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Don Locke: Lookin Thru Bifocals

Someone once said, “The secret to good writing is the rewrite.”

I wouldn’t know Meister Eckhart if I met him in the big road; but he did say a true thing: “Only the hand that erases can write the true true thing.”

Was mine true?  Maybe I should go back and express the true thing if I find I was wrong.”  The national press needs to heed this.  Sometimes we need to hear or see the word “correction” at the end of a script.  

So much for allowing me a bit of pontification.  Let’s get on to lighter stuff like coal buckets and combinets, plus a banana pudding lunch in a half-gallon Bob White syrup bucket.  

I’ll begin with my having a cup of coffee in the snack section of a large discount store in my hometown of Greenville.  

I glanced across the way at a booth on the other side.  “Could that be Hezzie Furgeson over there?”  Sure enough it was — after all these years.  I hadn’t seen him since I was seven or eight, and Hezzie was a young man.  He was laughing and talking  with friends over coffee.

“I’ll go over and speak to him later,” I thought.  However as I was looking around Hezzie and his friends left.  

My thoughts went back to the time Hezzie and I were standing looking up at the proceedings on the balcony in back of the warehouse of the general store at New Cypress, where my daddy was the manager. 

Ole Chum, our dog, had treed a rat inside a rolled-up, new, linoleum rug.  He was at one end barking his head off, water dripping off his panting tongue.  My daddy was at the other end punching at the rat with a broom handle.

After a while Chum got so excited he left his post and went around to daddy’s end — plum out of his head.  The rat came out, Chum saw his mistake and took off after him.  The rat used the only option he had left and sailed over the rail of the balcony.  

Hezzie was standing down on the floor looking up, slack-jawed, when the rat struck him smack in the middle of the chest. Hezzie staggered backward, kicking new coal buckets and combinets (portable conveniences).  By that time the rat was hunting new territory at a high rate of speed… long gone.  

My friend Tommy rode double on a mule with his friend to a field where the friend’s daddy was plowing.  In a half-gallon Bob White syrup bucket they were carrying lunch to he friend’s dad.  In the bucket was a good-size helping of banana pudding, that’s all.  Nothing more.

The plan was for one of them to get down off the mule while the other boy handed the bucket down to the guy on the ground.  However with young boys things often go awry.  Somehow during the attempted exchange the bucket was dropped.  When it hit the ground the lid flew off and a good portion of the banana pudding ended up on the ground in the dirt.  

The boys hurried to scoop it up with their hands and put it back in the bucket.  The daddy came; they handed him the bucket and left.  That night the wife asked her husband how the lunch was: “It was a little gritty but good,” he said. 

Kindest regards… 

 
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