Digressions of a Dilettante

Digressions of a Dilettante
Vignettes of Inanity by Bud Hearn

Thursday, March 25, 2010

The Law of the Land

“Historic,” it’s called. This new Dictate of Reform has now become the law of the land. Relief from years of inability to gain access to paid medical attention, millions now have the opportunity to have subsidized health care, lavishly doled out, courtesy of 219 “progressive” politicians somebody elected.

The early-morning lines for Wal-Mart bargains are shifting to the local hospitals, and numbers for entrance are being taken. People are now camping in make-shift tents and hovels at major hospitals, anticipating another form of emancipation. Democracy has been redefined!

Nomenclature, clocked by arcana, can change the meaning of all things. The 2,600- page “law of the land” is chiseled now in stone, rock-solid, and posted in paper and digits for all to read and obey. Nobody read it … gives new meaning to “land of the free.”

All laws have loopholes. It can be many things, often all at once. Take, for example, a former Georgia governor, Eugene Talmadge. His elections were due to the archaic “county unit rule vote,” a system whereby each county, regardless of population, had an equal vote. Schooled in the politics of Telfair County (McRae, GA), he was elected trice as governor. You remember Telfair County, right? Its mantra was, may still be, “Vote early and often.” Even its graves voted.

Loopholing such elections laws led to the “controversy of 3 governors.” Later his son, Herman E. Talmadge, and M. E. Thompson, both claiming to be governor, took strongholds in the state capitol. Each camp had thugs, armed to the teeth, and Talmadge succeeded by having the locks of the capitol changed. Ah, the good–old-days of politics.

Recently we toured Turkey and the Greek Isles and landed in Ephesus. Once a wealthy sea port, it had silted in and was now miles from the coast. Prosperity moved on. An earthquake had decimated the place, and about ten percent had been recovered and reconstructed from the rubble. Still, its presence was stunning, awe-inspiring. But dead history.

Walking the marble streets, one could imagine life in that age. Caesars, citizens and commerce all met there. Located at the intersection of the main Via stood a solid slab of flat marble. In it was chiseled “the law of the land.” It was conspicuously located, so none could claim ignorance.

Nearby were the ruins of the Temple of Diana (Artemis), the revered Greek goddess. It was in its shadow that a conflict occurred between Christianity and money, a controversy that continues to this day. It is documented in Biblical scriptures, Acts 19.

Also located at this main crossroads was a stunning edifice, the Bibliotheca, the institution and academic center of the region. Directly across were the public baths and toilets. The toilets were round holes, carved into solid white marble slabs, situate elbow to elbow. Stalls? Forget it. There were no secrets there, what you see is what you get! We sat on some, wondering…..

Adjacent to the baths, and directly across from the Bibliotheca, stood the remains of The Brothel, home to an institution older than the law itself. In fact, it was Moses’ Achilles heel…it had to remain in the Ten C’s to the Tribe’s chagrin. An underground tunnel extended from the Bibliotheca to the Brothel. “Honey, I’m going to the library today. Back for dinner.” Smiling men in robes always emerged from the Bibliotheca late in the afternoon.

Signposts did not mar the beauty of the Vias. But the Brothel needed directions for strangers with fresh money, starved from long caravans with camels. So, a few blocks away, chiseled into the marble street, was a replica of a heart. Just beyond were the imprints of two bare feet, facing forward. Above that was a right angle directional arrow, pointing left, indicating the Brothel. Hey, doesn’t take a genius here to figure this out.

Washington, DC is the new Ephesus. All signs point there. From stately marble buildings in the ancient Greek styles a continuous flow of legal effluvia flows forth. A few blocks west of the Capitol stands the Smithsonian Institute. In its construction, archaeological digs discovered the 1840 brothel of Mary Ann Hall, Madam on the Mall. Nearby is K Street, home to think tanks, advocacy groups and lobbyists. There is no shortage of pimps still in DC.

The Law of the Land... the noose gets tighter. Looks like the only thing omitted was a “breath tax.” Don’t hold your breath…it’s coming!

Bud Hearn
March 25, 2010

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Pure Bedlam

The lunatics have taken charge of the asylum.” Richard Rowland

I ran into a doctor friend at lunch, pulled up a chair, sat down. He was reading three newspapers and slapping his palm against the table and muttering things. “What’s up, Doc?” I asked. “Back on your own pills again?”

March madness, that’s what…pure bedlam out there,” he said. “Don’t you read? The world’s gone mad.” That’s old news, I thought, and I also knew that the NCAA basketball tournaments were beginning. “So what’s new?” I asked. “Happens every year, heck, every hour of every day, in fact.”

