I don’t know where I got that idea. She’s about to turn 90. She wanted to be a History teacher, but the History department at Illinois State told her they were saving spaces for the men and that she should go take Home Ec.
When she told me that, she said “What men? There were no men.”
And so she went home.
And had a different life.
And had my mom, who had me.
And here we are.
Good god, she’s an elderly lady, but when she gets running, she’s still very strong. So, there I was at one end of the leash, behind a large branch that had fallen in the yard and there she was determined to race the cat to the kitchen and, man, I don’t know how I caught myself, but I did, heart racing, adrenaline pumping.
I feel like I have gravity on my side, but apparently the trick with any large, seemingly immovable object is to pull low.
Anyway, the deer is finally gone, so I let Mrs. W. go over and have a good long sniff at where the deer had been. I wondered what happened to the deer and then, I was jealous because I knew the dog, with her nose flat against the ground, her cheeks puffing in and out to move the air across her nose in different ways, she knew. There was a whole story available to her through scent I completely missed out on.
I was tempted to put my nose down there and see what I could smell (“see what I could smell”–ha, if that doesn’t tell you how humans are oriented, I don’t know what does) but I’m not quite to that point yet.
Meanwhile, I wrote a nice post about meth over at Pith. One thing I was frustrated by is that The Missourian seemed to be able to find meth busts by weight on the DEA website and I could not (man, I am always shocked to find out piss-poor law enforcement websites are). But what their story outright said was that, though Missouri has the reputation as being the meth capitol of America because there are so many meth lab busts, the amount of meth confiscated yearly in Missouri is nothing compared to what’s confiscated in western states, where the lab busts are much less prevalent. Out west, they have gang and cartel involvement in the meth trade whereas here it still seems to be mostly local.
So, I was curious about how much meth per year Tennessee confiscates and how that measures up, but, curiously, I couldn’t find it. And I’m not saying that meth isn’t a problem. But I am concerned that law enforcement is choosing the more dramatic number–the amount of labs–in order to push for making pseudoephedrine prescription-only because the amount of meth they’re dealing with might not be that shocking.
Anyway, like I said over at Pith, I’m curious about this notion that this will be the time and this will be the illegal substance that we can force East Tennesseans, tucked away up in their hollers, from producing. It’s as if we believe all law enforcement prior to this generation were idiots and all holler-dwellers prior to this generation stubborn in a way these folks aren’t.
I doubt that’s true.
Anyway, I don’t want to downplay the scourge of meth. It is really terrible. But I sometimes marvel at our ability to believe that we can make something go away by making its price go up, instead of understanding that, by making it more lucrative, we’re inviting badder people into the trade.
Tiny Cat Pants 