Tex Norman

Ole Blue and the Twenty-dollar, double eagle gold piece.



Posted: Friday, December 26, 2008

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I remember once, back when I lived in Wewoka I had to go down to see Butch Patterson, a welder down there, to get him to do a little welding job for me. Ole Butch didn't have air conditioning in his house, and it was one of those hot Oklahoma afternoons when it gets to be like a 113 degrees in the shade, but you don't have to stay in the shade all the time. When I got to Butch's place he and some friends were all sitting in chairs under a Cottonwood tree drinking beer and trying to get through the scorching afternoon.

Butch invited me to take a chair and tossed me a can and after I told him what I needed I just chilled out with the group and we started swapping lies. Eventually Butch started telling me about when his daddy died and among his stuff they found this twenty-dollar, double eagle gold piece.

"Wowsy," I said. "I've never seen one of those."

"I'll show it to you," said Butch and he goes into the house, comes back out after a couple of minutes. Now we were all in a circle enjoying the shade, and there were dogs sitting around and chickens running free in the yard.

Now Butch had this habit of tossing little treats in the air and his bloodhound Blue would jump up and catch the morsel in mid-air and swallow it without chewing. This was a bad habit, because when Butch got to his side of the circle of chairs he just underhandedly tossed me the gold piece. Before I could catch it, Blue jumped up and swallowed it in a flash.

Butch went insane.

"Gall-darn it, Blue. You ain't getting my daddy's gold piece," shouted Butch. He grabbed a chain and chained that dog up to a clothesline pole, and then went into the house. Butch came back with a hand full of ground meat and a whole package of Exlax. He folded the laxative into the middle of that meat, made a ball of meat and fed it to the dog.

Did he get the gold piece back?

No. It was counterfeit. It wouldn't pass.

Tex Norman is a social worker, currently working at the Oklahoma DHS Abuse and Neglect hotline. He interviews people reporting abuse and/or neglect of children and vulnerable adults and writes a narrative. The narratives (and demographics) are used to initiate investigations of the allegations. He says it is like writing 8 to 10 stories a day. In August 2012, he will have been married to Kathie for 40 years. He has a son Ryan who earned a PhD from Princeton and he is now a scientist doing research in molecular biology. Tex spends his free time working as an artist and writer. He has one art site, and a blog that might be of interest: http://tex-norman.artistwebsites.com/ and http://collagepoetrybytex.blogspot.com/
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