Vacations and Veterans

The saddest part of this week is it's ending. What a great week though. I had to work a little. Got a promotion-yeah.
The boy (this is how I refer to my boyfriend) went fishing every day. He caught 28 fish on the Gallatin, 29 if you count the white fish, all in one sunny morning.
Going to the gun show today. Yes, I am a liberal who loves guns as you will find many that do. Looking for a shot gun as a birthday present to myself and this fall I plan on doing some skeet and trap shoots and I need to get up to par.
Speaking of par, we are going to hit a bucket of balls on the drive range today. Do I feel like a Yuppie or what? I like the idea of golf but I probably will really stink at it. The two surgeries I had at once on my right arm will make it interesting if not impossible but I am going to give it a try.
We did the 4th of July parade thing in Ennis. It reminded me of my child hood in Central MT. The parade could be removed like a puzzle piece from Ennis to my home town and it would be an unnoticable difference. I know the boy noticed that I cried a little when the VFW went by. I could not help to think of our nation during those wars and, now in my time, again at war and for what? Because Hitler was slaughtering innocent Jews? Or the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. No, not even because our Twin Towers are gone with only the horrifying memory of that day in September.
I stood up an started to clap as they went by. There were only 4 of them. 3 men and a woman. The guy next to me had a small family and he made them do the same but no one else clapped for them. They were even surprised I think, as they all looked over at us and then blank faces went to smiles. I just wanted to thank them for having the most difficult job in the world. I wanted them to understand that I, a war protestor, honored them for their difficult task. Whether I agree with the politics or not I always have a heart for our soldiers. Let's honor them. Let's say, "enough is enough", and bring them home.
I head to the greens now. Rested from my week off. Ready to head back to a new challenge at work, thankful that I have all that have and all for my friends and family with a twinge of sadness at how hard these things were fought for.

An Inconvenient Truth

See it. Tell people about it.
Al Gore does a really good job of succinctly linking our melting earth with our dependance on oil. We can do better. We have no choice but to do better. See it. Tell people about it.

From a short story called, "Ford Gray".

My Dad had huge Ford pickup trucks that smelled like the inside of the oldest book in the library, all of his life. I can still get teary eyed just seeing one of those beasts in a junk yard. If I were able I would open it's long abandoned cab, sit inside it; cry. If not to cry then to use it's cab as one might use a confessional but in this case the priest on the other side would be the soul of my dead father. There I would hold a much needed spiritual communion with him exacting my anger while finally forgiving him his humanness.
Would it be possible that there would be enough juice in the battery that I could get the AM to play just one song? Ya load 16 tons and whad'ya get, another day older and deeper in debt, Saint Peter don't ya call me cause I can't go....I owe my soul to the company store. Truly a hymn fit for such circumstances as this.
Though our father owned many in his life, the last 77 with a 350 sits in our mothers driveway. So huge, so looming; my mother just leaves it lurking there because to sell it would be the saddest thing to do, and to keep it... sadder yet. It has sat there since 1997 when my dad died. Will it be 10 years next October?
My dad, with our ill begotten help, painted it himself and it shows a little. He was not a body man, he was a rancher, moved to the big city of 6000 turned mechanic. His spirit broken and his desire to live lost he made a living that one might call a dying. His sons, 2 of them, sorrows purveyors at never living up to the expectations of the greatest man and the greatest failure. So much like him, they seek life as violently as they can attain it. Drunkenly or stoned in whatever fashion the day meters itself out to them. We, the rest of us, watch in distinct horror at having to relive what we thought was a Greek tragedy written in the history of a dead man but now we see it living in the lost, the brothers, the men of the family now. Both now unable to take care of themselves, one closer to the grave, the other closer to the prison cell; they have become the dirtiest trick God has ever played.
What bitter pride they feel for knowing the man, his harsh manner and brutal tongue sometimes flecked with the humor and character that lines their flesh. Those Ford trucks, they still haunt them with this same bitterness; a reminder of their paternal heritage, the pride I suppose would be part of just knowing that your father is the one man that helps you be the man that you are.
For them the Ford sits in that driveway with as much resentment as it can muster for my father, paranormally, from the grave. Or is it just that last cellular memory of the huge man, leering from it's windows, forearms spattered with red freckles and light blonde hair?
He was 65 when he died and he had no gray in his hair. The gray Ford parked in the driveway had aged for him. Letting him die a little longer, berating all of us until he could not avoid the last rites on his death bed because his pain outspoken his words.
We wet sanded that body by hand and, I remember, it was red before he painted it Ford Gray. It was the meat beneath the flesh. It was his Christine and we cling to it as idolically as if he loved our being, our communion with him. We hate it too, it's presence calling us to it to make us sit inside and smell it, things dead, things gone, things better forgotten. Still we sit, we remember, we cry, we turn on the radio and listen to Hank Williams Sr. the eerieness is not lost on us that this is what he listened to last before dying.
We loved the man, his anger, his drunkenness, our inability to ever please him. We honor the man that others tell us he was. We fear him, we miss him, we hate him and we love him. We wash over it all with Ford Gray and say that it is done. It is over but it is all that we are, every organic morsel...Ford Gray.