Author Archives: Mark P

21 Years

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My father died 21 years ago on this day, March 24. He was 82.

This is a photograph that was probably taken in November 1943 in Rome, Ga, around the time my mother and father were married.

My mother, my brother and I were at the hospital when he died, or more accurately, when his body was allowed to stop working. Someone at the hospital called me around 2 or 3 in the morning and said we needed to come to the hospital right away. My mother and I drove over immediately. I had to call my brother, who was living in Chattanooga at the time.

My mother and I sat in the chairs lining the walls of the ICU, outside the room where my father was, waiting for Henry. The weather was mild, and the windows were open. A mockingbird sang at the window the entire time

When my brother arrived, we went into the room to see my father. Then we told the staff to let him go.

And that was that.

That was one of the dividing points in my life. There was the time before my father died, and the time after my father died.

Now, with my mother and brother both gone, the days when there was a whole family don’t seem quite real. We were all there in those days, playing our parts. Then it was over, and I went home alone.

I ran across the photo while I was going through some photographs that my aunt gave me several months ago. They had somehow ended up at my aunt and uncle’s house, probably after my grandmother died.

A lot of the photos are from those days more than 75 years ago. There are a few with just me as a baby or very young kid. I told Leah that once we’re gone, there will be no one on Earth who cares about those photos.

There are a lot of photographs of my parents from many years ago, some of the whole family, and some of me and my brother as kids. There are a couple of class photos of my brother in elementary school, and some of him in college. I plan to send all of the photos, except for those of just me, to my nephews. I don’t know what they will do with them.

A question from the internet

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I use a Web site called Quora, a question and answer site. I sometimes answer questions there. I did that very thing Friday night, and I thought I would post the answer here:

The question was: What happened in a courtroom that made you feel sorry for the defendant?

It happened about 45 years ago, when I was a fairly new reporter for The Augusta (Ga) Chronicle during a trial involving the torture and murder of an elderly couple in the little town of Wrens. Two men had already been convicted and sentenced to life sentences for armed robbery plus death for the murders. These two were clearly very bad men (look up Billy Sunday Birt and the Dixie Mafia). I was covering the trial of a third man charged in the murders. He was young and poor, defended by a court-appointed attorney.

The defense attorney looked lost. He didn’t seem to know where he was going, or maybe even where he was. One day I sat next to the county attorney for the county where the trial was being held. He was not involved with the trial, but was interested like almost everyone in the county. At one point he leaned over towards me and said, “It’s a shame the quality of the representation you get depends on how much money you have.” That seemed to validate my feeling that the defense attorney was not doing a very good job.

I wasn’t sure whether the defendant was guilty, even after the trial. I felt sorry for him because it seemed that another more competent attorney might have managed to get a hung jury, if not an acquittal. In his argument during the penalty phase of the trial, the defense attorney begged the jury not to return a death sentence if they had even the slightest doubt about the defendant’s guilt. The jury returned life sentences, which I took as confirmation that the jury did have doubts, and that there might have been a way that another attorney could have found to get an acquittal.

But it was fortunate that I wasn’t on that jury.

I had forgotten a lot about the trial when I thought about answering this question, so I looked up as much as I could find. I didn’t find much about the third defendant in the trial, but I found a lot about the other two defendants, and enough mention of the third defendant that it’s pretty clear to me today that he was involved. He was certainly involved in other criminal activities of the Dixie Mafia.

This murder was unthinkably horrible, and it would have been a horrible mistake for one of the perpetrators to go free. So, my feeling of sympathy for him was misplaced.

Notes: The death penalties imposed on the two other defendants were later overturned, but there was no danger of their going free. Billy Sunday Birt was already in jail for another murder, and both had those life sentences as well. Birt was suspected of more than 50 deaths. It’s almost certainly impossible to know whether he actually committed all or any of those murders at this point. He died in prison in 2017 at age 79. As far as I can tell, Bobby Gene Gaddis, the second man convicted in the murders, died in prison around 2007. I can’t find anything about Charles Reed, the man whose trial I attended, but based on a number of appeals after the trial, he is either dead or still in prison. A fourth man, an attorney, had been charged, but the state dropped the charges and he was never tried.

Dangerous food

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About 12 years ago I tore my left rotator cuff when I fell off a ladder. I was only one step off the deck where I was working, but it was enough to cause a complete tear. I had rotator cuff surgery fairly soon after the event, but long enough that I gained a feel for what a rotator cuff injury feels like.

About four years ago or so, I had another ladder incident. I knew immediately that I had suffered another rotator cuff injury, but not as bad as the first time. This time it was to my right shoulder, which connects my dominant arm to the rest of my body. It hurt quite a bit for a short time, short enough that I could continue my ladder work after sitting down for a while. It didn’t cause any severe problems, other than making it impossible to throw rocks at stray cats, which was something I just had to learn to live with. I hurt it again about year or two later using a gasoline-powered auger, but still, I could live with the fairly minor symptoms.

And then about month ago my right shoulder began to ache. It was not really bad, let’s say about a four or five on the hospital scale of one to ten. I couldn’t think of anything I had done to make it hurt. I went to the same orthopedic surgeon who I visited last summer for my knees, and who did my left shoulder. I saw his PA, who said he would order an MRI. That was on Wednesday, March 10. I didn’t hear anything about the MRI by the end of the week.

On Sunday, I hurt my arm again, and it was bad. I couldn’t, and still can’t lift my arm above my shoulder, and sudden movements cause a sharp pain. It hurts some when I try to sleep, and it hurts if I absent-mindedly try to do some trivial task with my right hand. I called the surgeon’s office Monday to tell them I was hurting pretty bad and had limited function with my arm. They responded in about an hour. So now I will have my MRI on the day this posts, Thursday, and see the surgeon on Monday.

