I just got off the phone with Alberta Hurt. She is going deaf and her caregiver was not there so I could not tell her I’m coming over to pick up her new poem and publish it in this blog. Bertie is ninety-one. I use her to pick up young women at church. I am like the fox in the chic-house. I use Bertie as bait. They can’t resist telling me what a wonderful man I am to be taking this old wrinkly lady to church. Of course I am what they are hoping to find in a young man, a dude who will love them to the bitter end.
Bertie’s poem is titled ‘Old Crap – Or Happy Days’. As death nears, she is turning towards Buddhism and doesn’t know it. Her poem is about all the old crap that runs through our brains, that we wish would go away so we can be happy – in the end! Laying our old crap on others, is not cutting it anymore. Like me, Bertie is cursed with a Big Brain that is wide awake! She is as sharp as a tack. There’s no OFF switch.
Bertie had a farm and had convicts come help her. She was all alone with prisoners, teaching them about gathering eggs. She is almost fearless. She found a preacher on T.V. that convinced her the world is going to end, any day, and she wants me to take her to the pawn shop to get her a gun.
Montgomery Cliff was a great actor, and very gay. Read his biography to learn the dark side of homosexuality. Cliff was in two great movies ‘Suddenly Last Summer’ and ‘The Misfits’. SLS is about a gay who uses his beautiful cousin to attract young men that he seduces. TM is Bertie and my movie. She fell in love with me the moment she lay eyes on me at the poker game in the rec room.
Old ladies have fallen in love with me most of my life. I learned you don’t crush their movie they got you starring in. When I took Bertie to the Cowboy Church, on the way home I told her;
“You and I. We’re a couple of misfits!”
That hit her sweet spot.
“You and I…against the world!”
When my friend Sandra saw my reaction to Bertie’s poetry reading in my truck, she commented on how I was not being sincere in my response. But, she got it. I would be there for Bertie, and her, when the Grim Reaper come round to shut our poetry reading down.
Here’s my best friend, Marilyn Reed, when she was sixteen (1962). We were boy friend and girlfriend in high school. Last night she called me while on the road, driving back from Washington. She told me about the good movies she watched with her sister, and the little town she visited. When I fall in love, it’s forever. I learned my lesson.
Jon Presco
https://rosamondpress.com/2013/09/13/cowboy-christian-for-governor-of-oregon/
https://rosamondpress.com/2013/09/11/i-passed-for-cowboy-christian/
In Reno, Nevada, Roslyn Tabor (Monroe) is a beautiful 30-year-old woman who has just gotten a quickie 6 week divorce from her inattentive husband Raymond (McCarthy). After leaving the Washoe County Courthouse, Roslyn’s best local friend, Isabelle Steers, (Ritter) takes her to a bar at Harrah’s Reno for drinks to let the reality of her divorce sink in. While there, they meet an aging cowboy named Gaylord ‘Gay’ Langland (Gable) and his tow truck driver friend Guido (Wallach). They invite Roslyn and Isabelle to Guido’s place in the Nevada country to help her forget about the divorce, after Gay tells Roslyn that he is too divorced. They arrive at the un-finished house Guido had built for his wife, who had died several years earlier during childbirth. They drink and dance. Roslyn has too much to drink, so later Gay drives her home to Reno.
Eventually, Roslyn and Gay move into Guido’s half-finished house and start to work on it. One day after breakfast, Gay tells Roslyn how he wishes he were more of a father to his own children, whom he has not seen for some years. Later that afternoon, Roslyn and Gay have a argument when he states his intention to find and kill the rabbits that are eating from the vegetable garden they have planted outside Guido’s house.
Rosamond Press 
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