Addressing The Small Things

Several months ago, I ran across an article on famous people's last words.  I thought last words were reserved for tombstones, like "I Told Them I Was Sick", but I guess I was wrong.  As it turns out, more than a couple of books have been written containing people's last words.  I guess the authors went around and found people who happened to be near the famous dying person and asked them what they said before they checked out. Some of the quotes are quite grandiose, which makes me suspect that the real final utterances were tampered with for publication.  Others though, have that "real" quality, so you're pretty certain that they weren't altered. Take FDR, whose last words were "I have a terrific headache". And still others are in that middle ground, where you don't know whether or not to believe them. Supposedly, Humphrey Bogart said "I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis", but I don't know ... If he'd said "Gimme another cigarette", I'd have believed that, no problem.

Anyway, the further I got into these quotes, the less famous the people became.  Like who the hell is Richard Feynman, and why should I care if his last words were "I'd hate to die twice.  It's so boring"?  Maybe if I'm Dick's wife, I care.  Otherwise, not so much.  So then I began musing (I love to muse), what if my blog becomes famous after I die, kind of like Van Gogh's paintings? Maybe some author will come searching for Jan and start bugging her about what prolific words I spoke just before I started my dirt nap (hey, this could happen).  She'd better be ready with some snappy quote that will live through the ages.

As it turns out this is no easy task.  I want something that's clever, piquant, droll and solemn that rolls off the tongue easily.  The best thing I've come up with is something I coined just before my big op 18 years ago where a fiendish surgeon rearranged all of my indoor plumbing and when I recovered I found out that I couldn't burp anymore which still pisses me off to this very day.  But that's another story.  Just before they gassed me, I told Jan "See you on the flip side", which I made up on the fly and thought was pretty good.  So good, that I've used it as my standard on all procedures requiring me to lose consciousness ever since.

Good, but I don't think it meets the criteria I've outlined above.  I thought about "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country", but I think that's been taken and I don't want my rep as a world class blogger tarnished by plagiarism.

And it would be just my luck that I would come up with a killer tag line and then die accidentally, giving me no prep time to clear my throat and utter my soon-to-be-famous quote.  Instead, I'd probably say something like "Oh Shit" or "Fuck me", which aren't really suitable for general publication, but if you took a poll of dead people, you would probably find that more than 50 percent of them uttered one of those two phrases right before the lights went out.

So, to cover my bases, I'd better have a good final quote and a good tombstone quote.  I'm still working on the quote, but I think I've got the tombstone nailed.

Silent At Last

You have to admit it.  That's tombstone gold!

Edwinna Scissorhands

Actual conversation between me and my hair cut gal (HCG) this afternoon ...

HCG:  So, how do you want your hair cut?

Me:  The usual, except don't give me Spock sideburns this time.

HCG:  What?  I never give you Spock sideburns!

Me:  Whatever.  So, how're you doing?

HCG:  Oh, it's been terrible!  My dog stepped in a mole hole and broke its leg.

Me:  Mole hole?  What's a mole hole?

HCG:  You know how a mole makes tunnels?  Well, it has to make a hole to get to its tunnel.

Me:  Oh, yeah ... mole hole.

HCG:  Anyway, it broke it's leg and we had to take it to the vet, but it had shoulder damage too, so he had to operate on it and take some junk from somewhere else and graft it into its shoulder and leg.

Me:  Wow, is it going to be all right?

HCG:  Yeah.  The vet said it would probably limp the rest of its life, but its going to be okay otherwise.  My God, it cost us almost three thousand dollars!

Me:  Hold it.  You spent three thousand dollars?  And all you got back was a limping dog?

HCG:  Well, yeah.  What would you have done?

Me:  Put it down.

HCG:  What?!  You mean kill it?  I'll bet if it was your dog, you wouldn't kill it.

Me:  I don't have a dog and if I did and it cost three grand, yes I would.  Shit, you could have bought a robot dog for three thousand dollars ... or three robot cats.

HCG:  Robot dog?  That's stupid.  You're stupid.

Me:  I'm stupid?  I didn't shell out three grand to a vet and all I got back was a limping dog.

HCG:  How would you like me to run these scissors through your ear?

Me:  I wouldn't.

HCG:  (Silence)

Me:  You're going to fuck up my hair, aren't you?

HCG:  Probably.

Touchy.

