How do you think you would feel if you were sitting on the couch one afternoon eating pizza and watching Leave it to Beaver reruns and 30 minutes you found yourself in the basement of a police station answering questions from investigators in a grisly triple homicide case? Well I can tell you. Here's how it happened.
This memory popped into my mind when I was scanning some news archives and came across this; Ronald Ward dies in prison hospital at age 37. On April 12, 1985 Ronald Ward was a 14 year old child in the mid-term of repeating the 7th grade for the 3rd time in a West Memphis Arkansas Jr. High School. After school on that day he went over to the home of his best friend to play. After that things went haywire. Ronald stabbed to death his 12 year old friend and the two great-aunts that his friend lived with. They were ages 72 and 76. Multiple stab wounds on each. A butcher knife was the weapon either of choice or opportunity. Soon afterwards it would take a jury only 2 hours of deliberation to make Ronald Ward the youngest death row inmate in the nation at that time. His sentence was changed to life without parole later on appeal. He died of a medical condition 21 years later. That provides the background information of how that connects to me. I was living in West Memphis at that time and on the couch watching Leave it to Beaver when the police knocked on my door and asked me to come down to the station. I was managing a store in West Memphis at that time and figured it was something to door with an employee or a business related incident of some sort. Anything is possible in West Memphis, so who knows what it could be? I was directed to the basement where investigators asked me a series of questions. Many concerned my mother. What kind of car does my mother drive? Where was she at a certain time and date? Where was I? Do I know this person and that person? I answered the questions calmly and politely. My mother lives in Mississippi. She has no car. She does not drive. I was at work. At least 100 people can verify that. I am on camera all day long. It became evident very quickly that I had no idea what they were talking about. At the end of this event I did get them to explain to me what was going on. It seems that they had picked up a suspect and in his explanation of where he was at that time had randomly pointed at my apartment as they were riding in the police car. I have no idea why he did this. He didn't commit the crime. He must have been doing something else at the time that he didn't want the police to know about. Go figure. As it turned out there was no harm done. I didn't get mad at the police. They have a serious job to do and must do it thoroughly and systematically. That is how justice is found. The thing that you have always been told is usually true. "You don't have to worry if you have not done anything". Respect authority. This crime would soon be overshadowed by some even bigger news that would happen in the same general neighborhood: The Robin Hood Hills Murders. Another triple homicide. Ronald Ward, the family in the 4-room house, the young inmate on death row, all would be pushed to the pack pages of relative news. I missed Leave it to Beaver. In case you wonder about it Beaver skipped school and went to the fair with his friend Lumpy. They ate too much candy and got sick. Ward came down hard on The Beaver, but his mother intervened. Beaver missed dinner. I missed dinner. Ronald Ward probably missed dinner too. A lot of dinners are missed in West Memphis. A lot of dinners for a lot of reasons.
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been There are colors we don't see. Colors are visible wavelengths that pass thru the atmosphere. The near infrared and medium infrared wavelengths lie outside of human vision although they may been seen by some other animals. There are colors that some animals see but humans can't.
Have you ever thought about how hard it would be to describe a color that no one has ever seen? It would be impossible really. It would be like trying to describe how the number 39 smells. There is no point of reference. I have a theory on colors and on the question of whether our futures are predetermined from birth or are just the random results of happenstance. I think the answer is both. Here's how it works: (I'm using an analogy of course) When we are born we come into life with a bucket of paint. The bucket of pain determines the path we set out on. Mine may be blue. Yours may be green. We will more through life in a predetermined direction. That direction will not change unless we do something to change it. This is what is called "free will". When we take actions that send us off our path even slightly or become involved in the affairs of others their paint and our paint mixes, sometimes just a little, but sometimes in a big way. We know that the mixing of paint changes the colors. If your red paint becomes all mixed up and stirred together with someone else's blue paint it becomes purple and so on. You are now purple and might take on an even different hue if you add another color. We are now off the path of the red paint you started out with and the trajectory of your life will never be the same. Some might explain this as fate or karma or reaping what you sow. Now I wonder what the color of the paint that I was given might have been originally been and I think about what other colors might be out there that I cannot see and probably couldn't describe even if I could see them. And I think long and hard about the paint can that I came across in my path and stared at for years thinking it was red, convinced it was red, because I was told it was red and I believed that it was, I had faith that it was because of that belief even though I had heard whisperings and mutterings and careless words that I thought said" yellow" or sometimes "mustard" or "canary and I was sure it couldn't be, shouldn't be until there came a day when I awoke and looked at the can and saw that it was yellow. It had always been yellow. So maybe now it's mixed with my paint and I can't be sure of just what that color is anymore. I can only hope that the color is a color that people can see. Sunsets are different for me now. When I look at the orange sun setting I wonder how the orange got there and why. It's a mixture of red and yellow you know. |
AuthorI am a Mississippi native and now live in Jackson,Tennessee. I write about everyday life and events from the perspective of how they effect my own thoughts and feelings. Archives
April 2020
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