firesmithsghost

Being a drinker and being a writer means you’re going to attract more than your share of deranged and damaged people. Even if you’re not sober, and you don’t know you’re a writer yet, the Universe feels an obligation to fulfill your weirdness quota. “Freak Magnet” is what I’ve been called more than once in my life, and looking back, I knew I was running into more than my share of madness. I wish I had started writing earlier in life, and I wish I had drank less. I could have written down more, remembered more, but then again, maybe being drunk all the time draws that sort of person in.

Her name was Angel Akin Collins, and there isn’t a way to tell this story without using her real name, because it explains Akin more than anything else. Her parents were truly and weirdly religious, and thought their baby girl was akin to an angel, so they name her Angel Akin. Most people, especially girls I suppose, would have gone with their first name rather than the middle, but she liked Akin as a name, and so that was who she became after she left home. Her parents, of course, did call her Angel, but that was as far as it went if they thought the name might govern behavior. Akin was a poet, which as a class of artists will draw more weirdness to them than writers. Back to her parents, Akin’s mother died young from a serious alcohol habit, her father left one day to get some cigarettes and never came back. At seven years old, she lived alone for the better part of a month before anyone discovered what had happened. Akin was twenty when I met her, and she still thought that month was the happiest she had ever been. Her mother used to talk to Akin’s grandmother on the phone, even though her grandmother had been dead for decades. Akin grew up believing the telephone connected to the grave, and phones still creeped her out as an adult, such as she was. Her father raised her for a year or so on his own, treating her somewhere between a prized pet and a stuffed doll. He never really connected with her in any meaningful way, and when he left, she knew he wasn’t coming back.
Akin was a talker. Words spilled out of her like blood from a gunshot wound. I was a year younger than she, and I thought she was the most fascinating person I had ever met. This was during the time I thought being able to get drunk every day, openly, was the epitome of manhood, and I thought being in a relationship meant you slept and drank with the same person for more than a weekend. Life was a lot more simple back then, and long range planning meant having enough beer to last the rest of the night.
Akin was one of the few people I knew who read for pleasure. She had read “The Hobbit” and loved it because she was short and rather round. She was a redhead, and she thought if she tried hard enough she could get the hair on her toes to grow out bushy but it never happened. Akin thought wishing hard enough, or thinking hard enough about something would make it happen, but there were so many thing she wished for that never came close to happening. She really wanted to be a poet, but most of the people she knew thought her work was truly boring and stupid, but I liked it. Sometimes she was more like a hallmark card than most hallmark cards, but sometimes she could nail down a poem that stuck.
What poets do is capture tiny moments, seconds sometimes, less than that if they’re good, and they take their own lives and they meld the two so closely you look at that one second, or hear it, yet it’s so wrapped up in a life, you then begin to feel it too. Akin wrote a poem about a poem written on a piece of paper that flew down a street, finally lost to everyone because it landed in a ditch full of water, and faded out unread, but I thought it was incredible.
“Read it to me, Akin” I would say when we were smoking pot.
“You’ve heard it a billion billion times.” She would laugh, and I knew she loved being asked to read a poem, her poem, out poem, and she wouldn’t get up to find it, not as if she hadn’t memorized it by then.
“I’ll take you to the beach, and get you stoned, or I’ll leave right now, and you’ll be alone.” I had to make up some stupid rhyme or she wouldn’t read it, or if the thyme was something too stupid she would read it and leave out the inflection in the wrong places, ruining it, so I had to play along.

Akin was raped by one of her husband’s friends one night while he was at work. Her husband walked into the aftermath, thought Akin was cheating on him, beat the guy up, and she thought he was there to rescue her, but then he beat her up, too. Someone called the cops and because her husband told them she was sleeping with the guy she wound up getting the hell beat out of twice and raped in one night. I had no idea if that story was true, because Akin told me a lot of stories I didn’t believe, but she didn’t like phones and she was a little spooked when it came to sex sometimes. She and I stayed in touch with one another for a long time, and one day she called me to tell me it was malignant, and she was going to miss me.

