'Possum Patch: My Friend Bo

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

My Friend Bo

My Friend Bo stopped by today.

Actually Bo isn’t too well thought of around here but I can tell you that many’s the day Bo has showed up just in time to pull me out of a deep hole. So today I was pretty glad to see him and told him, “Come on in, Bo,” but he wouldn’t and I had to just stand out there in the wind in nothin’ but a jean jacket and my thermal underwear to hear about his latest project.

And it didn’t amount to a hill of beans but it took my mind off stuff I didn’t want to think about today so I listened like it was the dangest dang project I ever heard and had tremendous “potential”. However so, I can tell you that even around here there isn’t much of a market for chicken feet. Bo’s plan is to go over to the Mennonites next time they have a big chicken butcherin’ and get the feet and sell them on the internet. My part in this project, other than listening and nodding and saying, “You don’t say,” and “By dang, it just might be a money maker,” was to teach Bo how to run the computer and sell stuff on the internet.

I thought the “You don’t say,” and the ”By dang….” would probably be the easy part because I remembered Bo from when we were in grade school. He always had a lot of trouble with the pencil sharpener.

We talked a little while about how to wash all the stuff off the feet and how to keep them from stinkin’ while they were in the mail and such and then we kind of got down to the internet part. I asked Bo who his ISP was and he said, “What’s a “eye yes pee,” and I tried to tell him and he kind of went vague on me so I went back to the washin’ the chicken feet part for awhile.. then tried the internet thing again in a different direction.

“Bo, which credit card do you want to use. You gotta have a credit card for just about everything on the internet you know.: and he kind of gave a little jump and grinned at me, which is always unfortunate when Bo grins, because of that fight with Bud Seifert, and he told me he had it covered. He whipped out a credit card and waved it through the air in little slicing motions like it was a pass to the All Star Game.

“Here it is. It come in the mail yesterday. Pop always makes Pauletta Dean toss them but I snapped this one up before he saw it.” I didn’t have the heart..or the energy..to give Bo a lesson in credit cards so I kind of let that slide but I did mention that Joe might be ticked off when the bills started coming but Bo said “Not to worry. He’ll really be fired up when the profit money starts comin’ in now won’t he?”

We talked about how to pack the feet. Because it’s December Bo wanted to wrap them up all Christmassy and call them “Holiday Hen Hoovess” . “Now don’t that have a ring to it?” says Bo. I nodded like I really thought it did and Bo promised to cut me in for a quarter of the profits for teaching him how to do the internet stuff and then he said, “Well, I gotta go. There’s a lot to runnin’ a business you know.” And I said “Yes, there surely is. See ya, Bo” And he said, “See ya.”

But then there was a thing that had to be done so I said to myself, "Yancy, there's a question has to be asked and you just gotta ask it." And so I says to Bo, "Bo, what do you figure folks are gonna be doing with those chicken feet?" and he said "You wouldn't believe all the different kinds of stuff they eat up in the city. It;s just chock full of all sorts of ethical people now that eat stuff like squid legs and rattlesnake eggs and such as these chicken feet." Well, it has never been my way to get mixed up in the mores and geography ideas of my neighbors but I told Bo, "Well, Bo I haven't ever heard of anyone eating that sort of stuff," but he just grinned and flicked a box elder bug off the arm of my jean jacket and said, "Yance, that's part of your problem. You need to get up and about a little more." And he took off down the road.

And I went back in the house and sat in front of the furnace grate for an hour and a half before I warmed up.

Like I say, Bo always gives me something else to think on. And that’s worth a lot.

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A Bedtime Story for Chickens

Once upon a time there was a little red hen. Each morning she woke early and left the special chicken house and worked hard scratching all day and laid very nice eggs in the special nest in the special house for chickens. But she had one bad habit. She did not like to go to bed at Chicken Bedtime with the other chickens. One morning she did not wake early. She did not wake at all. Fluffy red feathers blew in the breeze beneath the apple tree where the racoon liked to perch at night.

The Moral of the Story is: Go to bed when you're supposed to.

Memoirs

These are my memories and even though others have their own, perhaps contradictory, memories these are mine.

