Author Archives: The Night Writer

Grandfather’s Day

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by the Night Writer

I was moved by the story yesterday of the Mentor, MN man who was killed when he used his own body to protect his 25-year-old daughter from debris during a tornado. The man, Wes Michaels, was the owner of the Cenex station in Mentor and was taking the day off to celebrate his 58th birthday. His daughter was covering for him at the station. When he heard the news reports of severe weather headed their direction he went to his business to check on things and to warn his daughter and their customers. Shortly after arriving he saw the tornado coming right at them, and directed everyone into the business’s walk-in cooler, finally laying himself down on top of his daughter as the tornado hit. She survived with bruises and some stiffness … and an eternal reminder of a father’s love.

It symbolizes for me the ideal of a father literally laying down his life for his child; I’d even imagine that Mr. Michaels didn’t even think twice in the moment but reacted automatically as he would have done if his daughter were five instead of 25. I will even imagine that any father I know would do the same thing, even though we may never come face to face with a tornado. This morning, however, as I spoke to our Inside Outfitters group (consisting mainly of men going through drug and/or chemical rehab at Minnesota Teen Challenge) I wanted them to understand that the willingness to give up your life in a sudden instant is merely a dramatic part of what it means to lay down your life as a father.

Several years ago I wrote an essay on marriage where I suggested that most husbands, if it came down to it, would be willing to take a bullet for their wives. The real question, I said, is “Will you give her the last doughnut?” The point I was getting at is that we need to “die” to ourselves daily by putting aside our selfish interests (and newspapers) to do what is necessary to support our wives. It’s not as romantic as going out in a blaze of glory, but it is more beneficial to long-term happiness. Similarly, what I wanted the men to grasp today is that being a father bears a quite similar obligation; to put aside our self-interests as needed in order to provide a better life for our children. In the case of these men, for example, that means denying our desires or rationalizations to drink or do drugs in order to create a stable environment and so we can “be there” — as opposed to prison — when our children (and wives) need us.

I elaborated a bit on Mr. Michaels’ example, noting how he saw the storm coming, and how he put himself into position to protect his daughter. Similarly, we need to recognize the storms that can come and put ourselves in a position to love, nurture and protect…even if our inclination is do something else. Even if we didn’t receive an example of that ourselves growing up. I know that that is an ideal that my wife and I have tried to live up to for our children, and it has shaped the way we invested our time and spent our money. I can’t say that I’ve never indulged myself or that I’ve been totally self-sacrificing, or that I’ve always been cheerful about the responsibility, but it is an obligation that I recognize as being very real and even tangible.

So, anyway, I shared these thoughts with the men this morning and, as often happens, meditated upon them for myself after I went back to my seat. I did a little check-up to see if I’m still trying to live up to this ideal now that my children are older; now that, in fact, one of my daugthers is about to have a child of her own. And, as it often happens, I was immediately confronted with a situation where I have been harboring my own selfish thoughts and thinking about my own comfort and not about what others needed from me.

As my daughter shared the other day, she is planning on a home birth (which means — since she and Ben are living with us while he finishes his internship and last semester of seminary — my home). She has acquired the necessary accessories and assembled a crack team of her husband, mother, close friends and an experienced mid-wife all ready to swing into action at any moment day or night. For my part, as much as I am eager to see my first grandchild, I don’t want to be anywhere close to the action as the labor takes place and the baby arrives. I was there in person with my wife as our children were born and it was something I wouldn’t have dreamed of missing. The thought of hearing my own daughter’s travail, however, makes me weak in the knees. After all these years of looking out for her, it just seems so counter-intuitive. Of course, I was thinking only of what it meant to me, and not to her. I have said that I wanted to be playing 36 holes of golf while this was going on, or waiting a mile away at Buffalo Wild Wings to get the news and, bless her heart, my daughter has merely nodded and guarded her expression, though I believe I could tell it hurt her to some extent, even though I’ve tried to deny it to myself.

As I confronted this in myself today I knew that my place is here. Not in the same room, but close by, praying, jingling car keys, lifting furniture…just — as I’ve always promised my girls — being there. Even if I’d rather face down a tornado.

UPDATE:
Here’s more about Wes Michaels. Sounds like he was a great example in so many ways.

Running with the storm

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by the Night Writer

I’m cruising west on the two-lane County Road 50 heading out of Miesville and making for Hwy. 52. When I had stepped out of King’s Place moment’s before the northern and western skies were luminous despite it being after 9:00 p.m. To the east and south, however, lay Mordor with lines of lightning crackling non-stop between walls of bruised eggplant. I had turned toward the light instead.

