The Story of a Flag for All People

By John Michael O'Keefe

In 1981 I met the scientist Buckminster Fuller, and he challenged me to become a "world problem-solver" and help solve the nuclear dilemma. Within six months of that meeting, I walked away from my position as president and heir to controlling interest of a multi-million-dollar insurance company to take up the challenge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Freehorse Publications
• Release date: Feb 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798990185715

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PART ONE

CHILDHOOD FATHERHOOD

Truth is a pathless land.

KRISHNAMURTI

I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. Now that I’m an old man I still don’t know.

CHAPTER ONE

BILOXI SUMMERS

Dogs are a lot like people in many ways, and it’s fair to say that many of us feel that dogs are people. You especially feel that way when you’re a kid and the dog is Tiny—the stray Great Dane. As for dogs themselves, the question is settled. They know damn well that they are people. I’ll get to Tiny here shortly, but before that there’s a shrimping story to tell.

Billy and I stand waiting for a lull in the speeding traffic on Highway 90. There are four lanes of it, but after that we’ve only got about fifty yards of sand beach to reach our favorite fishing pier. We’ve each got a five-dollar Zebco rod and reel, and I’m holding a tin bucket, with a half-pound of melting frozen shrimp, a half dozen hooks and sinkers, and a pair of pliers. Our crew-cut heads each sprouted ten thousand antennas for sunshine, and our feet are blackened and rubbery from summertime barefoot walking. Not too rubbery though, as they are still vulnerable to broken glass, the stickers growing in the grass of the neutral ground on the highway, ant bites and the occasional still-lit cigarette butts we encounter around adults.

There sure is a lot of damn traffic this morning, says Billy. Damn is a mighty big and powerful word for a six-year-old in 1960. We used it every chance we got, then we’d quickly glance around to make sure no significant large people were in earshot. I once got my mouth filled with a bar of soap for saying shit around a significant large person.

Yeah, I said, and they all look like they’re in a damn hurry about somethin’ too.

As a family-loaded blue station wagon zipped by, I watched the invisible trail left by its wheels. The invisible trail went over a brown, sun-dried and flattened lizard. Again.

I wondered how many times that already flattened lizard had been run over, and how many more times it would be, until it too became invisible, tire-embedded specks of it scattered all over the country. The lizard turned brown when it jumped from the green grass onto the highway, since the color of the highway was closer to brown than green, and those were the only two color choices it had. One more choice than what we’ve got.

The lizard didn’t know it wasn’t a good idea to camouflage itself when crossing a busy highway, not that it really mattered. Because it also didn’t know that it belonged to the class of road objects known as the run over them objects—ROT for short. This class of objects includes any creatures too small to do damage to people’s cars; things like small cats and dogs, squirrels, raccoons, rabbits, skunks, possums, most reptiles, most birds and all insects. It also includes brown and green lizards (if you find yourself on a green highway). Most people will not slow down for ROTs, and some people will even aim their cars at them and accelerate.

On the other hand, there is the class of road objects known as the go around them objects, the GATs. These include: other cars, very large dogs, most people, deer, elk, moose, bears, hippos, elephants, giraffes and some birds, such as pterodactyls.

Most highway accidents involving large exotic animals go unreported, if the driver can avoid it. It’s bad form for a driver, especially when drinking, to report hitting a giraffe or an elephant on a Mississippi roadway. It strains the reporting officer’s credulity. For the same reason it usually goes unreported, though it does happen infrequently, that a lone pterodactyl or a telephone pole will wander into a driver’s lane, but only if the driver is drinking heavily. In any case, GATs are generally avoided if possible.

That brings me back to Billy and myself. We fall into that borderline gray area, somewhere in-between ROTs and GATs, so we tend to play it safe and stay with the lizard class.

C’mon, Billy. I think we can make it now.

Billy lived around the corner and was the younger brother of my friend, Jimbo. One time Jimbo and Billy and I went out shrimping with their dad on his boat. The shrimping wasn’t good that day, they were small, and we caught mostly trash fish. Still, it was always fun to see what was gonna’ drop onto the deck when Mr. Foreman untied the bag at the end of the shrimp net. When that shiny, slithering and jumping little mass of sea creatures spread out onto the deck, it always looked like treasure at first. Then we would start picking through it, seeing that it was mostly little pinfish, catfish, jellyfish, crabs and mud, with a scattering of shrimp too small to eat. Then the treasure would slowly transform itself into a simple form of work, as we tossed it back overboard.

