Six Weeks from Everywhere

I grew up in the little town of Keene, Texas. I watched this water tower being built and for several years operated a day care center with the tower practically in my backyard. I grew up in Keene during the late 50s and finished college there in 1976. I got a special medallion with my graduation cap to celebrate my class being bicentennial graduates.

A lot of my peers like to get on Facebook and wail about how their childhoods in Keene were so terrible. Most of them do it because they are fighting feelings of guilt for leaving the Adventist Church. They didn't want the inconvenience of Sabbath observance or to have their worldly lifestyles cramped. It's pretty much a typical teenage rebellion and it starts when hormones start running wild and kids want to do things their parents would prefer that they wait before doing.

Keene is (or was) a Seventh-day Adventist town. It's grown and because it's such a nice little town, a lot of non-Adventists have moved into town and set up shop. Adventists are fundamentalist Bible Christian church. My great great grandfather, Elder Horatio B. French signed the church charter and helped establish the original Keene Industrial Academy that became the heart of the town. Elder French baptized better than half the newly minted Texas Adventists of the early 20th century. He was the traveling/baptizing pastor serving churches that didn't have a pastor yet. My family's history is deeply embedded in the town's history. The first hospital/sanitarium in Johnson County was in what became my grandparents' cow pasture. The roadbed of the Old Betsy Railway cut off a corner of their property next to the stock tank. I went to school from first grade to a BA degree right there in town. My great grandfather taught in the original Keene Public School. I did my student teaching in the elementary church school. My great grandfather's students became my teachers. 

The town stood on the highest spot in Johnson County which isn't saying much. Tornadoes for some reason (something to do with angels) avoid the town. For years we had no police department. When we finally did there were only two officers, Jake Howard, our neighbor, and my stepdad Ralph DeLaune who stuck lights on the family Rambler and patrolled on weekends. Mom turned us out on summer mornings, we ran loose in the town and surrounding woods, and we came home when the sun went down, often with a jar full of fireflies to light out way. There were no streetlights in town in those days and the streets themselves were all gravel with grader ditches. 

The secret to having a happy childhood in Keene back in my day, I am convinced, was to not care about being one of the popular kids. If you didn't care about them, they had no power over you. Me, I had no chance to join that august assemblage. I was a nerd, skinny with thick glasses and most of the time had white tape across the broken bridge of my specs.  Teachers set all the honor roll students on the front rows. We acted as a human shield for the teacher, protecting her from the barbarians at the back of the room. In my public school days, most of my class of 35-40 kids in 2 grades were either too poor for church school or had been kicked out or were the few isolated Baptists in the public school district. Meaner than second skimmings some of them. They liked to knock me around for their collective amusement.

Early in my life I discovered two important things.  One, you can get a job throwing papers when you are in 6th grade like I did. The route was five miles long, up hill and down, rain, snow, sleet or hail. I made $5 a week which I collected on Sunday (that's when Adventists and agnostics were all home in Keene). The Cleburne Times-Review didn't publish a Saturday edition. That's so they could take off on Sunday. It worked out perfectly for me because I couldn't throw papers on Saturday. All the businesses in town at that time closed up from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday and Seventh-day Adventists don't do business on Saturday. Not even delivering papers. So the local newspaper business had a kind of symbiotic relationship with their Adventist neighbors.

The second important thing I discovered was the miracle of mail order. I picked up the newspapers I delivered on the loading dock at the post office where we had a PO Box for years. As my reading for pleasure expanded, I discovered the classified ads in the back of Boy's Life and various comic books and such. For a few dollars I could get all sorts of things through the mail - flying airplanes, toy soldiers, catapults, and a subscription to the science fiction book club. I built a sci-fi library to rival the Carnegie Library's in Cleburne.  I pedaled my bike to on weekends, dodging big toothy farm dogs and climbing hilly gravel roads all 10 miles there and back.

Back in those days, we were apparently more tolerant of delay. Virtually everything I ordered from the back of Popular Mechanics, Popular Science and other such magazines, carried a warning label.  

