LET’S RADIO,” I yelled so Boss Man could hear it on the other side of the building.  Boss Man did a radio show on the other side.

  Wait.

  No response.

  Usually he’d yell something back once I yelled, “LET’S RADIO.”

  This morning…

  …nothing.

  Then I heard someone coming down the hall.

  It was Boss Man.

  He stopped and looked at me.

  “Grant,” he said, “I think Dave* is dead.”

  A weird shudder rolled over me.

  Boss Man turned and motioned for me to follow him back to the other side of the building.

  I rounded the corner and….

  …there was Dave, lying on the floor.  I reckoned Dave had had a seizure or heart attack and pitched off to the side out of his chair and on to the floor.  His legs were in his cubicle and the rest of him was sprawled out in the hallway.

  I walked around and looked at his face.  Dave’s eyes and mouth were open.

  “He was working on a project late last night,” said Boss Man.  “I talked to him around 10 last night.”

  I bent over and put my hand on Dave’s shoulder.

  I shook him slowly.

  “Dave?” I said.  “Dave, come on buddy.”

  But I felt a couple of new things…his body seemed loose, no tension.

  And Dave was cold.

  I was looking at my first real, live dead guy.

  Well, okay, I’ve seen dead people at funeral homes.  But dead people at funeral homes aren’t quite the same as a real, live dead guy.  Funeral home bodies don’t look real, they look like something between a mannequin and a person.

  But Dave looked real.  Thing is if his mouth and eyes were closed he probably would’ve looked like he was asleep.

  I stood up.

  “I called the rescue squad,” said Boss Man.

  I stood and looked at Boss Man.

  “Well, there’s nothing else for me to do,” I said.  “Reckon I’ll go start the show.”

  I’m the kind of guy who would’ve like to’ve told my listeners, “Hey, y’all know what’s going on here at the radio station?  One of our guys died and he’s out here in the hallway.”

  But I didn’t.

  I played music and really didn’t have much to say.

  I’d just seen my first real live dead guy.  It had quite an impact on me.

  I put on a long song and went to the break room to make some coffee.

  As I stepped out into the hallway and heard voices from the other side of the building.

  I walked around the corner and there was Dave, still sprawled out in the hallway.

  The Rescue Squad people had packed up all their stuff and were headed out the door.

  “Hey guys,” I called out to them.  “Just curious about something.”

  They turned and looked at me and I made a motion with my hands like I was making a presentation of Dave’s body.

  “What about this guy?” I asked.

  “He’s dead,” said one of the rescue squadsmen.  “There’s nothing we can do for him.”

  I laughed.

  “No shit,” I said.  “What happens next?”

  “Well,” said the same guy, “Deputies are coming along with the Medical Examiner and then the funeral home people will come and take the body away.

  And there was Dave, still lying there, still with his mouth open…and his eyes…

  I moseyed on back to the studio to make sure my song was still playing…it was…so I went to the break room to get a cup of coffee.

  That’s where I ran into Adelita, our DJ on the Mexican station.

  “Dios mio!” said Adelita with wide open eyes looking right into mine.  “Dave….dead…he’s just laying there.  Dios mio!  Cover him up or something.”

  “I don’t have anything to cover him with,” I said.

  “I have an old serape draped across my back seat, I’ll get that,” she said.

  Adelita turned around and went out the back door.

  I went around the corner again and there was a new guy standing over Dave’s body.  Two county deputies were standing by the door, one writing stuff down on a pad.

  “Are you from the funeral home?” I asked the guy standing by the body.

 “No,” the dude said sharply.  “I’m the medical examiner.”

  “Ah,” I said.  “Hey, is there any way we can cover the body?  Other staffers are coming in and they find him lying there a bit disturbing.”

  “NO!” yelled the man.

  Both deputies looked up.

  “I HAVE WORK TO DO,” yelled the medical examiner.  “THE BODY STAYS JUST AS IT IS.”

  I stood there and looked at him eye to eye, holding my cup of coffee.

  “Well,” I said, “That was easy to hear.”

  The man stood and stared at me for a few moments.

  “I’ve been up all night on another case,” he said in a calmer tone.  “I’m kind of tired.  Please tell anyone who’s bothered by this that when I am done taking pictures and notes I will cover him up.”

  I went back to the studio.

  While it was weird…having to act normal on the radio while a dead guy lay in the hallway just around the corner….I was learning stuff.

  I mean sure the Rescue Squad isn’t going to carry him away, the dude was dead.  Of course the Medical Examiner has to do his thing, to make sure there’s no foul play.

  A few minutes later the door to the radio studio opened up and there was Francesca.

  Francesca was the recruiter from the local university.  She dropped in from time to time and talked on the air about goings-on on campus.

  This morning Francesca walked through the studio door with eyes wide open.

