The Ransom Note

 

The note read: “If you want your beloved Mike back, put an envelope containing $20 under your garbage trolley before midnight tonight.”

I was confused at reading this note, even a second time. Mostly I couldn’t understand why someone would do such a thing. The absurdity of it all: twenty dollars isn’t much of ransom, and who the heck is Mike?

The message was printed, large, childish-printing, mixing upper and lower case, in blue crayon, on one of those many cards you get around Christmas time assorted charities. This one was of the ubiquitous snowy scene and Northern Cardinal. The kidnapper needed two cards.

My neighbor on one side is named David. David Something. My neighbor on the other side is Donna Evans and her husband Caleb. Across the street is Ms. Walton. I don’t know that I know all their kids or all their pets but Mike doesn’t ring a bell. He must appear important to someone, the kidnapper, obviously, who only wanted, who could only think, twenty dollars was a lot of money. Which is interesting since none of us had millions or even thousands we could get our hands on easily in a day or without other notice. I had to ask myself if the kidnapper hadn’t lowballed his ransom because he knew any better. Smarter than all the TV-ransom shows.

On top of that if I put money under trolley would I only have to wait and watch until midnight to catch the varmint? What happens if I don’t leave the money? I didn’t know who Mike was but I got this strange sensation he’s not very large or important or necessarily missing. Somebody’s cat, that had wandered in and now wanders out so the owner writes him off? The kidnapper would have to know the cat was named Mike. Maybe from social media? Maybe by luck of being around at feeding time? We have one older woman, real nice, very cordial, who walks the neighborhood and seems to know everyone’s business. I think she is disarming and not a threat so we, I know I do, talk to her very easily. She might have heard of a Mike and our kidnapper overhead it.

One other conclusion I could come to was “they,” the kidnapper, had the wrong address. And then had the nerve, or lack of brains, to stick this note in my door in broad daylight. Someone was either awfully brave or awfully stupid to walk to my side door and stuff this note in it risking being seen. I have some very nosy neighbors. We watch out for each other.

It took a moment to register that the neat ploy on my part, I’m so smart, would be to go on-line and show a copy of this note on the neighborhood Facebook group and ask if the person who knows “Mike” would kindly contact me. Or, better yet, I could tell the world somebody sent this note to the wrong person. That might make an interesting story for “Twilight Zone.” Ought to liven up Facebook, if nothing else.

Ms. Walton might have a cat. Or had a cat. I can’t say that I paid any attention. Mr. Walton had been a lawn-mowing obsessive. A “LMO” is what I called him. And still his yard was never much better than mine. She liked her flowers and is terribly polite. Ideal cat person. Should I walk over and ask?

If Mike was a person, I didn’t know him. Not any of my relation. My neighbor David didn’t have kids, as far as I could tell. He was about my age, kept to himself probably on the Internet learning how to build bombs, or something.

Who is Mike? Who was Mike? How’d I get chosen to fork over a twenty? I didn’t want to cause harm. I also disliked having to run to the ATM to get money just because I don’t carry any. And then what, leave it under my garbage trolley? With a hope that the kidnapper will take it, in return leaving Mike with, instead of the wind carrying it away, or someone else notices the envelope and helps themselves, out of devious curiosity? What am I, chopped liver? If anything I ought to get to negotiate, face to face, masked and distanced, of course.

I took a post-it note, and the ransom note, put them in one of those envelopes you get in the mail from the charities, and stuffed it under the wheel of my dumpster. On the post-it I wrote, “No!”

###

 

Donahue and the Ninja

 

The house at the corner of Eldon and Wright was old. A hundred years old. The paint was new. The garage was new-ish. The property was bordered on two sides with a knee-high concrete wall topped with box elder. The porch, a wrap around with a low railing, needed paint--the whole place could use some care--was the height that Donahue used to try to jump over when he was a kid. Sometimes he cleared it and sometimes he landed on his head. Or, in the forsythia. Which his mother disliked immensely. Her dislike had nothing to with his landing on his head, either. But, the big stairway provided a makeshift stage for all the the kids to play act on. The porch rail seemed taller then.

