Dog Days in Dixie

 

“(And) they say he got crazy once and tried to touch the sun, and he lost a friend but kept the memory’ John Denver lyrics. Dog Days is such a time.  

 * * *

On our island we know when Dog Days arrive. Nerves get on edge; tempers flare, cordiality is short and testy. We pack ourselves in dry ice to keep from melting. Worse, shaded parking places are harder to find than hen’s teeth. 

I circle the parking lot looking for one. No luck. New York plates have them. I’m forced to expose myself to the hellish heat radiating from the black asphalt pavement. It’s like walking on the fires of hell. The soles of my shoes scream.  

You think this is all hyperbole? Check out today’s weather forecast.  Heat index: 102 degrees. 

In Dixie, once revered until lately, we are enduring the insufferable assault of Dog Days. We move like liquid, as languid as molasses, zombies in slow motion. Meanwhile, the sleepy hound crawls from its heavenly hibernation, shakes off the cosmic dust of its lethargy and announces its scorching presence.   

Sirius, the Dog Star, gets its start early. Rising before dawn, it follows the sun’s circuit like a dog in heat. It basks in the sweltering sauna of humidity and inflicts its relentless heat upon us for six weeks. Only billionaires can avoid its unrelenting assault by escaping to outer space.

New to Dog Days? Google ‘heat wave.’ It’s when the sun pours out its searing bowl of wrath upon the earth, hot as the breath of the devil. It torches every living creature. People repent, pray and pledge their first born for reprieve. Relief comes only with a huge ransom.

Bigwig executives of Georgia’s utility monopoly luxuriate in air-conditioned comfort in Atlanta high rise office suites. They lunch scrumptiously from revenue generated by massive utility bills while bankrupt customers wander aimlessly about in hypnotic stupors. 

The heat bakes Georgia’s red clay into bricks.  Corn stalks wither, rivers boil. All nature languishes in silent submission to the onslaught. Asphalt roads melt into hot tar. Only kudzu, the Southern Cannibal, survives unscathed. This insidious vine is Georgia’s green solution to obliterating unsightly billboards of personal injury attorneys and abandoned, derelict tenant homes littering the backroads of long-forgotten farms.  

Often the Okefenokee Swamp erupts into flames by spontaneous combustion. Huge plumes of smoke deposit ash trails reminiscent of Sodom’s Vesuvius demise. Mobile homes melt in the heat’s relentless march to the sea. Nothing is spared.

People in the piney woods pack their pickups. They flee the fiery path in panic and confusion, weeping and clinging to each other in the wild chaotic exit.  The horror resembles a scene from Sherman’s 2.0 playbook.

The watermelon supply chain remains compromised, short supply everywhere. Last year a local farmer’s market advertised its remaining stock on e-Bay. Bidding was intense. A condo speculator from Macon paid $2,000 for the last melon. Before leaving the parking lot, he doubled his money by flipping it to a fellow from Michigan. Which might explain the state’s tolerance toward Yankees.  

How to stay cool without going totally naked is a challenge. I personally fell for the slick newspaper inserts touting linen shirts.  “Stay cool, wear linen,” they read. I bought five, only to discover they soak up humidity like a sponge and appear to crawl off my back. 

But all is not bad news in the sultry days of summer. Creativity helps us cope. Last year I spent a morning among the moss-draped oak hammocks with my friend, Wes Schlosser. Wes is a Falconer, a trainer of red tail hawks. 

These large birds are Georgia’s finest rodent predators.  Wes nurtures them to maturity, giving them a fighting chance for survival. One has not lived a full-orbed life until a red tail hawk, bloody in beak and talon, perches on his gloved arm. There are magical moments in Dixie even in dog days.

Soon the sun will sink slowly into a blazing orange ball atop the trees on the western horizon. It will glow for a time like an incandescent liquid rock while we gaze in awe at nature’s palate of colors and toast with a cool one the remains of a declining summer day.  

