The Lost Country

In Star Trek, the future is the Undiscovered Country. The future is the Lost Country for people with memory or cognitive difficulties.

 

My father moved to the lost country. The arduous journey was slow and filled with anguish, especially for my mother. For the first five years, I wasn't sure he was going anywhere. He and Mom sniped at each other about what they had heard on the evening news. We assumed he didn't understand the commentary because he refused to wear his hearing aids. He made mistakes playing his favorite card game. We thought it was because he wouldn't wear his glasses. He stopped calling us by name, and my brother and I compared notes. He told the same story over and over like a pre-recorded loop, and his friends began to avoid him. He stopped using the telephone. He drove to the coffee shop every day like he had a job and had to get to it. He stopped recognizing people and could no longer differentiate between past and present. He would become obsessed with a memory from his youth or childhood and talk about it exclusively, endlessly. He failed the mental cognizance tests at the doctor's office.

He sold his beloved Watusi cattle and got ripped on the price because he couldn't remember which animals were Foundation Pure, 15/16ths or some other lesser cross. What a sad change for a man who loved his cattle as much as his family. When my brother was born, he had told Mom the baby was "as pretty as a newborn calf." A rich compliment from him.




He adopted methods to cope with failing memory. If someone came to visit, he didn't have much to say, but what he did say made perfect sense. "Good to see you." "Glad you dropped by." "Come back again sometime." If he contributed to the conversation at all, it was in the context of an old memory.

When it became obvious he wasn't the same man he used to be, Mom gave me a clipping to read:

   'Don't try to make me understand. Let me rest and know you're with me. Kiss my cheek and hold my hand. I'm confused beyond your concept. I am sad and sick and lost. All I know is that I need you to be with me at all cost. Do not lose your patience with me. Do not scold or curse or cry. I can't help the way I'm acting, can't be different though I try. Just remember that I need you, that the best of me is gone. Please don't fail to stand beside me, love me til my life is done.' Author Unknown

He became belligerent and couldn't be reasoned with. He ridiculed us for saying he shouldn't drive in a blizzard. He didn't notice that his clothes were dirty or foul smelling and refused to bathe. He became incontinent. He declared he was perfectly content with the situation. We were the ones with the problem.

He didn't take that journey alone. My mother was right beside him. She treated him kindly and gently. She kept him presentable. At the proper time, she took the car keys away from him. If he wanted to go drink coffee, she took him. She did everything in her power to maintain a semblance of normalcy and routine. She gave him little chores to do, like setting the table or taking out the trash, and stopped expecting him to be able to mow the grass or change the oil.



With her own strength rapidly fading, my mother made the heart-wrenching decision to move him to long-term care. He adapted well to the new country where they allowed him to wear his cowboy boots and listen to Johnny Cash on Alexa. He thought he was in a hotel with a great restaurant. He was never able to find his room by himself. He watched Lawrence Welk on TV but didn't know how to change the channel. Someone had to remind him to use the toilet. He was easy to get along with.

In the dining room, he hesitated to eat the food placed before him, because he knew he didn't have cash on him. If someone sat with him and said the restaurant was running a tab, he ate with gusto. He always offered his food to someone else if he noticed they weren't eating. He observed that the restaurant catered to the elderly. In fact, he became more talkative and occasionally knew my name.  

Mom spent every day with him. Since she didn't drive after dark, they had a daily argument when she left. He wanted to go with her. When she pointed out that she wasn't able to care for him any longer, he reasonably suggested that she stay there and he would go home. The nursing staff finally asked her to stop telling him when she was leaving.  

I expected the end of the journey to last longer. Two and a half months after entering long-term care, he died of a massive stroke. The personality, mannerisms, and wit of the man I called Dad died years earlier.

NOTE:  If someone in your family can't remember what year it is, the name of the President, what they ate for breakfast, stops liking their favorite activities, or exhibits any of the behavior above, I urge you to seek medical help for them.   https://alz.org/

The Man Who Was Born Twice

My father was born in 1933 in Opelousas, Louisiana. His birth certificate says so. His parents, the ones who raised him, lived in Iuka, Kansas. They didn't meet him until he was five years old. In that five year span there is little known of his life. Somehow a woman named Williams brought him to Kansas. There are two likely scenarios. Either his birth mother up and gave him to this woman, or an agency something like today's social services removed him from the home and placed him in the custody of the Williams lady.

Once he was in Kansas, he ended up at the orphanage at Newton with a different name from the one on his birth certificate. This is a mystery.  

My grandparents already had a five-year-old daughter. She was as cute as a bug and had won a pretty baby contest. But they yearned for another baby and they weren't having any luck. Eventually, they made an appointment with the orphanage and met with the administrator.  Grandma told me she could hear babies crying while the woman lied and claimed there weren't any babies available. However, there was a little boy she'd like for them to meet.

Back in the day, the orphanage was situated on a working farm which provided meat, milk, eggs, and garden produce for their sustenance as well as an income from livestock and crops. She and granddad walked around the area with the shy child. Eventually, they came to a pen of cattle, and the little guy climbed up on the fence.

"I like those cows."

