“Decaffeinated coffee. (What’s the point?)”

Couldn’t agree with you more, Dr. Wilson. I can drink it anytime without it keeping me awake. I’m an old “tin can” sailor and learned to sleep anytime, anywhere, through any conditions. I could sleep through the General Quarters alarm and even firing of the 5-inch guns, which were about 25 feet forward of my bunk. (I had to have someone check on me if the GQ alarm sounded.)

“Is there anyone who liked coffee the first time they drank it? . . . . And how many, even with the acquired taste, drink it black?”

I liked coffee the first time I tried it. I always drink it black. Unfortunately, I liked cigarettes the first time I tried them, too. Smoked a full pack the first day and I didn’t have my first one until 6:00 PM. I’m paying the price now. Although I quit about 20 years ago, after 20 years of more than three packs a day, I’ve got COPD, which will probably, eventually, kill me. If Americans invented the cigarette, it should be on Dr. Wilson’s list. If I had stuck to pipe smoking, I’d still be enjoying good tobacco today. I still have my old calabash. Cigarettes make it too easy to abuse tobacco.

“Well Red, how many people like whiskey or even beer the first time they taste it? First time, I thought whiskey tasted like medicine and beer was bitter. ”

Although I was born in “beer city” (Milwaukee) and was raised in Wisconsin (Kenosha), I’ve never liked beer. I wasn’t impressed with the taste of Scotch (my father’s drink) the first time I tried it, but I’ll drink it straight or on the rocks now. I really prefer bourbon.

“Many of the major brands, as I understand it, are now El Cheapo Arabica (which tastes weak and smells funny), versus full-bodied Colombian.”

I may be wrong, but I thought that there were two types of coffee, Arabica and Robusta. I think Columbian is a variety of Aribica. Robusta is an inferior bean that is used to make decaf. I drink Gevalia — pricey, but it makes a good cup in a Milita drip-through coffee maker. (Gevalia sells a large variety of coffees and teas, some better than others.) If you are interested in iced coffee, try a Toddy cold-brew system, which you can probably get at a Seattle’s Best coffee shop at your nearest Borders bookstore.

(By the way, Mr. Kirkwood, I’m surprised that you didn’t comment on “Mothers in combat.” You may remember that we served briefly at the same time on the staff of the Presidential Commission on Women in the Armed Forces. You were just joining as I was leaving. The director of research eased me out because I wouldn’t spend $40,000 of the taxpayers’ money to purchase books for the Commission’s library. I knew that no one would ever read those books. Instead, I recommended that the commission research staff write short reviews of relevant books for the commissioners and only buy a book if a commissioner requested it. Did you see that Gen. Harries, a VP at USAA and head of that commission, recently died? Dr. Moskos, the so-called “father” of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” who also recently died, was also a member of that commission.)

“My grandmother had an old wringer washer, itself an innovation in its day.”

My mother used one of these when I was growing up. I can’t remember how old I was when we got our first automatic washer. She didn’t get a drier until after I went to college. We always hung the wash out in the back yard or in the basement in the winter. Our furnace was an old coal burner that was converted to oil. I don’t remember when it burned coal, so I must have been quite young when it was converted. It’s possible that it never burned coal. The furnace may have been converted before we moved in. (The house was new construction on the edge of the city when my parents bought it. Nothing but farms to our south at the time. Growing up, my friends and I would play in the new construction houses that were pushing the farms, where we stole tomatoes, further south.)

“The modern deer standing – prefabricated, with a chair, sometimes a heater, etc. – has changed the way deer are hunted. Actually, they are not hunted; they are enticed and harvested.”

I have a climbing stand hanging in my basement. I bought it a number of years ago to hunt on the military base where I work. Use of a deerstand on the base is mandatory for safety reasons. I started hunting about ten years ago to protest the anti-hunters. The president of the local humane society announced a protest of a meeting of hunters in the state called by the Department of Natural Resources. Only the president showed up. He subsequently (and falsely) claimed that he was assaulted by some of the hunters, who showed up by the hundreds.

