Lost

My brother left his home in Georgia the day after Christmas, planning to make the 600-plus-mile trip to our aunt’s house in western Pennsylvania for a belated family Christmas.

It was our first family gathering since our mother’s funeral in September.

There are not a lot of us left. Me, David, our Aunt Shirley, a few cousins scattered around. It used to be that a holiday dinner would fill Shirley’s downstairs with people.

This year, all of us who could show up fit around a regular dining room table.

Sue and I left Baltimore, figuring we would get to Shirley’s roughly the same time David did.

We got there at 9:30 p.m., ate, drank some coffee, and waited for David.

And waited.

I sat for a couple of hours in a chair where I could see the street. Finally, at 1 a.m., we all turned in. Which is not to say any of us slept well. Shirley slept hardly at all. Sue and I awoke, I think, at every passing car, or sudden noise.

We were not especially close as children, David and I. We were not estranged. That word implies a rending. For whatever reason, we never got particularly close.

Until our mother’s final illness, that is.

First, I have to say that he was always sort of a hero to me. He always did things his way, even if doing so made his life harder.

He took care of Mom for years, though sometimes you would think they hated one another, as much as they fought. As she sank into dementia and physical disabilities, he had a lot to deal with. It was hard on all of us, but him most of all. Dealt with it, god knows how.

We talked more during that time, I think, than we had in the previous several decades.

Back at Shirley’s the phone rang at 6 a.m. on Monday.

In a stupor, I tried to get the call on my cell, though it was coming in on Shirley’s land-line. By the time I figured that out, the message had gone to the machine.

“I’ve had some trouble. I should be there in a couple of hours,” David said. That was it.

More than “a couple of hours” later, close to lunchtime, I got on the phone. I looked up the phone number David had called from – he refuses to carry a cell phone – and discovered it to be in a little town in the middle of nowhere in the Pennsylvania mountains, far from any major roads.

Did some quick estimating. He really should have arrived some hours before.

I did some quick checking on the computer and called the several state police barracks between Shirley’s home and David’s last position. No wrecks reported involving any cars of the kind David drives.

That was a relief, but 25 years working as a newspaper reporter gave me plenty of mental images to fuel my worry. Out of gas on some back road, or some other car trouble. Off in a ditch or ravine in some remote area. And on and on.

I laid on the floor for awhile and tried to think about anything else but what might be wrong. Sue had been looking out of the window as often I had been.

I could hear Shirley praying quietly as she busied herself in the kitchen.

I fell asleep, but my dreams were dark.

In the early afternoon, I awoke to find my oldest cousin and his wife walking into the house. I’m afraid my welcome was a little distracted.

Maybe half an hour later, David pulled up in the driveway. He walked into the kitchen, looking a little chagrined. Just in time for our post-Christmas feast.

I didn’t know whether to hug him or hit him.

I went for the hug. Life is too short, and we’re both on the shady side of it.

But I confess that I’m a little frustrated that he won’t say what happened. On the other hand, maybe that’s a good thing. I can imagine all SORTS of adventures for him.

==============================.

© 2011 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.

Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

 

 

 

Burger to Go 2010 in review

Thank’s to all of you, 2010 was a good one for B2G, though I hadn’t posted near as many pieces as I would have liked. I really appreciate your support. TWB

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is on fire!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 3,700 times in 2010. That’s about 9 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 21 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 120 posts. There were 4 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 1mb.

The busiest day of the year was October 11th with 109 views. The most popular post that day was Pumpkins, Ahoy!.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, twitter.com, connect.pennlive.com, dailykos.com, and google.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for gliding lizard, world’s biggest pumpkin, burger to go, gliding lizards, and hold my beer and watch this.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Pumpkins, Ahoy! October 2009
3 comments

2

The Gliding Lizard and the Deity in the Loud Print Shirt December 2009

3

Hold My Beer and Watch This September 2008
1 comment

4

Hi, My Name is Pickles, and IYQ. April 2007
7 comments

5

Bunny, or, Words at a Memorial. September 2010
4 comments

Kicking Back

A new fire crackles in the Franklin stove, armor against the growing chill.

The writing-for-money stuff has been put away for the day. Time to relax.

