Wayward Landlubber

     John Fitzgerald Kennedy might be the last president to wear a dress hat, a fedora. Like everything he wore he wore it with aplomb. Maybe not like Fred Astaire or Frank Sinatra, but he looked good to my 8 years old sense of fashion. His predecessor, Dwight D Eisenhour wore a hat, too. He wore it with the brim up all the way around, Trilby fashion. Many men wore hats with a dip in the brim over the eyes, like Humpgry Bogart. Most of them white men. The black men wore their hats more like Eisenhauer, that hat was called a Pork Pie hat. That difference in headwear between Ike and JFK is fitting. Eisenhauer was a 5-star general, two-term president, a statesman with some skills, in the waning years of his rich life. I should mention, in light of current events, that he was a Republican also, a political designation that still held merit in those days, Joe McCarthy aside. Kennedy was the opposite: young, handsome, maybe a little too full of himself, but we loved him and san...

    I met Pinky on-line at a low point in my life. I enjoyed our conversations and her sprightly sense of humor. She was somewhat more conservative than I but I sensed that maybe this was not a serious issue, she was living in Prineville after all, an area that a former governor once called, "the other Oregon". In more recent times that county has wished to join 6 others to become a part of what can ironically be called, Greater Idaho. I drove to Prineville twice to visit her, it wasn't too bad. There were fine local beers, a local distillerie, and hemp fields, but the NRA yard signs left an oppressive taste. There was a third trip that had to be put off due to a forest fire closing the highway. Pinky had been living with her youngest son and his wife and was pretty much housebound due to her mobility issues. There was a senior center eight blocks away but it might have been eight miles. Later she got an apartment with another woman but her housemate treated her abusively...