Memoirs Chapter 1

Our House

Unlike many people, I spent my childhood in the same house in which I was born. My childhood was encompassed by the sameness of each room, the never-changing porches, ragged lawns and roughly wooded acres and the multiplicity of a neighborhood comprised of families with names that told the history of the Midwest without even trying.

As an adult I’ve been fascinated by those old names: West, Woods, Rogers, Yates, Mathews, Alexander, Shields, Faucett and of course ours, descendents of the Lewis’s, Allens, Bakers and McDonalds, all reaching back to the English and Scots Irish Kentucky and Tennessee immigrations of the very early 1800s.

The other names were newer, German or Irish and with German and Irish mores: Rittermeir, Rintschler, Stock, (Dad’s name), Ostertag, McGosker, Kirkpatrick, O’Dell, Coopersmith, Mylars.

Many of these German and Irish families, fleeing hunger and conscription, lured by land and wages, came a decade or two later in the 19^th century during and shortly after the building of the railroads and stayed to build the Midwest after the end of the Civil War.

Dad built most of our house. I understand it was just two small rooms sitting on a brushy five acre lot at the edge of a dirt road when Dad, Mom and my six older siblings moved in. He later bought an adjacent forty acres.

He dug a basement, added two upstairs rooms and two downstairs rooms and a porch at the back. The path from the back porch wound down past the walnut tree and through the tall weeds to the out house. A very large family of spiders owned one whole corner of the outhouse so I never sat on that side.

Dad had a lot of help from friends that worked with him as laborers at different building sites that evidently had a lot of “left overs.” His friends were generous fellows and made steady contributions from those sites in the form of left over buckets of nails, left over gravel, left over lumber and so forth. The day the guy came with the concrete truck with the left over concrete for the basement floor was a banner day. Thank heavens for left overs because we really needed the room.

I can just barely remember a pot bellied stove into which went old newspapers, little sticks of wood and sometimes bigger chunks of wood or a scuttle of coal. Dad’s big heavy coffee pot sat on the stove top and the smell of the coffee mixed with the smell of the burning wood and the steam from the coffee made the rooms seem a lot warmer than they were.

Before long the house was modernized even further and a monstrous coal stove taller than either of my parents lurked just under the basement

stairs. Heat rose into the house through a large grate in the living room.

A few steps away from the furnace was the coal bin accessed through a low basement window that opened onto the driveway. The coal truck would be backed down the drive and the driver, usually a black man, would shovel the coal by hand through the window.

Many people say that they can’t remember anything before they were four or five years old and I don’t know why. I remember a great deal before that. They say people remember intense experiences and that is probably true.

My first actual memory was of standing, crying in my crib, gripping the top rails, dressed in a little white flannel gown that tied at the back of the neck, and being very scared. It was bedtime and my crib was in my parents’ room. Mother came to me and lay me down and pinned the blanket to the bottom sheet on each side of me so I would not get uncovered in the night and told me, “Shhh”.

Soon after that my bed was moved into what later became the bathroom. It was a tiny room that opened off of my parents’ room with just enough room for my crib to fit along one wall. This was the room in which I slept during the Chicken Wars.

We had no well and water was saved from rain or hauled in I guess but stored in the cistern near the back porch. It had a large square concrete top with a smaller concrete square that could be moved to check the level of the water and to remove anything unsavory. Two cinder blocks placed on this cap kept it in place.

Frogs and toads lived in the inside rim of the cistern and Daddy said they never hurt anything but the snake he found once had to be removed. He did not like snakes.

During the Chicken Wars of my infancy me and my brother, just a couple of years older than I, would run to the concrete of the cistern top to evade the old Banty rooster. The rooster was very protective of his hens but the hens always came to people expecting to be fed. It was a no-win situation for us.

Even though we were forbidden to hurt the old rooster my brother always fought back hard, throwing dirt clods and sticks and even once throwing a pan of water on him that had been set out for the dog but we always lost and wound up high tailing it for the cistern top.

There we would wait until either someone came to rescue us or the old rooster forgot we were there and wandered off.

My nightmares at that time always involved that wretched rooster and the safety of the cistern.

My worst rooster nightmare was probably my last as it occurred during one of my parents’ weekly Pinochle game and I was taken up to sit on Mom’s lap and be made over by Aunt Opal and Uncle Frank and the Mylars from next door who had been fortunate or smart enough to leave their kids at home.

