My mother’s birthday is this month. I have the opportunity to share it with her to a degree that has been impossible for years — since I was in college, really. We are within easy driving range; popping over to Burnet for lunch is a real possibility. So I’m going to try to do it,…
Children misbehave more when their mothers are in the room. That’s not just cynical anecdotal evidence talking; that’s science. OK, it’s fake science. The article I read acknowledged as much. But the logic behind the argument made a lot more sense that most of the so-called data coming out of the think-tanks these days.
My mother’s relationship with the deer in her community has been fodder for a great many of my articles over the years. She has named half a dozen of them. They give birth in her yard. They eat out of her hand. They watch her from outside her kitchen window and start gathering in the back yard when she approaches the door. Cattle feed and watermelon rinds will do that, apparently.
My mother is the gentlest soul I know. Seeing her interact with the deer kind of makes sense, in a weird sort of way. Dad’s relationship with them is somewhat more puzzling. Although certainly a gentle soul himself, Dad was the one who taught me to aim a rifle at one of these creatures and shoot to kill. I spent my entire childhood staring up at the mounted head of a deer the size of a small cow. My dad’s work. I ate many a mess of chicken fried steak made with venison — cooked by my mom, so I guess she is complicit as well, in a way. And now the great deer slayer is feeding them cantaloupe — not to fatten them up, but just because it is pleasant, peaceful way to pass a decade or two.
A 9-year-old boy in Wales has lost an eye to a Nerf gun. This is not the beginning of a joke. This is the conclusion to a two-act tragedy. It seems he lost sight in the eye because of an incident with a toy arrow when he was only 3; the second incident caused irreversible damage to the eye, forcing him to have it removed entirely or else risk losing sight in the second eye as well.
The mother, who is raising money through crowdfunding to get her son a more realistic prosthetic eye, says she doesn’t want people to think she is a bad mother. I wonder why she would feel compelled to say that?
Once upon a time, there lived a young man in a faraway place; although Aggies like us inevitably want to call such characters Rock, we’ll call him Jake.
