“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

John Adams

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately what with all the brouhaha surrounding the Porkulus bill and other asinine quests of those in Washington. It of course has got me too rambling quite a bit so I thought I might as well jot some of that babbling down.

My mother, much like yours I’m sure, was famous for hurling occasionally befuddling statements at us as kids. Things like;

“Am I talking to a brick wall?” “Are you deaf or something?” “Does anyone in this house listen?” See a pattern here? And of course the typical favorites; “Shut up and Answer me when I ask you a question!” “I hope someday you have children just like you” (careful this curse actually works)

There were always the really confusing ones such as; “Enough is enough!” Huh? And “If wishes were horses...” I’ve never heard the conclusion and I’m somewhat disturbed by how many wishes I may have wasted trying to figure that one out. “I've had it up to here with you.” Now that one would’ve been easier to avoid had she only once given us some inclination as to where the hell ‘here’ was.

There was the infamous “Don’t” list. A veritable cornucopia of kids desires simply round up into a parental manifesto of “absolutely not.”

“Don’t . . . eat that, you'll get worms! . . . Go out with a wet head, you'll catch cold. . . . Make me get up! . . . Run in the house. . . . Sit too close to the television; it'll ruin your eyes. . . . Walk away when I'm talking to you! . . . And on and on and on.

At times she would question or very sense of reality with such conviction us ourselves would take pause . . . “Who do you think you're talking to?” “Who do you think you are?”

Perhaps because of her faith in the aforementioned curse she had no doubt she could simply will things into existence . . . “You WILL eat it, and you WILL like it!”

There was the occasional “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” Line, that remains a subject of great debate to this very day.

Eventually all of the day’s speeches were sure to be followed by the always faithful and dreaded . . . “You just wait until your FATHER gets home!”

This always brought immediate thoughts best described by Ralphie; “It was all over - I was dead. What would it be? The guillotine? Hanging? The chair? The rack? The Chinese water torture? Hmmph. Mere child's play compared to what surely awaited me.”

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Sheridan Folger,