John C Rainard

I've decided to be one of those guys who says whatever is on his mind. Rainard sits down calmly, to see what's on his mind, so he can start saying it.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In America I ordered a milkshake and the young man turned it upside down over my head.

I did not move. A samurai does not flinch, even when the ice cream is above him and gravity is the law.

Nothing fell.

The cup hung there, upside down, defying the sky, and the boy held it over me with the calm of a man who has done this ten thousand times and buried his fear long ago.

This is the Blizzard. This is Dairy Queen.

If it falls, they told me, you get it free.

I understood at once. This was not dessert. This was an ordeal.

The boy was not showing off. He was swearing an oath, with his own arm, that he had made the thing thick enough to hang against the earth, and he was betting the price of it on his honor.

The flip is not a trick.

It is a vow.

In my land a smith proved his blade by cutting.

Here a boy of seventeen proves his by turning it over a stranger's head and looking him in the eye while the whole line waits to see if he lied.

He did not lie.

He set it upright, handed it to me, and said "there you go, man," then turned to the next customer as if he had not just gambled his good name across a counter.

I tipped him everything in my pocket.

He tried to give it back. He said it was just a Blizzard.

I told him it was not just a Blizzard.

I could not explain the rest in English, and there was a line, and he was busy.

So I bowed instead.

He said, "You too, man."

That answered nothing I had said.

It answered everything I had felt.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

There is a diner in the Tennessee mountains where a little girl showed me a book.

She could not have been six. She held it the way grown men hold the deed to a house.

A thin paperback. The cover soft and bent from love. A cartoon bear.

I asked her, to be kind, if it was a good book.

She said, "The Book Lady sent it. She sends me one every month. She knows my name."

Then she went back to her pancakes, as if she had not just described something impossible.

I could not let it go.

All through breakfast I turned it over. A woman who knows the names of small children, sends them books, and asks for nothing. In my country she would have a shrine. Incense. One clean day a year when the town remembers her.

I decided the Book Lady must be a gentle fiction. A story mothers invent, the way we tell children the old mountain is watching, so they behave.

I was wrong.

The Book Lady is real. She is the most famous woman in the state. Her name is Dolly.

I made errors. In a hardware store I called her "your empress." The man thought about it honestly and said, "Close enough."

I asked a waitress if Dolly was still living. She set down the coffee pot with great care. "Honey, Dolly will outlive us all, and then she will send flowers to the funerals."

Then they told me the thing, all of them, in the flat voice this country keeps for facts too large to raise the voice for.

Dolly grew up one of twelve children, in a one-room cabin, in these same mountains. Her father could not read a word his whole life.

So she built the thing that sends the books. Not the clever children. Not the deserving ones. Every child who signs up, from birth until they start school, free, their own name on the cover, whether the family has money or nothing at all.

The children do not know she is famous. They know only the Book Lady. Some will grow old and never learn it was her.

Two hundred million books, a man told me at a gas pump. Then, seeing the number had defeated me, he made it smaller and heavier at once.

"She did it for her daddy," he said. "He never got to read. So she made sure every child after him would."

I would like to tell you what happened in my chest when he said that. I do not have the words, and I distrust any man who claims he does.

I come from eight hundred years of men who wrote everything down. We cut our names into stone so the centuries could not misplace us.

My father was the last of that line before me. A silent man. For forty years I believed his silence was the only thing he ever gave me.

In that diner, I remembered something I had put away as nothing.

When I was a boy, my father worked among machines loud enough to take a man's hearing, and in time they took most of his. He came home each night with nothing left to say. But there was one year, when I was learning to read and ashamed of how badly it went, that every night, however late he came in, he sat beside me while I read one page aloud.

He never said a word. I thought he was only checking that I had done the work.

It took me forty years and a stranger's diner to understand.

He could not hear me. By then he could barely hear anything. He was not listening to the words. He could not have caught one of them.

He was only sitting where a small boy could look up and see that his father had stayed.

I carried that year my whole life as proof my father was cold.

It was the warmest thing anyone has ever done for me. I just never had the book to prove it, so I let myself forget.

