A Home on the Range Lead Muffin Award To:

Anyone who even suggests that a full-time wife and mother doesn't "work". 

This one is for Mom, watching over me from above, and my friend Auntie J , watching over her own little ones.

My Mom quit her job as Deputy Sheriff to adopt two kids. We came with scars and fears and needs and it WAS a full-time job. I was just a baby, but Dad said if anyone touched me I'd scream.  Loads of fun, I imagine.  My older brother would rock in his crib, hitting his head gently but repeatedly on the frame.  Silent demons.  They didn't falter. They didn't fuss, They watched us carefully, pacing the room each night in that rhythm that is not a clock, but is the beat of a heart, of love. The love was expressed gently and often and it was not long before we were simply giggly, laughing children, with no memories of those early days, of anything that came before that wonderful, loving woman and our Dad.

She grew up in the depression.  Her Dad was killed in a logging accident when she was a teen. There was no insurance policy, only her own Mom working to support them all.  She graduated college with a degree in criminal justice in an age when women rarely did so.  She worked and supported her family until my Dad came back from WWII and they married, moving her widowed mother in with them.  Their first child died in infancy and after that, there were to be no more pregnancies. So they put in to be foster parents or to adopt.  I don't think they realized how much work that would be. Being a Mom at an age when her friends were having grandbabies, to babies who came with built-in burdens, had to be the hardest job she probably ever had.  It's a job many "professionals" could not do well

 It doesn't matter if you have money or not.  When the kids try and dye the family cat black for Halloween with your Miss Clairol, when someone wakes op crying with a nightmare or someone runs home with a report from school with a smiley sticker to tell you all the details when all you wanted to do was sit and have 10 whole minutes to yourself in the entire day, you have worked. 

It's a labor of love, but it IS a full-time job. The end product may not be a paycheck, it may not be awards on the wall or even tangible.


It's kids that grew up to serve their country, honor their flag and never take anything from a taxpayer that wasn't earned with blood, sweat, and tears.  It's a man that adored the very ground you walked on for what you did, what you sacrificed, all the traits of your toil that you passed on to us. It's the family that grieves for your passing yet still sees something of the best parts of you, in all of us.

We lost her too young, but that will happen with a parent that's already middle-aged when you come into their lives. But we wouldn't trade that for anything.  Because we gained so much from her, possessing, not our peers' never-ending obsession with time's dragging weight, but the fluidity of joy that is a life constantly rediscovered, the bright comets of all those brief, shining moments that are never lost, only redefined.

At night, I put my badge in a drawer in my bedroom where it lays next to her ID and badge. I'm proud of my Mom for being the Deputy Sheriff.  I'm even more proud of her for just stepping away from a career that she loved to simply be my Mom.

Whitetail Tales

The sound came from the darkness, a foghorn, groaning without ceasing. I woke from a savage dream, a werewolf chasing me. It's a nightmare I've had since childhood that arises after long days and spicy food for late supper. We all have had nightmares that arrive in that abyss between dusk and dawn, riding chill currents that make us shiver in those lonely, dark places. Why can't tonight have been a dream of a cabana boy named Buck Naked who arrives on the pathos of a glass of wine and a good day?

No spicy food late, ever again, I'd promise myself, if I could form a cognitive thought.

It had been a nightmare that disrupted both rest and sense. The creature's breath had been hot on me, claws shimmering in the dark and in my dream I picked up a can resembling bug spray, to ward him off, looking at the label to read "WEREWOLF B-GONE". I'm asleep and I know that's not going to work.

Never moon a werewolf. That's my advice to you, waking OR sleeping.


As I woke, there was nothing but that bellowing sound in the distance. Elk? Foghorn? Where was I? I looked around. I was on the ground, my bed was a sleeping bag. Large bodies of water are hundreds of miles away. I'm in deer camp and that is no fog horn off in the distance, that's Og.

Having lived on the road most of my life, I'm used to waking up in strange places with that sense of dark disorientation as consciousness alights, on a cot in a lab, in a truck cab, in the back of a C130. If tired enough, I can sleep anywhere.

