James M. Redwine

Personal Fun

While We Can

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Peg with her black umbrella

I had my funeral August 16, 2014. I loved it! I recommend you also consider having yours while you and your family and friends can laugh instead of cry. My parents had already passed before 2014 and I attended each of their funerals; they were sad. More importantly, the things I regretted not asking them or not saying to them were no longer possible. Another reason to hold your own wake is you can invite whom you want and see who really cares.

At my “Fun-er-al” we played and sang songs and marched a “second line” around our barn while singing, “When the Saints Go Marching In”. We shared not only good memories but speculated on the new adventures we would have. I cannot, for fear of missing someone, name all the wonderful dear people who helped plan and join in the celebration. But I still remember each one who made the effort to re-live my and their pasts together. And, I had no concerns that my transgressions might be mentioned; after all, I was right there! Unlike Mark Antony said of Julius Caesar in Act 3, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, only my good lived on.

I believe my wish to attend my own funeral had its genesis in my twelve-year-old boy’s reading of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. You recall that Tom, ever the mischievous imp, watched his Aunt Polly and the community of the small town of St. Petersburg on the Mississippi River mourn Tom’s supposed drowning. Tom and his friends Joe Harper and Huck Finn listened to people praise them just before the boys marched down the church aisle in glory. It was grand.

Then there was the splendid 1998 Irish movie Waking Ned Devine. Ned had just won the Irish lottery but the shock of winning caused a deadly heart attack. In the plot, the law was to claim the prize, 6.9 million pounds, one had to be alive. Ned’s friends in his tiny village had his friend, Michael O’Sullivan pretend to be Ned. To help with the ruse, the town held a funeral for Michael posing as Ned at which Michael’s best friend, Jackie O’Shea, gave a eulogy and said wonderful things about Michael. He got to attend his own passing albeit under the pseudonym Ned Devine.

One of my favorite folk singers was Phil Ochs who died in 1976 at age 35. He must have had many thoughts about how to save the world, but one of my favorite Phil Ochs songs is “When I’m Gone”. Part of the lyrics are:

“There’s no place in this world
Where I’ll belong when I’m gone
And you won’t find me singing
On this song when I’m gone

Won’t see the golden of the sun
When I’m gone
And the evenings and the mornings
Will be one when I’m gone

Can’t be singing louder than the
Guns when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it
While I’m here.”

In other words, words are not worth much if we do not say them to the living person. Therefore, say it now while we can and while we and those we care about can know how we truly feel.

This lesson was reinforced for me in an article by Angela Haupt in the August 5, 2026 Time online magazine. The general theme was about what we can and should or should not say to someone who is dying. “There is no perfect script and your presence likely matters more than anything you manage to say”. Haupt quotes Ira Byock, a palliative care physician, on the issue of whether to go see a dying friend. His question is, “Would you go to the funeral?” If the answer is yes, then say the things you want to say to your family and friends now while they can actually hear it.

Funerals are helpful for some of the survivors but they mean nothing to the deceased unless it is someone like Queen Elizabeth who pre-plans all the pomp and circumstance. For most of us, if we do not have frequent physical contact with those we care about and if those people do not make the effort to tell us now and then how they feel about us, it does us no good for them to show up at our funeral and say nice things to our casket. Unless you have your funeral while you are still alive and can enjoy it, what’s the point? I still cherish every moment of mine from 12 years ago.

August 16, 2014

You can also follow us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavelgamut”

Not Just Fleeting Things

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Poster from our wedding

Peg and I have planned a sojourn to the Grand Canyon for our anniversary. Actually, Peg asked me what I wanted to do, then she contacted the Park and got us a room for three days with a dinner reservation for August 25th, our anniversary. Once she had secured both room and board for us, she developed a scenic and meandering route to guide us; she included two motel reservations on the way out. As we may wend our way to Monument Valley and, as yet to be determined adventures on the way home, she will secure those accommodations before we leave the Canyon.

You might ask what I helped do in the preparations. Well, I did not demur to anything Peg proposed. And, I have already procured a bottle of Amarone for our anniversary evening. It makes me proud that I contributed. In fact, Peg’s meticulous matriculation to our anniversary Odyssey caused me to reflect on some of my other ideas that would have been but peccadilloes without Peg’s inspiration. As they are myriad and varied, I will mention just a few.

