It’s summer in Oklahoma, the weather hot and humidity out of sight.  As I drink a beer and dink on my laptop, I’m reminded of the many similar summers I experienced while growing up in northwest Louisiana.

We had no air conditioning then, only a ceiling fan and a lot of open windows.  As I pay attention to my new Eagle’s CD I’m also reminded that the music we listened to back then was either on scratchy LP’s or radios with tinny speakers.

I like the new Eagle’s album.  It has some good songs on the two CD’s, although most a little too country for my tastes.  My personal favorite is Last Good Time in Town sung, and I guess written, by Joe Walsh.

Age-wise I’m contemporaries with the Eagles and I’m happy to hear that in their sixties the boys haven’t lost their creative spark.  I grew up about thirty miles from the equally tiny town where Don Henley lived but hey, thirty miles across the Texas border may as well have been a thousand miles away.

Walsh’s song features one of his patented guitar riffs, his style as catchy as any musician that ever played the instrument.  The lyrics are meaningful but don’t weigh your soul down with some maudlin message.  The beat and back-up instrumentation keep enticing you to get out of your seat and start dancing.  Yes I did!

A new steamy summer and a fresh Eagles album make me happy and I’m glad the boys, in their sixties, haven’t lost their creative spark.  Maybe there’s hope for me yet!

http://www.EricWilder.com

My Brother Jack was born on July the Third and he and I loved fireworks.  We both wanted to be soldiers and we practiced war our entire childhood.  Because of our obsession my favorite holiday, and my Brother Jack’s, was and is the Fourth of July and the one I remember best is the first one that I can remember.

While growing up in small town Vivian, there were no City ordinances barring the use of fireworks.  Every manner of explosives was sold including M-80s and Two-Inchers.  Jack and I are both lucky to have all our digits as we later experimented with everything we could strike a match too.

My buddy Timmy Jon and I even mixed our own batch of gunpowder and almost burned up the house with it.  The first Fourth that I can remember, however, we made do with firecrackers, bottle rockets, sparklers and Roman candles.

On the Fourth of July my Mom and Dad would buy us about ten dollars worth of fireworks.  Ten bucks doesn’t sound like much but you could pop lots of firecrackers for that amount in the sixties.  We always began the fireworks as soon as it was dark enough.

I don’t remember my age but I was old enough to feel the excitement of impending danger.  With our Dad’s help we began lighting sparklers, popping firecrackers and launching one bottle rocket after another.  We soon got down to the good stuff.

‘Hold it in the air and shake it,” My Dad directed as he lit my first-ever Roman candle.

I can still remember the percussion and slight recoil as incandescent flame burst from the coiled-paper barrel of the explosive device.  I couldn’t count at the time but I had a seat-of-the-pants feel for how many fiery rounds the candle contained.  When it was over I held the warm rod in my hand, inhaling acrid smoke and burned powder.  It was an odor I will never forget.

My red-headed Brother Jack was next at bat and he had mischief in mind before my Dad ever lit the candle’s fuse.  My Mother was standing behind us in the open door of our house.  Soon as the candle started spitting fire, Jack began pointing it at anything that caught his fancy - a tree, the family car, me, and finally toward the open door of the house.

Dodging the oncoming fireball, my Mom screamed and jumped off the porch.  Jack put at least three fireballs through the house, luckily catching nothing on fire.  When he finally threw down the spent Roman candle my Dad just shook his head, grabbed the remaining fireworks and walked into the house.  Mom followed him, but not before unloading verbally on Jack.

Nothing much else was ever said about the incident, Mom and Dad giving Brother Jack the benefit of the doubt that what he did was caused by inexperience and lack of good sense.  After living in close proximity to him until I was fifteen, I know better.  He went to sleep that night giggling about scaring my Mom and Dad and getting away with it.

The Fourth of July means a lot more to me than just fireworks and hot dogs and we should all reflect on the sacrifices this wonderful holiday immortalizes.  Still, my favorite holiday remains the Fourth of July and the one I remember best is the first one that I can remember.

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The last time I visited my parents in the house where I grew up, before my Mother died, I sat on a stool with my laptop on the bed. This is the room where I lived for seventeen years of my life, the first fifteen along with my older brother Jack. The room is small, sixteen by fifteen, or 240 square feet. These days my brother and I get along very well. Now I know why! If we didn’t, we would have killed each other long before either of us ever graduated from high school. And the room seemed much larger than it does now.

