I'm a wood and word butcher I write and for me, it's developed into a passion I enjoy penning fractured prose of ordinary events, ordinary people because well everything, everyone is so much more than that Some are quite lengthy Here's one now; Recollections this became rather lengthy.... Ever so often, I'd drive up to the ol' place for, well, old time's sake. I always enjoyed the rush of memories, driving the old lane, and around the corner, up the hill onto the flat where most the kid population was, and where gramma's house, my 2nd home, crowned the hill. Our place and gramma's place was one property, adjoined by five or so acres of strawberry patch, making the patch a short cut between houses. Not long ago I hired a new engineer, he was a whip. Ate up everything I could hand him. Became our I.T. Made tedious, complex projects his fun little game. Interfaced quite well with our clients. We became friends, even though he was in his late 20's, and I in my mid 50's. Come to find out, his dad lived at and owned the property out there in the hills of Scappoose. I had to make the trip one more time. Our little house was ready for razing. The doors were off, the garage my dad and grandpa built (with a hand saw and hammer) were gone. We stopped. I boosted myself thru the doorless, and stepless porch entry, the closed in porch was our laundry room. Wringer washer, clothesline, wicker baskets, sweet smells of Fels-Naptha, my place to take off my day's clothes and grab the tub off the wall. Rooms, once huge, were now so tiny. The kitchen, remodeled with the rest of the house, still had the red fire alarm above the sink. Dad would proudly demonstrate to friends how loud it was, putting a glass of hot water up near it. The wood cook stove was gone, but the pipe coming outa the ceiling, with the ornate metal ring, bore testament of many a meal. Meals I learned to prepare, taking a few times to learn how to not break an egg yolk, how to get pancakes to turn out like mom's and gramma's, snacks dad showed how he ate when young, tater slices scorched on the cook top, then lightly salted. Tasted horrible, but really good.... cookin' with Dad, good. The table was gone of course. The curvy steel legged one that replaced the solid wood one, well not so solid, as we lost a meal or two due to the one wobbly leg. But that steel one with the gray Formica (?) top was up town. There I'd sit, waiting out the meal, spreadin' my peas around to make it look like I ate some. 'If you don't at least take a bite of your peas you won't get any cake!' Eventually, I'd be sittin' at the table alone, studying the gray swirly pattern of the tabletop, malnourished head propped up on my arm. Dad, Mom, and sis would be in the living room watchin' Howdy Doody on the Hoffman, or something just as wonderful. Eventually, I ate cake...then did the dishes. One Sunday morning I sat at an empty table, but for a glass of milk and the One-a-Day pill bottle. Dad and Mom were exasperated... 'Your throat is this big, the pill is this big'. Minutes-hours passed, shadows on the table shortened...'OK, just drink your milk' I drained the glass between pursed lips. The little brown pill remained at the bottom. Nice try, parents from satan. We had a lot of beans, navy, pinto, brown. Beans on bread was quite regular. Got to like'n it. Not much choice really. Had chocolate cake with white icing for dessert. No dessert plates. Cake just plopped on the bean juice. To this day, I still have a craving for cake soaked in bean juice. The house was designed so's I could ride my trike around and around, kitchen, living, bed, bath, bedrooms. They were my Daytona, straight away was the bed, bath and bedrooms. We had large windows in the front corners of the house from the remodel, 'so we can look out, for godsake'. Now we could watch log trucks barrelin' down Pisgah Home Rd, and my sis and I could have a bird's eye vantage from the kitchen when Dad backed the Bel Air outta the garage over three of the four kittens puss had had weeks earlier under the porch. Took my sis quite awhile to get over that, as she'd just