Friday conversation in zippy's world...
"You've sure done better with your tomatoes this year than I have with mine!"
His voice barked up from behind me as I was hunched over pruning the roses at the front of my lawn. He was thin, but fit, elderly but spry, clean shaven, bright eyed. He wore his old Marine Corps cammie cap with its insignia in the center and his double bars on either side of it. He's been in my neighborhood for some forty years, seen a lot of changes, as have many of my other neighbors. Ralph and Joann across the street, Mildred who passes by during her daily constitutional with her support hose high and her shoulders humped over so's you'd think she never did have a neck. "The day you don't see me out here," she says, "is the day you know I've died."
"We've had bushels of them this year!" I say to him, smiling at my vines, freshly pruned and naked but for green fruit hanging low.
"Squirrels keep getting my maters. I can't get rid of them. They take one bite and then bite another one."
"I think it's all in location." (Ours are along our drive, so they aren't as tempting to squirrels as they would be were they off the beaten path.)
"I haven't even had a single lima bean..." I then found out how his garden has not grown this year, for all his effort. "It's so bad I don't even want to plant again next season. but I will. how do you not plant? my cat got run over a couple of weeks ago. I am real sorry for it, too. I miss her a lot more than I thought I would. I think I won't ever get another animal. It's too painful when they go. I had her cremated and put her ashes in with all the other ones."
"The other ones?"
"I've had them all cremated so they can be spread with me when I go."
(insert image of zippy's heart breaking)
"I keep thinking there's no way I will ever get another one 'cause I just don't want to go through the hurt again, but how do you not? it's like having your girlfriend break your heart and you saying you're never going to get close to people again. how do you not get close to anyone?"
And then he laughed at himself, and I laughed with him. The wrinkle that had etched itself across his forehead as he remembered his slain friend disappeared. Not a permanent reminder after all.
"Elizabeth Kuebler-Ross said there's a little Hitler in each of us. I think that's true. Because I know if I'd seen who hit her I'd have thrown rocks in his windows. And I don't want to be like that, but sometimes you can't help feeling morally outraged. We have all these animals that only want to share our lives and give us love regardless of who or what we are, we have all these animals we kill every day because they don't have homes and yet we keep human killers alive. What do you do with people who take the lives of others? I say give them one year for all their appeals and then ZAP! 'em. Unless there's something to the DNA evidence that's hinkey, ZAP! 'em all!"
"I have to tell you," squeak squeak said the mouse. "I'm a die-hard liberal."
"OH! SO AM I!"
"GET OUT!"
"Cross my heart!"
(...that'll teach me to judge a Marine by his cover... har har har...)
"So I have to ask what is it that makes a person kill."
"Absolutely! There's mental illness - but what do you do?"
"I don't know."
"I taught Constitutional Law for years after I retired from the Corps. There are no easy answers. The only thing to do is go by the letter of the law. That's why Baby Bush - I refuse to call him 'President' because he was appointed, he wasn't elected by the people - infuriates me so. He's turning this country into one that I would no longer be willing to die for."
"Wow."
He condemned Baby Bush as being an "oligarcic mental pygmy who can't even put a whole sentence together in his native language!" and as being "morally reprehensible. The audacity to question a man's service record when he himself is a draft dodger! A draft dodger who's sent our men and women into a war we had no business being in to die for what? For what??"
He went on and on and on... to my liberal heart's enjoyment! He said he's refused an invitation to his brother's home for Thanksgiving because his brother, he knows, supports Bush and in his mind "that's akin to a Jew supporting Hitler." It seems WW2 was on his mind this day. "I told him 'you vote for that man this time and what you are really saying is that the people of this nation don't matter. That I - your brother - don't matter and that you care more about individual greed than about national enrichment."
I was stunned. I mean... even in my crazy family we put our best foot forward and at least try to get along... until, you know, we're under the same roof and all hell breaks loose. It never seriously occurred to me to just tell my siblings up front "you're an asshole and that's why I don't want to be with you." HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! OH! REVELATION!
He detailed the letter he wrote to Zell Miller after he read Zell's first book "Corps Values."
"I told him he was a disgrace to the Marine Corps and that he was representative of no Marine Corps value I ever encountered and that he lacked the testicular fortitude to confront his constituents - the Democrats who put him in office - face to face with his sudden change of belief. I wrote: 'I taught Constitutional Law for twenty years so don't bother trying to bully me with your half-cocked mumbo jumbo because unlike the dunderheads who believe what you're dishing, I actually do know my stuff."
"My name is zippy, by the way." I held out my hand which he accepted.
"I'm Charles. Ya'll lived here long?"
Not long enough, apparently, as this was the first time I'd met Charles and he makes that walk every day.
"I try for every day. You know, you get sedentary and that's not good."
I wonder if he knows Mildred.