This little working harbor with its tiny fleet of lobster boats and a few pleasure craft lie quiet under an overcast sky. The bell buoy at the harbor mouth tolls over and over, promising an unquiet night for those on the open water.

Out in the Gulf of Maine the sea tosses, never easy, and waves smash on the boney coast.

From here, it sounds like breathing.

It has been a vacation of small adventures. Nothing hair-raising. Nothing that would make the papers. Saturday night our friend and neighbor Bob brought over a blueberry pie he had made that afternoon. We dug out the vanilla ice-cream, and an evening of dietary mayhem and great conversation ensued.

Yesterday, we spent an hour or so up in Waldoboro with Nate Nickoll, an artist of endless imagination who has populated his property with dancing figures, dragons, giant ants and frogs and mermaids, even a yellow submarine, all made from scrap metal. Sometimes he sells his creations, if he can bear to part with them.

This morning, I created my first breakfast involving scallops. It was a big hit. There’s no telling what might happen next.

And, no, this column doesn’t have a point, not as it would if I was tackling economics, or man’s inhumanity to man, or my personal glee at the demise of the Hummer. It’s just me taking time to disengage, knock it into neutral, and just be.

You should try it.

==============================.
© 2010 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

The Day the Osprey Fell (A Maine Coast re-run)

I’ve seen a few houses fall down in my time. Demolition, fire, that sort of thing.

Never been in one while it was happening, though. Not until that night.

It was the last night of vacation for the year. It had started out calmly enough. It had rained heavily for the previous 24 hours, so we were ahead of the game. Instead of doing a lot of running around, we had sat in The Osprey, the little cabin on the Maine coast where we have vacationed on and off for the past 14 years, and had packed up most of our belongings.

I won’t say exactly where it is, because the people in that little community have so far escaped the worst of the thronging Maine tourist trade, and want to keep it that way. It’s on a working harbor, where almost all the boats moored there belong to lobstermen, and it’s common to awaken briefly in the pre-dawn hours to hear diesel engines muttering out toward the open water.

Not a bad way to start the day. At least for us. I’m guessing lobsterpersons feel the same way about their jobs as the rest of us do about ours: Some days, it’s fine. Most days, it’s just what you do to get by.

I’ll call the owner of the place Leo. He’s a retired school teacher on the shady side of 90, but still active. He and the live-in manager at the cottages, all of which are named after sea- or shore-birds, have been clearing several acres of woods for the past few years. It’s starting to look like a park.

I have a photo of Leo building The Osprey in the spring of 1950, a month after my first birthday. It was the first of a double handful of cottages that he would build over the next decade or so, perched on a long slope from the farmhouse where he was born and still lives, down to the saltwater.

People come to Leo’s cabins like they come to family reunions. Some have been coming for decades. Some who bring their children have been coming since they themselves were kids. Every cabin has a composition book sitting on one of the plain pine shelves, and just about everybody who stays keeps a journal in them about their time at the harbor. Sometimes the entries are about things to do, where to eat, tips about this and that. But over the years, some of the entries become more personal.

The writers are from New York, Maryland, Florida, England, New Mexico, and Texas. The entries were as varied as the people who wrote them, in penmanship neat and tidy or fat and loopy. Kathy A. and her dog Simon spent a month at The Tern every year from 1981 until June of 1987, when Simon, she noted, turned 12 years old. Then she disappeared from the record.

A family from Hartford, Ct., bring their cats Signe and Moussey, and spend their vacation time seeking landmarks familiar to their ancestors: “Traveled to Acadia – 3 hrs. – and got seats on the mail boat from Northeast Harbor out to Baker island….to visit the lighthouse that was manned in the 1800s by our great grandfather. It was a thrill to be the first relatives in all that time to return to the remote island.”

In September of 1987, a New Jersey woman named Nora stayed four days at The Tern with her 14-month-old son: “We are here because we have just suffered an intense personal loss and I, at least, am seeking restoration in Maine. My son is oblivious to the unfairness of life.”

So, coming to The Osprey every year is a respite, but something that is a part of other lives, indirectly, yes, but a dance, of sorts, a shared ballet with strangers and the ragged coast of Maine. I once researched the address and phone number for several families who stayed in The Osprey and, before that, The Tern. But I never contacted any of them. It would be out of step, a break in the dance.

