My Sunday Feeling

We had some bumpy weather around here last week. Thursday morning I awoke around 5 a.m. to the sound of the wind howling around my house. In fact, what woke me up was the dreaded “freight train” sound that folks around here have come to equate to tornadoes. Still, I didn’t hear any of the warning sirens so I went back to sleep. When I went out to get the paper an hour or so later, I noticed that some of the slats from the gate had blown off and the latch was severely bent, undoubtedly due to the torque imparted upon it by the high wind.

Great. Something else to repair.

That was not the last of it though. The second round of storms blew in around 10 or so. There was some minor damage out west of here over by the Racquet Club and the power went out in parts of the People’s Republic of Hillcrest. But nothing major. Folks east of here did not fare so well. There was considerable property damage a couple of counties over. One elderly man died.

This line of storms still had a considerable punch even hours later. A friend in Oxford said that he and his family were forced to take refuge in the basement until it passed over. So it goes in the Mid-South this time of year.

Naturally, my buddy Don has picked tornado season to come through Arkansas next week en route to North Carolina. This is despite the fact that he will have a 25% chance of being rendered airborne at any particular time during his stay here. I'm here because I live here. I don't go visit Chicago in January or Phoenix in August. Oh well. Love goes where it's sent.

You may remember that Don is moving to Carolina on account of his becoming reunited with a woman from college who lives out there. Quit his job, took the North Carolina bar exam, sold his house and is wending his way east to live out his days. As an aside, he now holds licenses to practice law in four-count ‘em- four states. He’s his own nationwide law firm. Which is how he may have to pitch himself to an otherwise unsuspecting populace in Durham if he doesn’t get off his dead ass and find a job soon. Anyway, he called me Friday afternoon.

“I just had the strangest feeling.” he broadcast from sunny California.

“Yeah?” I asked, semi-dreading to hear the response.

“I just left my house for the last time. I’m really leaving.”

Oooooh. Been there. I remember doing the final walkthrough in the house I grew up in before turning it over to the purchasers. I was struck by the emptiness and the utter silence. You wouldn’t know that six people and various dogs and cats had lived there once. I guess I wasn’t prepared for the emotional impact upon stumbling into the realization that everything had changed and that this particular chapter of my life was indeed over.

Everyone was really gone over at Mother's. Don is really leaving his house. Transitions can be hard.

“I don’t know. I can’t describe it,” he said. “I liked California. I raised my daughters in California. It seems like last week. You know, I bought that house because Barbara liked it so much.”

“I know,” I said. “That has to be weird.”

“I ran across some things that brought back some painful memories. I…”

“You are breaking up.”

“Sorry. This is a hard location.”

“Listen, you can’t be too hard on yourself. Besides, that’s my job.”

He laughed. Thank God.

Then he said, " I'm hard on myself because so many people are so easily self-forgiving. I try to face up to my mistakes and learn from them."

"Ummmm....okay," I said.

Silence.

"Well, enough of this,” he finally said through the static. “I need to check with my banker before pulling out. Unless the escrow agent was a complete thief, a possibility I do not discount out of hand, I should be a reasonably wealthy man again. I’ll call you from the road as I head on that way.”

I understood. A man can’t be too careful about his money.

Besides, he was breaking up.

Give My Regards to Hitler-Former Yugoslavian strongman (a euphemism for thug) Slobodan Milosevic died in his prison cell last night of natural causes. He certainly got off lighter than the thousands of non-Serbs who were brutally slaughtered during his government’s campaign of “ethnic cleansing.” I don’t believe in capital punishment and I don’t much believe in hell. But if anybody deserved a firing squad it was Milosevic. And if there is any divine justice, he is now being fricasseed on the lowest Bunsen burner in Perdition. This is one son-of-a-bitch about whom you will never hear uttered the phrase “He shall be missed.”

Stop the Presses!- This week’s Sports Illustrated devotes a considerable amount of space that it could otherwise more profitably devote to Heidi Klum wearing just paint to a story entitled “The Truth” about Barry Bonds and steroids. This is news? Anybody with eyes in their head could see what was going on out there in Major League Baseball and not just with Bonds. During the late nineties, guys who otherwise resembled humans in previous years were arriving at spring training looking like Lou Ferrigno.

