I hadn’t seen Mike in ten years. His hair had receeded farther back on his head, and was completely grey now. His eyes were bloodshot and puffy. He choked on tears as he asked, “What have you learned about all this?” as he swept his hands across Wendy’s kitchen.
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This is work in progress – literally – because I’m working on this for a few days. Please check back.
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Coach started picking me up and driving to New Orleans to train with Catholic wrestling teams by 8am the summer vacation before my senior year. They won because they trained all summer and we didn’t, the same way kids who read over the summer get ahead of those who can’t. The New Orleans Catholic schools had money for summer programs and we didn’t; they had brothers who volunteered to push wrestlers all summer long and we didn’t. But I had Coach, and I felt like the luckiest kid in the world the summer after Uncle Bob died.
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1955-1972
In the 1950’s, my grandmother was a young woman, living a comfortable life in Richmond Hill Canada, a neighborhood of Toronto. She was petite, barely 5 feet 1 inches tall. Or, as Canadians say, she was a’boot 1.5 meters tall, ‘eh. Her wrists were so thin that her watch would barely fit around the wrist of an average eight year old girl, but her hands were big enough to hold a cocktail glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She enjoyed life.
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“Bull fuckin’ shit. Get Colonel Don’t-Remember on the mic, Captain.” Said The Sergeant Major Hogard to a British army captain.
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I began writing a memoir, and I wrote the first true sentence I remembered as a child: Stevie Nicks was fine.
Read moreWe landed, and learned that most of the 82nd Airborne Division gone. They had flown to Saudi Arabia to stop Iraqi tanks from continuing their takeover of the Middle East. Kuwait had fallen quickly, and America’s Quick Reaction force had left Fort Bragg North Colina to draw a line in the sand that unambiguously said: no one shall pass.
The world’s oil supply was at risk, and I’m sure someone was concerned about the Kuwait people, too.
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I’m not sure who’s responsible for me being a casualty of the War on Drugs. It could have been the new president, Ronald Reagan. In 1980 he promised the Evangelical Christian groups that financed his presidential campaign that he’d fight, and end, America’s drug problem. Or, it could have been my dad, who had earned enough money growing marijuana to buy remote land in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, where he grew even more marijuana. Either way, I at a lot ketchup in the early 80’s.
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I suggest that you stop reading. This is boring. I’m not saying that as a way to interest someone into reading more, I truly believe that this would be boring to most people.
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