  “Ah,” I said.  “I see you came in the front door.”

  “I mean, COVER HIM UP, JEEZ!” said Francesca.  “I can’t unsee that.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “sorry about that.  The medical examiner said we couldn’t cover him up til he was done.  But you know, I’m a day late and a dollar short on telling Boss Man we need to make a sign to send people to the side door and lock the front door.”

  I got up and walked around the corner.

  Two guys dressed in suit and tie were wrangling a body bag around Dave.

  “You must be from the funeral home,” I said.

  “Yes sir,” said one of the nattily dressed men without looking up.

  I just stood and watched as they got Dave in the bag, rolled him on to stretcher on the ground then raised him up to a nearby gurney.

  The guys secured Dave with some straps and wheeled him out the door.

  I stood there.

  I thought about life.

  How it really is true…any day on this side of the grass is a good day.

  I thought about death.

  How it just happens and for those left behind the world keeps on going.

  The idea that the world would do anything else BUT keep on going came from when I was an itty-bitty kid….those couple of days around November 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated.  The radio played slow, somber instrumentals…there wasn’t as much traffic on the roads.  It seemed like the world slowed down.  As the years went by I came to understand that was a unique time.

  I thought about work.

  Work is what we do to pay the bills.  Life isn’t supposed to be all about work.  I’d bet Dave would’ve rather’ve been home with his wife when his time came.

  I thought about home.

  I had a bit of a feeling that after this morning I’d just like to go home right then and there.

  “HEY GRANT,” it was Francesca’s voice from around the corner, “THE SONG’S OVER, GET IN HERE….”

E P I L O G U E

  I sat in my recliner that day after work telling The Lady of the House about Dead Dave and the parade of people who saw him.

  “I’d like to die at home,” I said.

  “Awake?” she said.  “I wouldn’t want to be awake.”

  “Yeah,” I said.  “I want to see what happens.”

  “You die,” said The Lady of the House.

  “Yeah,” I said, “But I’d like to see the transition.  I don’t think it’d be the same if I died in my sleep.”

  The Lady of the House waved her hand in my direction as if to say, “Enough of your stuff,” got up and headed for the kitchen.

  “Just don’t die in your sleep at night,” she said as she walked away.  “I can’t think of anything much creepier than me waking up next to you dead.”

  I sat in my recliner and pondered this scenario.

  The Lady of the House came walking back in the room with one of our folded old blankets.

  “Here,” she said putting it on the coffee table, “Take this to work to cover the next one of you guys who dies….because I’m sure there will be a next one.”

*Most names changed

That Time I Went to the Fortuneteller

  Actual factual pic of Zoltar in the hallway on the way to the restrooms at Cline's Corner 

  My favorite saying, my favorite “motto” is “Expectation is the greatest source of suffering.”  It’s a saying that’s attributed to Buddha so I say Buddha said it, but I can’t be sure.  Anyway, it’s my favorite saying.

  It’s not that I’ve perfected not having expectations, I haven’t.  I see the saying as a reminder, something to strive for.  I’ve actually done pretty well on cutting back on my expectations.

  Think about it:  “Expectation is the greatest source of suffering.”

  You expect things of yourself.  Lovers, spouses expect things of each other.  Parents have expectations of their children and vice versa.  You expect things from your friends and vice versa.  Believers of religion expect others in their group, even outside their group to believe as they do.  The same can be said of politics.  Bosses have expectations of their employees.  Workers expect things from their bosses.  People have expectations of their governments.  Countries have expectations of other countries.  And when all these expectations aren’t met there’s the whole gamut of negative human emotions and stuff:  Frustration, disappointment, arguments, anger, estrangement, fighting, yelling, divorce, jealousy, envy, rioting and war.

  So I’ve really tried to not see the future…because if I knew my future I would have expectations about when my prediction would come true.

  I got to thinking about this the other day when The Lady of the House and I stopped at the travel center on I-40 at Cline’s Corner. 

  There in the hallway on the way to the restrooms was a machine…half a mannequin enclosed in glass, he wore a turban and his name was Zoltar.  I can’t remember if Zoltar predicted the future or what but he wanted a buck to do what he did, whatever that was.

  Zoltar figures prominently in the movie “Big” with Tom Hanks.  I’ve never seen “Big” from beginning to end, only bits and pieces of it.  But I gather the Zoltar in the movie is responsible for Tom Hanks’ transformation into an adult from a kid then back again.

  So when I posted a pic of Zoltar on the social media one commentator said, “Be careful what you ask Zoltar.”

  And then I remembered the time I went to see the fortuneteller in far south Florida…a woman, not a machine.

  I had always been hesitant to go to gypsy fortunetellers because I had read one time that the whole thing was a ruse on us “gadjos.” Gadjo is what gypsy folks call people who aren’t of their “tribe” (my term) or “non-Gypsies.”

