Redneck Tasering and the Razor-wire Rodeo

No Telling

Occasionally I find a ditty in the local paper that requires sharing. Those of you familiar with renegade pigs in the freeway and the survivor story of the swimming-pool hog may not be a bit impressed. Anyone who’s read my picks from the local police blotter might be too jaded at this point. I don’t know. Even News of the Weird may have a difficult time believing this one.

It seems we have a jail escapee. A gentleman who managed to unhitch a primary fence at the local detention center shimmied out, then scaled another fence about 13-feet high, crowned within razor wire. Although in the past hour or so we’re all relieved to hear he finally turned himself in, his story is already the stuff of legend. Little Rock’s KATV Channel 7 gave us this slice of life earlier:

“A theft suspect who was caught after he was swarmed by bees has escaped from the Faulkner County Jail.

Faulkner County sheriff’s deputies say that 46-year-old Ricky Dale Ford peeled back a section of chain-link fence to escape an exercise yard and then scaled a secondary fence Sunday afternoon to get loose.

Area law enforcement said Monday that Faulkner County deputies have not been able to find Ford.

Ford was riding a stolen ATV when he clipped a bee hive at a home on Billy Goat Mountain near Vilonia. He was caught Wednesday in nearby woods, where police found other stolen property.

When Ford struck the hive, the bees swarmed him, stinging him up to 100 times. Ford’s address is on nearby Nanny Goat Lane.

Ford was jailed after hospital treatment.”

There’s so much going on there I scarcely know where to begin. It’s no wonder Ricky Dale was compelled to give himself up considering the description of him published in the Log Cabin Democrat.

“FCSO Chief Deputy Jerry Gross said Ford was barefoot and was wearing black-and-white prison clothes when he escaped.”

And the real clincher,

“A deputy said Ford may still have visible whelps from the bee stings.

Ford is described as a white male about 6 feet tall with dark hair and a ‘mullet’ haircut.”

Why, this fella defines Audacity of Hope. Let’s forget for a moment that he’s a gentleman likely entering his heart-attack years. Nevermind the innumerable bee-stings that tasered him into the detention center in the first place. There’s a whole lot of believing (or something) that gets a man that age up and over a razor-wired fence. Barefooted.

I think someone needs to test the water up on Billy Goat Mountain. It may not explain the mullet, but it might go a long way in deciphering exactly what kind of country boys they’re growing up there.

Special thanks to my good friend Tony, who alerted me to the breaking news. If I wrote down one-tenth of the bizarre stories he tells me, I’d have to quit my day-job and scribble itinerantly.

A Fairy Tale with Teeth: Part Third and Final

No Telling

(A serialized fairy tale in three parts.)

Sliding to the floor like poured milk, she attempted to get under the flying bats. And there were dozens. You see, a roomful of bats is a difficult thing to count accurately, considering all that moving and fluttering and screeching. Let us say then that there were uncountable many.

But the round-eyed woman was all at once thinking, stealthy, and consumed by her biology in ways that eluded the H&P, but that must certainly be easily understood by nesting bats. She crawled first to the comic book bedroom of the sleeping part-time son who, because he feared darknesses we can only imagine or prosecute, left his door wide open for safety. And the round-eyed woman wept as she crawled hand over hand, a moonlit commando for rescue, because she knew that he was old enough to remember the terrifying houseful of bats and would never, never, never forget.

Exactly what the H&P did or thought at this moment as it is unclear. The background music to the rest of evening is an inelegantly strung series of his epithets punctuated by household decor thumping and crashing. For the H&P, it was war.

With the whimpering part-time son clinging to her belly like a like a small blonde pregnancy, and the Tranfsormer quilt over the both of them, the round eyed woman continued her paratrooper crawl down the hall very quickly and in a sing-song voice. This is just quite an adventure, she told the boy, close your eyes and I will tell you the story when it is over and I’ve made a pretty end of it.

And because he did, he did not see the tired fliers fall to the Stainmaster Nine plush carpeting, catching their calcaria in the little twists of orlon that made them fast prisoners difficult to sling out of the way with her still bloodless hands.