PLEASE ALLOW SIX WEEKS FOR DELIVERY.

When you are 12 years old, six weeks is an eternity. I'm not sure whether it was because they had no robots to pull stuff from the warehouses, or because they just weren't in all that much of a hurry. One thing it did was teach me patience. As a kid with galloping ADD, patience was a skill I very much needed.

Anyway, though Keene seemed to be six weeks from everywhere in the world, I became addicted to buying stuff by mail. I took up slot cars and found a whole company that sold slot cars, track, tires, motors, frames, decals and everything you could imagine. I learned how to buy a money order, fill out an order blank and send off for stuff. I bought model rockets, models of things the local five and dime didn't stock. The mail-orders arrived through the pokey old post office kept me supplied with bits and bobs to support the 47 hobbies I practiced in my bedroom workshop. 

As an adult, Sears, Montgomery Wards, and various mail order houses scratched my itch to send myself gifts in the mail. As a grownup, I still liked getting those packages in the mail.

AND THEN CAME AMAZON!  What a wonderful idea. I was already a fanatic reader and they started out with books, sucked me in and then expanded the range of things they sell astronomically. Then I discovered eBay  and debit cards and it was off to the races. I have Amazon Prime and no car, so there is always a steady stream of stuff rolling up the driveway that I got shipped to me free. Walmart's even bringing me some groceries. It's Christmas every day. I even send stuff to my family straight from Amazon. It's cheaper if it qualifies for Prime shipping and it gets there faster than if I went to the post office, picked up a money order, sent my order in, waited six weeks and then reshipped it to Mom for her birthday. 

Thanks to Fedex, Amazon delivery, UPS and other competitors, even the US Post Office has gotten faster and more efficient.  

So now, I'm down to three days from everywhere on average. I get cranky if I have to wait a week. I even run a little mail order website and print the shipping on my computer. People talk about the good old days and the good old days definitely had merit. We had lots more horned toads, fireflies, and trees you could climb that weren't forbidden by insurance companies. But if I'd had three day Prime shipping and streaming video, who knows if I would have ever worked up the enthusiasm to get out of the house and become an adult.

I think I became an old man during a crucial social, political and cultural upheaval. Not a bad time to be alive. Anyway, the Schwann's guy just delivered two frozen pizzas, I've got Amazon coming this afternoon with a package of guard rails for my Carrerra Go Slot car set, and tomorrow a guy on eBay is sending me a usb fan to cool my 3 tb hard drive that has all my movies on it. And Sheila's got a bottle of vinyl floor polish that will be here Thursday, same day her prescription refill will arrive.

We've come a long way from the days of six weeks from everywhere. We've even got our five year old grandson hooked on receiving packages from Grammy and Poppy (mostly Grammy). Grammy just outfitted him with Batman outfit complete with mask and cape - all ordered from my desktop and delivered in 3 days.

I really like living "3 days from everywhere." We don't have a car. We're old and arthritic and don't get around very well. We're kind of back to where we were as kids. Thank heaven for those wonderful packages. They don't take nearly as long. And icing on the cake? My town just got an Amazon Warehouse that opened up just a couple of miles from our house. Some stuff comes the same day or the next from there. 

Is this a great country or what?

 © 2022 by Tom King

 

 

If Biden Keeps it Up He'll Be Missing Some Tax Revenue!

 

Our alleged president is really working on making Texans mad.  Today his administration announced another critical food shortage. As if baby formula wasn't bad enough, there's a new one on the horizon.

IT'S SALSA!

That's right folks, no more picante sauce, enchilada sauce, salsa, or taco sauce? Salsa et al is expected to be off the shelf and in short supply elsewhere by summer. And as he did with the supplies of Covid treatment meds, expect President Puddinhead Biden to restrict supplies to Texas and Florida first. It's likely he'll ship any loose truckloads of Pace Picante Sauce to the border.