“Well, let’s start with basketball. You know who’ll win, dontcha? The Bookies decide that. Las Vegas is wild with excitement, billions pass through that sleaze pit, half lose, half win. But the bookies always win. Just not fair,” he roared.

Nothing’s fair,” I reminded him. “Life’s nothing but a chance, a roll of the dice. It’s a gamble with incredible odds against you. If it were a bet, you wouldn’t take it. Look, it’s all based on the natural law of cause and effect. Didn’t you learn that in med school? Or were you a vocational trade school grad?”

Oh, don’t insult me. I know that. Aristotle advanced the theory, we affirm it in the Hypocritic oath. But there’s madness in America. We just can’t stand unanswered questions. It started, according to my grandfather, when King George released the lunatics in Bedlam Asylum and sent them to America in revenge for Cornwallis’ embarrassment at Yorktown,” he ranted, his eyes glittering, accentuated by spasmodic facial tics. Disconcerting.

“Say on, doc, I’m all ears,” I responded. With wild gesticulations that cleared several nearby tables, he tore into it. “Yeah, when they got onto our soil, they intermarried and assimilated throughout the land. They were like a virulent contagion, all our descendents are polluted with their blood. We’re all mad, you and me, too.” His body began jerking uncontrollably and I felt a twitch in my face as well.

“Forget the Washington, D.C. madness...the most non compos mentis always ends up there. Plenty of local psychopaths who are unhinged. Listen to today’s news: ‘Man steals pants, flees naked from Wal-Mart, pursued by manager in parking lot.’”

More. He read on. “In Macon a woman’s dog chewed off her lips while she slept. She reported she let the dog lick the sweet tea from her lips. They were replaced by fat from her butt.” Since Sherman, Macon has always been a Mecca for maniacs.

Another, he said. “‘Conyers woman stuffs husband into oven and bakes him. Claimed she’d been drinking.’ Look,” he said, “who can make up such stuff?”

I bought in and interjected, “Once, my wife, a blonde in those days, took some porcelain to an artisan in Atlanta for repair. She reported he was interested to know if she knew her heritage. He proceeded to tell her that several millennia ago an alien spaceship from Venus landed in Norway. The creatures had pale skin, blue eyes, blonde hair and low IQ. Over time they were assimilated into Europe, then America, and by 2050 they would be extinct.”

“Well, might answer some heretofore unanswered questions about blondes, huh?” he laughed. The blonde waitress saw no humor in the comment. The dessert never came.

Doc, let me be sure I’ve got this straight. What you’re postulating is that all Americans are descendents of these nutcases from London? Hence, we are all off our rocker, more or less, which accounts for this madness. Right?” He rolled his eyes in a savage excitement, and answered, “You got a better answer for this bedlam?” I didn’t, so I left him drooling over a chicken bone. It was more than I could take.

I know, I know, I can hear you now…truly this is a pair of imbeciles. Who could believe such hallucinatory nonsense as this? But you have to admit for every cause there’s an equal and opposite effect. And as preposterous as it may sound, could there be some scintilla of plausibility hidden in it? You decide.

And should you detect some unexplained facial tic or some aberrant, atavistic tendencies in a family member, call me…I have just the doctor for you.

Bud Hearn
March 17, 2010

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Building Bigger Barns

“The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully…” Luke 12:16

Religious tracts are not quite my forte, I prefer land tracts…big ones. But since it’s Lent, I dug around in my Bible looking for some clues God left lying around that might offer some direction out of this real estate mess. I came across this allegory of a rich man.

This particular fellow was surely a real estate tycoon. He had the good fortune to own land that was pretty productive. In fact, so productive it made him richer. He had so much he hardly knew what to do with it, so he consulted with himself---his first mistake---and concluded that he’d leverage his surplus, hit the bank up for a few more million and build some bigger barns in which to store his crops. Which he did. Mistake number two.

I once wanted to be a builder. Growing up in a small town there wasn’t much building going on. My granddaddy decided to build a few rental houses and I needed money, so I signed on. Fifty cents an hour for a fifteen year old were good wages in those days.

I showed up on my first day with my hammer. My daddy called me aside and told me I had to start at the bottom, which meant the only building I was going to do was digging the foundations. My tools were rudimentary, invented by Fred Flintstone: a shovel and a wheelbarrow. Not only that, but I was to mix the mortar and tote the cinder blocks. “It’ll make a man out of you, son, build big biceps,” I remember him saying.

Big biceps, become a man…ah, magic words to a teenager trying to impress the girls. So I worked like a dog. Every night I measured my biceps. I saw little improvement. I confronted him with the lie. “Come by the store tomorrow, son, I have just the job for you,” he said.

