My Brother's Birthday

 

Donald Lee King - HS Freshman, gymnast, athlete, musician, nice guy.

October 23rd would have been my brother, Donny's 65th Birthday. He's been gone 49 years - close to half a century and I still think about things I want to talk to him about. I still remember him as the kid in the picture. We fought a lot - down on the ground wrestling matches; up into our teens. Then one day we realized that it was too dangerous to fight anymore because we were both strong enough to damage one another. So we quit.

 

We practically lived in the brittle old oak trees around our house on 4th Street, swinging from limb to limb in the treetops like a pair of apes. We'd set up army men on the ground and then climb to the top of this one oak that had a great crotch up there you could sit in. It provided a stable platform for our bombing raids. With our paper route money we bought these small metal toy bombs that you would load a Greenie Stickum Cap into and then drop from a height. They would pop loudly when they hit the ground among the toy soldiers. Once you'd exhausted your bomb load, you'd climb down and reset the soldiers, reload your bombs and then it was back up the tree again.

There were two Chinaberry trees in our yard. One by the house allowed us to climb up a limb and drop down on the roof at the back of the house. From there we would parachute behind German lines. Our "parachutes" consisted of one of Mom's old bedsheets. We'd tie two corners to the belt loops on the back of our pants and hold the other two corners over our heads, take a flying leap and plummet off the roof into a soft patch of thick grass that grew where the septic line ran out of the kitchen. It was sometimes squishy, especially if we'd been catching up on the dishes. Soft as the ground might be, that old house had a pretty high roof for an 80 plus year old one story house. My hips and knees are paying me back now for all of those parachute drops. Turns out, even if you only weigh 90 pounds sopping wet, hitting the ground from that height is going to be hard on your joints, even with the paltry slowdown provided by your bedsheet parachute. It also turns out there's a reason the Army used other than bedsheet materials to make parachutes.

The other Chinaberry tree was in back along the edge of the property.  The limbs of Chinaberry trees are not very big, but they are flexible and tough enough to support a pair of would-be chimpanzees as we sung from limb to limb. The back Chinaberry had limbs spaced so that you could start on a limb at the back of the tree and swing on a series of 4 flexible limbs and end up around by the front of the tree. Donny and I were very good at swinging limb to limb with our arms. We were the envy of the neighborhood. Unfortunately, some of our friends were not as "gymnastic" as my brother and I. A friend of Donny's, Edward Black, wanted to try it. I wasn't in the yard when he tried it, so I'm fuzzy on details. Mom heard someone screaming out back and ran to the scene. There she found Edward hanging by one leg from a lower limb, head down, his hands almost touching the ground. His leg was broken and if I remember right, Donny was trying to hold him up (or else he was hiding because he knew he was in trouble). You see, Edward had decided to try to swing from limb to limb like Donny did, but he was afraid he would fall, so as a safety measure, he decided to tie a rope to his leg to catch him if he fell. And Donny let him. Well the rope worked as advertised and snapped him up short before he did a header into the dirt. Edward hobbled around for weeks in a leg cast that summer.

Then there was the barrel incident! My step-dad had brought home an empty 55 gallon barrel which had once contained varnish from Brandom's Kitchen Cabinets. It had a lid with an intact locking ring. So! Donny and I took turns locking each other in the barrel and rolling the barrel down the little hill in our backyard. My sister, Debbie, begged us to let her take a turn. Finally, against our better judgment, we gave her her wish. She crawled in the barrel, we put the lid on it, locked it down and gave it a shove. As the barrel rolled off down the hill, there began such a wailing and screaming from within the barrel. "Let me out!  Stop it!" Trouble was the barrel was already halfway down the hill and gaining speed. 

Donny and I caught up with the barrel as it reached the bottom of the hill. From within the barrel there issued forth such shrieks and curses and threats that as Donny reached for the locking handle, gave us both pause. He stopped and looked up at me. 

"Should I open it or should we give her a second to calm down?" he asked.

"I don't know," I responded. "She sounds pretty mad."

"She's going to go straight to Mama and tell on us!"

"What's she going to tell?"

"I don't know but if we don't let her out the barrel's gonna explode!"

"Okay, stand back," I said grabbing the release handle.  My sister busted out of that barrel rather the way a wet hen would fly up in the face of whoever was holding the bucket with which it had been doused!  I never heard the end of it. Somehow Donny missed receiving the blame for the whole affair and he was the one that was most reluctant to open the barrel! My sister told the story of her abusive older brother who forcibly shoved her into a barrel, locked it shut, and pushed it off a cliff. She told that story from one end of the state of Texas to the other. I finally resorted to telling my side of the story to her friends (all of whom knew my sister's penchant for artistic storytelling). When I took up my own defense, she finally slowed down telling everybody how mean I was and confined the relating of that tale to people I was unlikely to ever meet.

