I have had a great month in Winter Haven, but it's now time to get home. Anyway, I need a real haircut, and you can't get a genuine buzz cut unless you can see the Dunklin County Courthouse at the same time. So, by the time you read this, I will have been back home a couple of days, with my hair whirred to a cue ball, and I will have had a thorough political reeducation.

I'll tell you for a while it was kind of shaky down there among those Lonnie Kinchen trained Democrats. "Yellow Dog" won't begin to describe those folks. They'd not only vote for a"yeller" dog before they'd vote for a Republican; if they couldn't find a yellow dog, they'd capture some poor old "sooner" hound and splash the poor creature with yellow "quickern" a young Teddy Kennedy could down a fifth of a good scotch and drown his girlfriend.

Mealtimes were the worst. You know, you are at the table, hungry, and someone at the table would, out of the blue, say, "I hate George Bush." Mind you, nobody would be talking politics at the time, but it didn't matter. Someone would say, "Would you please pass the shrimp," and here it would come, "I hate George Bush!" Clearly they were taunting me for a response that never came. And when that little ploy of theirs didn't work, they'd get me the next morning by reading Tom Friedman or Maureen Dowd type newspaper columns aloud at breakfast. I really got no relief from their punishment for past election related columns of mine until my nephew (in law) was stricken with a gall bladder attack. The timing was odd? For just before his severe, and apparently excruciatingly painful, attack he made the statement that he almost voted for George Bush as a protest vote against Kerry. Then it happened: horrible pain, diagnosis, and surgery. Just for saying he "almost" voted for Bush?

I'm happy to report that the surgery was successful. So successful in fact that four days after his surgery, he not only prepared, but he also ate part of my 70th birthday present from one of my Wisconsin great-nieces. Lisa Schiek, nee Smithmier, whose grandmother's maiden name was Kinchen, air expressed from New Berlin, Wisconsin (how German is all that?) a box of frozen bratwurst, Braunschweiger, cheese, and salami to Winter Haven, Florida to me. As I said, my nephew cooked the brats over an open flame, while he joined with the rest of us in enjoying the liver sausage, salami, and tasty Wisconsin cheese. The next day I hesitatingly asked him how he felt? He replied, "fine." On the spot, in the name of George Bush, I pronounced him cured of political gall.

My Florida family gave me an official Notre Dame baseball warmup jacket for my birthday. My great-nephew, Taylor Burdin, has been accepted by Notre Dame for admission this coming September, so we're in a full Notre Dame mode these days, and so much so that I wore the famous Notre Dame pullover when I took my littlest great-niece, Hattie Louise (HL), age five, to her weekly dance lesson. I had never been to a "ballet and tap" school before, but I was chosen for the job because the rest of the adults in the family were involved at the time in the gallbladder surgery event.

It was a cool morning for Florida as HL and I headed out to the dance studio. She was dressed in black "tights" and top, and carried her "after the lesson" clothes and shoes in a neat little bag. She refused a coat, but acquiesced to my wrapping a light throw over her shoulder and arms. As we arrived, the "dance moms" were arriving in their SUV's. I recognized a couple of them as morphed "soccer moms" from the neighborhood. HL and I were in her grandmother's "caddy," having dropped the grandmother off to do some therapeutic shopping.

The dance studio is arranged so that parents and uncles can see the lesson through a long, chair level, window. We spectators were lined up on folding metal chairs in a way that seeing the little girls dance, and conversing with fellow attendees, was easily done. It was then that a young father of one of the dancers noticed my Notre Dame jacket, and attempted to engage me in an in depth conversation about Notre Dame football. I was dumbfounded, but he never knew. I know nothing, zilch, about Notre Dame's sports. I just let him talk. I could have diverted him by asking, "Do you know the name of the music to which the girls are dancing?" (It was Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake." But I decided, in self-defense, to try a psycho investigational technique (Carl Roger's Psychotherapy) that includes, among other tools, simply repeating as a question what a person has just said to you, I led the man into telling me all that he knew about Notre Dame football. He apparently told someone at the studio that I was "a really a good conversationalist?" But that was not to be the end of the effects of wearing a Notre Dame outfit. An obvious Notre Dame fan, a man from Rhode Island (people spill their guts to me, with just a bit of manipulation) accosted me in a Winter Haven area Wal Mart Super Center that same day. "How about that lousy coach we got rid of?" More self-defense "psyching." And a lady in a Notre Dame sweatshirt gave me a smiling thumbs-up as I met her in the hallway of that vast store. My niece has now provided me with three pages of "cheat sheets" re: Notre Dame sports, and that'll have to do until I get up there for a game or two.

While all that was going on, my beautiful, athletic, intelligent, fourteen-year-old great-niece, Caroline Burdin, won first place in the zoology contest among ninth graders at the Polk County Science Fair. She will be going to the State of Florida contest this March. And how about Mason, the 10-year old? He, a straight A student, sports crazed, and a good athlete, was preparing to play soccer in the rain (?), as I was about to leave for Missouri. I know you'll forgive my loving those kids, in print?

Kenneth Kinchen is an independent writer with a background in international business and foreign service contracting.