Big mistake. “Son, take Jim and Felix and the flat bed truck down to the box car and unload it and put it into the warehouse,” he ordered. “What?” I asked. “You’ll see,” he said. Have you any clue how hot it is in August in an airless box car unloading bags of mortar and cement? Mortar weights 50 pounds, cement 95. Twice…boxcar to truck, truck to warehouse. Skeletons had bigger biceps than mine!

If this was what building was about, I wanted no part of it. “Don’t give up, son,” daddy said. “Go finish the job on our new house.” The job? Digging a 150 foot ditch to the street to hook up the sewer. The final straw. I dug that ditch in the broiling hot sun (biceps never bulged, but I got a good tan!). My daddy never liked it and cursed me. It was 4 feet deep and 12 inches wide, and he had to lie on his belly installing the sewer pipe. Ah, sweet revenge!

But manual labor broke my interest in the building business. And probably saved my life years later. I learned that one could do more mischief with a loaded ball point pen than a shovel. Land speculation came natural! Besides, I learned later that bank accounts attracted more girls than big biceps.

But back to our lucky rich guy with his barns. His luck became a curse…he simply had too much. He forgot the rule that nature only lends, never gives. His final mistake was thinking he could have his cake and eat it too. His lifestyle changed, new friends, more camels, condos on the Mediterranean, a younger wives and plenty of food and drink to go with it. But his loan came due…they always do!

Who can forget the scene in the movie, Cool Hand Luke, when Luke dug a giant hole in the warden’s yard, then had to fill it back up. Digging adjusts attitudes! Which could be interpreted today as an allegory. We’ve dug ourselves into some deep holes of debt in this country, and built a lot of bigger barns. Many stand vacant, stark testimony of greed…the land ceased producing.

Too much surplus has left us with a huge hangover. Like our rich man, we seem to have lost our collective soul in the blind pursuit of wealth. Common sense has always spoken, “If you find yourself in a hole, quit digging.” We find it hard to do!

What clues did God leave lying around? Read it for yourself. But, fellow Americans, charity needs no barns…let’s give some away. The barn building program can wait!

Bud Hearn
March 11, 2010

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Intimations of Spring...an Odyssey

Wayne jammed the breaks of the old pickup truck. It swerved and skidded to a sudden stop in the soft sandy back road of Atkinson County.

What the…?” I yelled.

“Look,” he shouted, “there, through the oaks. See ‘em?”

Barely visible through the thick undergrowth, a pair of black, accusatory eyes stared at us as if we were two desecrators violating the sanctity of a place occupied only by ghosts.

Let’s check it out,” Wayne said. That’d be my friend Wayne Morgan, an excellent photographer with a country boy’s eye for all things offbeat. Slightly twisted myself, we made a perfect pair.

We slid out into the eerie and windless silence of a timeless place captured in the suspended animation of the forgotten past. The mid-day sun’s rays warmed the forest surrounding the former homeplace as we trod up yesterday’s driveway.

In a clearing a derelict structure emerged, bleached from years of decomposition and unrelenting sunlight. It appeared as a whitened skull. Peering from it were two hollow and blackened holes, like empty eye sockets, adding surrealism to the marred relic. Like a descending mist, hoary beards of Spanish moss hung from large water oaks. The scene evoked a gothic sense of foreboding. We stood in stunned silence at the discovery. Nothing moved.

We found ourselves here by chance, the way most photographers and writers find themselves. We weren’t lost, just confused. Country dirt roads always lead somewhere, even if to nowhere special, which is exactly where we wanted to be. Nowhere special is where the exceptional is found, and that’s what we were looking for…intimations and confirmations of spring.

The winter had been long and arduous. Nerves were frazzled, tempers short. Hope saw its shadow and returned to its den. Our mission was to locate some signs of spring.

Atkinson County is basically nowhere. Nothing much has happened here since old Bill Atkinson was governor in 1894. It was a perfect place to find genuine evidences of spring.

The artifact we now beheld was a ruined vestige of the tenant farming era. We took turns describing its former occupants. A black, moldy velvet sofa sat on the rotting porch, surrounded by beer cans and broken glass. Clearly others had found this place useful for something. The sofa seemed to be alive and crawling with vermin, so we moved inside.

Debris littered the floors, and what furniture remained was broken, having been apparently used for fire wood. Glass shards lay on the decayed boards and faded wall paper seemed to be melting from the walls. Mildew was everywhere. Nothing useful remained, having been ravaged by scavengers.

We sifted through old papers yellowed with age. One was a postcard with palm trees in Miami, addressed to Waldo Winslow, Sandy Bottom, Georgia. It was terse and barely legible from water stains. It read, “I’m not coming back, Waldo. I’m sick and tired of the cold and picking tobacco and cotton. You can take those 80 acres and…” Nothing more was legible. It was signed “Goodbye, your wife, Yolanda.”