The round eyed-woman did not begin to shake until she saw, by the sweetly pink glow of the dim nightlights, the seven brown and rolling bodies each grappling their way toward the thick, dark underneath of the lovely rose quilt; a place warm and holy from the sleepbreaths of the babygirl dreaming swingsets and pristine sandboxes and “E” shaped honey sandwiches.

So she covered the boy with a Transformer swoosh. She flung wide the delightful rose quilt, slinging heinous brown bodies, and she placed the toddling girl between her white satin nightgown and the terror beating through her skin, and tied a quick umbilical knot to hold her.

Then she formed a ragged whisper to all things heinous, unsafe and named them with one word best not repeated here.

Standing, the round-eyed woman attached the quilted boy to her thigh like a large, confused mitten, and they ran very, very quickly down the hall, through the dark rain of innumerable airborne living-room bats, skipping lightly over the trapped and writhing ones, sliding cleanly out the front door of the June-blue house and into the softest September night.

They took the long way around, through the fence picketed and white, beside the trained and twisted curls of the foot-long beans (which gave an audible green sigh of twisting, pushing into tomorrow’s picking) until they were at last, quilted and keyless beside the mountainous door of the ancient and seldom purring late 50s Belair. The round-eyed woman lovingly unknotted the satin, and breathlessly placed the little ones inside where they scooched and snuggled into a small fuzzy pile, all Rose and Transformer, in the cavernous back seat.

From the windows of the Chevy, the round-eyed woman could see the H&P’s heroic attempts to slice through waves of circling bats, as he danced like a fruit-of-the-loomed marionette with strange despotic gestures and stifled sounds of imagined triumph. It was suddenly obvious then that he might be forever swinging at his own carefully constructed evils entirely too late and all alone. She covered close the little frightened things she loved and hummed a wordless, vining song, to smooth the sounds coming from the open door of the lovely June-blue house all circled round in white pickets.

~The End

Epilogue

Yes, the bats did actually happen. They had been nesting in the chimney, and once the bottom and top of it had been sealed, we can assume they became frantic. The path of least resistance was the plywood-sealed fireplace opening.

When all was said and done my husband counted over 170 kills, escapees through the open front door notwithstanding. For days after, we found the odd one here and there behind books in the bookcase, hanging comfortably from ficus tree limbs, and crawling across the kitchen floor.

Thankfully, the children have no memory of the bats. The H&P, I understand, is still swinging at difficulties of his own making.

A Fairy Tale With Teeth: Part Second

No Telling

(A continuation from Part First.)

magine, if you can, the fluttering mother-heart of the round-eyed woman as she crept like a strange midnight ballerina toward what might certainly be a particularly Geraldo scenario complete with masked gunmen and duct tape. The irregular sounds from the living room mixed with the panic throbbing pizzicato in her clenched and stylishly-ringed fingers. With her hair still wild from dreaming and the whiteness of her satin nightgown reflecting moon through the windows, she looked just like the twisted moonflower and passion vines that came up like demonic accidents around the front porch of the June-blue house. An unfortunate camouflage for a woman inopportunely stalking certain ski-masked disaster.

In the living room, she used the tennis racquet’s edge to flip on the light.

There was no one there. She breathlessly leapt to the kitchen, the dining room. Still no darkly-dressed, robber-band infamy.

The irregular thumping came from the unattractively secured and jagged piece of raw plywood used to seal up the underbelly of the chimney. Knowing instantly that the thumping could only be the muffled sound of a trapped bat or two slinging themselves selfishly toward the safety of her children, the round-eyed woman stopped and though a bit.

She thought about heinous, rabid, slobbering, madnesses-incurable waiting in spiky bat teeth. She thought about unendurable abdominal injections in the smooth tummies of the sleeping small ones.

She thought about Old Yeller and became all misty.

For some reason the H&P (Handsome and Powerful husband) found it easier to wake this time, and did not protest at all when asked to climb upon the roof of the June-blue house in the very midnight of a late September. The round-eyed woman kissed the sleeping children’s fuzzy hair softly and with great assurance that their perfect pink bellies would be safe from all that was rabid and rodent-borne.

With the H&P tottering on the steeply pitched roof making repairs (there is another story of him falling from the roof, but he does not die in that one either), the round-eyed woman was at long last able to snuggle into the bed and dream sad Erendira moments of men in lines and things undone.

