Vermont Selectboard Un-Candidate #10

     Did you notice; I learned how to spell "selectboard" correctly as one word not two?
     Yesterday, I emailed the Abeneki Indian, Rich Holschuh, and the Chair of the Selectboard, Kate O'Connor to enlist their support in getting the Reformer to publish my letter that it was a lie when they published for millions of readers  that ten minutes after the Indigenous Peoples' Day was voted in and in the middle of the financial report, I wondered if voting for the Indigenous Peoples' Day had been a good idea. Writing that made me look like a clown. Lacking a good plan for our economy and our national defense and security, the left's best weapon is its derision, and that was what they were doing to me even if they had to make up the situation.
     Like I wrote Kate, the Chair, there may be times that I do look like a clown having to flee a meeting or choking up during a speech and having to stop. The Reformer can then report those true events gleefully, if they're small enough. They don't have to make up fake news about me.
     Emailing Rich and Kate assertively was a big step for me. I gave them my phone number and checked for messages from them this morning. Nothing. But the fear and avoidance was marked. I know it's ridiculous to be so anxious - hard men and women would call it cowardly. No prob. In my defense though, I can claim that I knew extreme fear before I was even born. My mother wouldn't tell me this, but my sister who cared for our mother for ten years before her death, did. The story is that in 1946 in Anchorage, Alaska, my mother went to the Army base hospital for stomach problems. Why she didn't think about her periods or pregnancy I don't know. My father and mother were Puritans from Massachusetts and likely to get hysteria like the young women in Salem, Massachusetts, who saw their neighbors flying about on broomsticks and like all the other hysterics in Salem who believed the young women seeing witches fly. I mean, the hysterical college-age women in Salem seeing their neighbors flying around on broomsticks had such a catchy phrase. Remember it? It was "Believe the victim!" Who would dare to doubt them after that! But back to Anchorage, the Army doctors were probably all drunks because they didn't catch on either. Instead, they operated on my mother's stomach, saw me, hastily sewed my mother up, poured Jack Daniels on the incision, and kept mother in the hospital for two weeks because the baby usually died after such an intrusion.
     I didn't, but I was born with my umbilical cord wrapped tightly around my neck, probably from swimming around, doing back flips, frantically trying to get away from the scalpel. That's also why I have some brain damage, get flustered easily, and have no mechanical skills when all my brothers fix everything. That's probably the first time I felt great fear, and I wasn't even born yet. I mean who is threatened with a knife before they are born and lives to tell about it? Not many.
     With disgusting butterflies in my stomach, I did go to the phone and check for messages from Rich and Kate. For that, I give myself another pat.
"Freedom, Reason,and Evidence. Humor too, eh?"
Peter Nickerson   peternickerson12@yahoo.com  352-359-0850  Open "office" at McDonald's M-Th 9:15 F 8:15