That's all it took to convince Grandpa he had found his son.  One look had melted Grandma's heart and kicked her nurturing instincts into overdrive.

Even after reading the adoption decree it is unclear how or why the orphanage had custody of my dad. However, they swore out an affidavit in court that they had the legal right to release my father to my grandparents. I wonder, now that there is no one to ask, if anyone thought to ask that child if he would like to go home with these strangers.

His new parents immediately changed his name to one of their choosing. For several years the family was subject to visits to make sure the adoptee was being treated correctly. Dad was a rough and tumble child and sometimes he was a little banged up. My grandmother lived in a constant state of anxiety that she could lose him.

When dad was nineteen, she had a new birth certificate filed with the State of Louisiana. Nearly all the vital statistics were the same except for the names of the parents. Finally, she had written proof he was her son and no one could take him away from her.

Mint Juleps

Grandma Selma raised spearmint. It grew in a two-foot wide strip of dirt between the foundation of her house and the sidewalk. Mint is a perennial which spreads by runners which live just under the surface of the soil. The walkway prevented the plants from escaping and taking over the yard. Mint will grow in the shade, but it thrives in sunlight unless it gets too dry.

When we purchased our home, she graciously allowed me to transplant a few sprigs with a warning to keep it contained. I needed some greenery on the barren north side of the garage. Just in case it tried to get away, I made a border of bricks, burying them at an angle about 6 inches deep.  The mint transplanted well and stayed where I put it the first year.

The following year the vigorous underground runners crept up to the bricks, grew right over the top of them and took root on the other side.  The next year I chopped some out and gave it to my dad. The mint grew as fast as the recipe for Herman Friendship Cake. The more I pulled out and gave away, the more it spread until eventually a 10 X 20 area of my flower garden was knee deep in fragrant mint.

And it was durable! Kids, dogs, cats, nothing hurt it. We had a flock of ducks that liked to waddle through the patch catching the insects that were attracted to the plants. My dad used it as a mosquito repellent. In the early summer evenings, before he checked on his cattle, he would rub a handful of leaves on his arms and neck to keep the pesky bloodsuckers away.

After baking in the sun all his life, his skin must have been tougher than mine. I tried his all-natural bug dope once when I was mowing. I ended up staying in the house with what amounted to a chemical burn from the volatile oils in the leaves.

I gave up trying to corral the mint and let it grow, occasionally tricking my friends into taking some starts. Just for fun, I made mint jelly. You are supposed to serve it with lamb. Since I didn't know how to prepare lamb, I gave the confection away to anyone who would take it.  Dropping a few leaves in boiling water makes an all-natural air freshener. It is easy to dry and store for use in the winter. Just pick it before it blooms.

I received a phone call from a lady who identified herself as the wife of our meter reader. She had learned through him that we had a bed of spearmint. (I bet his shoes smelled like mint every month because he had to wade through it to get to the meter.) She explained that their daughter was getting married in a few weeks and that she and the bridegroom wanted to drink mint juleps at the reception. This lady and her husband had mint juleps at their own wedding.

She went on to say that they had checked into ordering mint leaves from a florist. Unfortunately, if they had to pay floral prices, they wouldn't be able to afford the drinks. Getting to the point, she asked if I would consider selling them some mint leaves.

Sell them? Lady, you can HAVE some. Would you like some plants so you can grow it yourself? Her husband must have told her how much mine had spread over the years, as she quickly assured me all she wanted was fresh leaves.

Oh, wait. I can't give this lady any of my mint, especially if it is going into beverages. My conscience wouldn't allow it. I sheepishly told her about the kids, and dogs, and ducks. Especially the ducks.

Undaunted, she assured me there was no problem.

No, really, ma'am. You don't understand about ducks. Ducks poop everywhere they go. Even if they haven't pooped on the mint, their feet are dirty, and they have walked on it. Really, I can not let you have any leaves.

Her daughter must have really had her heart set on drinking mint juleps at her wedding because I was informed any foreign substance would wash right off.

A couple of weeks later my meter reader, along with his wife, daughter and future son-in-law, showed up and picked mint while I stood by wringing my hands and wondering if duck poop caused salmonella or botulism. Did people catch typhoid fever these days? Apparently, my fears were unfounded. I didn't hear of an outbreak of food poisoning.

I planted the first spearmint starts in 1976. During the extreme drought of 2010 through 2012, a lot of the plants died. I still have a few plants in the shade of the garage and have been encouraging those to spread. By next summer it should fill in the gaps enough to start trying to give it away again. 

If anyone in my area wants to make a mint julep, I no longer have ducks.  :*)

Driving Lessons

My grandfather always drove a pickup with standard transmission and a stick shift. He was one of those old farmers who drove real slow and drifted onto the wrong side of the road while he checked out the crops. He didn't drive much faster on the highway, but he did stay on his side of the pavement. 

Since his pickup had four gears, he used all of them even though he seldom drove more than 30 mph.  Also, he had large feet and was in the habit of resting his size 13's on the clutch pedal. He burned out a clutch on the average of once a year.