Spooked

Over the weekend I was watching a program on the Travel Channel named "Ghost Adventures".  It's an incredibly goofy show that's fun to watch, and I'll come back to it in some future post, but as often happens, it pushed my thoughts into an area that is somewhat related ... in a fashion.

Death, superstitions, afterlife, beliefs and fear all tend to jumble together in a section of my mind.  I never can seem to sort these items out one by one and come to a definite conclusion about each of them.  If I could, I suppose I could understand why totally unreasonable things scare me.

Being scared, or more accurately spooked, is something I can't get a handle on.  Why am I afraid of the dark sometimes, but not others?  Why do I avoid certain situations or refuse to do certain things, when I'll do exactly the opposite when practically the same situations or things are presented to me in different circumstances?

I'll give a few examples.  My father died in his bedroom in his own bed.  When we visited my mother this past summer, I refused her offer to use that bedroom.  In fact, I felt a sense of unease when I used the shower in the adjoining bathroom and refused to put my dressing clothes on the bed.  In fact, I wouldn't even touch it. And yet, I had no problem sitting in a chair that he used as his favorite for years.

I used to do feed mill inspections at plants that my company owned.  At one plant, in Bartonville, Illinois, a young man had fallen into a high speed mixer and was torn to pieces.  They found him after the circuit breakers had blown in equipment on down the line and shut everything down.  I visited the plant several months later and asked where the death had happened.  During  my inspection, when I came to that area, instead of taking 10 to 15 minutes to jot down notes on sanitation, I literally ran through it with the hair on the back of neck standing up and fabricated my notes later on.  But on a visit to another mill in New York, where an employee had committed suicide in an isolated work area, I took my time with the inspection and although I knew it had happened, thought little about it.

I suppose that each individual has their own set of levers, switches and buttons that have to be thrown, pulled and pushed in just the right order to induce fear.

Maybe, if I live long enough, I'll figure out my particular sequence.  But until then, I guess I'll just continue to be afraid of the dark.

The Poll Workers

The several years a person spends in adolescence are restless ones.  You're too old to play children's games and too young to develop a serious interest in sex and drugs. As a result, you find yourself in a state of perpetual boredom, particularly during the summer.  My parents tried to keep me busy by having me mow the lawn almost every day, or picking up rocks that never stopped extruding from the Missouri soil.

My mother found a way to completely get rid of me one day by volunteering my services to distribute campaign literature at a polling place.  I'm not sure if this was legal, as I was only 12 years old at the time, but maybe such things didn't matter during those days.  I was told to report to the school that would act as the voting site at 6 in the morning, and I would stay there until the polls closed at 7 pm.  For my time and effort, I would be paid 15 dollars.  As I look on it now, this worked out to about $1.15 per hour, but I had no clue about money at that age, so 15 dollars seemed like a lot to just stand around.

On the morning of the election, my mother dropped me at the school, which sat precisely in the middle of no where, and drove off, saying she would be back to get me that evening.  After a few minutes, another mom drove up and dropped her kid off, who was to be my fellow campaign worker for the day.  Just before the polls opened, a lady drove up and handed us several boxes filled with a two page brochure featuring the candidate whom we would represent.  She gave us no instruction other than "hand these out" and drove away.

We opened our boxes and got our first glimpse of "our guy".  I don't remember the man's name, his party or what office he was trying to capture.  I just recall it was some obscure state position.

The first voters started to show up, and having no real clue of what to do, we just stuck out our hands with the pamphlets and watched as the people ignored us.  After 15 minutes of this, we got our heads together and came up with a catchy phrase to go along with our outreached hands. We decided on "We'd appreciate your vote!" However, our mumbled slogan matched with our prize winning scowls earned us nothing but dirty looks, and we quickly went back to sullenly sticking our pamphlets in people's direction as they walked by.

After several hours of this, we mentioned to each other that we were getting hungry and thirsty.  It was then that it dawned on us that both of our mothers had dropped us off with no food or water.

Following an hour of problem solving, we decided to go into the polling place and ask for some food and water, and also a place to take a leak.  The old bitch running the tables took one look at us and said in no uncertain terms that we were campaign workers and were not allowed inside.  Then she threw us out into the yard.

Voter traffic had slowed to nothing, so we ventured into the fields surrounding the school searching for food and a place to take a piss.  Between us, we came up with a few ears of feed corn, some blackberries and a couple of unripe persimmons.