  As I mentioned I didn’t want to know a prediction of my life, I would take life as it came.

 I had just had another one of my life trainwrecks.  By the end of the 1980’s I had had two or three and I had grown tired of them, pulling myself out of the wreckage and rebuilding.

  I had gone to therapy, I had gone to 12-step groups, I had read The Good Book, I had read the “Tao Te Ching,” “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu and stuff by lots of writers:  Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Raymond Carver, Alberto Moravia and others looking for answers.

  I was ready to go see a gypsy fortuneteller.

  I was looking for some guidance.

  There was only one in the south Florida town where I lived.  She had a big ol’ sign outside her place saying she only charged ten bucks for a palm reading.  It was my kind of price.

  I pulled up in front of the gypsy’s place one sultry south Florida summer evening and got out.

  I walked up to the door and rang the doorbell.

  Moments later a darkly complected, raven haired woman answered the door.

  “Yes, come in,” said the woman, opening a door that revealed a dimly lit sitting area full of plush red-velvet chairs and a sofa.  I got the impression she’d been cooking, there was a spicy aroma in the house.  “Please sit down.”

  I sat then she sat down across from me.

  “How can I help you?” she asked.

  “I’m looking for a little guidance on the merry path of life,” I said with a smile.

  “I can help you with that,” she said.  “I charge 10 dollars to read your palm.”

  “I’m good with that,” I said.

  And then we sat in silence and stared at each other.

  “Oh,” I said, “You want your money now.”

  She smiled.

  I reached for my wallet, pulled out a 10 dollar bill and handed it to her.

  “Right this way,” she said as she stood up.

  She led the way to a small room with two chairs on either side of a small table with a lacy cloth draped over it.

  We sat.

  She held out her hands over the table.

  “Are you right-handed or left-handed,” she asked.

  “Right-handed,” I said.

  “Then let me have your right hand.”.

  I held out my right hand, she took it and brought it down on the table.

  “Ah,” she said as she traced a line on my palm with her finger, “You have heavy Karmic debt from a past life.”

  “Hunh?” I said as I looked her in the eye.

  “You did something in a previous life that you have to pay back in Karmic debt,” she said.  “But I see you are just about through paying it off.”

  “What did I do?” I asked.

  “We will talk about that when I am done,” she said.  “Now let me see your left hand.”

  She took my left hand and brought it down on the table.

  “In the fall you will journey to the desert,” she said.

  I just stared at the gypsy.

  I had not told a soul about my plan to leave Florida and head out west.  No one knew that I had researched cities of the west and narrowed things down to Albuquerque or Las Cruces in New Mexico, Tucson in Arizona or San Francisco, California.  I had been kicking around moving to New Orleans but I had grown tired of living in the flat, humid region around the Gulf of Mexico.

  “What can you tell me about this journey,” I asked.

  “That is all I can see,” she said.  “You will be traveling to the desert and you will stay there for a very long time.”

  The gypsy released my hand and I sat there.

  “Now,” she said, “If you want to know what you did in a previous life that incurred your Karmic debt, come back tomorrow with something very personal like some underwear or socks in a baggie and 50 dollars.

  “Socks or underwear,” I chuckled.  “That’s weird stuff.”

  “No,” she said, “These are things that are deeply personal and have been close to you.  Your essence is left on these things.

  I smiled and nodded.  In my head I was saying, “No ma’am, I ain’t that stupid, sorry.”

  “I know you probably won’t, but that is another service I provide.”

  I smiled and sat there.

  “And you get in trouble in life because you assume the role of The Fool easily.  And you are too trusting,” she said.

  I stopped smiling and sat there.

  The gypsy stood.

  “We are done,” she said.

  I stood up.

  “Well,” I said.  “This has been interesting.

  The gypsy smiled and nodded.

  Soon I was standing at my car.  I looked around.

  The stars were starting to come out.  I looked at them for a little bit.

  I thought about my journey ahead.

E P I L O G U E

  As it turned out that October I decided to leave south Florida and head for Albuquerque.  Chamber of Commerce stuff I’d sent away for said the city had a moderate boom going on and there were jobs galore.  The literature went on to describe The Duke City as a place “where the city’s ethnic groups live and work together in harmony.”  That line appealed to my “can’t we all just get along”-ness.

  Albuquerque sounded like utopia.

  But that was back when I didn’t know that Chamber of Commerce literature many times is spun bullshit woven to cast an area in the best light possible.

  So I don’t know if I went to the metropolis on the High Chihuahuan Desert because the fortuneteller suggested it or if she could actually see the future.

  It’s a curiosity.

  I’ll never know.

  I have a saying for that too:  “Like much in life it means nothing.”

Mannequins Here, Mannequins There.......

