me
was born, in Oklahoma of all places
lived, is living
will die, someday, hopefully in the early afternoon, after lunch, because I like lunch, or dinner as my grandpa called it, back in Oklahoma. My grandpa was from Texas, had blue eyes, white hair and broke both wrists as a kid when he fell out of a tree near the Brazos river. I have blue eyes, white hair and I broke both wrists, when I was a kid, when I fell off a basketball rim near Oklahoma Memorial Stadium in Norman. I also broke both elbows when I fell from a bicycle near a Kinkos in Tucson.
My grandpa was cool, was neat, took me and my brother fishing often when we (me and my brother) were kids. This one time, on an Easter Sunday when I was around 9 and my brother was around 6, all three of us climbed the back of the Lake Ellsworth dam, the rocks that made up the dam, so we could fish on the other side. At the top was a barbed wire fence that my brother had a hard time getting over, but we got him over. Later, while fishing, Grandpa caught a little bass, unhooked it, and dropped it into the half of the minnow bucket on the bank. The little bass hit the water in the minnow bucket and jumped out, right back into the lake. My little brother threw down his fishing pole, said, “Well, there’s no use catching ‘em if you’re gonna throw ‘em right back” and stormed off, up the rocks, through the fence he had such a hard time with earlier, and down to the family picnic place. Grandpa told that story often, very often, almost every time me and my brother visited, and we never got tired of it. Well, I never got tired of it, Grandpa never got tired of it, but my little brother may have gotten tired of it. He never let on, if he did.
Back to me.
I hope to die in the early afternoon, after lunch, then dumped into an isolated desert location to feed the coyotes and gila monsters and velvet ants and pygmy owls and Harris hawks and turkey vultures and scorpions. That would be a good use for my dead body. I won’t know, of course, ’cause I’ll be dead, but if I were alive, using my dead body in that way would make me happy.
If I die. I’ve survived 3 surgeries, four broken bones, a concussion, falling out of an helicopter, four cuts requiring stitches, a dislocated finger or three, having my wisdom teeth extracted by an Army dentist and near-sightedness, so I may not die. I hope not. Maybe I’m immortal, but don’t know it, won’t know it for another 60 years or so. I hope so.
I say to you, poor you reading of my boring life, I say to you, be you, be me, by what you want to be whatever that may be. It’s worked for me. I’ve been a student, a soldier, a teacher, a statistician, a spouse, a louse, a cheater, a pumpkin eater, a hunter, a fisher, but I have never never never ever been Bismarck, North Dakota. I have been a small town in Wyoming, however, with a population of 26, all between 25 and 35 years of age. I am not sage, though I have been a sage, a plant, an herb, without peaches or any other fruit, but I do know what I know, superficially at best.
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