Missing In Action

If you want your heart squeezed go to youtube and type Waltzing Matilda the Tom Waits version. Totally out of this world. He is a veteran of the Amish Civil War. Missing in action because of his own accord, he has the ability to endear himself to anyone. A brilliant writer, singer, and artist.


Waits has a great quote: "If you get far enough away, you'll be on your way back." It seems all of my life I have been running from something. My mom and dad asked me as long as they were alive why I was always running. I could never answer that question.


Perhaps now that I am almost fifty maybe I have some clue; My dad was a truck driver gone weeks at a time in every state but Alaska and Hawaii, I know I wanted to travel like him. Few people knew that dad was a professional athlete. A Pro Bull Rider. He was bucked off one Saturday night and broke both of his arms, that put an end to that career.


My mother was the hardest working human I have ever been around. Be it working the eleven-to-seven shift in a rest home or working in a can redemption center she knew nothing but working as hard as she could every minute of every day. Then she would come home and do the house work inside and out.


Both my mother and father had a eighth grade education but we never wanted. They were incredible. Dad would bring home his pay check on Friday night and mom would give him twenty-five dollars to live on the road for the next week. As a young man I always said to myself no body will ever control my money but me. It took me years to realize my mom was incredible at managing money and dad knew it. Dad or mom never had a credit card. They fought to stay out of debt.


A true family history: My father was a son of a horse trader in West Virginia and my mom was the daughter of a horse thief on the Iowa-Minnesota border. On dads right arm just behind his bicep he had a long scar. I can remember as a young boy asking him what happened, he told me his father had a horse and it bit him they were thirty miles from the doctor and nineteen miles from the vet. You have heard doctors called old horse doctors, today's doctors should leave such little of scar for such a bad bite.


My dad grew up with tobacco farmers all around him. He chewed Mail Pouch loose leaf, smoked El Producto Cigars, rolled his own cigarettes, and would smoke a pipe now and again, and dip snuff. He died of a heart attack on my birthday my senior year in high school. Combine all of that nicotine with all of the fried food he loved to eat and it was inevitable. At the end he was one of my greatest heroes.