Now, ahead of me, the sky is a dingy parfait of blue and pink with gray-brown clouds striated across like a relief-map of the Hebrides archipelago. Appropriately, George Mauer’s “Running With the Storm” shuffles up on the stereo and the piano pounds as rain-drops start to gravel on my rear window. Looking to my right the dark green farm fields hold houses, barns, silos and electrical towers that all seem to glow from within. To my left, the sky looks like an overturned basket of eggs. Still ahead of me, the glowing sky is smaller but even in the face of the inevitable it is not going down without a fight. Not tonight.

Grilling at the Graybar Hotel

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by the Night Writer

A little over a year ago I started going down to the Red Wing Correctional Facility a couple of times a month to host a chapel service for the men. Red Wing is primarily a youth facility, referred to by Bob Dylan in his song “The Walls of Red Wing”, but they do have one “cottage” (more like a dorm) that holds 42 men. As prisons go, I suppose it’s not too bad a place. For some of the inmates it is their first prison, but most of the men have come from heavier security facilities such as Stillwater or Oak Park where they have already done significant time. Red Wing is often a last stop for these men as they near their release date, spending several months here under lighter security and with the possibility of supervised visits outside the facility to go to church or serve on work crews.

Last fall some of the guys asked if I’d consider doing a Thursday night Bible Study instead of the Sunday chapel so they wouldn’t have to choose between the chapel service or going outside when they had the chance. That wasn’t a problem, and after working things out with the prison administration we started Thursday meetings in November. One of my scheduled visits even fell on Christmas Eve and I was pretty excited about the opportunity to do that but unfortunately the snow and ice storm that hit that day kept me from making the trip. I made it down there the Sunday after Christmas, though, and brought a package of microwave popcorn for every man in the cottage. The reaction that day, and the reports I had from the guys on Thursday nights got me thinking about what other out-of-the-ordinary thing we might do for the cottage, especially as the Thursday night bunch were showing a strong interest in serving others. Eventually the idea came to me to have the Bible Study put on a cook-out for the cottage. I jumped through a couple of hoops with the prison administration and was a little surprised to receive permission. I was aided by the woman who coordinates volunteer activities who also suggested inviting all the other volunteers to the cook-out as a thank you.

With that settled, the Thursday group got together and hatched our plan and set a date. My church would provide the angus burgers, chicken breasts, cheese, BBQ sauce and jalapeno peppers and the prison kitchen would provide the buns, beans, potato salad, onions, lettuce, watermelon and root beer floats for dessert. My guys were very enthusiastic about the plan, especially “T.” who entered the prison system in his teens and has very nearly spent half of his life in prison. He was also nervous about grilling. “I’ve never cooked out in my life,” he told me.

Last Thursday, June 10 was the date we settled on and we worked out all the details. We even prayed for good weather! You might, however, remember that it rained just about every day last week, including Thursday. In fact, a doozy of a thunderstorm hit Red Wing earlier that afternoon. I was unconcerned; to my mind, this was something God had inspired and He would make a way (in fact, probably had already made a way) for this to happen. Sure enough, even though it rained throughout my drive to Red Wing, it had become a light drizzle by the time I pulled into the parking lot. By the time I’d passed through security and was inside the walls of Red Wing it had stopped completely. The guys and I got the charcoal fired up for the burgers and we put the chicken breasts (which had been pre-smoked in mesquite) in the kitchen ovens to heat. One of the guys in my group, T., told me how concerned he’d been about the weather, especially during the storm earlier in the day. “T,” I said, “you have to walk by faith, not sight. This was something God planned, so you just have to trust in the end result, even if a few storms show up along the way.” He grasped the idea.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m going to have to remember that.”