I remember a hotel in Ireland, waking at dawn to walk long, silent mornings among old churches, afternoon in labyrinths of alleyways that spoke to the ghosts of the dead. I'd turn in early, the sounds of the Irish dancers in the pub below, beating a staccato whisper on my brain as I fell happily asleep.

I remember Christmas Eve as a small child. I'd sleep on the trundle bed that was normally underneath my big brother's bed. Mom would tuck us both in while Dad went to "do some last-minute chores" (probably cursing up a storm during the assembly of the Barbie Dream House). We'd lay there in the dark, my brother, from his grown-up bed, speaking to his baby sister in that soft whisper of childhood, under the glow of big 1960's Christmas lights outside the window. We'd left cookies and milk out for Santa, though Dad suggested he'd prefer pretzels and a Budweiser. Then we tried to stay awake as long as we could, hoping to hear his arrival.

The clock ticked later and later, the house quiet. "Do you hear it!" my brother would quietly exclaim, but the clattering sound we heard was not reindeer on the roof, but the dog's toenails on the hardwood floor as she patrolled the hall, checking on her two-legged pups.

There are still too many nights in hotels, conversations with my best friend before sleep, waking in the middle of the night to the ping of an elevator, the hollow thump of a suitcase in the hall. I'd wake, cold, wishing I'd not forgotten my pajamas. I don't really want to get up, but I needed to, calculating the movements that would get me out of bed and to the bathroom, without bumping a toe on furniture that is not where it's supposed to be.

But then there are those good mornings, such as hunting trips, where even if my bed is hard and there is a demented air compressor sleeping a couple of sleeping bags away, life is good. We arrived the night before, chowing down on some spicy beefy/cheese dip that was so good we couldn't stop, raising our glasses in a toast to deer camp. A toast, not to the blood which will flow, but to the humble wish that in our years, we've acquired the strength and the skill to do some justice to the game. Then to bed early, sleeping bags arranged like some odd, lumpy crop circle there on the land.

But now it is morning. Morning being a relative term only in that it was past midnight. I glance at my watch, it's time to get up. I wake the others with the covertness of a nocturnal predator, a hand on their shoulder, a flash of white teeth, an expulsion of breath. Time to get up, we're at the top of the food chain and the forest awaits. I am no different than the men that I hunt with, the eagerness of the chase in me, a taste like brass in my mouth, the pounding of vein and blood with the draw of my firearm. Yet, like them, though they would be loathed to admit it, I still have that sense of tenuity against the infinite wilderness, even if the beast we were after was not some creature of lore, to be dispatched by a silver bullet, but a mortal animal of silent cunning and soundless hoof.

Breakfast is assembled quickly, washed down with strong coffee that has the faint taste of woodsmoke. Time for just one last gulp that washes away the last drowsiness in me, leaving only the aroma of clean air and the succulent bite of cold that rushes in the door as we head on out.

We drive my truck down a few miles of road, parking it for the long walk in, the darkness all-encompassing. There's a path in the corn that's barely visible, leading off into broad fields dotted with the sentient soldiers of battle-weary corn stalks. The landscape in the dark is without perspective; the few trees a diorama against the flat earth, the chilled expanse of a southbound Canadian Clipper filling our morning with frost and the sounds of falling ice, ringing like bells in the distance.

It was cold, it was ungodly early, but there was an intentness in us, a kind of implacable transport as we moved deeper into the fields, mindful neither of cold, or burrs that drew blood, or the stalks that slapped our legs. We moved surely, a flashlight in one hand, a Marlin in the other, gaining rapidly on that which we did not intend to leave without.


As we walked deeper in, my hands were feeling the cold, snow clinging to eyelashes that rimmed green eyes that still remembered sleep. I thought back to a warm sleeping bag, the luxury of more coffee. My feet were already growing cold, my breath speaking in the finality of a lover's abandonment, cold, impersonal, disappearing, even as I long to hold it back in, to keep me warm

"Do you hear it"? comes a voice from ahead, in the same tone as my brother that long-ago Christmas Eve. And we did, the huff of a buck from the trees. From the darkness, it came again. That glorious, sonorous grunt, the sound hanging motionless among the wavering shadows, the light beginning to prick the fabric of the landscape, illuminating much.