Volgograd, Russia, December 2003

I went to Volgograd, Russia to teach Russian judges about the American jury system. Volgograd was called Stalingrad during WWII. In a six month’s winter battle one and a half million Russians and six-hundred thousand German soldiers died there. It is recognized as the bloodiest ground battle ever. Also, it is known for the movie made about it, Enemy at the Gates and the Russian sniper, Vasily Zaitsev, who personally killed 225 German soldiers. Of course, it was Peg who made all of our travel arrangements and who prepared the PowerPoint for my week of lectures. It was also Peg with whom all the male Russian judges wanted to dance as she knows how to Rock and Roll and the Russians love American music.

Batumi, Georgia, September 2022

Then we were contracted by the U.S.A.I.D., the American Bar Association, the East-West Management Institute and the National Judicial College, where I have long served on the faculty, to spend six months in the country of Georgia working with Georgian judges. Georgia borders Russia and is directly across the Black Sea from Ukraine. Once again, Peg made all the arrangements and did all the paperwork for my twenty-four presentations. We had to socialize and teach through translators. Peg was able to easily ingratiate both of us into the legal community while giving me the professional credit. And, we were greatly aided in this by our wonderful Georgian friends, Irina and Eka.

Peg reminds me of that nostalgic 1968 song by Tom Jones, My Elusive Dreams. Basically, the lyrics are you followed me in all my dreams and never left me to move on alone. There is so much more that I find myself grateful to Peg for at this anniversary. Suffice it to say, without you all those and many other adventures would not even be memories. And one more extremely important and thoughtful thing Peg has done for me was she figured out how to use her I-Pad to get the 2023 Super Bowl live at 5:00 am Georgian time. We did not miss a moment of the Kansas City Chiefs defeating the Philadelphia Eagles on February 12. While Peg used her native ingenuity to defeat all efforts to have us miss the game, I did my part too; someone had to make the morning coffee.

By the way Peg, as she has done for many years, typed this column, emailed it to the news media, put it on my website and posted it to Facebook too. I think it’s only fair to point out that I did come up with the title and remembered our anniversary. Well, Peg may have gently mentioned it first. Thank you, Peg, and Happy Anniversary!

Our formal wedding picture

You can also follow us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavelgamut”

Fireworks Forever

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Photo by Gary Dunn

On the Fourth of July my wife Peg, and our son Jim, along with his wife Gina and our granddaughter Elyse spent the long daylight hours anticipating the nighttime fireworks extravaganzas to be exploded by generous patriotic citizens. I have been amazed since I was a boy at how much effort, time and money ordinary Americans expend to celebrate our Independence. Whereas we boys spent our lawn-mowing money on cherry bombs and Roman candles, municipalities and businesses light up the heavens with spectacular displays of bursting pyrotechnics.

We younger celebrants might spend scant time ruminating on the glories of America’s military history, but we did join in by dueling with imaginative ways of blowing up almost every conceivable container. The resulting burnt fingers and blurred vision were just part of the experience. Of course, every now and then some fool would experiment by flushing cherry bombs down a commode or setting off grass fires with T.N.T.’s.

Regardless, everyone loves to see exploding displays that call forth our good fortune to have been born in the U.S.A. We may not long dwell on the true reason for the Fourth of July but we all drink deeply of the fireworks that commemorate it. That is what whet our anticipation as we endured the long daylight waiting to ooh and ahh over the upcoming displays.

That was why when Mother Nature let us know who really was in charge, we experienced profound disappointment. The huge, powerful storm that began just as darkness finally arrived almost drowned out our enthusiasm for sitting outside to see the explosive shows. However, as all Americans, we refused to give up on our yearly celebration, especially on this 250th year of Freedom.

And, in the Mexican restaurant where we had stopped to eat as we endured the wait for darkness outside, inside the lights went out when the lightening began to strike and the thunder roared. A group of Gulf and Iraq War veterans were trapped inside with us; they sat at the bar and faced the raging storm just as they did the wars. And when our son introduced himself as a fellow combat veteran, they started yelling and congratulating him as Toby Keith’s song Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue began to play loudly from one of the vet’s cell phones. The whole dining room sang along as Gina and Elyse led the music. If you know the lyrics, you do not need me to recite all of them. But the core message is:

♪ American girls and American guys
We’ll always stand up and salute
We’ll always recognize
When we see Old Glory flying
There’s a lot of men dead
So we can sleep in peace at night when we lay down our head. ♪

The whole restaurant of strangers spontaneously sang to America in the dark as the storm raged outside. The 4th of July emotion filled the house.

