Boy, wait until they hear about the third-degree burn you sustained this morning, and didn’t even mention.

But as a rule, folks just don’t understand, darlin’–shoot, I’ve been working on it for how many thousand years now and how many lives–still sometimes feel like I don’t have a clue.

Key, I think, is that this SuSu person is a combination of tough and tender–very-tender-hearted sometimes, mentally tough as nails other times.

Like this summer at Felony Flats, when I learned that one of the boothies was living in his car–he’d put his meager wares out on tables, sit in his car waiting for customers, and at night, pull the car back to close to the railroad tracks.  Sure the guy was a drunk, ended up being evicted by the folks who were trying to help him when they cought him stealing their beer, but he had a sense of honor and integrity that many better-off folks would do well to emulate.

 I felt for the guy, and when I pointed his situation out to Kathy, she looked at the car–a Honda Prelude with plastic sheeting replacing two or three of the windows–sorta sniffed disdainfully and said “I’ve lived in smaller cars.”

Then there was the time some woman wrote this tear-jerking story  in the newspaper about having a miscarriage.  It got to me, and when I showed her the story, her reply was “Miscarriages are nothing.  Full-term stillbirths are hard.” 

The tender comes out when I see her show compassion and unconditional love to people who I would just as soon gut-shoot and leave to die.

Then again, living up here has a way of weeding out the  worst of the creampuffs and weak sisters.  I’ve seen folks arrive here raving  and gibbering about how Alaska was their new home and how wonderful it was, only to  bail out in October when it got too cold for them, the sissies.  Kathy called me a soft city boy when I got here, which offended me mightily–it was only half-true, I was really a soft suburban boy.  Like the time  my first or second year here when I was too squeamish to slime a salmon.

Thanks to Kathy and god and a little bit of guts and grit I didn’t even know I had, I’ve toughened up a bit.  Not much, but enough, I guess.

Okay, so I blogged in your comments, SuSu me.