Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Poems, Prayers and Promises

Poems, Prayers and Promises.

“What do you get when you fall in love-- Enough germs to catch pneumonia. After you do they’ll never phone ‘ya….” I always liked those lines. Imagine rhyming “pneumonia” with “Phone ‘ya.”

My favorite poet is Rudyard Kipling. He wrote some great stuff, but the gate keepers of contemporary poetry have panned him. They call him a racist because he used the “N” word. Read Gunga Din and tell me a racist wrote that poem. Hesiod said that those who can’t create excellence or know it when they see it are worthless.

My wife hates it when I draw hot water from the house and take it outside to mop up the garage floor. I tend to slop it about as I carry it outside. So I use the eye on the gas grill to heat it. By “eye” visualize my grill. It has a cast iron cover over the grid to cook the meat, but it also has a gas eye for things like heating up other foods. (Like a pot of beans to go with the hamburgers) So I use that eye to heat up a galvanized bucket of water that I get from the 55 Gallon drum under my roof’s down-spout. When it is on the verge of boiling I pour it into a mop bucket atop the degreasing liquid.

My garage/shop is cluttered at times but I try and keep the floor clean. Linda chides me often that I am slow to finish many of the projects I start. So they accumulate. She laughed when she pointed it out yesterday because she does the same thing. In my old age my attention order deficiency is a greater concern than Alzheimer’s. Linda has me taking a pill to prevent that… yeah, right.

Yesterday we had our annual cemetery meeting and I gave the treasurer’s report. I hate that job but the steering committee is not large. I did get them to break my job into two positions. One is the treasurer and the new position is someone to coordinate with the director of the Local Funeral Home as well as the grave digger about the precise location for digging a grave. I spend altogether too much time with my tape measure saying “dig here.” It is an old cemetery that dates to before the Civil War and it hasn’t exactly been maintained by stewards who were surveyors. The lines are not “Dress Right Dressed” and tend to meander about from one family plot to the next. It isn’t exactly like Arlington Cemetery.

There is one marble headstone that is elegantly carved marking the grave of a young girl who died at seven. I can see the family, in my imagination, gathering around the spot eighty years ago and feel their grief. I try and not get too close. There is a spiritual dimension to life that our ancestors knew that has been pushed into the background by all this science we embrace today. That is not all bad because spirits are frightening but pretending there is nothing to them is ignorant. Just because we haven’t figured out what they are is no reason to dismiss them.