And Daddy took noisy little sips of coffee from his saucer and clicked his false teeth at me, making the bottom ones slide almost out and it was always the best of jokes although Mom found the saucer sipping thing and the clicking teeth disgusting.

On Saturday nights we, that is the family, went to Nelsons Tavern where Mom and Dad and sometimes my older siblings and their friends would dance to the juke box and Dad would drink how ever much beer he could afford, generally one or two, and Mom would drink Coca Cola out of cool green bottles, slowly so it would last.

Mostly they danced with each other but occasionally a careful ritual would transpire. During a lull when they were not dancing, someone might come to our table and ask Dad if it was alright if he asked his wife to dance and Dad would always say they could and they would ask Mom to dance and she would leave her Coca Cola to dance. She particularly loved the Polka and the Schottische.

Although both Dad and Mom loved music and loved to dance, they did not dance well together. Mother, a very reserved person, danced rather stiffly and with considerable rigidity. Watching them was a little like watching a happy bee cavorting around an upright zinnia blossom. The bee is busy but the zinnia never quite participates.

Daddy said she danced like she had a poker up her butt but I don’t think he ever said it to her face.

And sometimes Dad would turn to Mom and ask if she cared if he danced with so and so and Mom would say no, she didn’t care and Dad would do the ritual. He would go to the table of the lady with whom he wished to dance and he would ask her husband if he would mind if he asked his wife to dance. Dad would turn to the lady and ask her if she would like to dance and off they would go.

A request was seldom refused within reason. But the ritual was always observed. No man approached another person’s wife without that permission. It made for the most orderly and friendly of situations wherein everybody could have a great time and the risk of misunderstandings was minimal.

Up to the time I got bored with party life and was considered old enough to be left at home with the bigger kids, I had lots of partners myself. Johnny Spoons, known for keeping time to the juke box by rapping out the beat with two spoons held between a thumb and two fingers, often partnered me to the poignant strains of Good Night Irene or Sentimental Journey but we both liked the polkas better. Even though he was very old and because of an injury, unable to keep up with polka steps, he seemed to enjoy it.

Shorty, however, was my favorite partner, partly because he wasn’t much taller than I was as a four year old. Shorty wasn’t really short but he too had been injured and was unable to stand erect. This meant we could pretty much look each other in the eye and Shorty’s eyes were always merry and happy.

Sometimes he would stand me up on the bar and everyone would clap and holler and I would do my four-year-old version of the hootchy cootchy to the music of the Sabre Dance and be rewarded with a bag of chips and an orange Nehi soda.

But I tired of the party life. I didn’t like sleeping on a pile of coats on a hard table and was finally allowed to stay home. I’m the only person I know who gave up the bar scene at such a tender age.

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Memoirs Chapter 2:

A Different Kind of Mother

Our mother was not like other mothers. She was hard to love and harder to like. Independent and unbending, she had few friends and regarded most of the world, including her children, who mostly reciprocated her lack of natural affection, as unworthy of her interest.

She was meticulous about her person and of a late evening, winter and summer, in those days before indoor plumbing, we were all ordered to bed and she began her bath.

The night I, having slipped quietly downstairs on some forgotten errand, saw Mother at her bath changed her forever for me.

Pale and naked in the moonlight from the window above the sink and its small pan of hot water, her body gleamed like the inside of a sea shell, cool and incandescent. The flesh of her breasts, flattened by the needs of seven infants, was only a shadow against her upper body and the smooth roundness of her abdomen shone starkly white in the silverness of the window’s moonlight.

The scent of her bath soap and the vinegar she used to rinse her once-red hair filled the room.

Her very luminescence, in the dark kitchen of our home that night, seemed out of place and time,..a visitor from some powerful other world that valued more a stricter code..a cooler hand and heart..that did not belong here with us and certainly not to us. The hot winds and dry suns of the Midwest were anathema to such a one.

Before me was a person meant for harsh and vicious winters and the pale meagerly glint of a Celtic summer. Such a one required friends more fast and foes more ferocious than the weak genetic pool she was stuck with.

Of course I could not come anywhere near verbalizing these thoughts at the time, even to myself, but the experience was a powerful one and it stayed with me to be pondered upon and sorted out as facts came later, drifting into my life as our lives unfolded.

'Possum Patch

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

My Friend Bo

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