Take Care,
Mike

Ice. There is ice on my windshield this morning and I carve a tiny peephole out of it with what water remains in an old water bottle in the back of the truck. The three tenths of a mile to the end of the driveway ought to be enough to warm the truck up enough to melt the rest of it. I drive bent over and craning to see the twin ruts leading east. Gorram ice.
It was 2004 or 2005 when the pond was last full, when we had a lot of wet weather, and oh by the way, that was also the last time I built a metal shed on the concrete slab in the back of the back yard. The water got a foot deep onto the shed, and now that I have a new one, it’s heading in that direction. One day as I was leaving for work, I spooked a deer that had come in close to get away from the hunters and as she ran down the driveway, she cut towards the pond, splashing my truck with water. The water on the windshield froze almost instantly it was so cold, and as it crystallized I wondered how many people on earth was, at that very moment, watching water splashed by a deer freeze into tiny beautiful patterns on glass.
When I worked in Surveys, I was riding in the back of the van, not listening to my supervisor’s nonstop rants against the various multitudes of people unlike himself when I noticed a hawk gliding towards the top of a utility pole. The wind was blowing hard that day, and the hawk was flying into it, and he let the wind lift him, nearly stall him, float him right above the top of the pole, where he seemed suspended in time for a fraction of a second, then he abruptly folded his wings, and dropped the final two or three inches.
A Luna moth was dying, it was late Summer, and the Alapaha River was still flooded, rushing over the metal workbridge we had put in. The fist span of the workbridge was still dry, and I liked to eat my lunch there, feeling the power of the river, listing to the sound of the water rushing over steel and itself. There was a pool, a still place on the Southern edge of the workbridge, where the water slowly circulated. I would throw tiny pieces of wood in the eddy, and wonder how long it would take them to spin out, or if they would just stay in the current. Pieces of bread tossed in brought flashes of silver as fish hit them. I picked the moth up and wondered if there might be a way to save it, to somehow succor it from its fate. The moth rose up, flew in a tight spiral, and then crashed into the still water of the eddy. It lay there, floating, then was hit from below, and it its panic, began flapping its wings, and for just a second or two, I could see it as the moth swam underwater, then another flash of silver, and it was gone.

I cannot remember why I was there, or where it was, exactly, but I do remember eating a ham sandwich, on a dock, and I think it was Lake Seminole. I was tossing bread into the clear water, and minnows fought for it. They were rather large minnows with large scales on their heads, like armor plating. I threw in a piece of ham, and suddenly a very small turtle game barreling in. I watched it approach, from underwater, and I was amazed at how keen its sense of smell must have been to smell the ham. This was no slow and ponderous turtle, but an agile and spry carnivore, moving in for a kill. There was much grace in the way it navigated around some dead tree limbs in the water, and unerringly, its nose led it to a meal. The minnows scattered, and I shared my lunch with the turtle, watch it expertly swim its way to each offering.

I wish I didn’t remember the orange legged spider, but I do, and I will forever. Sykes Mill Road is a tiny road, but we were putting in a culvert there, many years ago. I was watching an orange-legged spider walk across the water, flitting across the surface like an ice skater. I had never seen a water spider with orange markings, and I wondered if this was some new species, or perhaps one indigenous to this region, and suddenly a rock landed on top of it. The guy I was working with had absently tossed a rock in the water and crashed directly on top of the spider. Maybe it was the look on my face, maybe he really didn’t mean to do it, but he tried to laugh it off, as if it were an accident, but I hated him for killing the spider. One of the orange marked legs drifted downstream, and for some reason I felt as if this was an accusation of some sort, against me. I never quite got over this, and yes, it’s petty, and it’s worse than that because in 2003, the man killed himself with a gun. Perhaps if I have forgiven him the little things, he would have, too.
As the ice melted on the windshield a deer ran back into the woods from the other side of the pond, and I wonder if it was the same one from years ago. They stay close to my house because the mutts are penned up, and I do not shoot at the deer. I try to maintain peace with the creatures of the earth, in as much as I can. I have no idea why these moments I’ve shared have stuck with me, but they have, and I am a better person for it, I think.

