“I’ll write that down,” she replied. “Which store?”

So it goes. This is a small town. You cannot visit a grocery store without seeing people you know, so we stopped to speak with an old friend who was reading the small print on the tags posted on the shelves. “Being retired means you shop more and buy less,” he said.

I guess that is true. Given the age demographics in our town, you would think the grocery stores would pay a bit more attention to scaling down the prices on the basic, unprocessed food items, while charging the profligate more for their potato chips and beer. Unfortunately, we live in a cold climate, and growing peppers is an act of faith. When green peppers went from 50 cents apiece to 2 bucks, and red peppers approached 4 bucks, we declined the offer. The problem with age is that you don’t always develop dementia. We can still remember sweet corn at 10 cents an ear.

We just returned from visiting my wife’s father in Boulder, Colorado. There, among the privileged generation of Lady Gaga, we found strawberries at a buck a pound, red peppers so cheap we bought a dozen, and fresh Washington cherries cheaper than in Oregon. We binged so completely that the gastric distress could have powered my truck on the way home, if only we had a flex-fuel hose to the cab.

However, after a week in the frantic flow of traffic in Boulder, cheaper gas prices notwithstanding, we were quite happy to return to our little town at the end of the earth. Quality of life means a lot. You pay for what you get.

Clair Button makes irregular contributions of (ill-?) reputed humor to this column from time to time.

Here are some samplings of Hulbert’s insight.
June 9, 2010 - “The stock market is now at more or less where it stood at the bottom of the January-February correction. …Contrarian analysts consider this discrepancy to be a bullish omen…”

June 8 - “Monday’s stock market action was particularly discouraging, with the Dow closing below its May 6 intra-day low of 9,870 — the day of the infamous Flash Crash. With that level now broken, investors face the prospect of the stock market decline picking up steam. …within shouting distance of becoming an official bear market…”

On June 4 - “Corporate insiders are betting that recent market weakness is only a correction within a longer-term uptrend.  That’s good news for the stock market, since historically they’ve been right more often than wrong.”

You get the idea, right?  OK, I’m not Ben Bernanke, but Hulbert is obviously all over the map and doesn’t have a clue.  Of course the DOW is going to peak above 14000 in the next two months! Hulbert has no guts. That is his problem. Why the heck would Marketwatch pay that sucker money when they could hire me?

Likewise, there is another great financial blog called “Dripping Oil” which now predicts the imminent demise of British Petroleum (BP) in bankruptcy court.  This, of course, presumes that somebody assassinates the entire team of BP lawyers and catches BP exec Tony Hayward in “flagrante delicto” with the head of the Minerals Management Service at a Bermuda bordello. This is a company reported to make 30 BILLION bucks every year. The chorus of U.S. congresspersons clamoring for a suspension of the BP quarterly stock dividend shows they are getting worried about the security of their regular infusions of oil company cash into campaign chests.  Obviously, the media campaign against BP is starting to take hold in a world of Chicken Little investors and (dare we say?) “self-serving” congressmen.

The premise of the Dripping Oil prediction is so preposterous, that commentors on the blog are offering thousands for the secret to getting such meaningless drivel posted on Google (Goog) financial news.  I propose to show them how, thereby earning huge sums of cash, which I will then gamble and lose in the impending stock market crash just like all these other idiots.    And, I make those predictions on one day, not even wasting three days to write pointless columns of drivel for you to waste your time reading.

Clair Button has regularly shouted out financial advice to the British Exchequer (from a considerable distance,) but clearly, no one is listening.  I suggest you consult with someone more knowledgeable before investing millions.

What do veterans think about at those times? Friends lost. Things we did right. Things we did wrong. A misstep that caused a tragedy. Intravenous kits that failed to work. Bravery, loyalty, and sorrow. Brave foes. Hapless, innocent people caught up between warring forces. Fate. We wonder what happened to someone, perhaps someone you would not expect us to worry about. We discover we are not alone in those thoughts.  This is a piece I started writing last year, about a man we knew, who became important in our lives and memories.

 ”The World”

“The World” is what we called our homeland, the United States. What we meant was “The Real World” as opposed to the “unreal” world of our nightmare existence. Our lives seemed unreal at all times, whether we were fighting for our survival, taking risks we had never imagined we could, or playing like uncontrollable children to release tensions we did not comprehend.