We split off into separate fields, having mapped out who will hunt where, so not to shoot across areas in which one of us might be moving. I settle into the corner of a field, the tracks and trodden ground showing where deer were moving from one field to another.

As light increases, so does the sound, slowly sustained, not as a rush of noise, but as the water gently rising, lapping at consciousness, even as it settles into background noise you don't really hear. There was no movement at all, but for the flexing of my toes, trying to keep them warm in my boots. I can see little of the dark pools of distance in which my friends sat and as my body grew colder I thought of a warm bed and a mattress that doesn't have rocks that bite into my tender backside like army ants.

But my body begins to get used to the temperature, my fingers still comfortable and I sit and wait to see what the morning brings. Way off in the distance, a muffled shot. The deer are on the move, the world is awake.

Somewhere out here is the form of which we hunt, not as big as in a dream, but as big as can be grown in the corn dappled fields of the Midwest. In these fields, where cold and sun collide like weather systems, it moves, as aware of my presence as I am his, stopping to lift his massive head and take a deep breath, trying to get a fix on my location there in a white and windless morning.

So I sit as still as I can, the dark thoughts of bad dreams long gone from my head, alert and watching from a bed of cold leaves until I will hear again that retort of rifle that lingers intact in the cold streaming air. In that instant, there is no cold, there is no fatigue. A bullet cleaves the air, one blinding glimpse of the absolute revealed as it passes, only an echo remaining in its wake. In that instant, the form of a whitetail leaps and falls pulled into that absolute which, as well, is darkness.

 There's been more than one shot heard. We'll have more than one deer to get back and process. Plenty of meat for the long cold winter, a thankful blessing. It may be a day or two before I'm back home in my own bed. But I don't mind. There are moments in the world, places that take us outside of ourselves that are worth the lack of sleep, the taking of risk. Days when you wake thinking of only a cold bed, things unfamiliar. Days when you found you had been slumbering through even your waking moments until, with a preacher's voice of gentle guidance, someone said "Rise" and you did, your eyes lifting out of the deep quiet of your sleep into glory.

And there you will find riches on your pillow you never expected, a taste, a touch, things that warm your very soul; things you would have missed had you drifted too long with your eyes closed.

Back home everyone is sleeping, being loathed to shake off the drowsiness with which they forget. I am here, with my dearest friends, happy to have slept on hard ground, waking to cold clarity.

Help a Long Loved Business During the Shelter in Place

Yes, I admit. I'm hoarding Smarties (they will ship them in warm weather but the ice they are packed in only keeps them cold for 24 hours so I stock up in the Spring). 

My order from https://www.britsusa.com/ In Lawrence Kansas. Founded by childhood friends from Lawrence. With the coronavirus impact on business, I made sure to send Brits an online order to help out (wish I'd bought more of the Ginger biscuits though!)

Sally is great to do business with and they have all kinds of foods and gifts. I have ordered for many years.

If you like any British/Scot/Irish teas/sweets/foods please consider an online order. They also have bath and body products that make great gifts for spouses and loved ones. (The Cotswold Lavender products are awesome) 

Sally has been in business 20 years and the store closing due to the Kansas Shelter in Place will hit her hard.  Thanks to my friend Vic MD for introducing me to them years ago. 

Bacon Butterscotch Blondies

Calculate the trajectory. Adjust your angle.

Launch that Pork Projectile!*

*assuming zero porcine spin and downward acceleration of gravity of 9.8 m/s².

I tend to tinker with recipes and gadgets. So far I haven't destroyed my basement or set fire to the kitchen (though there was the one incident with the flaming pot holder). Sometimes the results are interesting. Sometimes we remove the remains in a bucket.

A couple Sundays ago  I was tinkering around the workbench out in the frozen garage, but the thick gloves made me about as dexterous with tools as Tyrannosaurus Rex.  Time for plan B for experimenting until the temperatures come up a bit.

The Kitchen!   Brownies sounded good.  But I was out of cocoa, having just the basics, plus brown sugar, whipped cream, heavy cream, and BACON!  (You can see where this is going, can't you). Butterscotch Brownies, otherwise known as Blondies! With Bacon and salted caramel.  But I didn't want to make a whole pan, just a little weekend treat, with perhaps an extra-large one I could take to my administrative assistant at squirrel central on Monday morning.