We put the net out a few times that morning, down near the east end of the Biloxi peninsula. It was a beautiful blue-skies day, but all we were doing were feeding the seagulls with the dead and dying trash fish we were catching. I would learn later, when the Vietnamese boat people arrived after the war and started shrimping, that a lot of what we called trash would be saved and used by them. They might make a soup with those little crabs and fish or fry them up and eat them. You see, the Vietnamese, unlike us, had known hunger and had a much wider range of vocabulary than us where food is concerned. Anyway, after the third or fourth try Mr. Foreman called it, and we headed back, right around noon.

We passed by the area of Deer Island where people said the old hermit used to live (some said he was still there) and made our turn for the harbor. Every time I thought about the hermit I would think of him as some kind of a magical man, able to live out there all alone. At one time there were wild pigs that roamed the island, with tusks that could cut a man up and kill him. I wondered if he ever had to battle those wild pigs, but more than that, I just wondered about his daily life, that is, how he lived and made his house, if he had one. It must be some kind of a fort or a tree house. We never knew because we never got to see him. Not once. We would just hear tales. Like the fact that he had a way he could quickly disappear if he saw any people nearby. Nobody ever knew where or how he got supplies. Some even said that the pigs killed him one day. For us it was just the many legends of the old hermit that lived (or lives) on Deer Island.

When we made that turn toward the harbor, away from Deer Island, I don’t know if Billy was thinking about the hermit too, or what he was thinking. But he seemed to be lost in thought over something or other because he was rocking back and forth on the back legs of a straight-backed chair on deck, rocking himself back towards the railing, which was only a foot high, when he pushed just past the point of no return and flipped himself over backwards into the water.

He was sitting right in front of the wheelhouse when he went over, and Mr. Foreman yelled, He can’t swim! so I dove in after Billy, not really knowing what I was going to do about it. I mean, I knew how to swim but that was it, I didn’t know anything about saving anybody. Anyway, I swam as fast as I could to get to Billy, and when I got there, he was already dog paddling around in circles, and doing a good job of keeping his head above water, so I said, Just keep on dog paddling Billy, and in minutes Mr. Foreman had the boat turned around and was pulling up to both of us.

Of course, everyone likes the idea of being a hero, and I suppose I could tell it like Billy tells it because after that day Billy would always tell people that I had saved him from drowning. But the truth of the matter is I was just dog paddling along with him by the time the boat came back around.

We used to go over to the Mavar’s yard in back of our house and eat mulberries out of their mulberry tree. They had the most regal mulberry tree, like a Medusa with many trunks growing out of the ground, and thousands upon thousands of purple mulberry eyes.

One time Bill Joachim, a kid our age, was over at our house and there was a group of us kids playing cowboys and Indians. We would dart in and out of the branches of the tree and use our imaginary weapons to shoot at each other. But Bill decided to take it to the next level. He managed to snap off a small limb of the mulberry tree, not very big, maybe four feet long and a couple of inches around, but with a sharp point at the place where he snapped it off. Perfect for an Indian spear. He decided to test it out on me and made a near-perfect throw at my face, and split open my cheek, less than an inch below my eye. It bled pretty bad and required a trip to the hospital and stitches. The proximity to the eye must have cause quite a fright for my parents because that was the first and the last time that Bill ever came to our house.

Bill’s family, the Joachims, had at one time been in kind of an informal race with our family, to see who would have the most children. But when both families reached the number thirteen, the Joachims just kept going, and going, and going, and finally were the undisputed champions, in fact of all Biloxi, with twenty-one kids. At the time of our cowboy and Indians fiasco, they were already four or five kids ahead of us. I think that fact didn’t help the incident of me nearly losing an eye. My folks must have figured that it’s bad enough that they beat us in numbers, without adding insult to injury by maiming or blinding the kids on our team, too.

When we were sitting in the mulberry tree and saw Tiny just across the fence in our back yard, it was one of the most beautiful sights of any stray dog we had seen, and in those days we got our share of stray dogs.

Sometimes there would be four or five stray male dogs in our yard going after one stray female dog in heat. We would get a kick out of watching them when they got stuck together during dog sex, what is called a copulatory tie. We just called it dogs stuck together. But the louder our laughs and comments and pointing at the dogs when they got stuck together, the more nervous my dad seemed to get. Then one day he got so mad at the stuck stray dogs in our back yard that he loaded up his shotgun with bird shot and bounced a load off the ground in front of them. Even that didn’t get them unstuck, but it motivated them enough to figure out how to run, still stuck together, out of our yard.

