Old people wandering the city of sin

By Royal Hopper

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

We honor what we know or the fences we create and cats who think they are dogs

When I was a kid my family had this cat, a crazy old Siamese feline who was convinced she was a dog.


She was so convinced she was a dog she learned to bark and chase cars with the two family dogs.

When these two muttly brown and white canines, charged the fence of the gray tiled house to bark at strangers as they passed, the cat would charge along with them meowing for all she was worth. I think she even tried to catch a frisby once and this was 1965 or so when the frisbies were much larger.

Now keep in mind, that unless they are literally selaed in somehow, it is fairly easy for a cat to escape the average house and/or fenced yard and several times she would do so standing outside the fence to meow her displeasure at the passersby in a very canine like manner.

Eventually, when it was clear that her "fellow canines" could not make it across that chain link barrier as easily as she could and after being stared at and ignored or laughed at by the passersby she would give up and retreat into the safety of her fenced in dog yard where her dogness would be accepted. She even peed on a fence post one time, lifting her leg in such a dog like manner that for a minute I actually began to believe she was indeed a short, pointed eared, black faced dog with retractable claws rather than a mentally ill and deluded feline.

Fast foward more than 40 years to one of my family's current dogs Reddy, a cute 50 pound ball of red short haired energy.



She is part boxer, part hound and a bright ball of nerves and urine and teeth. She was kept in a kennel the first part of her life because she peed every time she became the slightest bit excited which was often and chewed on everything.

When first released from her kennel first she walked in and out of its open door several times and sat down and turned to look at the door waiting for it to be closed for the night so she could go to sleep.



After a while we removed the kennel all together and without her box to hide in she huddled next to my wife and I often squeezing in between us to get that same comfortable feel of being closed in.

Our other dog, Spazz, was raised as an outside dog and spent his early years chasing other dogs away from the two acre lot we owned at the time. Because of that experience he simply cannot stand the sight or smell of any other canine anywhere near his two acres of land which is unfortunate since we now live in a 900 square foot apartment surrounded by other people and their dogs with equal determination to protect their plot of land.

We constantly have to pull him away from other dogs so his angry old butt will not get in a fight with some neighbir's innocent cocker spaniel. He is also quite honestly getting to long in the tooth to be be scrapping with the Pit Bulls and Great Danes that populate the complex where we live and is to stubborn to change.

The point of all this rambling is a discovery I have made about fences. Not the white picket fence kind or the silver gray cyclone kind or even the nice upper class brick and stone kind. Its the kind we build in our childhoods to protect us from harm and the kind we end up carrying around with us the rest of our lives, hanging around our necks like some kind of ghostly psychic albatross.

In that process the very thing that protects us fences us in, later becoming so familiar that it becomes almost a mental security blanket tattooed into our minds with indelible psychic ink in ways that little, short of some kind of space alien mind wipe, can change.

After awhile because of the security this fence has provided us the security blanket becomes what we love. After all one of the reasons we love our parents is the security, both physical and emotional, they provide us.



Given time what we love becomes what we love the most. Thusly in this Herculean tragedy of the mind and heart, the thing that hems us in, that limits us in sometimes tragic ways becomes, against all logic and sense of self preservation and sanity, the thing we love the most. It also becomes something we hold onto with all our might because we simply cannot bear to let go of the security blanket that has served us so well through the years.

I don't remember what became of the cat exactly but years later there was a rumor circulated among my pack of siblings and I that the cat had tried chasing cars once to often and was finally done in by her canine ways.