2002-07-27 - 3:49 p.m.

Cousin Jackie and Bing

By the time I remember Jack and Bing, Jack was a young man and Bing was an old dog. Jack had probably gotten him when he was a teenager and now the big black and brown dog was old and cranky. He loved Jack but would snap at me. He had long hair but was marked like a Doberman or Rottweiler with brown eyebrows, chest and belly, and legs. He liked to chase cars and Jack tried different things to get him to stop. I can remember Bing being chained to a large log or post. He would laboriously drag it up to the main road and charge out at cars that passed. I seem to remember a chicken-killing episode that resulted in his having a dead chicken tied to his neck for a while. In any case, Jack belonged to Bing and Bing only paid attention to him. When Jack left for college or Korea, we took care of him but he pined for Jack. I don't remember when he died.

Jack also had a black raven that he taught to talk after splitting its tongue. Jack became an engineer and fell in love with a nice girl from a very good family. The family definitely did not consider Jack a worthy choice and even as a child I picked up on this. They were in love however and had a big wedding and Jack and his bride went off to work for some government agency. They had 3 girls and a boy in quick succession and I don't remember much about the next few years. When I was a teen, they lived in some government agency compound near to us and I babysat for them once in a while. Wife would give me discarded dresses which I really appreciated since there were no yard sales back then. She was a nice gal but under a lot of pressure financially as Jack tried to move up the ladder. Later on she had a breakdown of some kind and her family took her home and got a divorce for her. I think she and Jack loved each other but she just couldn't make the adjustment from a wealthy home to a poorer one. Jack always loved her and has never said anything bad about her. She remarried but Jack's kids have always stayed closer to him, except for the middle daughter who disappeared for some years after high school but has since made contact with him. In later life, he remarried a nice lady and they visited Mamma often. She developed a lingering disease and Jack cared for her until her death. He is an honorable man.

He retired from the Forest Service and would go back each summer to work for them as needed on various engineering projects. He started writing poetry, first for retirement roasts, thankyou's to nurses who helped him though a medical crisis and the poem I copied the other day. Last year, he bought a dobro guitar(sounds kind of like what I know as a hawaiian) and goes once a week to an amateur night at a coffee house in the Montana town he lives in. He sings the old songs he remembers, The Old Rocking Chair and others, and sometimes gets help from a lady up his street in setting one of his poems to music. He calls me once or twice a year and we visit for a while. Perhaps he will take his camper and visit us down here some day. I would like that.

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