named 'em a few hours earlier. I was just enamored with the scene; romp-play-mew-look up-smat. Dad didn't know until he got home. Actually, it saved him an' I a trip, as when he thought we had too many cats around, we'd toss a bunch into a gunny sack and once down the road, hurl 'em out the window of our speeding chevy. I haven't maintained the sack-o-cats legacy, but there have been times.... The living room still had the oil stove that warmed us...in the living room. A flash of memory recalled the two end tables and lamps, aerodynamic, tables sharp, cutcha, lamps with flying saucer shapes, one had butterfly like images formed into its material, and when lit, enhanced their appearance. A sectional couch, we were up town. Before the sectional, we had one that kinda placed you in the middle, no matter where you started. It was my favorite, as sis and I spent many a day on it when sick. Mom would lay out the sheets and blankets, administering doses of tea, crackers, and toast, peaches if we felt up to it. Waste basket stationed at the tail end of that couch, since we were in such a weakened state we could never make it to the bathroom. Mom loved it, our own personal Mother Teresa. Yeah, we milked it for days...school work piling up. Recovery would finally occur once bed sores emerged. When we were actually sick, Doctor Day would visit. Fascinating, black bag, weird tools, gauzes, pill bottles, the smell of disinfectant and tobacco. Then the shot. It was all almost worth it. Asian flu was a bit serious, but chicken pox was horrific for me. It was Christmas, fever, pox forming. Presents! Guns! Six shooters!...only there was this pock right on my trigger finger. Dad, always the entrepreneur, would use the living room as the media center, inviting salesmen with projectors and actual reel to reel set ups, showing us how to become a thousandaire overnight. Nutri-bio was one, to take the place of one-a-days I guess. The Chinchilla movie was fascinating, and we even took a trip to a guy's garage to see how they were raised. Turns out they need an even controlled temp to get a good coat, and actually keep 'em alive. The Geiger counter became something to show company, and become an antique. Dad and Mom's bedroom held few memories for me except for the time Mom found a nest of baby mice in the bottom dresser drawer...and a hammer. There was that other brief time, but seems we were all pretty shocked. My bedroom was actually our bedroom, sis and me. After the remodel, we got twin beds, new ones. Recall my first migraine in my new bed, pressing my head into the pillow. Teddy no consolation, but then I didn't really give it an honest try to fix his dented plastic nose either. Dad was the bedtime story teller, Goldie/bears, red/the wolf, pigs/wolf.....pretty standard stuff....but did the job. Had a framed picture of a collie baying over a lamb in a snowstorm hanging over my bed. It hangs over my light stand table today, found in some of my mother's stuff. The yard was not spectacular, but when sequestered from the woods, was plenty for me. I'd play in the dirt. Mom, in her no-remote-thought-of-divorce-happiest-I'll-ever-be-but-don't-know-it days, would be cleaning the house, wiping something on the windows that would become a swirly fog, then wiping that off. Cleaning the floor was sweep, mop, wax. Linoleum was the rage. Lunch would be a great, but simple sandwich, with lettuce, and soup. The icebox held short stemmed dessert glasses of homemade chocolate pudding, each centered with a half maraschino cherry. For the longest time I thought cherries came that way straight from the tree. Cross over the Bridge, or Sunny Side of the Street played on the radio. Then it was a Paul Harvey segment. Nobody close died, there were no wars I was aware of, and folks were generally at ease during that eight year era of fond memories, just fragrant recollections. This aging cynic, years of crust giving way to a soft spot, down deep, had a hard moment of holding back visual emotion, as we drove away from the last tangible vision ever to be seen of the house of a sweet early life.