So, there we sat, the last Friday night of the trip. Everything but what we would need for the trip home was packed, zipped, tied, rubber-banded or otherwise tucked away. I would have already loaded the car, but the night was very dark and the grass slippery from the rain. I thought to wait until first thing in the morning.

The stereo was packed, so there was no music but the soughing of the wind ‘round the corners of the cabin, and the faint slap of waves on the rocks below. Just about every light was on, because the night somehow wanted brightness.

In a bit, I thought, I would light a fire, read a bit before taking a shower, and then go to bed.

About 15 minutes later, the front door popped open. I started to get up to close it, and the house fell down.

No, really.

The Osprey dropped about three feet on the harbor side and started sliding. I sat down – hard – in my chair, and clutched my bowl of ice cream tightly to my chest and waited, wondering if we would hit the water. All the furniture and luggage in the room slid toward us. Sue sat in her chair, eyes the size of saucers. Lamps fell, flared, and went dark. Vases leapt from shelves, books and touristy gee-gaws followed. Then, everything was still except for Sue’s alarmed “Eek!”

I finished my ice cream, waiting to see if The Osprey was done fidgeting. I got up, and said: “Damn.”

The power was still on, though we could hear that a water pipe somewhere had broken. I was very happy that I had decided not to build a fire in the Franklin stove after all

I stepped to the front door. The porch lay at a crazy angle, and had come to rest several feet from the steps.

“Damn,” I said again, figuring if I couldn’t be useful, I would at least be consistent.

I climbed over the porch, and looked around.

The rain had so soaked the ground that the front piers had slipped out from under the cabin. The Osprey had dropped, and then slid toward the harbor bank about three feet. This was a matter of great interest to me, because the edge of the bank was only about five feet away to begin with. It was quite a ride.

It took a couple of hours to get us set up in another cabin for the night, and about as long the next morning to get the rest of our things out over the tilted, linoleum floor and busted porch.

Melinda, Leo’s daughter, told us the next day that the family was considering their options for what to do. The Osprey was actually in good shape….not even a window broken or a wall awry. But it was old, and at the bottom of a steep slope. One of the options, she said, was simply to do away with it.

That hit me later, halfway home, when I realized I still had the key to The Osprey. I emailed Melinda and told her I’d get it back to her. But inside, I knew there might not be any real reason to do that.

Whatever they do, I hope they remember the little stack of composition books somewhere on the floor of the old cabin. It would be a real shame to lose all those stories, all those steps in the long dance.

(Note: This column first appeared in late Oct. of 2007. I am happy to report that the Osprey is settled sturdily on a fresh concrete foundation, and in a few weeks I will be back in it for two weeks.)

==============================.

© 2010 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

Cold Turkey: A Thanksgiving Tale. (By special Request)

Over dinner with friends tonight, I was asked to post this. So, here it is.

Well, this Thursday is the big day. Turkey day. I used to have the figures handy that told how many turkeys die to make Thanksgiving possible, but I’ve lost them.

It’s a lot.

Not so long ago, things were a lot simpler. A lot of the people I knew forswore their store-bought birds and got a live bird from a farmer.

Trouble is, too many of the folks who gave this “old-fashioned” method a try were young people from the ‘burbs. Their experience with “nature” was getting draft­ ed by their parents to help fight the war on crabgrass.

My neighbors at a little mobile home park in Georgia are a case in point.

The couple, let’s call them Tom and Tif­ fany, were both raised in one of those towns squeezed like putty at the seams where New York and New Jersey are glued together.

They grew up in some development named after the trees that had been cut down to build it.

Tom was a sleepy, even lethargic sort of guy. It was hard to tell if he was awake or sleepwalking.

Tiffany was, well, perky, given to hare­ brained ideas and sudden enthusiasms.

Tom was at the university, studying to be a biologist. Tiffany worked somewhere as a secretary.

The way it was told to me, one Thanks­ giving, Tiffany decided she would surprise Tom with a turkey.

