Child's memory and child's play.

I watched the end of the news tonight about a camp set up for children whose fathers or mothers had died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Featured was a seven year old girl confronting life after her father was killed. The camp was created after a forty plus year old woman produced a documentary film about children whose parents were killed in the wars. She became fatherless herself six hours after birth when her father was killed in Vietnam. His death was a fact of her life though she did not know him at all. There was no deep discussion with her mother and of course no counseling in childhood.

My father died after a year in the Louisville VA Hospital. He died of cancer and my strongest memories of him were the visits we made there most Sundays. Mom drove the forty miles from home and my sister and I went along. Sometimes Mom went without us, but usually we were there too. Our job was to be quiet and sit in the waiting room until she returned from visiting and drove home. We got to go to Daddy's room for a few minutes and if he felt well enough we got a hug.

On Wednesday night shortly before midnight March 31, 1959 the phone rang. I was in bed with my grandmother sleeping but when she moved to get up I woke up. The light went on in my mother's bedroom next door where the phone was. She answered and spoke though I could not understand her words. When she hung up the receiver she came to the open door between the two rooms and stood framed by the light behind her speaking to grandmother. She said, "That was the hospital. He died." Grandmother went into the next room. She closed the door behind her and I lay there under the covers until she returned. She left the door open and got in bed. I pretended to be asleep.

Sometime during the night I heard mom crying in her room next door. I don't think grandmother went back to sleep either.

The following days were full of all the chaos of the funeral, visitors and that long ride in the back of our car to the cemetery in Kentucky.

The girl in tonight's broadcast story said she was concerned that she would not remember her dad. I would have liked to tell her she would always remember but I know people are not alike. Still, she had met him and had distinct memories. I was eight the day after Daddy died. I remember many things about him but not a lot before he got sick.

The thing most mentioned about this camp for kids of fathers and mothers who died in the wars, is they are able to share their thoughts with kids who have similar experience. I was the only kid in my classes all through school whose father had died. There were fathers who had left and divorced but no deaths. At my house we didn't talk about it. I never heard her talk about Daddy. I do remember her standing at the sink in the kitchen washing dishes crying.

I think this effort to help the kids is important. The survivor of her dad's death remembers her feelings from loosing her father in a war forty years ago. We are in another set of wars today and have been there for over a decade so there are more kids whose mom or dad died.

I question why this compounding grief from generation to generation does not stop our lust to go to war.

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Monday evening this week in Louisville Kentucky a group of 11-13 year old kids were out playing in their neighborhood. They were running up to the door of a house, ringing the door bell and then running away on to the next house. It was a pleasant cool late spring evening in a nice neighborhood with pretty homes on city lots with yards. The area does not have drug crime and you don't often see an address listed in the newspaper crime reports.

According to the home owner, they went to his door. The fifty-six year old man whose name is Michael Bishop came out of his door and aimed a loaded shotgun at the kids running away. Twelve year old Jacob Eberle was struck in the back with buck shot and taken to the hospital with both lungs collapsed. He remains in the hospital tonight. He has told the police that the kids were walking up to the door and when they saw the man with a shotgun, they turned and ran. Whether they had rang the bell or not, this is something they were doing in the neighborhood on that spring evening.

Mr. Bishop has hired a good lawyer or two. He was arrested that night and released the next day on a $10,000 cash bond. Today he was arraigned and his attorneys say that night he was awakened from a deep sleep thinking someone was breaking into his house. The judge ordered all guns to be removed from his home and to have no contact with the Jacob or his family. He is due back in court the first of July.

Jacob's family has filed suit against Mr. Bishop for medical costs and other unspecified expenses.

Some of you may recall an incident on the other side of the city last October. I wrote about it here: http://writingminejoinme.blogspot.com/2010/10/pistol-in-hand-vs-hand-full-of-rocks.html.

There is a Kentucky Law passed in recent years that says a person in their home feeling threatened can kill someone meaning them harm. This has pretty much been how it is forever, but the Legislature felt it needed to further underscore this with a law. So today I can keep a gun loaded and in my home for protection. Unfortunately unlike Mr. Bishop a lot of gun owners share the house with their kids, spouse and friends. Often they become victims of the gun.

The thing is there is a huge difference between a rock and a gun.

There is a huge difference between a kid ringing a door bell and a gun.

The reality is when you have that gun in your home it's more frequently the only solution you can think of to solve a problem that if you didn't have the gun so handy, you'd solve another way and all involved could be home in their beds that night.

Big deals and small claims.

Big disputes arise in most everyone's life. When I say big, I mean big to the individual. I've been lucky but that may be because I don't enjoy fights.

When starting the business I thought the best way to stay out of court was to do a good job for a client and charge them a fair amount.  Simplistic isn't it?

In business of over 32 years there were only two clients who did not pay us.

One was a white cloth restaurant which had been in business into the third generation. They contracted with us for a job that was billed at $383.42. The bill remained unpaid after two months and I called to ask payables when it would be paid. We had not required prepayment as we had worked for one of the owners personally several times. The payables clerk told us they had not asked us to do the work and even though I sent a receipt for its acceptance, refused to pay. We discussed taking them to small claims but didn't as we knew we could make more than the total in the half day it would take for one of us to go downtown and present the case.

The restaurant went out of business three years later. This was after it had been sold to one of their former employees. That person owned it for less than a year before they went bankrupt.

The original owners had opened a second restaurant and because they had stiffed us on the first job we told them we would not take on more work for the new place. A friend in the printing business did all their printing and when the second restaurant went bankrupt they lost over $5,000. So by not collecting and thereby being asked to take on new work, we were blessed.

The second deadbeat was another restaurant, though they were really a seafood market that happened to also serve sandwiches. They had been in business five years and we did a small job that billed out at $183.98. The work was to set up a mailing list from hand written contest entry slips.

Within a month they went bankrupt. The owners went on a vacation for a couple of months. They then re-opened under a slightly different name in the same location. When asked about the money they owed us we were told "No that was the old business. This is an entirely different business." Of course having a well organized list to use in promotion helped the new business.

If you had gone into the new place the signage was the same, the food sold was the same and all the employees were the same.

This business closed this past week end. I will be on the look out for another reincarnation.

I was told after the first deadbeat game I should require all my clients to sign a contract. I never took the advice.  I saw that as a penalty to all the hundreds of good people we worked with. If I had a feeling they were rats I started requesting payment in advance.  It's amazing how that requirement kept us from working for nothing.

This subject of dead beats and small claims was prompted by a story in the New York Times about small claims courts cutting back evening hours because of budget constraints. Now instead of waiting a month and a half for a court date, it will be five months.

Have you ever had a small claim that you took to court? If you have, did you get justice?