I don’t remember getting along with my brother. Just the opposite. Memories of torment filling every waking moment abound in my mind, torment that usually lasted every single day until one or both of us fell asleep at night. If that’s true, then how did we keep from killing each other?

As I sat there, staring at the walls now decorated with pink print wallpaper, I wonder – did my Mother secretly want girls instead of boys? Even the sheets and comforter on the bed are pink. Yeech!

Now there was a queen-sized bed in the room. Jack and I each had our own beds, small beds. I remember moving them around like forts, taking the plungers out of our BB guns and having cork wars, shooting at each other until my Mother would hear us and race into the room screaming, "Your Daddy’s going to whip your butts when he comes home. Now stop it right now and straighten up this room."

My Father worked in construction and was away from home a lot. When he returned on weekends my Mother would meet him at the door with a belt. We almost always got a whipping before we got a hug. He never hurt us; the whippings were always more bluster than substance.

After pondering this great mystery of life, I’ve decided three things – the way we remember people we once knew is probably totally wrong, our memories of how things used to be are likely completely false and, last but not least, size only matters to adults.

One more thing bothers me, though. Am I wrong about the pink wallpaper?

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Yes, even in Edmond America there are pagans.  Check this article out!

The Edmond Sun, Edmond, OK - Local Pagans celebrate summer.

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 I realized there was something exciting and quite different about New Orleans the first time that I visited the city. Today, if you go south on Canal Street you will eventually end up at the Mississippi River. The City is in the process of rebuilding, but if you had followed Canal to the River before Hurricane Katrina you would have encountered many tourist attractions such as the Aquarium of the Americas, the World Trade Center and the Canal Street Wharf. Unlike today’s tourist-driven atmosphere you would have found something quite different had you taken the same journey in the 1950's.

I first visited New Orleans during the Eisenhower Era and remember standing on south Canal Street and staring down the hill toward the Mississippi River. New Orleans is a major international seaport and what I saw was a bunch of seedy bars that sailors from many countries frequented when they were in port. The bars were off-limits to American military personnel, and for good reason. They were dangerous, the women you met there "loose," and venereal diseases rampant.

"Those bars are a good place to get killed," my Aunt Carmol, an ex-marine during World War II and no shrinking violet herself, had told my brother and me. "Don’t ever go there."

The Canal Street bars were long gone before I ever had the opportunity to defy Aunt Carmol’s advice. Still, even as a youngster I felt the potential danger and lingering intrigue present around nearly every corner of New Orleans. One less dangerous but very intriguing place that was eventually cleaned up by the U.S. Navy was Storyville, the Big Easy’s early-day fantasy land that did as much to establish the City’s reputation as a latter-day Gomorrah as anything else in its history.

During the early days of New Orleans there was a shortage of females. To alleviate this situation, street prostitutes were released from French prisons on the condition that they migrate to the new colony. In 1744, the number of bordellos and houses of prostitution prompted a French army officer to comment that there were not ten women of blameless character in New Orleans. City-wide prostitution continued until 1897 when a puritanical city official devised a plan to control the problem. The plan resulted in the formation of Storyville.

Locals called Storyville "The District." It existed from 1897 until 1917, the concept of New Orleans’ alderman Sidney Story. Story’s plan wasn’t to legalize prostitution, but to control it by defining the boundaries within which it would not be prosecuted as a crime. The concept worked for nearly two decades and ironically the District became one of the City’s leading tourist attractions.

Despite the belief of many - likely propagated by fictional accounts in literature - Storyville wasn’t located in the French Quarter. It encompassed an area north of the Quarter, just east of Canal Street between N. Rampart and N. Claiborne. Elaborate bordellos, fancy restaurants and dance halls quickly appeared and flourished, along Basin, the street that became a legend because of its association with early jazz.

Jazz flourished in Storyville, although it didn’t originate there. Each bordello was a place for music as well as prostitution and each establishment generally had a piano player to entertain its guests. The bordellos often hired bands to perform, as did the restaurants and clubs that sprang up in the District. Jazz superstars such as Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong often performed there. Storyville was near a train station and many visitors to the City also frequented the bordellos and the clubs to listen to jazz. These visitors, as well as sailors of all nationalities, took this new sound back with them to their cities and countries of origin.

