Fed Up

My mother was short on words and stature. But around our house, these two words meant, I’ve had enough! Further emphasis was unnecessary, rebuttal futile. I wonder if she gets away with that expression in heaven?

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It’s Sunday. Lunch is a tomato sandwich, a juicy red, acid-rich Tennessee beauty, gobs of mayonnaise slathered on ‘light’ bread. It reminds me of my mother. She’d swear it was nature’s perfect food.

Tomato sandwiches take the sting out of life. Running close seconds are pineapple and pimento cheese sandwiches on white bread, the edges removed, of course. Eat these and you’ll be more than a conqueror with a belly full of this heavenly fare.

Sunday fried chicken is a hard act to follow, and tends to trump (oops) pork rinds as cultured cooking. Neither is kosher, of course, but Southern Methodists have no aversion to things fried or cloven-hoof smokehouse cuisine.

Lately an anonymous voice is leaving cell phone messages: “Hey, you’re a hack, write something about politics.” I want to say, “Man, who made me a judge over things?” But the thought eats on me. What do I think?

From somewhere in the past I exhume a sweaty preacher’s sermon. Poor fellow, he’s struggling for seminary words to flesh out the bones of sin. Not unlike politics, who can synthesize the situation we’re in with such poor choices? My mother’s words also surface.

‘Fed up!’ she’d say. Listen, these two words have nothing to do with hunger or being fed. The punctuation marks are the clue. They end, not with a question mark, but an exclamation point. Only idiots miss the point.

Etched in my memory is a picture of her in the kitchen, hands on her hips. Standing there are my brother and me, covered in dirt, probably fleas, too. Surely in that moment she cursed her decision for having offspring.

Her words were amplified, “You’re disgusting.” Big words are lost on small boys. I remember wondering if ‘disgusting’ had anything to do with her not making some more chocolate pudding. Isn’t that what mothers are for at that age?

Once I remember hearing her use those words on my father while he cleaned fish in the sink. He shriveled visibly and hauled the stinking fish heads outside. In retrospect, forgiveness came at the cost of a new car. Consequences follow these words closely.

It’s not hard to get fed up with life when it goes sideways. We feel like defendants in Judge Judy’s courtroom, stuttering a pitiful defense, caught in the horror of the justice system. Disgust is not descriptive enough.

Are we fed up with the never-ending political circus yet? It reminds me Archie MacLeish’s poem, ‘The End of the World.’ Vasserot, the armless ambidextrian attempts to light a match between his toes when the top of the circus tent blows off. Stunned spectators sit there, staring in the vacuous silence of a vast black void, seeing nothing and feeling nothing but emptiness.

The political sideshows passing for ‘news’ gags us with disgust at the spectacle. My mother avoided big newspapers like the plague, fearing contamination. She stuck with the local fish-wrapper, The Miller County Liberal. Listen, you have to stand and salute a newspaper with guts to call it like it is: “Pull for Colquitt or Pull Out.”

Politics in small towns tend to feuds. Winks and nods work just fine. Politics were never a hot topic in our home, not like food and fishing. Democrats ruled the south then. Churches and local charities delivered the dole, not the Beltway Bandits. My daddy questioned the sanity of anyone running for elective office, citing his experience on the church finance committee where budgets trumped baptisms.

Who can deny it, politics is a nasty trade. Fear and confusion are everywhere. It’s a seedy world of misfits, crazed with hubris; brainless nut cases running wild in the streets, the pestilence of despotism on all sides, walls everywhere, power-crazed cannibals feeding on themselves and the acrid air of anarchy filling the void. What a mess we’re in!

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Our enormous childhood seems to be slipping away. Are we ‘Fed Up’ enough yet to pull out the stops and proclaim, “Pull for America, or Pull Out?”

Now trump that!


Bud Hearn
August 12, 2016