She purchased a big hen from a farmer who swore on a stack of Greenpeace pam­ phlets that he had raised the thing from a poult and had never fed it anything he could not pronounce.

Back at home, Tiffany, raised on painless supermarket turkeys, could not bring her­ self to apply the firewood axe to the bird’s neck. The brief stay of execution ended, however, when Tiffany found Tom’s supply of chloroform.

She put the turkey to sleep.

Triumphant and little nauseated, Tiffany got the big hen plucked after a fashion, but the idea of trimming off the head and feet was beyond her sensibilities, not to men­ tion the idea of moving all the turkey’s in­ side stuff to the outside.

So, into the fridge went the nude bird, awaiting the arrival of Tom. Remember, the turkey was to be a surprise for Tom.

Tiffany’s unflappable husband came home in the late afternoon, tired, burdened by thick books and reeking of formalde­ hyde. Tiffany told him she had a surprise for him in the refrigerator.

Tom opened the door.

The little light came on.

The turkey woke up.

Naked. In pain.

And really, really ticked off.

With a hellish gobble, she exploded out from among the beansprouts and leftover chili, straight at Tom. The now-streamlined and furious bird dug its claws into Tom’s sweater and began pecking and biting him on the face and arms.

Tom, as intended, was surprised. And more lively than usual.

Still screaming, the turkey dropped Tom and charged into Tiffany, knocking her backward, breaking the glass front of her china cabinet.

The bird bashed the portable TV off its stand, knocked a life-size poster of Elvis the King from the walls before it flapped through the still-open trailer door. A strange, pale apparition in the fading light, the turkey fled gobbling fiercely into the depths of the trailer park.

The next day, Thanksgiving, I dined on a properly quiet and immobile turkey with my mother and brother. Tom and Tiffany went out for dinner at a local restaurant that featured a large and placid salad bar.

The attack turkey, I found out later, met its fate at the hands of a little old lady down the street who had never heard of “Mother Earth News,” but who knew a dinner on the run when she saw one.

MRI or, My Brief Life as a Cork

I got there early, somehow, and got all the paperwork done.

A chipper nurse named Missy escorted me to a waiting room and supervised the emptying of my pockets, removal of my wristwatch, and the loss of my suspenders and glasses. Then she slid a needle into my right arm and fitted it with a port so they could run some kind of tracing fluid into my veins once they had me inserted into the MRI. I don’t know what it was, but it’s designed to make the veins and arteries in my brain visible.

Because I’ve had a variety of work experiences and have worked around metal grinding and welding equipment and because I once had a bristle from a wire brush stuck in my eye, I had to get my eyes x-rayed before they would give me the MRI. Turns out the magnets in the MRI are so strong, any steel screws, staples or assorted scrap metal anywhere near the magnets gets pulled right out. They said that would hurt. A lot.

A quick note of explanation. I’m not dying, at least, not any faster than anybody else. Without getting into the matter any further, my doc and I figured it might be a good time to check under the hood.

After finishing her plumbing duties, Missy led me down the hallways, she toting a clipboard with my charts and me trying to keep my pants up, down the hallway to a room. She was a little irritated because I had to take an important work-related call and send a quick email before I surrendered my cell phone to the storage locker.

One last turn in the maze and Missy opened a big, thick door.

There it was.

It looked like a gray plastic mausoleum, the burial chamber of somebody important named GE. I looked at the opening with misgivings. It looked like a modernized version of a groundhog’s burrow. Or something very Freudian…the militarized version.

Missy and another woman got me situated on the slab of steel and plastic and fastened something like a cage around my head and jammed foam plugs into my ears. Missy put a rubber bulb in my left hand and said I should squeeze it if I felt like I needed to come out.

“Comfortable?” Missy asked. Except, with the plugs in my ears, it sounded like “cumferubble?”

“What?” I said, as the slab began to slide smoothly into the bore of the MRI machine.

I felt like a shell being shoved down the throat of a cannon.

“You might want to squinch your shoulders in a little,” shouted Missy so I could hear her through the plugs. “It looks like a tight fit.”

I’m a big guy. Too big, to be honest. More than six feet, and a tad over 300. A big tad.

