Gnarly Tales

I don’t know a lot about my great-grandmother ‘Katty’ - short for Katherine, except for stories about her. She died when I was about sixteen or so. That’s the way it is with older generations. They seem so ancient to younger generations two or three times removed, that the generations can never find much in common. Grandma Katty lived in a small wooden framed house near the railroad tracks in a small farming community in south Georgia, not more than a crossroads really in my time. But at one time it was a thriving community with a cotton gin, railway depot, a church or two and other accouterments of turn-of-the-century life in the rural south I understand.   The turn of the century being the one from the 18th to the 19th.   Her son, my grandfather on my mother’s side, was born in 1885 to give you some perspective. I distinctly remember Grandma Katty’s corncob pipe, and either that or a lip full of snuff seemed to be part of her whenever I saw her. She kept a small vegeta...

I had to renew my Georgia driver’s license recently, which I had allowed to expire somehow. Maybe that had something to do with the fact that it was good for FIVE years and I got it in August 2013 and forgot all about it. Any other license I’ve ever gotten anywhere was good for at the most, four years. Anyway, my new Georgia driver’s license is now good for SEVEN years!   Count ‘em, SEVEN LONG YEARS! Think about that! What the hell are these people thinking? For Christ sakes, I’m 77 years old now, and if I live seven more years, I’ll be EIGHTY-FRIGGING-FOUR! I’m damned near blind in one eye and can't see worth a damn out of the other, but I passed the vision test handily. I also walk with a cane and am nearly deaf in one ear, but they don’t even test for that. I was worried about the vision test when I went to the *DSS office but it was all actually a total breeze for me.   *(‘DDS’ now replaces the ‘DMV’ in Georgia, and the initials represent “Department of Driver Ser...