the dog days of summer

[franksolich]

Introduction.  the dog days of summer is dedicated to the buzzy primitive, “BuzzClik,” who mentioned recently that he enjoyed my “diaries” of daily life way out here in the middle of nowhere, on the eastern slope of the formidable Sandhills of Nebraska.

Of course, I’ve been long aware that these attract primitives as if bees to honey (especially the stories of the hippywife primitive‘s family, the Packer clan from northeastern Oklahoma), although admittedly they don’t seem to appeal much to decent and civilized people.

And so there’s an ulterior--ulterior, but not malicious--motive involved here.  For reasons inexplicable, franksolich has a reputation of being some sort of superman with magic powers, able to wrought damage upon primitives.  I have no idea where I got this reputation, and why, but there it is.

These threads are purely a public-relations effort, to convince the primitives that franksolich is a rather ordinary, average person, and sometimes even a boring one, so as to ameliorate their rabid fear and paranoia.

The people and events as depicted are from real life, but the elements of the primitives from Skins’s island are of course fictitious.

- - - - - - - - - - -

The last diary had stopped in early May, after a certain event flung me into the throes of melancholy and despair, but never mind.  As that thread ended, the property caretaker had been injured in an automobile accident, and given his old age and that he already owns a comfortable pension earned by the sweat of his brow, he decided it was time to quit.

And so a new property caretaker, a guy in his early thirties, was hired.  It’s a full-time job and pays very well, because he’s in charge of seventeen properties (although this one the only residential one) throughout the county (which isn’t a small one) that at times can keep one going seven days a week.

The reason he’s out here a lot is simply because it’s a convenient place for him to keep his stuff.

Unfortunately, the old property caretaker spent an afternoon with the new one, “explaining” franksolich to him, describing the experiences and observations of the preceding eight years, in which I allegedly “almost” got into some sort of fix or another because I’m deaf.  Never mind that nothing bad ever happened; he’s always been adamant about, “Well, it almost happened or could’ve happened, and usually came to a razor’s edge of happening, but apparently God likes you--remember that Swede at the bar in town says you’re the damned luckiest son-of-a-bitch he’s ever seen in his life, and Swede’s been around…..”

The new property caretaker, who hadn’t known me before, became concerned.  On the surface, I suppose the situation looks dangerous--a deaf person living way out in the middle of nowhere (the nearest neighbor lives six miles away, town is eight miles away, and the big city forty-two miles away), all alone, and with no effective means of communication if he’s in some sort of trouble.

Add to that that there’s a semi-major highway two miles north of here, and if a motorist has a problem, this is the only within-walking-distance place that he can seek assistance.  And add further to that that this property is located on the banks of a semi-major river, which attracts campers, usually of the primitive sort.

So there’s always been strange people showing up here, some of them really weird.

The new caretaker then made a rule--while admitting that I had the power of the Royal Veto to override him--that, for my own safety and security, no one would be allowed to camp and frolic on this property.

I wasn’t fond of this, but didn’t protest at the time because I was preoccupied with other matters, and because my stay here is rather tenuous (the aged owners want to “convert” the real-estate into a series of lots for lakeside cabins for their descendants, as it’s an ideal place for such a thing because of its isolation and “natural wonders,” along with hunting and fishing); it could either end this mid-winter, or go on indefinitely.

It’s been a boring summer, no excitement, and so this past week I exercised the Royal Veto.

to be continued, as soon as anything happens

[franksolich]

The neighbor’s wife came over in mid-afternoon on Sunday; it was the hottest part of a very hot day, and my guest and I were going to go swimming, so I groused at her, despite that the neighbor’s wife is one of my closest friends.

Actually, she was here to see my guest, who she’s known almost as long as I have, when she first came here years ago to study the William Rivers Pitt for her Ph.D. thesis in soil science.

My guest, in her early thirties, who’s married to a veterinarian, was born and raised on the affluent country-clubbed shores of Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.  I’d at first been leery of allowing strangers, especially from blue states, to poke around this property, but upon learning she’s a very distant relative of the late Clare Boothe Luce, I acceded, after which we became very good friends.

She’d spent the past eleven days here, because this might, or might not, be my last summer here, and she has fond memories of this place.  She also had academic business in Vermillion, South Dakota, but when she wasn’t up there, she hung around here, snapping photographs of birds and trees and other junk.

- - - - - - - - - -

I informed the neighbor’s wife that the ban on campers here was rescinded.

Despite my insistence that it’s been a very boring summer with nobody around, she was appalled.

“No,” she gasped; “you don’t know anything about people who show up here.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I said; “but notice please--a fine point everybody else seems to forget--that while there’s been some bad ones around, nothing bad’s ever happened.”

She and my guest began talking about the time the hippywife primitive Mrs. Alfred Packer showed up here to camp over Labor Day three years ago, bringing along the whole Packer clan, including hippyhubby Wild Bill.  I’d found them harmless, but the two women sitting at the dining room table with me vehemently disagreed.

“You didn’t see Wild Bill with that murderous gleam in his eyes as he sharpened his cadaver-carvers while talking with you, as if sizing you up?” the neighbor’s wife asked.

No, I said; I’d found him okay; rather taciturn, and at times a little grouchy, but that’s hardly a sin.

“And what about Mrs. Alfred Packer herself,” my guest brought up; “the way she always stared at you with those doe-eyes.  She looked so innocent and all that, but for some reason I got the impression she wanted to hop around in the sack with you.”

Yeah, that did bother me somewhat, I admitted; “I dunno why she was that way, because it was pretty obvious I wasn’t interested in any carnality with her.

“Besides being grey and drab--among other things--she was the cuddly type, and I don’t cuddle.

“I have no idea why she was that way.”

“Well, there’s a lot of things you don’t know about because you can’t hear,” the neighbor’s wife said; “you’re not the only person who gets up early in the morning.”

Not knowing what to make of that last comment, I let it go.

to be continued, whenever something else happens

[franksolich]

My guest left this morning, as she has an all-day drive to the far corner of Nebraska, where she lives,  from here.  She assured me she had a good time, as she always says.  She’s been a guest here before--in fact, the first time, she stayed here a whole month (when she undertook study of the William Rivers Pitt).

Those other times, however, the summer was somewhat cooler than this one’s been, and so it’d been easy to be the perfect host, breezy and cool.  This summer’s been a bitch, hotter than Algiers in July.

I told her to use the air-conditioned bedroom, while I slept on the couch in the living room.  The bedroom’s pretty big, but she’s a married woman and I’m a spoken-for male, and didn’t want things to look as if my guest and I were shacking up with each other.

I’d offered to get her a five-star air-conditioned room in the big city so she’d be more comfortable, but no, she insisted upon staying here, despite the heat.  “I like it out here,” she said; “there’s nobody for miles and miles around, it’s so quiet and peaceful, just you and me.”

Oh.

The first evening she was here, I made a jocular remark about the weather was so hot, I was going to have trouble sleeping in the heat, being bundled up in clothes and all that.  It’s an old joke--and really, I was only joking--and I was startled when she replied, “Oh now, I wouldn’t want anybody to be uncomfortable in his own home.  Do what you want to do; it won’t bother me.”

Oh.

In the past, she was always so proper that I was nervous being seen by her in anything less than what one might wear to church on Easter, but as she’s been a friend for a very long time, despite that she’s somewhat, uh, uptight, I decided it was safe to teas--er, test--her sincerity on that. 

I’m an early riser, about an hour before getting-dressed time.  I got up at my usual time the next morning, and went into the kitchen to make coffee.  The noise woke her up, and she came out of the bedroom, wearing her customary nightwear, some sort of long cotton shift.

Casually glancing at me, she merely commented that I was still “too” thin, not having regained any of that weight lost during an emaciating bout with mononucleosis last winter.

On the second day, she remarked in some sort of faux southern Maryland country-club drawl, “Oh honey, that’s a really nice backside you got there.”

On the third day, when passing by me, she playfully tried grabbing me there, but I ducked.

Nothing ever happened; her husband, with whom she’s very much in love, and the femme, whose company I find pleasant, need not lose any sleep.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Most of the time, if I wasn’t at work and she wasn’t in Vermillion, South Dakota, on other business--things which happily coincided with each other--I hiked or drove around with her, as she snapped photographs of birds and trees and other junk, and then as the day got hotter, we’d go swimming in the river.

She’s a svelte person--obviously her Boothe legacy--but perfectly proportioned.  Being of a modest nature, she wears one of those one-piece swimming suits popular during the 1950s, but she’d look really good in a bikini, despite that she doesn’t have all that surplus blubbery watery jiggling that seems to excite most men, but not franksolich.  She’s just perfectly proportioned, and firm.