Jose Canseco, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGuire, Jason Giambi and Bonds were sending baseballs out of the park at a rate hitherto unknown in the history of the game. Canseco and Giambi eventually owned up to it. Or Giambi, borrowing a page from Our Bill, at least owned up to having committed “mistakes in his personal life.”

Bonds, a prick from way back, not only refuses to admit that he has made any mistakes; he imperiously refuses to acknowledge the issue in any fashion whatsoever. This will become increasingly difficult to do if indeed the feds get interested in whether he perjured himself during the BALCO investigation or whether he committed tax evasion when he gave his chick on the side (the chick on the side at that particular time, that is) a bunch of cash from selling his autograph at card shows instead of reporting it to the IRS.

Me? I could give a rip about the whole fiasco. As long as the dingers were being racked up, the fans kept buying the tickets. As long as there was meat in the seats, MLB made the business decision that it was in its economic best interest to turn a blind eye to the obvious fact that felonies were being committed in locker rooms across the nation. You won’t find that in any of the corporate minutes but that’s essentially the long and the short of it.

We’re talking about baseball here. And because we are talking about baseball there’s hypocrisy aplenty to pass around for everybody. As unsavory a character as he is there is no sense in laying it all off on Barry Bonds. He was just a symptom, albeit an exceptionally odious one, of a larger problem. I’m just glad that his father, who was one hell of a player in his own right, is not alive to see this day.

Shut up. Play ball.

Question-Have you ever noticed that really bad sportswriters refer to themselves as “scribes?” Wally Hall-who amply fits that bill-described himself as a “trusty scribe” in yesterday's column. I propose that in keeping with the penitential season of Lent that Wally refer to himself as a "Pharisee" instead of a scribe for the remainder of the 40 day period.

Okay. So it wasn’t all that funny. But let’s see you try to wring some yucks out of the liturgical calendar.

Good Boy-There can be no more solemn act of love than when a person decides to end the suffering of a beloved pet. J’s Golden Retriever Sam was a great friend, a good and loyal companion. He was also 15 which made him a veritable Methuselah among Goldens. For 15 years he stood by her side as she worked in the kitchen. For 15 years he slept at the foot of her bed. He accompanied her when she moved to Little Rock and for a time was practically the only soul she knew here.

He had a famously sweet disposition that got him many pats on the head from folks as they walked past the yard. I didn’t know until last October that one of those “head-patters” was my cousin Michael who used to visit Sam as he walked to class at the med school down the street. Michael, who like Sam also has a famously sweet disposition, knew Sam for three years or so. I only knew him for about nine months.

By the time I got to know him he was starting to run down. His hip bothered him and it was a chore for him to get up and down the stairs. He was pretty deaf and his eyesight was none too keen either. Still, despite his infirmity, he remained a sweet and loving dog who liked nothing more than to lay his massive head on your lap as you watched TV.

The last time I saw Sam was last Thursday. By then he was not sleeping well and had become restless during the night. His walking was getting more hesitant and J had taken to carrying him up and down the stairs to the back yard. When I showed up last Thursday, they were on the porch. As I came down the walk, good old Sam, infirm as he was, slowly lumbered himself up on all fours and wagged his tail. Oscar Wilde once described such a gesture as a “little lowly silent act of Love.”

I don’t think about Heaven all that much. At least not as much as I ought to. But sometimes I wonder what it must be like. I like to think that I will get to meet my Grandfather Bowen. It comforts me to think that I will be reunited with friends and family that have gone before me. And I guess I will get to see famous people. I doubt that I will see Slobodan Milosovic and if I run into Bobby Bonds I won’t bother him with the news of what a self-indulgent asshole his son turned out to be. Besides, somebody else will have broke it to him by the time I get there.

And I hope to see dogs. What good is a heaven without dogs along with their “little lowly silent acts of Love?” I hope to see Brandy, my Grandmother’s cocker spaniel. I hope to see Duchess, our English Setter along with Belle, Mother’s beloved Border Collie, who was buried with her Frisbee out on property the family owns in Cleburne County.

I hope to see Sam and I hope that he can run and play again. And I will say to him what J used to always say:

“Good boy, Sammy. Good doggie.”

Transitions are hard. One friend is heading across the country in search of a great "perhaps." Another friend is confronted with it everytime she enters her now silent house.

Love goes where it's sent. Whether it's to North Carolina or to the veterinarian. Love goes where it's sent.