Rich's Ramblings
I’m working on it. I hope that I can use this site to make a few notes about myself and things that I find interesting. One project will be to see if this can be a “Legacy” page of stories I want to remember. So don’t expect much.
Sometime in the late summer of 1962 when I was 9, I had an accident with a lawn mower and lost the tip of my right ring finger. I managed to do this not with a motorized lawn mower by sticking my finger in the opening to clear out a stick, no I did this with one of those safe human powered push lawn mowers that my father had purchased at an auction sale for $2.
My dad and neighbors used to work together to put up corn silage into silos or in our case a board lined cement bottomed trough. All of the farmers would trade work days with each other to harvest the corn silage. One of the farmers owned corn silage chopper, a big blower that sent silage up 50 feet or more into a vertical silo, and special silage wagons. The other farmers would hire him and put together a crew of neighbors to harvest the silage. It was a working community party like atmosphere sans alcohol until all the work was done for the day. A supply of coffee and sandwiches was always available.
Anyway, seeing how the silage chopper would cut the corn stalks into tiny pieces, I thought, “I can do that with this old push lawn mower”. I tipped the lawn mower upside down so the cutting blade was up and the rotors would spin past the cutting blade. You could roll the wheels on either side and it would spin the blade really fast. The harder and faster you spun the wheel the faster the rotary blade spun. I would take a corn stalk and feed it into the spinning blade with the other hand. It worked pretty well, making a corn stalk silage like mess on the floor of the garage where I was doing this.
Everything seemed to be going quite well from the point of view of this nine year old until a cow on the other side of a nearby fence snorted and startled me. My corn stalk feeding hand went into the rotary blade. It didn’t hurt but was a little numb so I just shook it assuming that I had just banged it a little. Thats when I felt the blood spatter on my face and looked at the injured finger. My tiny little finger bone was sticking out the end and I was missing some finger.
I don’t remember if I went screaming into the house or just went into the house. Let’s face it, I was nine and my finger bone was sticking out – I was screaming. My mom just about fainted. But my sister Janet who was in her early years of studying to be a nurse wrapped it in a fairly clean dishtowel and put some ice on it. Mom was too freaked out to drive so Janet drove me to hospital. Mothers should never have an opportunity to see their children’s bones.
My doctor put me under anesthetic, (ether in those days), trimmed the bone, pulled the remaining skin over the end. To this day the finger nail that was remaining curves over that ancient wound. My daughter called it the “Marble Finger” because it was round like a marble. He put several stitches in the end, wrapped it with gauze, a small aluminum cast, and taped it up. A couple of weeks passed before I went back to have the stitches removed.
For some reason they kept me in the hospital overnight – probably because ether is a really dangerous and wretched anesthetic. By some freak of cosmic fate one of my grade school buddies Jimmy P. who was our next door neighbor a mile south of us was also injured that day. Jimmy had been riding his bike and fell into a very sharp piece of steel attached to their corn grinder for cow feed. He needed several stitches over his eye, and they put us in the same hospital room over night! They gave us each a little card board coin bank and put a whole 50 cent piece in each one! That was big money for a nine year old. We had a great time recovering from our injuries that night. Jimmy bragged that he had more stitches than I had. They fed us ice cream and orange Jello. We were almost able to sleep. I’m not sure how well mom slept.
Maren said, “mom, do you have any toilet paper rolls? I want to use them to hide the bare curtain rods in my living room. I found this life-hack online and they should work nicely”.
The mom said, “Sure honey, unfortunately I just pitched a bunch into the recycle bin but I will save a few for you”. The mom goes and gets a plastic bag and hangs it on the basement door handle. Soon enough there have been enough bathroom visits to empty numerous toilet paper rolls, and the bag starts to fill. The dad delivers the first batch of perhaps a dozen to Maren, making sure that they aren’t all crushed and that Fabby the cat does not chew up the plastic bag that they are contained in.
A new bag is started, and is gathering more empty toilet paper rolls. Maren says “Thanks dad, I probably have enough now but a few more won’t hurt. I can use them for spares. I will recycle the rest”. When the bag is full again dad delivers it to Maren as well, again making sure that its precious contents are not crushed and that Fabby does not chew up the new plastic bag. But before dad can leave the house a new plastic bag is added to the basement door handle. Maren assures dad, “I don’t think that I need any more emptied toilet paper rolls”.
Over time the bag on the basement door is refilled and redelivered to Maren, making sure that Fabby does not chew the plastic bag. Eventually stores stop using plastic bags and the mom and dad start to set empty Amazon grocery delivery bags next to the basement door to gather more tubes. These tubes are delivered straight to Maren’s recycling bin, unbeknownst to the mom. The dad tells Maren “that can be our secret”.
