At this point, the smartest thing she can do is to quit the race and throw her support behind Trump.  But she won't do that because her ego is too big.  She's on a quest to prove that she's just as good as any man, but all she's doing is proving that she's nothing more than a liar ("I won't run if Trump is running") and a typical egotistical politician. I'd cut my hand off before I'd vote for her.

Deo Vindice

IHC

Memories of Happier Times

 Yeah, I'm feeling sorry for myself right now, but considering all that has happened to me in the past 3 months, I think I'm entitled.  (The spiced rum and coke I'm drinking also has a lot to do with it.)

But you have to admit that the past 3 months have been pretty crappy for me.  I unexpectedly lost one of my dogs, Mason, to liver cancer on December 10th; I lost my mom to old age on January 25th, and I unexpectedly lost my last remaining dog, Cage, to lung cancer this past Monday on February 19th.  So yeah, the past 3 months have been kinda crappy all the way around.

So I'm sitting here feeling sorry for myself and drinking my spiced rum and coke, and I start thinking about some of the pleasant memories I have of the dogs I've lost and of my Mom, and I find that there's a lot of them.  I mean, a shitload of them.  We had Mason for 9 years and Cage for 11, so yeah, there's a ton of pleasant memories in my head as far as they go.

But the most pleasant memories I have are of my mom.  Two of them come to mind right away, and those are the two I'm going to talk about now.  They both took place at around the same time, in the mid to late sixties when my family lived in Highland Springs, Virginia.

When I was a kid (as in ten years old) I absolutely LOVED schlocky old horror movies, especially the Republic movies from the 1950's where the creature was always the result of radiation left over from all of the atomic bomb testing.  ("THEM!" is still my favorite horror movie to this day.)  As far as I know, all of the major cities in the early sixties had a locally produced program that aired every Saturday night, and they'd all show horror movies from the fifties and sixties, some of the old Hammer Studios movies being the best of them.  Richmond was no different, and at 11:30PM every Saturday night they would air "Shock Theater," hosted by "The Bowman Body."  The host would always make his entrance by popping up out of his coffin, sometimes sticking just his leg out and rocking it back and forth before he's sit up and look at the camera, grinning from ear to ear.  Yeah, it was schlocky as hell, and even to an eight-year-old it wasn't funny, but he tried.

Since the program came on so late at night and because I was so young, my mom was afraid that the movies would scare the crap out of me so she always stayed up with me while I watched them.  But with as many old horror movies as I watched on that show, I don't think I ever saw one from beginning to end - I always fell asleep halfway through, and my mom would pick me up, carry me to my room, and put me to bed.  

The other memory is my favorite memory of my mom, hands down.  This one took place in the summer of 1969 when I was on a Little League baseball team, the Cardinals.  I played catcher, and to be brutally honest about it, I wasn't all that good a player.  Truth be told, I kinda sucked.  I was a good catcher, sure, but as far as hitting goes - nah.  And the only reason I played at all is because we had a pitcher named Timmy that no one could catch but me, so every time he pitched I was behind the plate.  And because he was six inches taller than the average little leaguer and had a fastball that travelled at the speed of sound, he pitched a lot - which means that I caught a lot.

And struck out a lot when it was my turn at bat.

Except for this one game against the Braves, the team that the kind of obnoxious fat redheaded guy across the street, Rusty, played for.  (What did you think a redheaded kid was gonna be called, anyway?)  To this day I don't know how I did it, but I got just the right pitch and landed a solid hit, sending the ball waaaaaay out into right field.  I managed to get a triple out of it, the only triple I ever got in my entire life, and when I stopped at third base and dusted myself off from where I had just slid into the base, I looked up into the stands looking for my folks who were at the game.

And there was my mom, a huge grin on her face, her hands clenched into fists high above her head, jumping up and down in the stands and pumping her fists in the air, yelling to beat the band.  

I don't think I'd ever seen my mom that happy, before or since.

So whenever I'm down and need a smile, I think of my mom and that Saturday afternoon on the Little League baseball diamond behind the old Highland Springs Elementary School in the summer of 1969, when I got the only triple of my entire life and made my mom happy and proud.

Thanks, Mom.  You're the best.

I love you, and I miss you.

Deo Vindice

IHC