Throw it out!

My mother was not a pack rat. In fact she was the Anti-Pack Rat. If it didn't have an immediate use or recurring purpose, out it went. She allowed one small cardboard box for Christmas decorations, about the size of a toaster. We kept nothing in the attic; it was a sterile facility for the storage of dust. The basement was bare as well. One lone card table leaned against a whitewashed wall in the unlikely event we had enough company over to require its use. Otherwise there was nothing but a dehumidifier and the washing machine and dryer. Not even a cabinet to store detergent, bleach, and Mrs. Stewart's Bluing. All that stuff was placed beneath the cast iron laundry sink, right out in plain sight.

"Spiders are formed around undisturbed materials" she told me darkly as a child. And I believed her. It made me nervous to think of that card table, which might be harboring a hoard of black widows or brown jumping spiders, ready to overrun the household. So every few weeks I went into the basement to nervously jiggle it. Just to be on the safe side.

The only place she did not enforce her iron rule was the garage. It was a rundown shanty, like something out of Tobacco Row. My dad never parked the car in it, preferring to leave his trusty Ford parked in front of the house on the street, snow removal days be damned. My older brother Billy tinkered with his hot rod jalopy in it, and kept strings of rusting fishing tackle strewed about. Ancient rakes and shovels leaned wearily against the unpainted wooden walls; the storm windows were shunted into it in May, the same time the green garden hose was removed from its hook for leaky summer service. The reel mower lurked in a sunken corner, where snow melt always formed a deep noisome pool during the grey winter months.

My mother was wise to leave that sad hovel alone. She knew how to pick her fights. It was the original garage, from when our house was built in the 1920's; by the time we moved in thirty years later the spiders were already lodged comfortably and an occasional bat roosted in the exposed rafters. All our neighbors gradually replaced their ramshackle garages with brand-spanking new double-wide edifices, but mom and dad refused to spend a dime on ours. Dad just didn't care, and I believe mom was hoping that a wind storm would blow it over some August day or that it would burn down somehow. Then she would be able to raze the ruins, salt the ground, and have it paved over. She would have a flat and barren patch of property to gloat over.

She was an unsentimental and pragmatic woman. Which caused some hard feelings as time went by.

My older brother Billy went to Dunwoody to learn the printing trade, but had to drive a truck for many years before he got a birth in the heavily-unionized printing field. His meager take home pay, on top of several rambustious marriages, kept him rather poor. But he began collecting first edition comic books at an early age -- the first I Love Lucy; the first Monsteroso; even the very first Dobie Gillis. All of them stayed in their original plastic wrapping.

"Those babies are gonna be worth something someday!" he would chortle to me, when he'd come over for a visit between long trucking voyages. He kept them under the basement steps in our house, carefully stacked and inventoried in a plastic tub. When he finally got a coveted union printing job the money began rolling in and he forgot about the comic books under the basement steps.  He bought a lakeside home on Green Lake near Princeton and a Chris-Craft boat and held huge roistering picnics at his place all summer long, under the shade of a grove of butternut trees.

Then one day he waltzed in the door to tell mom he had just come from Shinders Books. They were offering a pretty penny for his first edition comic books.

"You won't find them down there. I threw them out" mom said quietly as he began to trundle down the basement stairs. There followed the longest, most painful silence I have ever experienced while living at home.

"Why?" he finally managed to ask.

"Spiders" mom replied, her eyes mere slits.

Billy turned and walked silently back out the way he came. We didn't see him again until Easter. But by then he was his old jolly self again, having apparently swallowed his resentment in favor of swallowing many slices of my mother's famous Easter ham.

I, too, was a victim of her mania.

To save money while completing the paperwork to go on my LDS mission to Thailand I stayed with my parents for several months after quitting the circus. I brought with me my clown trunk. It was a battered steamer trunk that I picked up at a St. Vincent de Paul up in Canada for a few dollars. I painted it robin's egg blue, and it contained all my clowning paraphernalia. When the official calling at last come from Salt Lake City I took along some of my jester's equipment, including rubber chickens, goo-goo glasses, my makeup kit, my complete wardrobe, and my musical saw. The powers that be in Salt Lake wanted me to do a little busking in Thailand for PR purposes. I left a few irreplaceable items in my clown trunk, which I put in a corner of the basement and covered with a fresh new piece of canvas I bought at the Army Surplus store.

I assumed it would be safe there, since it was such an integral part of my clowning career when I returned in two years. I said as much to mom.