My first batch, I poured the caramel directly on the brownie batter before cooking.  Big mistake.  The thick layer of caramel boiled, lowering the temperature of the batter, so that the end of cooking time I had what looked like butterscotch jello.  Cooking it further simply crystallized all of that sugar.  It smelled wonderful but the texture and firmness were way off (put it this way, I could have added some raisins and passed it off as an English dessert, and not in a good way).

The Second Batch?  Oh yes.

Chewy, Buttery, Sweet, Smoky, Salty. 

For the second batch, I added a little bit of chopped cooked smoked bacon to the batter and baked normally, brushed a tiny bit of the salted caramel on them as a glaze when they came out of the oven and drizzled a bit more over the top when serving.  We have liftoff!

Bacon Butterscotch Brownies with Salted Caramel

All I'm Going to Add About the Virus

Home Quarantine update

We will be off of Coronavirus quarantine in a few days (Partner in Grime was exposed to a sick passenger on a flight out of Singapore - the airline took 5 days to notify us).  We've both been able to work from home, many games of cribbage, Backgammon, Sorry (which we call "Calvinball"), and Mexican Train Dominoes were played. Since we always keep six months worth of food, water, and supplies on hand I didn't have to deal with any of the toilet paper hysteria.  I honestly think people are going to start using the rolls as currency.  They can call it the "Buttcoin".

Cheers!
Brigid

On Restoration

It was that time of the evening when things grow both restless and weary. The sun has dipped below the horizon, just enough light remaining to make out the forms of a couple of bicycles strewn across a lawn down the street, abandoned by children called into supper. Piled up in the corner by where I sit and read are Abby is the pile of Abby's "stuffies" laying as if napping, where they will remain this late afternoon until she gently carries them to her dog bed at night, to sleep by her side.

As I get ready to go out for a quick jaunt around the neighborhood before dark, it's not hard to see the houses that have big screen TV's in the living room as they are directly evident if the windows are open, or providing that telltale glare of light through the curtains. For many people, the TV is on as soon as they walk in the door, People come home, turn on the television, turn on the video games, draw the blinds, their view of the world that which comes through on the TV, losing imperceptibly their sense of the outside, of the world beyond a news anchor.

If someone walked past our porch at night, they'd see no such light. For we don't have a big-screen TV. We don't have a TV at all, but for a small one in the basement where we can get the weather with an antenna on the roof if we're down there due to Mr. Tornado.  If we want to watch a favorite show we have boxed sets, (cheaper than cable) from which to pick, watching on the computer monitor that can be turned to face the cozy futon in the office. Even that is something we only do on some weekends.

The crash pad where I lived after I got married, but before I was able to transfer to our Chicago facility, had a nice TV from my old house, but it was given to the young couple in need who are got all of the furniture, which we really have neither need nor room for up here.  They had lost everything in a natural disaster, and on a waiting list to adopt a baby, were anxious to be able to provide a furnished home.  They rented a small house, I provided all of the contents of mine, and they were finally at ease, that baby coming along in two months time from an unwed mother loving enough to give her child up to a good home.  Some things just work themselves out.

I'm fine with my smaller, older home. But anyone curious or casing this place to rob it would see hardwood floors, restored antique furniture, lots of leaded and stained glass and a Victrola, my service revolver in the nightstand and a few vintage LEO pistols of generation's past carefully locked up in the safe.

As big and beautiful as it was, I don't miss my old house.  It was your typical McMansion, those huge suburban houses that are less home than monopoly game house squares of plastic and cheap lumber and wasted space.  What wood is there is usually laminate, the walls not thick enough to withstand a really good storm or the thump of a neighbors bass played too loud. They look OK now, but I can't imagine what it will take to sustain them 100 years from now if they're even still standing.  But they are big and "new!" with three-car garages full of a lot of things that aren't paid for yet, the neighbor's house so close you can't swing a tax assessor without whacking your next-door neighbor. Some didn't even have furniture - the people buying them not having enough money after buying the too-big house to properly furnish it.

