GOOD MORNING, FRIENDS

A REMEMBERAMBLE FOR FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2025

It is Friday once more, y'all! Get down and come in, we will "set a spell." I have a question, what happened to the pigeons? When I was a boy, it was quite common to see pigeons, they lived and nested in town, and at all of the grain elevators, and peanut places, and were residents of many farms. If disturbed, they would as a flock, fly off, wheel about, come back and resettle. Speaking of pigeons makes me think of an old man we knew back then, who was connected to our family through his son's marriage.

He had raised pigeons, and had some fine ones. As a boy, I always had chickens and ducks of all sorts, turkeys and guineas, just all kinds of fowl. The old man was absolutely nuts, and came from a long line of absolute nuts. They seemed to cultivate their mental illnesses, baby them, coddle them, and grow them as a garden almost. Multi-generational insanity was a commodity for them, it was all they had of value. He married a woman who was way-off kin on mama's side of the family, and they had a passel of kids, boys and girls.

They raised them to carry on the family tradition of severe mental illness. They moved now and again, and had an old car at that time, but for the life of me, I have no idea of how they lived, I never knew of him or his wife ever working, and they had no inheritance other than that I have already told you of. They were poor, in fact the family passed along the family tradition of poverty as well as craziness. Oh, and he was also a religious fanatic, with his own version of Christianity that never burdened him with having to be good in any area of life.

He would get started on the Bible and he would start out slow and quiet, and build steadily to a crescendo of righteous anger, where he would begin cussing, and hollering, and then whoever he was talking to, would best high-tail it out of there. "Ye son's of B*TCHES" was one of his favorites to address a person to whom he was witnessing for Christ. When most of his kids were young, they lived on a dirt road, out in the country, and the old man dug a big hole in the dirt road in front of their house so folks had to almost stop and "ease through" it.

Ralph Peebles was the mail carrier and he got tired of having to drive through the "fox hole" in front of their house, so he drove up close to their doorsteps and went around it, with the main purpose of it, to make the old man mad. The old coot accused Ralph of trying to get a better look at his wife, bless her heart, no comment, here. The old man made a big sign and painted in big letters on it, "NO DRUNKARDS OR WHOREHOPPERS ALLOWED." The next morning his kids were so embarrassed that they pretended to get onto the school bus.

Actually, they hid in the woods all day. In those days, as we have discussed many times, people went en masse, to town on Saturdays back then. He was never one to miss going to town on Saturdays, he had a huge crowd of people to choose from to argue with. He would ask his kids if they wanted to go to town, and if they said yes, he would tell them to go to the back porch wash shelf and washup, while they were doing that, he would drive off and leave them. If they said the next week, they did not want to go, he would whip them all and make them go.

After their family got connected to ours through that marriage, mama and daddy tried to be nice and load all of us kids up on a Sunday afternoon or two, to be nice and visit with them. We enjoyed it because they had kids to choose from of all ages, so we liked playing out there, and I was fascinated by the old bast...uh, old man's pigeons. He had fat white ones, barred pigeons and even a few red tumblers, those are unique in that if you clap loudly when they are flying, they will begin to tumble through the air.

I guess it was an evolutionary adaptation to dodging gunshots. Those visits were always cut short, as he and his wife would ask mama and daddy to sit with them on the porch, and it would start out just fine. Nice friendly talk, but before long he would get on the subject of us being Baptists, and as he was a bootleg holiness, he would begin assuring mama and daddy and all of us kids were doomed to hellfire, and he was "d*mn" glad of it, as he would say. He would talk louder, increase the profanity and scream for all of us to get our "heathern" selves off of his property.

As kids, we loved it. Later he was not allowed to drive, so he rode a bicycle. He would ride to town with a big black Bible in his basket, wearing an old black clawhammer coat and black fedora, and never once stopped for traffic as he turned in front of it, or crossed in front of it, and if someone blew their horn, he would hold his old Bible up and cuss them right roundly, usually topped off with his trademark, "ye sons of b*tches!!" In their older years, when they had only one child yet at home, their youngest daughter, a son bought a small house in town for them and they moved there.

One evening, his wife was in the kitchen frying chicken for supper, while the old codger sat on the couch watching the six o'clock news, with the daughter sitting across from him. Before the chicken was done, the girl walked into the kitchen and said, "mama, I think daddy's dead." Her mama walked into the small living room, with her big chicken frying fork in her hand, with her daughter at her heels. The old lady stood there for a minute watching him, then poked him in the chest with the sharp tines of the big fork.

He did not move or flinch. She said to her daughter, "I believe he is." She looked at him again to be sure, and then said, "wait about ten minutes and call an ammalance." They gave me his pigeons, so all was well that ended well. I promised yesterday that as my GM,F's post was a bit of a downer yesterday, that today would be light-hearted and funny. I hope you enjoyed the tale because it was completely true.

Meet us here tomorrow if you will, we love it when you do. NUMBERS 6: 24-26 KKJV

..... we boyz three, babee conway, lil merle, & me