Sunday, November 26, 2017

Scared to Death

Dear Blog Reader.

I hope that this finds you doing well. I must admit that my hands are a bit shaky. I had quite the Halloween fright. It is hard to believe that we have passed Thanksgiving. But let’s face it. Thanksgiving was so early this year that I barely had time to recover from my Halloween ordeal. It was a wonderful Thanksgiving. It is over now and it is off to the next faze of the holiday season which I fondly call; Newthankschristgivemasday. It is a quiet Sunday morning. The lovely Miss Beverly has graciously made me smokies and eggs with one piece of heavy bread. What is heavy bread you ask? