James M. Redwine

Peg

Sour Grapes

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A plethora of professional football, a cornucopia of college football and, most importantly, the hallowed echoes of high school football. Thanksgiving brings out the America our Founders dreamed of, “A more perfect union”. One where the battles almost never involve fatal blows but where due process on the field requires impartial officials, the Judiciary (?), involved and spirited fans, citizens (?), teams with different positions, players and coaches who are leaders and standard bearers for the hopes of countless constituencies, fans (?).

Peg and I almost surfeited on football last week but our stomachs have about recovered from gastronomical excess and our eyes and seats are ready for more football. Unfortunately, we are already ruing the long, dark journey from February until the fall of 2026. Ah well, we do have a few other things to attend to. And the memories of this season and seasons past will sustain us until then. For example, my favorite Thanksgiving Day football game occurred during my senior year of high school in 1960. I have carefully and constantly rearranged that game, especially the role of my favorite seventeen-year-old player in the outcome.

Photo by Peg Redwine

I was a linebacker who was not particularly gifted in the speed department. All right, I was on defense because my time in the forty was not clocked, but calendared. On the other hand, as I was a catcher on the baseball team, I was fairly adroit at retrieving fumbles; I just did not usually advance them.

Anyway, as I relive that glorious Thursday afternoon in November of 1960, I see myself clutching a blocked punt from our opponent. Only an uncharitable observer would have pointed out that my teammate actually blocked the punt. Regardless, when the football bounced into my arms, I took off like a lightning bolt for the goal line fifty-one yards away, my player number on the team. Mercury could not have caught me.

The next day the newspaper showed why people dislike the media. My heroic touchdown was described thusly, “Jim Redwine, reputedly the slowest player on the team, lugged the ball over the goal line”. That is why my football career ended in high school.

However, Peg and I still plan to cheer on Indiana and Oklahoma University teams as they conquer the playoffs, cheer on Army in the Army Navy game, watch every single college bowl game late into the nights of January then end the season with the Super Bowl in February. Who knows, with coaches making more money than Croesus, maybe some school will hire me to coach linebackers on how not to run.

Photo by Peg Redwine

Predictions

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Happy New Year! Photo by Peg Redwine

It is the new year, a time when we humans have often either savored our accomplishments, reflected on our regrets, dreamed of our hopes or dreaded our fears. The new year has long been a time when people of many cultures have analyzed the past and predicted the future. As Yogi Berra might have said, the future is hard to predict. However, that has never stopped us from trying. As for me, I find regretting the past only makes it more regrettable and dreading the unknown future only leads to self-fulfilling prophecies. On the other hand, attempting to predict the as yet uncontrollable events ahead will probably do little harm as the world will ignore us anyway. Ergo, I will boldly, if ignorantly, publish a few of my predictions as my experience has been hardly anyone will pay attention so no harm will result.

First, I will not lose weight nor exercise more unless an increasing frequency of nighttime bathroom trips qualifies. Nor will I read the many potentially life-altering books I have in my library. Second, I will not help Peg more around the house nor spend less money on chips and dip and less time in front of the telly. Third, none of my complaints about any public officials will result in any constructive impacts as, first of all they will not be read and secondly none of the officials will think they need to make any changes.

When it comes to generic suggestions, such as I and many others have been making for many years, our state and federal governments may take umbrage, if they even take notice, but not one of our calls for peace in the Middle East or anywhere else will be heeded. In fact, I predict our national leaders will swallow the false intelligence once again fed to us by Israel, such as “weapons of mass destruction”, and we will support a war against Iran as we enable Israel’s theft and destruction of Palestine and Syria.

I do predict Ukraine’s invasion by Russia will finally reach a stalemate on the terms I predicted just after it began three years ago; and, after we have expended billions of our treasure. Russia will stop in return for a permanent seizure of Crimea that they have occupied since 2014 and the permanent occupation of a substantial portion of Ukraine east of the Dnipro River with Ukraine to maintain its ownership and control over the port of Odessa on the Black Sea. I further predict Russia will not help rebuild Ukraine, but America will to the tune of many more billions of our dollars.

Well, Gentle Reader, I suppose you can tell why I find predictions of the future as unhelpful as Yogi might have. I do have many more fears and hopes relating to our fragile globe’s future, but I find the concentration upon them debilitating. And, as it is the new year, I will just succumb to muddling on through 2025. “Happy” New Year to you all.

Labor Day

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My father’s father was killed in an accident when my dad was nine years old. My father had to quit school in his third-grade year to help his mother support the family. He went to work in an independent coal mine running water to the older workers. The mine was unregulated by state or federal law. The shaft was supported with tree limbs for beams and the coal produced was high sulfur. The dust he breathed helped lead to his death from cancer when he was fifty-eight. He left the mine which closed when the shaft collapsed upon some of the miners. Dad was out of the mine on a water run at the time the supporting tree limbs gave way.