Based on my left-armed experience, I expect the MRI to show a tear that warrants surgical repair. This comes at an inconvenient time because Leah is still experiencing a lot of pain in her leg after her failed surgery on December, and is not going to feel like carrying me around in her arms for two months while I recuperate.

I know that after the surgery I will have a few days of pain that will almost certainly require drugs, but that after that I will actually be able to move around and do everything that’s possible to do with only one hand, like tying my shoelaces. No, wait, I won’t be able to do that. I might be able to put on a shirt without help. I might be able to walk the dogs, if I can convince Zoe not to pull too hard. I’ll be able to work the TV remote with either hand. It’s going to be a hassle, but I will be glad to have it repaired, assuming that’s what the doctor says I need. We have a stray cat around the house that has been needing some attention.

You might be wondering how I sustained the most recent injury. Sunday night I was scooping out some ice cream. The ice cream was really hard. The spoon I was using slipped and I jerked my hand. No big deal, but I think it finished the rotator cuff tear. I made a noise that got even the dogs’ attention.

I had to eat all the remaining ice cream. It was too dangerous to leave in the house.

Wood for the mill

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There are thousands of acres of forest land around where we live here on the mountain. Berry College, which backs up to Lavender Mountain to our south and east, has a 27,000-acre campus, much of it in forest. Their property extends across Fouche Gap Road. Boral Brick Company owns hundreds of acres along Fouche Gap and Huffaker Road, which we take into town. Most of that is forest land. A few weeks ago we noticed that there was logging equipment along Huffaker Road four or five miles towards town. It didn’t take long for a huge swath of mostly pines to be cut, delimbed, and trucked away.

And then I noticed that an entrance had been cut into the woods at the intersection of Fouche Gap Road and Huffaker Road at the bottom of the mountain. It took only two or three days for the area to look like this.

As you can see, to the right of the road the woods are still intact. The area in the image used to lookd like this.

And now a large part of the area to the right of the road has been logged.

Loggers have pretty amazing machinery these days. They have equipment that can grab a tree and cut it off at the base. They have other equipment that can skin the limbs off the trunk. Then they have yet another piece of equipment that grabs a bundle of trunks and places them onto a trailer. When they finish, it looks like a battle has been fought. And it has, a battle in man’s war on nature.

The forest they are cutting is not mature; it’s really not even a healthy forest. The trees are mostly pine, which is what pulpwood loggers want, and they are crowded, tall, and thin. This is a Google Earth image of the area at the intersection of Fouche Gap Road and Huffaker Road.

Although this image is obviously from prior to the logging, you can see pretty much where the logging is taking place. It’s the area that looks smoother, with a finer-grained texture compared to the other wooded areas. This area has been clear-cut before, maybe 30 years ago. It’s much closer to flat land than the area just to the top of the image, where the road starts climbing the mountain. The forest that’s higher up the slopes is older., Although I don’t think it’s mature, it is approaching maturity, with a mix of pine and hardwood. The trees are bigger with wider crowns, and they are more separated from each other.

Everyone in the area is wondering what’s going to happen with the land now that it has been cleared. The brick company has had the land for sale, but the signs are gone now. Some neighbors are worried that Georgia Power plans to use it to store coal ash from nearby coal-fired power plants. There is already one storage area on the opposite side of Huffaker Road just out of sight to the right of the image. The closest coal-fired plant that is still operating is visible from our front porch about 25 miles away. I think some of our neighbors worry about heavy truck traffic, which is bad enough, but coal ash can contain arsenic, lead and mercury, among other things. I would just as soon not have another storage pit in the neighborhood.

I think the wood is bound for pulp, probably a few miles away at the International Paper mill where they make liner board for corrugated cardboard. The sulfur stench from the mill used to provide eastbound travelers from Alabama with their first hint that they were approaching Rome. If the wind was just right, we could smell the mill nearly nine miles away where I grew up.

A lot of the machinery of the modern world is either unpleasant itself, or leaves the world a less pleasant place.

Dog ills

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Our new dog Zoe has pancreatitis.

Zoe doing her cute peepeye routine

She has been throwing up occasionally, which doesn’t worry me too much. Dogs do that, especially dogs like Zoe, who put the omni in omnivore. But after three times in a short period, I took her to the vet. He did blood work, but didn’t find anything at the time. Then a couple of days ago she really let loose, and I decided to take her back. This time they did a test specifically for pancreatitis, and she passed. Or rather, failed.

Aside from vomiting, the other symptoms include loss of appetite, lethargy, and stomach pain. The night before the vet visit, she refused her food. That was uncharacteristic. She has also told me several times that she wanted to cut our morning walks short, which is really unusual for a dog. She has also been whimpering some, but she’s normally a very vocal dog.

Pancreatitis is a serious condition in dogs. It can be fatal if it gets bad and isn’t treated. Zoe’s case seems not to be too bad. The vet gave me an antibiotic (two pills, twice a day), something to settle her stomach (once in the evening), and an antacid (once a day in the evening). He also put her on a special gastroenteritic diet, which is three or four times as expensive as our regular dog food. Oh, and she has a yeast infection in her ears, so she gets drops twice a day. That means I have to give her four pills every night. That’s a lot of peanut butter.

She’s also not supposed to have any table scraps. She’s used to getting our leftovers, so she won’t be happy about that.

However, there is some good news on the health front — we are scheduled to get our initial Covid-19 vaccinations on Friday, March 5. On Tuesday evening we got an email from the hospital where Leah had her surgery. They are setting up a vaccination clinic for employees and people over 65. Apparently they emailed anyone who has had treatment there.