I go out in the woods a few days each season. I do what is called “still hunting” on the ground. I’m not a very good hunter, though. I hunt on public land and like to explore, so I tend to move around too fast and too much. I’ve never shot a deer. I came close a few years ago when I set up where I had scouted deer sign. Sure enough, a small herd came up over a rise where I was waiting, but as I waited for the deer to move so I had a safe background behind them, two hunters on an adjacent rise shot at the deer and scared them off. (The other hunters both missed their shots.) That’s a problem with hunting on public land. You’re not alone. I really like being out in the woods during the season. (I once spent an afternoon watching a beaver build a dam across a creek. I didn’t need to shoot a deer to consider that day a success.)

We probably need hunters to cull the deer. Actually, we probably need to reintroduce some carefully controlled market hunting to reduce the herds more than hunters are able to.

I’d better stop here.

The one American invention that has been accepted world-wide is:

THE MANUFACTURED TRUTH

Condi Rice informed us yesterday that she gave strict instructions to Saakashvili to “provoke” the Russians or engage in any military confrontation, yet half an hour after the conflict there were Hercules C-130 landing in Georgia with blankets and other type of “aid”. Naturally there were other “official” sources which claimed that even if “inprovoked” the Russians would attack and “we have the answer”. That way, we can pick any truth we like (fresh off the shelf).

Who can ever be against choice, or against life?

It takes a master planner and a considerable marketing machine to come up with:

Military aggressions named:
a) Just cause
b) Operation Allied Force (attack on Serbia)
c) Enduring freedom
d) Desert calm (Iraq)
e) Desert shield (Iraq)
f) Operation clean slate
g) Operation blue light (Iran)
h) Operation Continue Hope (Ethiopia)

However the abuse of the United States Constitution takes the cake: Under “Freedom of religion” we are bound to tolerate any cult (like Islam) irrespective how sharply it remains opposed to all things American.

Write the book.

At nineteen, I got on my first airplane, flew to New York and ate my first Chinese food; from there, I flew on to England and crossed the Channel and ate my first soft-boiled egg in Amsterdam – served to my mind on a golf tee, drank my first beer in Königswinter, Germany, where I also got locked in the hotel bathroom for a night, and then finally ended up in Vienna, where I was awed by the smallest and the greatest of things and events.

Although I visited home throughout the ensuing years and even lived back in Louisiana for short times, I did not really return until 1999.

During the years in which I was away – in Austria, Germany and France and California, the last being in many ways the most alien- I was surprised to learn that people were very interested in the daily things which I had done and taken quite for granted during those ‘nineteen” years with the same pastor, the same barber, the same school, the same parents and the same kinsmen.

Upon my “real” return in 1999, about thirty years later, I began to see those three loci with a special eye and came to understand that they – they being the people thereof with their customs and traditions – had contributed the most to that which was the best in me. There are scores to be cited, but one suffices: Miss Leamon (first name, which linked with “Miss,” catches just the right balance of respect and intimacy.) She was one of three teachers in our school who had remained unmarried in order to dedicate themselves to teaching. My own mother had been one of those; she had begun teaching at twenty and did not marry until she was thirty-two, having spent seven years living in the same boarding-house room and dining at the same table with the same people – themselves teachers. Miss Leamon, a close friend of my mother, lived in a tiny house and drank not coffee but tea – with creme, both of which were quite “unorthodox” for me. (This keeps me on thread, I hope, mentioning tea and coffee!) When I was really young, upon a visit at her house, I would ask for tea because she was the only person whom I knew with a whistling teapot. She was one of the teachers who, on the one hand, had that “teacher look” that could wither a fig tree at a thousand paces but who, on the other, could send a signal that she loved you and cared for you – that temperance one finds in a truly virtuous person. To the short of it, Miss Leamon died about six years ago, having married only after she had retired and having outlived her husband. I was unable to attend the funeral; however, a classmate of mine, from high school, called to share that a relative of Miss Leamon had told her that Miss Leamon had kept a list of students whom she thought needed her constant prayers. My name, I learned, had been on that list. The turns which my life took or did not take because of those prayers, I, of course, do not know; I do know that I am indebted to her and the many others of the three loci of my first nineteen years. It is for them that I from time to time tell a story when the opportunity presents itself.

“After all, there’s only so long a list of crimes we Yankees have committed against America, specifically against the South, that the good Professor can remind us of. It is a long list, though.”

And it ain’t nearly done yet!