He and my dad rented a pasture to graze their cattle. It was a picturesque spot with a creek running through it. His in-laws, my great-grandparents, lived in a modest house on the property.  It was a lovely spot for a picnic or wiener roast.

I was twelve years old on one of the times everyone in the family had gathered there. He took me for a ride in the pasture where he aimlessly drove in circles and figure eights. I knew we weren't counting cattle because they had all moseyed off to another section of grass. He went through the gear sequence a couple of times without ever topping 10 mph. 

With no warning, he took the pickup out of gear, coasted to a stop, and got out. 

"Okay. When you can change gears without making a screeching noise bring it back to the house."  He turned and walked off toward the house with his long legs eating up the ground while I sat in stunned silence.

Wait. Come back. You were giving me a driving lesson? All sorts of uncharitable thoughts whirled through my mind as I contemplated running after him demanding to know why he hadn't mentioned that I was being schooled or that there would be a pop quiz. Instead, I reluctantly slid across the bench seat and adjusted it forward until I could reach the pedals.

I had been driving the car ever since I got tall enough to see over the steering wheel at age ten, but this was a different situation. The car drove itself while I steered and gave it some gas.  Driving the pickup involved an intricate ballet of using two feet to manipulate the brake, clutch, and gas. One hand finessed the stick shift into the proper gear while the other stayed on the steering wheel. 

I already had a pretty good idea that I didn't want to shift from a forward gear into reverse. But how was I supposed to find the gears? Fortunately, the shifting pattern was printed on the knob of the stick. Gritting my teeth and hoping I was shifting into low, I moved the lever up and to the left, gave it some gas and eased out on the clutch pedal. The pickup lurched a little but didn't die on the spot or let out any audible complaints. 

I was a natural at this driving stuff. Before long I was running through the gears although I knew perfectly well from comments my dad had made that one shouldn't use the higher gears at low speeds. 

HA!  Take that, Old Man. Joyfully, I steered toward the gate and eased out onto the dirt road. Everyone was looking at me a few minutes later when I turned into the driveway. I was feeling pretty cocky by then. I was running out of driveway when it occurred to me I didn't know how to make the pickup stop, at least not gracefully. I put my foot on the brake and it died. 

Oh, well. At least I didn't run into my great-grandparents ancient 1940's sedan. I got out of the pickup and sat down at the bonfire. Grandpa didn't say a word to me about my driving, and I didn't say anything to him either.

Years later, sitting around with my cousins, reminiscing about the grandparents, I related this story. My two oldest boy cousins perked up and said he had pulled an identical stunt on them when they were about the same age.

Open Container

My mother is a teetotaler. If that word has fallen out of use, it means she doesn't drink liquor; she abstains from alcohol altogether. The simplest reason is that she doesn't like the taste or smell of the stuff. Second, it makes people act funny; it causes them to lose control of their good sense. The most important reason she has for never drinking is the fact alcohol has a way of ruining lives, families, and finances.

She doesn't get on her high horse and preach about the curse of drink. People can make their own mistakes. She doesn't judge.

That's not to say she didn't have some colorful relatives who were known to imbibe too much. At an occasion at her parent's house when my brother and I were small, some of the men were passing around a bottle of cheap booze. They had already loosened up a bit, and someone asked my grandmother if she wanted a drink. Read my 6-11-18 post about the goat in the house to find out what a good sport she was.

She good-naturedly abandoned the cooking and sat at the table with the guys where they poured her a drink. None of these people had ever heard of a highball glass or a shot glass. They poured a generous amount of undiluted rot gut into a water glass, and she proceeded to drink it like it was water. My dad recalls she was quickly on her way to dancing on the table when my brother, who was about four years old at the time, wandered into the kitchen.

"Gwammaw," he said in an innocent voice, "that's whicky."

She put the glass down and left the table to the sound of several male voices calling to the females to keep the kids out of the kitchen.

My mom spent twenty-two years working at a restaurant where the owner was in the habit of hitting the bottle during the evening shift. It was his own bottle and some people wouldn't allow their high school aged kids to work there because they didn't want the youths exposed to drinking. This was before 'liquor by the drink' laws passed in Kansas. Everyone in the restaurant knew how much he had been drinking by how loudly he sang. He only knew one song:  Happy Birthday.

When I was in high school, a craze for a holiday dish swept through the area. Everyone wanted the recipe. It was called Bourbon Sweet Potatoes. What exactly is bourbon? Quite simply, it's whiskey distilled from at least 51% corn and other grains, and aged in new charred oak barrels. 'Corn squeezins' was the slang during Prohibition.

Corn squeezins in the sweet taters? No worries, all you teetotalers. The alcohol cooks off in the heat from the oven. Or does it?

In their website What's Cooking America, the authors state that anywhere from 4 to 78 percent of alcohol remains in food after it is cooked. The results depended on the temperature and area of the cooking vessel not to mention the density of the food, such as cake batter. However, at the end of the article they cite the following author:

James Peterson, a cookbook writer who studied chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, stated in his encyclopedic cookbook called Sauces:

You need to cook a sauce for at least 20 to 30 seconds after adding wine to it to allow the alcohol to evaporate. Since alcohol evaporates at 172°F (78°C), any sauce or stew that is simmering or boiling is certainly hot enough to evaporate the alcohol.