Reminds me of another childhood experience; When I was about four or five, we lived out in the country. A sparsely populated neighborhood tucked back in the Chapman hills about twenty miles outta Scappoose. Our place, and gramma’s place, atop the hill, was separated by five acres of strawberries carved out of a thicket of fir trees. Ever so often I’d stay at gramma’s on a summer evening. She made good pancakes….and the folks were going out. One time I waited too long at home. There was just too much cowboy’n to do, and I’d lost track of time. It was already twilight, and I had several hundred yards up the hill thru a couple clumps of trees to negotiate. As I trudged thru the first glade of trees, I thought about eyes staring at me. I’d seen lots of bear sign in my tiny travels, and some bobcat and cougar scat here and there. So, plenty to consider. (Actually, years later, coming from town one evening, we pulled into the garage, and a big cat jumped down from the rafters and fled into the night. We just saw body and tail, but it was, without a doubt, a full grown cougar.) Whistling seemed to rid the noises of the stillness in the dark regions of my petrified mind. A generous moon lengthened shadows, turning stumps into animals of prey, licking their lips, fixated on my dashing form, like Tag would when I showed him the stick I was about to throw. Ever so often I'd give a quick glance back, but the glaring, glowing eyes that were obviously there would mysteriously disappear. The clearing, the path, the 300 yard dash. Breathing came in gasps and pants…or was that the breath of the galloping cougar that was about to sink his teeth into my neck any minute, and tear my puny body to shreds. The folks will wonder in the morning, ‘Where’s Gary?’ Then, days later, they’ll find bits of Oshkosh b’goshes, right at gramma’s door, and shreds of poop stained fruit of the looms, and the brim of my straw cowboy hat, the hat part that once housed my furrowed little noggin now several miles away in a steaming mound of mountain lion poopoo. The clump of trees loomed ahead, separating me and gramma, good ol’ pillowy armed gramma…..even good ol’ grumpy grampa. I heard something shriek, or was it a howl…I don’t recall my feet touching the ground over the last few yards thru their back yard thicket. I do recall gramma, and her audible laughter, her high pitched teehee, as I hung my coat in the utility wash room of the back porch. Apparently my countenance that morphed from bug eyed terror to smiling relief in the time space of flipping a light switch sorta tickled her. The pancakes were extra good that next morning.
Moving along.... A Friend I had a friend, last name of Grasser (of all the names), weighed around 360 lbs in high school and college...just did anything that would cause a stir...a perpetual grin on his ever so ugly mug. Longish brown hair lying flat on his forehead, somewhat matted. Always brushing it out of his eyes. White, almost transparent skin. Loose, ill-fitting clothes. Shoes, warn down in odd places from the inhibited stride of a fatso. He was around 6’ 6” and had no hind end, just blubber around his middle, tapering to essentially nothing, and walked with a slump, the backs of his hands pointed forward, arms immobile...like a friggin’ sasquatch. Quite intelligent, however. I learned to never strike up a conversation with him on the subject of political science. Nobody talked about his appearance. We loved him. We tried to get him to join in in a scrub game of half court. His feet never left the ground, and although quick wristed, has hands were like anvils when it came to handling a basketball. Still, he got a kick out of it, and I knew he loved being included for once in something other than cerebral confabs. Football was funny. He just stood there, turning, like he was on a giant electric football field, vibrating nowhere. He made Western Civ class a riot....even inspired me to crack a book....once. Met up with him a few years after college (I’d dropped out long ago, he was degreed in several things). But, selling LP albums out of the trunk of his ’68 Olds 98. A real free spirit...looking back, reminds me now of Uncle Buck. I was recently told of his fatal maladies..bunch of stuff, kidneys, liver, heart...all hooked up...hospice. Damn he loved his gin, weed, acid, fast garbage food, and all night parties. I miss him right now....really miss him. To you, Grasser, you magnificent yeti son of a bitch
