Day: April 6, 2016

Back when I was in high school my mother encountered a man who had once lived across the street from her family home. He and his brother had rented rooms there. Mama said that she had developed a crush on this man’s brother mostly because he was a student at Rice University and she always had a thing for highly intelligent men. Nothing ever came of her fantasies and she moved on into adulthood only to one day have a chance meeting with the old neighbor. She learned that the man was a widower, having lost his wife to cancer. He was lonely and raising children much like Mama. I suppose it was inevitable that he would eventually ask her out on a date. It seemed as though they had much in common but nothing might have been further from the truth.

After their first outing together my mom came home and insisted that she was never going to see this guy again. He was totally not her type even though he was quite handsome. He had not been particularly successful in life, never even attending college and constantly moving from one dead end job to another. Mama saw no future for them and that seemed to be the end of that. Unfortunately the man was quite persistent and my mama was far too kind to keep putting him off. Before she was even able to explain what had happened he had become a constant fixture around our house and not a particularly welcome one. In fact, I disliked him intensely mostly because of his politics. Continue reading “The Alternative Right” →