Take Care,
Mike

It was time to go on another raid, and there were so many thing I left lacking, because I hate to shop, there really was no other choice but to go to Mal-Wart, or spend half a day shopping around. Mutt Treats, meds of allergies, washer detergent, food stuff, junk food stuff for the game, and a host of smaller things. Damn I hate the place, but it’s either that or hit three or four stores before the game.
Why Mal-Wart would be crowded on Super bowl Sunday is beyond me, but it was. I had my sunglasses on, my MP3 player rocking, and drive the shopping buggy like a man possessed. Get in, get what I got to get, get out; it’s a lot like married sex. That remark will come back to haunt me, wait and see, and it won’t take very long either. I started to edit it out, but this is supposed to be factual feelings here, right?
There were four kids fighting over who gets to push the buggy in the middle of an aisle and there were no adults in sight. Not that I blame their parents for deserting them at all. I like chewing gum, did you know that about me? I like a certain kind, and right there in front of where my gum was, a little old lady stood staring. Okay, go get stuff for Chili and come back. I push the buggy as fast as I normally walk. Most people surprised there is someone around with some sort of haste, step out of the way in confusion. What is this man doing? Why isn’t he dawdling around staring off into space? There are people who treat this store like it’s some sort of cheap plastic Disney World or something. I get stuff for chili and head back to get gum. There’s a pair of wheel chair people blocking the aisle so I take a hard turn and cut through…damn…it’s the women’s underwear department. I take another sharp turn and my buggy skids on a black thong. I’ll never be able to look at a woman in a black thong again without thinking of this incident. Well, that likely isn’t true either, nevermind.
The old woman is still camped out in front of the gum, so I go get mutt treats. I like the pet department because people buy stuff for their dogs and I like it when I see someone buying something really cool. There’s a guy getting a great big box of treats and he looks happy, and I wonder if his puppy is as happy as mine are. The woman is still guarding the gum, so I reach around her and this startles her. I almost, very nearly, ask her what she was thinking about, but really I have to get out of here.

Because it’s crowded I have to wait in line behind people buying useless stuff. The same could be said for chew toys because canines have survived quite well for a long time without them, but waiting in a crowded place makes me bitchy. Two people ahead of me an ancient woman is trying to unload her buggy but in her right hand she carries the Instrument Of Dread. In front of the buggy, an even older man is trying to get a twelve pack of sugar free no caffeine diet coke zero out from under the buggy. I should have helped him, this I know, and honestly I still feel bad about it, but I was fascinated on how he would try to pull it out from under the buggy, the buggy would move backwards towards the woman, and woman would push it forward again, and the man would have to back up. About the time I realized I was being a jerk for standing there and watching this, the cashier walked around and aimed the price gun at it and it was over. Yet Instrument Of Dread remained. The IOD is an inkpen. The woman was trying to write a check. She had gotten it all written out when the cashier explained to her the check needed to be scanned, not written upon, and the woman didn’t even have to sign it. The woman had done this before, but she likes doing it the old way. I wonder when I’m that age if I will cling to my credit card, refusing to use the newer methods, too.
The couple ahead of me were buying useless plastic house ware stuff that will break in a month. The two women to my right were buying two toilets seats. One of the women was a painfully thin young woman, maybe in her late twenties, and she was skeletal. I mean she looked like a death camp survivor. The woman with her kept touching her arm, and speaking to her as they waited, and the woman ahead of me touched the arm of the man with her, and it struck me as very personal, in both cases. I watched the two women, and either they were lesbians, or close friends, and I decided they were friends and the thin woman had just survived something weird. The couple ahead of me wore rings, so they were married, and suddenly it hit me; I was the only person in line, two people ahead of me, two to my right, who was alone.

I was buying mutts things, the guy ahead of me was buying pink February fourhteeth thing that the woman wanted, the old man and woman were buying the essentials and nothing else, except the cokes, their daily treat I imagine, and the two women buying toilets seats really needed them, I would think, but I was buying things for my furry family, not someone I was with, or going home for. I wonder in twenty years or thirty years if I’ll be at some store, alone, watching other people in line, maybe the children of people I’ve waited in back for before, and I wonder if these same thoughts will come to me, and I’ll be too foggy to remember them.