Ribs and other Bones There’s nothing like a good meal for a get together, and the good meal is a barbeque. Being a northerner that spent some years down south, I can say those boys down there know barbeque. Ribs, fallin off the bone. Chikin, smoked, from wood, not wunna those fancy pellet rigs, but by an ol’ guy raised in a ‘grease house’, from a pit the size of a horse trough. Beans, I didn’t know beans could taste like that. Odd things, strange herbs, spices, homemade sauces, a bit a fat meat, marinated for hours. They were a meal all by themselves. Tater salad…M-M-M-M, none like it. Sweet tea, steeped in a gallon jug in the sun. Beer, Lone Star or Falstaff, didn’t matter, both tasted like mop water from a jukejoint, but did their job of cleansing the palate for the next bite. Sip, rib, sip, chikin, sip, beans, sip, salad, guzzle the rest. Made ya just fall down and scream. Houston. Down the street, Telephone road, was wunna those grease houses. An old black gent lived there with what seemed like three generations of family. Everbuddie's grampa, even mine for awhile. Everyone called him Chili. Bib overalls, white butcher’s apron, leather baseball cap was his eternal uniform. Had a high pitched, raspy voice, and always a smirk on his ol’ mug. More often than not, you’d find me sittin’ at his dilapidated picnic table after work, watchin’ him toil over the pit. Nuthin’ attractive. Tin lean-to roof, pile of wood, ol' white fridge that made a humming sound laboring in the heat, vats and jars, brushes, large forks, and the huge pit with a homemade steel lid, that once he was satisfied with how things were goin’ he’d drop down and come out to talk to me…..talk about stories…old day stories…..bone chilling, horrific stories. Naw, nuthin’ attractive….. ‘cept for the rich savory aromatic fragrance emanating from that glorious pit. I’d sit there, sweating like a pig, drool stream gathering on the table in a puddle… ‘Chili! WTF ol’ man!?’ ‘Boy, you know it’s not ready….I’ll tell ya when it’s ready.’ It was worth the wait. Fourth of July…or as they say down there JOOOlah, everyone barbequed. Po foke, rich foke, middle class foke, all had their pits goin’. You couldn’t walk two steps without getting hit upside the head with the aroma of the gods. One fourth, me and my lady were flat broke. I’d come off a month long stint in Brownsville, inspecting oil field pipe, big job. Tuboscope laid some folks off after that, so I volunteered for some time off myself. Took most of June, just me and my lady…nobody else. Ran outta money…rent was paid, car was maintained, just broke….food crumbs in the fridge, empty bottles piled in the corner of the carport below…sittin’ on the couch smokin’ a partial I’d dug outta the butt can. ‘I’m goin’ back to work.’ ‘It’s the fourth.’ ‘Oh’ Chili and family had gone somewhere. It was hot. Most neighbors had headed to Galveston. Our guts were eatin’ guts. Hadn’t been so hungry in a long time. A friend invited us to a company get together. The park was filled with heavenly flavors. Kids, old folk, parents, all had plates heaped with goodies, goodies that tempted me to follow ‘em, floating on the fragrant waves. We strolled over to the tables. $3.50 $3.50??!! I had 37 cents. One the way back to the garage apartment I swore I’d never put myself in that position again…especially on the fourth. I think wunneezdaze we need to head back down south for a spell. Something about the word ‘brisket’ that just sounds savory…didn’t know what it was ‘til I landed in Texas.