I had been told by the Volunteer Coordinator that we wouldn’t be able to say grace in front of the entire group before eating. (For that matter, brats weren’t allowed on the menu because we couldn’t have any pork products; in fact, if we put any pork on the grill the prison would have to throw the grill away). That didn’t mean, however, that the cooks couldn’t say grace before we carried the food to the cottage. Part of the prayer was that the men would feel God’s love through the evening. We had people already set up to serve the guys as they came through the buffet line, but I positioned myself behind the servers so I could see the faces of the men as they came through, much as I do on the Saturday morning Inside Outfitters breakfasts. I wasn’t disappointed … and neither were the men! If anything, I was amazed at how they conscientiously loaded their 10-inch foam plates with a chicken sandwich, a burger, beans, potato salad on top of the beans, watermelon on top of the potato salad and all the cheese, onions and jalapenos they could fit under a bun. They all carried their plates into the dining area and filled the tables there and began eating, talking, laughing and generally having a good time, which I assumed was pretty much typical for the dinner hour. One of the men who I hadn’t met before told me, however, that one of the best parts of the night was that guys were socializing with each other. Normally, he said, everyone stays pretty much to himself or with one or two friends.

Before dessert the coordinator thanked the various volunteers who had come for the evening (there was an older lady there who told me she teaches a crocheting class – “We call ourselves ‘the Chain Gang!'”) for the time they put in, and then introduced me as the head of the Thursday Bible Study and sponsor of the feast. There was some very satisfying applause, whistles and “whoop-whoops”. I had been told, of course, that I couldn’t preach or mention God if I spoke to the group, so I merely said that one of the men I was eating with that evening had already thanked me and said that something like this really helped the men feel as if they weren’t forgotten while they were inside. I then indicated the volunteers who were present and told the men that they were an indication that people outside were constantly thinking of them and planning things to do them good. “As proof of that,” I said, “a good friend of yours even asked me to do this cook-out so that you’d know he hasn’t forgotten you, even though you might not have talked for awhile, and I just want to say, ‘you’re welcome.'” And with that — along with more applause, a lot of smiles and nods…and a very relieved look on the face of one of the coordinators — I was done!

I spent some time mingling with the guys, congratulating T. and the Thursday night bunch, and getting a few stories from some new guys. It may have been overcast outside, but it was glowing in that dining hall and it was still going strong when I finally gathered up my things and got ready to leave. Something that T. had said to me a couple of weeks ago came back to me. “Listening to you,” he had said, “I’m beginning to believe that there are no such things as accidents. That everything happens for a reason, especially the people that you meet.”

In a reflective mood, I thought of Dylan’s song again as I checked out through Security, ready to pass once again through the “walls of Red Wing”. Some have assumed that young Bob had spent some time in that facility, but that’s not been proven. In fact, his lyrics don’t describe the facility that I’ve seen, but there is a verse that does seem to fit as I consider the choices I’d made in order to be there and the things that I’ve learned from the men I’ve met over the past 16 months

Oh, some of us’ll end up
In St. Cloud Prison,
And some of us’ll wind up
To be lawyers and things,
And some of us’ll stand up
To meet you on your crossroads,
From inside the walls,
The walls of Red Wing.

I stowed my gear in the car and headed back for the Cities. A couple of mile north of Red Wing it started to rain again.

Atlas Shrugs, PayPal blinks

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by the Night Writer

On Sunday Powerline had a post about PayPal (an eBay company), the on-line money and commerce service, deciding that the popular conservative blog Atlas Shrugs was a hate site and subsequently informing it’s proprietor, Pamela Geller, that it was restricting her account last Friday. Atlas Shrugged isn’t on my list of sites I read regularly but I look in from time to time. Pamela even linked to me once back in the day. From what I’ve seen the site is dedicated to reporting on the violence and evil done in the name of Islam, but certainly hasn’t issued death threats, called for the execution or oppression of others or celebrated the actions of those who attack, shoot or blow-up people with different beliefs. Apparently, in PayPal’s eyes and in Powerline’s words, “truth is the new hate speech.”

Over the weekend, however, PayPal received a lot of calls, emails and forum commentary criticizing their decision. Monday afternoon Pamela was contacted by a PayPal executive who apologized for the mistake and lifted the restriction.

As many of you know, on Friday of last week, my paypal account was “restricted.” After a recent review of my account they said, “it has been determined” that I was “currently in violation of PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy. Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for items that promote hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime.”
Huh?

I posted it over the weekend and received over a thousand letters of support, hundreds of ccs of paypal account cancellations…….. the people spoke. Love that.

And so today, about an hour ago, a very pleasant and rather deliberately clueless executive called me from paypal to say it was all a big misunderstanding and Atlas would be reinstated (and the subsequent restriction of SIOA and FDI removed also).

