DANA AND PAULIE WERE LOVERS

I find very little on the web.  There are some yellowed newspaper clippings in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet and that is about all to mark a tragedy that took two lives and never needed to happen.

In the mid ‘80’s I was living on Capitol Hill in Denver, engaged in the long process of trying to repair my life after a hard and bitter fall from grace.  I was attending AA meetings and tenaciously supporting myself by driving a hack.  I knew Dana Sue.  Not well.  I had sat in the rooms with her and her lover, Paulie.   I saw her on the street one day and gave her a ride to a meeting in my cab.  I found her to be a pretty, affable girl, big boned and muscular.  Hardly the brooding hulk described in the newspaper.  She was a bewildered little girl in a woman’s body.  That she had problems was evident but who in AA didn’t?  Or on East Colfax or on Denver’s Capitol Hill or in America?  She appeared to be heavily medicated.

I hadn’t seen her for a while.  I had moved to the Barrio and was attending a different meeting.  As I have the story, second hand, (it’s in the newspapers of he time but I am unable to provide a link) someone talked Dana Sue out of taking her psychotropics. She was desperately trying to control her illness that was caveing in on her.  Ultimately it didn’t work.

Paulie came home one evening to find Dana Sue, naked, covered with blood and holding a bloody knife.  She had picked up a man.  A one legged man at that and she had taken him home with her.  His body was tied to her bed.  He had been stabbed 117 times and her initials were carved into his chest.  Dana’s absolute rage had taken over.  I do not know what went into the inception of that fury but I think I have a better idea than most.

It could have been prevented.  The woman was obviously insane.  Anyone would know that.  Except the people who might have done something.  The mental health system and the Denver police dropped the ball.  Mental health lawyered up and the police actually admitted it, after throwing the lowest man on the totem pole under the bus.

Except for a sensible judge who ruled that Dana Sue was legally insane and committed her to the Colorado State Hospital in Pueblo.

The last time I saw Paulie she was walking alone toward the rougher edge of Larimer Street in Denver.

End of story.  Not by a long shot.  Dana Sue got off the leash.  After a couple of years in Pueblo she got out with the help of a female employee of the hospital either willingly or under duress.  After a couple of weeks and a drama filled Thelma and Louise chase throughout the Southwestern United States, Dana Sue was found in a motel room in Albuquerque with a bullet through the roof of her mouth. 

That kid got a raw deal her entire life.

The people we send to Washington to represent us are not doing their job.  They succumb to greed and worse they sell us out to special interests.  Our government is not proactive, they are reactive.  Dear God, the answer is right there, so plain, and yet our president and our congress refuse to act.  They play partisan politics instead.  Tell me why I should have any respect at all for those we send to govern us.  What is happening today is only an escalation of what happenened to Dana Sue Jones.  Dana Sue Jones went down only a few years after the mental health budget was drastically cut under Ronald Reagan, who is not my favorite president for reasons already stated.  See my post:  The Lifeblood of a generation.  Dec. 8^th.

WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEARTS OF MEN?

THE SHADOW KNOWS

MUSICA

When I came up on the farm I can remember milking cows by hand with the light of a kerosene lantern.  In 1948 my father broke down and ran electricity to the farm.  Bindweed County had run the wires out to Sowthistle Township in 1935.  Apparently my father, a true Nineteenth Century man, wanted to wait and see if it worked and was not a passing fad before undergoing the investment. 

Ironically the house caught fire the following February.  The fire was caused by a faulty brick chimney, the bane of very old rural homes.  The house was saved, one of few which took fire at that time.  Soythistle Township did not have their own fire department and they had to contract to Jimson City for fire protection.  By the time it took to get a pumper out into the rural areas it was usually a lost cause.  The common humor ran that they had never lost a cellar.

What did this have to do with music, you ask?  Some time after installing electric lights, we came up with a small table radio with a brown bakelite case.  It didn’t have much power nor did it have an antenna.  The case had acquired a crack and it had a loose wire.  Every so often the signal would wander off into the ozone and one had to bitch-slap it back into consciousness.