I don’t own any swimwear myself, but it was very hot, and nobody but her and I were around anyway.

Nothing ever happened; her husband, with whom she’s very much in love, and the femme, whose company I find pleasant, need not lose any sleep.

to be continued, when something happens

[franksolich]

The new property caretaker and the old one came by about noon today; the second insisted it was just a casual spur-of-the-moment social call, but I suspect he’d come along to relieve the ennui of sitting around at home twiddling his thumbs.

“There was some romancing going on here last week,” he said, upon sitting down.

My eyebrows arched and my lips turned dry.

“I swear,” I said in indignant exasperation, “hearing people don’t pick up information by actually hearing things; they just have some magical means of pulling information out of the thin air.

“There wasn’t anybody here but her and me all that time; it’s not possible anybody would know what went on here.

“And besides, nothing happened; there was some playing going on, but nothing more than that.”

“Whatever,” the old caretaker snorted, grinning.

- - - - - - - - - -

The new caretaker pulled out a bunch of little yellow post-it notes, with information scrawled on them.

“There’s been a lot of calls the past three days, about camping here,” he said.

“That was quick.  What do you have?” I asked the new caretaker.

He skimmed through the stack of yellow post-it notes, assorting them.

“There’s twenty-seven of them, for all the way through mid-October.”

“It’s hot, I’m tired and miserable,” I said; “let’s just do this weekend, and we can figure out the rest next week, when I’ll probably be in a better mood.”

“There’s two of them,” he said, “but of course only one can be here.  There’s a group of twenty-two from Ohio, headed to Oregon--”

“No way,” I said; “Ohio’s a blue state, and only primitives emigrate to Oregon, and so those are probably primitives.

“I want a quiet weekend, so no primitives.  Who’s the other group?”

“Seventeen adults and children, six vehicles, from Indiana, on their way to attend a conference in Montana.”

“What kind of conference?” I asked.

“I didn’t write it down, but I remember they said something about a Baptist camp-meeting.”

“Good,” I said; “Baptists are good.  Call them back and tell them they’re welcome this weekend.  Despite doctrinal differences, I get along perfectly fine with Baptists.  The salt of the earth, the Baptists.  Admirable people, the Baptists.  Honest, straightforward, hard-working, sturdy, modest people, the Baptists. 

“Never met a bad Baptist.  Tell them that whatever they need, they got.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“Well, all the others, do you have some ‘system’ of priority, when it comes to deciding who to take?” the new caretaker inquired.

I was beginning to feel as if the reservations manager for the Waldorf-Astoria hotel; the old caretaker used to field the calls, decide, and then tell me after it was a done deal. 

“Sort of,” I said.  “Save mid-August for the carnies, who’ll be here for the county fair.  I get along fine with carnies--”

“But the carnies camp at the fairgrounds,” the old caretaker reminded me.

“Until this year,” I replied.  “While the fairgrounds are more convenient for them, last year a whole lot of them got into trouble--you remember--for having booze, and the law doesn’t allow booze on governmental property.  They were really pissed, the fines they had to pay; it nearly wiped out their whole take from the fair.”

“Yeah,” the old caretaker said; “the sheriff does have ways of keeping our money here in this county; it paid for those new tennis-courts this year.  A financial wizard, the sheriff.”

I agreed, and continued.  “Out here, while they may lack the other necessities and conveniences, they can have all the booze they want, no problem at all.  I’m sure that this year, they’ll want to be here, rather than there.

“I get along fine with carnies, some of the most fascinating people one can ever hope to meet.

“And then,” I remarked to the new caretaker, “save the Labor Day weekend specifically for the first primitives who call and ask for it, so that we all can get some entertainment to celebrate the end of summer.”

- - - - - - - - - - -

And then later in the afternoon, the femme came by, waxing wroth.

It’s been a very hot day, making me short-tempered.

“I heard,” she said--

“I know what you heard,” I interrupted, sharply, “and it’s not true.

“Nothing happened.”

“I can’t believe it,” she insisted; “I mean, I can believe what happened, and I can’t believe nothing happened.”

I looked at her, my eyes crossing.

“Look,” I said; “a woman can lie to a man and get away with it, but I’ve never in my life known of a man to lie to a woman and get away with it.

“Nothing happened.”

to be continued when, or if, something happens

[Skul]

The minute I saw a new tale from the wilds of the Elkhorn, I smiled.
Good to see a new one.  Been awful dry this summer.

[franksolich]

“Do you suppose there’s any way to find out if my place is bugged?” I asked when I walked into the business partner’s office this morning. 

Lighting a cigarette, he looked up at me asking, “Now why would you suppose your place is bugged?”

Well no, really I don’t suppose that, I mentioned; “but I’m trying to find out how all you hearing people pick up so much information without actually being somewhere to see something.

“It drives me nuts, how you people do that; I’m sure you people just yank it out of the thin air.”

The business partner, whose other business is horses (never mind what our business is); he raises, buys, sells, and trades them, is a few years younger than myself, and lives at the top of the Sandhills of Nebraska, about half the distance between franksolich’s campground and dutch508’s cattle empire.

Even though we’ve known each other only nine years, he’s undeniably my closest friend and confidante.  We were at first just business partners, but after spending hundreds of hours and driving thousands of miles all over the Upper Great Plains states, well, it’s inevitable two people get to know each other pretty well

It is troubling, personally to me however, that the business partner and the femme loathe each other, which complicates this already-complicated life further.

Offering me a cigarette, he said, “So…..what’s the puzzle now?”

“How the Hell do you people know what goes on at my place, without actually being there to see it?” I asked.

“There’s nobody, nobody at all, around for miles and miles and miles, but yet for all that you hearing people know about me, I might as well live in a glass house in the middle of Times Square during rush hour.

"How the Hell do you people know this stuff?  And without actually seeing it?”

- - - - - - - - - -

In my exasperation, I’d swallowed the cigarette, and after I was done coughing it out, he extended me a new one.

“How do you know ‘you people’ aren’t actually seeing it?” he asked.

“No way,” I said; “you people know about stuff when nobody, but nobody’s, around.”

“How do you know ‘you people’ aren’t actually seeing it?” he repeated.

“BECAUSE THERE’S NOBODY AROUND TO SEE IT,” I replied.

He sat back.  “I think you’re wrong.  There’s always people around your place, but you’re just not aware of it because you don’t hear them.

“You know, you’ve been told so many times by ‘you people’ about strangers they’ve seen hanging around your place that looked dangerous or at least undesirable, and you’ve always denied seeing them.

“It’s not a case of ‘you people’ seeing things; it’s a case of you not seeing things.

“I don’t mean to come down hard on you dude, but you just don’t pay attention.  You can’t hear, and so even if they make a lot of noise, they’re not going to draw your attention.

“And since they don’t attract your attention, ergo, they don’t exist.

“Dude.  Try to understand; it’s for your own good.”

- - - - - - - - - -

There wasn’t going to be any reconciliation to this, so I dropped it, and talked instead about an upcoming trip to my boyhood home in the heart of the Sandhills.

“What I don’t understand is why it’s a big deal for you,” he said.  “We’ve been through there several times, both of us together, and so it’s not like you’re going back there for the first time after a few decades.”

I snuffed out the cigarette and lit another.  “’Through there,’” I repeated; “we’ve been through there, but remember, we never stopped--we just drove right through--other than those times you insisted we detour to the abandoned cemetery out in the middle of nowhere, where the bodies of so many of my own are buried.

“I could never understand that,” I confessed; “and sort of resented it at the time.  Both you and I were raised knowing that a person, and his physical remains, are two wholly different things, and so what happens to the body after death doesn’t matter.

“But no, you thought it would be good and decent of me, to ride over rough rutted country with grass and weeds as high as one’s neck, rabbits and prairie dogs and deer and snakes running around all over the place--I always had to borrow your spare pair of cowboy boots, remember, because I don’t have any of my own--battling the sun and the heat, to pay my respects.

“And because of the thick underbrush obstructing the view, one had to find the graves looking up to the sky, using celestial navigation.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, lighting his own cigarette.

“No problem,” I replied; “it doesn’t bother me any more.  Your intentions were good.”

I sat back.  “So you see, while we’ve been through there, remember we never stopped at any place or to see anybody.  We just went through there.

“’Going through’ isn’t the same thing as ‘going back’.”

“This time, I’m going there and stopping for a few days, for the first time since that cold rainy October night three months after my mother died.  I was the last of family to leave the house in which I’d grown up, finally getting all of my stuff out of there.

“That was a long time ago, when I was eighteen years old.  I’ve never been back since.”

- - - - - - - - - - -

“I’m not getting something, though,” he said. 