I was wrong. It was gone when, as brown as a nut from the tropical sun and only slightly shaky from several bouts of breakbone fever, I returned to the old manse.

My trunk was nowhere to be found in the basement.

"Spiders?" I asked my mother wearily.

"Spiders" she confirmed.

But there is a cosmic justice in play for mothers who jettison their children's belongings. Many years later she came across a cache of old license plates out in the garage while looking for some bone meal for her roses. I was there helping with the yard work and told her they might be worth something to somebody, but her disgust knew no bounds, and she immediately tossed them into the trash. A few weeks later at a family gathering my brother-in-law Tom said to her:
"Evelyn, I want to talk to you about those old license plates in your garage. I can probably get you fifteen hundred dollars for them from a collector I know."

"I threw them out" she said calmly to Tom. Without a tremor in her voice or glint of moisture in her eye. Game to the last, she was. But for a woman raised in the depths of the Great Depression, who religiously gathered Green Stamps, I knew that the blow had told. And to be honest about the whole thing, I didn't feel bad for her at all.

Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistment bonuses a decade after going to war

Short of troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade ago, the California National Guard enticed thousands of soldiers with bonuses of $15,000 or more to reenlist and go to war.

Now the Pentagon is demanding the money back.

from the Los Angeles Times

When Uncle Sam calls you to duty

he's generous with extra booty.

But when you come back,

a limb or two lack,

he sucks it back like an old cootie. 

Lend Your Energy with Horses

A horse is a huge enterprise;

go into with wide open eyes.

The feeding, the cleaning;

it's all full of meaning.

(I'd rather raise tiny fruit flies)

Clowns in Germany

Creepy clowns have been reportedly menacing residents in Germany with weapons that include chainsaws and a baseball bat, authorities said.

from Time Magazine

In Germany clowns on the loose
have broken the ages-old truce.
They're creeping about
with chainsaws so stout
that herrenvolk yell "What the deuce!"

The Russians want to watch us vote

Election officials in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas say they have denied requests from the Russian consulate to send observers to polling places next month. The Russians, it seems, wanted to study the "US experience in organization of voting process."

from Slate 


The Russians apparently dote
over how we are using the vote.
They'd like to detect
the smallest defect;
we've told 'em to go kiss a goat. 

The Magpie

There have been more than 440 reports of swooping magpie attacks in South Australia on the Magpie Alert website this year, compared with 339 in 2015 and 56 in 2014.

from The Adelaide Advertiser

The magpie does not have an ounce

of pity, but just likes to pounce

on biker and jogger,

and so this here blogger

these Corvidae stoutly denounce! 

The Chicago Cubs

A rabbi who is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post recently hailed the Cubs as “the Jews of the sports world,” an idea seconded by the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, who made a stop at Wrigley Field on a swing through Chicago this month.

from the Wall Street Journal

Consider the sneers and the snubs
endured by the suffering Cubs.
Their hope perseveres
though nobody cheers,
through famine and phonies and flubs!

How ‘Special Sauce’ Moved From Big Macs to Everywhere

When searching for something that's boss
at dinner, forget not the sauce!
Some mayo, some salt,
a pinch of asphalt;
it even perks up Spanish moss!  

A mailman who worked in Decatur

A woman videotaped a US Postal Service worker earlier this week dumping bin after bin of mail in the woods behind her subdivision in Decatur, Georgia.

from CNN

A mailman who worked in Decatur

was rather a lousy curator.

He thought of his letters

as so many fetters,

and dumped them into a green crater. 

Minnesota Snow Child

I am still a Minnesota snow child. The summer fishing and endless bike rides were fine as far as they went. But to me an overnight snowfall was an incomparable gift that turned my existence into a bracing delight.

If you were dreamy enough, as I was back in those pre-Doppler Radar days, you could sense the arrival of the first big overnight snowfall. The sky is battleship gray and the bare elm branches clatter in the wind, which carries the scent of an unflavored sno-cone. On the evening news good old Bud Kraehling is hedging his bets -- not saying it will snow and not saying it won't. But the glint in his eye lets me know he is wishing for it as much as I am.

I can usually see the Weatherball perched atop the Northwestern National Bank building in downtown Minneapolis from my bedroom window. But this night the frost is too thick on the glass pane -- which I take to be another good sign of coming snowfall. Our curmudgeonly oil-burning furnace in the basement clanks like boxcars being connected as it strives to keep our thinly insulated house warm. We have storm windows, but otherwise the only insulation is ancient newspapers, crisped brown, laid along the attic rafters helter-skelter.  

