A hellish torment of endless miles, possible death, capture, imprisonment and deportation. All for a dream to provide.
vs
Dirt poverty, in a jobless world of degradation, extortion, hunger sickness and endless hopelessness.
You choose? Gazillions have, since the dawn of man.
Richard Kimball
All future posts will only appear on: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Comments closedShe sat down in front of me. Very pretty in a bright, flowery, yellow shirt with “fleur dans le jardin” printed all over it.
Having just finished one semester of High School French, and heart fluttering I nervously asked if she knew what it meant. She did not, so I guessed, “Flower in the garden.” I earned a smile and it made my day.
It was a very lucky guess; my French teacher had given me an undeserved D the prior semester on one condition: “You must promise me, that you will never take French again as long as I lived.”
The need for a foreign language at age 15 in public school was senseless to me. No one I knew spoke one, needed one, or had plans to ever use one.
Twenty years later after an early life in politics and finally defeated in a run for the U. S. Senate, I found myself hopping all over tiny villages in Mexico wanting to talk with people that couldn’t understand me. So, I lived with a Mexican family trying to make do by taking in a border now and then. They couldn’t speak English, making for a months’ worth of submersion.
Every day I would visit various shops around the town, forcing myself to use my new words.
One afternoon I hiked past this enormous mango tree bursting with plump ripe fruit. The tree towered over a little brook in a lush postcard pasture, simply bursting with butterflies. So, I decided to go around town, talk to people about mariposas and purchase all that was needed to build a butterfly net, then catch a bunch for my eldest brother who had been collecting since birth.
I returned to the mango tree, net in hand and immediately fell in some mud on my first swing. Ten minutes later into my chasing and swiping I heard children laughing. I stopped and looked up the hillside to see two women as their kids giggled at me. Instantly clear what a sight I was, a big, dirty galumphs, swinging at the wind, I started to laugh too.
Anyway, I attempted another conversation with them and the words mariposa and coleccion, hit home. I understood little of their gatling gun fast responses, but I showed them the few I had caught and then one of the kids asked, and somehow, I got it, “Would you like to see my coleccion?”
I followed them down a muddy path to what they called a home. It stood propped up, by what, I do not know. But there it was, sheets of roofing tin mixed with tree limbs, cardboard and wire.
Dozing in a hammock near an open fire, where what looked like a giant pizza tin was heating up, was the father. He sat up and smiled while pointing his finger at a tree stump. It took a moment before I got it, he was offering me a seat.
One of the little girls disappeared into the vegetation while the others kept jabbering so fast, I could hardly pick out a word, but it was clear they were talking about me. The smiles, laughter and friendliness were a contagious joy.
If it had not been for the shack of a house, dirt floors and pounds of laundry hanging on wires strung through the trees, these folks could have been a Mexican version of The Brady Bunch, and I might have accepted their offer to stay for dinner.
The little girl returned, arms filled with a half dozen little glass jars, each one holding a dead, largely decayed snake in some sort of fluid. That was the collection she wanted to show me. I examined each with real wonder, particularly the one baby viper.
They all continued to spew out words so fast, I had to keep asking them to speak more slowly in the hopes I could pick out enough. We were having such fun, even as I was drop jawed at such happiness living in total poverty.
When it was time to go, they were clearly disappointed, wanting me to stay.
Then I got it.
They had been asking me where I was staying. I had been responding with the word “no,” meaning I did not understand what they were saying. It was likewise, with their offers to feed me, again not understanding “no”. When all was said and done, and I had left despite their complaints, it finally came to me: They thought the huge, muddy, crazy galumphs was homeless and likely hungry while offering me their hammock for a bed.
I have often, since that long ago day, thought of them and wished I could be them.
R
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Richard Kimball
Comments closedNo matter how long or how much I try to build her up, encourage her, back her in the extreme, she thinks herself weak.
I have always loved tough women and always imagined them tougher than men. As a general rule, they leave the beating and killing of each of other to those that swagger swinging their Johnsons, while she and her kind are slow to boil, tolerant to a fault, nurturing and making do with whatever cards they have been delt in life.
I fell in love with my first, long ago wife, unseen. I had simply heard a rumor: Her ticket and been pulled from a hat and won the door prize at a political event I attended. When a drunken United States Senator came down to escort her to the prize he said, “Aren’t you a cute young thing.” Her response, “Fuck you, Senator.”
That marriage didn’t last and my current love of these past 40 years would never do such a thing. What she would do was live a life so loyal and supportive of her sons and family that not a stick they could throw, not a cesspit they could wallow in would alter her devotion.
Confronted with a family’s most vile of circumstances: drugs, booze, cancers, and brain-altering surgeries. All bearing years, then decades of such irrational unspeakable motherly abuse that you or anyone you know would have deserted ages ago.
But here she still stands, tall, resolute, in unalterable devotion.
She is the toughest of all that I have known, tougher than me, tougher than you!
Richard Kimball
Now know that: Blog at: richardkimball.org is ENDING.
All future posts will only appear on: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
Comments closedWe have all wanted to ask God, why is there so much unspeakable evil and pain, innocents suffering or greedy flourishing, and so on.
I could never imagine, if I could ask, how God could make such things right and just, then, in a dream it came to me, God’s perfect design.
“I made you all as one,” God explained. “What you all see, feel and think is not as you imagine; a life lived solo with a given path and lone experiences.
You live every life in small momentary fragments, exchanging lives innumerable times into infinity. With no memory of what you have been and done I simply put you into countless new hosts, instantly adopting all their experiences, memories, all that they’ve ever been, in certainty that it has always been you alone.
Everyone is you. Your world, good and bad, is what YOU have made of it.”
Richard Kimball
Now know that: Blog at: richardkimball.org is ENDING.
All future posts will only appear on: https://medium.com/@daffieduck2016
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If you love America stop reading this, go fornicate and make babies.
Last year America’s birth rate declined to record lows while those over 80 are getting stitched, drugged, stinted, transplanted, cobbled, prostheticised, reconstructed and eventually organogenesisted, doubling our numbers in just 25 years.
Population decline, overwhelmed by increasing life expectancy, is the recipe for certain disaster. Each generation will be smaller than the prior one, just as the aged, unproductive and dependent explode in numbers.
A nation, depopulating, cannot succeed with an increasingly aging and needy citizenry.
A long ago Governor named Lamm said, “We have a duty to die and get out of the way!” Well, that’s not going to happen, so blow up that frigging wall, let those ambitious and hungry come, work, produce and pay taxes in support of us old timers. If not, at least give us a bucket load of Viagra and a case of fertility pills.
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