A few hours later, when the round-eyed woman heard hail gently bouncing and tumbling at the windows, she automatically rose to check the weather. She was accustomed to this, having lived cheerfully many years in a small southern town where the weather enjoys unaccountable changes and whirling tornadic things fall from the sky with regularity.

My lovely beans, she thought as she pulled back the soft sheets, will be beaten down to a fray. And this made her sad, because she adored the natural William Morris-like spirals pristinely curled for morning pickings.

By the time the she understood that the sound was not hail at all, not the rattling pieces of her broken heart, that the hail storm was not outside, but inside the house, the repeated flinging of blinded bat bodies casually slamming themselves into the post-war two-inch metal blinds had risen to a roll thunderous enough to wake even the sleeping H&P.

She turned the bedside light on with a gentle twist…

To be, of course, continued ~

A Fairy Tale With Teeth: Part First

No Telling

(The snake incident and a comment from a friend reminded me of this ditty I wrote some years ago. It’s ridiculous. It’s in three parts. And like all fairy tales, it’s true.)

nce upon a time a lengthy long time ago there lived this round-eyed woman in a mid-sized, downtown (right side of the tracks, but only just) old blue house. It was the color of the this very June sky, just two shades lighter, and had been built at the turn of the century as something better than a diamond ring to attract the unending love of a woman (now dead) who wanted not the house at all, but the ring.

Several owners later, the round-eyed woman moved in with her little toddling girl, one very black dachshund puppy, a part-time son, and a handsome and powerful man (hereafter, the H&P). She planted a garden where she grew broccoli too late and buggy foot-long green beans in matted heavenward spirals. It was very lovely place to be, and the round-eyed woman spent all her free afternoons tape-recording the voices of the young children for posterity while they played on the Wal-Mart swingset (model no. 2345-77-92002). In the evenings they would all gather in the back yard and cook assorted grilled meats to eat with the beans, staying outside until the swallows could no longer tell the difference between the round-eyed woman’s hair and the high wall of bean tendrils. The whole summer passed by sweetly.

One night, late in a September when the sun was still hot as three forgotten hells, the round-eyed woman looked up in evening light to see a new kind of swallow dipping and flailing. It only took one very close fly-by (a wing-breeze, really) for her to understand that the swallows had been replaced by some creepier flying thing.

Bats, she said, and ran into the house with a little one under each arm like floppy laundry, singing “Moon Shadow” (the children’s only lullaby) in an failing attempt to create calm in a sea of bats.

Later that evening, just after the round-eyed woman had snuggled the wiggling children into beds Rose and Transformer, and before she balled up in the tapestry sofa with the excruciating rhythms of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, there came an unusual sound from the fireplace, there, just to her left. It was some highly-placed screaming, almost a whistle.

And then a lone, wayward bat excused himself from the chimney’s esophagus and sailed through the open fireplace, afterward whooshing delicately about the room in uneven elliptical panic.

The woman quietly fell to the ground, Marquez still in hand, plotting in two and one half seconds just how long it would take to get the sleeping children and car keys free from the June-blue house. Before she could move, the reclining H&P deftly took three giant steps across the room (catching, of course, the only forgotten Lego squarely in the arch of his right foot), and as he fell his hand caught tightly one very collectible Billie Jean King wooden tennis racquet. A fortuitous weapon for such a moment.

Twenty or so increasingly violent back-hands and many freshly-strung expletives later, the bat lay in the floor, a flattened, fuzzy/brown, smallish thing. Much smaller, the round-eyed woman thought, than the drooling buzzard it had appeared to be just moments earlier.

To quiet the now frenzied round-eyed woman, the H&P promised to perch his life precariously on the roof the following morning and seal up the gaping and crumbling chimney so as not to let this ever happen again.

I’ll risk my life to save you from the bats, he said to the woman whose round eyes flicked tears of youth and motherhood into the new Stainmaster Series Nine carpeting.

Tomorrow, I promise, he said.

And as the round eyed woman calmly began packing enough clothes, diapers, and He-Man accessories for a week’s stay at her mother’s, the H&P found scrap plywood, gooey glue stuff and a gun-like instrument. He began to seal up the fireplace from the inside, and as a means to cease the packing and the frightening calm of the round-eyed woman, because he was most aware, suddenly, that he had said “tomorrow” perhaps one too many times.