And of course, we complained about being there in Vietnam. It was a year, an interminable year. We longed to get out, to go home.  We could welcome a “million-dollar wound” that, even if partly disabling, meant our internment in that strange, unreal world would end. Like grazing beasts, we lived in a wandering herd, doing what was necessary to survive, and gratefully moved beyond the scene when one of our number was pulled down in combat.

When we did go home, most withdrew and left the past behind. But not really.  A moment when you failed to save a friend is never forgotten. Some were rejected by the people they came home to.  Some managed to slip back into their old lives. Most adjusted to daily life and moved on.

We have the luxury of time and peace to look back. It did not really matter to my friends why our government went to war. Oh, sure, some volunteered out of patriotism. Some believed they were fighting would-be dictators who wanted to oppress a weak nation.  Most simply felt it was their duty to serve rather than run away to Canada. But the truth is that we were young, with only half-formed beliefs and even less understanding.

There was a man, more of a pawn and prisoner of fate than I, who put my year into a perspective I will always remember.  His name was Ni. A peasant farmer, he had been forced to work with the Viet Cong until we captured him.  He was  “re-educated” by his government, and released into our custody again as a “Kit Carson” scout.

“You Americans,” he said, “always complain. But you have only a year.” He told me that in his country, he had to fight from the age of seventeen, and could not quit until he was thirty-five. If he was lucky. If he survived. If he was not again captured by the enemy and forced to join their ranks. Forever. His war was forever. His chance of survival was best with us, and he was glad to be with us, to share our gruesome chore and our risk. Because it was the best he had experienced.

He had a family and twelve living children we never saw. That is all I know of him. That and his simple statement that both complained and accepted the reality of what he must do to survive.

We left him behind when we came home. I think of him and hope that he too found a “real” world to come home to; that he could live out the rest of his time in peace with his family.

Clair Button

There is an opinion that history is important because we learn from the mistakes of earlier generations.  Therefore we are wiser and safer and better looking and better in every way than our ancestors.  I find very little evidence to support that theory. For example, the big lesson to be learned from the career of Napoleon is that it is stupid to invade Russia.  The Germans of the middle twentieth century felt that they were smarter and better looking and wiser than the French invaders of the nineteenth century.  In spite of the fact no one has successfully invaded Russia since the Mongol hordes almost two millennia ago, I feel confident some bozo will try it again.  Can you say George W. Bush?

Speaking of the Democrats favorite Republican, the Russians proved that their army of soldiers and helicopters and tanks could not invade and win a war in Afghanistan.  The United States followed that lesson up within twenty years, and has so far proved the lessons of the Russian Army to be true.  Can you say George W. Bush?

Some people die because they have low morals and rotten character and limited intelligence.  There have been a few people who crossed my path that caused me to smile and wonder if the world would be more pleasant with fewer morons.  In spite of that, no one ever actually died from disagreeing with me. The great sage Mark Twain explained it this way:  “The trouble is not that the world is full of fools, it’s just that lightning isn’t distributed right.”

Speaking of morons, my compassionate side feels sorry for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, who must be going through terrible times when it is so painfully clear that the poor did not precipitate the mortgage crisis.  Their long-held theory that the poor are responsible for every American problem lies in ruins.  The people who run Wall Street have proven once again they are not trustworthy enough to go unregulated, just as they did in 1929 and 1893.  Drive the moneychangers out of the temple, and they sneak back in at the behest of the dull like Ronald Reagan, who find that deregulation is good, if only for the rich.  Have no fear dull folk, the market will crash again because we refuse to heed the lessons of history so that we can be wiser, safer, and better looking than our ancestors.

Speaking of better looking and dull, it seems crystal clear that if God is female, and I find no evidence to the contrary, She probably looks like Sarah Palin.  However, however, I much prefer to think that God is not a nitwit.  This is a classic example of how politics works in America.  We select our candidates on the basis of how they look on television, and Miss America is chosen on the basis of where she stands on the issues.

In my view, the greatest of all American writers is Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain. Halley’s Comet appears to our planet every seventy-five years.  It flew twice in Twain’s lifetime, once in the year of his birth, and the second time in the year of his death.  As the comet blazes across the night sky, Twain’s brilliance spews across the page. Ernest Hemingway called Huckleberry Finn the “best book we’ve ever had.  There was nothing before.  There’s been nothing as good since.”  I love Twain’s humor and irreverence. Mark Twain’s work does prove that freedom of expression exists in this country.  His comments on race, religion, and politics are relevant today.  Proof once again that the world has not changed much. The only things that have changed are the gadgets and tools.  The problems that come about repeatedly are the result of people and their egos.