Our house is old, it's small and it's sturdy.  There is no big mortgage, there is no credit card debt for the furnishings.  But for a small table that was a family heirloom, everything in our view we bought with cash or picked from curbside trash, restoring it as best we can, those items that another found to have little worth.  I think the only things well under 50  years old in the house are the computer, the mattress, the frame of a couch we restored and the two beloved souls I live with, both two and four-legged.

I've had a couple casual acquaintances look at the sagging porch that needs to be redone, the antiquated kitchen and a sun porch that makes the Green Acres house look upscale and make a subtlety snarky comment about it. They're not invited back. It's a work in progress, the whole house being a restoration project, much of the work on things you won't see on the surface. I look at it differently, I guess.  I don't see what still needs to be done.  I see what HAS been done.

The little village within the big city we live in is small, with a train station, small grocers, a mom and pop pizza place and a couple of pubs.  The houses themselves are grey, white, brown or brick, no trendy Victorian dollhouse colors, no urban renewal shades of yuppie reclamation.  The houses and porches are the shades of time and shadow and quiet murmured voices gathered between columns as if time and breath had made them all one quiet color, a hushed vestibule where all is forgiven.

Within a short drive is a trendy urban area where people live in half a million-dollar apartments, taking the train into the city, some not even owning cars as every bit of millennial spender and excess is within walking distance. We do go there as that's where the big home improvement store is.  That's where we bought all the copper pipe and wood for the house and a nice runner for the hall at a good discount because the young man with the trendy haircut couldn't multiply $12.97 times 6 on a piece of paper when the calculator went missing.

No, I'll pass on all the "hip" places unless they have tools.  I'm perfectly happy browsing in an antique book store or standing in line at the grocer with elderly Polish women.  Dressed as if they are going to church, many of them have survived more than one war, holding our numbers and waiting for the deli clerk to slice meat that was roasted in the store, not unwrapped from cellophane, shaving the meats and the cheese and carefully wrapping them up for me with a smile. There's homemade sausages, salads, and potato pancakes, foods known well to the immigrants that settled in this place. I'll pass on the toaster strudel, and buy one of the real thing, made by hand, breathing in the scent of sugar and yeast as I head home with my bounty, driving past an ancient church and a small park which knows know only the shades of those first children that played there.

Am I just getting old - looking at the past as simply stories of youth and bravery, doomed to forgetfulness as I eventually pass, as we all will, those points of affection and regret into a fog that quietly dims the lights? Or have I simply changed what parts of the world are important to me based on how I have touched the world, and it has touched me in return?

I think it is the latter.  Getting to middle age is some way, like surviving a war.  There are false truces and negotiations, retreat and reconciliation, triumph and treachery. In the end, if you are lucky, there is peace, your warrior's medals and ribbons being internal, only recognized when you look into the mirror and see those first lines around your eyes and smile because you know that despite it all, your sustained breath is its own little victory.

It's a peace I enjoy and as some of my peers rush around getting Botox and fillers, putting on enough makeup to make Krusty the Klown jealous. I'm perfectly content to put on sweat pants and tactical lip gloss and just hit the road, face bare and long red ponytail trailing behind me like those red warning flags you see on timber hanging off the bed of a fast-moving little pickup.

So tonight, I'll take a jog down through the village across the railroad tracks and down past the old church.  In the small graveyard, there stands upon a gravesite, a  stone angel, her shadow painting a canvas of dimming light as I move past.  She is a melancholy spirit, crafted in another century, her eyes closed as if in prayer, her mouth open as if she turned to stone at the moment she uttered her life's final secret.  Around the grave, there is a garland of living flowers, grown wild, even as the rest of the small graveyard fades to dust, flowers reaching for one last bit of sun, there amidst the silent stones, the histories that live on in this place.

I wonder how many people have walked past her, with earbuds on, or their head down with texting, not realizing the significance of a forgotten grave - that one small thing, that soul - at one time, the most important thing in the world to someone, held through sickness and health, and cherished even as they grew old and faded as flowers will.