“Can’t much blame her, you?” Wayne said. “Must have been a hard life here. Heck, those palm trees look inviting to me, too.”

I guess,” I replied, “but I feel sorry for old Waldo. Wonder what happened to him?” A glance through the black eye revealed a weathered marble tombstone, half hidden in the privet shrubs. “He’s still here, Wayne, out there. See?”

“Yep,” he said. “He’s here to stay.”

Walking through the dark hallway I picked up an old Prince Albert tobacco can. It was closed tightly. I pried the top open and was shocked to see its contents. “Wayne, here’s what we’ve been looking for, right here inside this old tobacco can.”

In the sunlight we emptied the can of its effects. Inside were dried daffodils, like the kind found pressed between old book pages. “What do you make of this?” Wayne asked. But he knew, even as I did.

Old Waldo had saved some daffodils from another time as a reminder that though winter slays, spring resurrects. They must have nurtured his hope that better times were coming. “Guess Yolanda wasn’t convinced,” Wayne sighed. “They don’t compare to palm trees.”

Let’s give ‘em back to Waldo,” Wayne said. We did, scattering them on the sunken earth that held his dust beneath the tombstone. “So long, Waldo,” Wayne said, uttering what may be the shortest eulogy in history, as he put the Prince Albert can into the back pocket of his jeans.

We stood at the homeplace among last year’s leaves, knowing with Waldo that fallow fields will soon explode with new life, and birds will sing again. Wayne’s Nikon shudder clicked, capturing the moment, and we turned and walked back into today. “What did you see,” I asked?

Look closely,” he said. Around the base of that wrecked skeleton of a house were myriad shoots of green, springing from the ground, their yellow blossoms bursting in the sunlight. Daffodils, hundreds of them. “There’s today’s evidence of spring, Bud, just what we were looking for.” Mission accomplished.

With a smile and a high-five, Wayne ground the gears, and the truck lurched forward, speeding down the dirt road to somewhere.

Intimations of spring are everywhere, even in Prince Albert tobacco cans. It was a good day to be alive.

Bud Hearn
March 9,2010

Thursday, March 4, 2010

A Letter From Aunt Mabel

I am not here to think, but to be, feel, live!” Johann von Herder

This may strike you as strange that I would include a letter from Aunt Mabel, but I felt obliged to do so. Humor will have to sit in the back of the bus today.

Times are complicated now that the world is inter-connected. But it was not always so. There was a time when things were simple, decisions easier to make, repercussions predictable. Aunt Mabel has lived through these times and into the modern times. Through it all she maintains a resilient spirit in spite of her own traumas of life.

Her world is smaller now. Sufficient even in her late 80’s, she lives alone, having lost a husband and a son. Her daughter and two grandchildren are the extent of her life’s range of motion. The familiar neighborhood she once knew has changed, not necessarily for the better, and her house is small and obsolete by today’s standards. The possibility of refinance would be impossible for her!

Like others her age, the house is cluttered with remnants of the past, hallways littered with magazines and newspapers stacked floor to ceiling. Her living quarters now consist of a small living room, bathroom and kitchen. Age has problems with discarding the superfluous in fear that it may again be essential. We know better, but they don’t. Life moves on.

She visited us on the island several years ago. I think the highlights of her trip were the Visitor’s Trolley, the light house and the history of the coast. She was especially amazed at the massive oaks. She drove away smiling, as I recall. We smiled with her.

We received from her this letter, written February 24, 2010. Like other elderly, the script is very small, which is probably metaphorical in some sense. It is included in its original content:




My dear children,

It has been so long since I have heard from you!!! I want you to write me when you can, and tell me all you have been doing.

I still sleep in my recliner every night with all my clothes and shoes on.

When I changed from my old termite company to Terminex, a woman came to my house from Center Point with a big stepladder. She put up two bigger smoke alarms. One over the door that goes to my bathroom, and another over the door into my kitchen.

She also brought a big thing that sits next to my telephone at the end of my living room couch.

She said it was so if my house got on fire, the smoke alarms would go off and the nearest fire station would be notified and send a fire truck to my house at once.

Isn’t that amazing?

Lots of love to you always,

Aunt Mabel



The letter was written on inexpensive note paper with a rose imprinted at the top. Frugality never dies with the aged, it seems. Nor does their penchant for life and amazement. In many ways they are like children, hearing the secret whisper of life speaking to them in the small, simple things they can comprehend. Our generation seems to have lost this innate sense of astonishment in the minutiae.

Aunt Mabel still lives in her small, suburban home in Birmingham. Yes, her family has moved on, yet she remains, irrepressible in her zest for life. And in spite of the outward appearance of old age, inside her indomitable spirit of life flourishes.

Isn’t that amazing?

Bud Hearn
March 4, 2010