  

  For the past couple of weekends when I go to yard sales I’ve been intrigued by the appearance of a ceramic baby with no clothes.

  The first time I saw it it was sitting up in a box.  I called it “Creepy Baby” because the doll looked so life-like.  It didn’t have a fake smile like so many dolls do.  It just…was.  It looked creepy.  So I called it Creepy Baby.

  The second time I saw Creepy Baby was laying down in a box at a junk sale down the road from the previous weekend’s sale.  I knew it was the same doll because the left shoulder socket was broken just like on the first.

  “Hey,” I said to The Lady of the House.  “It’s the second time I’ve seen it.  Must be a sign.  It’s just a buck.  We could bury it in the front yard…up to its chest and position its arms so they’re raised in the air.”

  The Lady of the House turned and looked at me with a look that told me there would be no Creepy Baby buried up to its chest in the front yard.

  Muriel* used to do stuff like that with mannequins.

  I hung around with Muriel in the 1990’s.

  Muriel fancied herself as an artist…broken mirrors were saved in boxes for a possible mosaic, our pickup truck was hand painted with frivolous art done by the students in the dance class she taught, dog hair was saved for potential weaving into a dog hair sweater, each wall in the house was painted a different color, skeletons were drawn on the walls in honor of her arthritis (don’t ask me, it’s just something she told me), and Muriel had a collection of mannequins and mannequin parts.

  A potted plant would have mannequin arms sticking out of the soil with hands raised.

  There was the garden with the mannequin heads placed in strategic points, peeking out from the tomatoes and peppers at passersby on our street in Roswell.

  Then there was “Ted.”

  Ted was the full-sized male mannequin that Muriel put in different outfits over the years to fit her moods.  She said she named him after a Santa Fe artist that she said knew.

  One year Muriel put Ted in jeans, t-shirt and sunglasses in our front porch swing in Roswell…his hand raised in a gesture of greeting.

  It was the next day that the young woman who lived across the street “met” Ted.  She was getting groceries out of her car when she saw Ted sitting on the front porch swing with his hand raised.

  “Hi,” she said waving at Ted.

  Ted didn’t move.

  So the young woman put down her groceries, walked to the edge of her drive, waved and again said, “Hi.”

  Ted just sat there with his hand in the air.

   Young neighbor crossed the street and said, “Can you not hear me?”

  Ted sat there with his mannequin grin, hand in the air.

  The woman came up on the porch and laughed at herself for not seeing Ted was a mannequin.  About then a stray cat shot out from under the swing and bumped into her leg.  She screamed because she thought the mannequin had kicked her.

  That’s when I came out of the house with all the commotion going on.

  The young woman saw me, stopped, came back across the street and told me about her encounter with Ted.

  Muriel and I lived in Amarillo for a while and when it came time to move her dad loaned us an old, beat-up school  bus to load our stuff into and haul to Arizona.

  Ted sat in a wooden chair strapped to a platform on the back of the bus.  There he was, his hand raised in a cheery highway “hello.”

  As we passed through Hereford, Clovis, Roswell, Ruidoso, Las Cruces, Tucson and on into Phoenix I got a kick out of watching people in cars and trucks waving at Ted.

  Once we got settled into Phoenix Ted took up residence sitting in a chair on the patio of the condo.  Some time later Ted was joined out on the patio with some kid mannequins.

  The mannequins of children were appropriate for Muriel’s place because she had a thing for attracting kids.  Our place was a hub of activity for the little crumbcrunchers in the condo complex.  When Muriel got off work in the afternoon the kids started showing up…they’d play with the dogs, they’d color, stuff like that.

  One day a new kid, probably about 4 years old, came to join the group.  The kid kept staring at Ted.

  “Who’s that,” the kid asked an older kid named Danny.

  “That’s Ted,” said Danny.  “Muriel caught him stealing cookies from her cookie jar so she killed him and stuffed him with beans.”

  The 4 year old opened his eyes wide and kept staring at Ted.

  “So,” Danny went on, “You don’t want to steal nothin’ around here.”

  One spring my mom came to visit me in Phoenix. 

   Early mornings Mom would take a cup of coffee and a book out to the patio, sit at the table there and read.

  One day while she was visiting I came home from work and she started laughing as she told me a story.

  “I was out on the patio reading,” said mom, chuckling, “When these two women came walking by.  They stopped in front of the patio and one says to the other, ‘This is the place with all the mannequins.’”

  One woman got closer and even leaned over the patio railing and got within inches of mom’s face.

  “And this one looks so real,” the woman said of my mom.

  Just then mom turned and looked at the woman leaning over the railing.

  “Oh!” said the woman, practically falling backwards, turning and quickly scurrying away with her friend.

  Mom laughed and laughed.

*Names changed.....

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…..