“Here on one hand when we’ve gone through, you balked at going to one cemetery to remember the dead, but here on the other hand, you’re going back someplace you ignored for thirty years, to go to another cemetery to remember somebody.”

“This is different,” I said.

to be continued whenever something new happens

[franksolich]

“You know, you really have to get serious about all this,” the business partner said.  We’d concluded our conversation of the morning, and gone out to get some dinner.

“I’ll never forget the time we were running around, and I noticed somebody was following us.

“A great big fat guy, his belly hanging out and down, as if an apron; obviously near-sighted and asthmatic.

“Usually, but not all the time, wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Che Guevera on it.  It was like an XXXXL size, almost a tent, but still it was w-a-a-a-a-y too small for him, and stretched in such a way it took a while to figure out who Che was. 

“The second time I saw him, I took care to notice his car was from Illinois.

“I didn’t see him for a while, until one day I went to meet you at a restaurant.  You were already there, waiting for me…..and in the next booth was this same guy.

“He always averted his eyes when he saw me looking at him.

“One time when I drove out to your place, I saw him--you weren’t home yet--and he was peeking through your windows.  A second time--and again, you weren’t home--I drove up finding him looking in the glove-compartment of your car [I was using someone else’s vehicle at the time].

“But for a big fat guy with such tiny little feet, and such short breath, he could move fast; those two times, I yelled at him and started chasing him, but he rolled away too fast for me.

“When we were up in Bismarck, I’ll be damned if he wasn’t there too.

“And [the neighbor’s wife] told me she’d seen him one time too, when you and she were at the grocery store in [the big city], he was right behind you, eavesdropping.

“And [the old caretaker] said that one morning as he was driving up to your front porch--you were asleep inside--he saw him, walking around the side of the house wielding a big axe.

“But damn, he was fleet of foot; he got away every time, from everybody.

“Somebody notified the sheriff--I think it was one of those guys who was working across the road from your place, who’d seen him hanging around there--and pretty soon your whole town was on the lookout for a fat guy driving a car with Illinois license-plates.  But he must’ve heard something, because he disappeared after that, and wasn’t seen any more.

"And only God knows how many times he was there, and you were there, and there wasn't anybody else to see he was there.  I'll bet lots and lots of times."

Hmmmm, I said.  “That sounds like Fat Che, the ‘benburch’ primitive once prominent on Skins’s island.

“But it couldn’t have been him, because as far as I know, Fat Che never got within 500 miles of franksolich.”

“As far as [you] know”--that’s the problem here.

“Don’t take it hard, dude, but there’s a lot going on around you that you don’t know; that you aren‘t aware of, because you can‘t hear.”

Nonsense, I said; “I never saw Fat Che, or some fat guy resembling him, hanging around me.

“And besides, if you saw all this, how come you didn’t say anything to me?”

“This was years and years ago, shortly after we’d first met, about the time you killed that roly-poly red-headed scammer--the autumn of 2005 or something--and I wasn’t used to you yet.

“I just assumed you knew what was going on, and were looking out for yourself already.

“You know, at times you do give others the impression you’re more competent, more perceptive, than you really are.”

Nonsense, I repeated.  “I refuse to be paranoid.”

to be continued as soon as something, anything, happens

[franksolich]

After dinner, the partner and I went golfing.

I don’t really mean “golfing,” of course; I just aimlessly hit a ball around while others engage in a serious sport.  I dunno excresence about golf, even though I’ve been hitting a ball around golf courses since I was a freshman in high school.

And that happened purely by chance; students in our local high school were always offered a membership at the country club at a substantially-reduced rate.  But one had to be old enough to get one.

My younger brother, when in the seventh grade, pointed out I was now eligible, and if I became a member, he could golf as my “guest.”  As I owed him for favors he’d done me, I said yeah, sure, whatever, no problem.

I’d said that under the assumption that as soon as he was in the ninth grade, he’d get his own membership, and if he needed me to come along, I could go as his guest.  Not all the time, but most of the time, he was unsuccessful in finding someone else (it was a problem with the time, not with him; he was a popular kid), and so I had to go along.

Much to my disgust, they wouldn’t let me play as his guest, because they thought the student membership fee was so absurdly low as it was (at the time, $10 a year) it couldn‘t possibly trouble a teenager, paying it.  So I had to remain a member two more years, through my junior and senior years in high school.

Sometimes I was successful in finding a friend of mine willing to play serious golf with him, while I just merely tagged along two holes behind, hitting the ball around in random ways, to see what’d happen.  If some more serious golfers came up behind me, I let them play through and waited until they too were two holes ahead, and resumed aimlessly hitting the ball.

It was one of those first times when I had to play serious golf with my younger brother, that for the first time in my life, I actually uttered the “F” word.  I was fourteen years old that first time I said it.  My younger brother and I were raised well, and it was quite a shock to him, his eyes growing as big as saucers watching me curse and kick and jump up-and-down on a golf club.

Come to think of it, I don’t recall my younger brother ever doing such a thing himself.  He was always mellow.

The partner made a couple of telephone calls, and found a partner for serious golfing, relieving me of that obligation.  I just followed them around, two holes behind (I can hit a ball pretty hard, and far), aimlessly hitting a ball every which way, to see what’d happen.

Then we all had supper, and I headed back home.

Even though I’d picked up a nice check, in the non-pecuniary senses, it’d been a loser of a day.

to be continued once something happens

[franksolich]

The neighbor came over for breakfast; he had more information on the Baptists coming here to camp this weekend (he‘d spoken with the caretaker the preceding evening).  They’ll show up sometime on Saturday, and stay Sunday until sun-down, after which they’ll hit the road again, headed to that old-time-religion camp-meeting in Montana.

And there’ll be nineteen of them, five cars, because a few others back in Indiana decided to join them.

And they be black.

No big deal, I said; Baptists are Baptists, good people, the salt of the earth.

“No way am I going to have any problems with Baptists,” I told him.

- - - - - - - - - -

About noon, I had a visitor, a woman who used to live in town but doesn’t any more.  She was here visiting her parents, and simply by bad luck, missed out on seeing my guest (apparently my guest hadn’t told her she was coming up here) by a couple of days.

To explain something as shortly as possible; this woman was from here when I first met her.  She’d been a sorority sister of my guest at the University of Nebraska circa, oh, ten years ago.  She introduced me to my guest.  My guest, studying soil science, learned of the William Rivers Pitt.  I on my part learned she was a distant relative of the late Clare Boothe Luce, and the rest is history.

As the sun was overhead, we sat on the front porch instead of the back, so as to avoid the heat, and chit-chatted.

“I’m so sorry you have to go through this,” she remarked; “you can’t believe what they’re saying in town.”

Oh yes I could, I replied ruefully.

“When I first started hearing the rumors--they were pretty credible at first, but then got more and more outrageous--I called her, to find out what was going on.

“’Nothing happened,’ she told me; ‘but we had so much fun.’”

I heaved a sigh of relief.  If somebody didn’t believe me, maybe they’d believe her.

- - - - - - - - - -

Later, for supper, because it was too hot to do anything else, I went to the bar in town to order my usual.

Swede, the husband of the owner, he of Norwegian derivation but whose specialty is Italianate cuisine, groused as he burned a hamburger and fried dry some potatoes.

It didn’t help his attitude that I stood by, watching him.

He was about ready to take the hamburger and put it on the bun when I interrupted him.

“Uh, you didn’t press it down on the grill hard enough.  I see there’s still some grease in there.”

He glared at me, but was smiling when he was done.

“I heard something happened last week, at your place--”

“Nothing happened,” I interrupted, before he could go any further.

He grinned.  “Well, I suppose it depends on what your definition of ‘nothing’ is.

“I heard you got guests this weekend.  Kindly remind them that Saturday night, the special’s fried chicken.”

to be continued as things happen

[franksolich]

“Why Bridgeport and Chimney Rock, of all places?” the business partner asked me.

We’d gone up to the capital city of South Dakota on business, and were now returning.

“That I’d once lived there was just a coincidence,” I said, “and of course I wouldn’t have any memories of it.

“It was the furthest west and south we could go from home, giving us enough time to turn around and get home in time for our ten o’clock curfew.

- - - - - - - - - -

“We had to be home by ten o’clock, but our parents neglected to be exactly specific, and so while of course they meant 10:00 p.m., and we knew they meant 10:00 p.m., because we were kids 15, 16, 17 years old, we whined that we thought they meant 10:00 a.m.

“It happened about every other Friday night, for a little more than three years, right after he and I’d gotten our learner’s permits to drive.  One was supposed to have a licensed driver accompany one if one just had a learner’s permit, unless one was going to or from school, but in the vast emptiness of the Sandhills, with so few people around, one could get away with doing a lot of things one couldn’t get away with doing in crowded, congested areas.