The front door was open and he knew William Cobb Abernathy aka "B.C." aka "Sweet" (although no one seemed to know why he was called that and the last guy who did call him "Sweet," at the Riverside Tap and Dance, lost two teeth for his unauthorized familiarity) might be in the house this time. Sweet Abernathy was wanted for assault with a deadly weapon on the person of Jill Smithson. Ms. Smithson had no beef with Sweet Abernathy and he none with her but she said something inappropriate, apparently, and he went after her with the heavy end of a pool cue and a beer bottle. She was pretty well bloodied by the time the barkeep got there with his genuine Louisville Slugger. Abernathy lashed back and the crowd ducked long enough for him to get away.

Mr. Smithson was one to think the cops wouldn't find Sweet Abernathy so he hired Donahue to find him instead and sooner, perhaps for personal reasons. He didn’t say. The cops had already searched the Eldon Street address, Sweet's mother's home. She was in the nursing home and Sweet would stay at the Eldon Street house sometimes but not that day and not several other days until Donahue figured Sweet just couldn't be anywhere else. Sweet didn't have a girlfriend, that Donahue knew of, and a call at the residents of Sweet's two best pals from an earlier run-in with the long arm of the law proved fruitless.

The house was cold. It was late October and the heat ought to be on but it wasn't and the lights were off except for one in the kitchen. Donahue gravitated to the kitchen but mostly it was only stale aired. The 'fridge hummed and there were dishes still in the drainer from the last time he was here, and a few pots stacked on the corner of the oven. The linoleum-topped table in the middle was just a tad dustier than last time, too. Donahue, .45 at his side, circled the table and then started down the hall towards the front of the house, nearly spooked by his image in the hall mirror next to the front door.

Donahue had watched enough scary movies to know he should never turn his back on a closet or to back his way through a hallway but he also had his .45 out and cocked and nerves of steel (not so much I-beam steel as maybe chicken-wire steel.)

Not looking ahead but instead looking down, he sensed something behind him, in the kitchen. He spun to his right, .45 coming up to eye-level, as the hatchet whistled by his ear. He saw Sweet Abernathy, crouched on the table, in some convoluted pose, outfitted somewhere between Superman and Kato and Bruce Lee. The hatchet sailed on non-stop directly to the mirror, the crash of breaking glass ignored if even anyone heard. The .45 exploded in a deafening roar, the kick wrenching Donahue's half-bent elbow.

 Sweet Abernathy took the slow, heavy, lead round just below his Batman utility belt, folding him in half down to a four-point stance on the table. He didn't move for what seemed like an hour, as if he were getting his breath back, then his head, hooded in red, trimmed in lightning bolts, dipped to the table top.

Donahue froze, too, in awe, his fight and flight instincts in check. He didn't swallow. He didn't breath. He didn't blink. He knew what happened in the movies if he did.

Sweet Abernathy dropped a shoulder, and ever so slowly, tipped over, off the table, almost landing on his back, his foot flailed out and caught the stack of pans on the corner of the oven, and they followed him down to the floor with a crash that broke through the ear-ringing thunder of the .45.

Donahue got up his nerve to approach Sweet Abernathy’s body, wedged between the table and the oven, a pan laying flat on his chest. Donahue had seen too many movies where the warrior-wannabe leapt up from certain death to decapitate his victim in one motion with time enough leftover to smoke a cigarette.

But not Sweet Abernathy. He was completely dead.

###

 

Case Closed

Case Closed

It is late afternoon and the office is quiet. Doris, my secretary, is already at home by now. Our town is not all that big. I can get from one side of town where I live to one of my favorite eats on the other side of town in easily 20 minutes, or less if the lights are with me. She says she can be home in less time than it takes to walk from the office and around the block to the lot and then wait for a clearing in the traffic.

I always seem to leave after our rush half-hour.

