Do I Miss It?

i am constantly running into former students out in public, occasionally i meet up with a former colleague. the first thing they want to know is how do i like retirement? Good question.
I ran into my good best friend and colleague Jim Fort at puckett's yesterday morning when sarge and i were on our way to breakfast. we hugged like brothers, which in a way we are. the first words out of our  mouths were, "do you miss it?" we had to stop and think about the answer.

i miss starting my day off in my room at six in the morning drinking coffee and having breakfast with fort. here we solved all the problems of the world and discussed school business and other subjects, some school and some not. i miss seeing my kids get off the bus and greeting each one as they walked through the door. i miss the bus drivers. i miss lance evans the administrator who worked on the bus ramp with me, i miss the duke and they myriad of SROs who spend every morning with me for two decades. Marc Craig, i miss you the most. i miss our dialogue. Rachel, Tracey, and Tonjia, you will never know how much i miss you. the baker elementary kids, Morgan being in the very first group, i miss you all so much it makes my heart hurt. the bakers kids all had parents who worked at CHS and we put them on a bus to school every morning. they became my kids. sambo i miss dollar day and molly i miss your antics. morgan i miss watching you, crystal and becky come across the field, stopping mid way to take your shoes off. i  miss bring okra and tomatoes to the girls in the English wing. Chloe, Liz and Cora, i miss you all so bad i can't stand it. Lance i miss our discussion s about history and politics. Tammy i miss hearing that Elvis has left the building, Roger White, i miss your optimism. you are a teacher's teacher, never forget that. Bill Wade, i miss you sitting in your truck eating a biscuit and listening to the radio. i miss your wisdom, i miss you like i miss my father. i am still bitter about you leaving this earth so soon. you wisdom benefited many of us long after you went to be an angel. Marty Avery, i miss your serious approach to humor and the hours of conversation, and Uncle David Walker, i can not begin to tell you how much i miss you. thank you for being there for morgan the day she lost it in class. one horrible day i do not ever plan to repeat. Veneta Moore Jarnigan, Miss Mo. you were my sister and morgan's other mamma. Nuff said on that one young lady.
pride, i have a lot of that. Jenny Garland, Drew Norman, Becca Carter, Becca Witherow, Jeff Loveless, you were my babies, my students and before i cashed in,,you were my colleagues. i am so proud of the fine adults and teachers you became. you made a difference in  my life and you are still making a difference in the lives of thousands of kids who you will meet and teach in your career. Theresa Brown, my third grade buddy from glencliff elementary school in good old Flatrock. i could never have found a better person to spend a career with. i have loved that famous lindsey smile since JFK was in the white house. god bless you all.

do i miss the BS? not one dog gone bit. Our profession is the most noble of all professions, every one has to have a teacher. even those who pass laws about education had to have teachers. i do not miss those who want to improve education at the cost of teachers and students. i do not miss, nor do i like those individuals who want to tell my colleagues how to teach, and yet these people have never taught. the teachers, the differences makers are not the PHD (piled high and deep)  in education. it is the teacher, the administrator who works long days and nights, comes in when they are sick and passes up opportunities to work in other fields that pay a lot more money. i do not miss the evaluations designed by someone who as my uncle smokey grover did not know their asses from deep center field. i knew it was time to go last year when a big makher from the center office started ranting about how may more test we were going to have and how things were going to change, i looked at fort sitting next to me, told him the woman was meshugge. he agreed. when she started again with the next year things are going to change, fort and i looked at each other and said, "NO,"we knew then that our inservice days were coming to and end Mazel Tov.

A Bigot is:

: a person who strongly and unfairly dislikes other people, ideas, etc. : a bigoted person;especially : a person who hates or refuses to accept the members of a particular group (such as a racial or religious group) according to Mr. Webster, this is the definition of a Bigot. 

You may not like my flags or monuments, i may not like yours, but as my friend Judy Jacobs says, "as Americans we have the right to wave our flags and have our monuments. no one certain race or religion has a handle or a patent on bigotry. we all do. sad but true. Deo Vindice. 

i find it amusing that with all the flap over the Confederate flag, the flag makers, and flag sellers are making out like bandits in the humming world of trade and commerce. keep pulling them down and someone will keep putting them back up. Amazon in now allowing Confederate flags to be sold again on line. 

Make it you ambition, to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your hands, just as we told you 

1 Thessalonians 4:11

Go Set A Watchman

This morning i finished Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman, the squeal to her iconic To Kill A Mockingbird.  I loved it, it will most likely go into my top ten favorite books of all time, i have read a lot of books. Some people fearful to read it because friends did not like it or the review were bad, need to get new friends and quit reading book reviews. Enough said.

The book is different and yet a lot like Mockingbird, a lot of the major players from To Kill A Mockingbird are gone, either dead or written out, or actually not written in at all because the newest Lee novel is the original. The book is about going  home, Tom Wolf said you never could. But at some point in our life for various reasons we all have to. This is what Jean Marie "Scout" Finch did. 

