Month: June 2017

 

Me:  Eddy, I got your text.   I guess you got texting down cold. 

Uncle Eddy:  Charlie, I love this texting crap, cause its one to one.  I sends you a text, and you know it’s me.  Not like that other bull crap.

Me:  Not sure what you mean, Ed.

Uncle Eddy:  See  – twitter-tweeting, facebooking, yelping and yowling and snapper-this and snapper-that – that’s closet bull-crap.  You got something to say to a guy, good or bad, you do it face-to-face, not hiding behind some posty thing.   You know what I mean, kid?

Me:  I think so.  I guess you mean direct dialog, Ed? 

Uncle Eddy:  Yeh, I ain’t so good with words.  Point is if you got a beef with a guy, go look him in the eye.  If he ain’t in your town, send him a personal-like text or e-mail thing.  This snapper-yapper crap lets guys hide in their basement and make big talk they wouldn’t make to your face.  In the Army and when I worked the mills, guys got feisty you know, but you looked the guy in the eye and told him what you thought.  Man-to-man, you know?

Me:  I hear you.

Uncle Eddy:  Now we got this whole mess of say anything you wants to whoever and you don’t need the stones to look him in the eye when you says it.  Even the Prez – he’s tweeting up a storm, calling out this one and that one.  If he’s got a beef, why don’t he call him up on the phone, he probably got a hundred phones, and talk straight to him?  Instead of all this name calling crap like a kid in a schoolyard.  I ain’t an educated man, kid, but if I caught my own kids doing that, I’d whack their asses.  Kids have beefs, too, but they should oughta tell the other kid what’s what.  And if they gets a punch in the mouth, that’s life, you know.

Me:  You got a suggestion for the President?

Uncle Eddy:  Damn straight.  If he’s got a beef with someone, call him out private.  Or call one of them press things and say it plain to everybody.  Seems to me he’s hiding in the dark calling out everybody and their brother but he never says it man to man.  That’s crap, Charlie.  In the Army, a guy like that you’d call him a coward – worst thing you can say to a soldier. You was a Marine, and I bet you guys sure as hell didn’t do that in-the-dark crap.

Me:  No, I didn’t.  Marines always look you in the eye.    

Uncle Eddy:  Damn straight.  But the tweetering it’s a bad example. Everybody’s doing this posty crap now, thinking it’s the thing to do.  It ain’t right, kid.  Anytime I got a problem with you, I’m going to tell you – just you – what it is.

Me:  I know that.  I’ll catch you later.  Unless you got a beef with me now.

Uncle Eddy:  Nah!  You and me is always square.

 

 

Me:  Hey, Uncle Eddy!  Thought I’d ring you up and see what you’re thinking about all the impeachment talk – and that pesky Bobby Mueller the Special Counselor who’s poking around.

Uncle Eddy:  Charlie, I just got calm down about it – and now you gone and stirred me up.

Me:  So what do you think?

Uncle Eddy: I got to tell you, it’s damn straight about time.  I voted for them guys.  Bought all that crap they were spouting about jobs and money and good times for middle America.   Bull crap!  Ain’t none of it happening, is there?  But all them fat cats cover up each other’s ass.

Me: So you think there’s something there?

Uncle Eddy: I’m thinking someone with balls ought to start poking around.  Government law is government law and ain’t nobody should be thinking they can make up their own like some kid’s play time, you know?

Me: You think that applies to the President, too?

Uncle Eddy: Crap!  Double crap!!  That applies to everybody.  Look here, kid.  You know I was in Korea.  Wasn’t no damn volunteer — I was drafted.  I didn’t want to go, cause you heard my older brother Stevie was killed at Normandy, and I ain’t no damned hero.  But I went.  Didn’t matter I didn’t want to fight no damn Koreans, I went cause the law said I had to.

Me: My Dad said you had a rough time, Ed.

Uncle Eddy: Damned right I did.  Froze my ass for two years, getting shot at, sleeping in mud, seeing my pals blown to hell away.  Wasn’t no fun – but I followed them rules, damn it.  Guys in the Army don’t get no chance to make the rules they wants, they do what they’s told to do.

Me: And the Chinese and the Russians?

Uncle Eddy: They was the enemy, kid — shot at me, I shot at them.  And let me tell you something important – if I had ever walked over to them China guys to talk, the Army would have straight away shot me.  That was the law.  But now the big dogs is talking with them Russians who ain’t our pals any more than they was back then.  But nobody gives ‘em a slap on the ass, they just cover each other’s asses.  But it’s against the law, kid, against all them laws I know of.  So if nothing else, maybe this Mueller guy can dig up all that under-the-table crap and stick it out there so the Congress guys gotta do something.  If 18-year old soldiers got to follow the law, so does everybody else.  You got me?

Me:   I got it, Ed.  Let’s hope things get cleaned up.

 

Me:  Hey, Uncle Ed.  Good to hear from you.  What’s going on?

Uncle Eddy: Remember when I told ya “nobody wants to grow up to be a coal miner”?  And you printed that?

Me: I do.  Why? Did you get calls?

Uncle Eddy: Lots of ‘em.  People says “Eddy, you got that right”.  Even pals down in Parkersburg says I got more sense than the prez. Can you imagine him droppin’ that damned Paris deal?  So’s we can make more smoke?

Me: I agree, but nobody can stop him.

Uncle Eddy:   Look, Charlie.  I miss them steel mills, but I’m too damned old to work ‘em anyways.  But I got to tell you, aside from not enough jobs, it’s better in the Mahoning Valley now.  Hell, your Aunt Marge can finally breathe without coughing fit to puke.  Nobody wants no more coal.   You see on TV them China people walking around with doctor masks on.   Kid, you know I lived my whole life like that.

Me: I remember our visits were pretty smoky.

Uncle Eddy: And that was good weather.  I remembers when they was goin’ gangbusters on them coking ovens.  Hell, it got so bad they run streetlights in Youngstown and Pittsburgh 24 hours a day.  High noon and you couldn’t see squat.  And where you was in Cleveland, down near 89^th – you tell me it wasn’t just as bad?

Me: It was, Ed.  We’d visit my Grandpa in Fairport Harbor and we thought we were in Heaven.  My Ma would send my sister and me out there for summers to get some clean air.

Uncle Eddy: Damn straight.  Hell, too many guys I worked with is dead already when their lungs give out.   Your old man was one of them, kid, so you know.

Me: He was, Uncle Ed, so I do know.

Uncle Eddy: But that prez grows up in air conditioned palaces.  He don’t know squat about smoke and crap. So, yeh, we need jobs bad, but we sure as hell don’t want our grandkids dying early from the dirt.  And ain’t nobody’s gonna use coal no more anyway.  Like I says, power companies uses gas cause it’s cheap and there ain’t no boilers to shut down and haul out ashes.  I cleaned out coking ovens when I was a kid and that’s butt ugly work.  Nobody wants that crap no more.  I seen all his slick lawyer pals on TV saying how wonderful it’s going to be.  Ain’t none of them picking up shovels and heading for West Virginia, is they?  Bull crap.