It was not just coal dust that contributed to his health problems. When he had to search out another job after the cave-in, he found work in a cement plant where he breathed in cement dust for several years. He lost that job when he had a heart attack at age thirty-three but had no health nor unemployment benefits from the company. He was out of work and bedridden for six months while my mother nursed him back to health. They were without outside income or insurance during that period. That is why my father went into insurance sales. He and my mother were strong supporters of workers’ rights who revered Labor Day just as they did July Fourth. They knew that law was essential to ensure safe working conditions. Such things as child labor laws, restricted work hours and days, health precautions and minimum wage requirements are not socialist ideals but are some of the building blocks of our economy. Labor Day is a celebration of America’s commitment to fairness, equality and good economics in the workplace.

Of course, as Peg points out, for about half of America’s workforce the bulk of their work is in their homes. Peg says it is ironic that we have a national holiday named Labor Day. She asks, “What about some fairness and equality in labor around the home and, what’s more, what about some recognition not just for ‘child labor’ but for the labor of having a child?” I should have seen this discussion coming when I casually mentioned my days of manual labor for hire.

According to Peg, Mother’s Day is a fine recognition of mothers but flowers once a year just doesn’t cut it. “Where’s the beef?” she asks. “Where is the minimum wage for round-the-clock cleaning, cooking, laundry, deliveries, nursing, sewing, yard work, gardening, child care, carpooling, schedule maintenance, bookkeeping, counseling and furnishing a sympathetic sounding board for every hurt feeling? And what about some time off occasionally? How about some time alone with peace and quiet and a cool drink that somebody else brings to me?”

Well, Gentle Reader, you most likely fall on whichever side of this one-way discussion your gender dictates. So, for now, I plan to change the subject and return to a topic I may be able to discuss without interruption, that is, Labor Day. Oh, not the one Peg is on about, but the one declared by President Grover Cleveland in 1894. So here goes.

Peg got agitated as we watched numerous male politicians on television exhort the wonders of the American, mostly male, workers whose harsh working conditions in the 19th and 20th centuries caused the birth of Labor Day. When it came to Peg’s complaints about work in the home, I felt duty bound to point out that husbands were responsible for much of her complained about female labors. After all, someone has to wear the clean clothes, eat the food and watch the kids play soccer and baseball. It is not all beer and TV you know. And if anyone had ever asked men to have the kids, who is to say we might not have considered it.

Further, most men have no problem with wearing the same comfortable t-shirt and Levi’s for a week or so. And on top of that, beer and chips have plenty of nutritional value to sustain men through football season. I told Peg, gently, that she was being disingenuous in her analysis of the significance of Labor Day. Labor Day for male workers was much like the right to vote for women. While women were wearing white, marching and singing songs about freedom, we men were busy gathering at bars talking about seeking fair working conditions. Men gladly organized for shorter work weeks and safer working conditions as women sought not just the right to vote, but also better working conditions and fair and equal treatment everywhere. The two movements fed off the synergy of one another and, together, made life better for both men at work and women at home and work.

Of course, those intertwined crusades for justice made our country better for us all. So, I guess if Peg thinks Labor Day is truly about all labor, I will, in the spirit of home harmony, agree. After all, I’m getting hungry and the game’s about to start on tv and I’m hoping Peg will bring me chips and a beer.

Hell Hath No Fury!

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Abigail Adams (1744-1818) was the wife of our second president, John Adams, and the mother of our sixth, John Quincy Adams. She wielded great influence over both but could not secure for women the right to vote. Her effort in the cause of female rights is exemplified by the following excerpt from one of her numerous letters to John while he was deeply involved in the Continental Congress:

“- I long to hear that you have declared an independency [from Great Britain] – and by the way in the new Code of Laws [The Declaration of Independence and new Articles of the Confederation] which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice or Representation.” (April 1776) 

A mere 144 years later most American women who were twenty-one years or older got the right to vote when the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. However, in the meantime there was hell to pay for a lot of people who forgot the aphorism, “Hell Hath No Fury Like Women Scorned!” (from a 1697 English play by William Congreve, 1670-1729). Perhaps John Adams and his fellow Founding Fathers, they were all men at the Continental Convention, should have listened. Perhaps they might have saved the United States 144 years of angst and saved themselves many nights on the couch.

It is not as if women, and a lot of men too, were not struggling mightily for many years to give females equality. Such courageous heroines as Dolly Madison (1768-1849), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) were marching lecturing, writing and enduring social, political and even physical danger in the cause of female suffrage. And in my own family my grandmother, who had no right to vote until she was well beyond 21, instilled in my mother, who well remembered when women could not vote, the debt she and other women owed to those pioneers. The best way to repay it was to exercise their dearly bought franchise. My 87-year-old sister Janie was imbued with this burning ardor as is my wife, Peg, who is not 87 but whose dearly departed mother lit that same flame in her.

My sister is a testament to how sacred many women, and many men also, hold the right to vote. Janie has been diagnosed with a slowly progressing but debilitating illness that many would have called uncle to before now. However, I am confident nothing will prevent her from participating in an election that might result in our first female president. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote that I bet included Janie’s. But she and her distaff cohorts now have another chance. I have no doubt my beloved, and committed sister will make it to November 05 and, hopefully well beyond, the medical folks are of the opinion that they have no opinion. “It will be what it will be”, they say.