One of the questions people ask when they learn that my wife and I have put together a book is:  “Where do you get your inspiration?” Ideas don’t just materialize out of my little pea-sized brain.  If you are an honest writer, you must admit that all inspiration derives from God.  It is not simply the big ethics books like the Torah, the Koran, and the Bible that are divinely inspired, but every scribble we put to paper. THEREFORE, if you have issues with the opinions expressed here, DON’T bring them to me.  I’m not your problem.  Take it up with the BIG GUY!

DAVE RAMA

Ten people who entered the country illegally were busted in North Carolina for running a tax preparation business that claimed 22 million dollars in phony tax refunds for their clients between 2006 and November 2009. One tax credit improperly claimed on a majority of the false returns was for child care expenses, prosecutors said. The credit can result in a refund even if no taxes were paid. About 13 million in refunds were paid before the IRS discovered the fraud. A number of the guilty parties would “assist” their clients in cashing the refund checks, presumably pocketing a healthy cut of the refund.

Ask yourself why international criminal gangs would come here to target our tax system as a means to make a living.  The number one reason you should already know is that the tax code is so complex that even the IRS can’t figure out who owes what.

The second thing you should think about is whether it is really worth it to you to go through so much work and agony to get each tax break or credit the law allows.

While my retirement income is pretty straight-forward, I spent sixty bucks on a tax program to help me organize my records and calculate profit and loss on a pitiful publishing business and a significantly more successful bit of stock market gambling. In both cases, the software left me in the lurch to read multiple volumes of tax rules and instructions from the IRS. I had to file three different forms on a 75 dollar capital gains reduction that saved me close to 20 bucks. But I spent six hours scratching my head while reading the instructions in four different IRS publications. In other words, H&R Block either didn’t know what I should do, or their paid software engineers could not write software that could calculate it.  I would gladly have paid the 20 bucks just to avoid reading all that legalese garbage, but I didn’t want the IRS to throw me in jail for not filing three pages of forms which each had a single line item saying the form they required the oil company to submit did not apply to me or mean a damn thing.

If we re-write the tax code to cut out the wrangling over what we can deduct or whether the government ought to give us money for taking care of our own kids, I could have saved the 60 bucks on software, a net savings of 40 bucks without the reduced taxes. Imagine what I could have saved if I had hired a tax consultant to figure out I didn’t owe twenty bucks.

The IRS could have saved us 13 million bucks in fraudulent refunds, and we would have a few less illegals who come here to steal from us because our tax system is insane. Now, why in the world am I paying you to take care of your kids?

For whatever reason, a large quiet man and a woman fell to sleeping in a hut together. She took the bed, deep with quilts and blankets, and he took a place by the small hearth.

She awoke in the night, hours before dawn, to see him huddled at the stone cold hearth with no fire. She knew right away that she could not have the warm bed only; he was suffering from the cold, crouched and shivering.

“Come,” she said with sudden authority. “Come into the bed.” He roused and did as she told. He crawled over the foot end and found his way in.

“The wood was wet and would not burn.”

She quickly swung the covers away from her curled back, saying “Lay against me. You must get warm.”

So he did. She felt his massive body slowly relax then soon fall into a slumber of even breaths. It was unwieldy for one to be so close without an arm across the other’s body, her body that he leaned into.

“It’s alright. I am covered. Throw your arm across. It’s alright.”

She fell asleep in the rhythm of his breath, with his arm innocently across her hip.

She would half-awaken, feeling his breath, his warmth, remembering that he was there. And fall to sleep again.

When she was aware he was laying there, awaking as she was awaking, his fingers felt her skin. She smiled to herself: his hand had found the only inch of break in the cloth on her body, and unconsciously did little affectionate touches like a sleeping child would caress its mother.

When she was fully awake, eyes closed, laying in the warmth of this bed, their two bodies close, she realized her toes were playing footsie with each other, something she noticed that she did in her years of lonesomeness.

Her touched her, and why would she shirk? It felt good. He thanked her for inviting him to the bed. “I had to,” she said.