But, today, we heard the verdict in a crazy case, and I’m thankful, but still in favor of having a scotch straight up in the office where I can take a deep breath and be satisfied at the end of this one. I closed the blinds on the west window but opened the window to the east. It wasn’t hot but I wanted a little bit of fresh air and street noise to help collect my thoughts. I wasn’t all that in doubt about the outcome but I’ve been around the barn enough times to know these things can take a right turn anytime.

It actually had not been a case needing a lot of police work or investigation on my part. I was there to provide some muscle for the victim. A private person had hired me to do that. The defendant, her ex-husband, had come loose a couple of times before the proceeding. He got himself cuffed to the chair for his antics which didn’t seem to really make him any smarter. I sat behind him and would have dearly loved the chance to deck his butt, bailiff or no bailiff. He proved to be a jerk which coincided with his Murder in the Second charge. Bought him 33 years, the max. Without parole. Rear smart guy. Career over. Life over. Every hope and dream will be locked up, basically, for . . . ever.

A doctor, no less. Trained? In what? Not how to murder your wife, for sure. They had become estranged. He was the first person the cops zeroed in on, before the night was over. They had two kids, aged 10 and 12. Nice kids. Now terribly traumatized but when I saw them this afternoon as we left they seemed relieved. By the time the mother was in the ER the cops were already interrogating the ex-husband.

He had offered up money but used his girl “friend” to act as go-between. She’d wormed her way into this teenager’s -- the shooter -- love-deprived brain. He was a dope. She was no winner. He was a bad shot. Dad thought he’d thought of everything.

If anyone was relieved -- if that-- at the verdict, it was the mother. She taken a bullet to her right hip, shattered it completely, and a second grazed just outside her right eye socket. The shooter’s little 32-caliber popgun did damage only because he was up to close but if she’d been five or ten feet farther back he’d missed her. It was some cheap piece of junk that jammed after the third shot. Bozo didn’t have hardly enough brains, he testified how scared he had been, dumped the thing in the bushes just off the porch. Patrol officers found it while they were standing outside on the porch making their calls to headquarters. The ex-husband had bought the thing, he thought, from some guy who would never talk, but did, and went scot free. Like I say, the case was pretty much over before it started. If Dad had listened to his attorney he might have --might have-- gotten a few years lesser but he decided to fight it out, ever thinking he wasn’t so much as innocent as much as he just too damn smart to lose, and kept losing every time he doubled down.

The deal between the DA and the supplier irked the judge and me, too. The guy should have been held responsible. He testified that the husband said it was for self-defense and the husband did not testify, at all or otherwise, so the jury went with what it had. The defense tried to discredit the supplier and did, I think, but that didn’t excuse the husband. Sometimes these things get a bit smelly.

She will be a long while before she walks right and they still aren’t sure how serious the wound is to her eye. It is serious enough that so far she hasn’t regained sight in it. She and her children are going to have a tough time but at least they can start with this piece of closure.

Don’t feel sorry for dear Bubba. He was bound to get caught and if she’d died he would be headed for death row, in Tennessee or most certainly life without parole. Slam dunk. No deals. No bargaining. Dead to rights nailed his behind to the barn door.

Dear ol’ dad argued he was the victim of some ill we never quite got a handle on. He grasped at straws, when he should have just left her and the kids and the county a long time ago. It was almost obvious from the git-go that he simply wanted her dead and didn’t have any qualms about who or how it was done.

If there is something uniform about murder, it seems to me, is the husband has a money interest that clouds his vision. He wants his cake and eat it, too. Never works that way. Never. Too many motives, too lazy, too chicken to actually pack up, and get out of Dodge. Or, in this case, Chattanooga. So, he’s got 33 long years to think about it. Thirty-three Christmases spent staring out the cell window. Thirty-three spring times missed. Thirty-three summer solstice spent in a 12-by-12 cell. By himself, most likely.

One of the reasons this crime really upset everyone, including me and the judge and the jury, for certain, was that the two little ones were home at the time, found their mother. Despite that they provided a couple of clues that identified the getaway car. Talk about impressive.

