LETTERS FROM HOME: GIVING THEM SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT AT THE HARDEE'S

Jan. 8, 1998

Dear Julie,

It hasn't been a quiet week in Cape Girardeau. A low front brought temperatures into the 60s, sending the golfers to their closets to finger their clubs and worrying gardeners that their bulbs will rush out to greet this falsest of springs. But steady rains accompanied the warm days, leaving the golfers in a mid-January reverie of what might have been, and the gardeners to fret even more about a premature awakening of their plantings.

DC has spotted moths and recalls a similar mid-winter warm spell in the past that brought out baby frogs.

The urge is strong at the doorway of the new millennium to attribute these balmy breezes through our leafless limbs to a brewing cosmic event, perhaps the arrival of Mothra, or at least to El Nino's latest tantrum. But it's somehow reassuring when the weathermen announce that, as warm as today was, it set no record. No fireworks required.

Colder temperatures and frogsicles are predicted.

The big green and white golf umbrella has shielded my morning walks this week, and still the rain blows in to splatter eyeglasses. One morning of unrelenting rain, water cascaded over the sidewalks and created shallow lakes on streets. On lower William Street, the sidewalks ran mud-brown and for some reason a horror story came to mind, about a man in New Orleans who was sucked into a storm drain during a hurricane, never to have been heard from again.

Well, it wasn't that bad. But as I plowed on, thoroughly soaked, men in passing trucks nodded compassionately.

We learned this week that our new health care management organization is bankrupt after less than four years. It was losing money, which the guys at the 3 p.m. coffee klatch down at the Hardee's no doubt reckon is hard to do in the health care industry.

Joe says, "Twenty dollars for an aspirin and they can't make a living."

It leaves you wondering. Are we so unhealthy? A collection of hypochondriacs steeped too long in the swamp gases of Southeast Missouri?

Paid health care's a delicate proposition, I guess. Since you're paying for the coverage whether or not you're using it, the tendency is not to let it go to waste. Like a diner at a buffet restaurant who just wanted a chef salad and fruit for lunch, we come back with a little dressing and gravy, dumplings and chocolate cream pie on the side.

We also discovered that a former city attorney has been busted for, as he would be quick to qualify, allegedly laundering millions of dollars in drug money. This was a handsome, bright young man who arrived here in the mid-1970s newly minted by the University of Missouri School of Law.

He was a dynamo, even argued and won a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Everybody wanted him to run for office but he never did. Maybe he was too aware of his dark side.

Making no assumptions about his guilt or innocence, these things make you wonder why people who have spent so much time studying the law and applying it to other people's lives often enough end up finding ways to pretend the law doesn't apply to them. It's a mystery.

But it makes you want to go back and look at the city's books.

Over at the Hardee's, they've got this guy tried and sentenced to try making friends with the bottom of the drug food chain in Potosi, and they've prescribed a dose of castor oil for the health care system.

They talk about the weather no matter what it is.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.