I think it may turn out that Peg’s mother, my mother and even our grandmothers and great grandmothers, all of whom have gone onto their rewards, may find some way to join Janie and Peg at the polls November 05, 2024, only 248 years after Abigail’s entreaty to John. Of course, many will exercise their rights in support of their contemporary female hopefuls but many women will vote for men on the ticket. And many men will freely vote for the fairer sex but will also support the men on the ballots.

In other words, gender will no longer be, and should never have been, a determining factor in either choosing a candidate or having the right to make such a choice. Congratulations to all of us for no longer basing our vital political selections on sex, no matter what that designation may be. Abigail should be beaming wherever she is.

The Birds

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Peg has an almost pathological approach/avoidance psychosis with the date of April 15. Together we experience each year’s stride, step, stumble and eventual exhausted final shoulder bruising penance of shoving the burden of our tax obligation up to Mount Olympus, that is, Washington D.C. On the other hand, Peg each year becomes teenage girl giddy as the traditional return of the hummingbirds to the feeders she sterilizes and fills with sugar water. No wonder the little woman-made diabetics buzz in and out in a frenzy of laser like attacks. You see, Peg is convinced “her” hummingbirds spend from November to April 15 watching the calendar and calculating when she will hang out the syrupy nectar. This year Peg exceeded all avian expectations, but, the first zooming scout did not come until April 17.

 Each year is the same. About April Fool’s Day Peg begins fretting she has somehow offended the Patron Saint Francis of Assisi and “her” hummingbirds will abandon her numerous feeding stations and soar right over us in search of sweeter pastures. I told Peg that failsafe source, the Internet, also names Switzerland’s St. Gallen (St. Gall), or the disputed Saint Milburga, an English nun, or perhaps the Russian Saint Tryphon Medallion were the patron saints of birds. But Peg said since she and I had been to Assisi and visited the Saint’s tomb, she was pretty sure she should address any complaints about hummingbirds to him.

Anyway, apparently none of the saints have been offended by my destruction of several bird nests built under the eaves of our cabin and bunkhouse. Well, they may have gently punished Peg for my indiscretions by making her wait until two days after Tax Day for the birdlike epiphany.

 However, now all is well and Peg is convinced the hummingbirds actually know our address and plan their entire yearly migration from South America or Mexico to our front veranda to besot themselves on Peg’s sugary slurry. It’s okay with me if she wants to believe it, but I am just glad to see the smiles return to her face as the small kamikazes jockey for position at her feeders. They certainly are aggressive little creatures. They remind me of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and the gigantic King of the Brobdingnags who is appalled by the vicious nature of tiny humans who invented canon and gun powder instead of seeking peaceful solutions to sharing resources.

Be that as it may, while I view the birds’ infighting over Peg’s largess as off putting, Peg sees everything they do as adorable. Each year we agree to disagree as to the true nature of the hummingbirds. You will note, Gentle Reader, the feeders still go out every April.

Spring Forward

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JPeg Osage Snake

Tuesday, March 19, 2024 was the Vernal Equinox. The sun was directly over the earth’s equator and husbands throughout the world saw their sublime winter days replaced by wives who feel compelled to build nests, or more correctly, to exhort their husbands to help do so. Peg does not care that we live in the country and no one can even see our yard from the nearest road. When spring arrives, my reverie ends. Watching sports on TV fades in the glow of longer days that demand immediate attention to countless tasks that must be attended to, “Right Now!” Never mind that not one of these matters mattered until the ponds stopped freezing over.

The inexhaustible energy of a wife in springtime is exhausting. What is there in the female biology that cannot accept that Mother Nature provides her own rejuvenation of beauty such as dandelions and blooming thistle. Woman-made improvements to nature’s burgeoning bounty of wild growing plants, that Peg calls weeds, must be addressed with rakes, hoes, chemicals and sweat, mine.

It is not that I wish to ignore home maintenance. I agree that grass should be mowed occasionally. However, where is the sin in appreciating what comes from nature? Do we need numerous areas for flowers and vegetables that are readily available from Walmart? Why did we save for retirement if we are not going to retire? And, what about the welfare of all the little critters we are disrupting and worse with god-knows what concoctions that we spray and spread? I ask you, Gentle Reader, well, at least those of you who are husbands, what is wrong with living with nature? Live and let live sounds good to me.

Another thing that comes with spring is the plethora of Nature’s creations that apparently want to live in proximity with us and which Peg cannot abide. About once each day I am startled by, “Jim!” I know from the tone and decibel level that some unlucky snake, mouse, squirrel, scorpion, spider or bird has been doing its spring things too close to ours and my role is to ruin its day. Never mind that all these creatures want is to eat and procreate on their own terms without our interference, they must be dispatched, by me of course.

There is hope for Peg’s yearly compulsion to control the natural world with my labor. Before long the Summer Solstice will arrive and the moist earth and temperate weather will gradually metamorphosize into sunbaked clay and near drought. Then maybe Peg’s condition will cure itself until she hears the siren of autumn’s equinox and the chores of preparing for winter.