Falling asleep as a kid on a winter night is like being administered a powerful anesthetic in the hospital right before surgery; one second I'm wide awake and full of thoughts, and then it's eight hours later with seemingly no measurable interval between the two points of time. For a delicious moment I look around the room, which is bathed in a bright milky light -- the shine of sunlight reflecting off snow.

A bowl of Malt-o-Meal awaits me in the kitchen, where I sit staring out the windows at the frigid manna. Where once there was nothing but a bitter brown frozen lawn there now sits a quilt of snow. I can't wait to get out into it. My mother scolds unheeded as I play with my cereal, too excited to eat.

Then comes the prodigious ceremony of getting dressed to go out. This takes time and patience. No slick polyester materials back then to shield me from the chill. First come the zippered black rubber galoshes over the shoes. The zipper, of course, is reluctant to cooperate and needs to be rubbed and lubricated with a bar of Fels-Naptha laundry soap. Then a long woolen scarf is wrapped round and round my scrawny neck until it looks and feels like a yoke. My padded wool coat weighs a good ten pounds dry -- once it is wet with melted snow it will double in weight. A wool cap is forced down over my head like a bottle cap, and then the thick woolen mittens are attached to my hands. I've already broken into a sweat as I step out the back kitchen door into the purity of untrodden and untroubled snow.

If it's a school day I trudge through the snow one block to Tuttle Grade School -- imagining all the while I am fighting through a trackless Siberian waste. Is that a polar bear up ahead ready to pounce? No, just old Mrs. Henderson's wheelbarrow carelessly left out in the yard overnight. A file of penguins in the distance resolves itself into other little drudges like myself, waddling along to school.

But, glory be, if it is NOT a school day, I head back to the garage to disinter the snow shovel -- in my case a cast iron coal shovel that weighs almost as much as me. I dig and thrust with this behemoth until I have cleared a path from the garage to the back door, then rest a moment to watch the lines of snow fall silently to the ground as the wind stirs the elm branches. Then I continue my labor into the front until the sidewalks are clear.

Now, I have pondered many years as to why I enjoyed this chore so much. As a general rule, I was loath to lift a finger around the house and had to be threatened and bribed immoderately to do anything. But to me shoveling was a pleasure. Perhaps it was the pristine silence all around me or the deep heavy clang of the shovel as it scrapped the cement. Something tactile it was, that gave me a keen sense of delight. My mother was equally puzzled as to why this one particular chore held me in such a thrall, but she was not going to rock the boat by asking me why I liked doing it. If it ain't broke . . .

Until, of course, I grew up and acquired a bad back. Then shoveling became hateful torture.

School day or not, the most pressing item on the agenda is bushwhacking my best friend Wayne with a snowball. He lives across the street from me, and it is understood by both of us that no warning is given prior to launch. Whoever scores a direct hit first wins. A year older than me, Wayne is wiser than I am in all boyhood things -- but the first strike triumph is always mine. Probably because he is a bit more of a gentleman than I am. When it comes to snowballs, I am an out-and-out cad. I know his habits and schedule well, and I lie in wait behind tree trunk or mailbox to ambush him. The rules then call for a general free-for-all, with targets including other unwary passersby and cars going down the street. Usually as the battle reaches a white hot pitch one of the cars we pelt brakes abruptly and the driver piles out to revenge himself on the little weasels who have scared the bejabbers out of him. That is our cue to melt away like the wily Inuit into the blinding whiteness.

A Minnesota snowfall is an abiding thing; it won't run out on you. So there is plenty of time for snowmen and snow forts and more snowball fights.

Naturally sledding is on the agenda, but it is a challenge in that the nearest park, Van Cleve, is as flat as a pool table. So we take our sleds over to Grandma's Hill -- a very slight hump in Southeast Minneapolis that answers for immediate needs. It's actually a street that crosses a railroad track. My grandmother Daisy lives on that street; hence the moniker 'Grandma's Hill'. The descent is not very spectacular, but sliding across the railroad tracks adds that touch of forbidden danger that a boy craves like candy.

My soggy woolens are freezing up, giving me a stiff Frankenstein's monster walk, so it must be time to head for home. One last snowball is exchanged for friendship's sake and then I'm in the back hall, ruddy-cheeked and on the verge of chilblains. Emerged from my soggy cocoon, I sit down to a big plate of Schweigert wieners -- my mother's traditional meal after the first big snowfall. She serves them with plain macaroni and canned corn on the side. It is food I still eat, at least in my mind, whenever the slings and arrows and bad backs of life become too acute.