I'm confused. Does the alcohol completely evaporate or not? Nearly everyone who sampled the sweet potato dish thought it was divine, couldn't taste any liquor, and decided no spirits lurked in the food to cast their wicked spell. My mom wanted to make it for Thanksgiving.

Ah, now she had a problem. How could this lady of high moral standards walk into an establishment that sold spirits and purchase even a small bottle? Someone might see her. In a flash of inspiration, she asked her boss if he would sell her some bourbon out of his bottle. He was a jolly old guy who never turned down a reasonable request. He pointed out that without a liquor license he could get in a lot of trouble if he sold it to her, so it was a gift.

Armed with the recipe, a measuring cup (as though there wouldn't be such a thing in a restaurant kitchen) and a pint mason jar, she stood by as he doled out the prescribed amount. She put the container in her handbag and took it home with her at the end of her shift. Back at home, she left the jar on the kitchen counter.

"What's this?" my dad asked.

"It's whiskey for a recipe I'm making for Thanksgiving dinner. You stay out of it."

"Where'd you get it? The only booze that comes in a jar is moonshine, and it's illegal."

"Harlan gave it to me."

Dad twisted the lid off, gave a sniff to the high quality contents and raised his eyebrows. "You drove home with this jar on the car seat?"

"It was in my purse."

"I'll rephrase the question. You drove home with this open bottle within arms' reach of you?"

"What difference does it make? It's not open, or wasn't until you sniffed it. The lid was on it."

"It's an open container. It's not sealed. You could have been arrested if you'd been stopped."

"Why would anyone arrest me for bringing an ingredient for a recipe home with me?  I wasn't drinking it."

"It doesn't matter." Dad's voice rose an octave as it always did when he argued with my mom. "It's an open container. It was accessible when it was next to you on the car seat. It's part of the drinking and driving law."

He never convinced her she had broken the law. The distinction between carrying a mason jar of booze in her purse or in the trunk sounded ridiculous to her. He didn't even try to get into the ramifications of the jar not being labelled.

The sweet potatoes were delicious, and I'm sharing the famous recipe with you.  Have a wonderful Thanksgiving whether you make this dish or not.

Bourbon Sweet Potatoes

4 pounds fresh sweet potatoes, cooked and mashed

(you can save a lot of time by opening a couple of two-pound cans)

1/2 cup butter, softened

1/2 cup Bourbon (your choice of brand)

1/3 cup orange juice

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon apple pie spice or allspice

Add in order and mix well.  

Line a large, greased casserole dish with pineapple rings (1 can, drained). Spread the above mixture over the pineapple. Sprinkle with walnut or pecan pieces.

Bake 45 minutes at 350F.  

At the end of the 45 minutes turn on the broiler. Remove the casserole from the oven and sprinkle it with mini marshmallows. Place it under the broiler until the marshmallows are lightly browned. Watch closely.

This dish reheats well with the Thanksgiving leftovers.
Bon appetit.

Fly Away

Before the use of designer herbicides that target specific weeds or Round-up® Ready soybeans, a genetically modified crop which is resistant to glyphosate, farmers relied on pre-plant herbicides and  tillage to prevent and control unwanted weeds. In 1984 we had an outbreak of cockleburs in a soybean field we rented which was directly across the road from my in-laws' house.

A weed is any unwanted plant. It might have an economic benefit in some other setting, but in a field of corn, beans, wheat, flax, canola, or milo, for example, they are destructive. (See my 7-16-18 post about pigweeds.) Besides growing in the wrong place at the wrong time, the weed will drop seeds at the end of the growing season creating a worse problem in subsequent years. In our soybean field the cockleburs were stealing valuable nutrients and moisture.

What are cockleburs and what do they look like?  Click this link to see what mature seed pods look like. I believe George de Mestral, the inventor of Velcro®, had similar burrs in mind when he decided to create his hook and loop fastener. The burs are famous for fastening onto animal fur and will catch a ride on most fuzzy fabric as well. I didn't know it at the time, but all parts of the plant are poisonous to mammals. Although they are picky about where they grow, the plants are self-pollinating and like most weeds take advantage of favorable conditions.

The conditions were very favorable in our irrigated soybean field, and a large area where seeds had lain dormant in the ground had sprouted. The weeds could not be cultivated out. Too much damage would be inflicted on the leafy soybean plants. Since cockleburs have shallow roots making them easy to pull and I was young and enthusiastic, I decided to rogue the field myself.

The trouble lay with my two-year-old son. He was at that age when he didn't want to let Mommy out of his sight. He didn't want to stay in the house with Grandma either. He sure didn't want to take a nap. He wanted to help.

I had numerous conversations trying to make a toddler understand why he couldn't help and why it was important for him to stay with Grandma while I worked. I gave up on the project the day I looked up to see my mother-in-law chasing him down the road.

"How am I going to get the cockleburs out of this field?" I asked him.

He had the perfect solution.

"Don't worry, Mommy. The cocklebirds will grow up and fly away."