Satisfied, the round eyed woman went to sleep and began lightly dreaming of angel-sized bats with very enormous wings and handsomely drowned and barnacled bats, because Marquez can invade even a June-blue house despite the application of epoxy sealants.

It was the irregular thumping that woke her, sounding for all the world like a madman playing rasta rhythms on the front door. Unable to arouse the sleeping H&P, the round-eyed woman crept a stealthy path down the hall, pausing only to lift the now loosely-strung and somewhat gory Billie Jean racquet from the elegant mahogany hall tree. Taking only the slightest moment to appreciate the contrast between the two, she continued to creep low, fingers bloodless for a two-fisted backhand…

To be continued tomorrow~

Good Friday

No Telling

It’s been a pretty damned nice day. Really.

I have a friend who once astounded me by keeping a Gratitude Journal. She’s that kind of person, glass half full and all, and kept whole scribbling book just to write down those things that happened to go well. She sees the lovely in everything, and I’m a little envious.

Not that I’m some old crank screaming at kids to get out of my yard or anything. Not yet, anyway. I’m like everyone else – smooth mornings, trying afternoons, exhausted evenings – sometimes too busy with the minutia of the everyday to stop and say, hey, that was a delightful moment.

Well, I’m doing it right now.

There was a time this morning when I looked at my 11:00 Intro to College Writing class and saw My Reason. The one I get up for every single morning. There they were, two fresh weeks into the semester, terror and self-consciousness gone. My students were writing and talking about their writing in little clatches here and there. I floated from group to group listening, smiling, nodding. One group helped a friend with his essay’s opening. The ideas flew. Another group laughed about a piece one of them had just read aloud, and as they remarked and responded, the writer scribbled furiously in the margins of his own paper.

At 11:00 I had a classroom of students who owned the writing. There was no need for me to stand at the podium and pontificate about audience and structure. Something clicked in that room today, and my students collectively and independently became writers. Not students in some composition class with an assignment – writers.

My gratitude is in being there to witness it.

At 2:30 I rode with Em to pick up The Perfect Grandson at pre-school. This was my first time to visit his school, to see his new life outside of our little house. Em led me down a hall and into a room filled with two year-olds chatting and resting and playing – a whole rainbow-coalition nest of other people’s perfect grandchildren. It’s such a tremendous responsibility taking care of other people’s beloveds, and those women whose names I don’t yet know who nurture these delightful fat-cheeked toddlers are angels. I’ve made a mental note to tell them them this, because they need to know.

Then The Perfect Grandson came careening from across the room with his crazy hair and big light-up Spiderman shoes.

“Meee-Meee!” and buried his little face in my skirt. That knee-hug was a moment so fine I want to weave 2:30 today into a scarf I wear around my neck until I die.

I am indeed the luckiest woman on the planet.

Dancing the Body Electric

No Telling

I‘ll admit it, I have an electrical problem. I’m not talking about my house, because it’s so brand new everything is probably under some warranty or other. I’m talking about me.

I have a fairly checkered past when it comes to small electrical and battery operated nuisances. There’s not a watch made that I can’t stop just by wearing it. I even wore a series of them around my neck on a chain – charming little pendant watches – thinking it was the direct contact with me that was the problem.

Nope. About once a month I’d be at the jewelry shop getting a battery replaced or apologizing while my favorite repairman scratched his head in disbelief. As a second-generation watch-guy, he’d seen cases like mine before. Chip died not long ago, and I quit wearing watches altogether.

Light bulbs. Now, they’re a real issue. I can blow a light bulb dark faster than anyone. Those can be a bit pricey to replace, so I tend to leave them be and live with a few lamps here and there. Climbing up and down the ladder that much is a worrisome venture anyway.

As a public school teacher I had an unnerving habit of blowing those little overhead projector bulbs regularly. Students in my classes took this phenomenon for granted after a while and one of the sweet backrow-boys would always scuttle off to the office to bring back more bulbs. Sometimes they came back emptyhanded.

I was rationed. My reputation was so tarnished that none of the other schoolmarms would loan me the use of their projectors, not even in a pinch. We were close friends who would and did share our last dimes and many times our county-line box-wine. Not their overhead projectors, though. They knew better.