We could only pull in two stations.  A 600 watt Polish station out of South Bend which played a constant stream of Polka music and WLS out of Chicago.  WLS beamed out 50,000 watts of country music.  Country music at that time, around 1950, was just pulling away from the hillbilly music image and morphing into classic country.  So I came up exposed only to Eddie Arnold, Hank Snow, Ernest Tubbs, Kitty Wells and, of course, the tortured genius of Hank Williams.

I still listen to Hank on nights that are so godawful lonely that I want to ratchet right into self pity.  This is as close as I come to drinking.  And I submit to you that nothing of any worth has taken place in country music since Patsy Cline flew into the side of a mountain in 1963.         

                                      THE SHADOW

THE LIFEBLOOD OF A GENERATION

20 The  harvest  is  past,  the

summer is ended, and we are

not saved.

 21 For the hurt of the daughter

of my people am I hurt; I am

black; astonishment hath taken

hold on me.

 22 Is there no balm in Gilead;

Is there no physician there? Why

then is not the health of the

daughter of my people recov-

ered?

<< Jeremiah 8:20, 21, 22 >>

These are the names of men I have known.  They were my friends.  They lived and worked and laughed and loved.  They are dead now, the victims of a strange new plague and an unresponsive government.  Some of them were gone before I knew their last names and some of their names, time and memory have erased or distorted.  But I will never forget them.  I have done the best I could.

George Banchero   Charles Ned Holland   Jim

Larry Glass   David Dobrovolny   Scott Kaiser

Jack   Eddie Nunez   Rex Sumner   Cordell Nelson 

Kenneth Waters  Joseph Bankston

I had planned to post this on December 1, World Aids Day.  

That didn't happen.  I'm sorry.    

WHAT IN THE NAME OF GOD HAVE WE DONE IN THE NAME OF GOD

 

Shortly before my 19^th birthday in the autumn of 1959 I was working and living on North Delaware Street in Indianapolis, an area of stately old mansions which had seen slightly better days.  This was a short sojourn of about six weeks before I went into the Army.  The weather was a beautiful warm pre Indian summer that September.  Across the alley to the North, stood the old Jewish Temple which had been converted into a thriving Fundamentalist Church.  The building was classically beautiful, constructed of pure white Indiana limestone with an abundance of colored art glass.  The place was very active with many programs and always seemed to have a full house for every sermon.  There was an air of success permeating the entire operation when you could hear the preacher coming loud through the open windows.  It was almost enough to make me curious enough to enter and sit down.  But having an inherent suspicion of churches and clergymen in general, stemming partially from my contact with them already while working in a Funeral Home, I stayed on my side of the alley.  There was a red flag which I didn’t connect until years later, but both he and his wife drove brand new black Cadillac sedans.  That was the day when a Cadillac still meant something, and yes, I had mine in another decade.

I saw her, his wife, one day walking----waddling--- really down the alley.  She did not look like she did when she was portrayed in the documentaries made years later.  She was short and stout bordering on fat.  She had a beehive hairdo which every woman under 87 had that year.  Even with my inexperience with woman’s hair and the distance from her I knew it was dyed black.  I had never seen a preacher’s wife who dyed her hair but way beyond that there was an air of absolute evil over and around her.  That is the only way I can describe it.

I went into the army and took my basic training.  I returned in the spring of

1960.  I drove up Delaware Street and the whole place was gone!!  It was like empty.  I don’t remember if the sign was still there or not but otherwise the whole place looked as if it had been raptured.  No explanation.

It was not until, November 18 1978, 34 years ago, when I had occasion to thank God for keeping me out of his church.  When it hit the headlines and the National news big time; stories of a murdered congressman and 918 people dead after drinking Kool Aid laced with cyanide that the name Peoples Temple and Jim Jones clicked into place for me.

THE SHADOW SAYS; THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER HISTORY ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT!

