notes for XV:
mom doing graves rubbings and framing them around the house
she actually did this…well, what are grave rubbings anyway?
Mom, in our various travels across the country, would ask Dad to stop at a random graveyard…so we would stop and Mom would venture in to the graveyard’s heart and search out interesting engraved tombstones and then when she found one, she would get out her willowy thin specially-made-for-this paper, place it directly on the tombstone and using a specific charcoal from an art store and start rubbin the charcoal onto the paper thereby transferring the letters to the paper and what you ended up with was complete rendering of the tombstone, highlighted by the black charcoal which if it were a “good” one, she would then frame and hang them in our house and as a kid, I never thot twice about Mom’s hobby…I accepted her hobby as a perfectly Mom thing to do…
the key thing to know is that I loved being around dad when I was caddying etc.
hunt breakfasts
Mom was smart about a lot of schtuff..so what is a hunt breakfast?
a hunt breakfast is when you go into the kitchen half-asleep and hunt for food, literally and figuratively so that is what we did…Mom liked to sleep in and not be bothered by these early risers meaning Dad, me and my sister…so Mom would shop for items in quantity, case in point, she would buy me a case of Cheerios so that I could start my day without her assistance…it was the same for Dad and my sister. She got them what they wanted for breakfast each morning and she stocked the pantry, accordingly…it really was genius when you think about it and she was waaaaay ahead of her time for buying in bulk quantities back in the mid-1960s…as above with grave rubbings, it seemed to me growing up this was another example of a perfectly Mom thing to do…
I seem to be on a roll, this morning
so for posterity:Sunday, January 5, 2025, the time in The Everpresent Now is 5:00 AM
days of summer before the bus trip spent on relatives farms, working my ass off
January 16, 02025 3:21 AM
the memories from those trips to relative’s farms to work every Summer are filled with schtuff like the following:
one Summer, I was sent by train from NYC to a relative’s farm in Iowa…I did not know these particular relatives at all but Dad did so I left NYC not knowing anything about them except they ran cattle and farmed the rest of the acreage…as it turns out, these people were exceedingly kind and welcomed me even though they were distant relatives from us and me…so the routine that Summer went like this:
get up at the crack of dawn..eat a huge breakfast while we waited for daylight, then hit the field with whatever chore was pressing for the day, then after that, go back to the farmhouse for a huge and filling lunch, then back at it again until dinner where would we eat again…and rested from the days labors…it was just the two of them, here…I did not know if they had kids, grown or not but our nights were filled out by playing canasta…now, they had a third partner so I learned the card game though, I never in my life played it before…two memories stand out for me on this farm Summer:
1.and 2.
Baling hay: Nowadays, all you see when traveling acros America is the rolled up hay bales but back then in the early 1960s, we used hay balers that worked like this:
First, the farmer would cut the hay or alfalfa and it then would be laying in the field…at this point, you hoped it did not rain while the hay was laying there then the farmer would take a harrowing rake and rake the the hay into neat rows..after this was done, he would hook a baling machine up to the tractor and the baling machine would be hooked to a bare flat bed trailer…so this is where I would come in because the baled hay (neatly tied by the baling machine and of a uniform size) would come out of the machine but unless it was handled by someone that baling machine would spew the bales out onto to the bare trailer without being to manage the stacking and arranging…so a third party was needed to be used to manage this activity…what’s the secret, Dad?
as the neatly tied bales exited the chute, I would grab each bale using a baling hook (I thot as a kid they were incredibly heavy and bulky but I could learn to handle this task) and with hooked bale run as fast as I could down the length of the trailer and start stacking each bale and then run as fast as I could to back to the other end of the trailer where the chute was pumping our another bale to be hooked…sometimes when first learning what it took to do this over and over again, all I could manage was to drag this heavy, bulky object to the end of the trailer..in those early moments of learning what it took to do this the farmer would slow the tractor down while I caught up..soon though, I became stronger and could handle this task better and soon, we could make quick work of it…unlike an older, stronger and taller person who could do this work and most importantly, stack them higher than I was able to do but we managed…the neat thing was as the stacked bales grew at the end of the trailer, I got closer and closer to the baler and did not have run back and forth so much which was cool..soon, we had a a full trailer and we would then quit baling for the day and drag the trailer to the barn…this is where I get to take each bale, hook it and drag or carry it to the back of barn and stack them, all over again and on and on until the trailer had been emptied of its bales…but heck, I loved it even though it was hot as blazes in the Iowa heat and I was sweating like a whore in church cos I knew it needed to be done and I had a great meal coming and could rest at night or play canasta, as the case may be…
2.
on another day, my chores would be completely different, to wit: spraying cattle with fly repellent spray.
so we would go out to the pasture where the cows were grazing and gently entice them with fresh alfalfa…I would wander among them so they would smell the good stuff, walk back to the aforementioned trailer and then using the tractor and trailer would slowly lead them from the pasture to a corral near the farmhouse and when full to the brim with cattle in the small corral, the farmer would close the gate while the cows grazed on the alfalfa I had laid down for them…then, it came time for me to do work…the cows were tightly bunched in this corral and munching happily on the alfalfa…then the farmer would load a pump air sprayer with fly repellent and expected me to climb in there with them and spray each individual cow with this chemical, tip to tail…so that is what I did…as an aside here, I must be noted that I wore nothing but the clothes on my back and had no protection from this chemical…no breathing protection, either so God only knows what I was exposed to at this early stage in my life but back then, we did not know anything…all this is hindsight and based on a career of Haz-Waste remediation where we used Personal Protection Equipment or PPE for breathing and clothing on a daily basis… so the cattle were ready and so was I…I climbed the fence into the corral and began dousing each cow with generous dousing of the chemical…
all the while, all I could think of is what would happen as I moved through this mass of tightly bunched cattle if a cow inadvertently stepped on my foot…I just had on some boots with no steel toe protection and was terrified of this happening but as I worked my way through the cattle, I learned that if I just shuffled my feet as I moved to another cow, the cow would sense this and move its foot…so the fear lessened and I became more confident as I worked each and every cow…moving throughout to the whole corral and got each and every cow doused…maybe some twice but Hey, I was new to this task…my mentor, the farmer just hung out at the fence and watched me with no comment or advice which was fine because he could see me gain confidence as I moved from cow to cow…I know he would have helped if I got into trouble but I did not and I learned by doing
Full Stop 5:34 AM January 16, 02025
being able to tell my kind and loving parents that the gift they gave me, was an entirely inappropriate fat-tired slug of a bike in appearance and style to this seven or eight year old kid…there are photographs taken of me where you can see me with a bogus, gritted teeth,forced smile…sad to say but then again…I later told Mom and Dad and they knew I wanted a bike, that year, going in Lake Oswego that Christmas so I felt comfortable enuff with Mom and Dad that I could tell them how disappointed I was with that bike and since the move to NYC was imminent, the next thing I know, I was on a racing Schwinn with thin tires, underslung and inverted handlebars so I could crouch low the bike and get up to speed… that bike was quick and agile as hell on on the streets of Manhattan…I loved that bike for its speed and agility…I could race with the wind on that bike
fast forward to about 1972, back in Bay Area again…long story, short, I bough a brand-new out of the box Honda 350 motorsickle in the morning, convinced the salesman I was an experienced motorsickle rider and promptly dumped it on a oil-slicked curve in the road, back thru hills behind Stanford, headed to beach…oh, well