THE FIRST TIME SOME SON-OF-A-BITCH TRIED TO KILL ME - I WAS NINE YEARS OLD.

Everything in my life seems to happen on bright sunny days, with birds singing, puppy's playing in the grass and flowers in bloom. Then shit happens and the rest of the world just goes right on twirling around on the fucking hilltop singing show tunes.

Life isn't fair, and then you die. That's it.

Every year my fathers' annual 30 day vacation was spent over a thousand miles and a million years away with his family. I'm talking moonshine running, gun toting, yodeling back woods hill folk. Most had never ridden in a car or ever even seen a television set. No newspapers, no radios, no nothing. This was really never a problem until 1968, I believe, when we left a little early to spend a few days with some cousins in Detroit. That's a whole different story.

In this lazy time, many folks came up into the "hollow" to visit and among them was always my Aunt Bec. Bec was pencil thin and worn huge skirts with wide belts and was forever very very drunk.

Rumor had it that Bec had become angry once and had crawled atop the dining room table and urinated. On this particular day Bec was staggering up the stairs as I was passing through the house, my grand dad stopped me and told me to go keep an eye on her so she didn't set the house "afire". So I trudged upstairs, past a large puddle of piss on the landing, making mental note to bring all comers to see Bec's piss when my duties here were fulfilled.

I peeked in the rooms as I passed and came across Bec sitting on a bed holding a bottle of booze laced orange soda tilted so that most had run out onto the white spread.

I said: "Aunt Bec, you're spilling your drink."

Bec: "No honey, it was like that when I got here. What the hell are you looking at me for?"

me: "Russell sent me up here to make sure you don't set the house on fire."

With that Bec smashed out her cigarette on the window sill.

Bec: "There."

And with that I was free. I started down the long hallway with great anticipation of a birds eye view of the piss when all of a sudden Bec bellowed from her perch...

Bec (screaming): " You get back here you little son-of-a-bitch, you stole my liquor, I'm gonna kill you you little bastard"

By this time my fat ass was in a dead run, Bec (as with everyone else) carried a gun.

In the front room at the foot of the stairs was the door out. I knew I couldn't get away from her in that direction as it was wide open space and she'd have six shots in me before I could cross the creek. My only hope was through the house and out the back, if I could run fast enough to the out house I could use it to block my escape up the back mountain.

Now, gentle reader, you may be wondering where are all the adults in this game. They were all drunk, some down at the barn, some up at the little house across the creek, elsewhere in general. There were only two people that NEVER drank. My mother (forever gunless) and my granny who carried a .44 in her apron.

When I rounded the corner into the kitchen there stood my old 80+ granny firing up the cook stove. The wall held a huge old wood fired cook stove and a door on either side. My granny pointed to the pantry door and she calmly said "be still" as I jumped into the pantry.

Bec was hot on my heels. She jerked open the other door that lead to the staircase to the basement and started hollering down that she was waiting on me.

It was then that I remembered the stories of the pantry fire the year before as the wall between Bec and I was gone. I could have reach out and touched her. She never looked up and I was very very still.