There are other incidents. My favorite was the time both Em and I were writing furious poems at the dining room table and the chandelier bulbs began going out one by one. And the other time when we argued loudly over something teenagery and knocked out cable TV for three days. I suspect she’s got a few electrical issues as well.

Oh, and the neighborhood street lights. That’s okay. I don’t walk the subdivision loop anymore and no one on the Homeowners’ Association board has fingered me as the culprit. Let’s just keep that one between us.

The point of all this is that I think it’s getting worse. Recently I’ve found myself stuck in elevators that don’t seem to stick for anyone else. Twice last month and once again already this month. The first one was a particularly good stick, one warranting pushing that button and asking the campus police for a little assistance. The other two I’ll call “stalls.” The elevator hesitated, then decided to deposit me on a floor I didn’t choose all the while refusing to open the door.

The other day, I rode that badboy up and down half a dozen times before anyone could get the thing to release me.

I‘ve almost made friends with the problem, really. It’s a lot like the watch-and-light-bulb thing. If I half expect the elevator to malfunction, then there’s no reason panic. Eventually, the door will open. As long as it deposits me and my trick knee on the first floor, I’m golden.

I figure if it happens again I’m going to outfit that elevator with a comfortable chair. I’d carry a flashlight for emergencies, but that’s just asking for trouble and darkness. Maybe I’ll stow a box of kitchen matches and a fat candle under the cushion, just in case.

Why We Should Name the Storm

No Telling

Oldest known photograph of a tornado – August 28, 1884. South Dakota.

Yes, it’s hurricane season. I’ve been watching reports lately about that feisty Jimena, the one who threatens to ugly-up the Baja peninsula. Odd are she’ll wrap herself up once inland and head right straight through Arkansas. They always do, and even though these hurricanes are watered down by the time they visit us, there’s usually plenty of rain and a few fiery storms to make things interesting. We’ll have an errant tornado or three.

The tornadoes we’re stomped with have no names, at least nothing as swanky as “Jimena.” It must be because hurricanes are measured by what devilry they may bring, while tornadoes are only measured afterwards. All storms have numbers – category 4, F-3, that sort of thing – but only hurricanes have names.

So why can’t we name our tornadoes? I think we need a frame of historical reference at the very least. Here’s an example:

“That twister back in ’93 was a demon. ‘Member it?”

“That one that took Mr. Hightower’s fence and made a necklace of it over to the water tower?”

“Naw, I’m talkin’ about the one in the fall, the one that sliced the Chevron station in half. Found that ‘Pay Inside’ sign – remember? -stuck in the front glass of daddy’s Ford. You was there.”

“Damn. I thought it was that one closer to Christmas when we found all them dead fish from the waterspout. Them filleted ones.”

“Naw, now, that was the Chevron twister. Picked up the whole stockpond and shook it like a hound.”

“Ohhh, yeah. You’re right. I was there.”

You see my point. Our disasters need naming just like anyone else’s. Probably even more so, because we can’t rally ’round a good storm story if everyone’s confused.

I realize the National Weather Service (NOAA) has a lot on its plate just now, what with all the hurricane naming and warnings and projected paths and such. I hate to give them more work than they can comfortably handle. They’re performing a vital service and I’m sure many of their employees are working long days.

So here’s my proposal, NOAA: You name the tornadoes whenever you feel it’s warranted, and I’ll do the gruntwork necessary to supply the names. Gratis. In fact, I’ll start out with a few right now. Feel free to use them as you see fit and let me know if you need any more. I found these in the local phone book and there are scads more where these came from.

Tornado Names: Female

Anaverle, Beulah, Cozetta, Dymple, Elva, Flodine, Georgia, Halogene, Iva, Jo Nell, Kitty, Lurleen, Mavis, Nevetta, Otha, Pearlene, Queenie, Rowleena, Sissy, Twanette, Una, Vernice, Wanda, and Zelma.

Tornado names: Male

Ace, Buford, Clyde, Dax, Elmore, Finis, Garrett, Harvenious, Israel, Junior, Kimbro, Lester, Millard, Noble, O’Dell, Percy, Rusty, Skeeter, Twig, Ulis, Vester, Windle, and Zeke.