First Jobs My very first ‘job’ was hoeing roses for an ol’ guy at the end of the mountain road up from our place. He was a prize winning grower, lots of entries and ribbons and medals and plaques from all over and of course Portland, the City of Roses. As a teacher, the crotchety ol’ fart was not the gracious diplomat he was when accepting an award. ‘Quit pickin’ at it like a #@!%* woman! ‘Gimme that hook.’ He’d jerk the ‘hook’ outta my hand and commence to beat the holy crap outta those roses. Apparently, the ones that survived became resilient and hardy....and beautiful. The hook was not much more than a smallish three prong pitchfork bent 90°. ‘You don’t stop till it’s rainin’ like a cow peein’ on a flat rock.’ That was the work schedule. And off he’d go in his dilapidated ’49 ford sedan. The engine sounded like it would blow apart any minute, pistons rattling around, tappets tapping a beat, zero oil. Only drove it a few hundred yards, just to harass us. One of the old hands said, ‘just hoe like mad until you get over the hill, then you can take a little break’. The old gent seemed to know what he was talkin’ about, he’d been there a long time. Back permanently stuck at 45°. Kinda bugged me...cause when it was rainin’ like a cow peein’ on a flat rock, we’d all beat feet over to the walnut tree....here he’d trudge...and there he’d stand....bent. His hands were stuck in a hoe holding position. Not big on talkin’. ‘How long you been doin’ this?’ ‘Some time now.’ ‘Huh.’ It was $.60 an hour...10 hours a day. I’d been there just a few days, and hoein’ like mad. The hill just a half hour of back breaking hacks away. Once over the hill, outta view from the ol’ guy’s shack, I straightened up and leaned on my hook. Just stared into the sun. Rolled a smoke. A smoke never tasted so good. I was just gettin’ into a mind filled tryst with Sophia Loren when I heard, ‘That’s enough of that, git offa my property.’ I turned around and there he was, leanin’ on them crutches. How in hell had he snuck up on me? Had he crutched his way up the hill, knowing full well what I was doin’? At first I was startled, and maybe a bit scared. Then I got mad, and with the knowledge that several fields of hay bales were just waiting for me, I headed right for him. His expression changed from sneering disgust to alarm. ‘Don’t worry ol’ man. I’m not gonna beatcha. You’ve done enough of that yerself. Here’s yer hook.’ So, yeah, I got fired from my first real job. When we moved closer to town, I got an evening job at a rather posh restaurant. The Hillvilla up on Terwilleger Blvd. It worked well with my junior year schedule. Work till 11pm…sleep through class...if I went. Washing pots and pans. My first day, I ran a sink full of water, hot and cold. The owner, Ed Palaske, reminded me of Mr McGoo, kindly, gently turned off the cold water. Hot water and steam came outta the tap. ‘We don’t use cold water. It’s not so sanitary.’ His hands and forearms looked like lobsters...no hair, red, much like a burn victim. Lou, the cook, doing a great impression of Ed Asner, just leaned on the counter and grinned. I’d never known hot water up till then. The crab pots and pans, from making crab louie, did loosen up better. Then I graduated to the salad bar. Much like a bar tender. The waitresses would come up, order, and I’d prep, sip a coke and munch on crackers. This one waitress, guess she was in her late thirties, would tell me dirty jokes and chit chat when ordering. She had blonde hair, all pulled back, like Kim Novak in Vertigo....rather buxom...like my dad’s Police gazette gals. I had fantasies about her while I was sleeping in class. Sometimes a dignitary would call me over, ‘Hey sport, here’s a buck, get me a pack of Winstons outta the machine...keep the change.’ If a patron didn’t like their meal, one of us would get it. Never had food like that. After my shift, and the upstairs was closing, I’d head downstairs and get another coke from the bar, and if lucky, I’d chat more with Kim Novak, and watch her sit there, undulating. I think that was my best high school job. I know it was.
Thank you @Ruby Begonia Writing has long been a passion of mine Sharing with folks that enjoy them is my sole intent I plan to weave this thread around several stories I have a somewhat extensive accumulation. Again, thank you
Chinchillas, huh? Mom and Dad were just about ready to start raising chinchillas when they learned that if the mother gets disturbed, she will eat the babies. We lived next to a very busy railroad track and we kids always ran out and got the engineer to pull his horn for us. That put the end to the chinchilla scheme.