Our house was almost as old as the town of Keene where we grew up. In the winter when the wind blew the linoleum floors would breathe up and down and sigh softly in the night. It was a bit creepy I can tell you. But we had a pretty good time of it. My brother and I roamed the local woods and creeks. Donny was more ambitious than me. He went along with friends who soaped the college fountain, climbed things they weren't supposed to climb and generally got into mischief. I was more the shy nerdy type, but still we had some adventures.

The last time I talked to him was the night before his death. We stayed up late Christmas Night talking about Christmases to come and how we would celebrate it with our families. He said he would make his kids wait till morning to open their presents. He was an old softy and I'm pretty sure he'd have given in and like me, let them open one on Christmas Eve. He told me he was going to get his grades up again and stay out of trouble. He wanted to go back to Chisholm Trail Academy again where his Adventist friends were. He'd gone back to public high school after his grades fell at CTA. He told me he wanted to get back to church again too. He used to play saxophone trios for church with his friend David and Mr. Schramm the band director. He missed it.

 

Donny got up and left before I woke up the next morning. He was headed for his friend's house to hang with his motorcycle enthusiast friends. That afternoon a couple of friends pulled up to the house and took my sister and me to the place Donny had gone. I walked into the back room and found him lying dead on his back on the bed, a bloody hole in his chest from a shotgun at close range. The cops didn't bother to warn us and no one told us he was dead. A friend playing a joke with a shotgun that wasn't supposed to be loaded had pulled the trigger at close range. My mom was already there. I can't imagine what she was going through. I went through 3 very dark days. I spent much of them aimlessly wandering the woods where Donny and I had roamed since we were small.

The guy who killed him later told me it was the worst day of his life. I rather believe that. He'd killed a friend doing something careless and stupid. The police wanted to rain down the wrath of the law on the boys, but my family believed the boys that were there and didn't want to compound one tragedy with another.

Still, hardly a day goes by I do not miss him. Jesus cannot come soon enough. I have two brothers and a son I need to spend some time with.

© 2021 by Tom King

Climate of Fear: The War for America's Shy People

The rhetoric in this countryhas become ridiculous - on both sides! Saying this will not get me a large audience as a blogger. Many conservatives have decided that telling lies is okay as long as your intent is good. The hard left has been doing so for years. Wild stories and inflammatory language is one way to have a popular blog, though.

Me, I'm congenitally unable to do some of the things you have to do to be a successful blogger - among those, tell "good" stories if I know them to be untrue. I'm not very good at writing to be search engine optimized. It seems dishonest to write so that you repeat key words that are popular search words on Google, Yahoo, Bing and the rest. Technically, I should find a way to mention, for instance, Ted Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechne, Chappaquiddick, Robert Novak, Michael Jackson or Rebecca Gayheart and Eric Dane (some sort of romantick entanglement I believe). All these are high on the most often searched list of keywords this week. Unfortunately, four years of Mrs. Creel's English classes taught me the evils of artificial writing and I cannot do it and feel good about myself, no matter if it would help me get one million "hits".

If I wanted to rile up some conservative readers and win their allegiance, I should mention Van Jones, Glenn Beck or Town Hall. I do, if I have something to say about those things, but writing an article where I repeat those names simply to get the search engine to move me up in a word search seems as disingenuous as Michael Savage calling himself by his full name instead of using pronouns like "I" or "me". Makes me want to smack him!

According to master blogger, Robert Stacy McCain, some other tricks include finding ways to insert popular women in not much clothing into your blog, picking fights so that you gain lots of enemies and spending a LOT of time self-promoting.

Ah, well, I guess I didn't really want to be a wildly successful blogger anyway. I think I'd rather write honestly. I sleep better at night that way.

Now that I've wandered off topic, let me get back to it. I read a piece in which a liberal someone had gone to a town hall and waved around a map with Iraq on it. He found (surprise, surprise) that 75% of those who opposed Obama's health care initiative were:

1. Unable to find Iraq on a map though it was brightly colored and in the center of the map.

2. All stupid white people who only memorized anti-health care junk that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity had sent them by e-mail or were paid by some mega-insurance companies that had paid them to spread lies about Obamacare.

3. All were probably either on Medicare or Veteran's Care and were hypocrites anyway.

Again I am shocked.

Okay, that was sarcasm. I admit it. It's just that once again, we're getting the same old Democrat tactic. I remember it from high school where it was a popular way to keep the cool kids in power. No matter what happens, if you don't believe and act the way the popular kids did, you were labeled stupid and ignorant even if you have a 139 IQ, a 4.0 GPA and actually knew what you are talking about.

It's the rhetorical equivalent of the masterful comeback, "Oh, yeah!" The Democrats are masters of it.