How many now, truly possess that which holds weight and value, something that when viewed, when held, lights up the eyes with the triumphs of all risks and renunciations. Or have we become a society of the easy and disposable, be it a product, a relationship, or worse, even a life?

As the sky begins to spit snow again, I hurry home, but not before lifting my closed eyes up to heaven, mouth open, catching flakes of snow on my tongue, a self-communion of one, as I say a blessed thanks for a long safe journey through life.

As I approach our house, the light dimming, I see the glow of the television sets in other homes, an unearthly artificial glow, as canned laughter seeps out of an open window. As I arrive home, climbing up the tired stairs unto the large porch, there is light inside from the wall sconces, rewired but decades-old, bright as a spark, significant of human shelter and repose. As the key rattles in the door, there is a soft woof of an old Rescue Lab, her grey muzzle snooting me happily as I enter the house

A burglar casing the place would look through the front window and shake their head, seeing little for which they would give value. I look inside and see the riches of a strong house that shelters me with vigilant accord. It has stood for a hundred years, with an air of history and invincible possession, which will remain, long after I am gone.

I set my keys near the Victrola and my husband's Fedora.  As he calls out a greeting from the kitchen, I pat Abby the Lab on the head, looking at the small precious things that have been rescued and now live here, grateful for eyes that finally learned to see.
 - L.B. Johnson

To Capt. Carroll "Lex" LeFon 10/9/1960 - 3/6/2012

Chapter 22 - On Friendship (From True Course - Lessons From a Life Aloft, Outskirts Press 2019.

I think the friends we make in the aviation business are unique. There's something about sitting inside for a meal after a long day in the cockpit, watching the lights reflected in your beverage, a long day ended, that sometimes is the best part of the day. It was a chance to relax and share conversation with someone, who between 4:00 a.m. show times and approaches to minimums in heavy snow squalls and turbulence, became your friend.

It's the time you review the doings of the day, when you tell stories and bragged softly and the advertised glamour of being a pilot emerges long enough to make you believe it and forget for a moment the lack of sleep, lack of pay when you first started out, and too frequent lack of respect.

Growing up in a mostly male household and spending all of my early life in a male-dominated profession, I have no idea how most women choose their friends. But it seems that men have two kinds of friends. The first kind of friendship develops slowly, the friendship growing like an oak, thickening each year. My dad, in his ‘90s now, has that kind of friend. The kid with whom he played stickball is now the guy with whom he plays cards.

The second kind of friend is different. The bond is instant, forged under fire, molded in the heat of battle. For many that friendship is forged in the military or law enforcement. For me anyway, that kind of friendship was forged in the cockpit. I guess it's for this reason, rather than for any love of the thrill of working long days in decrepit aircraft for five hundred dollars a month, that I remember my first days as an airline pilot as being the best years of my life.

When I wasn't flying, I was hiking and climbing. It was more a technical hike than a true climb but we still loved it. My friends with whom I flew also joined me on such adventures.  Climbers, at least those who manage to do it without breaking something, learn early on that there is no adversary in climbing. You can't “conquer” a mountain. There are times when I got halfway up, and enveloped briefly in both cloud and the excess of testosterone in the air, stopped, afraid to move. Yet my friends were with me, encouraging and guiding as the sun came out again and, on those occasions, the mountain sometimes granted me the privilege of a successful summit.

I did most of this in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado and the friendships formed there warm me still. Understand now, we reached the summits of nothing more than a couple of 14,000-foot peaks, not anything requiring professional mountaineering skill. I did my excursions with a ragtag bunch of amateurs rounded up from the crew lounge.

Our hikes and climbs weren’t the stuff of today’s YouTube videos. Our efforts were simply free form days of testing our limits. Adventures fueled by caffeine, youth, and the unspoken octane of facing up to fear in something other than an airplane. We tackled such trips with fierce pride, in our unity, in our will, even as we prayed to God each night that we’d make it home safe, to that God that looks after new-hire copilots no doubt. With this faith, we simply put one foot in front of the other, until the journey was complete.