“About half the time, we never got home even by ten the next morning, and that doubled the Hell we had to pay.  He had a ten-year-old pick-up truck, and I had an eight-year-old sedan in high school, but both were in, uh, decrepit shape, and we couldn’t trust them to make the trip without problems.

“And if one had car problems in the Sandhills in the middle of the night, one really had problems.

“From home, the next all-night gas station was 225 miles west; not a thing in between.

“And traffic was such that one met another vehicle maybe once every hour and a half.

“So we instead ’borrowed’ one of the parents’ cars, usually a late-model Pontiac or Buick sedan.”

- - - - - - - - - - -

I was describing to the business partner how my best friend and I “cruised” around when teenagers.

“He’d been born with a withered right arm, and I’d been born without ears, so we made a perfect pair; if something needed two arms, I did it, and if something needed listening to, he did it.

“We were liked--nobody ever shunned us--and all that, but still, we were sort of apart from everybody else.  He was a farm kid, and I wasn’t originally from the area.  Since I was singular, ’status’ meant nothing to me because no matter what, I was going to always be different.

“He went out for football for a couple of years, but because of that weak arm, he wasn’t very good, and so gave it up.

“So both of us had chips on our shoulders.  As I said, we made a perfect pair.

“In high school, ‘cruising’ usually meant driving up-and-down Broadway, from the east end of town to the west end, doing that over and over and over all evening long until curfew, yakking and playing loud music as the tires rumbled over the bricks that were the pavement.

“It wasn’t uncommon to put a hundred miles on a car in a single evening, without leaving town.

“But being who we were, we dared to be different.  Our cruising always involved a 600-mile round-trip all through the night.  As I said earlier, that was about every other Friday night; the opposite Fridays, we were grounded, not at home, but chained to within the city limits and the distance to his place out in the country.

“Those Fridays, we were utterly scrupulous about observing the limits imposed on us, because we knew if we violated them, our trips through the Sandhills would be done forever, or at least until we were out of high school.

- - - - - - - - - -

“This was before we were doing this, maybe when we were 13, 14 years old, but one time my mother had a ‘talk’ with me--at the same time his mother was having a ‘talk’ with him--reminding me it was all well-and-good that one had a ‘best friend.’

“’But don’t you think you spend too much time with him?  The world’s like a tossed salad, so many different people in it, and it’s good to try them too, at least once in a while.  Why don’t you at least occasionally try doing something different, with different people?’”

I lit a cigarette.  â€œLooking at it as an adult, some decades later, and the way the world is today, I suppose it’d be a concern of mine, too, if I were a parent, but given the time and place, the parents needn’t worried; nothing ever happened.

- - - - - - - - - -

“The Sandhills at night were awesome.  Because the land was so vast and so empty, and hence no artificial light to obscure the sky, if the moon wasn’t out, and there wasn’t any higher-atmosphere fog and mist up there, one could see millions upon millions of stars with the naked eye.”

The business partner already knew that; he too had been raised in the Sandhills, but like dutch508, only on the outer edge of them, not in the heart of them.  An important difference, here.

“But if there was fog thousands of feet up there, or clouds lower down, one couldn’t see a thing.

- - - - - - - - - -

“We left right after supper, about 6:00 p.m.  This being the Sandhills, in early evening, most of the time it was overcast and even raining, although by the middle of the night, it’d usually cleared away.

“Even in winter, we went.

“Going through a blizzard was bad, but it was equally bad after that, when the snow was done falling and just blowing around, usually in the morning on our way back home.

- - - - - - - - - -

“One time, we got stuck near Hyannis--as you know, there’s no more remote place than on the moon, near Hyannis--but by sheer luck, we found a ranch-house.  It’s a very good thing we found it, too, because it’d be miles and miles and miles before we’d come across the next one.

“It was weird, really weird.  Despite the paucity of people around there, they were all very rich.

“This was a single-level white-stone house with twenty-one rooms, an elongated dining room stretching about half the length of a football field (or so it seemed), and a waterfall cascading down one wall of the living room.  

“That freaked me; apparently it was electrically-driven, but it was real water and real rocks, and the ceiling went up pretty high.

“He was rather more awed by all the taxidermized animals around; deer-heads, full-bodied mountain sheep, birds, snakes mounted frozen in position, dead fish nailed to boards, a bison head, and even a whole bear in the den.  And lots of lots of antlers.  I forget what else; it was like a zoo.

“There was an old man and an old woman there at the time; the rest of the family that lived there had gone away for the holiday--this was the week between Christmas and New Year’s--but they were robust and healthy, and had spent long lives being marooned in winter.

“She was a good cook, and he was a good talker.

“The telephone lines were down (so too was the county electricity, but they weren’t connected to that, being too isolated, and hence had their own garage-sized generator, or whatever it was), but the man, using a ham radio, got a hold of someone way down in New Orleans, who then called both of our sets of parents back up here, to tell them where we were at, and that all was okay.”

I lit another cigarette.  â€œIt was all okay at least as far as we were concerned.  We were stuck there three days, and had Hell to pay with our parents when we finally got home.

“Ah,” I exhaled, blasting out a cloud of smoke as big as my head.

“There’s something special about being boys in the Sandhills, a gift from God, and so rarely bestowed.”

- - - - - - - - - -

“You were pretty young, and that’s big country, and in the middle of the night,” the business partner said.  â€œAnything dangerous ever almost happen?”

Just once, I said, “and that was on our very first trip.

“We reached to where we were supposed to turn south, the all-night gas station 225 miles west of home, which had a café attached.  We were still only 15, remember, and went inside it.

“It’d be considered tame, passe, these days, I guess, but it was jampacked full of big burly truck-drivers and their molls, painted women with elephantine busts and asses and too-small clothing.

“Indecency wasn’t allowed in those days, so there was none of that, but still, we felt as if we’d talked into a bordello or something.

“As we walked to the counter, a heavily-mascara’ed woman wearing a too-small sweater, drunk, and smoking a cigarette, swung around to look at us.  Even though she was standing about four feet away, the upper pair of hers almost smacked us in our faces.

 â€œâ€™Oh, lookee here,’ she squealed.  â€˜A couple of little ‘uns.  Two root beers for the Innocents, please.’

“I still shudder when seeing a woman with big bloated jugs, it was so grotesque.

“But other than that, no nothing bad happened, or even nearly happened.”

- - - - - - - - - -

 

“The biggest problem we ever had was usually just a matter of being only 110 miles or something from home, and the needle on the gasoline-gauge skipping near EMPTY.

“A hundred and ten miles to home, the nearest all-night gasoline station, or 115 miles west, to the next-nearest.

“It always held us up for a long time, as we had to wait for someone else to come along.

“Usually, the person got us to somebody’s ranch-house, and in those days, ranches had 55-gallon barrels filled with different sorts of fuel for emergencies, and the owner’d supply us.

“One of the very first times this happened, an old guy stopped, and insisted upon taking us straight home, even though it was a 92-mile detour for him.  When we were 15, we looked, I dunno, maybe only 13 or so, and he thought young boys shouldn’t be out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.

“Again, we had to pay Hell with our parents when we were delivered home--not only weren’t they used to this sort of thing yet, but the stranger had gone so far out of his way, and as we’d been using a family car, someone had to drive way out there the next day with gasoline, and bring it back.

“I remember that well; he sat in the front seat with the old guy driving, while I slumbered in the back seat.  The old guy was a good talker, and he had to respectfully listen, for about two hours, learning all the virtues and versatilities of some sort of house-cleaning product, Watkins, I think.

“I had to hear none of it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

When we stopped to change drivers--the business partner and I do that about every two hours--he said, “You guys got off easy.  If I’d done something like that one single time, my old man would’ve come down hard on me.

“I would’ve never been allowed outside my bedroom until graduation.”

“It was a complicated situation,” I explained as I turned on the ignition.  â€œOther than this one thing, we were perfect angels as teenagers, never a problem.

“He did all his chores, and did them right, and did them without being told to, and I was liked in my part-time as a grocery carry-out boy.  We both dutifully went to church every Sunday, and I to confession (he wasn’t Catholic, but from an obscure German evangelical sect) once a week.  We were very kind to all those around us, and respectful of our parents.  We held doors open for even just girls, and escorted little old ladies across the street.  We did okay--not great, but okay--in school.  

“Of the four parents, the wrath of his father (wielded on me, too) was the hardest to bear.

“But even his father understood that his oldest son had been doing a man’s job since he was 10, and done it thoroughly and cheerfully without asking, becoming somewhat more mature than his real age, and so had to relent at least a little.