Oreos

Growing up we had silly house rules for various games, but one set-in-stone rule for life. You do not tell lies. You couldn't water it down and make it a fib, or a story, or any other word which equated with untruths.  Thou Shalt Not Lie.

Liars were punished. Sometimes, just the thought of being punished was dreadful enough to tell the truth, even if you knew you were going to get in trouble anyway for something you did.

One day when my brother and I were about 4 and 6, or maybe 5 and 7, our mother discovered Oreo cookies on the dining room table. The first no-no was that no one asked mom if they could please have a cookie. Egads, the soft yummy filling was missing. Who ate the middle out of the Oreos and left the cookie in plain sight? 

My brother was the closest and he was questioned by Mom. He knew he was innocent, so he threw me under the bus, (a phrase that won't be coined for half a century). 

"She did it." He's pointing at me and I'm wondering what I did.

"Lisa, did you eat the middle out of these cookies and leave the outsides laying here?"

My Mom is looking at me with that scary, mean mom face and I didn't know why.  I hadn't done anything wrong. Therefore, my brother was lying.

"I didn't do it. He did it." I pointed at him to make sure she knew which one of my only brothers I was talking about.

This circular logic revolved around the room a couple of times with mom threatening to get the yardstick and switch us both when my little brother just happened to look at Dad.

Canary feathers were clinging to his lips.  

"Daddy did it," he exclaimed.

Mom apologized to us and asked Dad if he was going to let her punish us.

I never was satisfied with the answer he gave.

You Said WHAT to Grandma?

CAUTION: This content is not G-rated.

My brother graduated from college in 1979 with a chemical engineering degree. Then began the job hunt. Without naming any corporations, he interviewed with a firm that manufactured paper products. Our grandmother was anxious to hear about the company and whether he had a chance to land a job. When she learned the primary product was baby diapers, she wasn't as enthusiastic. She couldn't imagine that a large plant would limit themselves to one line and insisted on knowing what else they made.

My brother was as vague as possible and admitted that they did make other stuff. 

What other stuff? Grandma demanded specifics.

Later, my brother said he didn't want to tell her, but she made him.

In the 1970's, if a man didn't want to talk about unmentionable feminine hygiene, he could just say Kotex, and everyone got a pretty good idea what he meant without going into greater detail. There were other brands, but you get the picture.


"They make Kotex, Grandma."
 
Grandma's lips snapped shut, and she dropped the subject. Forever. By the way, he didn't take that job.

Today, kids aren't so reticent about what they say around their grandparents. For instance, last year my son and daughter and their respective spouses played Cards Against Humanity with my mother. If you aren't familiar with that game, I beg you not to look it up.

According to their own press:
Cards Against Humanity is a party game for horrible people. Unlike most of the party games you've played before, Cards Against Humanity is as despicable and awkward as you and your friends.
The game is simple. Each round, one player asks a question from a black card, and everyone else answers with their funniest white card.

Wikipedia says:
Cards Against Humanity is a party game in which players complete fill-in-the-blank statements using words or phrases typically deemed as offensive, risqué or politically incorrect printed on playing cards.

Anyway, these four thirty-somethings convinced my 80-year-old mother to play. Ah-hem. My brother and I played as well.  

Grandma was a good sport. I was offended by how well she embraced the perverted nature of the game. It was just wrong.

I don't know who won. I don't know if we kept score. I think the game is over when someone laughs so hard, they puke.

The Goat Who Ran Out of Gas

My grandfather on my mother's side was a backyard mechanic and ran a little shop from his farm. We're talking subsistence farming on 40 acres, raising alfalfa, a handful of pigs, a milk cow, and hens.  He rented a pasture where he had a modest cow/calf herd. 

In the mornings, when my grandma left for her job in the school lunchroom, half the neighborhood men convened at his house.  After drinking a couple of pots of black as tar coffee made in a glass percolator on the stove top, they adjourned to his shop and wasted away another half of the morning smoking roll-your-own and telling stories. (Boy, did my brother ever get in trouble for repeating a word he heard!) The shop was dark and grimy. Everything had a generous coating of black axle grease or motor oil on it. He didn't own anything modern like a parts washer, so there were dishpans of black, oily gasoline sitting on the floor for rinsing off bearings and the like. I always worried those men would burn the place down with their matches or the ash off their cigarettes. 

Each fall it was a combined effort to chop enough sorghum to fill everyone's silo to feed their cattle through the winter.  Each man had a job they knew very well and they went from farm to farm until it was done. One of the neighbors was also a first cousin of my grandfather. His name was Orle. I don't know exactly what was wrong with him. Easy explanation was that he was 'simple'. He always crowded into a persons space and got right in their face. If he asked you a question, he didn't wait for an answer, but would say Huh? way down in his throat. He kept that up until he got an answer. Once, my dad decided he would just ignore him.  Dad lost. Another neighbor was a cousin by marriage. He had a bird dog named Jack that stuck its nose in my crotch every time I got near it. Not exactly germane to the story. 

