My friend John

I knew him as John........the uncle of a classmate.
When you're from the rural area around a small southern town everybody is related to someone you either know or are related to yourself.

Search my family tree in any direction and you're as likely to find a Doctor as a storekeeper or dirt farmer. From Preacher to property owner (where the property owned was humans)...........to a War between the States deserter who was hanged as a horse thief. One distant cousin traveled with the '49ers to Cali-for-ni-a and returned with a bag of gold.........then returned West and on the trip back died in Illinois at the start of hostilities.

All this to say that we might have been related........I have no idea. But John would come dove shooting every September after the silage was cut and the ground would be sometimes gray with doves.

He sensed in me a somewhat kindred spirit I guess.........I was fresh out of the Army and pissed at the government for telling me that to keep the farm my Dad worked so hard for, we'd have to pay tribute to Washington to the tune of $53,000.00.
John was divorced.......20 years older than me.......and lived in a 26 ft. travel trailer. He was pissed at the government for passing The 16th Amendment to the Constitution and the Federal Reserve Act of the same year.

Always a character, one of the first things John showed me was how to get a silver dollar to fit into a longneck 12 oz. Pepsi bottle and then out.........without bending the coin or breaking the bottle. Of course there is a secret to it which I cannot reveal lest I bring down retribution on my head from the Magicians guild.

In the mid-seventies this country got exactly what it deserved when it elected a South Georgia supposed Peanut Farmer as President. This denigrated both the honorable profession of growing Peanuts and the Presidency. Those who know, knew that Billy was the farmer and Jimmy was always a kiss ass politician. And not a very good one at that. When he kissed Komenia's ass by refusing to stand by the Shaw of Iran, they repaid him by turning him around, doubling him over and shoving the takeover of our Embassy in Tehran up his nether regions.......causing him to dribble down his pants and lose the next election.

This in conjunction with Federal Reserve policies led to the worst one year inflation of the last century and as a consequence the price of Gold jumped to $852.00 an oz.. An aberration which quickly corrected itself and stayed below that mark until just recently. An while there are companies out there touting gold as a great investment........if you factor in inflation over the last 28 years (which by the way shows that the current value of a 1980 one dollar bill to be approximately .05 of a dollar or five cents) you have to have a price of over $2000.00 to make gold worth as much as back then.

Don't get me wrong........I like gold.......I read somewhere that pure gold reflected the soul of God. Gold is described in the Bible as 'clear as honey' and if you look into a crucible of molten gold it appears to be transparent and at the same time reflects and image of you back to your eyes. Reflecting the God within us perhaps??

Of all of the images made of or engraved on Gold I think I like this one best:



Probably because Liberty has always been the lady I chased the most.......and have the greatest love for.....................

.........something very few of the current candidates for president have any love for......nor any desire to help any of us have more of.

John..............

........Oh yeah.........The Athens SWAT team traveled 2 counties out of their jurisdiction at the behest of a crooked sheriff and shot him 10 times with automatic weapons when he came to the door of his travel trailer.

Another name on the list with Abraham, Martin and John.