For reasons I cannot explain to you, I am incredibly and very poignantly reminded on this day that I am one of the few people I know who is totally alone.

Take Care,
Mike

Lucas is showing signs of being part Pit Bulldog, and before anyone has any sorts of misgivings let me say first Pits are some of my favorite people. Whatever you might have heard about Pits, let me assure you they are some of the most loving and gentle dogs alive today, and most of who they are depends greatly on who raises the animal. That said, Pits are tough critters who play hard and can take a lot of punishment when they are playing. The Loki Mutt and I tussled around in the leaves today, and I was surprised at how hard I had to pop him to get him to understand where the boundaries are. I had the same problem with Bert, many, many, years ago, and I do understand that a puppy in play mode has to be trained to come out of it when I tell him to do so. When I say stop he has to stop, right now.
Lucas is more like Bert than he is Sam, but he stays at Sam’s side more often than not. Sam doesn’t swim, and he doesn’t wade but once again, the Loki Mutt is showing sure signs of being Bert’s son, not Sam’s. Lucas likes to run full bore through the firepit, which is now a wading pond for the dogs. I tried to catch him in motion yesterday, but my god that dog has put some speed on. Lucas, if he was six months old in August, is a year old now. That means I have at least another year of puppy left to deal with, and the worst as far as damage does has yet to come. The training part is pretty much solidified, and Lucas behaves himself well, I must admit, but he has boundless energy, and he seems driven.
I’ve never shared space with a dog that seems to have such a sense of destiny as Lucas has. He wants to be lead dog. He wants to have the place next to me when we’re sitting down. He wants to be the dog at my side when we’re walking. He wants to be Bert, actually, and Bert has taken a great deal of umbrage at this. Sam’s tried to kill Lucas once, but most of the time when Sam and Lucas tie up it isn’t a big deal. Tying up with Bert is a big deal, however, and Lucas has been pushing it lately. The very said Luke would be stunted and as far as I can tell that’s Vetspeak for “Oh dear dog in heaven this is going to be a large critter”. The Loki Mutt continues to grow.

The most positive thing I have to report to you is Lucas is showing almost none of the signs of deprivation reaction that Sam has. I got to him in time to keep any permanent damage to his psyche from occurring so it would seem, and he’s nothing like Sam was six months after he got here. Sam has always been deeply scarred by the time he spent with people other than humans, and even though he has enjoyed a life of peace and security, Sam is flawed. I cannot heal the wounds that have been created in his mind, and in this, I consider we humans even more flawed still; we can do more harm than we can repair, or heal. Sam will live his life out in peace, and perhaps there is more I can do for him, and certainly all the damage that has been done is done, as long as I live.
Physical and emotional abuse stays with the victim longer than we know, longer than we fear, and longer than we care to admit.

I happily report to you the state of the Loki Mutt is very good. At this moment he is sleeping, or recharging, with the Elder Mutts, but soon he will rise to torment and destroy, as puppy are wont to do. Six months deep into my time with him, I must say I feel somewhat robbed of being deprived of his earlier puppy months, and even though it might have cost me two pairs of running shoes, one hundred feet of garden hose, two blankets, a twenty by twenty tarp, a hoe handle, a dozen holes in my yard, some siding on the house, and who knows how much money in chew toys, I still love this little dog.

Take Care,
Mike

It's the birthday of Stewart O'Nan, (books by this author) born in Pittsburgh (1961). His novels include Snow Angels (1994), The Speed Queen (1997), A Prayer for the Dying (1999), and Last Night at the Lobster (2007).
He maintains that a person who wants to be a writer should always carry around a notebook: "If you don't write it down, it's gone."
In an article entitled "Finding Time to Write," he paraphrased Joseph Conrad's maxim "that there are only two difficult things about writing: starting and not stopping."

Poll #1520451 Lost Without You
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 14

Are you watching LOST tonight?