Pamela asked the exec why her blog was designated a “hate” site, by whom and on what basis. The exec didn’t know. Why were aggressive Muslim sites such as the one that called for the deaths of Comedy Central executives, or one selling DVDs of the radical imam Anwar al Awlaki still allowed to be PayPal vendors? Not sure. Other answers were conciliatory but not illuminating or encouraging in the event others are accused of the same thing in the future. As a result, Atlas Shrugged is not going back to PayPal, and has already joined an alternative service, GPal (motto: “friendly payments”) and already has the GPal button up in its sidebar.

g-pal buy-now-buttons-small-donate

It’s all a simple misunderstanding

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 by the Night Writer

Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s attorney, Sam Adam, Jr., stated yesterday that Blago “didn’t take a dime” and simply trusted the wrong people. He went on to say that, “The guy ain’t corrupt” and that “not a single penny of ill-gotten money went into Mr. Blogojevich’s campaign fund or his own pockets.”

I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation. In fact, I’m sure I’ve heard it explained before. Oh, right — it was all laid out in the musical, “Fiorello” that dealt with the break-up of the Tammany Hall machine. The song, “A Little Tin Box” explains it in a way so easy to understand that you’ll wonder why you never thought of it yourself:

JUDGE: Mister “X,” may we ask you a question?

It’s amazing, is it not,

that the city pays you slightly less

than 50 bucks a week,

yet you’ve purchased a private yacht?

 

WITNESS: I am positive Your Honor must be joking.

Any working man can do what I have done.

For a month or two I simply gave up smoking

and I put my extra pennies one by one…

into a Little Tin Box,

a Little Tin Box

that a little tin key unlocks.

There is nothing unorthodox

about a Little Tin Box.

In a Little Tin Box, a Little Tin Box

that a little tin key unlocks,

there is honor and purity,

lots of security,

in a Little Tin Box.

 

JUDGE: Mister “Y,” we’ve been told

you don’t feel well,

and we know you’ve lost your voice,

but we wonder how you managed,

on the salary you make,

to acquire a new Rolls Royce.

 

WITNESS: You’re implying I’m a crook and I say no sir!

There is nothing in my past I care to hide.

I’ve been taking empty bottles to the grocer,

and each nickel that I got was put aside…

into a Little Tin Box,

a Little Tin Box

that a little tin key unlocks.

There is nothing unorthodox

about a Little Tin Box.

In a Little Tin Box, a Little Tin Box

there’s a cushion for life’s rude shocks.

There is faith, hope and charity,

hard-won prosperity,

in a Little Tin Box.

 

JUDGE: Mister “Z,” you’re a junior official,

and your income’s rather low

yet, you’ve kept a dozen women

in the very best hotels.

Would you kindly explain, how so?

 

WITNESS: I can see Your Honor doesn’t pull his

punches

and it looks a trifle fishy, I’ll admit,

but for one whole week I went without my lunches

and it mounted up, Your Honor, bit by bit…

It’s just a

Little Tin Box,

a Little Tin Box

that a little tin key unlocks.

There is nothing unorthodox

about a Little Tin Box.

In a Little Tin Box, a Little Tin Box

all a-glitter with blue-chip stocks,

there is something delectable,

almost respectable,

in a Little Tin Box!

It appears Mr. Adam will use an intesting line of defense that combines purity and sentience:

“You have to be comatose not to figure out how to get a dollar out of $52 billion,” Mr. Adam said, referring to the state budget. “But who didn’t? Him!” he said indicating his client.

Rent to ride

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by the Night Writer

Last summer when we were in Barcelona we saw a lot of bike racks strategically placed around the city and near the beach, with each rack featuring small, distinctive red and white bikes bearing a “Bicing” logo. Bicing is the name of the municipal bike rental program in Barcelona where potential riders buy a one-year subscription via credit card – I believe it was 6 Euros at the time – and then receive a Bicing card that lets them unlock Bicing bikes at one of the kiosks. If they returned the bike to another kiosk within 30 minutes there was no charge, with longer rentals resulting in nominal costs being assessed to the Bicing-members credit card already on record. Similarly, if the bike was never returned, the replacement cost was billed to the credit card as well. I remember thinking the plan was kind of neat and might have even tried it on some of those leg-weary walking days if there had been a way to get a membership card quickly (they are mailed to you). I thought the idea had some merit in Barcelona where it is balmy pretty much year round, but I figured the climate of Minnesota made this idea a non-starter for the Twin Cities.

bicing 2

bicing

Apparently, I was wrong.