WEED

Fortunately for a lot of people the High Sheriff was born before his time.  A few years after he was term limited out, vans painted psychedelic colors were spotted parked along rural roads in Bindweed County.  They were sporting Illinois plates and Chicago bumper stickers.  Long haired young people in tie died shirts and headbands sporting peace signs were seen picking weeds from roadside ditches and loading them into the back of the van.  The times, they were a changin’.

Early in World War II the Japanese captured the Philippine islands cutting off the major supply of Manila rope to the United States.  Rope, made from hemp, was needed for almost everything used to fight a war.  So, for the war effort, the government ironically urged farmers to grow hemp -- marijuana which had been made illegal only four years before.  In part due to a ridiculous propaganda movie Reefer Madness which later became a cult classic.

Well, we won the war, as much as you can win any war, and the patriotic farmers of Indiana went back to growing corn and soybeans, plowing under

their forgotten fields of marijuana.  Some of it remained along fence rows and in forgotten corners where it multiplied and thrived regarded as ditchweed and not as a cash crop.

It was not until many years later when I became more conversant with different forms of weed and the effects of smoke that I remembered and recognized the pungent unmistakable odor of our haymow in the barn on our farm in Soythistle Township in Bindweed County Indiana.

 THE SHADOW SAYS: BORDEN WASN’T THE ONLY ONE WHO HAD CONTENTED COWS.

A CRIME AGAINST NATURE

 I must have been on school the day the High Sheriff of Bindweed County   visited my mother but my little sister remembers vividly clinging to her skirts in fear as he harangued my mother over…..what?

Over the heinous crime of polluting the river?  Of what great import was it to the law and order of Bindweed County that we dumped the hot ashes from our wood stove into the Tippecanoe River?  Hot ashes were not a thing you wanted to have close to buildings especially on a windy day.  Beside that, everyone had been dumping everything into the Tippecanoe since the first white man sank up to his knees in its muddy banks.  And of all the people to accuse; MY MOTHER who wouldn’t even remove the tag that said: “DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW”.

It is well my father was gone that afternoon.  He would have stood up to the man, Sheriff or not.  As it was he just told my mother to wait a week or two and then resume business as usual.  The old man was pretty low key and I can’t remember him ever getting into a rage.

Sheriff Morris Morris, “Mo” to everyone in the county except for the increasing number who had had a run in with him, was on his third term as Sheriff of Bindweed County.  A local boy, he had returned from World War II a much decorated war hero where he had reputedly strangled a Japanese officer with his bare hands during the vicious island fighting in the effort to invade Japan.  The local citizens thought ‘What better man to enforce law and order in Bindweed and environs.  Mo had his own idea of “law and order according to Mo”.   A deeply religious man, he was a lay preacher in

‘The Church of the Revelation of the Risen Spirit’ where he had attended since his youth.  What fostered his absolute hatred of alcohol and those who drank it or were even suspect of drinking it, nobody knows.  As the Sheriff advanced toward middle age his temper grew more and more ungoverned.  He was known to simply go off on people and launch a tirade of verbal abuse.  On more than one occasion he roughed up men for little reason.

I suppose any man who, given a gun and almost absolute power over almost 400 square miles and the residents thereof along with the enthusiastic backing of the local newspaper, could confuse himself with the Deity.

And then there are some who think that to hassle a defenseless housewife with a small child is tantamount to being a bully.

THE SHADOW SAYS:  WHY DO YOU SAY WHITE MAN WHEN IT IS NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT TO SAY BLACK MAN OR RED MAN?

 Listen here, Shadow.  You are not indispensable to this blog!

I CAME UP ON A SMALL SUSTANANCE FARM ON THE SOUTH BANK OF THE TIPPECANOE RIVER---

---in Bindweed County, Indiana.  My parents worked hard, obeyed the law, paid their taxes, did without before they would buy on the black market, refused to join the Klan, stayed the Hell out of the way and got worked over by the system every time they turned around.  I came from a family who did not place a long distance telephone call unless it was to call the veterinarian or if someone had died.  They were a little bit behind in their payments and a little bit ahead of their times.  And when they died their names were misspelled in each of their obituaries.

