Does a bear . . . Does a President . . . do brain surgery?

I want to tell you how close our family came
to electing one of us to the Presidency or,
at least, to becoming a Republican nominee.

It is necessary to begin the sad story of our near-greatness
long after we began to show first signs of near-sightedness.

Recently, the Honorable Surgeon Dr. Ben Carson,
in what might have been a sub-conscious--or, at least,
sub-historical--attempt to establish his street cred,
told how near he came to stabbing one of his buddies
when they were just kids fooling around with murderous impulses.
Dr. Carson was no wimpy, nerdy, goody-goody kid, you know!
He came from the streets, and by virtue of his own
commanding urge to become President of the United States,
did not allow his murderous impulses to get loose.

Somebody in the newspaper business--you know,
those rotten purveyors of occasional fact and high drama,
looked into the matter of Dr. Carson's story.
Unfortunately, it appears that only Dr. Carson remembers
anything about the time when he almost did not become President.

No one doubts that Dr. Carson has command of the facts.
He, after all, has revealed to us that the Old Testament Joseph
of Coat of Many Colors fame (or perhaps that was a coat with
long sleeves), he, the Joseph found in a reed basket floating
in the Nile, was really the guy who built the pyramids
to store grain in: you know, during the years of plenty.
Really big barns with teeny-tiny granaries!

But I am losing my place in history, here.

It is told by our family that one of the Jacobson grandchildren,
having wandered off into the woods, came scrambling back
at full tilt, scared but vocal, shouting that he had seen a bear
almost! Everyone just laughed. There were bears,
and occasionally people saw bears, but not almost.

What did we know?
We weren't surgeons.
We weren't even Republicans.
We listened to FDR on the radio.
No one in our neck of the woods
even thought about being President,
and certainly not on the Republican ticket.
We remembered Hoobert Heaver.

We squandered our birthright,
something like Moses--or was that Noah?--
and traded our posterity for a mess of pottage.
None of us, as you may have noticed,
has ever become a brain surgeon,
or even President if that opened up.

But we did come close!
We did, for one brief, shining moment,
almost catch sight of a bear.

Comments

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When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

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