The jury was done in a hurry. Attorneys will tell you that a short deliberation is just for show. They’d made up their minds by the time they met in the jury room. Thirty minutes to formalize the vote and ninety minutes to make him suffer. They had no doubt of what happened and why and by whom.

The boy shooter --not long out of high school-- pleaded guilty. He rolled over on the girl. Accepted life with the possibility of parole. He knew he had been seduced and used but also knew he had pulled the trigger.

The girl rolled over on the father. She pleaded guilty, and was put on parole for five years. She got off easy. Love is a strange beast sometimes.

Dad, on the other hand, is going to go away. It is just as simple as that. Murder in the second. Conspiracy. Abetting. That sort of thing. One of those strings of offenses that is fifteen indictments long. He is already written out of the history books and out of the family record. He will never see his kids again. He will be an old man, if he gets out, and he might not get out. Tennessee prisons are neither better nor worse than any others and his kind is not liked behind bars.

This scotch is no help. The drift of street sounds do not distract my brain from the complete tragedy of this ordeal. The various stories unfolding down there on the street might come to a climax minutes from now. Who knows? I hope not. Cases like this do not have a winner. Everyone lost. Justice does not get served. One of my favorite quotes is from Faulkner about justice he wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot fence rail. That story of his has stuck with me since college.

The two young ones will have to adjust to knowing their dad tried to kill their mom. Not the kind of thing you talk about in show-and-tell. They will have a lifetime of personal emptiness to lug around like a ball on a chain. Mom will survive, I hope, although she might lose sight in one eye. The hip will be replaced and she will walk with a limp. Every time she opens the front door of the house, there will be this scary moment that this could happen all over. I don’t know if she’ll sell the house or not. At some point she’ll have to go back to work for a living. I have to wonder if any man will want to marry her. The victims always seem to remain victims forever. Just like once an ex-con always an ex-con, once victim always a victim. It all seems so utterly useless.

I wonder what will happen when her son, decides somewhere in the next few years, like a lot of young men, to own a gun. I wonder how she would react. Once a victim always a victim. We supposedly rehabilitate the criminal but do we ever relieve the victim of their burden? I suppose we can’t actually erase such trauma from the brain and about all they can do is scab over it.

 

[Note: This is basically a true story. The young man who pulled the trigger was eventually pardoned and allowed to return to Chattanooga. The father is still in prison. The girl left town. The mother was blinded in one eye by the shooting.]

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Photography

 I have been taking pictures since high school. I never could afford a “good” camera nor could I afford a lot of processing. But I did buy used cameras and did what I could. It’s been a long learning curve. 

With the advent of electronic cameras and the cell-phone camera photography has skyrocketed. I have tended to say this is good.

 I do not favor a particular subject genre. I tend to like a well taken photograph without judgment to topic or equipment.

 Currently I use a Nikon Coolpix camera. It is an automatic camera with a few bells and whistles. My backup is my Moto cellphone camera. I tend to set more outdoor and varied shots with the Nikon. The cell-camera is great for quick snapshots. The cell-camera’s advantage is it is unobtrusive. They’re everywhere and seems almost a compliment to the subject for such an off-the-cuff photograph. Of the two, I prefer the Nikon because it has a lot better range. Does it match an SLR? I don’t think so but I am not sure that such a statement is completely true. Or necessary. A whole lot depends on what you want to shot at a given time and what you can manage.

 Probably, there are SLRs with a share feature. Does that mean you have a camera/cellphone and a cellphone with a camera and share is a cellphone/camera? Not sure where this blending leads.

 The best rule of thumb for any camera is to take a lot of pictures in order to learn it’s options and potentials. I also take several of a given subject (including a black & white) but I also ditch a lot of photos. My current collection on my computer is a modest 14,000 images. A key thought here is that I store my photos for the long term on the my base computer. I have met a few people who seem to save their photos on their camera or on their phone. I guess it works for them.

