LET ME START OFF this week’s column with a sincere apology.
Rev. Lankford Moore brought the Ministerial Alliance press release for the annual community Easter worship service into our office in plenty of time for the news item to be in two issues of the newspaper before Easter.
Except that he gave it to this columnist who promptly put it somewhere out of sight and out of mind. Therefore the service got no pre-Easter publicity in the paper.
My fault and, as I said, my sincere apologies. The apology is also intended for our community citizens — our readers — who like to get up early each Easter to attend the service on such a meaningful day.
I will make this promise: if I am still around next Easter the Ministerial Alliance service will get extra publicity.
But, a suggestion for ALL of you who are needing some newspaper publicity for your upcoming project: Remind us often. I bet the folks at the radio stations would tell you the same thing.
LAST WEEK was a bigtime week for errors, otherwise.
I wrote about the late Henry and Mercedes Dildy and — SURPRISE — I was wrong.
Louise Savage says that I surely meant the late RUFUS and Mercedes Dildy.
She’s right, of course. Louise says she was a Dildy and was related to Henry and Rufus. She remembers that Mr. HENRY Dildy’s house was on North Main, as opposed to the RUFUS Dildy house I wrote about which was on that short block of Sunset Street. The HENRY Dildy house was later torn down for the ‘new’ PCA building on North Main which today serves as a sort of apartment building. So, both Dildy homes are gone, as are those wonderful people who helped form our community.
One thing I remember (correctly, I hope) was that the late Mercedes Dildy was an organizer for Red Cross blood drives here. She was a sparkling, witty lady who was always ‘dressed to the teeth,’ and I hope the stories about her having been a Radio City Rockette were true.
The story is that she and Mr. RUFUS Dildy met ‘up north.’ They wed, and returned to live here in his old family home on Sunset Street.
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ANIMAL CRACKERS. Sometime about 2:30 Thursday morning, I waddled into my bathroom and stepped on something wiggling and wet. In fact, something wet struck my bare ankle.
In the dim light from a computer screen coming from two rooms away, I could see something coiling on the bathroom floor. It looked to be dark; about the thickness of my index finger; and about 8 inches long.
“Oh, lordy,” I moaned. “I’ve got a baby snake in my bathroom and it has done bit me on the ankle.”
I jumped over and around the vicious viper, and turned the light on.
What it was, was a very large, very wiggly, very wet earthworm which must have slithered in out of the rain and through a crack at the bottom of the patio door. The ‘bite’ must have been from it whipping its tail (or head) around when I stepped on it.
First of all, I am relieved to tell you that I did not wet myself. But I did yelp pretty loud. The earthworm was quickly returned to do its good work in my patio landscape soil.
But for awhile, I was sure that it was one of them Cottonmouth Water Mocksicans.
I have enough ego that I do not want you to think I was scared by a helpless, little bitty earthworm.
My answer contains a question. Did you see the old black-and-white movie about a tarantula spider that got itself exposed to an H-bomb and the radiation made it grow huuuuuuuuuge? Didja?
That tarantula was creeping around in the New Mexico desert wreaking great havoc and eating many helpless, little New Mexicans. This tarantula was the Queen Elizabeth Ocean Liner of spiders.
Well, ‘my’ earthworm was the same way. It was really, really big. In fact, it was the Queen Elizabeth Ocean Liner of earthworms. It probably had some radiation and was extremely poisionous.
So don’t go around laughing at old Scardy Cat Louie just because he may or may not have yelped at an earthworm.
Instead, let us rejoice that his pajama bottoms are still dry.
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ONE MAN’S TRASH is …..
At first I thought I’d easily be able to scrape up a pickup truckload of old stuff to to haul off to one of the city’s free Spring Cleanup dumpsters. But when it came right down to it there was nothing I could bear to part with.
Except for the bedroom television set which hasn’t worked since 2011. Well, it sorta worked. Sometimes I could get it to hum, but most time it ignored remote and manual commands, and it ignored my stern glare. When it hummed it also smelled funny.
No one works on tv sets like that anymore so I hauled it off to the debris bin which the city had placed in the parking lot at the fire station.
After observing what other people had left, I was no longer ashamed of ANYTHING I placed there!
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HE SAID: “A doubtful friend is worse than a certain enemy. Let a man be one thing or the other, and we then know how to meet him.” Aesop, Greek storyteller
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SHE SAID: “Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.” Jane Austen, novelist
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SWEET DREAMS, Baby