It’s Chainsaw Day, the day the last bit of the tree gets cut up in smaller pieces with a chainsaw, and it’s no accident I’ve waited this long. Chainsaws are dangerous, always, never safe, and no one can tell you they’ve mastered the art of the chainsaw unless they’ve hired someone else to use it for them. There are long pieces to be cut into shorter pieces, bramble to be cut into kindling,  and ugly pieces to be cut down to size. I hate chainsaws. Maybe something would happen, I told myself, like a traffic accident, or winning the lottery, or some other form of drama where I wouldn’t have to use the chainsaw again, but this is Chainsaw Day, and so I drag it out of its black coffin, and hope it cranks, sort of, maybe, and if it doesn’t, oh well.

It does crank, on the third try, and I cut some of the smaller, but longer stuff and the chainsaw doesn’t try to kill me yet. The thicker stuff comes next, and I’m careful to stand out of the angle of the sawdust, and watch for the chain breaking, and watch for the kickback of the saw that shortened Tommy Odom’s leg by two inches back in 1981. Chainsaw are ridiculously easy to use, and therein lies the danger. Anyone can start one, anyone can pick one up, anyone can see how easy it is to zip through pieces of wood. Zip! Zip! The noise is terrible, but the wood piles up quickly, and they are so easy to use. Zip! Zip! But the vibration causes fatigue and sooner or later to get tired and get careless and suddenly there is a gusher and your bone has been turned to bonedust, not unlike at all like sawdust, except it isn’t the life of a tree running down your leg.

Odd, how fragile our lives are, yet the  tree still lives. Some of the wood is still green, very green, and the smell of a tree’s death please some people, but I know this for what it is. This is my tree, and it’s being rendered for cremation, and it occurs to me my own cremation will be much different. Or maybe, if I donate my body to science, it will be much like this, until the last day of class, when the last of me is wheeled out and slapped into the toaster, never to be burned again.

There’s real life in the tree, even at this stage, and when I toss one of the green pieces onto the ground I can feel the strength in it, I can feel the life in it yet, and there is never a time in a human being’s time there is that much power in a life. This is real, true, energy that is able to hold up thousands of gallons of water, tons of woods, three acres of shade, and do so without breaking a sweat.

The ugly pieces are those that held limbs and branches, and because of this, I have to cut them shorter to be able to split them. I’ve gotten good again, I’ve fallen back into the groove of swinging an axe, and a maul, and pounding the wedges again. My endurance isn’t what it once was, but I’m faster, more efficient, and I realize why they say youth is wasted on the young now. I dreamed there was a hole in one of my gloves, but there isn’t. I know, I know, yes, a hole in one of my gloves is an odd thing to dream, but that’s my life. Dreams blend in, yes, I know, I know, it’s a form of insanity, but that too is my life. My fingers don’t reach all the way to the ends of my gloves, and they never have, really, because I have small hands. “It’s like dating a lesbian again, “ a woman told me once, and then there was this silence as she realized what she had said, and I realized it too, and we lay there in the dark and I almost asked, but I realized she hadn’t meant to say it, so I didn’t, and right at this very moment, no, not back then with her, but right now, while I’m splitting the twisted piece of Oak, I realize that like the wood which I split to reveal the twists and knots and hard places, that night I had split a woman, to reveal her own hidden secrets, and in much the same way, in fact. Much later, a year or so in fact, the woman squeezed my arm and said, “That’s her” and I realized she was talking about the college professor we had been speaking to at a party, and looking back there was that gleam in the eyes thing, but I didn’t ask that night, because she knew I would, and I knew she would be disappointed when I did, and I knew she would wonder why I didn’t, but that is the woman. Women love secrets, and revealing them, and men aren’t supposed to care, both generalizations false, yes, I know, but it fit then, and it worked then.

The woodpile gets bigger with these thoughts, and the analogy pops up but I need to move on. I wonder what this tree looked like the day I was born, and when it got sick and begun to die. It was dying when I got here nine years ago, and I’m dying right now, just as slowly as the Oak, maybe quicker in fact, but I wonder how many more I’ll lose before I go. How many more will I have to burn? Will I bury my dogs before it happens? Will my parents die before I do? Death, death, death, I’m stacking a death into a pile, and using a chainsaw while I daydream, and I hope the two don’t meet.