They'er using it to marginalize the frighteningly large numbers of angry mainstream Americans who are showing up for Health Care Town Hall meetings this summer. The target to be intimidated and "guided" into correct liberal thinking by this particular anti-free speech campaign, however, is not the mythical moderates. It's not conservatives. It's not even the liberal base that supports the health care takeover. This tactic is aimed at people who, by nature, don't want to make a fuss. They don't want to get into a screaming match. They don't want anybody to be mad at them and they do not want to be thought of as "different". This is the group that is truly the swing vote in US elections. They are the go-alongs. It takes a lot to move them and fear that something bad will happen that will upset their world is one of the biggest things that motivates them to action. It takes a lot to get these guys out to a town hall meeting. It is not in their nature to go against anything, much less their duly elected congressman or woman. They don't really understand all the ramifications of political stuff like this because it really doesn't concern them. Only when something threatens the health, comfort and safety of their families. Why else do you think the message is, "Don't worry. Health Care Reform won't hurt you. It will make everything good for all Americans. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain....."

If you go to a town hall, watch how these plain simple folk react when they get really angry at their congressman. Watch them shake their heads as they speak. It's as though they are saying "No, no, no, no, no..." all the time they are confronting this powerful person that they may actually have voted for because they were comfortable with him. They don't want to be there. They don't want to confront this person. They look over at the union guys and the liberal plants sent there to intimidate them and they just flat want to go home and hide. Even their body language says "I don't like doing this."

The problem is that even if they agree with someone, if that person or group resorts to the tactics of shouting, fear and intimidation, they drive those same people away. It's a careful dance between just enough intimidation and too much. Joe McCarthy failed to understand that back in the early 50's. He was right about Communists infiltrating Hollywood. It really was happening. Americans were frightened by it. But when he resorted to Gestapo like tactics, he lost America's shy people. There was a point in the McCarthy hearings where the country gave a collective cringe and turned off their radios. After that, no one cared how much of what he said was true. They weren't listening anymore.

At first, Washington, the Adams boys, Jefferson and Patrick Henry were considered rabble rousers and the American colonists by and large really didn't want to hear them. Mel Gibson captured the sentiment in his character's reaction to the revolution in "The Patriot". He just wanted to take care of his kids and his farm. He wasn't looking to confront power. He knew what the cost would be and he shrank from paying that cost.

I don't blame him. I don't blame any of the grandmas and grandpas that have driven to the town halls in their pickups and big grandma Buicks. It happened during the Revolution. Britain got cocky and pushed their grab for power too far too fast. They made the silent majority, the shy people of America fear for their way of life.

That's what's happening in the first months of the Obama administration. They chose the quick grab for power over the slow, steady approach. The Cap and Trade and Health Care Initiatives are the equivalent of a "Hail Mary" pass in football. I think they've decided that this is the last chance for socialism and if they risk it all on this one roll of the dice, they can win!

Bloggers, talk show hosts and conservative action groups are fighting a delaying action, hoping Americans will wake up to what's happeing before it's too late. We need to block that Hail Mary pass or time may actually run out on us. We'll be left with a frightening new system of government with the power to destroy all opposition in its way.

Delay and Sound the Alarm!

We need night riders like Paul Revere to wake up the country to its peril. We also need the informants that found out the British were coming and where they were going to. Soon we'll need the patriots at the bridge standing toe to toe with a foe that is disciplined, well-armed and confident. But on that day, which side will America's shy people be standing behind? That's the critical factor in whether we win or lose in this fight for freedom.

I think I can tell you which side they'll take. It'll be the side that best convinces them it can protect their way of life - the things they most value. The side that best articulates its case without malice or brutality (or at least without the appearance of malice and cruelty) will carry the field. As Ghandi and Martin Luther King, the original Martin Luther and Jesus Christ himself demonstrated, it may require some of us to have nerves of steel - the ability to hold our fire till we see the whites of their eyes. We may have to risk our lives and our honor, our wealth and our safety. Some of us may be ruined in the effort. Some may not survive. The way to win may well be for enough of us to go down with dignity and reveal the foe as a cruel tyrant by his behavior. We may lose talk radio, conservative news, religious broadcasting and independent publications before it's over. We may lose a lot of things we value before America fully wakes.

I hope not.

In this current, and what I believe may be final, conflict, we must tell the truth, no matter what. We must not pass along lies and rumors just because it works to make people believe like we do. Our opponents do that very well. They lie themselves and then convict us in the press of lies we never told. They make up things to support their agenda, no matter whether they are the truth or not. We must not do that too! We must not resort to the tactics of Goebbels, Stalin, Mussolini Saddam Hussein and their ilk simply because lying is an effective tool to get what you want.

Let us be careful in this conflict to tell the truth. I'm listening to both sides and there are many out there who believe that what our government is trying to do is wrong. Many tell the truth scrupulously no matter what their critics say to the contrary. Others say exciting things that will get them ratings without any concern for whether the things they say are true or not. If it sounds good, they'll use it. I get a dozen e-mails a day from people I care very much for with stories in them that are lies. They are great stories and may make me mad at people I should be mad at. Nonetheless they are lies and we hurt ourselves by telling them.

It is harder for a righteous man to fight a war. There are weapons we may not use; tactics in which we may not engage. The clerk at my local grocery store believes that Jesus's coming is imminent. That may well be the answer to the prayer that many freedom-loving Americans have been praying lately.

God help us!

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