My John Wayne Moment (from June, 2006)
September 15, 2009
I read recently about a former Marine who was attacked by four armed thugs – two of whom had guns – as he walked home from his job at an Atlanta restaurant.
Thomas Autry, who is 36, was jumped as he was walking home from work. He called for help and pulled a knife out of his backpack, and got busy. The upshot: One attacker dead, one in critical condition, and two in custody.
Only a Marine would take a knife to a gunfight and walk away the victor.
Police, sensibly enough, did not charge Autry. Of course, Atlanta is the South, where I grew up, and, for good or ill, the South has always viewed weapons of any kind as educational tools and instruments of attitude adjustment.
I guess every guy dreams about having his own “John Wayne Moment.” I had one once. There is a song that says “life is different than it is in your dreams.”
My John Wayne Moment came late one summer in the late 1960s. My wife and I lived in a little wooden farm house on Turkeyfoot Road in Clarke County, Ga… The house sat back in a clearing in thick pine woods, at the end of a long dirt driveway.
We were hippies, sort of, and the house was small and isolated, but had most of the modern amenities. Well, there was an outhouse that you had to chase the copperheads out of when you needed to go, and the electricity was limited to a single light bulb hanging from the center of each of the rooms. But it did have running water, though no water heater and we had to bathe in a washtub on the front porch.
Still, it was $50 a month and we liked it. Until the strange car started showing up.
It was an old white Ford Falcon station wagon, not in good repair. There were always three or four guys in it. The car would drive to the edge of the clearing, stop, and just sit there, idling.
The men just sat there, watching. I approached them the first time, thinking they might be lost. They backed up and left. They came back several times over the next few weeks. I didn’t like the way they looked at us, especially the way they looked at Mary. They always had beer.
We did not have a telephone.
After about the third visit from the Falcon, I drove to my parent’s house and dug out my old Stevens .22 automatic rifle and a couple boxes of cartridges.
And a good thing, too.
In the small hours of the next day, the Falcon was back. This time, it drove right up into the yard. A man got out of the front passenger side, and strode right up on the porch. He walked right past the bedroom window. In the moonlight, I could see he had a knife.
It was hot, so the door was open, the screen latched. I heard him cut through the screen.
I don’t remember this part, but Mary said I rose up off the mattress, cursing and praying in the same breath, and, scooping up the rifle, ran toward the porch.
I was a good shot, back then. My buddies and I used to hunt rabbits with .22’s. This was a fat man in a white shirt on a moonlit night. I figured he was mine.
The man jumped off the porch and ran toward the far side of the clearing. I ran out into the yard, raised the rifle, and fired all 15 rounds at him.
At that point, I remembered the Falcon wagon and the fat man’s three friends. The car was about 10 feet to my left.
This was my John Wayne Moment. One bad guy, I thought, perforated in the piney woods. Three drunk bad guys and a ton or so of steel to my left.
And me, long hair sticking straight out every which way, wearing nothing but a St. Christopher medal, a Timex watch, and an empty rifle. Not even a cowboy hat.
It was a moment, all right. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more naked.
I don’t know how long we all stood or sat there, respectively. Seemed like a long time to me, but I didn’t check the Timex. The driver of the Falcon threw the battered old heap into reverse and tore down the driveway without bothering to turn around. I guess he didn’t realize my gun was empty.
Suddenly, there I was, all alone, under the moon in the piney woods, standing barefoot in the red clay dust, wondering if I had made the whole thing up. I mean, it was the 60s, after all.
I think Mary came and got me back into the house. I don’t remember, but I’m pretty sure I did not sleep.
Nothing ever came of it, except the white car stopped coming around. I never called the Sheriff to report the event. The guy was, after all, running away from my house, so if I had hit him, I would have been the one going to jail.
I got a bunch of friends to come over and walk around looking for a fat guy with a lot of holes in him, but we never found him. I finally had to admit that I was so angry and afraid that all of my shots had gone wild. I have to say, though, that I never saw a fat man move so fast.
© 2006 Marsh Creek Media,
Gettysburg, Pa.
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Daniel Bartlett, August 1, 1960-Mary 21, 2002.
“I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.”
(from the funeral card.)
JoAnn told me Dan’s service would be held in a small chapel, so I promised not to use any big words.
On the way up here from Gettysburg, it struck me that perhaps our most persistent sin as humans is our sloppiness toward time.
We spend it like the government spends money, as though we had an unlimited supply. Time is our greatest thief, and now it has taken Danny away from us.