These three cousins plus two other neighbors usually filled silo together. They used an ensilage cutter much like this. One day they were taking a lunch break, sitting around on the ground under some shade, and a goat kept trying to get into everyone's lunch pail. My grandfather sarcastically asked his neighbor what he would take for that goat since he was so proud of it. He said a quarter and Orle (the simple one) reached into his pocket, threw the man a twenty-five cent piece and hollered SOLD. The joke was on grandpa, and this bunch made sure the goat went home with him at the end of the day. 

I don't know what kind of goat it was. I expect a meat breed. It had horns that curved back and seemed pretty big to a 7-year-old. It must have been someone's pet. My brother and I named him Billy. He stayed around the yard and didn't get out on the road. We tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to pull a little red wagon by tying a rope from the handle to his horns. Technically, he pulled it, because it moved at great speed when he ran off.  On the other hand, the wagon was bouncing on its side, and my brother and I were in a tangle on the ground. Not to be thwarted, we tried it a few more times and decided Billy didn't have enough training. 

After retrieving the wagon and rope, my dad took Billy by the horns and led him into Grandma's HOUSE. The goat was already upset from the wagon treatment. The results were worse than the time Dad tucked a thirty-pound pig under each arm and let them loose in the kitchen. 

My brother and I had been outside recovering from the wagon wreck. Hearing shouts, we ran to the house. When the goat's hooves hit the hardwood floor, it went spraddle-legged. The more it struggled to stand, the crazier it got. It also lost control and rained goat droppings all over the dining room floor. 

Soon we were laughing, jumping up and down, trying not to step in anything, and generally adding to the chaos. My mom screeched at my dad and took a rolled up newspaper to the goat. Dad told her it wasn't the goats fault, so she brandished the paper at him. My grandpa collapsed into a chair and held his feet off the floor as he clutched his ribs. "It's playing marbles!" he guffawed. When the over-excited animal was back outside, my grandma cleaned up the mess. She never did get mad at my father for any of his tricks. My Mom had serious words with my Dad, but he never did quit grinning.

Billy did everything that goats in children's storybooks did. It ate tin cans, for instance. We thought he was great.  He had one talent, or vice. He liked to hang out with the guys in the shop. He lapped up gasoline out of the pans on the floor. The first time I saw that I was sure he would die.

One sad day we went to see Grandpa and Grandma and couldn't find Billy. We looked everywhere. We were frantic.
 

My dad told my brother and me that Billy had wandered away from the house, ran out of gas, and couldn't get back home. 

My brother and I were traumatized by Billy's disappearance. We imagined dreadful scenarios of him getting run over by a truck, or laying down in some distant field and starving. We talked about him all the time. I mean until we were in our 30's. Really.

Several years ago, I got in my dad's face and told him I was a big kid now. I could take the truth. What happened to Billy?  He laughed and told me. I called my brother up and bragged that I found out what happened to the goat. Then I kept him in suspense for two years before I gave him the answer. Dad played along and kept it on the QT as well.

I won't be so mean to you, dear reader. A neighbor's grandchildren came to his farm for the summer, and they took the goat. From there? I don't know.

HOUSE RULES

My Dad's family was crazy for two things: fishing and card games.  The fishing lure (pun intended) skipped a generation with me. I still enjoy a rousing game of 10 point pitch or Aggravation.

I learned to count and add with Dominos. As soon as my brother and I had learned the rudiments of the game with Double Sixes, Dad graduated us to Double Nines. The only indication we ever got from him that we had accidentally played a tile that scored was if he asked if we wanted that count. When we got older, we learned to watch him like a hawk because he would claim he scored when he hadn't or write down 25 points when he had only made 10 or 15.

When we played Aggravation, which was already a fast-paced game, we discovered it would move a lot faster if every player had his own set of dice, instead of waiting for the preceding player to politely pass them on. 🎲🎲🎲🎲🎲🎲🎲🎲

Here are the House Rules for board games.



 Rule One:  Watch Dad.  He Cheats.

Rule Two: Don't let your playing pieces roll off the table.  All other players may move their pieces at warp speed until you get back to the table.  If your playing piece/s roll/bounce into the floor furnace, you are out of the game.

Rule Three: Don't repeat any words Dad said.





A genius invented 10-point pitch. There are an astronomical number of combinations of hands that can be dealt. The human element of players and their bids increase the combinations to an unfathomable level.

House Rules for card games are a little different.

Rule Four: The object of the game is not to win.  The goal is to keep my dad from winning. Period.

Rule Five: If you are in the hole (have a negative score) and shoot the moon (a bid worth 20), and make the bid, you lack 1 point of getting out of the hole. This is a time-honored tradition dating back to the day my grandfather proclaimed the rule when my Dad and my aunt were kids.
Just FYI, going SET means not making your bid. If you bid 7 and fail to get 7 points, you go SET. 7 points are taken off your running score. That's how you can be IN THE HOLE. 

This looks like a good hand. I'm a cautious player. I'd bid 6 in Spades and hope my partner had some trumps. I know people who would bid the maximum 10 on these cards. Why not go crazy and shoot the moon?