Tiny came all alone one day. He was huge but humble, and only wanted to beg for food. He had a collar on, but there was no name, and he was skinny and looked malnourished. My mom made us hamburgers for lunch that day, and we each gave Tiny a piece of our hamburgers. After that we fed him every day and night for the four or five days he was there. He started looking healthier, then one morning he was gone.

Have you ever been in a situation that was oppressive and you couldn’t think of any good way to deal with it, and then you have a brainstorm, but when you have the idea it’s already too late? That’s what happened with Tiny.

You see, we had some Puerto Ricans who lived on one of the side streets near our house, on Keller Avenue. I never saw their parents, but these were older kids, like sixteen or seventeen, and they lived in two small trailers on a big, dusty lot. They would lounge around outside the trailers, laying on lawn chairs, and their two junkyard mixed-breed dogs would lay there next to them. But every time we rode our bikes past their place, they would sic those dogs on us. They loved it, laughing at how we would peddle, then lift our legs, then peddle some more. They never sicced the dogs on us when we were walking. I think they figured that the dogs might do some real damage, and they might get into some real trouble. I think they just liked scaring us more than anything.

So after Tiny was gone, I had one of those if only… brainstorms. We once lifted up the side of Tiny’s mouth and looked at his teeth when we were feeding him, and his teeth were ferocious looking. Massive teeth, they reeked of broken bones, ripped flesh, even death. I thought, what if we still had Tiny, and we could tie his mouth up with some fishing line, so that his teeth would be in a permanent snarl, and take him to see the Puerto Ricans and their dogs. That would be so sweet. Or even better, what if we could lure the dogs to chase us on our bikes and get them to run right into Tiny with his fangs all showing. You could stack four or five of those junkyard dogs up and they wouldn’t even reach Tiny’s head.

I imagined those dogs running up under Tiny, maybe he would rear up like Godzilla, and those junkyard dogs would be showing all the whites of their eyes in fear, scratching to get their little junkyard bodies going into reverse. Then we could show the Puerto Ricans what kind of monster dog was putting the fear of God into their mutts, and even them. I imagined the dogs running back to their owners, so fast that puffs of dust would be popping up under their paws, and then the Puerto Ricans yelling, It’s a faahcking monster dog, man, and them converging together on their trailer doors like metal filings on a magnet, scrambling to get inside. But Tiny never stayed around long enough. He was still a glorious dog though, just being himself, just being Tiny. I know Tiny never came across anyone who loved him as much as we did. I just hope he remembers his days of being loved at our house.

CHAPTER TWO

SAM AND SAM

Although my dad owned the local funeral home in Biloxi, I was as much mystified by this whole business of death as any kid. I used to ride my bike through the old Biloxi cemetery, looking at all the gravestones, crypts and monuments. I would read the names, dates and epitaphs, wondering about the past lives of the dead. Rebecca Haley, Born October 10, 1927—Died January 21, 1934. Wonder what happened to her? She only lived seven years. Then I would think, I’m only seven! and imagine death… would it be like sleeping? Or dreaming? Blackness? Would there be angels in heaven or devils in hell? What would it be like?

Lots of markers had the date of death left blank, like this—James Delcambre, Born August 19, 1936—Died__________. The first time I saw that I remember thinking it was awfully strange. Why would they leave the date of death off? Didn’t they know it? Were they so upset they didn’t want to accept it yet? That was before Sam Johnson explained those kind of markers to me. Sam dug graves for my dad’s funeral home, and the first time I met him he stood under one of the funeral home tents, digging one.

It must have been close to 100 degrees even in the shade on that July day, when I approached him on my bike. He stood about two feet deep inside the three-by-eight-foot rectangular hole he had going, with his dog laying up on the side of the hole looking down at him. He had just thrown up another shovelful of dirt when he saw me roll up. He slowly eases straight up, leans on his shovel handle and smiles, his wet brown face luminous from the sheen of sweat.

How ya’ doin’ there youngun’? he says from one side of his mouth; the other side holds an amber-colored cigar holder, with the stub of a cigar in it.

I’m ok, how far down ya’ going?

Well, if old Sam’s shovel don’t give out, I reckon we be goin’ down ‘bout fo’ and a half foot. He lays the shovel aside, takes off his straw hat, pulls a faded blue and white handkerchief from his back pocket, and begins mopping his face and head with it. When he puts his hat back on, he leans back slightly, hooks a thumb under one of the suspenders which bows over his round gut, and says What’s your name youngun?

My name’s John. What’s yours?