In the fullness of time, the mom and the dad move into a senior cooperative. When the mom and the dad have visitors from the senior cooperative, mom’s new friend Barbara notices the empty Amazon grocery delivery bags in the corner of the front vestibule full of empty toilet paper rolls. Barbara asks the mom “what do you do with the toilet paper rolls?”. The mom responds “my daughter Maren has a project that she uses them for, I forgot what it is but she needs them so I collect them”. Barbara sensing a project of great import, starts to collect her emptied toilet paper rolls to the mom in Amazon grocery delivery bags that she gets from her son.
Barbara’s friend Jim sees Barbara delivering bags of empty toilet paper rolls to the mom and wonders “what is up with that?”. Soon Jim and his wife Sandy are collecting Amazon delivery bags full of empty toilet paper rolls to the mom and dad’s home and they are in turn delivering all those bags to Maren. Word gets out, one thing leads to another, and soon the entire senior cooperative is collecting toilet paper rolls from the mom’s and dad’s daughter Maren. Word spreads to other senior cooperatives and assisted living centers all over the city and now truckloads of Amazon grocery delivery bags full of empty toilet paper rolls are being regularly delivered to the daughter Maren.
Maren has long since given up trying to stop this, and instead has had to turn it into a full-time business of creating custom designed planners made from recycled toilet paper rolls and empty Amazon grocery delivery bags.
Eventually, after creating large and successful toilet paper roll planner business, Maren sells her business to Amazon, she moves into a home with a large screened-in porch with Fabby the cat where he can watch birds all day and they live happily ever after.
One of the first friends that my father made when we moved from our Southern Minnesota farm to a farm near Litchfield was Bud, who’s real name was Francis. He was definitely more of a Bud than a Francis. Bud would often haul some of our cattle to market at the South Saint Paul stockyards “down in the cities”. On return trips Bud would often pick up some part needed for machinery or something else and return that to my dad or other nearby farmers. The “app” for that was a dial telephone, or perhaps the 1953 Ford pickup, you either called Bud or drove over to visit since there was no such thing as an answering machine, share a cup of coffee and make the arrangements to pickup the cattle and get those machine repair parts.
One of these trips happened sometime before I started grade school, I must have been about 5 or 6 years old – about 1959 or 1960. That’s is a long time ago so my memories of those times aren’t all that sturdy. I think that it was a summer afternoon, dad loaded the cattle we were selling onto Bud’s truck, put me in the cab with Bud and I rode along on an overnight trip to the stockyard. We must have arrived there late in the afternoon. I tagged along as Bud unloaded the cattle. I watched as they left down the chute for their grim destinies. There were narrow pathways between the cattle chutes for the workers, truckers and farmers made from large 2×8 slat gates that could be easily reconfigured to move cattle to different destinations. It all smelled like cattle would smell, people many miles Northwest of the stockyards in South Saint Paul would have smelled them as well.
Being a five year old, cattle are big, as a farm child I was used to that. Suddenly there were these giants – they had draft horses! Those animals looked as tall as trees – they were these amazing giants with huge hairy legs! I am not sure why these horses would be at a stockyard, I assume that the stockyard just acted as the trading place.
After dad’s cattle were weighed and evaluated for quality, Bud went to the stockyard business office to collect the check for dad. They would type out the check and hand it across the counter to the sellers for their livestock. I remember it as a large room with a creaky old worn down wooden floor and panelling, but I am sure that if I saw it now it wouldn’t be all that much larger than a living room. Behind the paneled counter on the paneled wall hung a stuffed two headed calf – another amazing site in an amazing day.
Riding in that truck in the dark was a treat too with all of the dials, and the speedometer all lit up. Much later in life I would listen to Tom Waits tell about the tale of the “Phantom 309” with “dashboard was lit like the old Madam La Rue pinball”, and it reminded me of this trip. I think that know what Tom Waits felt talking about the Phantom 309. Big Joe was not that different from Bud who’s voice was a slightly smoother gravel than Tom Waits voice.
After leaving the stockyard Bud took me to truck stop where he bought me a quarter chicken to eat – it was a quarter of a very small chicken. We sat on round red stools at the counter that I could barely reach to eat my greasy and tasty chicken along with a glass of milk. After supper we went to a hotel in Saint Paul that was probably an unsavory place, as a small kid I wouldn’t have noticed that. I remember the large hotel neon sign flashing red outside of our window, and the sound of nighthawks outside the open windows bzzzzzeeeuuugggh, bzzzzzeeeuuugggh, as they hunted for insects all night. That was the first time I had ever heard nighthawks and their call is seared into my memory. I don’t think that Bud or I got much sleep that night, this adventure was all a bit over stimulating for a 6 year old boy.