In 1917 the Secretary of the Navy was Josephus Daniels and his nickname "Tea Totaling" perfectly described his tolerance for sin. Daniels insisted that New Orleans either shut down Storyville, or else he would close the naval base across the river in Algiers. The base provided too much income to New Orleans for the City fathers to see it close so they shut down Storyville instead.

A wave of Puritanism swept across the United States during the era of World War I and the residents of New Orleans weren’t exempt from this phenomena. Embarrassed by Storyville, city fathers began systematically dismantling the District. In the years following 1917, all the elaborate bordellos were demolished leaving only a metaphorical scar in place of nearly two decades of irreplaceable history. Even the street names were changed, world famous Basin Street becoming North Saratoga.

Toward the end of World War II, city fathers made yet another planning blunder. Soldiers were returning home from war and needed a place to live, so the Iberville Housing Project was built on the site of Storyville. Never spoken about in travel brochures or in tourist information, the low-cost Iberville Housing Project quickly became dangerous and crime-ridden. Close to the French Quarter, the Project was a place to avoid at all costs instead of the tourist attraction that the District had once been.

Even with the dismantling of Storyville, prostitution never left New Orleans. It simply spread out across the city to places like the seedy bars frequented by sailors on south Canal. Unlike south Canal, transformed now into a tourist attraction rather than a city blight, the area around Storyville remains largely unknown and off limits to tourists.

New Orleans’ city fathers made a colossal blunder when they demolished the historical District. They compounded their error when they covered up their mistake by building the infamous Iberville Project. Finally realizing their horrible error in judgment, they did return the name Basin to the famous street that was home of legendary jazz and fabulous bordellos. 

New Orleans still exudes a well deserved aura of danger and intrigue and there are still more than enough historical sights to see, even though one of the most famous is forever gone. Few vestiges of Storyville remain, yet like the tang of Tabasco Sauce on the palette, its memory remains long after the last spicy bite of Etouffee has been consumed.

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It’s almost impossible to grow up in northwest Louisiana without learning how to swim.  My Mother never did and remained afraid of drowning until the day she died.  Because of her inordinate fear of water, she made sure my Brother Jack and I had lessons when we were very young.  From that point on, we were rarely far from the water’s edge.

Jack and I quickly became excellent swimmers.  My favorite TV show was Sea Hunt with Lloyd Bridges and I always imagined that someday I would become a professional frog man like my hero Mike Nelson.  It cost a quarter to get into the Vivian Municipal Pool and my friends and I went almost every day.  Likening myself to Mike Nelson, the main character on Sea Hunt, I could swim the breadth of the pool underwater ten times without surfacing and I still remember visiting Marineland of the Pacific where many of the episodes were filmed.

I wish some movie producer would make a feature film of Sea Hunt.  I would go see it and I’m sure millions of other baby boomers would also attend.  Who would be the star?  How about Jeff Bridges?

Jack and I bought swim masks, fins and aqualungs as soon as we could afford them.  While neither of us ever made it to a South Pacific atoll it is still on my bucket list.

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Dirty rice is a Cajun specialty.  Here is an authentic recipe for Dirty Rice Dressing from the French Acadian Cookbook published by the Louisiana Acadian Handicraft Museum, Inc. in 1955.  The recipe was contributed by Dr. W.E. Hunt of Lake Charles, Louisiana.

1 cup rice                                             1 clove chopped garlic

1 pound ground meat                            Salt, pepper and hot sauce to taste

1 pound ground giblets                          Pinch of thyme and sweet basil

   (from fowl or separate giblets)

1 cup chopped onion                            1 bunch green onions and tops chopped

½ cup chopped bell pepper                  1 tablespoon minced parsley

½ cup chopped celery

Cook rice in double boiler until fluffy, using enough salted water to 1 inch above rice.  Allow to cook unstirred until all water is gone.  In one skillet sauté ground meat and giblets in ¼ pound butter until brown; in another skillet sauté onions, pepper, celery and seasoning in ¼ pound butter.  Add other ingredients.  In large pan mix all above ingredients well, using natural gravy from fowl to moisten.

