When was the last time you saw a golfer walking across a Las Vegas swimming pool in the wee hours of the morning with a look of red eyed hung over determination guarding his precious clubs like a mother bear guarding her cubs.
It’s not all that uncommon here in the city if sin when there is a convention of Scottish cow pasture pool enthusiasts in town. The one fellow I spied appeared to have just checked into the hotel and the only luggage he did not check were the tools of his beloved pass time.
My father was a Golf enthusiast. He even managed a couple of courses when I was young and although my father assures me Golf is a sport, the sports editors of the Orange Leader, the newspaper where I worked for five years, say it is either a pass time or a secret cult on line with the Illuminati, Pyramid Society and the League of Women Voters. (This is Texas keep in mind)
Tall tales in Sin City One morning I met an older woman who was roaming around the hotel pool. She was 80 at least and had obviously had led a life that was not exactly easy. She said her name was Anita. Anita is German. When she around 10-years old , she and what remained of her family, found themselves in the Russian sector of a occupied Germany surrounded by Russians who hated them and she says herded them into “camps” in other countries for awhile.
It is a story of hand to mouth existence and of friendly small town folks who helped them have enough to eat.
The story has faded in memory but she says her family was rescued by what she calls American Daredevils who refused to believe what Soviet officials told them. Because the clear lines of the cold war had not yet materialized and the barbed wire barriers and border guards that would later characterized cold war border tensions were still ten tense years away Anita and her family were saved, rescued from the Russian controlled sector and brought to the west.
As a adult she made her way to Canada where she now lives and spends part of her Golden Years vacationing in the city of sin and telling bored security guards about her family’s life story.
A quick Google search with the words she gave Glatz the Vertreibung reveals there was a great flight of German settlers from Poland after the war and the Russians did control the eastern sector of her homeland and Poland half of which they conquered in agreement with Adolf Hitler. Life was indeed rough for Germans in the early years after the war the articles say. However I did notice that the last name she gave me, Lasko, was the same as the heater that was sitting next to me. Perhaps she just didn’t really want to be bothered. Perhaps the old memories were just a little to strong or perhaps she was just eager to flag down the Mickey Mouse look alike that spent part of the day walking down “The Strip” posing for pictures with eager camera toting tourists.
Passing out on the sidewalk
This week was a lot like the last week in the City of Sin it was weird. Sunday as the shift started at one local casino a man was discovered passed out on Strip sidewalk. Apparently he and Jack Daniels decided this is far enough and laid down on the side walk to sleep.
This was just to cool to leave out a junction between two towers at one of Sin City's Landmark properties---Photo R.M Hopper Odd CouplesLater that day I saw a mother and son standing together.
The son was about ten or twelve maybe thirteen years of age. He had a huge green Mohawk with six inch spikes and Mom for her part seemed fine with it. They were actually a cute couple and I wanted to snap a picture pf them but by the time I secretly fished my cell phone out of my pocket and turned the camera on they had moved on.
I also noticed that the 70s seemed to be coming back with a vengeance. The same tight fitting fashionable knee length leather coats with the sashes and the dark sun glasses and long straight 70s style hair and boots with high heels that independent women, including a lot of my mothers friends wore in the decade of neon earth tone appliances, bell bottoms Brady Bunch lunch boxes and is officially back in style.
I wonder if my mother still has any of my old bell bottoms. I could break out the leisure suits and the disco lights or maybe find my old tie dyed Led Zeppelin T-shirt or Alice Cooper concert tickets.
“You know I was such a boring kid that my parents actually drove me to see “Alice” at the civic center alone and left me there without concern. I hesitated as I got out of the car waiting for the lecture that never came. I actually think I wanted them to lecture me worriedly about the dangers of smoking weed at the concert.
“We’re not worried our wonderful boring child, you‘ll have a small coke and a bag of peanuts and sit in the back?” their smiles seemed to say and I even moped a bit as they drove away unconcerned…Sigh
Incidentally what does blurble la gundago zonta…mean??? Is it some kind of Stars Wars lingo.
I had a Sin City visitor express those very words to me with great conviction and although I had no idea what he said to me I pointed toward a nearby elevator and said “up there I think.”
It seemed to satisfy his curiosity but he was far to “tired” walk to the elevator.
Such is Life in the City of Sin '
Til next week
take care
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