 Both camers offer plenty of options. I keep finding little things on the cell like a portrait depth-of-field option that is really neat. I have been learning to get away from changing the ISO to using the =/- aperature option. I use this for both color and black and white settings. I like the black and white on the Nikon more than the cell. But the cell takes some great blue skies that I have bit of a problem with on the Nikon. It has taken more than a few spoiled shots to learn each camera’s quirks.

 I doubt I’ll ever win any prizes but I like to think I can take some nice shots once in a while. Photography, like writing, seems to make a person stop and pay attention to details. We know from experience that journalism photography captures the thrills and tragedies of life. I don’t even imagine me doing that. But I have found it I start to shoot something --anything-- that next thing I am doing is shooting everything, stuff I hadn’t thought was even there a moment ago. This results sometimes in having a photo that is not pleasant to view. But, if photography is to capture the world around us then that ought to include the uncomfortable.

 The adage is that the camera never lies. More accurately, the picture never lies. No longer. And probably not ever. The photographer determines most of what you see. The photo-editor is next in line to filter image selections. Then another higher editor or publication owner has the last say. With the rise of photo-manipulations the game is really changed, not in a good way. It is as if you take a really good photograph and one of two first questions will be: “Did you photo-shop this?” And the second is: “I’d shop out that little teeny piece of white stuff in the bottom left hand corner.”

 Another adage is “a picture is worth a thousand words.” I like that approach. It allows, and makes, me to be in charge. The photograph, I hope, is me speaking. As an aside, this is part of the rise in graphic novels. A drawing is worth a couple of pages of tedious text. I should have ownership of what I photographed as opposed to leaving the message to others. If I do things right, the end viewer and I might have a meeting of the minds.

 That ownership comes from taking a lot of photos. Looking at good photographic work. Paying attention to details out in the field.

###

 

 

 

Pennies

 

Pennies?

 

So I am wondering about pennies. Don’t know why the two have anything in common--maybe something to do with allowances and the value of money. 

Money is first of all a medium of exchange. It has no other value. And it is not usable for anything else. It has to have some reason for acceptance, which is where we are today. Its cost and its use are disconnected. It isn’t that pennies aren’t valuable it is just they aren’t worth much. Two-hundred seventy nine pennies will get you a short of coffee at Starbucks.

 I’m also reminded about the difference between counterfeit money (fake) and Confederate money (legitimate, valueless).

 Being “legal tender” is what makes a currency acceptable, to pay a debt. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of anyone getting sued for not accepting cash for a payment. But, nowadays, the vender might be able to say something to the effect they expect a card and not cash. With phone payment “systems” are gaining traction it is not out of the realm to imagine in the near future vendors won’t even want a card.

 But also, practicality and convenience makes “money” money. Back when a penny had more buying power it’s portability helped make it work. The system of one, five, ten, twenty-five, and fifty cent pieces meant change had use. With inflation the penny became weight. Where we are today with pennies has taken many decades to get here. Nickels are next to fall?

 A small business person has to make decisions about the convenience of cards and subsequent transaction costs versus keeping change, counting change, keeping the till right. The old axiom I learned was that if the till was short, that cost the company. If the till was long that cost the customer. The poor shop owner just wants to sell coffee or leather purses, not be a financier. For rounding to the nearest 5-cents will require some people to get shorted and other not-shorted. Is that okay?

 I’m trying to get in the habit of taking along a wad of pennies when I go out. Some of the coffee shops will reduce their price if you pay cash. And if they don’t I think most of them still welcome exact change. It’s a hard thing to juggle.

 If there are 330-million people in the US each hoarded one-dollar worth of pennies is not 330-million pennies but 33-billion pennies out of circulation. Ten bucks is one-thousand pennies. Returning either to a bank is nothing more than a polite citizentry thing to do.

 As a thought piece, imagine how many pennies should be in each till for each shift for each register in your local WalMart. Multiply that by the number of stores in the country and a funny thing begins to show up. We can’t do without pennies.

We have come to a realization--finally-- that physical money has a real cost to it. The penny is too expensive to keep making. The nickel would be next. This is not new. But are we willing to default our handling of money to the credit card system?