In the few short years I knew him; it never passed my mind that I would attend his funeral. Certainly not this soon.
We had a lot of fun when we’d get together, usually with our significant others. We didn’t see each other all that often, actually. We had work. We were busy. There was so much to do. There would always be time…later.
Well, later is here, now, and look where we are.
There is a lesson here, somewhere. I just know it.
Those who really knew Dan Bartlett will not be surprised to learn that most of our get-togethers involved food and laughter.
One of the many reasons I enjoyed hanging out with him was that he was one of the few people I know who could eat more than I. How he arranged to do that and have ME gain all the weight, I’ll never know.
His enthusiasms were as quick as they were energetic. I remember one time Dan and JoAnn were over for Sunday breakfast at our house. I’d made up a mess of biscuits. One of the condiments we had on the table was a jar of soybean butter. Dan gave it the old hairy eye-ball and announced that it must be simply God-awful, and he’d have none of it.
Well, I talked and cajoled and pleaded with him to give it a try.
Reluctantly, he agreed, and smeared a modest gob of the stuff on half a biscuit.
About 20 minutes later, 3/4 of the contents gone, I had to threaten to whack him on the head to get what was left of my jar of soybean butter back.
Dan’s sense of humor stayed with him until almost the end. A week before he died, JoAnn took him to see his neurologist, as he’d had two very bad seizures the night before.
“Well, Mr. Bartlett,” the stern and humorless physician said.”What brought you here today?”
Without batting an eye, Dan replied:”An Oldsmobile.”
All kidding aside, the thing that stands out most in my memory about Dan Bartlett is his persistent and spontaneous humor. Even as he approached what we all assumed would be his middle age, I think he still looked on the world in a very joyous, childlike way, and was very quick to see the humor in almost any situation.
And yet, here we are. We have all lost a good friend, and I know the world seems today a little darker, and a little less interesting.
© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,
Gettysburg, Pa.
“Burger to Go” is a product of me and my company, Marsh Creek Media and, as such, I am solely responsible for its content.
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The Bringer of Light (First published 6/21/1994)
June 18, 2007
In the winter, I forget about fireflies.
I don’t know how this hap pens. How can I be so jaded to take them for granted? I guess it’s because there are so many of them we think of them as common, simply so much background glitter.
Late one evening I stood in the driveway taking in the night. The fields stuttered with a galaxy of fireflies, blinking the lusty Morse code of their brief mating season.
The black expanse under the clouded sky swarmed with them, as though the Milky Way had come down after all this time to see what all the commotion was about.
Taking fireflies for granted makes sense, I guess. As we grow up, we like to act cool, like we know it all. Miraculous old world. Ho-hum.
The firefly is doubly misnamed, in fact.
The light has nothing to do with fire. Its scientific name, Lampyridae, means “torch bearers.”
Also, it’s not a fly, but a beetle.
America has about 100 species of firefly – out of 2,000 across the globe – each with its own flash pattern.
The members of a Southeast Asia species flicker their tail-lights in unison. Must be quite a sight.
The light show you see in the open on summer evenings are the males of the species, looking a little girlie action.
The females remain on the ground, mostly out of sight, flashing back.
One naturalist wrote that the males can be attracted by squatting near the ground and flashing a penlight at two-second intervals. I’ve never tried it, so I don’t know if it works.
The firefly’s light, called “bioluminescence,” is caused by the internal mixing of two substances in the bug’s body called, wonderfully, “luciferin” and “luciferase.”
Don’t be alarmed. The materials were not named after the devilish Lucifer, but after the one in Greek myth, the light-bearer who brings in the dawn.
Almost all of the chemical energy expended by the firefly results in light.
Compare that to the light of a 100 watt bulb; 94 percent of the energy it takes to run it is wasted producing heat.
However interesting all that is, it has little to do with what is so magical about fireflies.
Science can tell us, to paraphrase poet Dylan Thomas, everything about fireflies except “why?”
A famous Dutch philosopher was once a summertime houseguest of a friend of mine.
During a dinner party held on his first evening in the country, the old man walked out onto the deck that over looked the woods behind the house.
After a long while, my friend went looking for her guest.
He stood transfixed, staring at the fireflies, which he had never seen, awed that such things could be.
Everybody else at the party was inside, talking shop, and playing office politics. Only the philosopher thought to look around. Only he was open to wonder.
Sometimes I think that only children, philosophers and poets retain wisdom in this world. The rest of us are too busy with email, meetings, cell phones and lawnmowers.
And that’s a shame.