Mom and Dad belonged to a card club for about 50 years. They met once a month at alternating homes. In the early years, the host couple gave out prizes for high, low and the Galloper.  If you bid 7 and made it, you wrote your name on the Galloper prize. Whoever had their name on it the most, took it home at the end of the evening. In case of a tie, they drew for high card. Most of the prizes were white elephants, especially low prize. When the lottery was legalized, $2 tickets became popular prizes. 

My folks taught my kids to play pitch when they got big enough to hold the cards. I think my daughter was about twelve before she caught on to what 'going set' meant. We thought it was odd that she didn't react to losing points. One day it hit her that every time she or her partner went set, they lost that many points.  "WHAT!!" she shrieked. After that, when someone lost a hand, my Dad would mimic her.

I told one of my Dad's friends what a low-down cheat he had been when my brother and I were kids.  
"You learned to pay attention to the game, didn't you?" he said.

PRANKING MY BROTHER

Generally, I don't recommend playing practical jokes on people who know you well. They know how to get even.

When I was teetering on forty, a flyer from a well-known photography company appeared in our mailbox.

             FREE GLAMOUR SITTING

Free stuff.  I'm in, with my husband's enthusiastic approval. A lot of ladies I knew responded to the invitation. Students from an area cosmetology college did our hair (but only the part around your face that would show in the photo) and applied makeup. The photographer provided racks of accessories, from pearls and lace to denim and rhinestones, and feather boas.

About six weeks later they rolled back through town with the proofs where we learned the fine print. I wasn't the only one who mistakenly thought I'd get some free pictures. My husband was persuaded to purchase a framed canvas of his favorite, and we bought a couple of loose 8 x 10s and all the proofs.

I gave one to my mother and told her it was my thirty-nine and holding shot. There is something about sitting in an alluring pose with a professional photographer tilting your chin just so, and giving you a specific spot to look at that changes your entire demeanor, especially when combined with soft lighting and out-of-focus effects. Mom spent way too many words saying she didn't recognize her daughter. She said I ought to send one of the poses to my brother and see if he knew who it was.

My cousin from Denver just happened to be visiting. So we hatched a plan. At first, the idea was to anonymously mail the picture from an address he wouldn't recognize.  My cousin graciously said one of her friends wouldn't mind if we used her return address. Naturally, she would need to carry the envelope home with her and have it postmarked from the city.

Then I got the idea of messing with him. What kind of message could we write on the back that would make my brother think a strange woman had sent him a picture of herself?  We considered and discarded the idea of saying something like 'Wish you were here.'  We didn't want his wife to accuse him of something he hadn't done. Finally, we settled on 'Thinking of you.' My cousin wrote on the back of the picture in her lovely script and dotted the i's with cute little hearts. 💜 💜

Two days later it belatedly occurred to me we had excluded a vital participant from the joke. I called my sister-in-law and confessed what we had done. She promised to keep an eye on the mail. Several days went by. I had stopped imagining possible scenarios of my brother pulling that picture out of the envelope.

His wife called. In a barely audible voice, she said, "Lisa, the picture is here. How long am I supposed to keep him guessing?"
I said I thought a week or ten days would be about right.
"I can't do that. He's about to stroke out," she said.

An hour later he called.  "You got me good.  REAL GOOD."

He went on to tell me that when he opened the envelope, his first instinct was to stuff the package in the garbage disposal. (It probably had something to do with another story about strange high heels in his hotel room. He was innocent!) He couldn't destroy it because the mail was on the counter where his wife had laid it. She was sure to ask what was in the manila envelope. By that time she had sauntered into the kitchen, and he managed to choke out that someone was playing a rotten trick on him.

First, he investigated the return address. A grade school friend lived in the Denver area. He looked the address up, and it didn't match. It didn't occur to him that our relatives in Colorado would play a joke on him. Then he combed through the business cards he had exchanged with female engineers over the past few years. None were from Denver. None should be sending him enticing pictures.


Meanwhile, his wife had nonchalantly examined the picture and read the intriguing message on the reverse. "I think this looks like your sister," she blabbed.

He told me he scrutinized the photo even more closely and disagreed with her. He retrieved his family memento shoebox, and a magnifying glass, and compared every picture he had of me to the one in his hand. Through the process of comparison, he proved the glamour image wasn't me.

About that time their daughter came home from school. My sister-in-law stuck the picture in her face and said, "Quick. Who is this?"

"Aunt Lisa," she responded.

As practical jokes go, that one was a great success. I spent the next ten years waiting for him to get even. He sure knows how to keep a person in suspense.

Watusi Cattle

My father raised Watusi for many years. These domesticated African cattle should not be confused with Longhorns. The Ankole-Watusi have been registered as a breed in the U.S. since 1983.  Dad was interested in them for three reasons. The first was his life-long abiding fascination with anything different or unusual. The second was the fact the meat is lean, and much like venison with no marbling. Third, the cows have easy births dropping forty pound calves. Rarely does an owner lose a cow or calf or require a visit from the vet.

There are two ways to describe the Ankole-Watusi.  Foundation Pure which means 100% pure bloodlines.  Or, Native Pure, which means a crossbred animal has been bred back to pure until it is 15/16ths Watusi DNA.

