Reflex Unload

by

Jerry Dale McDonnell©2014
Published in MungBeing #56 (reflections)

Numbers III


1.
Ratios

Bees construct hexagon hives—6 sides—made of wax and honey.

Some brown bears have 3 cubs
if honey and fish are plentiful.
 
Everyone starts with 1 mother and 1 father
            some end with 3 or more grandfathers
                        maybe 2 or more grandmothers.

2.
Orders

17 years old. Boot camp. Herded. Stripped. Hair cut like a con.
Civvy Clothes bagged and tagged like bodies.  
New uniforms stuffed in a duffle.
Fall in. Atteeen shun! 

Our first 2 orders:
1. You will never forget your serial number as long as you live.
            2. You will only remember the good times.

We lived in our mind outside war
Like a monk in a brothel with extra cash from the poor box,
We knew we had to spend it to win and lose.
It wasn’t pro choice.
            Win, lose, a crapshoot: war begets more wars.
Lessons learned fodder strategies to fight the next one.
            My serial number laughs, finds that blotter of acid.
Drops it. It remembers the good times.
The mind is a different matter.
3.
Friends

1089-W. 
Our phone number in the 30’s, early 40’s.
A live human operator took our number
Plugged it forward with a deft hand. You could ask her
How her day was going, how her kids were doing.
She wasn’t a booked face Wi-Fied from space,
She was alive, a live breathing voice
Who had eggs for breakfast, toast and coffee.
As close to you as a warm cozy campfire
In a fall evening when the frogs were serenading.
1089-W.
                 I remember . . . a friend.

4.
Addresses

708 Acres St. Burlington, Iowa.
A tiny house, 1 barely bedroom, 3 rooms, 600 square feet . . . maybe. 
Small living room, side room a hair bigger than the bed with a double French door as bedroom, kitchen the largest room. I slept in the attic with a slanted roof like a tent, accessed it through the bathroom. A pooper, a bathtub, a sink. Dad, step-grandpa, always put the seat up on the stool and took a dump sitting on the bare porcelain. Houses close on each side. The backyard went down to a drainage that if you followed it for 1 mile or less you would reach the Mississippi River. “Can you spell Mississippi?” Dad, my step grandfather, asked. It was the first word I learned to spell: 11 letters long.

200 pounds of coal came down the chute to the basement to feed the furnace.
2 glass bottles of milk were delivered to the front door in the morning.

Played trumpet. 2nd seat in grade school all city band.
58 years later. Trumpet sits idle behind the door

5.
Formulations

Buried 1 grandmother. I called her Mam. Met my mother who took me from my Step Grandpa. Dad. Met my mother’s father (Mam’s 1st husband) a dirt farmer in southern Illinois, who didn’t get electricity until 1944.

Stole 1 pistol, a .35 caliber 6 shooter, from an uncle.
Red Skelton on the radio made me laugh 100 times a week.
                 I joined his fan club.

One framed, autographed picture of Red Skelton today hangs on my wall.
       Uncle took pistol back in 1946.
     My first unsuccessful theft.

6.
Equations

1956. High School. Swam my last lap on the swim team. Backstroke: fitting. Played my 1st role as Mr. Marshall in The Little Foxes. Drama teacher was disappointed I was a senior. I wanted to be a Forest Ranger. Or an airplane pilot. Maybe a soldier.

“Good luck in spite of yourself,” my counselor wrote in my yearbook. Graduated Suma Dead Drunk; went to jail 3 hours after graduation.

7.
Comparisons

11-22-19 (**make sound: Bump Ba!), Birthday! Same day, different year President John F. Kenney was shot. Died. Show cancelled that night. I was playing Marco in Arthur Miller’s, View From the Bridge in the San Francisco Bay Area.

8.
Assumptions

58 years later: Last nights dinner is forgotten like a hole in a discarded sock.
       U.S. Navy Serial number 515-**-** burned on my brain
           in an easy chair floating down the Bitterroot River in Montana
                laughing, smoking a joint,
                      taking a hit of whiskey with a beer chaser,
                           would drop acid if it were at hand. 
            If God were generous acid would come by pony express.

9.
Presumptions

According to National Geographic, thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of Monarch Butterflies are missing in action and fish don’t like acid.

100 Senators and too many Congressmen are born bent with calculated calculators, reckless religions, musty morals, rusty rifles, deformed details and

I’m not allergic to bees.
I love bears.
I’m the only grandparent left.
I remember my serial number.
Some of the good times are a lie.



__________________________

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Regretful Death

Published in Cirque, Vol. 7, No. 2; 2016 www.cirquejournal.com by  Jerry Dale McDonnell Above the routine of the rasping, cutting sound of the crosscut saw the noise and demeanor of the late-September afternoon woods changed. We didn't immediately quantify the change. We just knew it changed. The odor of standing pine and fir, of sawdust and fresh cut wood, the light dampness of the air, the gurgling water in the creek dancing around rocks all remained, but something had changed. Even the camp robbing Gray jays in the trees were on alert.   Living in the woods, paying attention is just the way of things. Sounds, smells, clouds, the wind, changes in plants and trees, migration and habits of animals are like news on the radio. In the timber-pole corral our lead and riding horses were agitated, which is a blip on the radar. Joker, the smallest, but oldest and wisest horse of the herd snorted, laid its ears back briefly then spun and jumped to the other side of ...
Read more

Glory Royal

Published in Over The Transom #27: February, 2016 by Jerry Dale McDonnell It’s our bar. A day’s end hard work bar with a too recent nod toward tourist hippie/yuppie types. It’s long been my comfort zone where I’ve spent much of my dead-end life and where she found me and took a hold of me and twisted me around. Bras of various cup sizes—donated after the shots and beer back have done their work—hang down from the ceiling like plucked chickens. Twas usually around midnight when the occasional gal pulled her bra out from under her blouse, or if the booze had brought her to stupid, tits were bared. Hooting and hollering of tit bragging and admiration is standard. Two visiting strangers started the collection years ago but now most of the hundred or more hanging bras are from young just turned legal drinking age city girls sometimes escorted by long hairs with unearned holes in their jeans on a weekend toot to our small village in the mountains just shy of Canada. We, a bare knuck...
Read more

Beluga Fall

Published in Explorations, ©Jerry D. McDonnell, 2000 Anchorage, Alaska; September. 1993 He said he was sorry. Some people believed him. The judge didn't. He was still a teenager . . . eighteen.   They gave him sixty-five years. No trial. West of Dillingham, Alaska; March 1976. The view from under the bed is limited: six shoes on the bare boards,   the empty whiskey bottle spinning crazily. The gun-shot explodes; cringing, he holds his ears, his mouth frozen open. A body slams to the floor. The bottle stops spinning against the fallen face of his older brother whose cheek is smashed up against his eye, his tongue hanging from the open mouth. A second shot rocks the bare, wood walls of the tar-paper shack; he flinches, banging his head on the bed springs and bites his tongue in terror tasting his own blood. Another body shakes the room as it hits the floor; the face of his older sister twitches as it hammers into the bare wood.   Dead, his brother stares a...
Read more