A program called Nice Ride MN is rolling out in Minnepolis this week that is very similar to the Bicing model I saw in Barcelona. As with Bicing, the memberships are pre-paid ($60/year) with credit cards as security and trips less than 30 minutes are free (keep it more than an hour and a half, though, and you’ll be billed $6/hour). The bikes are funky-looking but functional; blue and green here instead red and white, but not the kind of ride you’d likely want to steal other than for the sheer perversity of it. They are most definitely short-trip bikes, with smaller wheels and frames clearly not meant for cruising. As the Nice Ride MN site says:

Nice Ride bikes are designed for one job, short trips in the city by people wearing regular clothes and carrying ordinary stuff. All Nice Ride bikes are the same size, the only thing you may have to adjust is the seat, and it’s easy!

I can see them being especially popular around the Chain of Lakes (where biker/walker/jogger relations are already touchy), downtown and the University, though it appears from the program map that there just a couple of kiosks near Lake Calhoun and none around the other lakes. It cost $3.2 million to get this started with roughly a third of that coming from a donation from Blue Cross-Blue Shield, a third from the federal government and a third from the City of Minneapolis and various corporate donors.

More utopian versions of this concept have been tried here before, such as the infamous “White Bike” program in Minneapolis. Here white bikes were left around the city with the idea that people would use the bikes as needed and then leave them for other people to use. Of course, those bikes soon disappeared or were trashed. This latest version addresses that with the credit card subscriptions and billing.

Oh, and forget about using these bikes in the winter — they’ll be removed from the streets and the program shut down December through March (your annual subscription is actually more like an 8-month subscription).

Personally, I think that if this was a truly great idea then some private company would have come up with the plan and the capital. Instead, the government with some private help is funding it and while I might like the same money to go to, say, fixing pot-holes, I suppose you could classify it as an amenity that makes the city more “liveable”. It will be interesting to see how expensive the program is to maintain and administer and how people here respond. The Barcelona Bicing program began in 2007 and the bikes we saw last year all looked to be in good shape but I have no idea how often a bike has to be repaired or replaced. I might even consider using the program myself if I had such a need in the downtown area, though I’m afraid that design and colors of the bikes, along with my physique, might cause people to think a bear had just escaped from the circus.

It’s in the game

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by the Night Writer

There is news this week from Canada about a youth recreational soccer league in Ottawa where a team that gets ahead by six goals automatically forfeits the game. It’s the latest devolution of the “Mercy” rules in place in most youth sports these days, though this policy is enough to make one argue for a “Sanity” rule. The message it inevitably sends is that “if you suck bad enough there will always be someone else we can make pay for it.” Sure, they’re just kids now, but they grow up with that mentality and the next thing you know you’ve got multi-billion dollar bailouts for businesses too insecure to fail.

That’s about all I’m going to say about the cultural implications of this mis-begotten policy, there are plenty of people to do that. It does, however, remind me of the time when I coached a girls (9&10 year-olds) fast-pitch softball team. They were all pretty much new to the game so my focus was on teaching fundamentals and sportsmanship and trying to make it fun. The league had a mercy rule that limited a team to scoring no more than five runs per inning. If you got to five runs, regardless of how many outs were on the board, you were done at the plate for that inning. You could, however, get more than five runs if extra runs were scored as part of the same play. For example, if you had scored four runs already and bases were loaded a home run would still add four more runs. You can read more about this league here, but we were undefeated going into our last game. In the last inning the other team scored four runs to cut our lead to two, and loaded the bases with two outs. We were playing on a field scheduled for a men’s league game immediately after ours, and while we weren’t in danger of going overtime, the men wanted to get on the field for their warm-ups. Clearly, intentionally walking the batter would score the magical fifth run, ending the game and preserving the win. The girls knew this, and my pitcher asked me if she should walk the batter. I said no, play it out. This made her pretty nervous. Meanwhile, the guys were clamoring for me to walk the batter so they could get on the field. I turned to them and asked, “Is that how you learned to play the game?”

That shut them down a bit, and I called a timeout and deliberately sauntered out to the mound, and called my infield together. I told the pitcher, “you can do this, and your teammates are here to make the play.” Everyone went back to their positions and a couple of pitches later the batter hit a soft pop-up that was caught by our second-baseman, who also happened to be the tiniest kid on the entire field. The whole team was elated, jumping around and hugging. I don’t think they would have been quite as excited if we’d simply walked in the “losing” run and walked off the field, and I can’t imagine that the other team would have felt they’d been treated fairly in that scenario.