I left a few letters out, mainly because I’m not partial to names beginning with Q, X or Y. Makes no difference. What’s important is that we give each tornado a distinct identity. Simply calling a twister an “F-2” is hardly personal, and believe me, nothing is more personal than finding your car twisted around the uprights at the local ballfield.

Besides, using local names gives the storm a regional flavor. Retelling the storm would be much easier, and dire warnings more effective.

“Get the kids in the cellar, honey! This’n makes Skeeter look like a soft breeze!”

Exactly.

Snake Charming with a Big Shovel

No Telling

It’s entirely too early on a Sunday morning for this kind of excitement. I’ll need to huddle in my office and shake this off with a few more cups of coffee.

The weenie-dog doesn’t understand Weekend Time. Neither does The Perfect Grandson, but only one of them has to go outside on a leash in public at odd hours. I have a love/hate relationship with Bobo. His real name is Boner, and that explains a lot. Thankfully The Perfect Grandson is still practicing the language and has made hollering at the dog a little more acceptable. He’s Bobo now (pronounced Baaahhh-bow) and thank God for that.

Regardless, Bobo had to go outside before my second cup of Sunday coffee. I wear a lot of hats, but Em wears the one that says, “take the damn dog out.” Not my job. Besides, she looks cute all the time and I need a little spackling before I go out in the street.

I’m a Southern woman of a certain age. That carries a lot of lipstick-baggage.

So out they go and BAM, they’re back inside. Em’s hyperventilating and doing an odd tiptoe dance, Bahbow strains at his leash and throws his little black body repeatedly against the front door. Em finds enough breath to tell me there’s a baby SNAKE by the MAILBOX. She thought it was a big WORM, but then it STUCK it’s SNAKEY tongue OUT.

It was the closest thing to rap music that’s ever happened here at my house, what with the breathless emphasis and the hopping around and the thump, thump, thump of the weenie-dog slinging himself rhythmically at the door.

How silly, I thought, we live in a walled subdivision with an iron-clad set of Homeowner’s Association Rules and Regs. Snakes aren’t in the bylaws.

I snatched up The Perfect Grandson and we – all four of us – went out to the mailbox. Sure enough, there was a little brown snake half in the grass, half on the driveway. Both halves together were probably all of six inches long. It stood it’s ground and we kept our distance.

I know there are some snake-huggers out there who might take offense at what comes next, but babies and weenie-dogs and possibly-poisonous reptiles don’t mix. The snake had to go. Em high-stepped back inside dragging a frothing Bobo on a leash while I held The Perfect Grandson high and eyeballed the snake to make sure it made no fast moves houseward. The worst kind of snake is the one you can’t find. I have experience.

“SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!” said the boy, pointing down.

“You got it, buddy. That,” I said, “is a snake.”

Em came flying out of the front door, having traded Bobo for a really big garden shovel. I won’t give the gory details play-by-play, but you can assume Em’s mama-bear instincts kicked in and settled the standoff. Several times. Don’t worry, I whisked The Perfect Grandson away before he could witness the carnage.

The issue now is snake identification. Since it was a baby, there’s always the possibility of more. We need to know what we’re up against. According to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, it was either a deadly-venomous copperhead, or something harmless like a king snake. This isn’t an easy ID because, 1) the snake was young and those look different from the adults, and 2) it’s not easy to ID a snake that’s in approximately seven pieces.

Em got a little shovel-happy. I don’t blame her. If it’s any consolation, snake-huggers, she shouted something like oh God, I’m killing someone else’s baby just before the shovel hit concrete. On some level, she’s remorseful.

The distinction, though, between poisonous-killer and harmless snail-eater is an important one. We’ve got more research ahead of us. I’ll need another cup of coffee and an hour of sensibility before I can say for sure.

Think I’ll put on a little lipstick and look over those bylaws again.

Clearly, I’m in the Wrong Line of Work

No Telling

For the past week, I’ve heard nothing but horror stories from my students. While these were often about parking tickets – which is their own fault – most of the terror had to do with buying textbooks.

Everyone had a story and the register-tape to prove it.