It was on one of these climbs that we met Frank. He was from the U.K., the robust sort of fellow who looked on life as an exercise for the heart to prepare it for encounters with the rest of the world. He was an ordained minister, and one morning on a trail on the side of Mt. Rainier he produced a Bible, a small metal flask of wine and some week-old bread and ministered a quiet communion to us.  As I held that little piece of bread in my mouth, looking out onto a landscape that was as pure and pristine as forgiveness, hearing the sounds of nature behind the words of sacrament, that simple act brought tears to my eyes.

The major airlines started hiring again, and most of us moved on, but stayed in touch, trading stories of our flights in the Army Reserve or the Air National Guard as well as pictures of our new and improved airplanes. We would try and get together each year, usually in Montana where a couple of us had family.  Frank even joined us a time or two, and we could sit around the fire after a day of fishing or just wandering the woods, proclaiming this an aviator’s true calling as from the white ash of a campfire, our old memories cooled as we made new ones.

It was a few years later, most of us scattered and gone, with new jobs, spouses, and all the trappings of adulthood when the call came.  Frank died while on a trip visiting his family.  There was going to be a funeral in his homeland.  But our flying schedules and budgets prohibited the majority of us from such a trip.  So we met someplace close.  We drank too much, we reminisced at length, and it was only when the words grew cold with the night air did we raise our glasses to the man in the empty chair.

We All Bleed Red - Give the Gift of Life

On the side of one of my gun cases is a sticker of a pint of blood

Some people casually look at it, some don't notice. It's from a Bloodcenter where I used to live.  I'm not a fan of needles.  I bore my childhood shots without a lot of screaming fits (which, flat out, weren't tolerated by my Mom).  But I'd have tears on my face.

But as an adult, I had to have some more shots to protect me against some really icky things I might get in certain "work" areas. This was before Partner in Grime and I were more than friends.  I went with two former Marines, Special Forces, guys I worked with. We lined up, for what would be a series of shots. there was no privacy.

The nurse stops, looks at  me and says "could you be pregnant?"

I looked at her in the eye and said "NO" (my lifestyle, old Fashioned or otherwise, was no one's business)  "I'm forty (mumble mumble) ".

She said, "could happen, are you SURE you aren't pregnant".

My teammates, all 500 pounds of them are trying not to giggle like second graders.

I said "Trust me, I'm not. 

Further intrusive (look, this was a "employer" medical place, not my HMO)  she said"

"What form of birth control are you using?"

I replied, deadpan:

"Nudity seems to be working."

The guys lost it.

But I hate getting stuck with a needle. But at least I didn't faint like one of the guys.

I also donate regularly to the blood bank, including today.  Why?

My Dad was a volunteer for the Red Cross.  He gave gallons of blood over his lifetime, having a particularly rare type.  When he was too old to give due to health reasons, he volunteered to drive the blood from the blood drives in our tiny town, in special coolers to the big city, a 2 plus hour trip.  He got paid a little per diem, enough to cover gas, but the time and wear on his vehicle was his.  He did it for years until he quit driving except to the store and church.

Another reason?  I have O positive.  O- can be given to any blood type.  But if you HAVE O of any type, that's all you can take, anything else and you are toast, the others have some leeway.   So the blood banks usually call me when they get low on O.

If you never have, consider it.  It doesn't really hurt.  Getting pricked by a thorn in your garden hurts ten times worse.  Trained nurses can get that needle in with no more than a little pinch.  The draw process doesn't hurt at all, I just lay back, happy to have my feet up and chat at the nurse. He or she is your captive audience, tell them about when you were the star football player in the '70s, bring out the grandbaby photos, they are just sincerely happy you are there. 

Before you start, you will have to fill out a confidential questionnaire to ensure you haven't been somewhere or with someone that could put you at risk for certain diseases. (No, I have not played naked Twister in Tobago recently and wasn't a fry cook at a burger place in the U.K. in the '90s.)  Once that's done, they check your blood pressure and hemoglobin (I was 15.1, a good number). The donation itself takes about 10 minutes plus 10 minutes to sit and have a cold drink and munch the free cookies and other snacks. A few days after your donation, you can also log onto their website and get your blood type and cholesterol numbers, all for free!

Then go home, none the worse for wear but a small bandage, knowing that blood you gave might literally save someone's life.