Way Too Much Drama

The longer I hang out in Smalltown, the more I am convinced that I lived a sheltered life before I got here. There is a barrage of real life around here. Sometimes too much and too real. It is terribly rude of Smalltown to let it all hang out like that.

First of all came the death of Lars Johanssen, a member of my church who was first-generation Swedish. He was such a sweet little man. In my first five weeks here, he brought me a weekly watermelon fresh off the produce stand a mile out of town. He only stopped doing that after a hurricane blew away the produce supply and the stand closed down. Lars was a retired electrician and helped me get electrical work done at my house. Everyone in the Smalltown church was nuts about Lars so this is a tough death.

Still thinking about Lars' death after I hung up the phone in my office yesterday afternoon, I drove over to Mighty Fortress Is Our God Lutheran Church for the community steering committee on time banking. A group of pastors and laypersons from various churches meets there to eventually launch a time bank, which is like a money bank except that people bank "time dollars" for their labor. For example, someone may watch a neighbor's kids for an hour and bank a time dollar for that. He or she can then ask someone to provide an hour's worth of yard work. All labor counts the same, whether it is an attorney's legal work or fixing someone's plumbing.

That is a digression. Back to the main story. I arrived at the time bank steering committee to find out from the Presbyterian pastor Sophie that she had had a baby taken from her. Here is the story on that. The baby's mother was addicted to drugs and the baby was not thriving. Sophie took the baby and literally saved his life. Yesterday the mother came by the office and demanded her baby back. Under state law, if Sophie had not yielded, she could have been arrested. Sophie is now working with Child Protective Services -- if they can be called that -- to get some legal cover so she can get the baby back and legally keep him until the mother is functional enough to take care of him.

I can think of one good way to solve these vexatious issues of birth and death. I am going into business to license who gets born and who gets to die. If it is a problematic death, such as Lars', I will act like a bureaucrat and put it off indefinitely. That way the survivors would not have to deal with it for a long, long time. And I am going to grant or deny licenses to breed. That mother would have been firmly refused a license to reproduce until she got her drug problem under control. She would have had birth control residue put in her water supply to make conception impossible. This kind of thing would provide much-needed chlorine in the human gene pool.

Sometimes, folks, I gotta laugh to keep from crying.