I don’t remember the ride home – I suspect that a sleepless Bud had to pour me into the old truck cab and take me home. A few years later Bud failed get around to taking his tetanus shot. He got a minor injury to his hand from a rope burn, and he contracted tetanus – or lock jaw as we called it. Lock jaw and rabies were the two most feared farm diseases when I was growing up. Rabies was almost 100% fatal if not treated immediately with a series of painful shots into the stomach. Likewise lock jaw was almost always fatal. Bud managed to survive his bout of lock jaw. He lived for many years after that, eventually moving in with his girlfriend Mamie, becoming slightly less bachelor but still unmarried.
This happened on the farm when I was about 14 years old in 1967. I was in the living room of our 3 bedroom South facing rambler on a sunny winter day, when I looked out towards one our our fields near the road. I noticed several snowmobiles racing around circles in our field. I also saw several pickup trucks and cars pull up and park on the road nearby.
Needless to say this activity was not sanctioned by my dad the land owner where these people were trespassing. There has always been a strong rural tradition of property rights and many of our neighbors had their land posted with no trespassing signs to dissuade hunters from shooting your livestock or shooting your family members when they were trying to harvest fall crops.
There is also a strong rural tradition of ignoring other peoples property rights when it gets in the way of you having fun, as in the case of these particular trespassers. In this case they were using the snowmobiles to track a fox across the landscape and they were using CB radios to communicate where to go next.
I grabbed the 7×35 pair of binoculars that we kept in the living room and watched what they were doing. The people on snowmobiles were circling the fox, running it over and over again. This barbaric act of cruelty did not seem to have any purpose other than the joy of killing an animal. I was infuriated. I was 14. And I strongly suspected that each and everyone of those people in cars and pickup trucks had some kind of gun.
There was no such thing as 911. And even if there was, it would take a sheriff deputy 30 minutes to an hour to show up. I had heard of rumors of a gang of rural thugs that would hunt and trespass on people’s land and when the owner complained, all of the tractors would have the oil plugs loosened, or sugar in the gasoline of the car. Or worse. There were rumors of barns burned and livestock lost in a fire. Even if none of that was true I had the very fact of their willingness to trespass in someone’s front yard in the middle of the day when someone was likely watching – and they didn’t care. They probably started the sugared gasoline and barn burning rumors themselves to cause fear. I am sure now that gave them an extra rush.
Before that incident I thought that snowmobiles were kind of fun. Me and Johny B, a farm next door neighbor would frequently use his dad’s snowmobile for winter adventures. But after this event I lost all respect for the people that use these machines. I have seen examples where snowmobilers shoot across the road in front of you, or go through the yards of town folk at midnight, of inconvenient fences being cut. It seemed to be a case of 99 percent of snowmobilers make the rest look bad.
I posted this on my Face Book page in October of 2016 about an encounter I had on a walk in my neighborhood. Reposting here with a few more details that I remember.
On my evening walks I frequently stop by to say hi to a neighbor and to B.S., chat about weather, and what’s going on in the neighborhood. This evening wasn’t much different except that L&M had a couple of married friends over from his work, I will call them Motorcycle man and Motorcycle woman. Everyone was drinking a beer, which is normal for this neighbor and his friends in the evening.
Motorcycle man offered me the use of his wife, which I ignored. I got the impression that this offer was often extended to people that they meet.
Motorcycle man and Motorcycle woman happened to be white, which is not unusual either. Motorcycle woman was talking about some Youtube channel that showed “black crime in Minneapolis”, and she thought I should be familiar with it. She seemed confused that I didn’t know about it. My neighbor L&M said, “Hey I’m black you know”. The woman reassured my neighbor that “you’re one of the good one’s”, putting her arm around him.
There was some banter back and forth between my neighbor L&M and his friends, including the color of the friend’s black colored motorcycle and some other nearby pickup truck that was also black. It all seemed a bit alcohol soaked.
At some point a young woman on a bicycle passed by on the street, and Motorcycle man yelled after her “meals on wheels!”. I could have told him what a jerk he was for saying that, but considered his probably drunk state and chose to ignore it. I can only imagine how terrified and disgusted that woman felt. Motorcycle man had to repeat the phase a couple of more times, as if I was too dumb to get his brilliant joke: “… meals on wheels, … get it? Meals on wheels…”. I just rolled my eyes and tried to hold my usual evening conversation with L&M.