It’s Sam. Mighty pleased ta meet you, John. He casts a glance around the empty cemetery and says What you doin’ out this way? Ain’t none o’ these here folks gonna’ get up and play with you, he chuckled at his dog, ain’t that right Sam?

I thought your name was Sam? I said.

Tis—my name and his name too. Name good enough for a man is good enough for a man’s dog, ain’t that right Sam? and he lets out a big belly laugh, Yeah, good enough for his ol’ dog too.

I like to ride my bike around out here and look at all the gravestones, I say, still sitting on my bike seat.

Lookin’ at them gravestones huh? I guess that’s alright, just as long as you lookin’ at ’em from from the top down and not the bottom up, he laughs again, his great stomach jiggling like ticklish Jell-o. His dog raises his head up to listen to some sound meant only for dog ears.

I say, By the way, do you know somethin’ about those gravestones? Now his shovel is moving slow and steady.

Know somethin’? Yeah, I reckon I oughtta know somethin’, I done helped to set a many a one in the ground. Why, what you want ta know about them doorstoppas for the dead?

Well, I was just noticing that lots of people buried here have the date of death left blank, see, like that one over there— and I pointed to a marker that read, Walter Schule, born July 9, 1932—Died______________.

He let out another big belly laugh, Oh youngun, you talkin’ bout old Walter? Why that banker man ain’t died yet, lessen he done slipped out the back door without tellin’ ol Sam, ha ha ha … Nah, I’m afraid he’s still kickin’, that one… still helpin’ hisself to po’ folks money an’ rich folks wine, ain’t that right Sam? The dog’s eyes followed a buzzing fly.

I said, Well, what happened? Somebody make a mistake? Why they got his gravestone standin’ there?

He stopped shoveling again, let the shovel handle lay against his chest, and took a box of matches out of his pants pocket and lit his cigar. After he got a few puffs going, his milky brown eyes looked up at me under eyelids that drooped halfway over them. Well son, you see them markers that’s got them dates left off ’em, them folks is preparin’ themselves for gettin’ in that ground. They just gettin’ good and ready to go. Hooo lawd! Some o’ them folks starts gettin’ ready waaaay ahead of time. Take ol’ Walter; why he’s been gettin’ ready for that grim reaper goin’ on thirty years now. Yeah! Boss told me one day up at the home that he even got his own casket picked out and paid too! One of them with that fine ladies’ dress type material all on the inside, and the outside built up better’n a Cadillac! Then, if that weren’t enough, he’s got him one o’ them big ol’ steel boxes to go over the casket, built like a big ol’ locked safe, just in case somebody gets a mind to bust in on ‘im down there. Lawdy lawdy! What they gonna come up with next? He threw another shovelful up. I reckon with all that stuff he just can’t wait ta get under the ground, ain’t that right Sam?… Yeah, just can’t wait… and a grin curled up around his cigar holder.

Sam looked up to see the puzzled look on my face. Don’t add up much, do it son?

Nope, I said, I thought people wanted to stay away from dyin’ as long as they could.

Sam kept digging as we talked. Don’t know, son. They call theyselves not wantin’ to die, but some of ’em spend a powerful bunch o’ money on it ahead of time. I guess some o’ them folks done spent all they could on livin’ stuff so they gets involved in the dyin’ stuff. Lots o’ folks even spend lots o’ time worryin’ bout who’s gonna split up they stuff when they die. They make a paper up, call it a will. I guess they call it that cuz they be thinkin’ I will die and I will get buried. Hell, we all gonna pass on, but take ol’ Sam an’ me, fo’ instance… we see other cats an’ dogs die all day long, but that’s them not us, an’ when it is us, we ain’t gonna know nothin’ bout it anyway, so why get worked up over it now?

As we talked, I watched Sam’s foot on top of the shovel. Over and over again, the foot and the shovel head would position themselves in slow synchronized motion, then pause, as if his whole leg was relaxed, then shunk—the shovelhead would disappear as smoothly as a card slips back into the deck. I knew it didn’t always go that smooth though, as I spotted a pickaxe off to the side, with some chunks of Oak tree roots the thickness of my arm scattered around it.

Yeah, I guess you’re right. How long will it take you to dig this hole?

Oh, I reckon about a half-hour befo’ supper time, good Lawd willin’. —shunk… shunk… He kept throwing the dirt up in a rhythm.

I said, You thirsty? I can go get you somethin’ to drink if you want.

I was just gonna ask you the same thing youngun’. If you go look in the back of that pickup truck you gonna see a water jug with a paper bag sittin’ next to it. Bring ’em both on over here and we’ll have us a drink."