I scrunched. I slid. My nose rested a fraction of an inch from the inside of the tube. My shoulders rolled forward to up around my ears. My considerable gut smooshed up tightly around about three-quarters of the surface, cutting off all the light from that end me. The other end of the tube was open, but I couldn’t see. All I could see was the white plastic two inches from my nose.

I realized suddenly that I would spend the next half hour tucked like a cork in a bottle while loud mechanical noises crunched and crashed all around me and powerful magnetic waves would wash over my poor addled brain cells. Half an hour. A not inconsiderable slice of eternity, from that perspective.

I think I busted the little rubber bulb.

“We haven’t started yet, Mr. Burger,” Missy said.

My reply was perhaps a little brusque.

“Hang on….” She said, as the slab began to slide back the way it had come. I will swear on a stack of bibles that I made a popping sound when my midsection cleared the rim.

I was soaking wet. They had asked me in one of the questionnaire’s if I was claustrophobic. I wasn’t. Not when I was filling out the form, anyway.

NOW I’m claustrophobic.

As luck would have it, they have another machine that does not make one feel as though they have been imprisoned in a giant condom, and the patient scheduled for that machine was late. We went through the same drill. Inside, my nose was no further from the surface, but the sides were open, which I could just barely see out of the corner of my eye.

It was enough. I spent 45 minutes (evidently that machine takes longer) listening to what sounded like robots on roller skates playing racquetball with several old cars, alternately firing laser cannons. Even with the ear plugs, it was quite a racket.

Oddly, I feel asleep several times, awaking with a start when the noise stopped while the technician did something or the other to reset the machine. Perhaps the robots needed more old cars to slap around.

After it was all over, Missy led me back to the changing room, removed the plumbing from my arm, and told me I could re-load my pockets and person with all my assorted hardware. Still shaky, it took me awhile to sort out my suspenders and get them back in place without any knots.
I don’t know the results of the test yet. I like to think if they found anything interesting – my father’s cameo ring I lost when I was 12, or any of that stuff I memorized in the eighth grade – they would have called. So I’m not too worried.

The next night, I went to dinner with friends. We had wine. When the bottle was empty, I picked up the cork and started to put it back in the bottle for some reason. I stopped, pulled it back out and left it on the table.

==============================.
© 2010 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

The Storm I Remember, or, God Stomps Cuba

It was September in Key West, well past midnight and quite warm.

The pier on which we sat stretched out pale and luminescent under a clear sky and a full moon, far out into pale jade water. The lounge chairs creaked now and then as one or the other of us shifted our weight.

We rarely spoke, there at the southernmost tip of our country, while hell raked Cuba, 90 miles away.

The sky glittered cloudless overhead. The southern horizon, however, glowered an inky, impenetrable black, laced throughout with lightning. From east to west, as far as vision could follow, a constant curtain of lightning, a steady growl of thunder filled the air, a continuo under the quiet lapping of the water and sighing of the wind. We sat, transfixed, for hours.

I never hear thunder that I don’t think of that storm, and the eerie, jeweled spot from which I watched it.

This week has been one of storms where I live now. Some pretty good ones, too; lots of wind and rain, lightning and thunder. A little flooding here and there, branches and wires down.

Not the biggest we’ll get, mind you. Those will come mid-summer, real Old Testament howlers that come down from the Appalachians and stomp around like God in a royal snit.

I love storms. I don’t like the damage they do, but that sort of comes with the territory. I’ve been lucky over the years and avoided being injured or having a lot of property damage. Well, there was the time when parts of a mobile home I was living in wandered away during a big winter gale about 25 years ago. To tell you the truth, the morning after that storm, I was a little bit surprised when I looked outside that my home hadn’t changed ZIP codes.

As I said, I love storms. As a kid I used to climb a pine tree in our back yard and ride the wind-bursts. Obviously, my parents knew nothing about this. Just as obviously, the tree wasn’t in a place that attracted lightning, or this column would be a lot shorter.

I think I like being reminded that humans are really not as in charge as we’d like to think we are. Few things do that as well as extravagant weather. Simple-minded evangelicals like to use bad weather as proof of our iniquity, that God is punishing us for our sins. But they miss the point entirely. So much preaching comes down to ego, when you come down to it. The universe, in that world view, was created as a stage for us to conduct our little morality plays. It’s all about us.

