My Criminal Past

 A little girl says to her grandmother, "How old are you, Gram?" She says, "sixty-five." The little girl asks her, "Did you start at 1?"

As a septugenarian, I realize the years have piled up and I'm starting to worry about my past coming back to haunt me. No, not the many wrongs I committed due to a lot of repressed anger. I'm talking about the truly big mistakes.

I was reminded of this the other day as I was reading about the travails of celebrity chef Paula Deen. Ms. Deen has recently witnessed more mutiny than Captain Queeg - and without the benefit of those steel balls Bogey juggled as he, too, desperately sought calm from chaos.

In Paula's case you may ask who chose to mutiny and why?

Well, just about every sponsor she has ever had for her many cooking products, recipes, kitchen implements,etc. It's rumored that even Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemimah jilted her. That's assuming they're still in the good graces of an ever increasing reactionary politically-correct business environment.

Even the supercilious decision makers over at Wal-Mart have realized that Paula and her hot potato - with or without the generous gobs of sour cream and slabs of butter she might have recommended - were no longer going to make their traveling squad.

To my amazement, the only one Paula seems to have  in her corner - not for her fatty food recipes - but, at least over her use of the "n word"  was none other than USA Today's contributor DeWayne Wickham, one of the first to go into attack mode over the slightest sniff of suspected racism.

He writes, "Paula Deen, 66, is being punished for telling the truth under oath about the racist word she spoke in "private" (ed.) years ago and which she now disavows. There ought to be a statute of limitations of the privately spoken, bigoted banter of someone who was born in the Jim Crow age and has come to regret it. So, I'm willing to give Deen a pass."

I agree with both conclusions. There is a valid reason the NAACP apparently felt no compulsion to become the NAABP.

So, here's my dilemma. When I was about 6 years old - maybe about the age of the young girl in the opening paragraph - my buddy Jack Bash, and I pulled down our shorts and peed against the side of my house.

My question, based on the Deen debacle: Are the indecent exposure police going to come knocking on my door any time soon?

I too, regret, my criminal past.