MY PAL DIVAD SREGDOR
David Rodgers
By Tony Cloud
(Editors note: The writer remembers his boyhood friend David Rodgers here in this short essay. I’ve known Tony Cloud since we were young kids, so you can imagine my pleasant surprise in recently discovering his creative and fresh voice as a storyteller. You will notice no explanation is offered for the reversal of letters in the title—a subtle nod to their boyhood secret code of friendship.—Bob Vickrey)
Yep, Ole Divad was something special.
An old friend from way back in the Cub Scout days, he was.
Karen and I drove to Lake Charles to witness his hitching when we were expecting our first daughter fairly quickly
Sure was hoping all would work out and we could get back across the Sabine in time so I wouldn’t have to break the news later to her that she was a “coon-ass” by birth.
Terrible news that would have been, but we made it.
Before that Karen and I had married and David was in our wedding and I guess he thought he was part of our new family cause it seemed like he was over quite a bit.
And we loved it!
We would all three go to the Stinkadena drive-in and Karen would sit between us two fools, all three in the front seat, and we would have ourselves a time.
Hope nobody we knew saw us.
Thinkin’ of Young Tony, I wish he’d relayed to the Biology teacher that he had established a human-reptile bond with those two water moccasins that him and David had caught over on the levee and brought to school for all the children to study.
Man it was a lot of trouble to get those two snakes to class, and then you go and put em in a big jar of chemicals overnight—Could not believe it.
Had those babies in an ice chest and it got tumped’ over in the front yard.
There were about ten kids around and plenty of panic followed.
They didn’t name names, but if you remember they announced over the loud speakers the
next morning—No more snakes!
Wow, and just to think, I had already picked out names for them overnight—
Slippery and Slimey.
Anyway, a lesson for you Mr. Sandell. Don’t kill two guys’ snakes without asking. OK?
David Rodgers was a wonderful friend over the years,
And I was sad when he moved off.
And it was unreal news when I found out he had passed away.
Tony Cloud retired after a 40 year career in the pipefitting industry, including the last 12 years for United Technology where he worked in Houston and traveled throughout the country. He and his wife Karen live in the Houston area.
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