We really need to get rid of that whole idea. Storms are random. Nature itself has its own purpose, its own dance to perform. And we’re caught up in it, an integral part, to be sure, but only a part. I am an atheist, but I sometimes like to imagine God up there, rolling storms down off the east slope of South Mountain like so many atmospheric bowling balls, just to see what happens.

© 2010 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.
Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
Check out the two “Burger to Go” blogsites:

http://burger2go.wordpress.com/

http://burger2goclassics.wordpress.com/

My John Wayne Moment (a “Burger to Go” re-run from 2006

OK, this is from back in 2006. I haven’t posted anything in a while, for which I apologize. This one was published in Flagpole, and entertainment and politics weekly newspaper in Athens, Ga., with an excellent hand-drawn illustration that I have on my backup drive and haven’t retrieved yet.

Anyway, a friend saw something on facebook that reminded her of this story, so here it is:

I read recently about a former Marine who was attacked by four armed thugs – two of whom had guns – as he walked home from his job at an Atlanta restaurant.

Thomas Autry, who is 36, was jumped as he was walking home from work. He called for help and pulled a knife out of his backpack, and got busy. The upshot: One attacker dead, one in critical condition, and two in custody.

Only a Marine would take a knife to a gunfight and walk away the victor.

Police, sensibly enough, did not charge Autry. Of course, Atlanta is the South, where I grew up, and, for good or ill, the South has always viewed weapons of any kind as educational tools and instruments of attitude adjustment.

I guess every guy dreams about having his own “John Wayne Moment.” I had one once. There is a song that says “life is different than it is in your dreams.”

My John Wayne Moment came late one summer in the late 1960s. My wife and I lived in a little wooden farm house on Turkeyfoot Road in Clarke County, Ga… The house sat back in a clearing in thick pine woods, at the end of a long dirt driveway.

We were hippies, sort of, and the house was small and isolated, but had most of the modern amenities. Well, there was an outhouse that you had to chase the copperheads out of when you needed to go, and the electricity was limited to a single light bulb hanging from the center of each of the rooms. But it did have running water, though no water heater and we had to bathe in a washtub on the front porch.

Still, it was $50 a month and we liked it. Until the strange car started showing up.

It was an old white Ford Falcon station wagon, not in good repair. There were always three or four guys in it. The car would drive to the edge of the clearing, stop, and just sit there, idling.

The men just sat there, watching. I approached them the first time, thinking they might be lost. They backed up and left. They came back several times over the next few weeks. I didn’t like the way they looked at us, especially the way they looked at Mary. They always had beer.

We did not have a telephone.

After about the third visit from the Falcon, I drove to my parent’s house and dug out my old Stevens .22 automatic rifle and a couple boxes of cartridges.

And a good thing, too.

In the small hours of the next day, the Falcon was back. This time, it drove right up into the yard. A man got out of the front passenger side, and strode right up on the porch. He walked right past the bedroom window. In the moonlight, I could see he had a knife.

It was hot, so the door was open, the screen latched. I heard him cut through the screen.

I don’t remember this part, but Mary said I rose up off the mattress, cursing and praying in the same breath, and, scooping up the rifle, ran toward the porch.

I was a good shot, back then. My buddies and I used to hunt rabbits with .22’s. This was a fat man in a white shirt on a moonlit night. I figured he was mine.

The man jumped off the porch and ran toward the far side of the clearing. I ran out into the yard, raised the rifle, and fired all 15 rounds at him.

At that point, I remembered the Falcon wagon and the fat man’s three friends. The car was about 10 feet to my left.

This was my John Wayne Moment. One bad guy, I thought, perforated in the piney woods. Three drunk bad guys and a ton or so of steel to my left.

And me, long hair sticking straight out every which way, wearing nothing but a St. Christopher medal, a Timex watch, and an empty rifle. Not even a cowboy hat.

It was a moment, all right. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more naked.

I don’t know how long we all stood or sat there, respectively. Seemed like a long time to me, but I didn’t check the Timex. The driver of the Falcon threw the battered old heap into reverse and tore down the driveway without bothering to turn around. I guess he didn’t realize my gun was empty.