There is a bookshop two doors from that diner. I have just bought a thin paperback with a soft-looking bear on the cover. I am mailing it tonight to my father in Japan. He is eighty-one. He still cannot hear.

He will not need to.

Inside the cover I wrote one line, large enough that he can read it without his glasses:

"I finished the page. I always finished the page. Thank you for staying."

The Book Lady learned it from her father, who could not read.

I learned it from mine, who could not hear.

And somewhere in the mountains between us, those two old men would have understood each other completely, and said nothing at all, which is the loudest thing men like them have ever known how to say.

[John C Rainard @rainard]

Amen!

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In Texas they told me to stop at Buc-ee's for gas.

I have been to shrines. I have stood in temples that took two hundred years to build.

I was not prepared for the gas station.

There were one hundred and twenty fuel pumps.

I counted them because I did not believe them.

A man beside me was filling a truck the size of my first apartment, and he was not filling it because it was empty.

He was filling it because he was here, and here is where a man fills things.

Inside was a hall so vast I lost the horizon.

A wall of jerky. A wall of fudge I did not know the country produced.

A brisket sandwich handed to me by a man in a beaver costume.

And I want to be clear, the beaver is not a mascot.

The beaver is a saint.

The people speak of him the way my grandmother spoke of the mountain behind her house.

And the bathrooms.

I had been warned about the bathrooms and I had dismissed the warning as the pride of a loud people.

I was wrong to dismiss it.

The bathrooms are famous across the whole state and they have earned it.

I have slept in worse hotels. I nearly bowed upon entering.

A janitor was polishing the floor with the devotion of a man tending a garden he loved, and when I thanked him he said "welcome in," which I have since learned is what Texas says instead of hello, and also instead of I am glad you exist.

I went in for gas. I was inside for ninety minutes.

I came out with fudge, a shirt printed with a joke I do not fully understand, forty dollars of jerky, and a feeling I can only describe as having been to church.

I did not need any of it.

I needed all of it.

I have walked through the great cathedrals of the old world. I lit no candle there.

I lit no candle at Buc-ee's either.

But I did fill the truck.

And I understand now that in Texas, this is the same thing.

[Rise Of Alberta @RiseOfAlberta]

A new country is taking shape north of Montana.

Conservative. Common sense. Energy rich. Built on the same values as its American neighbors.

October 19 is the vote. If it clears 50 percent, a binding vote on independence from Canada follows in 2027.

The countdown is on.

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

Watch President Donald J. Trump's Full Speech on American Exceptionalism at Mount Rushmore on the eve of America's 250th:

[Kagan.Dunlap @Kagan_M_Dunlap]

Okay, this earned a follow

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

A compilation of cooking tips you may not know

[📹 gobye68]

[John C Rainard @rainard]

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[John C Rainard @rainard]

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[John C Rainard @rainard]

Time to fire up the grill.😋

[TaraBull @TaraBull]

Spotted off of Anna Maria Island, Florida

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

https://t.co/yvJOwOS4xE

[Glockford Files @GlockfordFiles]

The Biden presidential library looks pretty bad, but it’s way better looking than the Obama presidential library.

[Rob V @RobV59]

There's a couple floaters spotted in the Obama presidential library 😂😂🤣🤣🤣

[John C Rainard @rainard]

I don't like her politics but her dancing was as good as anybody else in the video. When you apologized in advance I thought she had embarassed her self somehow. Not so.

[End Wokeness @EndWokeness]

Gov. Abigail Spanberger "busts moves" at a Juneteenth event. I apologize in advance.

[John C Rainard @rainard]

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[John C Rainard @rainard]

Not joking.

[UFC @ufc]

Only one way to start off the Ceremonial Weigh-Ins 🦅

#UFCWhiteHouse LIVE Sunday June 14 at 8pmET on @ParamountPlus!

[ UFC Freedom 250 Presented by @Cryptocom & @RamTrucks ]

[DINO 🦖 @DINOR0AR]

Someone struck oil!

If you watched The Beverly Hillbillies, you are morally obligated to share this video.