The Jurist by William C Blome
THE JURIST The greenish roses that loop about a silver rain spout in the rear of a Topeka railroad station that no longer services Kansas City or Wichita have been termed “darlings” by people quite a bit more muscular and brainier than me. These roses bi-annually grow rapidly, but I annually refuse to fall for the omnipresent bromide about how the promise of vivid color occurs lots of places in Mama Nature’s realm and always overtakes the optics of her dullish green, though I’m really not the jurist you’d want to be in front of were the growth and color of roses a life-and-death issue of your days here, or some predictor of your chances to go wild-west, lasso, and then hold onto a fortune. No, for that, you’d want someone along the lines of Adlai Stevenson, Mikhail Sholokhov, or Billie Holiday, and you’d hope like hell Katherine Mansfield and/or Edgar Degas had earlier been coaxed to be on standby, or, better yet, was actually waiting i...