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 Do you like ghost stories?  Two young enlisted men home from Afghanistan encounter a place hotter than the Middle East.

SOLDIERS

By Eric Wilder

Jim and I crossed the state line at noon, black Kansas thunder clouds chasing up behind and miles of highway still ahead.  Swirls of ocher powder daubed the once pale sky and tumbleweeds rolled along the highway like steel balls in a giant pinball machine.  And there was heavy wind, whipping the car and scaring up pheasant and jackrabbits lolling in the ditch.

            Awakening from a fitful dream, I rolled up the windows of Jim’s old beater and pulled a bandanna over my face.  Earlier that morning we’d left Omaha, stopping only once to relieve ourselves by the side of the road.  Jim’s mood, like the weather, was foul and he hadn’t spoken in two hours.  Refraining from disturbing his trance, I folded my arms, braced myself against the seat and closed my eyes, trying to lock out the storm.  Jim’s mood and the piston drone knocking beneath the hood.

            Three miles across the border the storm caught us, turning dust into rivulets of mud on the car’s hood.  Rain blistered the windshield leaving only flashes of visibility between labored swaths of slow moving wiper blades.  Then a billboard, barely visible through the downpour, alerted us to a truck stop up ahead.  When we reached it, we found a weather-beaten filling station beside a roadside juke joint.

            Jim said, “I’m tired of fighting this storm,” and eased into the gravel parking lot, but the storm hadn’t tired of jousting us.  As we ran for the front door, it bombarded us with falling missiles, thunder shuddering the walls as we entered.  We removed our wet ponchos and shook ourselves like two retrievers coming out of a pond, then gazed around the room until our eyes adjusted.

            Five dismal patrons gazed back at us.  Strobe shadows, cast by neon beer signs, cloaked four dingy walls.  Through the pallor a middle-aged bartender behind the counter, mindlessly polishing a glass with a white rag.

            In back, a beefy man played pool alone.  The faded rose tattoo on his hairy arm matched the exact hue of his sleeveless T-shirt.  Before turning away to continue his lonely game, he gave us a a quick once-over.  A man and woman, immersed in their own whispered conversation, glanced up when we arrived.  An old man in a wheel chair watched us approach the bar, his rheumy eyes never blinking.

            Jim slapped his palm against the counter, stared at the bartenden and said, “Two draws, and a tequila shooter.”

            “You boys old enough to drink?” the bartender asked.

            Jim glared without answering but I said, “We’re both twenty-one.”

            Red hair and ruddy Irish complexion melded with Jim’s high Indian cheekbones, and even when he smiled he seemed angry.  He wasn’t smiling.  With a frown on his own craggy face, the bartender glared back at him until he finally noticed our short hair and clean shaves.

            “Soldiers?”

            “Yes,” I said.

            “Artillery?”

            “Infantry,” Jim said.

            Muscles twitched in the bartender’s neck and he smoothed the greasy black hair of his head and then his mustache, with his fingers.

            “Guess if you’re old enough to fight, you’re old enough to drink.”

            He laughed and it quickly drew into a dry hacking cough.

            “Damn right,” I said.

            Watching us from the corner of his eye, the sullen bartender drew the beer.  As he did, Jim stared bullet holes in his back, even as I nudged him the ribs with my elbow.  The bartender returned with two beers and a tequila shooter and Jim immediately killed the shot/ When he slammed the glass against the bar, sharp sound echoed like the crack of a small caliber rifle through the room.

            After finishing his beer in one long pull, he nodded at the two empty glasses and said, “Again.”

            Again, errant muscles twitched in the bartender’s neck as he drew another beer from the tap and reached behind him for the tequila.  Jim finished his second shot and glanced around the room like a stray cat in a strange barn.

            “Easy,” I said, eyeing his empty glass.  “Got ourselves a long way to go yet, buddy.”

            With a smirk, he said, “In a hurry, sport?”

            Intent on the couple in the back of the room, he didn’t see me shake my head.  Looking like a middle-aged farmer, the man was dressed in overalls and baseball cap.  The woman’s sallow, weather-beaten face pegged her as his wife.  We watched the farmer slam his hand against the table, hard enough to rattle both of their beer mugs, and glare as if he were about to strike her.

            “If you had a lick of sense, woman, you’d know what a fool question that is.”

