Manpot's Tales of the Tropics Read Online Free Page B

by the Klan. She'd endured the
death threats. She'd stood by him when McCarthy fingered him as a
Commie ...She'd followed him faithfully to Tortola to live on the
north shore when there was no electricity and just donkey
trails.
    She was as a demure as a Sunday school teacher...but
could have the mouth of a trucker.
    But, on this day, the constables got Miss
Elizabeth….Sunday school teacher.
    "Why hallo officers," she smiled, offering ice cold
lemonade, "how may I help you two handsome young men?"
    Trying to keep a straight face they explained the
complaint and asked just who had been at this beach party.
    "Well", said Miss Elizabeth, keeping a spectacularly
straight face," there were many people"...
    Promptly she started rattling off name after
name...and then said " Would you like to interview…all of
them?"
    The young policemen sipped their lemonade and quickly
made the smart decision." No, Miss Elizabeth...that will be fine",
said the senior of the two, "I can't believe any of your guests
would have done such a thing."
    "Well there were some kids playing on the beach,"
said Miss Elizabeth innocently.
    Miss Elizabeth reported back to the boys who were
enjoying their afternoon swim.
    The boys just laughed...they’d defied many things in
their long lives…would they have the audacity to defy the “...man
on the hill…" disturb his happy hour with an occasional whiff of
smoke or a drifting spark?
    Not these heroic boys of summer.

YES HE IS A PIRATE
    You could tell the guy was a pirate...He was sitting
in a beachfront bar in the Caribbean…drinking rum…oh, and yeah, he
had a jaunty eye-patch.
    With a parrot on it...
    Every happy hour I saw this man in one of my favorite
watering holes on Tortola…It's a bar and restaurant called
"Myett's" where the trade winds blow...and seem to blow in a good
mix of locals, tourists and just plain wacky characters. Every time
I saw the "pirate" he smiled and said "Hi"...
    Finally we started to talk...
    "Tell me the tale of the eye-patch", said I after
buying him another Mount Gay...And the tale he told was an
inspiration…
    A genetic disease had attacked his left eye leaving
him almost totally blind in that eye...and then had started to
attack his other eye. The only hope, his doctor told him, was a
radical operation...followed by an even more radical recovery
period.
    For six weeks after that operation he would have to
keep his head forward…perfectly still...twenty four hours a
day...seven days a week.
    In pitch darkness.
    Our "pirate" had the operation and then told me how
he learned to sleep leaning forward…in fact live his whole life for
those six weeks hunched forward... He could not move and he could
not see.
    Finally, he told me, came time for him to return to
his doctor's office to have the bandages removed. The doctor warned
him not to hope for too much...Even if he had vision in that one
eye it might be very fuzzy, said the doctor, "maybe just shadows
and shapes."
    Slowly, he said, the bandages were unwrapped...but he
was terrified to open that eye. He might be blind...He might never
see again...He might be confined to a life of "shadows and
shapes."
    As a tear welled in the unpatched eye our "pirate"
said he opened his good eye...and in the words of Johnny Nash
yelled " I can see clearly now..."
    "I kissed the doctor...I kissed his assistant...and I
bawled like a baby", he told me," then I decided to enjoy every
single moment of the rest of my life."
    At 75 years of age our "pirate" bought his ticket to
the BVI's swearing to take in every spellbinding site in that
spectacular technicolour you only seem to find in the tropics.
    At that moment the sun started to set over Jost Van
Dyke.
    My "pirate" buddy and I toasted that spectacular
scene and he grinned like a five year old.
    To me the sunset was beautiful…to him it was a
miracle...
    The “pirate's" name is Dick Swain...we dubbed him
“Insane” Dick Swain. Since that incident he has endured a bout with
stomach