Killed in a bar when he was only three

Davy Crockett died this past week. He was the first childhood hero I remember. I just read a riddle about him. Why could Davy Crockett hear so well? He had a left ear, a right ear and a wild frontier. Actually it was Tonto who could hear the best, but he never knew Davy Crockett.

I used to sing the Davy Crockett theme song. but I was this young suburban Jewish kid who grew up near Philadelphia. Kill't him a b'ar when he was only three. If someone would have explained to me that he murdered a bear at 36 months I don't know if I would have liked him more or less. In the mid 50's murdering wild animals was just what you did, no questions asked.

I wondered today if I was the only one who got that line of the song wrong. I googled it and found this it is a misheard lyric, duh. but that is where the riddle came from so it was worth the search.

I still have a Davy Crockett Wallet, I even have the box it came in. This is important in collecting circles, means you are totally OCD. Here is an image of the wallet from an antique site.

It sold for $70. I had a coonskin cap as well but hat disappeared while Eisenhower was still president. My friend David was obsessed with Davy Crockett, he changed his name to Davy (well that wasn't too hard was it?) and he had everything, the entire outfit, the tent, the rifle, the powder horn. My friend David killed him a tarantula when he was only 5. So he says.

I liked the Lone Ranger, don't get me wrong, but he looked like a pudgy raccoon. Tonto on the other hand was very cool and I bet secretly wished the Stone Stranger would fall off a cliff. There are all those jokes about what Keemo Sabe means. There is actually scholarly writing on the subject:

http://www.old-time.com/misc/kemo.html

And Trigger, the horse. Is it true that the Lone Ranger had him stuffed and placed in his living room?

Wait, this is about Davy Crockett. His side kick was Jed Clampett. Before Jed became a millionaire while shootin' at some food.

My father, see previous posts, would laugh with great guffaws recalling my song lyric gaffe. It is the last thing I remember him talking about before he died. He was a few years older than Davy Crockett.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAVN_n0PljQ

Good bye Davy.

Back with Old News - Birth, Life & Death

To my readers, if there are any, I wrote this in August 2008 and never posted it. I sort of misfiled it. Here goes…

I was switched at birth. My mother is not quite on board with this. But neither of my parents was present during my birth. Mom was knocked out for 24 hours and my father lost his driver’s license and couldn’t get there legally. My real name is Zigmund or Ziggy to my friends. But I don’t know any of them.

My real parents are Jewish Gypsies who had a trained dog act. They would do regional circuses popular back in the late 40’s and early 50’s. I should do a DNA test to settle this thing once and for all, but that would kill my current mother. Or she would just think it is funny, or maybe both. I wonder if she would want to meet the real me, is he still alive?

So far everyone in my family thinks this is just part of my sense of humor. Ha, ha, enough already. So why am I the only brother with all of my hair? Okay, that could happen with Mendel’s Law. My mother’s (allegedly) mother and her family went to their graves with all of their original hair and teeth. When my grandmother (also allegedly) was 99 she thought I was her brother Joe. She also thought she played third base for the Orioles. She died at 99.9. I figured out the math and this is really the case, 36.5 days before her 100^th birthday. It was the same day my best friend died, they were 50 years apart. But that’s another story for another time.

Maybe at 59 I should drop this whole switched at birth routine. It is like being a Borscht Belt comedian still playing at third rate Las Vegas Casinos. The comedian everyone thought was dead until you see the billboards near the Las Vegas Airport.

Differentiated and proprietary. That’s the mantra. How do I find this new shtick? It requires innovative thinking. I tried the story about how I grew up to the sounds of roaring lions in my suburban hometown. We lived two blocks from the town zoo. They had this sad African Animal Prison. That’s my name for it. It was basically a jail for lions and monkeys and a few snakes-in-a-bowl. They finally closed down this Gitmo-for-Animals in the early 60’s after the town drunk got his finger bit off by one of the bored lions. You could get into the Animal Jail any time you wanted. The Age of Trust Before they were able to stop the infection he lost his entire arm. The story in the paper said that a special cure juice had to be flown over from India by an actual Swami-type person in a Nehru Jacket. His picture was in the local paper.

Soon after that the old bison escaped and ran through the streets of my town. They reinforced his pen. The age of trust was over for him. They added prairie dogs and he would trip in the holes because he was going blind.

I suppose I would have missed all of this had I been where I should have been. It is too hard to think about at 59.

I promised to write after the radon problem was corrected. Well that was a couple of years ago; I have been sort of lazy about writing. Lots of things have happened but I will start with the radon. Found this amazing contractor who has spent years in the radon mitigation game. And he lived right around the corner. Within spittin’ distance as the saying goes. Wonder how that saying started. Why not pissin’ distance or tossing an egg distance. Well he was competent, thorough and neat; he took the radon down to well with in allowable range. Why I didn’t do this sooner is a mystery. Maybe it was the radon. The aliments if the 8ch Family turned out to be allergies, poor 8ch daughter is allergic to her favorite substance in the universe, cheese. This is a major bummer as fake cheese is a tasteless gelatinous petri dish like substance that has as its main claim to fame the ability to melt.

I suppose what threw me off the keeping up with my writing was the death of my father. At this point I am forgetting about the switched at birth thing since I knew him for 57 years. He died in February 2006. He was going downhill for a few years, decided to stop fighting death about 3 months prior to the end. I don’t know if he was ever really up for the fight. In retirement he hiked through the Himalayas,

joined the Peace Corps and did a stint in Serbia and Fiji, and then had is knees replaced. It did not go well and it was downhill from there. Losing your mobility when you are a restless person is a major life changer, for the worse.

At the end, and it was after a series of in and out of the hospital every month or so, he was in a teaching hospital, the fate of the time, place and speed at which they needed to get him help I was told. I knew it was time to bring the living will he made, as I was sure that even with all of his careful planning no one at the hospital would have this record or access to it. It seems like you are always starting from scratch with every change in medical venue, I think doctors hate to share. I hear that is changing as some are succumbing to the lure (monetary incentives) of electronic record keeping. I think somehow they will still find a way to keep patient info some big mystery, especially from the patient.

As this was a teaching hospital I had to not only insist that they put a copy of his DNR in his main record jacket, but I had ten copies made and had to distribute them to all of the student doctors who saw this dying old man as a learning experience. No, we are not going to put him on dialysis, see?, it says so right here. But it would help clear the toxins they would say. Luckily he had an attending physician who was a gerontologist, a doctor from Russia, who had more humane sensibilities.

Almost two year later now I am really missing him. I know this because I am humming really bad songs that he used to hum, and really badly. Begin the Beguine, Paper Moon, There's an Awful Lot of Coffee in Brazil, just to name a few. Here is a youtube video of Begin the Beguine. it is in German but the song is still the same:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n6AFrNE7Hs

So many times I want to talk to him, tell him what's going on. My eyes sting when that happens.