One Nation, Under God
One Nation, Under God
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It’s a miracle some kids reach adulthood. When I was ten years old, my yearning to fly like Superman almost nipped me in the bud. Back then, I idolized comic book characters — Batman and Robin, Spider Man, Plastic Man, and Won-der Woman, but my number-one hero was Superman. I marveled at his feats of strength, his X-ray vision, and the way women fell all over him. But his flying skills fascinated me most. What must it be like, I daydreamed, to zoom through the air at supersonic speeds, to alight wherever you wanted? I had to find out. With a c...
That woman despised me for returning my date to the girls’ dormitory after curfew. She even went so far as to write me a sarcastic note stating I was no longer allowed to enter the dormitory, and if a co-ed living in Quigley Hall would stoop so low as to go out with me, I would have to send another man to fetch her, someone whose conduct was “more becoming of a gentleman of the University of Mississippi.” Her name was Velma Jane Battenbaum. We called her V.J. Battle-axe. She never moved from her station at the reception desk, and whene...
Widow woman Johnson, who wasn’t overly bright, lived with her brood of urchins in one of the rental houses on my father’s Mississippi Delta farm. When completing her oldest son’s birth certificate, she either didn’t know how to spell the name she’d chosen, or left off the last letter, and dubbed him Lyndo. Even less mentally gifted than his dam, Lyndo was an ideal target for trickery, a trait capitalized upon by the tricksters in our secret society, the Mohicans. The Mohicans decided that all girls, including our sisters, were beneath o...
I wish Dad had caught me swiping his pistol; he didn’t. It was a beauty, a Military High-Standard .22 caliber. All I wanted to do was “borrow” it so that I could enjoy slaughtering rats with a bunch of other gun-loving students at the garbage dump located several miles from the small town that was home to the university we attended. We’d meet late in the day, about the time the rats began their nightly forays among the putrefying flotsam, and hide behind a clump of bushes within pistol range of our victims, the population of which could only be...
My brother Ronnie and I were nothing alike. He was good; I was bad. Curious about everything, I got into trouble constantly, and received many a switching because of Ronnie’s snitching. Occasionally, though, events worked in my favor. Such was the case with his good buddy, Chippie the Chipmunk. Wild creatures interested Dad, and if he caught one, he’d bring it home for a few days before setting it free. Once he brought home a chipmunk and put it in a birdcage. “Boys, what shall we name him?” I suggested Monk, but Dad preferred Ronnie...
In reading and writing, I found rhyme and reason, but not in arithmetic. As best he could, my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird explained it. Although illiterate, he had been taught by life’s most demanding teacher: experience. His wisdom filled many gaps in my education. Take percentages, for example. The teacher’s explanation went over my head, but Jaybird’s made sense: “Let's say you’ve got $100, and I konk you on the head with a stick, and take all yo’ money. I robbed you — hunnud pussent. But, if I take $50, I robbed you fifty pus...
Although Dean and I were only in junior high school, we had already acquired hoodlum habits. We decided it was less trouble to do wrong than right, and more fun, so we devised a coin flipping scam to beat our schoolmates out of their lunch money. Operating on the five-flip, odd-man-out-wins-all principle, we two con boys lured suckers in and contrive to have our coins land on heads and tails, insuring we’d win the third guy’s money. We repeated this four out of five flips. On the fifth flip, we made certain both of our coins landed either tai...
Let’s hope that scientists in one of the nations that refer to America as the Great Satan don’t figure out how to bounce death ray beams off cell phone satellites. If so, many youths in the country will be fried instantly. Cell phones have altered America’s entire social and cultural landscape. Youngsters who can’t afford essentials, like food and clothing, somehow can afford cell phones, and use them constantly. Social amenities, such as greeting when passing someone in a hall or on a sidewalk, no longer exist among young people because...