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Bad Time
- University of Arkansas Press
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Bad Time The president was having a bad time of it, and so was I. In church. In school. Delivering newspapers that said ileitis door to door. “A heart attack, now this,” my father said, citing the surgery Ike required the week I finished fifth grade with “needs to improve” in citizenship. When I batted, coiled, and cocked like Stan Musial, my father told me I looked like Nixon waiting for a fat pitch he could hammer to the White House. And my mother? After each game, she checked for ticks because didn’t I know we were things that fed them, publicizing our blood with sweat and heat and breath? “Look,” my father said, “He’ll get over it,” meaning it wasn’t polio, that I was saved like Ike, who ran again, giving Nixon four years to wait. By November I’d learned one tick in a million finds food enough to survive, that the ambush tick has to sit on plants until something sweeps close by. Such anticipation. Such need for the fortune of blood. And if, miraculously, a warm thing passes, there are a thousand ticks whose legs are poised. That smell, so close, means some of them will live, and now one tick leaps, followed by another, taking to the air with the insistent vote of altitude. 33 P 1FINCKE_pages.qxd 5/21/08 9:31 AM Page 33 ...