Sad news this morning that William F. Buckley's wife Patricia has died. Julie and I were remembering this morning the time we went with a National Review group to the Buckleys' place in Connecticut for a magazine staff cookout. Pat Buckley had a deserved reputation as one of the grandes dames of New York society, and that reputation could be intimidating. She was one of the people you moved to the big city to meet, but that you never really got to. Well, we got to. At one point she and Julie got to talking about how unregenerately evil were squirrels, who ate tulip bulbs and wreaked mayhem on gardens. Pat told Julie that at one point, she got so tired of the little bastards that she stood out on their bedroom balcony there in Stamford and picked them off with a .22-caliber rifle.
I love that image: one of the nation's premier socialites locked and loaded and taking out squirrels from her balcony with a rifle. What a life, what a lady. RIP.
Incidentally, here's the NRO remembrances page. Worth reading.
Pat Buckley, RIP
Monday April 16, 2007
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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I once had an attic full of squirrels, who had chewed through a gutter and fascia board. Whenever it rained, half of the gutter water would flow through the hole and into the house. The rodents caused about $3000 of damage. I trapped as many as I could, but there were some who literally wouldn't take the bait. I got up early one morning, brewed a pot of coffee, slipped open a window, and picked them off one by one with a bow and arrows.
God bless you, Pat Buckley.
What a wonderful day to celebrate gun violence and animal cruelty! Compassionate conservatism strikes again!
Holy crap. The woman is dead. Let her be--who really cares what you think? Eric B | 04.16.07 - 3:43 pm | # Well, since Rod made the original post and then opened the combox for comments, evidently *he* cares what we think. And Holy Crap to you, too! ;-)
Great stories, harvey.
From what Rod says about Mrs. Buckley, she sounds like the kind of woman who would have been happy for people to sit around telling stories about any old thing at her wake, so here's another: When my brother and I got our first BB guns (age 11 or 12 or so, Daisy Golden Eagles, and man, we were proud), we loaded up, practiced a bit, and looked around for a bird. A sparrow in a maple tree about twenty or thirty feet away. We both took aim and fired at more or less the same time. The sparrow dropped. We stared for a second, looked at each other and said simultaneously "You shot it." Maybe it's an over-civilized excess of sensitivity, but I never could get into hunting--that is, the actual killing part. Maybe you have to be more acquainted with hunger. Loved to walk around in the woods and fields and shoot, though.
Maclin your story brought to mind a Lacey legend. My grandfather was a tough old bird. His oldest son, still kicking on his third, yup, third, pacemaker at next to ninety was just as tough. They didn't talk for twenty years or so because they both fired at the same deer at the same time and only one bullet hit the deer. Both claimed it and grandpa pulled senority. Cost him twenty years of good conversation if you call grunts and nods good conversation. This morning as I was identifying my path through the woods for the tractor to pull some logs I stumbled upon a turtle. I moved him out of the path. And watching someone intentionally take out a turtle crossing the road sends my back straight up. However, there's always a however, I will shoot a turtle in a pond as fast as the next marksman. Go figure.
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