Evidently.
Jimmy Carter died. He always seemed like a pretty straight shooter to me.
And he loved his wife and family. A good God-fearing man.
Rest in peace, sir.
I love everything about the College Football Playoffs, except one little change I would make.
Reward the top-4 ranked teams with the first round byes.
Speaking of the playoffs, I could turn this into a love affair post to my Fighting Irish of Notre Dame, but I won’t.
Just keep on winning boys.
I remember when I was “on the road” in the early seventies and we stopped into this sleepy west Texas town and we (my German Shorthaired Pointer Chopper and I) rented this very cool studio apartment with a pool and a six-foot privacy fence giving Chopper a nice big yard to leave as he easily cleared the fence.
The manager of the twelve-unit complex was a very cool lady named Thistle. She was about 45 or so, and she had some rough miles under her belt.
But she kept her figure.
One night we got drunk and she intimated that she had been accused of cheating on her fiancé and that she was forced out of town and on to a new life, as she put it.
Joanna was her accused lover’s name.
Thistle took an immediate liking to Chopper and when I saw the pictures of her dog on her nightstand, I understood.
She allowed Chopper to use the pool whenever he wanted and he soon became the whole property’s pooch.
One day I walked into a railroad salvage outlet and with nothing more than proof that I had a lease (which I would soon break) I had a massive Marantz stereo system delivered that would rival the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound.
We would fulfill half of the six-month lease we had on the ultimate bachelor pad which saw us hosting orgiastic parties every single weekend we were there.
We left rather abruptly when an angry young man, accompanied by three other (for lack of better words) good ol’ boys, pulled up to me with bad intent on their simple-minded asses. I was told, in the most obviously-threatening manor, that I had played with the wrong WIFE at one of our Saturday night soirees.
Now, a Mexican in West Texas does not exactly stand on the most stable of legal foundations, to say the least.
Especially in 1974.
I left the massive sound system and little else in our condo.
The only other thing left in the apartment was a hastily scribbled note.
Joanna was here…
I knew Thistle would understand.
Check out this little shorty that did not make it into my book EMOTIONS: Not your Mama’s ABC’s!
The Recording
“Surprise!!!
Doctor Bill Evans hated surprise parties, especially his own. He was at least making an effort to act surprised and grateful. This was his accommodating nature.
He was a grouch.
He picked my neatly-wrapped present up off the oak end table and viewed it with much scrutiny before neatly removing the wrapping.
“What?”..
“It’s a recorder, Doctor. You know, to help you keep track of things better.”
He glowered at me and said quite insincerely, “Thank you.”
He spent the next several months at the hospital joking about my present, or as he referred to it, my welcome-to-the-new-millennium gift.
I was the brunt of all his jokes.
I knew he was working late the night of the big basketball game, so I made my way over to his office undetected. I stealthily ascended the old wooden staircase to his office and waited just outside the doorway.
“Intern review session 107,” he said into the tiny microphone as he slipped the recorder into his shirt pocket.
As I cracked the door open, there was the old bastard, hunched over his massive, cluttered desk, smiling as he reviewed the aspiring doctors’ files under his charge.
I raised the knife high over his head.
“Joke about this, old man. Nobody jokes about Mark Diaz.”
The knife pierced his skinny little neck, blood soon pooling on his desk calendar.
I took one last look and fled down the stairs.
Dr. Bill’s eyes began to cloud over, as the little revolving wheels in his pocket sealed my fate.
*****
Stay well.