“My father was old, tired, and I wasn’t aware of it, already dying.

“My mother was the “talk,” rather than the “hit” sort of disciplinarian, but this son of hers being deaf, well--

“And also, she was far more preoccupied about my father, and about the futures of my younger brother and myself (the older brothers and sisters, being considerably older than us, had already gone away to college, into careers, married, had kids, all that).

“In the end, it was his mother who decided the issue, out of sheer exhaustion more than anything else.

“As she once told my mother, ’Well, at least we know they’re not out drinking or using drugs or getting girls pregnant, so we have to trust them….whatever it is they’re doing out there.’”

to be continued, when something gets around to happening

[franksolich]

The wife of the retired banker stopped here this morning, to dig up some of the William Rivers Pitt.  She’s an avid gardener, and has six of them, all of which have been featured in colorful photographic displays in magazines.  Usually she and her husband, Grumpy, who wears his polyester pants hiked halfway up his midriff, take away a dozen or so of those galvanized-steel “bushel baskets,” but this time, she brought some guy with a pick-up truck, who shoveled the antique fertilizer into the bed, taking a great deal more.

In case one doesn’t know, this is a large mound of swine excrement dating from 1875 until 1950, when award-winning pigs were raised here.  It looks like ordinary dirt, although a tad bit darker than the dirt surrounding it.  And of course it hasn’t emanated any particular odor since Ike and Mamie were in the White House.

It’s always covered with dense foliage, and the cats like to romp and play on it.

The William Rivers Pitt, an Alpine-looking miniature Jungfrau, is pretty big, and even if semi-truck trailers were used to take it away, it’d be a long time before it’s all gone.

She brought her 10-year-old grandson with her, a kid who’s never said much, instead always staring at me open-mouthed and his eyes as big as saucers.  I suppose it’s because he’s heard that I was born without ears, and is curious about what franksolich looks like under the hair that covers up the absence.

Good luck with that, kid, I always think; I’ve been here a long time, and so far the barber and medical professionals are the only ones who’ve ever seen it.

The wife of the retired banker is of course affluent, and of the “one can’t be too rich or too thin” sort; she’s in her early 80s but doesn’t look or act a day over her early 60s.  When complimented on her youthful looks, she always laughs, “Oh, but [franksolich] and I are two peas in a pod that way…..”

This morning, she was wearing a light cotton dress, old tennis shoes, a big floppy hat with fake roses on it, and the usual pearls around her neck and jangling bracelets on her wrists.  She didn’t have gloves this time, because the guy with her of course was doing the dirty work.

- - - - - - - - - -

I’ve always appreciated her because she’s the only one around who tells me what people are talking about but are too embarrassed to admit it.  Stuff that never appears in the newspapers; who’s hopping around in the sack with who, who’s having money problems, who’s drinking too much, who’s expecting an infant, who’s in trouble for being the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time, who’s being cuckolded, who got yelled at by his boss, who passed a bad check, who’s flirting with his secretary, who’s acquired sexual tastes of an interesting nature, &c., &c., &c.--those sort of things.

In other words, the ordinary standard mundane run-of-the-mill local gossip.

Being deaf, I’m not privy to whispered chitchattery, and know about other people only what I read in the newspapers…..and the newspapers leave out a lot.

She’s always been sympathetic to my plight; gossip is the lubricant of sociality, and I’ve always been as if cylinders running without oil to ease their operation.  In the absence of such knowledge, it puts me into the position, when encountering another person, of assuming the other person’s nice and noble and high-minded and principled and honest and virtuous.

Which of course is not always true, but what can one do, not knowing otherwise?

- - - - - - - - - -

When out of earshot of the curious lad, I gently inquired what was new; what’s being said around town.

“Oh dear,” she said; “there’s been a lot of talk going around this week, but as none of it’s true, none of it really happened, I won’t waste your time repeating it.”

to be continued any time something happens

[franksolich]

Damn.

Devout Catholics Have Better Sex, Study Says

Group presents data showing those who go to church weekly have most frequent, enjoyable sex

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/07/17/devout-catholics-have-better-sex

[vesta111]

Damn.

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/07/17/devout-catholics-have-better-sex

[vesta111]

I find that regardless of a hearing problem, many people hear but refuse to believe what they hear.

Better to be unable to hear then to hear and disregard what we hear.

[franksolich]

Don't interrupt my narrative, vesta, dear; it's rude to interrupt.

[franksolich]

“So that’s my problem,” I told the neighbor’s wife when she got done reading something I’d found in U.S. News & World Report; apparently I’m not devout enough.

“But God, I try, I try…..”

As mentioned earlier, the neighbor’s wife and the business partner are my closest confidantes, two people with whom I’m eminently comfortable discussing anything, no matter how intimate or how embarrassing.

With the neighbor and the femme, for example, I’ll discuss 75% of things, but not 100%.

The neighbor’s wife is a few years younger than me, and like me, she’s not originally from this area, having been born and raised in suburban Kansas City, Missouri.  She went to college, where she got a degree in dental hygiene, and where she met her husband [the neighbor].

She’s the mother of five children, three girls and two boys, aged 11 years down to circa 6 months.

She doesn’t work any more, excepting on the farm (located six miles north of here; they’re my nearest neighbors).  She’s in admirable shape for a woman her age--as trim as Nancy Reagan or longview--because she’s an avid horsewoman, an interest she never developed until she got married and moved up here.

It’s a joy to watch her--and I’ve watched her for hours and hours, in all sorts of weather, sitting inside the cab of a pick-up truck as she’s ridden up-and-down the long meadow by the river up by their place.  I go along because her husband insists upon it, as he’s always worried she might fall and break her neck or something, and so needs watched.

Especially on a cool grey rainy afternoon in October, when she reminds me of nothing more than the young Elizabeth I chasing after foxes, or rushing to meet Lord Darnley, or something, her long hair flowing behind her.

- - - - - - - - - - -

I thought of something else, relating it with the topic at hand.

“You know,” I told her, “that’s why I never first had sex until I was 19 years old.

“Because I couldn’t hear gossip and rumors, I never knew who the girls were, who were ‘easy.’”

She looked at me.

“If you think people know such things just by looking, you’re nuts,” I said.  “They know such things because they hear about such things, they share information about such things.

“Well, that left me out of the loop.

“I ended up going all the way through high school treating all the girls as if they were virginal princesses.  In fact, I treated the biggest trollop in our class as if she were Ste. Genevieve, because I didn’t know, I hadn’t ever heard a single word of censure against her.

“They were said, but remember, I had no means of overhearing them--and not knowing anything else, it was always best to err on the side of caution, assuming the best of her.”

The neighbor’s wife tried to say something, but as she’s said it before, I brushed it off.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said; “I already know, some people think it’s ‘nice’ that one thinks highly of someone nobody else does.  But then on the other hand, behind our backs they laugh at us for being so innocent, so naïve, about that person.”

“You know,” I concluded, “if one has a friend who’s deaf, who’s kept out of the loop of things, and one spent at least an hour a week with that non-hearing person, filling him in on what’s going on with other people--who’s hopping around in the sack with who, who’s been seen with who, who’s loose and who’s not, who’s straight and who’s not, those sorts of things--it would be a magnanimous act of charity and compassion.

“In fact, it’d probably expiate many sins one’s done, because one‘s lifting a suffering human being out of the unrealistic and phantastical depths of Pollyannaism in which he‘s mired, always thinking better of people than he should.”

to be continued whenever one’s uplifted

[franksolich]

In mid-afternoon, because it’s still like Mauretania in July here and I didn’t want to cook anything, I went to town to get a late dinner.  Swede, the husband of the owner and of Norwegian derivation, whose specialty is Italianate food, was cooking, which surprised me.  Usually he’s not in the kitchen until supper-time.

He flung a hamburger on the grill and put a brick on top of it, so as to ensure it’d get done to my satisfaction, thoroughly cooked all the way through, every drop of grease squeezed out of it.

When he was done, he packaged it up and told me, “Here, I have something for you.”

He gave me a piece of a paper with notes on it.

“You’re having all those people out there this weekend, and I thought they’d be interested in our special on Saturday.  I’m even willing to give them a discounted price, if they buy enough. 

“And more than that, since these aren’t the sorts of people likely to come into a bar, if they telephone, I’ll have somebody here deliver it out to your place for them, no problem.”

I looked over the notes; it was a hand-written menu of fried chicken, fixed various ways; and Swede was offering them a pretty good discount.

“But this is just fried chicken,” I said; “how do you know they’ll like fried chicken instead of something else?”

