Living month to month,
Below the line of poverty,
I still have all the modern amenities
Like an apartment, indoor plumbing,
Electricity,
A comfy bed that takes turns with
Internet and TV.
I’m poor but my life is rich.
Also, when you come to think of it,
Centuries ago,
Kings had less than most of today’s so-called poor.
Kings had to hire chamber musicians.
We have playlists on iTunes.
Plus a monthly inheritance from my late parents.
I know love outlives death because
Mom & Dad are still feeding me.
She did it till she was 77! She made retirement her birthday present to herself.
When my two brothers (Mike & S.J.) and I were younger, she was Secretary of
Cape Breton Right to Life.
From Manitoba to Ontario to Nova Scotia to New York State to Indiana.
To steal a joke from a Missionary Kid friend of mine:
As the son of a pastor,
“When I get homesick I don’t know where to go.”
I’m the oldest of three boys.
As I said, Dad was a pastor,
But before I was born and before Dad was married,
He was an apprentice funeral director and embalmer.
I still remember my dad, David Ketchen,
Sitting at the kitchen table with my brother Mike
When, all of a sudden, Mike says,
“Dad, did you realize you were an embalmer and your initials are DK?”
If you don’t get it, say, “DK,” fast, and you’ll get it.
I also remember on Dad’s 49th birthday,
Mike gave Dad a birthday card.
On the front was a beautiful painting of a serene chapel surrounded by autumn leaves.
Dad opened the card, and inside it said,
“In Deepest Sympathy.”
My youngest brother S.J. is my favourite person in the world.
Before I came to that conclusion, I was a real jerk to him.
I would contradict everything he had to say,
Insisting he had to get it right, but I had it wrong.
I discovered that when I came home for Christmas
From my first semester on the mountaintop campus of
Covenant College, a Christian college on Lookout Mountain, Georgia, U.S.A.
It was right on the border of Tennessee and overlooked Chattanooga.
Literally and figuratively a mountaintop experience,
The Holy Spirit must have gotten a hold of me because
When I came home for Christmas
My whole attitude toward my little bro S.J. Ketchen had changed.
From then onward he has been and continues to be “my favourite person in the world.”
I was the official photographer for both of my brothers’ weddings.
You know what they say, “Always a photographer, never a groom.”
I’ve always wanted to marry a woman,
But I’ve gotten the, “Let’s just be friends,” line from them more times than I can count.
I think Mike is right in thinking I might have Asperger’s Syndrome.
My official diagnosis is Severe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,
But Asperger’s makes sense to me. I still have OCD, but also being an Aspie makes sense to me.
I get the feeling that may be why I’m so romantically inept, still a virgin at 53.
Well, a 99.9% virgin. In my early teens, I sexually experimented with another boy my age (both 14),
But I was too naive to even realize what I was actually doing.
It was the early 1980s and he said to me,
“Don’t tell anyone, but I’m gay.”
Internally, I was shocked! I didn’t know what “gay” meant, even though it was what I was doing.
I just knew that “gay” was something you weren’t supposed to be.
See what I mean by, I was naive?
I didn’t even learn what the word “fuck” meant until I was in grade 9.
I’d hear the word in elementary school and just knew it was a really bad word but had no idea why.
Also, to my friend who was being gay with me, in retrospect,
When he confessed to me he was gay,
I should have responded,
“No, you’re not gay. You’re just 14 and confused like me.
We’re in our early teens, our hormones are raging, and we’re just trying to figure it all out.”
And today, he’s heterosexually married with kids.
Yet today, I’m still confused. I’m a single, celibate 53-year-old nude model online exhibitionist.
© JTK.CA
Name: Tad ::: Pen Name & Web Address: JTK.CA
Social Media Moniker: @NudistPoet
© Jonathan Tad Ketchen
Guelph (pronounced “Gwelf”), Ontario, Canada, eh!
JTK.CA@JTK.CA
519-830-4812