 The farm I lived on as a child was little changed from the Civil War.  In my lifetime I

have bridged a gap from living almost in the 19^th Century to Outer Space.  The house was heated with wood stoves and was illuminated by the yellow glow of a kerosene lamp.  I did my farm chores by the light of a kerosene lantern.  My father, a cautious man, wanted to make sure electricity wasn’t a passing fad before wiring up the farm in 1948.  He farmed with horses until sickness forced him to sell them to an Amish farmer in 1944; the year of the fear.

But—I did not walk seven miles through the snow to school.  I was insured of attendance by the ever faithful school hack.  My parents knew if I walked to school I would never show up.

This was the times and place where I came up:

Before dawn on a late October morning a few years before I was born someone drove a 1933 Ford V8 through a T intersection and crossed the state road into a field just east of our house leaving muddy tire tracks.  It was Dillinger, it was rumored, on his way north to Chicago after relieving the Peru, Indiana police department of their arsenal.

   I attended Soythistle Township School and graduated after enduring twelve years of sanctioned bullying by both the older students and some of the teachers with only my mother keeping me there. Beyond that, I am self educated.  Three days after graduation I was on a bus out of there on my way to start my career as an Undertaker and to fall very much in love.  I was 17 and she was 22 and I had a deeply held dark secret.

But I digress.  That I will write about another time.  Maybe.

Why an Undertaker?  Because the Undertaker in Jimson City knew how to dress.  I mean, my old man was a pretty snappy dresser himself but this guy used to come out to social functions in Bloomingsburg and he had this Camel’s hair topcoat to die for.  Damn!  It was a pretty thing and I wanted one, so what better way…..  More importantly, the Undertaker from Jimson City didn’t have cowshit on his shoes. What was actually on the soles of his shoes, I didn’t find out until later.

THE SHADOW SAYS: MARLENE DIETRICH MY Kind of WOMEN-----Bear with me here, this is a bit of a leap. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=1d-qiTI1NYA

  
In Europe it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman - we make love with anyone we find attractive. / Marlene Dietrich

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=1d-qiTI1NYAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=1d-qiTI1NYA

JOE COORS REPUBLICAN FOR CONGRESS

                                                                                                                                                                   

Well, now----I have had this old beer ad for a long time.  It pretty well speaks for itself.  I have been saving it for the right occasion.

 votesmart.org/candidate/135695/joe-coors-jr

 Can a leopard change its spots?

www.corporations.org/coors/

THE SHADOW SAYS: VOTE YOUR CONSCIENCE NOV. 6

THE WATERMELON MAN

when I was a lad in the ‘50’s living on a farm in

Bindweed County, Indiana we would grow melons, both watermelons and muskmelons.   

(I have been informed that no one calls them muskmelons anymore, but that they are referred to as cantaloupe.)  No matter.

In the summer when they were ripe we would stack them along an embankment beside the state highway which made a natural display area.  People from Jimson City would drive out on a Sunday excursion to buy our melons.

This usually coincided with a visit from my Aunt Vida and Uncle Esthel.  Aunt Vida was my mother’s older sister who had had the good sense to marry Esthel Fish.  My father and Uncle Esthel would sit outside on a bench all day and talk until someone drove up.

At this point Uncle Esthel would go into action.  When he got up to walk over to their car he would be sizing them up as they parked.  This guy was half merchandiser, half manipulator, half Jew, half con man and all salesman!  He would pick up a melon and totally deadpan say “Now this one here is a Dixie Sweet.  It is a deep yellow with a firm flesh and a sweeter than normal taste.  And that is a Mississippi Mellow.  The flesh is a little greener but the taste is indescribable, kind of a sweet, buttery........” and so on until you could smell the magnolias. They thought they were buying a fine wine.  Of course he was making up the names as he went along and improvising the whole thing with what he thought he could get away with.  He would do twofer’s and threefers.  He would offer to, and indeed would, plug a watermelon if he thought it would make a sale.  Then he would throw in a freebie to an already inflated price and everyone was happy.