Swede looked at me as if I were Bozo from Outer Space.

“Trust me,” he said; “they’ll like it.  Those people always do.”

to be continued later, after anything happens

[franksolich]

Don't interrupt my narrative, vesta, dear; it's rude to interrupt.

By the way, this wasn't directed at comments; it was directed at off-topic comments.

[franksolich]

Just as I returned back from town, the femme was coming down the highway from the opposite direction.  Being a gentleman, I kindly stopped on the highway in front of where one turns off to this place and waited for her to go first, after which I followed her in on the long private drive.

She was just coming by to drop something off, nothing important.

But then I remembered something, and told her, “You know, there’s people camping here this weekend, Baptists, and I imagine they’re going to have some sort of small camp-meeting while here, Gospel and that old time religion music.

“And it’s likely to be the real thing.”

Now, I wasn’t telling her this because she’s a Baptist (she’s not, but of another Protestant denomination much like it), or because I wanted her to see a show, much as what the cultists of the obese Bagwam Maharishi Rawalpindi Thiruvananthapura Yogi from Oregon put on last year--no way--but simply because “the arts” are her professional interest, and here, she might be able to see some authentic stuff, a real part of what is good and decent about America and Americans.

And, I was right.

But as it turned out, she was planning on it anyway, having heard all the details of the upcoming company elsewhere--probably through those magic means hearing people use to pick up information out of thin air.

Damn.  I can never surprise anybody with news they haven’t already heard.

- - - - - - - - - -

She noticed some photograph albums on the dining room table, that she hadn’t seen before.

My family archives, identified, sorted, and catalogued, are in professional storage down in Omaha.  My family archives, just dumped into boxes (for later assortment), are in professional storage in town, and as I get the latter things done, they go down to Omaha.  This was the latest batch that I’d done, and was now getting ready to send to Omaha.

She picked up one book, so as to see what was inside it.

“No, no, no,” I hastily said; “you don’t want to see that; it’s all junk.”

“What’s ‘junk’ about it; it says it’s from your first two years in college.”

“After high school, I gained weight,” I said; “I was as tall as I am now, but fat, really fat.

“The Lincoln Leviathan, bending the scales at…..a whooping 214 pounds, at my fattest.

“Damn, I was fat, and hated it.”

I showed her one photograph of franksolich with one of his roommates.

“Look how fat I was; I was a blimp, a great…..big…..blimp.

“I think my waist was half a mile around, thirty-eight inches.

“And those stupid eyeglasses didn’t help either.

“Ew.  I was s-o-o-o-o fat, I could‘ve hired myself out to a freak show in a carnival.”

She looked.  “Well, you’re certainly smaller now, and better-looking, too.

“Only your hair’s still the same, worn the same way, and the same color.

“But I wouldn’t call you ‘fat’ back then.”

“You need to have your vision checked; if you saw me back then, you would‘ve immediately rejected me as a suitor, thinking I‘d be a better match for the Lynne Sin primitive,” I said.  “But very fortunately, two years after that photograph was taken, I got a hold of myself, and melted down to a normal 162 pounds at 6’3” with a 32” waistline.

"And I resumed wearing contact lenses.

“In the intervening decades, I alas put on twelve pounds, but I’m still the same altitude and thickness.

“It makes me break out into a cold sweat, that I could’ve been fat all my life, instead of for just a mere two years.”

to be continued, when something else happens

[franksolich]

In the early evening, although when it was still very bright and very hot outside, a couple of visitors came over while I was in the south meadow, playing “fetch” with the cats.  I toss them a frisbee, they run and catch it, bring it back to me, and I pat their head.  And then we do it again and again.

It was the first time these people had been here, and I’m not sure the impression I gave, especially the way I was dressed, as if Lord Kitchener of Khartuom; the khaki shorts, the tan shirt, the tan bush-helmet, attire which I find more suitable for myself, personally, out in the Sandhills than I do “cowboy” wear.

In case one’s not aware of this, the clime and terrain out here--excepting in winter--is exactly the same as what is to be found in former British East Africa.

The guy looks like an older-and-greyer Jimmy Stewart; his wife, like the late Nina Khruscheva.

I don’t know them hardly at all, but they’re very nice people, the salt of the earth.  He’s a truck-driver, and she’s a nurse’s aide at the nursing home in town.  He’s also the local Baptist preacher.

I invited them to come with me into the house, although with some trepidation, because I wasn’t sure if it’d offend.  The walls of the dining room, the living room, and the bedroom are covered with custom-framed copies of portraits, most by Hans Holbein, which by themselves could hardly offend anybody.

I’ve been accused of living in a portrait gallery, but whatever.

But here-and-there, there’s something betraying my own religious affiliation; the crucifix hung above the furnace thermostat, the “Sacred Heart of Jesus” which was a classic in American Catholic homes for decades (I’m sure this, with its frame and glass, is an antique by now), and three icons of the Virgin and Child.

(There’s also a framed photograph of Bela Pelosi hanging on the wall behind the commode in the bathroom, but never mind--)

However, they didn’t seem to notice.

- - - - - - - - - -

They did however notice the telephone.

“Oh, we’re sorry,” the wife said; “we thought you didn’t have a telephone; if we’d known that, we would’ve called rather than bothering you with a visit.”

I preferred that people come out here, rather than telephoning me, I assured them; “this thing was contrived by a hearing person who thought he understood what deaf people needed……and consequently, it’s a pain, a hassle, a nuisance, a trial, for deaf people to use.

“In fact, hearing people use it more than I do--but if one does, always best to turn off the blinking red light before picking up the receiver, lest one’s ear-drums are blasted out.”

- - - - - - - - - - -

“We heard some of our brethren are coming here this weekend,” the man said; “and were wondering if it’d be okay with you if some of us came out here to visit.”

I saw no problem with it; in fact, I thought it a great idea.

“And we were wondering,” the wife added, “if our local church could have a cook-out with them--”

“No problem,” I interrupted; “in fact, you may feel free to borrow that army-sized charcoal grill in the front yard.  I can haul it down to the river in the back of a truck here.

“It’d be great,” I rhapsodized; “hamburgers and french fries done on the grill.”

“Well, we weren’t quite thinking of that,” the man said, hesitantly. 

“Most of our members would like to donate ham-hocks and spare-ribs from their freezer lockers.”

That sounded okay, I said, “but what if they don’t like ham-hocks and spare-ribs?”

The couple looked at me as if I were Bozo from Outer Space.

“I’m very sure they’ll like ham-hocks and spare-ribs,” the wife said; “they’ll eat it right up.”

to be continued…..whenever

[franksolich]

Better to be unable to hear [rumors, gossip, back-stabbery, &c.] then to hear and [have to] disregard what we hear.

vesta, dear, during the middle of the night, like Saul on the road to Damascus, it came to me, as if a great blinding light.  You hit the nail on the head, sort of, although opposite the way you appear to think it is.

But I'm compelled to do some deep thinking about this; it might take a couple of days.  You're wrong, but the brain was suddenly congested, overfilled, traffic-jammed, with s-o-o-o-o-o-o many reasons "why" you're wrong, that one has to spend some time sorting them all out.

Nothing wrong with being wrong, vesta, dear; all of us are human, and we've each all been wrong before.

[franksolich]

When I got up about 4:45 this morning, as I was walking through the kitchen to empty my bladder in the bathroom, I remembered something, and suddenly got very nervous.

Before making coffee, I wrapped a towel around my mid-section and cautiously approached the window there, to look to see if anybody was peering inside.

Then, with none of the lights yet turned on, I sidled into the dining room and slowly looking around the corner, I surveyed the large picture-window that’s on the south side of the room.  Nothing there.

I quickly skipped over to the far corner, and from there glanced around to see out the large picture-window that’s on the east side of the house.

Then I tip-toed to the front door; nothing there, and nothing out in the front yard looked out of order.

Still clinging to the wall, I made my way into the living-room, where I looked out the large picture-window there, but all I saw was the silhouette of the alpine Jungfrau-looking William Rivers Pitt in front of the rising sun.

I then slowly eased my way to that place where, if I were vulnerable, I’d be most vulnerable, the large picture-window in the living-room that looks out to the north.

- - - - - - - - - -

One of the most attractive features of this place are the windows, on all four sides through which one can see the awesome panorama of the Sandhills of Nebraska.  When I first moved here, there were window-shades, which I immediately took down and trashed, because since early childhood, I’ve always associated window-shades with poverty; only poor people had them.

Better-off people had curtains, draperies, Venetian blinds, whatever, and at the time I made a mental note to get some of those while in the big city.  But due to the press of other preoccupations, I’d never gotten around to it the past eight years.