Suddenly, there I was, all alone, under the moon in the piney woods, standing barefoot in the red clay dust, wondering if I had made the whole thing up. I mean, it was the 60s, after all.

I think Mary came and got me back into the house. I don’t remember, but I’m pretty sure I did not sleep.

Nothing ever came of it, except the white car stopped coming around. I never called the Sheriff to report the event. The guy was, after all, running away from my house, so if I had hit him, I would have been the one going to jail.

I got a bunch of friends to come over and walk around looking for a fat guy with a lot of holes in him, but we never found him. I finally had to admit that I was so angry and afraid that all of my shots had gone wild. I have to say, though, that I never saw a fat man move so fast.

© 2006 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.

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Saying goodbye to Davy Crockett

Note: This column appeared in the March 20, 2010, edition of The Patriot-News in Harrisburg.

Known for his coon skin cap, Fess Parker as Davy Crockett was an idol to many young baby boomers.

When I opened up the Web site for my hometown newspaper, out of the corner of my eye I saw a photo of Fess Parker in the far left column, the one reserved for the obituaries of famous or infamous people. I hesitated before I would let myself look.

Davy Crockett was dead.

“LOS ANGELES (AP) — Actor Fess Parker, who became every baby boomer’s idol in the 1950s and launched a craze for coonskin caps as television’s Davy Crockett, died Thursday of natural causes. He was 85.”

He got me drunk once. Well, a little tipsy. More on that in a minute.

If you’re of a certain age, you remember that tall, lanky figure dressed up in fringed buckskin, fighting his way across the mythic American frontier of the first half of the 19th century, wrestling bears, fighting or befriending Indians and besting bad guys.

OK, it was the frontier as imagined by Walt Disney, which had little relationship to reality, but never mind. Disney was all about imagination, and he gave us somebody bigger and better than real life — a hero, a straight-shooter (literally and figuratively) and a guy we all wanted to be.

Parker later sort of reprised his role as Crockett in a TV series about Daniel Boone, playing the title role and, for all appearances, wearing the same suit, expression and personality.

Back in the spring of 1997, I was in the Santa Barbara area on vacation with Sue. Her dad had worked for Disney for a long time and during an occasion where he and Parker were receiving Disney Legend awards, Parker had said if we ever got up his way, to stop in and visit his winery.

A few years later, we did. We went in, sent a message to the offices upstairs, and went to look around in the gift shop.

“He’s not going to come, you know,” I told her. “Somebody will come down and say Mr. Parker is tied up, but they will be happy to give us a tour.”

A few minutes later, I’m poking around wondering if I could live with myself if I bought a Fess Parker golf shirt, because I don’t golf, when a voice, THAT voice, called out Sue’s name as a question.

Sue, Fess Parker, and me, slightly inebriated.

I turned, and there stood Davy Crockett.

He looked about nine feet tall, with a mop of white hair, a cotton shirt and blue jeans. Solemnly, I shook his hand and introduced myself. I am a newspaper reporter. I have interviewed my share of famous and notorious people. I am cool.

In my head, though, a small blond boy inclined to chubbiness and wearing a coonskin cap charged forward to the front of my mind and squealed “It’s DAVY CROCKETT!”

It went pretty much like that all day.

It was like hanging around with an old friend. Part of that, for me, was because I had known him forever, had been him, in important ways, wearing my coonskin cap and slaying swarms of bad guys in scores of backyard battles.

He invited us to a private wine tasting. My memory is foggy, but it was from nine to a dozen wines. He was giving me a lesson in why wine lists use words like “earthy” and “woody” to describe background flavors in various wines. By the end of the tasting, I was pretty buzzed.

He piled us into his enormous old Mercedes sedan and hauled us into the village of Los Olivos for lunch.

On the way, he told a story about little Fess riding his dad’s mule into nearby Fort Worth. The animal got into the middle of an intersection and decided he had had enough traveling for one day, and simply stopped. Parker said his father had to come to town to jump-start the beast.

All the while, though I remained outwardly calm, that dumb kid in the coonskin cap kept running around in my head, issuing war whoops and being obstreperous.
Finally, I told him about that little hellion stomping around in my imagination.
“Don’t worry,” he said, with that lopsided grin, “I get that a lot.”

