Tito's and Tonic

“To the white people life is a very long and high set of stairs, but to my mother [Sioux] life was like a river, a slow and stately wind across the sky, an endless sea of grass.”
                -From The Road Home by Jim Harrison

Until the gods started playing their tricks two weeks ago, it hadn’t rained in ten years.  I even sold my sailboat so as to prevent it from suffering the fate of the other boats in the lake - their sharp keels piercing the mud and muck of a lake without water.  But not anymore.  The skies opened up with fourteen straight days of tornados, hail and prodigious flooding.  I heard ten “serious” references to Noah and his ark, most from spraytanned T.V. news anchors; and even more “I told you so’s” about the "delusions of nitwit liberals and their global warming theories".  But even though the Canadian River is out of its banks, with herds of Facebooking gawkers lined up along the highway to witness this strange event, rest assured the lake will be a muddy pit and the Canadian will slow to a trickle in six months.        

After procrastinating, walking around for a few weeks with dime-sized holes in the bottom of my disintegrating cowboy boots, I finally took them to the cobbler to get them re-soled for a fifth time.  I’m somewhat emotionally attached and can’t bear to part with them, even for a week.  So I’m in secret mourning, as if I’d lost an old friend.  And there is the thought I just paid seventy five bucks to the cobbler for the fifth time, which is about $255 more than I paid for the boots back in ’97 at a ramshackle western store along  a dusty highway in far west Texas.   

On this Mother’s Day I saw a woman standing on a busy street corner holding a sign that said “I’ll bet you can’t hit me with a quarter”.  Her broad intoxicating smile seemed out of place as if she’d just won the lottery.  I noticed she was holding the sign with two stubby fingerless hands.