            Apparently she didn’t and her unspoken reply filled the room with silent reverberations.  As we watched the scene unfold, Jim’s shoulders tensed and he stepped away from the bar.  Grabbing his elbow, I held on.

            “Not this time.”

            Halting, Jim tried to stare me down, but I stood my ground, shaking my head.  Then, immersed in our trance, we both jumped when the bartender slapped his hand against the counter.  When we wheeled around we found him leaning over the bar with an amused look on his whiskered face.

            “Didn’t mean to scare you boys. ‘Nother beer?”

            “Sure,” I said.

            He asked our names when he returned .

            “I’m Paul and this is Jim.”

            “Proud to meet you.  Name’s Ezekiel, but people round here just call me Zeke.”

            I shook his hand; Jim didn’t bother.  Instead he asked, “What’s the story on the old man in the wheelchair?”

            “Rivers is his name.  We call him Old Man Rivers,” he said, chuckling at his little joke.

            With a lidless stare, the old man in the wheelchair glared at us through the crumpled mass of oblique wrinkles obliterating his withered face.  Large angry gaps pitted his features, weathered and spongy as fallen white cake, and a half-smoked cigarette rested between gray lips.  Like tangles of red snakes on cold stones, broken capillaries veined his nose and eyes.  With gnarled hands clawing the wheelchair and bony arms like the plastic limbs of a child’s discarded doll, he looked like warmed-over death.

            “I’m buying,” Jim said.  “Give him whatever he wants.”

            After pouring a shot of bourbon, Zeke tilted back the old man’s head and dribbled liquor into his mouth, causing his blotchy tongue to wriggle like an earthworm growing desperate on a sharp hook.

            Jim smiled and said, “Give him another.”

            As I was watching Zeke whiskey-nurse the old man, someone tapped my shoulder.  Six inches from my nose, a pool shooter blithely invaded my space, smiling insanely and blinking one discolored eye that looked to me like a spoiled eye yolk.  I backed against the bar.  When he spoke, his stale breath smelled like battery acid gone sour.  Stumbling slowly over his words, he said, “I’m Doyle.  Was a soldier once myself.  Ol’ Man River’s my Daddy.”

            I said, “That right?”

            Doyle grinned and pumped his head like a long-handled water pump.  “Nah, not really, but I like to call him that.”

            Noticing Jim’s amused smile, I backed even further away from the counter, but Doyle pivoted and followed me like a machine gun on a swivel turret.  Then lightning struck, shaking rafters and sucking air from the room like a giant accordion.  Doyle grimaced like a frightened child and drifted back to the red glow emanating from the swaying fixture above the pool table.  Raising an index finger, I signaled Zeke to bring more beer.

            When Zeke brought our drinks, he grinned and said, “Doyle’s a little nuts.  Myra takes care of him.

            “Myra?”

            “Lives with the Stewart’s,” he said, pointing at the couple in the back.  “Looks after Doyle and takes care of Old Man Rivers.  Brings them in every morning.  Comes and gets them every night.”

            Zeke’s mention of Myra prefaced her appearance through the back door - a pretty girl with pale skin and colorless blonde hair.  Thin and wispy fabric clung in blue waves to every subtle feature of her diminutive frame.  And, like a low cloud wafting slowly in a gentle breeze, she approached the counter and squeezed in between Jim and me.  Zeke placed a glass of white wine in front of her.

            “You must be Myra,” Jim said, suddenly becoming verbose.

            “Yes.”

            “Rain’s a little heavy outside.  We came in to drink beer and wait it out,” he said.

            In a lilting, whimsical voice she replied, “Come in and I will give you shelter from the storm.”

            As Jim listened to her recite the line from the old Dylan tune, his neck inexplicably flushed crimson.  As if reading my thoughts, Myra turned and studied me with pale, unnerving eyes.

            “The storm is dark and frightening.”

            “Yes,” I said, suddenly at a loss for words.

            “Have you met Zeke, Doyle and Old Man Rivers?”

            “Yes,” I said again.

            Dismissing me with a coy nod, she daintily picked up her glass of wine and went to the old man, stroking his neck with cashmere fingers.  As Jim’s had done, River’s ruddy skin flushed crimson.  Static electricity, brushed up by her fingers, raised thin hairs on his head as a booming clap of thunder rocked the roof and wind whistled through the loosely-fitted windows.  Again, rain blistered the outside walls and darkness began to drape the windows with muted gloom.