SCHOOL Year One We didn’t have kindergarten. Hell, we didn’t even have all eight grades in that one room school tucked deep in the Chapman hills. And we didn’t have a bus, or lunchroom, or gym, or indoor plumbing. What we did have was Mr McDunn. Looking back, he was the best grade school teacher I’d ever have. Field trips were field trips, thru the woods behind the schoolhouse, down to the creek, building mud dams, and making wood sail boats, or we’d head up stream to the beaver dam, and when the steelhead were runnin’, before I even knew of a sea run rainbow fish that would grow to enormous proportion, he’d stand straddle legged in the stream and bail out those monsters with his hands. Then we’d watch him cut one open, displaying the biggest fish eggs I’d ever seen. One time, when it was snowin’ like a banshee, we took an old mop wringer and made igloos. Yeah, we went every day, snow, ice, whatever. And yeah, no bus, so kids appeared at school early, and while we were waiting for teacher to arrive (from his attached living quarters) we played with these little plastic red bricks that would snap onto each other….they fascinated me. We made planes, and built forts, and skyscrapers. It was like goin’ to the beach, I could never get enough. But school, it was workbooks, my own pencil, my own desk. Desks were the old wooden ones you see in old movies, the kind that hook up in a row, had the ink well, and groove to put your very own pencil, and you had a place underneath, housed in black wrought iron, to put your work books, and the seat flipped up, and so did the person’s in front of you. That person was Francis Keller. She was a tad messy, as her workbook place was eternally jammed with wadded up papers, and leaky pens, and broken things. And Francis herself was a bit unkempt. But she did have a fetching look about her, and she was tough as nails. She could beat the crap outta most kids there even though she was only in third grade. One rather disenchanting thing I recall about her was her habit of snorting whatever was in her throat and nose and swallowing. First I’d ever heard such a noise. Kinda like a reverse gargle…..and she ate paste. Thinking about it years later, those unseemly habits may very well have become attributes……… One time during recess, nature called, and I headed to the outhouse. It was a three holer, and it had a trough. I grabbed the middle hole so I could peek thru the crack in the door for female invaders. But Francis got the jump on me. There she was. But she wasn’t there for business. Next thing I know she’s flippin’ her dress up and her underwear down. Standin’ there starin’ at me. Whoa, I immediately had a flash back of me and Connie in grampa’s tool shed, and made the brilliant deduction that Connie was not deformed, as most or all girls were missing some very vital things. Then I took care of my back side and jumped off my perch to button up and head the hell outta there, but not quick enough to skirt Mr McDunn’s shadow. So there we all were, Mr McDunn in his aura of teacher/god like omnipotence, Francis of who magically had put herself back in the altogether, lookin’ at me like I was satan, and me, standin’ there with my bib overalls huggin’ my ankles. I learned a couple things that day. 1) Wimin are way ahead of any mind game you may ever venture to get conned into playing. 2) It’s because they are not distracted by all the apparatus us guys have. So, yeah, we didn’t have all the facilities of the schools in town, but my first classes in psych and anatomy were right there in the three holer. Over all, I learned more about social life that first year, than all the other seven grades put together. And now, every time I go fishin’, wading a small stream, and catch the faint scent of roiled mud and creek water wafting thru my nostrils, my mind flashes back to those first golden autumn days of school.
School, The following years The local craftsmen had united and built us a real school. Closer to town. Two rooms. Indoor plumbing, one for boys and one for girls. Newer desks. Swings. …and a huge field. Mr McDunn took us out to the field to explore. Now I’d been runnin’ thru fields all my life, so I was a tad unimpressed….until he had us kneel down and move slowly thru the weeds and thistles, identifying everything that grew or crawled. It got so I couldn’t wait for the next discoveries. OK, we were all a bit rowdy, but he had a presence about him that got your attention. It sorta made the teachers that followed pale in comparison….and we took advantage. Seems every one after him ended up having some sorta nervous breakdown right in the middle of the year. Not sure what happened to Mr McDunn, but I got drift that our folks were not impressed with his philosophy, cause he was quite direct and they were a bit protective of their little darlings. TheYear of Taboli Mr Taboli arrived my third year, straight from the Philippines….or as he said, the ‘pillippeens’. He wore a suit. Reminded me of Desi Arnaz, hair all slicked into a pompadour with half a can of pomade. And that accent. He didn’t have a chance. ‘OK turd grade, turn to page turdy eight.’ We slowly sacrificed that poor soul. An event that I recall was pretty much the end of Mr Taboli. Francis had a little brother, Dicky. Remember, this was in the ‘50s. The term ‘dick’ had yet to have a negative connotation. Fun with dick and Jane was just that. We called him ‘Dicky’. The kid was just one happy little guy. Always grinnin’ that huge grin, buck teeth spaced wide apart, gigantic mouth….but had some intellect issues. However, happy…just glad to be included in anything we did. Unfortunately what we did was mostly to his detriment. Andy had this oversized gravenstein apple. ‘Hey Dicky, I bet you can’t put this whole apple in your mouth.’ Turns out he could. It’s just that he couldn’t get it back out. So, we’re all laughin’ our asses off, and Dicky is laughin’ and droolin’ and chokin’ some, when Mr Taboli blows the recess whistle. We all file back inside to our desks. Dicky’s sittin’ there with his gigantic mouth stretched to the max, buck teeth clamped on that apple, just starin’ down at page turdy eight, droolin’ all over his workbook. We’re all lookin’ straight ahead. Then Dicky begins to get a little red and choke. I gotta say, he held it together pretty good, not bein’ able to swallow and all, but once he commenced gagging, it was pretty much all over. Remarkably, Mr Taboli was pretty good with a knife. He leaped over Bart’s oversized legs hangin’ in the aisle, and proceeded to perform an applectomy right there in class. So, he was a hero…….for a few minutes. It was only a matter of weeks that his rosy outlook of teaching the children of the trees would take a turn. The event that became the clincher to his destiny was our zip guns. Little simply made ‘guns’ from clothes pins, springs and pebbles. Just enough zip to cause a welt. A well placed shot destined for a girl’s hind end…unless it was Francis….she’d take it from you and feed it to our own hind end. Well, after all the lunchtime screaming and running, Mr Taboli rounded us up and just sat at his desk for several minutes. Then calmly gathered up our zipguns and placed them on the floor in a little pile and commenced to jump up and down on them, screaming something in a language other than English. Then he strolled over to his desk, sat down, put his head down, and started beating the surface of it with both fists. Fascinating. We didn’t have school for a couple days after that. The Wadsworth years would follow. I bumped in to Dicky a decade or so later. ‘It’s Richard now’ The poor chap had been working in the woods. If you are short on brains, the woods are not the place to work. It’s bad enough if yer quick and sharp. Seems Dicky had run a chain saw up his hand, right between his fingers, up to his wrist. They didn’t do much for him in the patchwork dept. At first, seein’ him at a distance, I’d thought, geez, Dicky is a Trekie,showin’ me his Vulcan wave. Wonder how they're all doin' now..............
The Wadsworth Years Mrs Wadsworth was our teacher for a couple years…..actually 2 ½ years, as she stepped in when Mr Taboli made his infamous exit. The white coats didn’t come to get him, but after the zip gun affair we never saw Mr Taboli again…our first conquest. Mrs Wadsworth was different. She was old, and done with it all, but folks gathered around her and conned her out of retirement. Turns out she’d run a concentration camp of grades six thru eight back in Milton-Freewater for centuries. Quite the disciplinarian, as she could still wield a bamboo rod with the deftness of a samurai. And those high top orthopedic oxfords that housed her rheumatoid ankles were nothin’ to mess with either. She stood about five six, and weighed in at oh say 97 lbs, but still had a presence about her. I got her to smile a couple times, but usually she wore this sour look, like she just got fed some horse shit, of which we tried. She had what was sometimes referred to as denture face, some real jowls, kinda looked like Deputy Dawg’s gramma….and she used it to her advantage, lookin’ down on you thru her bifocals. Eddy P, the terror of turd grade, was putty in her gnarly hands, and even his little brother, satan of second grade, was no match. So things were as quiet as they could be in those two years. We all respected her, and I even admired her, and I’d like to think she got a charge outa me, as she would single me out as an example for others not to follow. When she gave me her special attention, I’d notice her neck would commence to sorta blossom into a rather deep crimson beginning at the start of her collar and creeping up to her chin. This aurora was gradual, and mesmerizing. Grammar was her specialty, and diagramming sentences on the black board was what we all did, over and over…past participles and me became friends, as we both found our little special place in the parse tree of life. But the second room in that school held my fond attention. Miss Dickerson taught kindergarten thru second grade. She