Motorcycle man offered to give me his wife a couple of more times, showed me his two switch blade knives, and then came over to the fence and in a serious tone asked “Say, you ain’t voting for ‘Hilde-beast’ are ya?”
I responded “Why yes, as a matter of fact I am”. He said “Man you should be voting for Trump. I just don’t see how anyone who has any smarts isn’t voting for Trump.”
He continued “You know what is going in this country don’t you? We got all them Somali’s comin’ in and getting social security. They never worked for it, how’s that fair?” Then he said something about “Don’t you know what’s going on in Venezuela? They got starvation and its ‘cuz of socialism”. His wife Motorcycle woman was also contributing to these apparently well known facts.
Motorcycle man and Motorcycle woman argued against “Obama Care” because it is socialism. I tried to point out that it was covering people who did not have company provided health care or that had some preexisting condition. He proceeded to tell me that his wife was a breast cancer survivor, but somehow that was an argument against Obama Care. He didn’t seem to understand that without Obama Care his wife – Motorcycle woman would likely not have any coverage at all because of her preexisting condition.
My neighbor L&M has the strength to survive this kind of interaction every day in his workplace as if it should be normal. I am not sure I have that in me.
This is when I decided that it was best to continue on my evening walk, making sure that none of those Little Free Libraries had any thing that I wanted to read, admiring all of the empty Adirondack chairs in front yards, and enjoying the nice rainbow towards the end of the walk. When I came back past L&M’s place Motorcycle Couple were gone. I assume that somehow they made it home against all odds considering how intoxicated I thought they might be.
When I was growing up on the farm we had several guns, most of which were 0.22 calibre. One was an old pump action Remington 0.22 with a magazine that held about 15 shorts. For a period of time we had an Iver-Johnson 0.22 revolver. We also had B-B guns (Daisy Air Rifle), but that is story for another post.
Many of out barn windows, and a few signs suffered from my attacks. Occasionally a bird or a rabbit. (Sorry about that nature: I beg your forgiveness). Sometimes me and one of my neighbors Johnny B would go to the creek and hunt carp. We would bring our 0.22 rifles, remove our shoes and socks, hike up the pants and wade up stream. When we would see a carp ahead of us in the shallow creek, we would attempt to shoot it. There are a few problems with shooting carp in the water, one of which is that as a 12 year old my ability to calculate index of refraction between the air and our targets under the water was not very quick, so we would have to shoot a little closer than where the carp appeared to be. Another is that the energy of a 0.22 short that we usually used for this sport was expended in the first few inches of water. I don’t remember ever causing the death of any of the carp but I do remember that it was a lot of fun to be out wading in a creek with guns.
Guns also taught me some valuable skills that were of use later in life. For instance I felt like I needed a bandolier to look cool wandering around the woods near our house. I created the bandolier as an arm band out of some old denim, and some elastic bands that I sewed together. I would fit the 0.22 bullets into the elastic bands sown at bullet sized intervals. Later I occasionally would hem my own blue jeans and even sow buttons back onto my shirts. See – I learned a valuable skill.
When I was in ninth grade we had the option to take a gun safety course as part of our physical education/health class. We were required to bring own gun to school.
Let me repeat that sentence: We were required to bring our own gun to school. But it had to be unloaded, and it had to be in a case. So I bought the $0.77 case from Coast-to-Coast Hardware with the string tie at the stock end, packed up my bullets, my books, my homework and headed to school on the bus, with a few other farm kids in that same class. I had to take the gun directly to my locker and leave it there until the class. At class we would board a school bus and go to a nearby shooting range where the Phy Ed teacher would demonstrate how not to accidentally kill one another, and we did some target practice. At the end of the course we were given a junior hunting license that allowed us to bag a couple of pheasants, ducks or quail.
By this time I was not as interested in hunting for sport as I was shooting carp that I could never hit. I never developed an interest in hunting. And having survived bullets through my South Minneapolis home and garage I no longer have a fondness for guns that I had as a kid. I would gladly skip my experiences with guns as a youth if that could have saved our society from the insane violence of recent decades.
This is Greeper the owl. He was named by my sisters because that is the sound that they decided that he made. Greeper came into our home when he fell out of a tree “in the woods across the road” as an owlet. I was probably about seven years old at the time, which would have meant that my sisters were still at home in high-school.
Greeper tried to feed on the red and green spots on our kitchen-dining room linoleum floor, and often left his own contributions to the linoleum floor. We found that he enjoyed beef livers, and had to get a fresh supply of those from the store every week in addition to what we kept in the old freezer.