            “Myra,” the farmer called.  “Come answer Mary for me.  Tell her what a fool question she’s asking.”

            Moving fluidly away from the bar, Myra glided to their table and listened as the woman cupped her hands and whispered something into her ear.  After answering, Myra turned away, leaving the woman to rest her head on the table and weep.

            When Myra returned, Jim asked, “What’d she want?”

            “Her daughter Emily’s gone.  Car accident separated them.  Mary asked if I knew when Emily would join them again.

            “Did they take her to a hospital out of town or something?”

            “She’s where she has always been,” Myra answered.

            “Then -“

            Before I could finish the question lingering in my brain, Myra placed a finger on my lips and shook her head.  “You don’t need to understand,” she said.  “The storm’s not over yet.”

            Excited by Myra’s perfume, Jim gently touched her cheek.  She didn’t move away.

            “I wouldn’t mind getting to know you a little better,” he said.

            “Forever?” she asked.

            Letting his hand drop, he caressed the length of her willowy arm and said, “For as long as you want.”

            “Don’t talk to her like that!” an angry voice said.

            Behind Jim was Doyle, his teeth clenched in an irritated scowl.  He quickly wrapped a hairy arm around Jim’s neck and yanked it forcibly back, Jim slammed an angry fist at Doyle’s jaw, then tossed the surprised attacker over the counter and dived over after him.

            A weighted club appeared in Zeke’s hand.  With a practiced swing he tapped Jim lightly on the neck, just below the base of his skull.  Jim sank, unconscious, to the floor.

            “Ain’t hurt too bad,” Zeke said, glancing up at me.  “Be just fine when he wakes up.”

            After helping drag Jim’s inert body to a chair, I rejoined Myra at the bar.  She was staring at the ceiling as she sipped her wine.  She seemed disinterested in the whole affair.

            Glancing at my empty beer, I said, “Better have another.”

            “Sure you can handle your liquor?”

            “Jim didn’t start it,” I said, frowning at Doyle.

            Doyle was still on the floor, grinning like an idiot as he rotated his swollen jaw with his hand.

            “Maybe not,” Zeke said as he drew another beer.

            Myra said, “Where have you been, Paul?”

            “Afghanistan.  We just got back and finished our leave.”

            “Saw lots of action, didn’t you?”

            “Yes.”

            “Kill many of the enemy?”

            Her question, asked with a curious smile, took me by surprise.  “Maybe a few,” I answered.

            “And Jim?”

            “I’m sure he killed his share,” I said.  “What’s the name of this town, anyway?”

            “Don’t you know?”

            “Seems a bit familiar, but no I don’t.”

            Zeke chuckled and said, “You’re in Inferno.  Inferno, Oklahoma.  Hotter’n hell in summer.”

            “Could you love a girl like me?” asked Myra, interrupting Zeke’s vivid description.

            “Guess maybe I could,” I said.

            “You love someone else?”

            “Life,” I said.  “With the war and all it’s about the only thing I’ve really though about along those lines.”

            “Life is a fickle virgin,” she said, her pale blue eyes suddenly glowing like cold pearls.

            “And you?” I asked.  “What do you love?”

            Myra licked her lips and looked at Jim.  He was conscious, but still moaning as he massaged his neck.  Without answering my question, she turned to leave, but stopped and turned as if having a second thought.  After she touched my hand, I rubbed the icy remnant her touch imparted as I watched her walk through the door, held it open and as she gazed at me.

            “Wait, I called.  “Where are you going?”

            “Come with me and I will show you.”

            “Can’t,” I said.  “Have to get back to the post.”

            “Please,” she said, extending her willowy arm.  “I promise, you won’t be sorry.”

            I started to follow but remembered Jim, still lying on the floor.  Another clap of thunder struck, closer this time, shattering the trance and causing me to blink.  When I opened my eyes Myra was gone.  Quickly, I downed my beer and tossed some money on the bar.

            “Still mighty nasty out there,” Zeke said.  “Better have another drink.”

            “Another time.  Not today.”

