Chip Shots

Call me Gollum. He and I are brothers, as are all who cannot part with the very thing that destroys our lives….  It started innocently enough. Smeagol was fishing when his brother found a shiny ring in the river. Fascinated, Smeagol asked for it as a gift since, after all, it was his birthday. A fight ensued and, shockingly, he killed his brother in order to gain the ring.  That was ages ago, a distant memory. Smeagol treasured the ring, called it a birthday present, always kept it with him, and shunned all human contact for the sake of his “precious.”  It was all he could think about, and all that mattered to him. The gift rewarded him with long, albeit subhuman, life. It didn’t matter that he’d become a shell of his true self, an offensive creature called Gollum for the strange, guttural sound coming from his mouth. The ring was all the comfort he desired. He was alone and happy.  Until the day fate intervened. The ring changed hands, first to Bilbo Baggins and the...

I always liked Chuck. He was a good old country boy who loved to 'coon hunt. Born and raised in Arizona, I knew nothing about that kind of thing. In fact, I knew nothing about most things in rural Indiana. I remember talking to the man who owned the farmland around our home. He wasn’t a member of our church so I thought it was safe to ask him a stupid question. “I recognize the corn around me, of course,” I said. “But what’s that smaller stuff I see growing everywhere? And what’s that huge tractor-like thing in the barn behind my house?” “Those are soybeans, and we call that machine a combine” he said, suppressing a smile. (Asking that question in Indiana is like asking someone in Arizona, "What in the world is that prickly thingy?") On another occasion I visited a neighbor who proudly showed off his flower garden. The front of his house was filled with every kind of bloom I could imagine. He told me about all the stuff he planned to add next year. “Where will you find ro...