There’s the one about the poor science major whose Intro to Chemistry book was $270 – used. There’s another involving a Psychology textbook that rung up at just over $110. “I was relieved,” the poor child said, “it was the cheapest book I had to buy.” My own daughter threw down $140 for a used Spanish I book. Thank God she found it, because a new one would have set her back over $200.

Keep in mind that these folks have four, five, sometimes six classes to buy books for, as well as other pesky things like tuition, room and board, and “fees.” They’re all taking out loans.

So I began thinking about my first semester in school. My folks doled out right at $1,000 for the whole Spring 1980 semester. That covered everything, including my books. For two grand a year, you bought a kid’s college education, at least at the state university here in Arkansas. No, I didn’t walk to class in four feet of snow, but I did have a job and a car – one paid for the other. I’m walking around with an $8,000 undergraduate degree right now. For now, let’s forget about grad school.

Students attending school this year at the same university pay approximately $13,000 a year, give or take a science book or two. I realize it’s been a few years, but that’s an astronomical increase. The average four-year jaunt through the ivory towers will cost 52k – not that many of these fine students will have an average jaunt. Many programs now have five-year plans and there’s no getting around it.

Let’s forget about their grad school too, because none of them will be able to afford it.

Here’s where I got tangled up. After class, I pulled out the Granny Calculator with the Big Buttons and started figuring. If the 79’/80′ school year was two grand, and the 09’/10′ school year is thirteen grand, and school costs keep rising exactly as they have thus far…

…the unborn children of my students will pay approximately $78,000 a year to receive a state college education. That will be (clickclickclick) around $312,000 for the whole undergraduate rodeo. Feel free to check my math. I was an English major.

Ladies and gentlemen, I may very well be teaching the last generation to earn a college degree. We like to talk about Generation Y (or Millennials) as the tech generation, but history may prove them to be the Last of the Educated. All these texting, Facebooking masses will be intellectual gods.

Tonight I look at the sleeping Perfect Grandson, and even though several generations of family are socking away money for his college, it may take more than this village to educate the child. Even here in Arkansas where such a thing is relatively cheap.

I predict in the future there will be a rash of bank robberies and petty thieveries committed by women in orthopedic shoes and brandishing canes. Legions of Grammies out there trying to raise a little tuition spare-change for their Perfect Grandkids. There won’t be jails enough to hold us all.

In the meantime, I’m thinking of going into the textbook business.

Achoo, Y’all

No Telling

Well, that didn’t take long. Let’s see…The Perfect Grandson began preschool last Thursday. Here it is the following Tuesday and every last person in this house is sniffling, coughing, sick. I’m not concerned that this is the swine/H1N1 flu business that seems to be everywhere but here, it’s just a cold or a collective allergy or something irritating that has all of us in the No Telling household grabbing tissues and drinking orange juice.

The Perfect Grandson prefers to wipe boogies all over his face in a lightning-fast one-two motion with the back of his little fist. Em says she’ll be glad when he gets older and isn’t so haphazard with his hygiene and learns to use a tissue.

I’m not telling her. You tell her.

The news is fraught with dire predictions about this flu. As someone who works in a sea of devil-may-care college students, this is the kind of train I’d like to see coming down the track before it hits me. College kids stay out too late, eat crappy food, and live too close to each other. Anything that comes on campus sweeps across it like the Black Plague. Just so you know, I’m unapologetic about wearing gloves during Pink-Eye Season and think nothing of running off students before they have a chance to touch a doorknob. Shoo! I say. And take your pink-eye with you to the health center.

My sister is an elementary school teacher in Birmingham, Alabama, and she told me tonight that just about everyone has that H1N1 business right now. She says they’re not closing down the schools because it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. I’ll bet they change their minds when they try finding substitute teachers in another week or so. Good luck with that, Birmingham.

As I am a Woman of a Certain Age it’s likely I was exposed to that last bout back in the 70s, which may very well provide some bullet-proofing. We’ll see. In the meantime I’m headed to Walgreens for a gallon jug of hand sanitizer and some Lysol spray, because these college kids love to kick you when you’re down.

I can’t do much about The Perfect Grandson’s germs, though. Especially since he wears them everywhere and all over. When the little guy feels poorly he wants extra hugs and kisses – and he’ll get them, too. He already has, that’s why we’re in this condition.

No kissing on the face, though. At least not until he’s old enough to use his shirttail instead.