            Bracing Jim beneath my shoulder, I started for the front door.  Curiosity stopped me beside the couple’s table.  I stared at the weather-beaten woman until she glance up at me.

            “Sorry about your daughter.  How old was she when she died?”

            A single tear trickled down the woman’s face, and she said, “Emily’s not dead.”

            “But what about the car accident?”

            The woman’s lingering eyes held me locked in place.  “Emily wasn’t in the accident.  Just Ralph and me.”

            Breaking her cold stare, I pulled Jim out the front door.  From there, he staggered alone to the car, revived somewhat by the rain.  He took the keys from his shirt pocket, tossed them to me and slumped into the seat.  I gunned the engine and hurried away before the wipers could clear away the ruthless onslaught of the rain.

            A mile down the deserted highway, I glanced into the rear view mirror and searched in vain for the squall.  No use.  It was gone, along with the two buildings, replaced only by silence that seemed to cloak damp earth around us like a shroud.

            Far away, behind reality and disappearing foothills, lightning and thunder flared and crashed like distant fire fights.  Further still, filtered light mingled with road dust blown up by our racing tires, streaking the waning horizon.  As it did swirling ocher powder obliterated the dying sky, reflecting pale allusions of ancient storms.

END

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Cats are graceful creatures that never really have an owner and I’ve told lots of stories about those that have occupied large places in my heart.  One of them was a big tom, a little special and just a bit more memorable than most.

All our acquaintances knew that Anne and I were cat people and rarely a week passed that someone didn’t try to give us one.  We almost always resisted or else we would have had hundreds of cats instead of the handful we felt responsible for.  A cry for assistance occurred one day that we couldn’t ignore.

Friends of friends owned a small apartment complex and someone had abandoned two cats in an upstairs apartment.  A week had passed before the landlord found out and by this time the two felines were traumatized.  Anne and good friend Bruce rescued them from the locked apartment after much ado and lots more trauma.

Both cats were solid white, one a young female, the older a grown male.  Bruce fell in love with the little female and took her to care for.  The big tom was half crazy from his stay in the apartment and it was soon apparent that if Anne and I didn’t take him we would have to have him put down.

We named him Max because there was a Mel Gibson movie out at the time called Mad Max and this new addition to our family qualified as more than a little wacky.  Max was a cross between a Siamese and a Manx.  He was solid white with gorgeous, slightly crossed blue eyes.  He had only the semblance of a tail and his hind legs were longer than the front ones.  He was fixed but had a heavily muscled torso and tufted ears that caused him to look like a white bobcat.  Oh, and he was very strong.

For the first few days we fed and watered Mad Max while giving him a wide berth.  There were other cats in the family and soon he began to cozy up to us.  He liked King Tut and followed him wherever he went.  Tut was as regal as his name implied and I think he liked having a lieutenant around.

After a year or so we noticed Mad Max was looking sick so we put him in the cat carrier and took him to Dr. D our friendly vet.  He spent the day there and when we picked him up, Dr. D explained what had happened.

“Tailless cats tend to rub their rear ends in the grass and occasionally get plugged up.  Max had an excretion ball that solidified to the point it wouldn’t pass.  We gave him a sedative and then soaked his rear in warm water until we could extract it.”

Dr. D gave us some antibiotics for Max and the big boy was back to his normal self in a day or so.  As time passed, he became an integral part of the family.  He loved his daily full body strokes and began demanding his share of the attention.  He was still sort of nuts and if you rubbed him once too often he would take a swipe at you with his powerful paw.

Another couple of years passed, along with the oil boom.  Anne and I were struggling and had little money to go to the doctor or dentist ourselves.  The cats were relegated to emergency only vet visits.  One incident finally occurred that we had no money to let the vet remedy.  Max had developed another petrified poop ball in his rear and he was miserable by the time we noticed it.

“You’ll have to fix it or he will die,” Anne said.

I knew that she was correct.  Drawing a bucket of very warm water, I pulled on a pair of gloves and prepared for the worst.  I needn’t have worried.  Powerful Max was too sick to fight.  He didn’t even squirm when I lifted him and lowered his rear into the warm water.

I don’t know how long it took but the petrified poop soon began to soften.  I finally got hold of it with my gloved hand and worked on it until it finally came loose, Max and me both breathing huge sighs of relief as it did.