He said soft words, and began a little exploring of her body. She responded in little moans. He found her breast and played with the touch of it. She was turning toward him, eyes closed, accepting his lips on her mouth, feeling her own strong response, taking in the smell of him, the ease of his actions, his no rush reaches, even the moments of stillness, deep in morning warmth together.

After she had thrown back the bedcovers, exposing herself, after she had reached for his haired erection after his invitation, they were very very close. He was patient, they kissed, they were a man and woman fully together.

For some reason, they did not talk much at first. He suggested, knowing they would be leaving the hut and joining the others and continuing the journey, “We should say we are married.”

This worried her, and he saw her thinking hard. “I…I am not divorced from my husband. He has been gone eight years. I do not know if he is alive or dead.”

“What do you feel?”

“I think he’s alive,” she offered. “I am strong. He does not bother me.”

They were quiet together.

“We do not know each other,” she said.

“We know plenty. You were very good to offer me the bed when it was so cold.”

“You were so cold. I had to.”

“No, you did not have to. You did. You are a good person.”

“Will you protect me?” she asked. It was strange to ask. It was not what she meant.

“Are you in danger?” she queried. “Are there things I should know about you?”

She remembered that he spoke evenly with the other men, that he always had good suggestions. He was a man that was as a nation to himself.

“No, I don’t harbor enemies. I would not endanger you. But,” and he thought here carefully, imagining what he might do in unexpected circumstances, “if something came up and it would not be safe for you to know me, I would deny our relationship…so you could not be hurt….”

He felt her stiffen a little.

“…by a nod or a glance, something to tell you, but no one else, to warn you.”

She was thoughtful. They were perfectly at ease with one another. This was rough territory. There were desperate people around, men who would sell anything to their own advantage; people who were aimless, or broken. It would be good to feel his protection, to be allied with one such as him. She had no trouble imagining them traveling a long time together.

“Maybe,” she offered, and it was a thought that came suddenly to her, “maybe you could give something away, like carry a coin in your pocket and if a time should come, offer it to the person of doubt, put it on the table, be sure that I can see.”

He nodded, still close to her body, unworried.

“People grow old together and then one of them dies,” she revealed her fear.

“People are ready by then. So, they enjoy each other while they can.”

“Do you drink?” she asked.

“Sure, I drink.”

“One? Or two?”

“Sure, sometimes two or more. I enjoy drinking now and then.”

“I can’t tolerate drunkenness at all.”

“That’s okay,” he said.

“You know,” he said to her, looking her strong in the face, “we are married. God married us. You did the right thing. We have been perfectly comfortable with one another, no fears, no pretense.”

She knew he was right. ~ L.W. Bergeron

Walked to the post office and shipped the four packages I had. Walked to the phone company to drop off sprouts for employee Tom. Paused in the parking lot to greet former landlord Bill who, at 84-plus keeps going smiling, walking, doing, and I related my south-end-of-town-house temperature yesterday morning of 14 deg. F, but that this morning it was 10; he said his house across the street from here had 13. We smiled. I offered, “But… it’s going to be a sunny afternoon,” and he agreed as we parted.

I walked homeward down S. Pine past Velda’s house, thought-of-a-feather-and-saw-a-feather (interior smile). Saw two black birds flying happy together above me (thought of the spirited friend), then a third, trailing. Found: a couple more feathers outside Fran’s house, then another, larger, less fragile.

Turned the corner onto Dawson, spotting a hawk in the distant bare willow trees in the southern creek pasture. Watched him, felt his body watching back, with my full awareness of the intense sun shining upon me from the peripheral left, sensing his message that the times are still critical; I remembering the aboriginal’s retelling last night on the phone of how a scout would place his own vision behind the hawk’s eyes to see what he, a man, could not.

Walked home: a lovely, cautious, take-nothing-for-granted early spring morning. Inside the front door, emptying my pocket I found the bank card that did not work was another, similar-blue card (interior smile). I swept the entry floor, which I had been meaning to do for days.

Leaves Blown Apart

by C. F. Button

Empty quiet filled hours between delayed flights in Chicago O’Hare airport. Leaves with faces swept by, rattling, skittering voices caught in droning conveyor winds that failed to stir me. Some were brightly colored, some drab. Some briefly lodged against walls or benches and others raced past to meaningless destinations. They were nothing to me until one bit of color dropped from an eddy of swirling forms and paused tentatively, as though seeking refuge in my quiet, still pocket of space.