 An interesting spread sheet problem: find some number of pennies in circulation (in the hundred of billions) divide by pennies per pound and divide that by 2000 to get how many tons of pennies are in circulation. Check my arithmetic, Double check your data (it seems to vary). I got slightly over 346-thousand tons. The answer is rather staggering, if it is even close.

 What we ought to see one of these days is the neighborhood kids doing a penny-collection drive. A better haul than mowing yards. Way ahead of pocket change for an allowance.

###

 

Thanksgiving 2025

 

Thanksgiving 2025

 

I am just back from spending a few fun days in Clearwater Beach for Thanksgiving. I haven’t been to Clearwater in about 50 years so I don’t remember a thing about the place. The “beach” town is about two miles long and maybe a quarter mile wide at the widest. Half is old residential and lavish home living. Half is tourist heaven (or hell, depending on whether you have to commute there to work). 

From Johnson City it is a fairly long drive, about 750 miles or so. As is well documented there were several million people on the road at various times all of them going my direction, it seemed. I split the trip into staying in Savannah both directions. The trip wasn’t so hectic as much as boring and hard on the body. I’m gettin’ too old for this stuff. I was neither the fastest nor slowest but I tend to be a bit cautious. And make stops when I wanted to and not dictated by time or fuel or someone else needing a rest stop. And, until just below Asheville on the way back, was the only real time of frustration with traffic. That was only because I just near enough to home to feel like I should be there.

I get asked why I didn’t go through Atlanta. From here it appears the route is westerly around Knoxville and Chattanooga then around Atlanta and back easterly to Clearwater. Or, head out east towards Charleston on I-26 and take I-95 to Jacksonville and cut across diagonally to Tampa. Measured about the same. But I know the road better going east. No matter how you cut it, the miles were plenty.

My hotel was on the beach. And I mean right on the beach. The hotel’s patio-retaining wall was protected by boulders and at low tide about 5-10 feet of sand. Each building has a walkway between them that usually did not end on the beach. Every square foot in that end of town is developed. There was no such thing as a vacant lot. The public beach was about four or five hotels down the street. They have parking but I never did try to understand how the payment system works. 

We had fun. I enjoyed chatting up folks. Our gang ate at Granny’s Diner in Crystal River. Great place. Locals love it. Food was good. The staff was a busy, smiling bunch, too. We asked about the sign that said it was a rule you could not order syrup on your grits. Well, I said, whoever thought you should put syrup on your grits? Don’t know that I got an answer but it was an ice breaker if there ever was one. Check ‘em out.

I’d go again. Just give me a year to let me recover from a lot of driving. 

###

 

walk about

 

On psychogeographic map(s)

 I was privileged to attend a lecture the other day by Dr. Scott Honeycutt from ETSU’s Literature and Language Department about personal map making. Dr. Honeycutt creates hand-drawn maps of our area with a lot of amusing detail and different orientations. They are a treat to explore themselves.

 Specifically talking about my town of Johnson City. I have photographed enough downtown and slugged back a lot of coffee to think I have probably been to most of the nooks and crannies. Dr. Honeycutt offered a different approach: at every intersection flip a coin to go right or left. I’ve got to try this. He also suggests you walk a straight line until the surface changes texture. But in either case, try to make a mental note of what you see and hear and smell that maybe you just did not notice before.

 When I am out with my camera I have noticed that when I start slowing down and paying attention to details then more details pop out. The photography becomes, I think, better because it is no longer superficial. Nothing wrong with snapshots! I do that, too.

 I can imagine smaller cities like ours have a lot of places to explore.

###

 

 

At the six-month mark of the year, here are some favorites out of 21 books read.

Better fictions

Sipsworth (by Van Booy)

Diary of a Dead Man on Leave (Downing)

True Grit (Portis)

 Better non-fictions

The Wide Wide Sea (Sides)

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Allen)

The American Story (edit. Rubenstein)

The Demon Of Unrest (Larson)

 Crossovers

Good Night, Irene (Urrea)

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