Next up, he's issued an executive order radically increasing the production of ethanol to be used in fuel. Not that it will lower the cost of fuel any. What it will do is mess up internal combustion engines, fail to cut emission and, more importantly, it will cut corn supplies. 

IT COULD LEAD TO A MASSIVE CORN TORTILLA SHORTAGE.

What next?  We've already got a beef and chicken shortage building. Next thing you know it'll be cheese and then where will we be.

SO LONG MEXICAN FOOD!

That will be the point at which Texas and probably Florida will leave the Union. And it will be with the full support of cowboys, Hispanic folks and people everywhere who love Tex-Mex, Whataburger, Dr. Pepper, Chuy's,  Taco Bell and those little authentic Mexican taco stands at the Annual Tomatofest, Black-eyed Pea Festival, State Fair, Yamboree, Onionfest, Azalea Festival, Rose Festival and Fat Stock Show.

And don't forget this China Joe. Lockheed makes fighter planes in Ft. Worth. We know how to build  ships and the know-how to run a navy. We have a SpaceX Launch base in Corpus Christi, another couple of commercial space companies in West Texas, several Army bases, Air bases, Navy Bases, massive oil refineries and reservoirs of untapped oil.  We also make nuclear weapons in Texas and the NASA launch control center is in Houston. We have a massive airline hub in Dallas-Ft. Worth, two NFL teams, three basketball teams, two pro baseball teams, and no income tax.

We also have something like the 5th largest economy in the world and out from under the shackles of Washington's over-regulation, it's liable to rank even higher. With the loss of Texas,  as the United States loses Texas' massive power grid with nuclear power plants which have been forced to supply juice all the way up into the northern states. If those states stop sucking power from Texas, we have plenty of fuel for our gas fired power plants. We've even got our own coal, a massive wind farm facility for when the wind blows, offshore oil fields Biden won't let us drill in, and Gulf Coast ports a plenty. We have Halliburton.and dozens of other large construction companies to keep our infrastructure kept up. Halliburton, by the way builds oil platforms. 

So go ahead Joe. Makes us mad. I'm betting Oklahoma and most of the heartland would go with us along with Alaska much of the South and Southwest including Tennessee. We'd be an oil producing, food producing, hard-working country. Well-armed and ready. The US Army already has a majority of sergeants who curse fluently in Southern and Texas accents. 

We could make Donald Trump the press secretary for the new nation. Just turn him loose on Twitter in case DC isn't paying attention. We also own massive media companies, TV, music and movie production resources. We even have Chuck Norris and the actual Texas Rangers so don't think we're going to put up with Yankee agitators. And we do remember how schools are supposed to be run and what to do with people who commit crimes.

Our national motto could be, "Let's Go Brandon!" Texas already has experience being a stand-alone Republic and we know how to build walls and control borders, so if you Yankees are thinking about swimming the Red River, better check in at the consulate to get permission to enter and a green card because you'll need to work when you get here.

Now all we need is a name.  Any suggestions?

 © 2022 by Tom King

 

 

Life on the Edge: Childhood Adventures of The Flying Dingbat Brothers

My brother Donnie atop the Mizpah Gate at SW Junior College 1969.
Campus security was not amused!

We always liked high places. We lived in the treetops in our yard - big oaks with brittle branches. Mom finally quit looking out the kitchen window. The view must have been worrying for a mother. Her two sons, who seemed to believe they were either Tarzan or Cheetah, would inevitably be swinging from the branches of the brittle old post oaks in our back yard or making like a gibbon, swinging arm over arm from branch to branch of the Chinaberry trees. We were pretty good at it too, though Donnie was somewhat better than me. My mom one day found one neighbor kid dangling from the Chinaberry with a broken bone (leg or arm, I don't remember). He had attemped the arm over arm trip round the Chinaberry that my brother and I used to do, only he was scared so he tied a rope around his leg in case he fell. 

He did!

It's fortunate he didn't tie the rope round his neck. Mom cut him down and called Edward's mom and he went off to the doctor. Nobody got sued for childhood stupidity fortunately. We were safe anyway as we were too poor to sue.