The newest Harper Lee work introduced a new character, Dr. Finch, Atticus' brother, he is now my favorite Harper Lee character. Every small town has a Dr Finch, our town has Page Chamberlain, a brilliant scholarly Southern gentleman, a bit eccentric with a huge heart, who knows were ever skeleton in our county is located. 

pretty soon i am going to make my trip home, to my firs real home, Dickson, Tennessee. i am going to look up my old friend Butch Hooper and we are going to wander among ghosts. i want to stop at my grandparent's store and see if i can see a little boy wandering among the fields or drinking free Cokes all day long. We will see. 

For the Chattanooga Marines, Brothers All

I am enclosing the words from the epitaph from the grave of a young Marine killed on Guadalcanal many decades ago. It if as fitting today as it was seventy years ago. As I post this I am thinking of all the Marines I have know all of my life. Barry Townes, Dudley Jones, Nick Stewart, Dustin Hickman, Will Craig, Don Geving, Warren Fuson, John Caudle, and Andrew Carpenter. There are many more, This is for you.


 And when he goes to heaven
To Saint Peter he will tell
Another Marine reporting, sir
I've served my time in hell!

I know Andrew, Dudley, John and Warren are there now helping them get adjusted. Semper fi gentlemen, i am proud of you all. 

Rode hard and put up wet to dry

it has been a long day at the villa. Swanky Plank Vintage Market ran it's first full day today and we had a yard and a house full. lots of really nice people. met a family from Copley, Ohio which is a stones throw from where sarge grew up in Medina County, Ohio. we hailed each other with the big OH IO as they left the mansion. i love my buckeyes. i am finding all of  my northern guests passionately telling me they are angry about America's newest run of Joe McCarthyism, the flap over pulling the confederate flag down. Thanks to the politically brigade we have sold out of all of our confederate flags and decals we just got in last week. Our distributor is two weeks behind in filling orders. We may have to bury  the silver in the yard again soon. We  have diverse crew, several of us have Confederate ancestry, my buddy Jason, a man i love like a brother, we taught together for almost ten years, he and his family are the Rippavilla lawn crew. Jason is a member of the Sons of Union Veterans, having a distant uncle and granddaddy from Illinois who fought in the Battle of Spring Hill in 1864. Mr. Cost one of our volunteers is commander of the SCV camp i am in. His mother is from Wadsworth, Ohio. Sarge's hometown. Enough. 
Got home and unloaded, my 1864 clothes are now in the washing mashing (warsher). A hot shower and a couple of Great Lakes Brews along with a Kosher treat, i am ready to crash. will see you all at the villa in the morning. mazel  tov to all.

Hanging out today and waiting for the big event.

Rippavilla has been a center of insanity for the past few days. The cause of this insanity is The Swanky-plank Vintage Market. It is our big fund raiser. It starts tomorrow. I like this type of insanity. We have a great director, great staff and some very hard working board members. I look forward to the big event every July. The picker comes out in me and i scour the show looking for treasures i can take home and horde away with my other treasures. The thrill of the hunt gets me every time and with sarge looking around on her own, i can guarantee i will find some cool things. There will be great carnival food. The best burgers and fish sandwiches ever, and there will be live music. I am not a huge fan of the live music having grown up in Nashville were even a local pizza joint can be a live  music venue.
The old mansion will be up to speed, after all vintage market is for her. Like and old battle ship she needs lots of powder and paint. Our tours are half price starting at four on Thursday, we will have docents in every room in costume, another reason i like working during this event. anyone taking a house tour will more than get their money's worth. more detail per room. i always take the dining room where the generals had breakfast on the morning of November 30, 1864.  Nobody will have to attack Franklin after the tour! Our shop has loaded up on items and i just got in a new shipment of books this past week.

If you are a John Prine fan, might ought to make sure you have a copy of Paradise, my favorite Prine song. Peabody Coal Company wants to take it away. Seems Mr. Peabody's legal beagles want the lyrics describing how Mr. Peabody's Coal company done carried it all away is offensive to the corporate politically correct. they think it makes them look bad. go figure. i may have to hid my John Prince CD alongside my Stanley Horn books and my Confederate flags until some level of sanity returns to our nation. Shalom ya'll. Hopefully no one was offended.

Sarge and i had a road-trip to Nashville today. Had a good time touring the Country Music Hall of Fame. Lots of cool stuff to see. I liked it a lot, but i will say, it does not come close to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Down town Nashville is a lunatic asylum all day today, with many streets already being blocked off this morning for various July Fourth events. We paid thirty dollars to park for four hours. Yep!
We made our way down Charlotte and overland a few blocks to Clinton Street. We had a wonderful lunch at a place called The Ole South Smoke House. Great food and even better service. The place is spotless clean! Their restrooms rival mine at Rippavilla in cleanliness. Impressive. We also visited the pickers store Antique Archaeology. Lots of smalls, not bad prices, lots of tee shirts, ball caps, bandannas and coffee cups. Lost of NFS  stuff too. I found an old Indian Motorcycle that I would kill to have. Don't think Sarge would let me keep it in the den.