So, as sheets of rain and blowing winds did their best to dampen our spirits, we just got into the car and searched for others as reckless and determined as we were to see the great show. What we found were that adults were as determined as we boys used to be to celebrate our nation’s birthday, even in the face of flooded roads, falling trees and incessant lightning strikes. It became a game entered into voluntarily, if ignorantly, by virtually every person who could get a pyrotechnic device to light between acts of death-defying recklessness.

As I drove the five of us around in search of fireworks displays, we found countless descendants of our Founding Fathers who, also, refused to be intimidated just by a little thing like death and destruction. Now, Gentle Reader, I do not claim that good judgment prevailed, but I know we sure had a lot of fun and felt very patriotic.

You can also follow us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavelgamut”

Lieutenant Colonel James D. Redwine

Not the Valkyries

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Armadillo with textured shell and long tail sniffing leaves on forest floor
A generated armadillo searches for food among leaves on the forest floor

Peg and I returned to our log cabin on our ranch and saw three large vultures just outside our front door vying over the carcass of a massive armadillo. They were so intent on rendering their share of the bounty they did not fly away until I got of our vehicle. My first impression was of President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu and some Ayatollah gnawing at the remains of Iran.

Armadillos are about as ugly a creature as nature has produced. They remind one of what a Congressional Committee might have produced had some generous pork producer asked their favorite House Member lackey to come up with a substitute for a hog to sell to the government for C-Rations. An armadillo is without any redeeming aesthetic value. They look the same from the front as the back; long, scaley and nasty grey from end to end with tuffs of hair dotted around for enhancement must be what other armadillos consider attractive.

Such attractiveness must work for them as the population of armadillos is growing exponentially as proven by all the dead ones on our roads. And for some reason, the Congressman who designed the armadillo provided that each pregnant female gutter-rat can produce four offspring at a time. It is as though the Armadillo Design Committee wanted to assure America has an alternate national symbol that is to the bald eagle as the U.S. Department of Transportation is to Roman highways. That is, roads that are built with planned obsolescence in mind versus two-thousand years of service.

Anyway, as I exited our pickup Peg screeched, “Jim, those vultures may attack you! That thing may still be alive.” We have plenty of experience with vultures, so I was fairly confident the already wafting putridness from the truly dead beast was what drew in the prairie vacuum sweepers.

I grabbed a pair of gloves and lifted the armadillo by its hairless, scaley tail. I was surprised at how heavy it was. It must have been a very pregnant female before somebody on the nearest state highway, two miles away, had run over it. I estimate it weighed twenty pounds based on my previous armadillo experience. I carried it out into the pasture and made sure it was visible from the sky. The vultures only waited about twenty minutes before hovering around the reeking mess. The pasture was armadillo-free by the next afternoon.

I wish to commend the vultures for somehow transporting the heavy helping of armadillo from what, I assume, was a two-mile flight. It looked like they had clung to their prize as long as they could before having to release it onto our lane. Mother Nature surely knows what She is doing even if our Congressional Committees do not. Vaya con dios mama armadillo, feel free to never return.

By the way, I do have a friend who swears the meat of an armadillo tastes like “sweet pork”. As I told him, he has my blessing to collect every dead armadillo he finds on the highway and serve them at Easter. He will have no competition from Peg and me, and that is even without the leprosy factor.

You can also “follow’ us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavelgamut”

Hail From Hell

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Peg and I traveled to Scotland in 2017. We did not rent a car then because the British Isles have age restrictions on driving. After having to drive on the wrong side of the road in Ireland in 2013, we accepted the wisdom of those regulations. Then after surviving the Oklahoma thunderstorm on the highway last night in the dark, I suggest all driving everywhere should be reserved for no one under 30 or over 40. Only quick and 20-20 drivers should be on the roads. Author’s note: we weren’t the only ones who should not have been blindly swaying from lane-to-lane last night. There must have been thousands of too young and reckless and too old and feckless operators of potential death machines dodging hail and guessing where the road should be.

The Redwines in Scotland

It reminded us of our Scotland trip to the Isle of Skye. We stayed in the small town of Broadford and one day took a shuttle to the even smaller town of Portree. When we slowly and carefully got off the bus, we saw a sign that said, “Caution, elderly people crossing”. We were amused and even took a selfie; of course, we were almost 10 years younger then.

One of us got hearing aids a couple of years ago but they are more utility as earrings than listening devices. One of us was too vain to admit to any hearing difficulty but the uselessness of the set we bought justified the age-denial.

