Another Day....

 

Despite the heat, skies have been beautiful here lately, and I owed Maya (and myself) a long walk out in the hills to clear the cobwebs and to be reminded that Nature is still magnificent (even if what we see on TV isn't), so Saturday morning we left the house early for one of our favorite spots in the rolling hills just south of town. I also wanted to see how Maya would do on the fifteen-foot leash I bought for our hikes.

We hadn't gone a hundred yards when we saw this:

I think I know my sister well enough to know that if she's reading this, she's making an "Are you kidding me?!?" face if not saying that out loud. Yep. Sad. Someone had no use for Grandma's little white spinet piano, so they drove it out to the hills and pushed it out the back of a truck onto the ground. I've seen a lot of things out in these hills, but this just broke my heart. I thought of three different places it would have fit in my little house. Damn, people. You didn't have to toss it out like some kind of garbage.

Speaking of such: As I said, I've seen a lot of things out there. Our next discovery, about a half mile past the piano, was this guy:

Sad, huh? When we came upon him, his tie was askew, so I fixed it. Then, because Maya was just happy to be out in the hills, and she was willing to wait patiently, I sat him up so that instead of staring at the sky all day, he could see some sky and hills, birds and coyotes, maybe some dirt bike or mountain bike riders (I imagine the latter stopping to chuckle and take a photo), and possibly some more miscreants offloading junk they can't be bothered to drive to the dump.

Isn't he handsome? I love bears. People think I love giraffes--and I do, don't get me wrong--but my first love will always be bears. Stuffed ones, live ones. Doesn't matter. I have bears all over my house, in one form or another (mostly stuffed). And in my car. (Ask my sister, who sometimes rides shotgun. Raggedy Bear travels with me wherever I go.) I can't imagine what prompted someone to toss this dude out, especially when he was dressed so nicely.

But then, people aren't always thinking clearly when they drive out to the hills. See this big, beautiful oak, and that small yellow something at the base of its trunk?

If the device you're using to read this has the capacity to zoom in, you'll discover, as I did, that it's an empty Pacifico box. Niiiice. (For the uninitiated, that's beer.) I mean, if you're going to drive way out in the hills, sit under an oak and experience Nature, that just might be the perfect beverage to consume. From the Pacifico website:

"Pacifico is a pilsner-style lager with a crisp, refreshing flavor and a touch of grass-citrus and ocean mists."

Seriously. I want one now, and I don't even drink beer. (Well, hardly ever.) But the ad copy had me at "ocean mists."

I guess I'm glad the drinker(s) left all the empties in the box. I mean, they could have smashed them against the tree, creating a dangerous hazard for wildlife. Just to note, that box has been there a long time. Maya and I have passed it often. No, I haven't picked it up to carry it out. It's a mile in on the trail, and I have both hands full handling Maya on the way back to the car. And my phone, if I have to take a picture. Case in point, this lovely gourd and blossom:

After we saw that, we saw this. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was a bear print, but there are no bears out there. Just, apparently, tremendously huge dogs. I held my hand over it so you can see how big it really was.

It was a great walk, and Maya enjoyed having the freedom to wander a bit on her new leash. But all good things do come to an end, so we trotted back to the car for the short drive home. Just another day in paradise.

One Billion

Last week the jackpot in the Mega-Millions lotto topped one billion dollars.

One billion.

That’s a thousand times a million.

To give you some perspective (and I think we all need to gain some perspective on occasion), at the rate of pay I was earning as a high school teacher, I made a million dollars every twelve years. Roughly, in twenty-seven years of teaching, I made (and spent—trust me) two and a quarter million dollars.

But in order to make a billion dollars, I would have had to work a thousand times that long. Yep. If I’d kept working, I would have made a cool billion dollars after twelve thousand years (give or take a few hundred years).

Makes me tired just thinking about it, though I’m sure I would have enjoyed spending that much time with my students—kids who were kind, smart, funny, compassionate, and always entertaining. Sweet kids. Innocent kids.

It also makes me think, now that I’m living on my pension (and not earning much from my writing—I mean, you’re currently reading my words for freeee!) that perhaps I might have chosen a more lucrative line of employment.

Take gun sales, for example. Know how long it took gun manufacturers in the U.S. to earn a billion dollars? Ten years. Oh wait—they made much, much more than a billion in ten years. That’s just what they made on assault-style weapons. You know, AR-15s and such. Those sales alone earned them a cool billion dollars. In ten years.

Don’t you wonder what they do with all that money? I do. I’d like to think they put a few million aside to pay medical bills and PTSD counseling and grief therapy and renovations of the crime scene whenever there’s a mass shooting. I’d like to think that, all right. But I can’t. Because they don’t.

Ever wonder who pays the medical bills for victims of mass shootings? They do. The victims, I mean. Well, their insurance companies, but as we know, insurance companies only pay for certain things these days. “Out of pocket” expenses can be astronomical. Especially when you’ve been hit by multiple rounds that basically explode inside your body. (CNN has a non-graphic simulation video posted on YouTube of how the round from an AR-15 affects human tissue. You can view that by clicking here.)

Curious, I did a search of “mass shooting” on the Gofundme.com page. There are hundreds and hundreds of accounts set up to help victims. Because, as I said, if you’re hit but don’t die, you’re going to need really good insurance coverage.

Because gun manufacturers are using their billion dollars for other things.

Look, I know I’ve been harping on this issue for months. Is it too much?

Could it ever be “too much” as long as mass shootings are still happening?

Am I “one of those Dems” who want to “take all the guns away”? No. No, I am most decidedly not. I believe the founding fathers had good reason to say everyone who wants to have a gun at home should have the right to do so. I have no issue with the handgun my nearly-ninety-year-old neighbor is ready to bring out should civil unrest rear its ugly head here in our senior community. I have no issue with a single friend who keeps a gun in her nightstand in case her abusive ex-husband decides to come at her again. I certainly have no issue with my brother’s hunting rifles because he hunts deer humanely, and he eats what he kills (and anyway, most of the time he just has fun camping out with his friends and doesn’t bag anything).

But if we have any chance of stopping the type of carnage we have seen in recent months and years, we have to do something.

How about we reinstitute the ban on assault-style weapons? Because you know, they were banned for years. And the percentage of these types of mass shootings dropped dramatically. And in those years that they were banned, my brother continued hunting and neither my friend or my neighbor felt unsafe without their handguns.

I do have one friend who owns an AR-15 and feels threatened by any conversation involving gun control reform. He uses his AR-15 to hunt coyotes. So he can kill an entire pack at one time.

So yeah, I wouldn’t mind if we passed a law saying he can’t do that.

Mostly, though, I’m more focused on no more children dying deaths so violent, their parents have to give samples of their DNA in order to identify their bodies.

Give it some thought. Maybe call or write a senator. Or vote for only those individuals who sincerely support gun control reform. Please.

Because this:

And because this is a reminder of how quickly we forget:

 

Oh, by the way, we know now that someone in Illinois won that billion-plus Mega Millions jackpot. Wouldn’t it be cool if it were someone in Highland Park? Yeah, I think so, too.