I glanced up. “U. S. Marines” was emblazoned in a yellow band across a young man’s tee shirt. Judging by his short-cropped hair and muscular chest and shoulders, I concluded the shirt was probably authentic and belonged to him. There was something in the shy way he glanced at me that faintly tugged on my invisible shroud of isolation. I nodded and silently resumed eating my portable dinner. Without speaking, he settled next to me on the two-seater bench at the side of the hall, folded his arms across his chest, and self-consciously tried to find a balance between somnolent patience and expectant attentiveness to the other travelers busily hustling between flights.

It was the patience that got me thinking, the patience that had to be learned. Memories tumbled like leaves in wind, memories of young men always moving, being transported, and learning to sleep, to rest, to relax, and to tolerate uncertainty. Trucks, planes, helicopters, long marches in single file, it didn’t matter which, you always had to learn to wait, to gather each precious moment of rest and luxuriate in it, never to hoard what could not be saved. Patience does not come quickly or naturally to young men. I, too, had been attentive to each passing figure and feature in my landscapes once. Each bit of motion might lead to adventure, or danger, or nothing at all – it took a while to learn that patience. The young or inexperienced dislike waiting. The old and experienced learn to live with it.

At the beginning of my trip this time, I had met two friends, brothers-in-arms, from a never-ending yesterday 37 years long. Winds of time and fate had blown my friends and me away, each on a separate path, and made us strangers for so many years.  Yet we will always be twenty years old, those brothers and I, no matter what our bodies and faces look like now, no matter if some of the details of yesterday have started to slip from our memories. We learned patience together. We shared a fierce bond of loyalty that endured all those years apart.

Glancing sideways, I thought I could see the light of idealism in the marine’s face, and perhaps anticipation of challenge and glory. Clean-scrubbed innocence, the kind you only see in the young. My friends and I knew the brief exultation of living through the danger this young man could only imagine in his future, wondering how, when the moment came, he would face the challenge. It was such a silly conceit, that self-doubt and concern for living up to a romanticized notion of heroism. I had known it, too.

A single year can teach patience beyond measure, a willingness to wait forever for another adventure like the one this young man anticipated so eagerly now. I thought of my friends’ shared grief, the kind that made the exultation of your own survival so brief. Would this young man feel it someday? Would he and his friends grow old with forty years of never-ending nightmares filled by horror?

I could sense him taking my measure as well. Curiosity showed, and perhaps a desire to speak – yet he hesitated. Could he see the brittle old armor that still separates and protects me from the innocent pain of green, young soldiers like him? I wondered, should I say anything to him?  Is there anything I could say that he wouldn’t take as criticism or as the emotional wandering of an old fool?

An announcement of my impending flight, changed to another gate farther down the hall, broke through my whirlwind of thoughts, brought me to earth and present tense.

I looked at him directly. “Are you active in the Marines now?”

“Yes, Sir. I was just at officer training camp. Headed home to Kansas now.”

The “Sir” provoked me like the buzz of a mosquito. I had once been a sergeant. Sergeants don’t easily accept being addressed as “Sir,” but he meant it politely, as respect due an old man. I repressed an urge to laugh at the irony.

“Is that like ROTC in college?” I asked hopefully.

“No, Sir, no college. The Marines don’t have that program.”

No, I thought, the Marines would want them young and unpolluted. Another thought came unbidden. Oh, hell! A first lieutenant! He’s going to be a first lieutenant. My platoon had lost two of them in less than a year. He’s going to want to lead the charge into battle or take risks for his men, thinking that is his duty, to risk himself before his men. I thought of booby-traps and body parts flying through the air, images which still wake another of my old friends in his 37^th year of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Suddenly the sense of loss was heavy on my chest and I already feared for this eager young man’s life. Was there was anything I could say that he would understand, anything that would make a difference?

I stood to go. I held out my hand and he shook it.

“Good luck, then. Take care of yourself and your men. It’s an important job.”

“Yes, Sir, I’ll try my best.”

I hauled my bag down the corridor. There are some things which can never be explained or understood unless you have seen the sunlight glance off the wing of a butterfly, or a mote of dust in the air turned to gold, or a drop of ruby-red blood suspended against an ice-blue sky – a moment before fate grasps all life in its rending jaws and leaves consciousness forever marked. No, he couldn’t have understood if I said more. Not then. Give him time. Give him time.