Such are Dog Days in Dixie when anything is possible. Pretend it’s Saturday night somewhere. Find your best neon-light heat retreat, make a memory and let the good times roll.  Nothing lasts forever.

 

 Bud Hearn

July 28, 2021

 

Drawing courtesy of Leslie Hearn

Counting Days and Pennies

Will our pennies last till the end? An oxymoronic question asked by a moron.

***

Who can deny we’ve had too much idle time on our hands lately? Idle time stirs up mental demons that stoke the fires of our fears.

I’m reminded of the Scriptural advice of numbering our days and applying ourselves to wisdom. I get the calculator and discover I’ve already surpassed the three score and ten allowed and am bumping the limits of the extra ten. That calculates to about 231 days remaining. Sobering, seeing how little has been accomplished and worse, how costly it is to exist these days. 

Such stark thoughts prompt one to start counting their pennies, wondering if they will hold out to the end. Which always brings up the proverbial conundrum, “When is the end?” There’s the rub. Only One knows, and He’s not talking.

The other day I stop in the grocery store to pick up some things.  Mostly hamburger, chicken and shaved turkey to supplement the dull, boring dry dog food.  Nothing too good for the dog.  I walk out with three small sacks and $63.42 poorer. Is inflation real or what? Transitory, I’m corrected.      

I complain to ears that don’t listen, not out of disinterest but out of the fact this is old news. “So what’s new?” is the usual comment.

Is this what life’s come to, meek acquiescence to the inflationary robber barons on every aisle and shelf from food stores to lumber yards to appliance stores and car lots? Is Jimmy Carter running for President again?

No use remembering the old days when pennies counted, the days when $25 would get you through a weekend, drinks and dinner out, a movie and some left over for the Sunday collection plate.

Believe it or not, there were times in the Land of the Lost Cause when cotton was picked by hand. Wages were low, $.03 cents/pound.  That’s right, a picker dragged around a large cotton sack, sweated row by row and if blessed could pick one hundred pounds in a long day.  Wage? $3.00, 300 pennies.

A friend who has passed his allotted ten extra days and I had lunch this week.  Inflation was not the subject, but he did note how times have changed.

“In the ‘60’s, I made $500 a month in my first job. You?”

“Well, $450 for me, but I had a company car and expense account.”

Even then, this was a far cry from picking cotton and literally counting pennies at the end of the day.

I was rummaging around in some old letters my mother saved and one popped up. It was from me. It chronicled a mile-by-mile road trip to New Orleans with my aunt, uncle and grandmother.

In Biloxi we searched for a cheap motel, found one for $16 per night, with air conditioning (roaches came for free, I discovered). I was apparently focused on the value of pennies, even in those days. I was thirteen.

We had dinner (called supper in those days) in the restaurant. I had deviled crab, my uncle a steak and others fried shrimp. Cost? $12.00.  My letter indicated I was impressed and had cotton-picking perspective.

But that was then, this is now. Today we’re shocked while watching the erosion of value and purchasing power of our currency occur like a runaway train down a one-way track into oblivion.

We can continue to kick Nixon around for hammering the last nail into the coffin of our asset-based monetary system. Fort Knox was raided, the gold disappeared and nobody’s talking about where it went.  Some say China, but I have some in two of my molars.

There’s no limit now of how much cash can be created or what value is assigned to it.  As long as it will buy dog food, gas and whiskey, who cares. Until it reaches its stealthy fist into our bank account and filches our last remaining pennies. Cotton picking may make a comeback.

So, what does the future look like? Have we enough pennies to see us through? Or will we continue to live in anxiety, sweating out the parsimonious penny-pinching outlay of our remaining loose change?

Most seem to be surviving, ATM’s are active, Covid is on the run and somehow folks are managing to convince themselves the stock market will go up forever and is not related to Las Vegas. So far, anyway.

 * * *

We’re writing the chronicle of our own road trip now. Uncle Joe driving.  Gonna be interesting to read fifty years hence. 

For now, we have little choice…just buy the ticket, take the ride.