It has been said that the measure of a great speech is to make them laugh and to make them cry and to thank them for it.  I learned a lot from him.  He was great!

TO SERVE AND PROTECT

 

A few years ago……five, six, It’s hard to tell.  Time blurs after a while.  But it’s a fine, fair Saturday morning and I am standing on the 16^th Street Mall, the pride of Denver.  A ‘Great City’ by all accounts.  World class.

A well dressed matron approaches me and asks directions to a nearby hotel.  Old money, I take her to be.  Very refined and indeed a pleasure to be of service to.  I give her directions, she thanks me and goes on her way.

As I turn to leave another woman stops me.  This one is about 35, blonde and wearing a powder blue plaid wool skirt.  She looks like she should be teaching Freshman English in a high school.  Then it gets a little strange.  She propositions me.  Me!  Jesus, I’m an old man.  (Well, not that old.)  I am standing there thinking, “Look whores do NOT work the 16^th St. Mall.  Ever! And particularly not at Ten o’clock on a Saturday morning”  I ask her why she picked me and she says because she had seen me talking to that lady.  I am starting to think I have been catapulted into the Twilight Zone.  Anyone with any sense would have fled for their life at this point but nobody ever gave me credit for having much sense.  So I think I would like to run with this.  I invite her into a nearby McDonalds.  (What McDonalds isn’t nearby?)

   I buy the coffee and we take a booth.  I ask her why she is hooking.  She says she is doing it to make the rent.  This is at least plausible.  All of this without agreeing to her proposal.  So I ask her how much she wanted.  She says $150.

Now, unless you are into schoolteachers, there is no way that this broad is worth 150 bucks.  No!  Nyet! Nada! Never!

   This is going nowhere.  I am looking at her purse which she had placed on the table.  The fashion police comes out in me.  It does not match her outfit at all.  It is a cheap little square box with a hinged lid and a handle, like a school girl’s lunch pail.  It is just big enough to hold a snub nose .32 and a badge.  I made her for a cop about a minute after she stopped me but I like to play with fire.  I can usually spot a cop or a whore.  Little difference, really, at times.

  I am about to ask her to open the purse when she bolts.  I think she knows she had been made.  She went out the door.  A few minutes later I follow her.  I spot her a half a block away with her head stuck in the drivers’ window of a patrol car of the Denver Police Dept.  It is time to go.

About six months later I am again walking on the mall.  I walk past the horsie patrol.  This is something the city does to promote good will and photo ops for tourists and conventioneers.  And there, in a blue uniform and a cowboy hat and holding the reins of a horse, stands my whore.  There were many things I thought of to say to her but for once prudence dictated that I keep my mouth shut.

True Story.

Citizens, do you wonder where your tax money goes?

THE SHADOW KNOWS

I'D GIVE FOUR MILLION JUST TO BE ABLE TO TAKE A PISS WITHOUT IT HURTING. / HYMAN ROTH / THE GODFATHER

          A continuum of the previous post.

From the recovery room there was a seemingly long and painful trip up to my room where I was to stay overnight before I was sent home.

   The entire stay became increasingly surreal to the point of being bizarre.  I met my nurse, Mike, to be followed by Travis and Brad.    Male nurses who defied all stereotypical concepts of a nurse, male or female.                      

I am old school when it comes to gender separation by profession, Rosie the Riveter aside.  My sister is a nurse, now retired after a long and successful career.  Nurses in my mind are still pert young things who wear pinstripe uniforms with starched aprons and cute little caps.  Another stereotype.  I had my male nurse and a gorgeous unnamed female nurse working side by side to ease my pain.  When you are in a world of hurt, it doesn’t matter.  I could fall in love with every female nurse I ever had and a couple of the
other as well.

In the time I spent there I experienced an epiphany of sorts.  Illness has apparently mellowed my spirit.  I realize that Denver Health is part of the American Health Care System, good or bad.  They make their mistakes and perform miracles.  They are what they are.  But I have always walked out of the hospital and not been carried out feet first.  That is saying something.  Medicine and surgery are not finite sciences and I needed to realize that.