Picture by Tony Ricketts

The reason we were on the road back from Indiana was our children had thrown an 80th birthday party for Peg and a 75th party for her brother. It was great and enjoyable, especially because all we had to do was get there and back; we did, but barely. Peg rode in the back seat so she could lie down while I drove. Normally, Peg navigates as I would have had Christopher Columbus in Greenland. If I can see the Big Dipper, I can guess which way is north.

Usually, we do not encounter monsoons and Peg can shout directions to me with little damage being done. Alas, as they said about elderly Aunt Edith in the movie Christmas Vacation, I couldn’t have heard a ‘dynamite truck exploding in a nitroglycerin factory” during the hail last night, so her increasingly panicked screams to “Watch Out!”, fell on truly deaf ears.

Well, we got back to the ranch about 10:00 pm and hurried into the cabin as we yelled at one another. Some of the conversation I did hear went something like this:

Peg: “Jim, get in here before the lightning strikes again.”
I heard, “Where did you pack the medicines?”

Jim: “Peg, you’re all wet, do you need a blanket?”
Peg heard: “Peg, don’t be such a wet blanket.”

Peg: “Put the dirty clothes in the washer.”
I heard: “Jim, it’s time you did the washing for a change.”

This morning the sun is out, the rain and hail are gone and Peg and I are trying to recover. As we live on the prairie, we have deer, armadillos, etc., and wild turkeys that often appear in our yard. In an attempt to make amends to Peg for shouting back to her when she had shouted at me that my driving was going to get us killed, I tried to tell Peg we had some turkeys pecking in front of the veranda.

Jim: “Peg, come look at the preening tom!”
Peg heard: “Peg, where’s my toothbrush?”

Peg: “Jim, you need to get a photo of those turkeys.”
I heard: “Jim, quit being such a turkey.”

Regardless, all-in-all it was a wonderful celebration and another exciting adventure. However, it is a good thing that we are not likely to be attending another 80th birthday party.

 

You can also follow us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavelgamut”

A Wee Philosophy

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Peg & Jim Redwine at the Scotland Border, 2017

Robert Burns (1759-1796), Scotland’s best-known poet and farmer, was ploughing his field one day when he upended a mouse’s winter nest. The poem Burns wrote in the original Scots language, “To A Mouse”, is as difficult to decipher as Peg and I found trying to comprehend conversations when we visited Scotland. Therefore, I will cite the English version that in part says to the “Little, sleek, cowering timorous beast”:

“I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
And justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes you startle,
At me, your poor earth-born companion and fellow mortal?
….
But Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes of Mice and Men
Go oft awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain .…”

Then Burns turns his thoughts inward towards his own fate:

“Still you are blessed compared with me!
The present only touches you:
But Oh? I backward cast my eye,
On prospects dreary!
And forward, though I cannot see, I guess and fear.”

In other words, the mouse may have lost his present home, but it is not burdened with regrets from the past or dread of the future. Shelter alone is the mouse’s concern, but Burns is chained to past misfortunes and the possibilities of future disasters, much as each of us humans are. The mouse’s loss of a temporary home pales in comparison to mankind’s sentient reality.

Gentle Reader, you may wonder what these two conflicting perspectives have to do with anything. Of course, you may not even take note. However, to me the dilemma between the Wee Beastie’s loss of a nest and Burns’ acknowledgement that “ignorance may be bliss” came clearly into my mind when Peg said, “Jim, I smell a dead mouse in the kitchen”. Naturally, the onus was upon me to answer for the mouse’s demise and alter any more future consequences. I am married; I know the drill.

My first response was my fallback position for all domestic quandaries, I ignored it. Unfortunately, Peg was not willing to let nature deal with nature so waiting until the smell was gone was not feasible. Then I searched for a mouse corpse in the usual places, such as under the kitchen sink or near the pantry, nothing. Next, I checked around the outside of our log cabin to see if there was an odiferous source in Peg’s dried flowers, nope.

All easy solutions failed me. The dreaded, “Jim, someone (me) needs to crawl under the house to see if some animal (we have lots of them) died there and is rotting away”. Oh, the glories of flashlights, facemasks, knee pads and possible confrontations with Big Foot or perhaps an upset skunk. I donned my gear and armed myself with a large trash bag and a short-handled shovel.

After about an hour of banging my head and digging up suspect piles of damp dirt I declared a truce with Ma Nature and told Peg I thought the smell was well on its way to dissipation so we should just hang on awhile. You might already know how that resolution was received.