Name: Robert Wade “Dearest Father, if I may bother you for the briefest of moments, I believe this offensive insect to be a Rhipicephalus Sanguineus and I would be quite appreciative if you would remove it from my person.” At least that’s what she seems to remember saying to me at the time.
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I hate it when that happens. Usually it’s a song. It’ll be something you’ll remem
ber from way-back-when that ends up getting stuck between the ears and then spends the rest of the day irritating the surrounding brain cells. Singing Shari Lewis’ “The Song That Doesn’t End” with the kids, during the drive into school in the morning, requires nothing less than a marketing meeting to be rid of. Terrible stuff!
Worse still is some single strange thought like: where did pockets come from? Think about that for a minute. If most of the really good ideas come from nature, and if pockets are a really good idea, then there’s an undiscovered species of dinosaur out there that evolved the Cretaceous equivalent of the fanny pack.
It’s worth mentioning that the two legged kids didn’t curse me with the “pockets” question. No- Boomer did this to me.
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Great Aunt Daisy kept Guineas. This was back in the 1970s, and up until this spring, most everything I knew about domesticated fowl- I learned from her guineas. The finer points of guinea behavior I picked up more recently from watching the “Jurassic Park” movies with my son.
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Springtime. The very word conjures up visions of spindly legged lambs bouncing about, chickadees squabbling around the feeder, and trees breaking out in song while the sun beams down benevolently. All very Disney-esque. Unfortunately, I’ve long since been disabused. There’s not going to be a Laura Ingalls look-alike tripping down any of the snow drifts in my backyard any time soon. I have to think that Julius might have gotten to put in the garden come spring of 44 BC if he’d paid better attention to the season- a couple of months of cabin fever is likely to make even the most stoic of Roman Senators a bit cranky.
But there are some undeniable signs that spring is in the air and, rather than hiding under our togas, all that can be done is to grit our teeth and get on with it.
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People were flatter in the ’70s. I’m not talking about left to right thinner or up ‘n’ down thinner. This hasn’t got anything to do with pounds per square inch. What I’m talking about is front to back thinner. In a word - flatter. I suspect that the Nixon administration might have had something to do with that but I can’t actually prove it. Perhaps some future historian will publish a scholarly work explaining that the government surreptitiously added some chemical to our drinking water which unintentionally resulted in a “flatter” population and, rather obviously, nobody noticed anyone else was flatter because everybody was flatter. Flatter and maybe shorter. Be that as it may, in the interim, we’ll go with what we can prove using a yard stick and a level.
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Despite my eldest daughter’s assertions to the contrary- I was young once. There was awhile there when I thought about getting a signed affidavit from her Grandmother attesting that I had not been planted here by aliens. It occurred to me lat
er that doing so was probably a bad idea as that would only introduce the possibility that Grandma was the ringleader behind the entire conspiracy. There are times when all you can do is scratch your head, tuck your antennae back under your cap, assure the kidlet that you love her, and just walk away.
This bedtime story starts in about 8 BC (Before Children) and I was spending the summer with my Grandparents in rural Tennessee. Being a young man (yes!) I was engaging in those sorts of activities that young men do when there’s no school, long hot days, nothing in need of baling, and a notable lack of parental supervision- shooting glass bottles by the burn barrel, throwing rocks at the water moccasins in the creek, driving the old Mazda pickup around on the gravel roads, tromping around in the woods with the dogs or just doing my level best to avoid being around for chores.
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