There was a gallon plastic jug, half full of water, and the paper bag, which had a small bottle in it. When I brought them over to Sam he sat down on the side of the grave, took off his straw hat and set it down, then wiped his face again. He took a slug of water out of the jug, then handed it to me, and I took a slug. Then he unscrewed the cap off the small bottle and took a swig. Aahhh. That’s my medicine… ol’ Sam’s gotta have his medicine, twice a day. That’s doctor’s orders, and he winked at me. Put them back in the truck now, wouldya’ youngun?

He put his hat back on and grabbed the shovel, You see youngun’, me an’ this here hole, we got us a deal goin’. I go easy on her an’ she goes easy on me. You don’t never wanna get in a hurry diggin’ a grave, ’cause you just might end up puttin’ yourself into it, ain’t that right Sam? Sam gave silent affirmation.

When I rode out of the cemetery that day on my bike, somehow all the gravestones looked different to me—they glittered like sun-sprayed granite-and-marble punch lines to some joke that I hadn’t quite figured out. I would sometimes see Sam after that, either at the cemetery or at the funeral home. We became friends, even though our times together seemed to always happen by chance—except once.

I had gone away to college and come back to Biloxi for a visit. I now had a family of my own. Hearing one day that Sam the gravedigger lay at home on his deathbed from cancer, I went to see him. I went up to the front screened-in porch and, seeing it was locked, knocked on the screen door. No response. The old frame house didn’t appear to have any movement in it, so I went around to the back, where there was another screen door. There I heard voices inside and hesitated, before tentatively knocking. Sam’s voice boomed above the others, Come on in here youngun’!

I opened the door right into his bedroom, and the first thing I saw was the biggest television I had ever seen on the opposite wall, sitting on top of the dresser (the source of the other voices I heard). Sam lay on the bed, with his dog Sam. He was dressed in his regular work pants and socks, with a tank T-shirt on. He had his old cigar holder with the stub of a cigar in it in his mouth.

Sam said, Well I’ll be, come on in here youngun’ and sit a while with ol’ Sam. There were no chairs, so I sat on the edge of the bed next to him. He was watching a game show on TV. On one side of the TV there was a picture of Martin Luther King and on the other side was a picture of Jesus.

He called out to his wife in the kitchen, Mary! Bring this youngun’ here a coke cola. You wanna’ coke cola youngun’?… Mary this here’s John O’Keefe. He’s done growed up on us.

Sam’s wife was a petite woman. She looked to be much younger than Sam. She was wearing a flowered dress and green apron. She smiled and said, Nice to meet you John, as she handed me a glass of Coke and ice.

Likewise, ma’am, thank you.

I took a sip of Coke. Sam says, Let’s see if we woulda’ got rich today youngun’, what you want, door number one, door number two, or that big box there?

Ummm, lemme see, I think I want door number one.

Sam said, Me, I want that big ol’ box there.

Sam won an all-expenses-paid trip for two to Monaco. I won a mule.

That’s about my luck, I said.

What you talkin’ ’bout youngun? You done got the best o’ that deal! Now who wants to go spend a week somewhere an’ you gotta eat a bunch o’ stuff you ain’t never seen before an’ sit around like some fool bump on a log… you can’t even talk to the local folk cause they don’t speak English. Shoot… now that animal—that’s a prize! You can ride that mule, plow you some garden with that mule, and that mule is gonna be around long after that trip has done come and gone. Ain’t that right Sam? Sam must have been dreaming of when he was a young dog because his legs were running in his sleep. I never once saw him run when he was awake.

I said, Well Sam, I guess we would both be happy then because I would sure trade you that mule for that trip to Monaco.

Reckon we would son, reckon we would, He laughed, and then lapsed into a coughing fit. He reached over to the nightstand and picked up a familiar looking pint bottle and took a swig. Wild Turkey, youngun, doctor’s orders. He handed it to me. I hesitated for just a moment, then turned it up and took one burning gulp, and handed it back, with my eyes watering.

Yeah youngun, I got a good doctor, he knows just what to give ol’ Sam.

I said, Sam… speakin’ of doctors, I wanted to ask you—he interrupted— Bout ol’ Sam’s cancer? I instantly regretted bringing it up and tried to focus on the TV. A game show contestant was dressed like a huge rubber chicken. He was trying to guess the amount of cash in the game host’s hand without going over. Don’t pay that no mind son. Time for them young bucks to get to diggin’. Mary’s been lonesome here, an’ now we can catch up, spendin’ some time together.

The game contestant guessed $1,000. The