Dad also liked their disposition.  Although they have the most massive horns of any cattle breed, they aren't considered aggressive.  The lyre-shaped horns are the animal's air-conditioner with excess body heat dispersed through the blood vessels in the horns.

      I admit to being a little anxious when Grandpa led the kids among the herd to this baby.

Watusi need their space.  If too closely confined, they will swing their horns at one another demanding more room.  They also use their horns to brush flies away.  Most cattle would use their tail. They can accidentally knock a person down when they suddenly swing their head.

After they are butchered, the skull and horns make great decor. Dad donated a set of horns to many a local fund-raiser.

 
If you would like to see more images or learn more, here are a couple of links.


https://livestockconservancy.org/index.php/heritage/internal/ankole-watusi
http://www.awir.org/Ankole Watusi International Registration+

UHT OH, ADWIAN

In Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank, the title is a secret signal between a high-ranking Air Force officer at Strategic Air Command in Nebraska, and his brother back home in Florida. It is a bone-chilling warning that nuclear war is impending. When I was growing up, our family had its own code for disaster. Thankfully, we never had to use it because of mushroom clouds on the horizon. My brother was a Boy Scout. He participated in all the mysterious activities Boy Scouts do while sisters stay at home. Cool stuff like wearing a uniform to meetings, camping out, practicing interesting skills, learning to cook over a campfire. It sounded like fun. He came home from one such adventure very excited about a skit two other campers had performed for the entertainment of the troop. I should stop right here and say this skit may have been published exclusively for Scouts in a pamphlet suitable for the age group. Never having been initiated into the arcane world of scouting, I don't know that for certain. Without concrete proof I will give the credit to that prolific writer, ANONYMOUS. Despite the fact the original skit required two performers, my brother decided he could act both parts (three parts, if you counted the off-stage sound effects). He persuaded Mom and Dad to rearrange the dining room into a suitable theater. They good-naturedly pushed the table off to the side and set three straight chairs in a row for the audience, them and me. He began the skit by introducing the characters, Bobby and a goat named Adrian. Bobby couldn't pronounce his R's very well, so Adrian sounded like Adwian. Bobby was leading Adwian on a leash down a railroad track, (wailwoad twack.) You will need to use your imagination to picture my brother acting out both parts. In no particular hurry, they walked along talking about things young boys and goats talk about. Unfortunately, Adwian got his little hoof stuck between two railroad ties. Imagine my little brother bent over walking on his hands, pretending to be the goat Adrian, with his left hand caught in the imaginary ties, then Bobby pantomiming tugging on the leash, trying to get him unstuck. Adwian is a little upset and lets out a couple of half-hearted bleats. "Naa, naaa." "Don't wowwy, Adwian," Bobby says. "I'll get you out.” My brother jumped up and ran around the corner into the kitchen where he made the sound of a far-off train whistle. Back to the dining room (stage). Bobby: Adwian, the twain is coming. Adrian: Struggles to loosen his hoof. Naa! Baa Bobby: Pulls on Adrian's leg and tries to get him loose. Back to the kitchen. Whoooo Whoooo Back to the stage. Adrian: Fights harder to pull his hoof free , but it is still caught. He kicks with his hind legs to increase the leverage. NAAA! WAA! Bobby: Realizing the goat can't get free, he claps his hands to his cheeks and says: "Uht oh, Adwian." He said it with a rising inflection on the Uht and dropped his voice on the oh. Back to the kitchen. WHOOOOO WHOOOOO Chuga-chuga Chuga-chuga WHOOOO WHOOOO Back to the stage. Bobby stares back in horror at the rapidly approaching train. By now the "audience" is contributing to the train sound effects, pretending we can see it chugging through the kitchen, and shouting encouragement to Adrian. Adwian twists his head back as far as it will go, considering his hoof/hand is caught in the railroad ties. He leaps into the air with his hind legs while Bobby pulls with all his strength. BAA WAA BWAA "PULL ADWAIN, PULL!" WHOOOO, WHOOOO, WHOOOO At the last second, Bobby jumps to safety while Adrian goes SPLAT! The train rumbles past, right between my chair and the one my Mom is sitting in. Bobby stands beside the railroad track and surveys the carnage. My little brother almost managed to produce real tears as he wailed, "OH, ADWIAN!" I was mad. A funny skit for kids should have a happy ending. While Mom and Dad applauded, I strode two steps to where the imaginary Adwian lay dead, gave him a good kick and hollered for him to get up. I guess the moral of the story was to stay off railroad tracks. For the rest of our childhood and decades on into adulthood, whenever the situation looked dire, (cattle out, flat tire, forgotten homework, something on the stove boiled over, a sock with a hole in the toe, even if it was only because our move got blocked in a board game) someone in our family would say, "Uht oh, Adwian." My widowed grandmother re-married. One day at a family gathering, her husband burst out, "Who the heck is Adrian?" My brother and I fell all over each other laughing, then had to apologize because he thought we were laughing at him. Here is the link to a variety of age-appropriate skits in case you weren't lucky enough to belong to the Scouts. https://www.boyscouttrail.com/skits.asp