But no matter; the Sandhills are so awesome one wants to see them twenty-four hours a day anyway.

(In case the obvious question arises, the 8’ x 3’ window in the bathroom is obscured--no one need fear loss of privacy in the bathroom--there being some sort of milky-white frosted plastic laminate glued on the glass.)

(And in case another obvious question arises, when my guest was here last week using the bedroom, before she arrived, I’d carefully and neatly placed newly-laundered bed-sheets over the three windows of that room.)

I walked around the door leading from the living room into the bedroom (I’d originally gone out from the bedroom through the door leading into the kitchen), and stopped in my tracks.

- - - - - - - - - -

Oh fu…dge, I thought; what am I doing, acting so damned paranoid?  Paranoia’s not part of my nature.

I flung the towel onto the bed and brazenly walked into the kitchen to make coffee.

That made, I grabbed a package of cigarettes and walked out to the back porch.

The panorama from there was epic; the sun in front of the house hadn’t risen enough to lighten up the back yard, but it was already shining over the meadow and the side of the river 500 yards distant.

There’s an amateur-grade telescope bolted to the porch-railing, pointed towards the river, and I did look through that--but I was doing that even before I was paranoid.  I swung it from the walnut grove on the south, up the riverside, to the meadow on the north.  Nothing to be seen but birds.

As I smoked a cigarette and drank some coffee, I got more and more irked at myself, for having been so paranoid.

There was an old high-school cheerleader bullhorn on the back porch.  Someone had brought it to a party here last summer, and had forgotten all about it.

I grabbed it, and jumping onto the railing, stood there and boomed out to the horizon, “COME OUT, COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE!  PRIMITIVES!  STALKERS!  DUmmies!  COME OUT, COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE!  I DARE YOU!  COME OUT, COME OUT, TAKE ME ON, FREAKS!

“COME ON OUT AND TAKE ME ON, YOU PISSANTS!  YOU LOSERS!  RACISTS!  BIGOTS!  COME AND TAKE ME ON, FREAKS!

“I KNOW YOU’RE OUT THERE, WATCHING ME, EVEN THOUGH I DON’T SEE YOU AND CAN’T HEAR YOU!  YOU’RE OUT THERE, AND COME ON, TAKE ME ON, YOU CLOWNS!”

- - - - - - - - - -

Suddenly someone came walking around the corner, interrupting my bombasts.

From atop the railing, I glanced over at the sun-dial in the back yard; it showed sometime between 6:15 and 6:30 a.m.

Oops, I was late getting dressed.

But it was only Horacio, from the big city.  He’s from Texas, and I’ve known him for years.  His real name is “Juan,” but the first time I met him, I didn’t “get” it, supposing it to be “Horacio,“ and even though I learned later his real name, old habits die hard.  And besides, he’s used to it, and me.

Juan is in his late 60s, and a grandfather.  He has lots of family down in Texas, but lives up here because it’s quieter.  After having worked in meat-packing plants for almost fifty years, he’s retired now, and as an American citizen since some time when Dean Rusk was Secretary of State, he collects social security.

In his spare time, he does “’farmers’ marketing.”

No, it’s not like with the primitives in New England and their “farmers’” markets, where produce from Florida and Georgia is sold as “locally-grown;” one can’t fool people around here like that.

Whenever Juan feels the need to visit his descendants down in Texas, he takes along a big pick-up truck and a hand-made trailer, and brings back up here produce they’ve grown down there, to sell around here.  He doesn’t sell from any set place; he usually goes from small-town to small-town for a day, parking in front of a bank (the best spot, he says, and it doesn’t cause trouble with the local grocer), and sells.

Being an honest man and not a New England primitive, he uses no deceptive advertising.  His watermelons are plainly marked “Texas watermelons,” his cantaloupes “Texas cantaloupes,” and so on.

Everybody knows Juan, and he’s waxing fat and prosperous in his old age.

I live on his way to this town, and he always stops by, to see if I want anything, which of course I do.

- - - - - - - - - -

“Let me get dressed, and then let’s go and see what you have,” I said.

What he had was mostly watermelons, and I commented, “Oh good; I definitely need some of these, lots of these.

“I’ve got a bunch of guests coming this weekend, Baptists from some inner-city Abyssinian church in Indianapolis, and given that the weather’s going to be hot, these’ll go over good.”

Juan looked at me.  “How do you know; they might, uh, be offended--those people are sensitive about being thought of that way.”

Uh, no way, I said; “I dunno anything about that; all I know is everybody likes watermelon in hot weather.”

to be continued once something happens

[franksolich]

“Great job, as usual,” the business partner said as he got into the driver’s seat.

“You know, dude, you’re s-o-o-o-o-o good that sometimes I even forget my part, as I’m so wrapped up in watching you--”

“I know,” I interrupted; “and since you’ve ignored your cues, you leave me at sea, all alone.

“Talk about feeling like a pig sliding on ice.”

“Oh, but that’s when you’re at your best.”

- - - - - -  - - - -

He and I had just concluded some business with someone in a county nearby--never mind what, other than that the business partner and franksolich are the “good guys” in such things--and since we weren’t going anywhere else, he was just taking me home, I’d already gotten rid of my jacket, tie, socks, and shoes, sitting in the passenger-seat with just the brown pin-striped pants and a wholly natural cotton white shirt.

I don’t see how it’s possible to get any hotter than this, out in the Sandhills.

“You know,” I reminded him; “that’s eventually what’s going to kill me--although I hope for not a very long time yet--all this ulcerous erosion inside of me, caused by the life-long stress of masquerading as a hearing person when in fact I’m not hearing at all.”

Yeah, he knows; he was after all present that one Sunday evening in August four years ago when, without warning, I’d quickly expelled [what was later medically estimated as] three and a half pints of blood; blood all over the place.

The business partner, being in the highest ranking of emergency medical technicians--a paramedic--had saved the day; it ended well.

“It’ a very strenuous way to live, but I’ve never known any other way of living.”

- - - - - - - - - - -

“Tell me how that all happened again,” he said, “because I’m still trying to figure out the ‘why’ of it; why you’ve always felt compelled to act as a hearing person.”

I’m sure everybody on conservativecave knows the story by heart now; franksolich was the next-to-the-last child in a large family, born when my parents were older-than-usual; in fact, I have no memories of either of them without grey hair.

All the other children, including the one that followed, had been born with nothing wrong, and so it was a rude surprise when I’d emerged from the womb absent ears.  There’d been nothing during the course of the pregnancy to indicate anything was wrong, but ooops, here I was, a healthy robust bouncing vigorous infant, but missing two of the most important parts of one’s body.

(It was decades later determined to have been caused by the chemical Accutane, but that’s another story.)

franksolich was a phenomenon few had seen before.  (One is a decidedly miniature “ear,” but malformed and no ear-canal; the other is simply a “tab,” which usually evolves into an ear-lobe on most infants.  Neither has ever grown; they both remain the same size today, that they were when I was born.)

- - - - - - - - - -

When I was 3, 4, 5 years old, the parents had to make a decision about my education.

At the time, the only option available for such children in Nebraska was that of being boarded-and-schooled in a very large multi-storied sinister-looking building in downtown Omaha.  It was freely available to all deaf children; if one was from a poor family (which wasn’t the case here), the taxpayers of the state paid the bills.

If that was the only option, my parents decided “doing nothing” was better than that.

There were actually many factors favoring doing nothing, at least in my case.  Both parents were medical professionals, my father a CRNA (registered nurse-anesthetist) and my mother an RN (registered nurse), and my father besides that a hospital administrator.  And along with those credentials naturally came “connections” with hordes of other medical professionals, all the way east to New York City.

There were lots and lots of older brothers and sisters in the family available to watch and teach (this actually ended up being the weakest part of the “chain”); we lived in a small town alongside the pastoral Platte River, where everybody knew everybody else and their circumstances, and watched out for each other; and the pace of life was so slow, so peaceful, so quiet that even the most-troubled child should have no problem absorbing the world at a leisurely pace, instead of having it all at once stuffed down his throat.

(A significant factor, not known at the time, was the absence of television; everybody else had television, but there was never one in our house.  I have no idea why--I mean, it wasn’t as if we weren’t up-to-date [when we later moved into the heart of the Sandhills, for example, our house was the first there, ever, with central air-conditioning]; I grew up with plenty of modern conveniences.

(But we never had a television, nor do I recall anyone in the family expressing a desire to have one.)

- - - - - - - - - - -

“So…..one fine September morning the year I was five years old, I was without warning thrown into the ‘mainstream’ of school.

“Yeah, sure, the teachers had been told all about me and were ready for me, but I hadn’t been told a thing.