We found that if you focused on Greeper’s eyes, while twisting his body around 360 degrees, that he would stay focused on your face until he snapped his head around lightning fast and stayed focused on your face. The effect was that it appeared like you could just keep twisting his body around and his head just floated above it in one place!
Eventually Greeper could fly and rejoined his sibling and parents. He would still fly down to our porch and grab a meal of beef liver while mom and dad stayed up in the old elm trees chiding him on his poor choice of friends.
After the summer Greeper eventually returned to the woods to do the job of all Great Horned Owls – kill rodents and piss off a lot of crows.
It’s not a good idea to involve yourself with young animal like this. His parents would have taken care of Greeper despite his fall from the nest. Sure a cat, a weasel or fox could have found him but mom and dad do have some good defenses against those predators. I am glad that I had this farm kid learning experience but for the safety of the animal I can’t recommend it to others.
Originally I wrote this for our neighborhood newsletter in 2007. So here it is again. Bubba is holding the chicken, then Tony I think, and Oscar who still lives nearby. I don’t remember who the gentleman on the left with the 22 t-shirt is.
The Big Game
The game was already in progress when I stepped out into my front yard. It was taking place in the side yard of the fourplex next door. Bubba (James) and his cousin Tony were playing for the championship.
I watched this game for a couple of minutes trying to figure out the rules. It involved Tony or Bubba either kicking or throwing the ball to each other, making contact, and then the person with the ball tried to break away and go to one end of the field or the other. If you made it to your goal you scored 2 points. There were four downs until the other guy had to kickoff to his opponent.
The sidewalk next to the apartment building, consisting of some cracked concrete slabs, was a foul line. If you did something illegal, like touch the hands of your opponent when he was tackling you, that was a foul for which you got a strike. 4 strikes and you lose the game no matter what the score. Eventually Bubba’s sneakers came off and marked the foul line near the fence by my house.
Tony yelled “Hey mister, can you watch our game?” which I did and was drafted into being the referee of the game. As the referee my main duty was to make sure that they didn’t do any tackles involving arms around the neck and I was supposed to make sure that they didn’t go over the foul lines. I wasn’t a very good referee but I did keep the neck tackles to a minimum.
After a while Bubba’a cat Leo, and his 3 year old sister somehow became part of the game. Leo’s job was to lay in a pothole about midfield and look like the orange and white cat that he was while all of this running and tackling was going on around him.
Once in a while they would declare that they had fouled or the that the other had fouled them. In that case there was “an injury on the play”. Bubba was up to about 4 strikes or fouls when the rules changed to 5 strikes to lose the game.
Bubba’s sister’s involvment in the game was to ride around on Bubba’s back while he tried to tackle Tony, but there was another injury on the play since Bubba stepped on a rock with his bare feet. Bubba’s little sister was more interested in the grass seed head that she harvested from the fence line and eventually disappeared towards the alley goal line spinning and dancing in her shiny leopard print dress.
Tony asked me “does this look like college football?”.
I responded “Well… Not quite” but it was time for the next play. There was some dispute where Bubba suddenly got a touch down and went from 2 points to 6 points winning the game. But Tony wasn’t having any of that so they decided to start a new game. After a couple of plays in the new game Bubba’s older sister came out and told Tony that his mother was calling for him.
They wanted me to referee another game the following night. I said that I would have to see because I had other things that I needed to do and gave them a possible maybe. It was getting dark out, and Tony left Bubba saying “love ya’ cousin, see you later”, and Bubba echoed that.
One of my reasons for starting this is to avoid FaceBook. FaceBook is an addictive disease that is destroying the world. It doesn’t really understand that it is doing that any more than the Spanish Flu virus or the ebola virus, it just seems to be its function with regard to humans.
When a friend decided to start his own WordPress blogging site, I decided, “hey – I could do that too, and learn a lot in the process”. One of the things that I seem to have unlearned over the years was how to write, how to express myself, how to get my ideas out on some medium.
Again I blame FaceBook and all of the other short attention span media for this – as well as my and everyone’s addiction to those media. I can’t speak for others, but I always seem to have to scoop a meme, or make a cultural reference. And I think that I see that in others who use those media.
Its not like I ever expect anyone to read this or find this blog, I am doing this as a treat to myself. About a year ago I had a conversation at my wife Peg’s work reunion party with a guy named Denny, who is trying to write some legacy stories about his life – and ever since that I have had the hankering to pursue that in some form or another. So I hope that this gives me an opportunity.
I am not going to do an Orson Scott Card Speaker for the Dead sort of thing. I will leave discovery of my short comings to others. I would like to focus for now on the stories from my own life that made me feel something. I will start with “Greeper the Owl“.
Toad Aweigh
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