Frankly, I don’t know if anyone on that team remembers that moment now, some 34 years later (though a certain former second-baseman might), but I hope they do. I hope that as they grew up they remembered that they had been able to test themselves, to develop their own skills and had learned how to trust each other as well. I hope they learned that you have to take risks sometimes to get what you want, while always playing within the rules. Along the way I hoped they learned that winning is fun, but losing is part of life, too, and that experiencing both makes you better able to celebrate with others when they win, and commiserate with them when they lose. While any glittery trophy they received that day likely now corrodes in some rural Missouri landfill, perhaps something purer still gleams inside them. Could one moment in one season made a difference? Perhaps not, but I hope that in later seasons with other coaches the same lessons and principles were reinforced and carried over into other areas of their lives.

After all, it’s in the game.

Highway of death

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by the Night Writer

In the last 30 years I’ve driven between Minnesota and Missouri in all kinds of weather and in all seasons. Spring and early summer are the most scenic times. Missouri has always seemed to be kind of a brown state to me: mud and wet clay in the winter and baked dust in the summer, while in the fall the leaves seem to turn dry and brown all too quickly. It is a hilly state, however, and a welcome contrast to the flat lands and straight roads of Iowa that we aim our way across to get there. In the spring time the hills are green with trees, turning blue-gray as they hump their way to the horizon. Come summer, a humid haze hangs over these hills like an old gym sock, making your mouth dry just to look at them.

Spring, however, also seems to be the time when various critters get a touch of the wanderlust and a desire to see what’s on the other side of the road – especially if it’s female. Disney would say they are twitter-pated, but they are often twitter-pasted. Whether because they are distracted or, conversely, perhaps too single-minded, the animals don’t pay sufficient attention to what must be the mind-boggling closing rates of oncoming metal and rubber monsters. This particular trip seems gorier than most as we see a steady collection of gob-smacked fauna on the shoulders of the road, in the medians, and often on the highway itself. Dogs, cats, deer, ubiquitous raccoons, rabbits and sometimes unidentifiable flats of fur are garnish for the vultures we frequently see loafing in the skies ahead of us, recognizable by the spread, finger-like feathers at the ends of their wings. From the time I spent working on a road crew in this state, however, I know this is also the season for the most unlikely of road warriors: turtles.

When you think of how many swift animals such as deer and rabbits get turned into pizza it is strange indeed to ponder what impulse could incent an unimpulsive tortoise to cross the road, and the ugly odds against a successful arrival. Still, they are shattered left and right this time of year. Does Darwin know about this?

At one point, I’m driving as we cruise down a relatively straight stretch of two-lane Highway 63 when we see a black shape that looks like a large serving platter in the middle of the oncoming lane about 100 yards ahead. It could be a piece of rubber from a blown tire. I’m trying to categorize it as my wife asks, “Is it roadkill?” I’ve noticed, however, that it has actually moved a little closer to the other side of the road as we watched, and I’ve also noticed an empty flat-bed truck with a red cab coming our way. “Not yet,” I reply. “Snapping turtle.”

Sure enough, the truck has edged over and I think it’s trying to straddle the snapper; turtle shells can be hell on tires. Instead, about 50 yards ahead of us the left front tire hits the turtle at 60 miles per hour. I’m expecting squish but instead it’s boom as the turtle blows up like a grenade; blood, parts of shell and parts I don’t even want to try to describe go flying up into the air as high as the roof of the truck. I’m too shocked to look at anything but the road so I don’t see the face of the driver as the rig sweeps by us so I don’t know if he’s smiling or gulping.

It’s probably two miles before I reach back into the box of ju-jubes on the console next to me.

Got me a hard-headed woman

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by the Night Writer

This shuffled up today, from the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens…

I’m looking for a hard-headed woman
One who will take me for myself
And if I had my hard-headed woman
I won’t need nobody else, no, no, no
I’m looking for a hard-headed woman,
One who will make me do my best
And if I find my hard-headed woman
I know he rest of my life will be blessed, yes, yes, yes
I know a lot of fancy dancers
People who can glide you on a floor
They move so smooth but have no answers,
When you ask “Why did you come here for?”
I know many fine feathered friends
But their friendliness depends on how you do
They know many sure fired ways
To find out the one who pays and how you do
I’m looking for a hard-headed woman
One who will make me feel so good
And if I find my hard-headed woman,
I know my life will be as it should, yes, yes, yes

I know someone like that.