As the day wore on, it became hotter and we became hungrier and more thirsty.  Delirium set in.  We began doing dramatic readings for each other from the campaign pamphlet and decided that the picture of the candidate closely resembled Peter Potamus, a popular Hanna-Barbera cartoon character at the time.  This was so hilarious that we asked people to vote for Peter Potamus as we tried to distribute the now-despised pamphlets.

"The Candidate"

In the last few hours before the polls closed, we made camp under a tree and fashioned paper airplanes and miniature pirate hats from the hundreds of pamphlets that no one would take.  Finally, my mother arrived to take me home, and I was too exhausted, dirty and sunburned to yell at her for leaving me to die that morning.

As it turns out, I never saw a dime of my promised 15 dollars, but I did learn several valuable lessons from my one and only experience as a campaign worker.

Never trust a politician.  And ... unripe persimmons give you diarrhea.

Chicken Dinner

Recently, I was watching some foodie program on television.  The host solemnly intoned that it was important to know where our food came from.  They went into great detail about how vegetables are picked and processed, but kind of glossed over the animal prep, completely ignoring that all important slaughter step. Having spent over a quarter century in the commercial feed industry, I'm well aware of the process involved in getting that friendly little farm animal to the table, and I conveniently block the more disturbing images from my mind before I dig in.  But when I was a kid, that process was kind of hazy.  As far as I could figure out, one minute old Bossy was looking at you with those big brown eyes, and the next there was a hamburger in front of you.

My mother grew up on a farm, and about three times a month, we'd go out on a Sunday to visit for a few hours. Grandad had about 200 acres and raised cattle and guinea hens to pay the bills.  When we'd pull into the yard, there were always a couple of chickens running around, which I thought were there for the ambiance.

One Sunday, we finished our visit and loaded up to go home.  As we were saying our goodbyes, my mother carried a burlap sack from the back of the house and threw it into the trunk of the car.  I didn't give it much thought, as my grandma was always loading us up with tomatoes, cucumbers and corn during the summer.

When we got home, my mother took the sack out of the trunk and placed it in the garage.  I noticed as she did this, that the sack twitched a bit, but I had other important shit to attend to, so I promptly forgot about it and went on with my business.

I should mention that we had just completed building a house in what was at the time, a pretty nice new subdivision.  In fact, we had moved in only a month before.  We were just getting to know our neighbors, and they seemed to be an agreeable, prosperous lot.

About an hour after we were home, my sisters came running into my room, yelling at me to come look at what mom was doing in the back yard.  The three of us scrambled out the back door and onto the balcony.  Mom was down in the yard, holding the burlap sack at her side. She reached into it and pulled out a live chicken.  She put the chicken on the ground, where it stood stupidly looking around, no doubt thinking "what the fuck is this?" Now, a chicken looked perfectly normal in my grandma's barnyard, but eerily out of place in our back yard in suburbia.  For just a second, I thought she was just going to let the chicken wander around and that we were going to start a chicken ranch.  Could we do that?  What would the neighbors think?

But before I could even finish that thought, mom grabbed the chicken by the neck and began whirling it around like a soft ball pitcher winding up for the throw to the plate.  After several revolutions, the chicken arced halfway across the yard, minus it's head, which was still in my mom's hand.  The chicken landed in an explosion of feathers and gore and began darting aimlessly about the yard, blood spurting from it's neck.  My sisters screamed, I nearly lost control of my bladder and the headless chicken crashed into a tree, where it keeled over and became still.

Aghast, the three of us looked at mom, our mouths working in silent protest.  She merely glanced at the chicken head clutched in her hand and said "there".

The three of us retreated to our safe places, and that evening we had chicken for dinner.  I refused to eat it, which my mom dismissed as "silly".  My sisters were too young for convictions, but they barely touched it either. Instead, we filled up on bread and green beans, which we kept well separated from the vile chicken that sat menacingly on our plates.

The next night, we had chicken casserole, but disguised or not, it was still the same chicken and I wouldn't eat it. The headless hen made it's last appearance the night after, camouflaged as chicken salad.  There were no takers.

That was our first and only experience with "fresh" chicken.  After that, all poultry would arrive at our house in a frozen state, via the IGA.

It is said that in the moment before you die, your life flashes before your eyes.  I'm all but certain that one of the images crossing with me will be that of a headless running chicken.

Thanks Ma ...