PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Inflation adjustment: Due to inflation, it's now "they're not all that and a single chip". Or else you're just setting the standards impossibly high.

Thank you very much.: Thank you very much.

Wow, I couldn't pass this up: Wow, I couldn't pass this up and I'm glad I never do. What is there to say other than you're flippin' BRILLIANT man?! and you know it's true

Several NDE's have confirmed: Several NDE's have confirmed that we do meet our beloved animal companions on the other side. I was very touched by your personal experiences with precious souls in animal bodies.   You're never, ever verbose!     

I was five months old when I: I was five months old when I was adopted in 1958.  Later, in 1995, I inquired into my adoption file, as was my right, and found out that my birth mother had been a high school girl and my birth father was a young man of the same age of whom her parents did not aoprove.  Her father, my maternal birth grandfather, had a PhD in Chemistry, was director of research for a major American corporation, was an elected elder in the Presbyterian Church and, like I once was, a thirty-second degree Freemason.  He was also, according to the records clerk who pulled my file, apparently a first-class bastard, as he bribed the family court judge who presided over my adoption (and told my birth mother that were wishes carried no weight with the court); he also bribed the adoption agency attorney and several of the medical staff who delivered me.  This was discovered in 1995 because the official file also contained, probably by error, ledger pages that the judge had kept---apparently the judge arranged the bribes and made the payments on my birth-grandfather's behalf, and then kept a record of it which ended up accidentally included in the file,  The judge also knew the people who adopted me through their involvement in the political party to which they all belonged, and he had told them that he was doing them a favor by rushing the adoption through and cutting corners (which was what my birth-grandfather had paid him to do anyhow).  By another odd coincidence, both my adopted mother and my first-wife's father were employed by the corporate division over which my birth-grandfather presided, although none of them were acquainted with each other.  My birth father "went bad" after my birth mother's father forcibly broke them up.  He later married, moved to Richmond Indiana, where---during the summer of my seventeenth year---he came home early from a business tript, caught his wife in bed with the next door neighbor, and pulled a gun from under his jacket and blew her brains out.  He then called the police om himself and surrendered to them, and did a ten year stretch for manslaughter.  Here is the final irony:  in the cemetery where my adopted parents are buried, they are located less than a bundred yars from the graves of my birth mother's parents---the scheming corporate exec and his alcoholic wife.  How's that for a tale?  Truth is always stranger than fiction.

so we weren't looking them in: so we weren't looking them in the eyes

And thank you for telling me: And thank you for telling me about your experience.  I remember hearing from my grandmother that when my father, who was basically a naive farmboy, enlisted in the Marines, his personality radically changed during his experience of boot camp.  Apparently, after graduating from basic training, and before being deployed to the battleship Nevada, he had a few days leave at home and, although he looked like her son and had the name of her son, she did not recognize much of her son's personality.  Of corse, I only ever knew the post-war personality.   (A bit of trivia:  during a reunion of his unit in 1986, my father and his surviving friends were given some information by the former captain of the battleship . . . that they had been selected to be the first unit to invade the Japanese main island, and that their death certificates had already been filled out by the captain a couple of weeks in advance, because the planners in Washington had estimated that thousands of soldiers in the first invasive force would die on the beaches just to establish a foothold.  However, three days before the invasion was due to begin, the battleship received orders to turn fully about and head away from Japan at the fastest possible speed.  My father could remember feeling the ship turn radically, and then the engines running so hard that the body of the battleship actually shook.  President Truman had decided to deploy the atomic bombs, and the designers had badly overestimated the blast radius, which they believed would reach the main seas around Japan.  But at least he did not die in the invasion, as had been expected, and then thirteen years after the war . . . he adopted me!)  If this has been too verbose, feel free to delete it.