 

Bud Hearn

July 16, 2021

 

 

Fireworks & Freedom

 

“And it shall come to pass afterward, I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions…”  Joel 2:28

 *  *  *

What we have here is a minor 9^th Century BC prophet projecting his prognostication of great blessings which God promises to pour out on His people in the future. While He might not have had America in mind, per se, who can ignore the fulfillment of this prophesy in the founding and maintaining of our great land? And Sunday we’ll again celebrate this blessing.

Soon the skies of our Homeland will explode in celebration of the birthday of Independence Day, a dream come true. It marks the 245^th anniversary of our Republic. But what exactly will we be celebrating?

Freedom, that’s what, fruit that has matured from the Tree of Vision nurtured by courageous men and women, young and old. These patriots pledged their lives and fortunes to fulfill the deepest dream of mankind…Liberty. The Declaration of Independence is the Word, the seed of that powerful dream, a dream that should beat in the heart of every citizen. The Word became flesh.

What is Freedom? A chimerical wish-list envisioned by idle daydreamers? Or some romantic notion devised by Utopian wokish idealists? Hardly. The poet, Gibran, writes, “(Vague) and nebulous is the beginning of all things, but not their end…that which seems most feeble and bewildered in you is the strongest and most determined...and if you could hear the whispering of the dream, you would hear no other sound.” Thankfully, our ancestors heard that whisper. Do we?

From what compost is Freedom conceived? Often from the exploited detritus of oppression, enslavement, tyranny and brutality. It seethes in obscurity. It endures beneath the turf of tyrants, despots and dictators. When it can no longer be suppressed, its collective voice shouts, “No more!” It then rises from darkness into a tsunami of unrestrained power.

All births are bloody. Travail precedes each. Ben Franklin and a friend once watched a hot air balloon exhibit in a field of France. The balloon rose slowly from the ground, floated over trees, and landed in a nearby field.  Peasant farmers with pitchforks, ignorant and fearful, attacked it.

The friend remarked, “What good was that experiment?”

Franklin replied, “What good is any new-born baby?”

Freedom begins as a baby. But it grows, changes, dreams of its own destiny. America’s experiment with Freedom is older now, but no less vibrant. The baby is maturing, and it’s changing.

How does Freedom consist, hold together? Is it by milquetoast methods of submission to the winds of fortune? Or is it by, as Churchill said in England’s dark hours of WW II, “…blood, toil, tears and sweat…?” All revolutions and preservations of Freedom are achieved not by slick rhetoric, but by the shedding of blood. America’s experiment with Freedom is no different.

Is our dream of Freedom in jeopardy? Has it become a faded billboard for rent, cheap? A fast-food court of entitlements, tawdry trinkets and handouts to appease the masses? A nation of freeloaders and pilferers of the public treasury? Free everything…healthcare, food stamps, welfare checks, mortgages, you-name-it? Are we like drunks, sucking the dregs of the Dream at the bottom of a bottle of debt, celebrity politics and self-gratification? Scary thoughts.

Again this year the fireworks extravaganzas will bring to remembrance Francis Scott Key’s words, “…and the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.” And that’s what we need…a constant reminder that the horror of darkness has not extinguished our flag, the symbol of enduring Freedom.

On Wednesday the Spirit of Liberty will blow softly in the breezes. Firecrackers, both real and symbolic, will beat back the night for a little while longer. After the parades, picnics, BBQ, hot dogs, beer, watermelons and heartburn, we’ll sleep soundly, nurtured in the comfort of Freedom. But not all of us.

Somewhere on a dusty desolate plain a soldier with a weapon will keep a night watch. Somewhere a baby will be born. Their lives will merge with old men who still dream dreams, and with young men who still see visions.

Every generation has the power to retain or forfeit this Dream and Vision of Freedom. Which will we choose?

But for today, The Dream and the Vision live on. Now, begin the parades. God bless America.

 

 Bud Hearn

July 2, 2021