I’ll bet he did. Goodbye, Davy.

King was ordinary man who accomplished extraordinary things

Note, this “Burger to Go” ran as an item on the Review & Opinion page in Jan. 17,2010 Patriot-News, Harrisburg, Pa. Part of the text was adapted from an earlier “Burger to Go.”

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be 81 this year, perhaps gone frail and a little dotty. Thinking back on his arc as firebrand and martyr, that is frankly hard to imagine.

Those of us who were around in his day remember him differently than younger folks do.

While he was alive he was, depending on where you stood, a visionary, a man of God who held his country’s collective feet to the fire of its own founding documents or a royal pain and a threat to the (white) American way of life. Some saw him as the devil himself.

Since his assassination in the spring of 1968, he has undergone a sort of apotheosis and elevation almost to a kind of deity. That’s too bad.

What was remarkable about King was that he was, in the end, an ordinary man who accomplished extraordinary things. His death by an assassin’s bullet was unusual only in that he was in the forefront of the national awareness when it happened.

The Ku Klux Klan and any number of groups and individuals scattered fear and death across the landscape in those years, indeed, for decades beforehand.

One of the most heinous Klan murders happened 15 minutes from the house where I grew up in Athens, Ga. I was 14. It was in the summer of 1964, just nine days after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The victim was Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn of the Army Reserve, and a Washington D.C.-area educator, husband and father.

He and two colleagues were on their way back from a Reserve event at Fort Benning, Ga., when three KKK members pulled up next to the out-of-state car and gave Penn blasts from a pair of 12-gauge shotguns, blowing off the back of his head.

That happened at home, MY home. This wasn’t a grim photo of a lynching in the rural South. This was now.

People I didn’t know, but knew by sight, had done this. The world looked just like it always had. People went about their business, shopped for groceries and did laundry. Adults talked about it in hushed tones, some fearful, some gleeful. Some of the kids at school joked about it. A good start, some said.

Years later, one of the Klansmen involved in that murder, though not one of those in the car, owned a greasy spoon called The Open House Cafe across from where I worked the night shift at a print shop.

I used to go there for coffee and watch him. If it was me the way I am now, after 20-plus years as a reporter, I’d have asked him what he was thinking that night, what they thought they’d accomplish. But I was 19 or 20 then and afraid.

It was a different time. Almost a different country.

I mean in the sense of “Whites Only” signs over water fountains, and public rest rooms labeled “Men,” “Women” and “Colored.”

Fast forward nearly 50 years. Things are different. Not perfect but different. Change has come to America, as President Obama said in his acceptance speech, if at a glacial pace. It wasn’t fanaticism we saw on those faces in Chicago’s Grant Park that election night, despite fearful comments to that effect.

To be sure, there were and are fanatics on all sides, some of whom would deify Obama and some of whom would gladly put him in his grave rather than see him succeed.

The light in those faces late on Election Night was not the deification of Obama, but that of people who have for centuries stood out in the cold of our nation’s further reaches, allowed only to look in the windows and dream. On Nov. 4, 2008, they suddenly saw the door to that house open and a hand beckon them to come in.

Yes, there is still racial hatred and violence. Witness the 2008 beating death of a Latino man in Shenandoah, not so far from where you probably sit reading this.

But I can tell you that in 1963 that story would likely have never made even the local news outside of a one-inch police blotter entry, if that.

Even if it had, nobody would have investigated to the point that five locals, including three cops, would have been indicted in the case.

Back then, it would have been a thing whispered in bars and in sitting rooms. Some might even have called it a shame.

We can only speculate as to what Dr. King’s take would be on the movement he helped spark.

On the one hand, the same nation that once enslaved African-Americans has elected one to its highest office.

On the other, well. Look deep into your own heart. What do you see?

(Note: I believe all four of the Klansmen are now dead. One of the triggermen was shot in the chest—by a shotgun, ironically—by a man with whom he had been arguing.

The last time I drove by The Open House Cafe, which had been closed for some years, it had become a church.)

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© 2010 Marsh Creek Media, Gettysburg, Pa.

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