This is pretty much my youthful
self-image back then.

My kid brother, God rest his soul, and I made a ramp by our driveway on a little rise. We would come tearing down the street on our bikes, hit the ramp and go flying. My brother, not the finest bicycle mechanic in the world followed me over the ramp. He sailed up into the air (we used to get a couple of feet in altitude our of a jump) and as he left the ramp, his front wheel came off. He hit the ground, forks first, but gymnast that he was he managed to tuck and roll up to his feet. He looked around and spied the front wheel rolling off across the neighbor's front yard and took off in hot pursuit, managing to catch it before it ran out into the cross street half a block away. 

My brother was the epitome of cool, unlike his awkward older brother. I have two pictures, one of me and one of him doing a hand spring over a heavy sawhorse we had purloined for the purpose. Donny's image was captured at the peak of the flip, perfect form, toes pointed, back straight headed for a 3 point landing. I was better at photography than gymnastics. The picture of me shows a gangling kid, long torso, short legs, sort of a skinny flying troll look. I looked like someone had flung a bag of loose bones over the sawhorse. I was headed for a -5 point landing and a face plant. I told my brother his looked so much better than mine because I was the better photographer.

 

How Donnie actually looked!

Life back then was high-risk and a ton of fun!

Our friend Leslie Gilley had a great long rope that hung from a huge tree overhanging a usually dry creekbed in the pasture behind his house. I asked him how often he replaced it. Since his older brother had installed it years ago and the knot was above his climbing ceiling when he was 12, he told me, "When it breaks."

We would climb out on another limb that over hung a bend in the creek, grab the rope and swing out over the creekbed, back and forth until it slowed down enough to slide to a stop in the gravel that filled the bed of the creek at that spot. One day I climbed out on the limb with the rope, leaned back and launched myself out into space. As I approached the bottom of the swing where momentum reached its zenith, I heard a crack above as the rope parted. I hit the gravel in the creekbed butt first and at pretty good speed. Fortunately, I've been blessed with very tough bones and nothing was broken.

Leslie's comment was, "Hey man, you broke my rope!"

I answered, "I'd have been happy for you to break it."

My brother, the gymnast, decided he was going to do a triple flip on the trampoline. He finally did it, but got a bunch of bruises and sprained his neck along the way. One day he was late for school on Monday. Mom flipped back the covers on his bed and found him sleeping in his skivvies and covered with bruises. Turns out he'd been motorcycle racing, had run off the track, through a barbed wire fence and crashed in a gully sans bike. I'm not sure Mom knew he'd been doing motocross or that he could ride a motorcycle for that matter.

In the middle on the bottom,
where else would I be?

I thought I'd outgrown being stupid until I became a staff member at Lone Star Camp and was introduced to water skiing. I got to do a lot of stunts in our weekly ski show, I think, mainly because I used to do such spectacular wipe-outs. Remember: not as coordinated as my gymnast brother.

I was once jerked off my skis (on purpose), but then lost my swimsuit while being dragged around the lake (not on purpose). Though, I told the ministers wives watching from the doc that I had done that on purpose. We all laughed and laughed.

I've got so many stories about my brother and I and the disasters we suffered doing risky things. I once kicked myself in the back of the head while trying to barefoot ski. We did pyramids for ski shows. I was the center guy at the bottom. When the pyramid collapsed at the end, accidentally or on purpose, Guess who got fallen on?

The point of the story is that I look back on my misadventures fondly. I've been almost run over by a motorboat, jerked off a lifeguard tower by a ski boat, and was nearly immolated during a campfire skit of Elijah and the Priests of Baal (Donny was in on that one.) My best friend kicked loose a 500 pound boulder that hit me square in the chest while we were free climbing a 40 foot cliff over the Brazos River. Not sure how, but when the stars cleared up I was hanging from a scrub of a tree 30 feet above a field of rocks.