In the American Civil War the first advice from the veteran soldiers to the new recruits was---- “Stay away from the surgeons.”  Surgeons are skilled mechanics.  They work with scalpel and needles and thread to reshape mangled tissue and bone and excise diseased organs and yes, fix it so I can pass water again.  For this I will be eternally grateful.

   When they visit your room the surgeons stand in a line far from your bed and near the door as if ready to make a break for it, should it be necessary.  I do not think they can deal with physical suffering.  Their work is abstract.

The staff of Denver Health, particularly the nursing staff, carries the load.  These are the people I came in contact with on a “hands on” basis.  They are patient, dedicated, professional and sainted.  I have never seen anyone like them.  I heard one of my nurses, Brad, a huge ex-bullrider coming down the hall singing “Mack the Knife” – in German.  I swear—I don’t make this shit up.

I have, and I suspect most men have, a castration complex.  Mine stems from when I was 15 on my father’s farm.  We raised hogs and when it came time for them to be castrated, my job was to wrestle them down and hold them while my father wielded the knife and a rag soaked in Lysol.  I cannot say if it was more traumatic for the pig or for me.

Finally alone in my room I stealthily reached my hand under the sheets and groped to where they had repaired the cursed Hydrocele.  I quickly counted.  One!  Two!  Thank God!  The only things I have left in this world are my dignity and my balls.  The hospital stripped me of my dignity but at least I still have my balls.

   At last when I was discharged and home, to care for myself, it was with some degree of irony that this old farm boy reached for the square green tin of Bag Balm.

THE SHADOW IS SPEECHLESS FOR ONCE.

IN SPITE OF THE BEST EFFORTS OF THE AMERICAN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM, I STILL LIVE

I was referred to the Urology Clinic.  I knew what that was.  Kinda.  I mean, they handle plumbing problems.  It turns out my prostate was prostrate.  Now all men have a prostate.  I was never sure why.  It seems to be an annoyance more than anything.  Like male pattern baldness.  It enlarges over time, slowly, insidiously, until you can no longer empty your bladder.  The best answer was surgery.  And quickly.  Ah man, not again! I mean, the scars aren't even healed from the last time.  But it is better than drowning in my own piss.  They want to do a TURP and while they are at it they will repair my Hydrocele. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocele_testis  If you really want to know, check the link.  I can no longer bear to look.  The Hydrocele was a gift from the surgeon who did a hernia repair on me 7 years ago.

Was I scared?  Nah.  More like terrified.    

You see, when I hear the word surgery I immediately conjure up this vision of a well, next to a large shade tree.  Under which there is a kitchen door resting on two sawhorses.  There is a bearded man, shirtsleeves rolled up, wiping a bloody knife on his leather apron.  Beyond that there are blowflies swarming on a large pile of putrefying arms and legs.  In the distance one can hear the dull WHUMP of field mortars and the ripping canvas sound of volleys of musket fire.  You get the picture.  This is where my mind can go.  Back to that place where I have been before.

This is not heart surgery and there is little drama.  They begin by suckering you in.  There is always the ubiquitous needle stuck in my arm.  The nice lady slips a vial onto it and announces that she just wants to give me a little something to calm me.  Something to take the edge off while they get ready.  OK.  I’m all for tha………………….

…………..Out of the blackness into a dim surreal half light.  PAIN!  Muscle Spasms!  I have been raped by a Chinese section gang.  They transfer me from the anesthetic to morphine.  I asked for a lighter dose because I don’t do well on morphine.  Actually I adore morphine but I am a recovering alcoholic and to give me morphine sets loose long dormant urges buried in my brain and I go absolutely Batshit for days.  I did things and said things that I mercifully, only vaguely remember.

THE SHADOW SAYS: WE WILL CONTINUE THIS ON THE NEXT POST.

FOR I HAVE SEEN THE ETERNAL FOOTMAN HOLD MY COAT AND SNICKER / PRUFROCK / t s eliot

  I have had a hard year, physically,

and emotionally. It has been marked by loss, illness, betrayal and self doubt.  I am slowly pulling out of it. I have a strong constitution and do plan to be around for some time. 