had a dimpled smile that would melt me into deep daydreams of her and I. I’d sit thru history class, fanaticizing about us goin’ campin’. Her lookin’ on with admiration of me building a camp fire with nothin’ but my woodsman’s prowess, and then skinny dippin’ and then, well things got sorta grey from there, so I’d be stuck on replay, filling in more details with each re-run of my boyish manliness and her absolute womanliness, then fog, then back to camping, swimming, fog….sometimes we’d just lay on the bank after skinny dippin’ all naked, basking in the sun, fixated on each other’s genitals…but there was always that darn fog……. The Mrs Nelson half year….aka The Half Nelson She tried to be nice. ‘You can attract more bees with honey than with vinegar.’ Killer bees The white coats did come for her
something I writ while still employed; Henry I feel as though I’m on the set of the last half hour of Papillion, or the movie Life. Just said g’mornin’ to Henry for the gazillionth time. He’s been an employee at this fine establishment since the doors opened, before even me, of which I’m regarded as the furniture. We are both a bit slower of foot and noticeably grayer since we first met. We have light conversation…about gardening, the weather, our offspring. He’s a bit short on words. Been thru a gaggle of engineer regimes. Been in charge of what we call the process room forever. It’s where we encapsulate, vacuum varnish, mold, and do all the dirty work....the dirty work that takes a mad scientist to coordinate all the tanks, racks, and ovens to yield product (as our brochure says) ‘in a timely manner’. For him, it’s a symphony, and he’s the conductor. Patience his not his strong point. He’s ‘hard to work with’. Whenever an upstart engineering manager approaches him about a certain process (more like begging for an answer, so he can document the procedure in the build book), his usual reply is, ‘You’re the engineer, you tell me….ah...hahahahahaha’. He can be seen on any given day, meticulously scraping out the last drop of epoxy in the bottom of a 5 gallon bucket….’It’s expensive’. About ten years ago I had to take him in to counsel. He’d made a production worker upset, to the point of tears. We all knew he was just being Henry, harsh words were how he communicated. I sat with him and the production manager, and explained to him about how he represented our company, and therefore an example, blather blah, blah, blather. I guess he took every one of my words to heart. I guess I dressed him down, took him to his inner core, because he began to weep. It really took me off stride, as I was just building momentum, not even getting off my final salvo. It confirmed what I’d learned sometime before. Gruff crusty people, folks with chips on their shoulders, that once the armor of their defense is removed, will just fall apart. I guess he was more than motivated that day, because motivation lasts only a short time, but he has yet to come off so harsh, as he’d been so many times before. He is not articulate in the English language. Someone once mentioned to me that ‘Henry sure speaks funny’ ‘Yeah, he speaks funny like that in seven languages.’ He was a man without a country for around twenty years. He finally was granted citizenship. Quite the celebration. A lot of his people were there, and they all revered him as a god. He looked good in his uniform. That day he became ‘Henry’, and we shared a sixpack of Private Reserve. He still mentions our little celebration, and has the Henry’s Private Reserve cap, we gave him that day, hanging above his desk. Henry has several distinct scars all over himself. Holes the size of machine gun rounds. Holes that remind him of the death march, of hiding under the body of the guy that became him when he took his identity papers because he’d lost his. Holes that should have killed him more than once. Holes that remind him of the loss of his entire family. Holes that cause him to be even less verbal when someone inquires as to ‘what’d you do to get that?’ Holes that remind him of the price of freedom. He still eats his lunch with sticks, sometimes sitting on the picnic bench cross legged. It was a year or so after I’d hired on that Henry learned it was more acceptable to actually sit on the toilet instead of stand on it then squat. I was glad to see that…hated always having to wipe those freaking footprints off the lid every dang time. Yeah, him and I are on the other side of the hill now. But it’s still really great to say g’mornin’ to my fellow countryman every day ….it’s actually quite an honor.
More passion than gift, I assure you But, thank you Glad you enjoy them I consider myself a word and wood butcher I've been into live edge furniture of late and a few hundred tiny abodes They're a tad whimsically demented Folks seem to go for that I have them in all the local high end junk shops I plan on creating a thread on them View attachment 57943
Oooooh, I just LOVE those bird houses!!! I'm glad you're still making them, Gary. You are so talented.