As a grownup I risked 5 nonprofit startups, unpaid, wrote more than one million dollars in grants, became a nonprofit consultant, a freelance commercial writer and am working on publishing a novel (the sixth book I've done). I taught self-defense for staff of a mental facility treating often violent kids from diminutive 3 year olds to 17 year old football players and one powerful 300 pound Samoan kid. I wrangled 20 horses, read a book on how to break horses and trained several to ride. I cut trails with emotionally disturbed kids and road 5 days a week, 5 hours a day and never lost a kid. I took youth groups camping and led canoe trips down Texas rivers. I taught canoeing and swimming and rescued a drowning steer from the overflowing Trinity River in a canoe with the help of a junior lifesaver girl I'd just graduated the day before. WE SAVED THE COW!

My wrangling days....

We made some memories and took some risks. My Mom had two ADHD boys and she raised us just right. We were allowed to take risks and we took 'em. She didn't hover. We grew up to be good people with the right blend of courage and kindness. My brother and I once extricated the car of a church singer from stuck high centered on a curb with the front wheels dangling in a deep mudhole. After we leveraged his car from the mud, Donny and I then walked home in the freezing rain afterward. And no, he didn't offer us a ride (we were on foot) because we might get mud on his mother's car's upholstery. Walking home, wet and shivering across a pasture waist high in wet grass, my brother and I felt like we'd won a battle against evil. After all, Steve did make it in time to sing for vespers. We made it home to a hot shower.  

I lost my brother his sophomore year in high school, killed by a stupid prank by a friend. Christmas, the night before he died, we sat up late talking about how we would do Christmas when we grew up and had families. He talked about his plans to work on improving his grades so he could go back to church academy with his friends. We used to fight like cats and dogs. I can't remember why we wound up in wrestling matches. We quit doing it when things got too dangerous and chances of hurting each other became too real. 

In that last day, however, my brother and I bonded as we never had before. And when Christ comes to take us home, I'll be looking around for my brother. We're still not done swinging on ropes, skiing, climbing trees and sailing. I never got a chance to take him out on my Hobie Cat and catch a full breeze and tip her up on one pontoon. 

Oh, the things we'll do once we have forever in which to do them.

© 2022 by Tom King

Tom king

 

Now, I know How Snow White Felt

I love the woods and lakes and anywhere the wild things live and play. Our next door neighbors have a beautiful patio that one service guy calls "Narnia". Squirrels drip from the trees and squadrons of birds hang from Dan and Suzanne's feeders. He buys peanuts in 50 pound bags for the squirrels. I've seen chickadees eat bird seed from Dan's hand. Squirrels climb up into his lap. He's like a hairy-chested Snow White.

He's left me in charge of the squirrels on occasions when they go off on vacation. The squirrels have come to accept my presence, but not to quite trust me close up. Imagine my disappointment when I went next door to find Suzanne and Sheila (my wife) sitting on the patio with a table full of squirrels next to them begging for peanuts. Sheila had one on her shoulder. It kept coming back, climbing up in her lap and plucking peanuts from her fingers. I wanted a squirrel to jump up in my lap too, but while she was there, they preferred her lap to mine. She won't let me post videos of her, so I have been waiting to talk Little Red into climbing up so I could show it to my grandson - perhaps to lure him to come visit us in Washington State with the promise of feeding wild squirrels.

Today, after Dan and Suzanne left for Idaho, I went over to feed the squirrels. The red squirrel I call "Little Red" approached me with a puzzled look. Deciding I was the only one around, he took a leap of faith and landed on my knee. After that he ran back and forth stashing peanuts and leaping up on my leg for another one for the rest of the afternoon. 

 The squirrels all have personalities. Little Red won't take cracked or dirty peanuts. He prefers perfect peanuts.  Two-fer, a gray squirrel won't leave without two peanuts tucked under his chin. If you're slow with that second one, he'll snatch it out of your hand. Cressie has a crescent shaped scar on her back and Lightning runs at full tilt wherever he goes.

I was able to video Little Red's first jump onto my leg. It may seem stupid but that has been the highlight of my week. Another little peek at heaven for me.

© 2021 by Tom King