 Max and I both survived the petrified poop ordeal and he lived with us altogether for almost ten years.  He met his demise early one morning in a dramatic fashion.  Anne was walking outside to get the morning paper when she heard a commotion in the garage.  The cats liked to sleep there, roosted on the hoods of our car and we always kept the door cracked so they could go in and out.

As Anne stood looking at the garage door, a large German shepherd came bounding out with Max in his mouth.  Anne chased them down the street in her robe and nightgown, yelling at him to stop as she ran.  The dog paid her no mind and quickly outdistanced her, disappearing down the block.  We never found Max’s body.

Max was limp, his eyes closed when the large dog came running out of the garage with him.  Our vet told us that he was likely killed the moment the dog got him by the neck.  “He probably never knew what hit him and I’m sure he never suffered,” Dr. D told us, hoping to make us feel better.

Mad Max met his dramatic demise, hopefully without suffering, and Anne and I consoled each other with the knowledge that he was a grown cat when we got him.  He lived another ten very good years with people that cared for him deeply before the dog got him.

Yes, Max was a little different and slightly crazy but we loved him despite his less than perfect qualities.  Max was a special cat, and sometimes you love special beings in ways hard to explain – except in your heart.

http://www.EricWilder.com

http://www.Ericwilder.com

I was surveying some shallow gas wells near Billings, Oklahoma yesterday when I recalled the first well I ever got drilled in Noble County.  I briefly recounted the story to the three people in the vehicle with me but I omitted telling them about the pathos I felt at the time.

It was near the lowest financial ebb for Anne and I following the eighties oil bust.  We had a very large glass piggy bank that we had filled with coins over the years and we had agreed to wait until our most desperate moment before opening it and spending the coins.  The time finally arrived.

We were expecting thousands but there was only about two-hundred-sixty dollars in the glass pig.  The money tided us over for the moment but we got down to our last dollar on more than one occasion.  Somehow, every time our money became dangerously low I would somehow manage to sell a prospect or make a few bucks doing a little consulting job.

There were few real jobs available in the State at the time and there was a joke going around about a geologist that applied for a job flipping burgers at MacDonald’s only to be told, “Sorry, but all the geologists that work for us have Master’s Degrees.”  The story wasn’t far from the truth.

Before the “Bust” I had an ego as large as Texas.  Geologists must have a second sense to find oil many miles below the earth’s surface and the best are dubbed oil finders.  I knew that I was good and I also knew that I was also incredibly lucky.  One of the founders of Texas Oil & Gas once told me, “Eric, you have a gift.  You’re an oil finder.  There aren’t many around like you and if you can find oil and gas the world will beat a path to your door.”

It didn’t seem like anyone was searching very hard for me in 1989 as I remember going a year without selling a prospect.  Somehow Anne and I managed to eke out a living but my pocketbook and my ego had taken a huge pummeling.  I had lost my mojo and everything I touched seemed to turn to turkey poop.

My dreams, along with my ego, were severely bruised but not completely destroyed.  I continued working and had the idea for a drilling prospect in Noble County, a county I had never previously worked.  Unable to afford professional drafting I drew the map on a sheet of typing paper and colored it with a used set of thrift store colored pencils.  It took me a while to find someone that even wanted to look at it.

One weekend I read an ad in the Sunday Oklahoman classifieds.  It was posted by someone with a Dallas area code and they were looking for a geologic prospect.  I called the number before finishing my first cup of morning coffee.

Two days later a man driving a Volkswagen with a large rubber roach attached to the roof drove into our driveway.  He had a small exterminating company in Dallas and he also drove a bus at the DFW Airport.  Before the crash he had worked in a phone room raising money.  He thought the time was right and that he could raise enough money on his own to drill a well.  He left Oklahoma City with my hand-drawn maps and left me and Anne with a check for $7000.00.  We were on Cloud Nine.

Two years passed and he hadn’t drilled the well.  He finally called and told me in his slow Texas drawl that he had decided not to drill the well.  “My engineer says even if we find what we’re looking for that it will be drained.”  I spent the next hour convincing him that his engineer was wrong.  Tom D was (is) a good man.  He could hear the neediness in my voice and knew that if he had been there in person that he would have seen me on my knees.

“All right,” he finally said.&