“Man,” I groaned.  “Talk about throwing baby from the bath-water into the boiling water.”

- - - - - - - - - -

I lit another cigarette.  “I was still pretty young; I have no idea what I thought.

“I do recall, though, that sometime during the first or second grade, when I was 6, 7, years old, I consciously decided that if I were going to survive, I had to be just like everybody else.

“Well, I couldn’t be just like everybody else; I couldn’t hear.

“However, I could act just like everybody else; provided I camouflaged the absence of ears, I could do that.

“And the rest of course is history; John Barrymore had nothing on franksolich.”

- - - - - - - - - - -

The business partner laughed, sort of. 

“I’ll never forget it,” he said.  “The first two or three times we got together [this would be the autumn of 2005, shortly after franksolich had disposed of the late red round one], before we decided to work together, I had no idea.  You looked and acted perfectly normal, and didn’t give the slightest clue.

“Then somebody told me you were deaf, and I said ‘no way;’ it wasn’t possible.

“The next time we met, I directly asked you, and you said ‘yes.’

“’Oh man,’ I thought; ‘this guy’s a blatant liar, a poseur; I don’t want to work with him.’

“Finally, you got exasperated and lifted the hair off both sides of your head, and I saw.

“Dude, you are awesome.”

I thanked him.

the Baptists are coming, and so something might finally happen

[franksolich]

Upon getting home, I went to sleep in the bedroom, even though it was still only the afternoon.  It’s likely to be very hot for a few days, and as the femme was going to be here using the bedroom this night, the only room in the house with air-conditioning, I decided to take advantage of it while I can, which won’t be for long.

In the depth of the afternoon, about three, I got up and went out to the back porch.  I was still wearing the brown pin-striped pants from the suit, and the pure cotton white shirt, but was barefooted and all that.

Looking to the south, I saw a group of people wandering near the grove of walnut trees.  I swung my eyes over to look at the side of the river, where I saw a bunch of cars and some half-set-up tents.

The Baptists from Indiana had arrived.

I rang a hand-held antique school-bell that had been left on the back porch--the sort of bell used to summon students back in from recess--to attract the attention of the group walking by the trees, hoping their leader was among them.  I also “hallo’ed” and waved, but I’ve never been sure my voice carries that far.

They saw me and waved back, and one of them began walking towards the house.

- - - - - - - - - - -

He was far enough away that I had time to collect my thoughts.

Now, I know it’s passe these days, honor and respect for men of the cloth, but I stubbornly retain my reverence for these selfless men who’ve given up all else to serve God.  They get not only courtesy from me, but awe and wonder.

However, it’s all very complicated.

Among my own, it’s the most natural thing in the world, to automatically bow one’s head in respect to such a person, but the upcoming visitor was Protestant, not Catholic, and it’s my understanding Protestants don’t care much for such formality.

However, being what I am, I’m greatly uncomfortable with this “oh, just call me Joe; we’re human, just like everybody else” bit.  There is no way in Hell franksolich can treat a man of God as if he’s only just like everybody else, because he’s not.

Also, Protestants tend to get huggy-huggy and cuddly-cuddly when meeting each other, which makes me cringe.  I’m not a hugging or cuddling sort of person; such intimacy repels me, turns me ice-cold.

In the past, I’ve tried getting away with just a quick hand-shake, but I’ve never succeeded.

It’s always been a quandary, and never ends well.

- - - - - - - - - -

As he got closer, I noticed the preacher bore a striking resemblance to Congressman John Lewis of Georgia, although not as fat or decadent-looking.  And certainly more cheerful.  Also, he was wearing what were obviously thrift-store clothes, in which no self-important politician would dare appear.

I “read” “Praise the Lord!” on his mouth as he got closer, smiling and lifting his arms.

I was taken aback; that’s too much exuberance for my Catholic tastes.

For lack of any other idea, I slightly bowed my head to him, and as if solemnly speaking from a crypt, said, “Welcome, in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, through Whom our Salvation is assured.”

Well, it was the best I could think of at the moment.

He bounded up the steps, and we shook hands.  I took one of his elbows and gently steered him to a chair at a table in the shade of the porch.  After all, this was not a young man.  Then I said, “I’ll sit down in a minute, too, but first, it’s very hot, and you’re hot…..and thirsty.

“Coffee or milk or tea or orange juice?”

“Water,” he said; “I’d sure like some water.”

I walked into the kitchen.  Water was too common for a man of God, so putting ice into two large tumblers, in his I poured three-quarters of a quart of pure orange juice, and in mine, three-quarters of a quart of whole milk.  Then I went back outside, with napkins too.

- - - - - - - - - -

He gave me the statistics of the group; there were now twenty-two of them, aged 77 years down to nine months, eight motor vehicles, five tents.  They were going to stay here this night, and Saturday night, and then sometime near sun-down on Sunday, get going west again, driving through the night, to the camp-meeting up in Montana.

They didn’t need anything; God had provided.

I arched my eyebrows at that; from various clues, I suspected God had some unfinished business.

I inquired as to how they’d heard of this place; I mean, it’s not on maps or anything.

He told me that some weeks before, a white guy had passed through their church in Indianapolis, and mentioned this place.  “He was tired, run-down, destitute, and maybe running away from something.  He stayed for our services, but obviously wasn’t ready for God yet.  He mentioned this place, and that it was run [sic] by ‘a nice guy, one of the nicest guys one can ever hope to meet.’”

I thought a while, and then remembered.

“Oh yeah,” I replied; “that must’ve been Italianate Jesus, who was running away from that weird cult of the fat greasy Bagwam Maharishi Rawalpindi Thiruvananthapura Yogi in Oregon; they were chasing him because they were afraid he’d reveal all their secrets.

“They were here last year, and I’m still living it down.”

- - - - - - - - - -

I mentioned that their friends from around here were going to show up about supper-time, hoping to treat the visitors with a cook-out after it cooled down in mid-evening.

“We already know about it,” he replied, not aware that such words sting.

How is it possible, that hearing people--

I mean, neither group knew the other, and had no way of contacting each other.

Damn.

“We’re appreciative of the hospitality of our brothers and sisters, and’ve been looking forward to it.”

- - - - - - - - - -

We talked of a few things of general interest, but I was getting itchy.  I was hot and miserable, my head aching from all this communication.  And I hadn’t had a cigarette since returning home, suspecting it not good manners to smoke in front of a man of God.

About five o’clock, the femme showed up, bringing with her two of her students in one of her dance classes in the big city.  All three of them were going to spend the night, in my bedroom.

Okay, I figured; I’d opened the door, paved the way.  The rest was up to her, all the socializing.

“I have to go to town to get some cigarettes,” I announced, giving the impression that I’d be right back, but actually meaning I’d be away for a while, to rest up from all this social interaction.  Not that I have anything against people, but simply that I “burn out” quickly, and it had after all been a trying day.

to be continued when the next thing happens

[franksolich]

“Well, I think that’s terrible--why would you do such a thing?” the neighbor’s wife asked me in early evening, when I found her out in the long meadow, exercising her horses.

I’d gone up there, six miles north of my place, after leaving the party down there in the hands of the femme, although she probably wasn’t yet aware she was now in charge.

The neighbor had taken their five children to supper at their grandparents’, but I knew she was still at home.  She wasn’t around the house or thereabouts, and so I took one of their pick-up trucks to drive around looking for her.  I have a free pass to use their vehicles (and those of others, throughout the county), and as my car’s low-slung (my preference; they’re easier to handle in the relentless winds of Nebraska), it doesn’t take deep ruts very well, if at all.

She let the horses go, and we walked to the pick-up truck and sat in the air-conditioned cab.

About this time of the day, it always looks like rain, but it never does.

“Well, she’s used to it,” I smiled, weakly; “it’s hardly the first or the twentieth time I’ve done it.

“She likes to socialize, and finds everybody interesting--and they, her.  She’s a very chatty, effervescent, curious person.  I look at it as if I’m doing her a favor, giving her the gift of people to socialize with.”

“I wonder if she sees it that way,” the neighbor’s wife offered.

“Well, she’s never complained, and besides, it makes sense.  We’re a  pair, and in a pair, the person most temperamentally-suited for doing something, does it, so that the other person, who might be badly-skilled or inept at it, doesn’t have to deal with it.

“And,” as I reminded the neighbor’s wife, “it works the other way, too.  For example, when there’s primitives camping out there, because they’re a threat to respectable women, I deal with them, won’t let them get near her.

“So I carry my weight too.

“Tonight, we got a case of decent and civilized people, no problems, so they’re all hers.

“Besides, I’ll be the perfect host tomorrow night, when you’re there too.”

to be continued, whenever I find out what happened