I am writing this post and will probably publish it tomorrow, the day before I report for yet more surgery on Monday, July 23, 2012.  It is nothing as dramatic as brain surgery or open heart surgery.  It is only that my much battered and overused plumbing is shot and badly in need of repair.  There are risks, as there are risks in crossing the street.  When your time is up, your time is up.  It is, of course, possible that this will be my last post.  I hope not and do not plan for it to be.  I’ve got some zingers waiting in the wings but I don’t want to drop the whole load at once.  But for sure, as it says in my profile, “There are many songs that will not be sung.”

Fear, yes.  I have had enough pain and do not want any more.  Not to mention the indignity of it all.  I am thankful that I do not plan to go into this hungover and dehydrated.  One of the many benefits of my sobriety.   I have had an appointment with each of my therapists this week.  I am engaging in prayer and meditation and rest so as to be as physically, spiritually and emotionally fit as possible.  When I go in I will have done as much as I can do.  It will no longer be in my hands.

I know I have not been totally forthcoming in my writings.  My writing has been pretty well controlled.  It is just my style.  I have written some thinly veiled stories but have, in the most part, not used real names out of respect for both the living and the dead and in some cases, my own mortal ass.

There are things I am not, at this point, able to talk about because they are too horrible to comprehend or just too embarrassing.  I believe we all take secrets to the grave. 

I have had fun using the nom de plume of The Shadow.  It was just something I pulled out of my ear and thought “why not”.  I will probably use my own name someday.  I have no problem with that. I am certainly not ashamed of it.

I have always thought that the two worse things that could happen would be to lose a child or to lose my eyesight.  I have buried a child and now I am going blind.  Glaucoma that was not attended to until it was almost too late because I thought only black people got glaucoma.  So much for thinking.  It is a slow process and the Doctor says I will probably die before I am completely blind. Always something to look forward to.  My left eye is almost gone and I am having a difficult time using the computer.  Just so you know.

This sounds to me like the final episode of OLD YELLER.

THE SHADOW

SPITALNY, A CLASS ACT!

In the summer of 1958, after graduating from High School at 17 and before turning 18 that fall, I was working as an apprentice at the Aaron-Ruben Funeral Home in Indianapolis.  The job was that of a glorified gofer that got to wear a suit at least part of the time.  Aaron-Ruben was the only Jewish funeral home in the state of Indiana.  Irv Ruben also ran Hoosier Monument up Meridian Street and ran a livery service to some of the smaller neighborhood funeral homes in the city who found it more economical to rent a hearse or limousine than to stable their own.  I was also sent out to drive on these funerals representing almost every ethnic minority in the city primarily Eastern European.  At that time Indianapolis was unofficially a segregated city and the Black population took care of themselves.

   For my labors I received $15.00 a week and room but as a result I was exposed to far more varied customs and cultures infinitely more interesting than anything I had ever seen in Bindweed county.

   Many of these funerals stand out in my mind for different reasons.  One of them was a family member of Phil Spitalny, whom I had never heard of at the time.  It turned out that Phil Spitalny was a band leader who was billed as Phil Spitalny and his all girl orchestra.  During World War II when all the men were drafted into the armed services, Phil formed an orchestra made up of young women.  I am not sure it quite lived up to its potential.

   I was sent to work this funeral.  I believe I drove a limousine to take the family from either the synagogue, or more likely, the cemetery to their home.  The lawn was covered with tents with a large catered buffet to feed their many friends.  Then I saw something I have never seen before or since that afternoon.  On one side of the lawn there was a separate spread for the people who were working the funeral.  We were actually being fed and cared for when at any other funeral we just went hungry.  I remember thinking at the time that this was an example of the way people should act.  When I think of that day on that tree shaded lawn when we were treated well because that was the thing to do.  Every time I hear or think the name Spitalny I remember this and still think of the definition of class.

THE SHADOW SAYS – ENJOY!  http://youtu.be/2K6CuKdaMQQ