It was one of those "between women" periods of my life. There
have been two of those, the first between Wife #1 and JB and
the second between JB and SWMBO. This bit of biography occurred
during the first. I mention this because for some reason I
don't quite understand I don't go off half-cocked with anywhere
near the same zeal and reckless abandon when I'm "with women"
as I do when I'm "between women."

It's August 6th so as I'd done every August 6th for the last
few "between women" years I headed to the Armed Forces Recruiting
Station which was set up in a storefront on the UI campus to do
a reading of Thomas Merton's prose poem "Original Child Bomb".
I carried a placard with an appropriate and pithy barb about
war crimes on one side and genocide on the other (the military
types hate that ;-) and I set up shop on the sidewalk to read
the poem which takes about 20 minutes. Now in years past most
folks would file past without so much as a sidelong glance and
those who did stop, look and listen more often than not rolled
their eyes and went on their way. I expected nothing different.

I'd constructed my placard out of poster board and for no other
reason than it was handy and I didn't have anything else I
stapled it to an old putter. I hadn't got much past the opening
line;

Points for meditation to be scratched on the walls of a cave

when a jarhead came busting out the door demanding that I leave.
He must have been new on the job because my 20 minute reading
had always been happily ignored on that sidewalk in the past.
I politely declined to leave and started right back in with:

In the year 1945 an Original Child was born.

The jarhead glared at me, glanced at the golf club, glared
again, glanced again and you could almost see the tiny little
wheels spinning behind his beady little eyes as he stormed
back inside to call the cops.

The brief shouting match drew a crowd, my biggest ever for a
solo sidewalk demonstration, and I proceeded to enjoy the moment
giving Father Louis' poem full voice and not a little theater
to boot. When the cop showed up the jarhead came back out and
demanded that the cop look at my golf club. I just shrugged and
said so what, apparently the cop agreed, but he did say that I
was creating a public nuisance (thereby giving me a seat forever
on the Group W bench ;-) and insisted that I move along. But the
crowd, attracted by the spectacle of a cop and a fully uniformed
spit & polish jarhead arguing with a longhair, wouldn't hear of
it. Several amateur lawyers and at least one real one argued
that I had every right to read a poem on a public sidewalk.

I finished the poem, provided several in the crowd, which had
grown to a couple of dozen or so, with the citation to Merton's
poem and called it a good day afield.

Fast forward to the first Gulf War. No longer "between women"
I'm with SWMBO. We'd been on some scary outings protesting that
stupid war and took note of the fact that law enforcement was
more likely to help "patriots" beat the **** out of protesters
than prevent it.

I had misgivings from the get go. The "plan" if you can call
anything concocted by a bunch of lefties a "plan" was to march
from the UI Quad to the Armory, speechify under the flag pole
and then plant a bunch of crosses (tongue depressors painted
white and formed into crosses) beneath it. In the first place
the flag pole at the Armory is where the ROTC boys toot their
little horns, shoot off their guns and perform their patriotic
flag fetish ritual. Military types take that kinda silly ****
seriously, which is why the "organizers" decided to go there.
In the second place there was no exit strategy. We were to meet
at the Quad, march to the Armory, insult the military, then
what ? Just disperse and walk the four blocks back to the Quad ?
Riiiiiiiiight. The "patriots" aren't going to attack a whole
organized "march", but when the "march" disperses into twos and
threes ...

Anyway, that's when I remembered the beady-eyed jarhead and the
golf club from years past.

And *THAT* boyos, is the last time I will ever address 7 irons
on this forum ever again.

--
Ken Fortenberry