.50 Cal

 

You'll be surprised and dismayed that my Fiddy was lost in a tragic boating accident, but through tears of loss I remember seeing my first .50 cartridge. It was in Milwaukee and I was maybe 7; there we were at a party in the next door neighbor's house.

The boys who lived there had just got back from Vietnam and I remember one of them showing me a cartridge case, we were by the kitchen sink. "What's that?" I asked, being 7 and curious, he replied, "That's a Fifty and it'd go right through this sink, through the wall of this house, through the wall of your house and out the other side."

This, gentle readers, has stayed with me for something like half a century.

Arma Virumque Cano,

LSP

Man On The Moon

 

53 years ago yesterday, Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. "One small step for man, one giant step for mankind." I remember the day. Morning in Milwaukee at the Campus Rectory, my dad was a UWM chaplain, and my parents called me in, "Look at this, son!" And I did, a flickering black and white image of a man on the Moon, history in the making. Quite a thing.

Of course Neil Armstrong wouldn't be able to say "man" and "mankind" today because patriarchal oppression. By the same token, we haven't really been back to the Moon and no wonder, we've devolved to such an extent that we're unable to define "man" and "woman." Is that a first? Perhaps.

Speaking of which, world leaders are Bastille Day laughing at us. Wonder why. At some point, maybe soon, narrative will flounder on the rocky shore of reality.

Watch my tracer,

LSP