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Friday, 2-8-2002 Paul Harvey's Ghost Dear Political Diary, I read at the Edison Raleigh school this morning, again on a live television feed. Before I started the kids in my live audience asked me if I'd read at other schools, Lincoln and Kenwood, the year before because they remembered my Gorilla Slippers. I honored a request to read Me First again but switched to Bootsy Barker Bites for my second entry followed by a quick Noisy Nora. I headed home at eleven and Claudia and I set out on a six hour trip to Iowa. I was leaving story book land for an Iowa funeral. Claudia's grandmother had died the previous week in Florida and we were coming to commit her 98 year old soul to God. Gram had been a farm wife and she was sharp as a tack till the day she died keeping up with world news every day. We listened to my birthday gift to Claudia on the way down tapes of old Radio shows. I also read a little of Confederate in the Attic which we've been reading to prepare ourselves for a tour next fall of Civil War battlefields. We stopped at Claudia's uncle's home first then went out to dinner with more of her family. After we settled down to eat at Union Iowa's premier diner the subject of my voodoo came up. A year ago Claudia had visited to help her Uncle clean out his old farm house and she found out that her whole family were avid Paul Harvey listeners. She had a lot of explaining to do. In 1998 I was briefly the Chair of the Board trying to keep two suspicious factions from eating each other alive while the Teacher's Union threatened to go on strike. I had lasted four months before stepping down as chair. I had chosen a theatrical way to go about it to the dismay of my fellow board members by putting a voodoo curse on "ill will" in the School District. That's not quite how Paul had reported my antics to the nation. For two years my wife's family thought her perfectly nice husband had put a curse on Duluth's teachers. Now that they knew the real story they could tease me about it. |