 

I split one more piece of wood and it looks impossible but it opens up like a woman who never smiles but secretly wants to be taken, and like a woman who is diseased with some virus, this piece is filled with large red and black ants. This is an eviction notice, and they aren’t happy at all. All these thoughts are piling up like the wood, and the comparison between the Oak and women makes me realize where the term Mother Earth came from, and I wonder if we can ever get back to being who we were meant to be before we’re cut up and burned.

 

Take Care,

Mike

A poem by Richard Brautigan:
"30 Cents, Two Transfers, Love"

Thinking hard about you
I got on the bus
and paid 30 cents car fare
and asked the driver for two transfers
before discovering
that I was
alone

Most pressing human issues today are caused by simple math; we human are far too good at multiplying, but we’re a divided race, and we subtract too much from the earth without adding anything back. There are far too many human beings on the earth and when things go to hell, they are going to hell in a hurry and we’re going to deeply regret we didn’t have some sort of plan as to what to do about all the people.

Right now, at this point in history, in this country, it is impossible to do so much as discuss population control without Hitler’s name being brought into it. Maybe by the next generation we will notice that it is impossible to legally drive a car, buy a handgun, cut someone’s hair, or tattoo someone without a license. Yet any moron with an erection can father a child, and any idiot ready and willing to open her legs can get pregnant, and there isn’t a damn thing anyone can say or do about it without being labeled a Nazi.  

By the way, in case you’re interested in more math, Hitler’s wars caused more deaths of innocent civilians than any of his evil science experiments, his pogrom against the Jews, or anything else he did to anyone else, yet you never hear about a group of crazy religious people screaming about the military being Nazis, do you?

Abortion is a legal way to terminate a pregnancy. It is not murder. Murder by its very definition is an illegal act and as long as it is legal then the crazies are going to just have to live with it, or kill because of it, whatever their particular god is up to these days.  I personally think it ought to be subsidized by the government and there ought to be abortions clinics right next door to every church, just to keep the nutcases close to home. Moreover, they ought to have to take in every child that is produced by their protests. If they stop ten women a day from having an abortion then in nine months that church inherits those  ten babies. Get your stopwatches out to time how long the protests would be going on if these people have to live with the results of their actions. I don’t like religious people. More succinctly worded, I do not like people who think their views on religion ought to be made into law, and if those views aren’t, they have the right to kill someone over it.

 

Oddly enough, I find myself siding with the nutcases in a recent debate.

 

Tim Tebow is a college football player of great renown. He’s also very up front when it comes to his beliefs. That didn’t keep Alabama from beating the Hell out of him, and set Tim Tebow to crying like a spanked child on national television, but hey, that’s football.

Tebow’s mother, when she was pregnant with him, was told by a doctor or two to terminate her pregnancy, or so the story goes, and she refused to do it, and as a result, Tim Tebow is now been hired by Focus on the Family to air that story during a commercial during the Superbowl. As far as I know, the story is a true story. FOTF paid 2.4 million dollars to air the ad…once.

 

Let me make a distinction here; I am pro abortion. I think there ought to be more of them. I think they ought to be free. I also think if a woman has an abortion she, and the man who fathered the child, ought to be sterilized, but you know there’s going hell raised when that’s brought up. Anyway, some people are purely prochoice. They do not care if a woman has, or doesn’t have, an abortion, they just think the woman ought to have the right to choose.

 

These people, the Pro Choice people, are having fits over the Tebow commercial.

 

I have heard some say it’s inappropriate to show the commercial during a football game. Uh, yeah, I get that, but if that’s true why protest it? Let them show a very serious and hotly debated topic watched by millions, but it will likely be sandwiched in between commercials involving talking cats and another one involving a nearly naked woman selling a sexual lubricant. The overwhelming majority of the people watching this commercial will be men, who have been drinking, and who are likely to remember the nearly naked woman more intensely than Tebow, unless that blonde he’s banging is sitting in his lap, topless.

 

Here’s my view on this: If it is a true story, if FOTF has the bucks to pull it off, and no dogs are injured as a results, more power to them. They have a right to present their point of view, even though I think they’re morons. They bought the time so let them use it as they see fit, and if that causes some sort of social change then it’s because people like me weren’t smart enough to figure out how to counter them.