I give special thanks to Perry Stokes for reading in my place, because I had found this piece too difficult to read aloud once it was written, and to my friends from Recon Platoon, 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Division, 196th Brigade, who have helped me face those buried memories and become more whole.
Clair Button

I doubt liberal easterners paid much attention.  A lot of them are asleep at the switch, anyway. But here in the west, most of us got weekly reminders – recycled email forwarded umpteen times.  While not exactly asleep at the switch, my friends forget who they mailed the message to the previous week.  Bob was not bright enough to check the list of names that Dave and Bubba used when they both sent the email to him. I was on their lists, too. Also, Mrs. Bob, Mrs. Dave, and Mrs. Bubba included me on their mail lists.  Everybody figured “what the heck, he’ll want to know this anyway, and if he got it before, he can just delete it.” Most of us didn’t even read it. We knew what it was about, anyway, and went right out and bought more bullets – each time.

Those damn Democrats were going to take our guns and make us get a criminal background check just to buy bullets. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the bullets after the Democrats had taken my guns, but I figured, what the heck, it can’t hurt to have a few more rounds.  Plus, I sure did not want to have anybody check into my background the next time I ran out of bullets, so I pulled out my wallet and beat them to the punch.

With all the reminders, I went out and bought 3 new pistols, 2 shotguns, an M-60 machine gun (slightly used) and a couple extra grenade launchers, too.  I already had enough automatic rifles and night-vision scopes. Don’t ask how many bullets I bought.  Somebody had to bring the national average up to 38. Those dumb-ass liberals back east didn’t do it.

Well, it looks like the rumors fizzled.  Nobody came to take my guns or ammo. So now, like most of my neighbors, I am sitting on an ammunition dump that will take out two square blocks of homes if we have a fire. The chain reaction that would set off in this town would probably make the Iraq war look like a picnic.

In other words, what we have out here in the west is a glut of stockpiled munitions. When my friends die, the estate sales alone will flood the market with guns, bullets, armored personnel carriers, and grenades.  I might pick up another machine gun or two if my neighbors die first, but eventually, even my guns will get back into the supply chain.

This is the beginning of the third dip in the economy, bigger than the commercial real estate bubble.  We are going to put a lot of national defense contractors out of business when we go. Be smart. Get out of the stock market now.

Disclaimer: Clair Button is not an investment adviser.  If you are dumb enough to take this as investment advice, you ought to check in to buying a burial plot instead of stocks. The odds are you probably don’t have long to live.

After his death I was in a quandary for a few weeks, knowing it was inappropriate to send out the library system notice after his sudden death. I sought the advice of a warm-hearted clerk at the main library after realizing the family could be going through his things and that the library was hoping to get back that brand-new book – so that correspondence was probably timely. She suggested a well-worded gentle letter explaining the situation.

The obituary did not have local addresses for his relatives although the surname has many people here whom I don’t know that well. I wrote a note to the funeral home director, who called me, aghast. “I’ll pay for the book myself! The family is absolutely devastated.”

I felt horrible; she was right. I said the branch library could simply cover it. We ended the conversation with her saying she’d seek permission to get into the house. In a few days I found the book in the book drop. I checked it in, relieved, paid the fines, and took it home to read what he had read.

I was halfway into it, having marveled at the writer’s talents which were those of a remarkable person who had amazing life experiences and discovered rather well into maturity that writing was a venue for him. The stories were wondrous and disturbing. I was soon done. This was, I knew, not a book to simply put on the shelf between the alphabet of other author names. It needed cleansing, and release, and so, at home, I ‘smudged’ the pages with great intent and compassion for this soul who held it at a poignant time.
Judging from his presence with me and the little I knew of the situation I came to believe that with the children gone, he was bereft and floundering. The story in the newspapers was that he had been drinking with a visiting friend in the evening at home, after a day of shooting, and accidentally shot himself.

I can believe all of these possibilities ~ that the book was not lost, but that he may have decided to keep it as meaningful and at hand, and to pay for it [Have I not done this once myself?]; that the accidental shot was truly an accident, or, perhaps it was no accident at all ~ perhaps even the friend could not tell; and that it does not matter to any of us here on earth what happened because it was a fateful moment between him and his Creator; and all who are left behind – whether of flesh, entanglement, embrace or simple acquaintance – are minus his presence and simply given a mystery to come to personal terms with. LWB