Moreover, why the hell would you put a guy in a white lab coat in charge of your life? Sure, if you had cancer you might want to listen to what the man, or woman, has to say, but if they told you they were going to take out a lung, wouldn’t you go get a second opinion? My doctor hates my guys because I won’t take the drugs he wants me to but I say it’s my choice. Choice? Isn’t that’s it all suppose to be about, choice? What? You’re pro choice as long as the woman chooses abortion?

 

You people screwed this one up, and you’ve got people like me being all snarky at you because of it.

 

Whether I like it or not, whether the pro choice people like it or not, commercialism is legal, just like abortion. Whether I like to it or not, or whether the pro choice people like it or not, some women are going to choose to have babies. Some of them are morons. Some of them are not going to be very good moms. Some of them simply have no idea what they are getting into.  But having a baby is easy, raising that child is not. Raising a baby and being a parent is an act of will and courage, and it is quite simply the hardest job any human can undertake. And, not to put too fine a point on it, it is a choice. Tim Tebow’s mom made that choice, and she seems to have done pretty well with it.

 

Regardless of where you stand on the issue, you’ve got to respect the mom here.

 

Take Care,

Mike

by Hilaire Belloc

Matilda told such Dreadful Lies,
It made one Gasp and Stretch one's Eyes;
Her Aunt, who, from her Earliest Youth,
Had kept a Strict Regard for Truth,
Attempted to Believe Matilda:
The effort very nearly killed her,
And would have done so, had not She
Discovered this Infirmity.
For once, towards the Close of Day,
Matilda, growing tired of play,
And finding she was left alone,
Went tiptoe to the Telephone
And summoned the Immediate Aid
Of London's Noble Fire-Brigade.
Within an hour the Gallant Band
Were pouring in on every hand,
From Putney, Hackney Downs, and Bow
With Courage high and Hearts a-glow
They galloped, roaring through the Town,
'Matilda's House is Burning Down!'
Inspired by British Cheers and Loud
Proceeding from the Frenzied Crowd,
They ran their ladders through a score
Of windows on the Ball Room Floor;
And took Peculiar Pains to Souse
The Pictures up and down the House,
Until Matilda's Aunt succeeded
In showing them they were not needed;
And even then she had to pay
To get the Men to go away!
It happened that a few Weeks later
Her Aunt was off to the Theatre
To see that Interesting Play
The Second Mrs Tanqueray.
She had refused to take her Niece
To hear this Entertaining Piece:
A Deprivation Just and Wise
To punish her for Telling Lies.
That Night a Fire did break out –
You should have heard Matilda Shout!
You should have heard her Scream and Bawl,
And throw the window up and call
To People passing in the Street –
(The rapidly increasing Heat
Encouraging her to obtain
Their confidence) – but all in vain!
For every time She shouted 'Fire!'
They only answered 'Little Liar'!
And therefore when her Aunt returned,
Matilda, and the House, were Burned.

"Matilda (Who told Lies, and Was Burned to Death)" by Hilaire Belloc, from Cautionary Tales. © Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1907

 

It's the birthday of the novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, (books by this author) born Virginia Stephen in London (1882). She never went to school, but her father chose books for her to read from his own library. She was only allowed to move out of her family home after her father's death, when she was 22. She moved into a house with her brothers and sister, and instead of writing letters about what she'd been reading, she began to write literary criticism for the Times Literary Supplement, and she became one of the most accomplished literary critics of the era.

Woolf believed that the problem with 19th-century literature was that novelists had focused entirely on the clothing people wore and the food they ate and the things they did. She believed that the most mysterious and essential aspects of human beings were not their possessions or their habits, but their interior emotions and thoughts.

She considered her first few novels failures, but then in 1922, she began to read the work of Marcel Proust, who had just died that year. That moved her to write her first masterpiece: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), about all the thoughts that pass through the mind of a middle-aged woman on the day she gives a party. Woolf went on to write many more novels, including To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), but she was also one of the greatest essayists of her generation. In her long essay about women and literature, A Room of One's Own (1929), she wrote: "So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery."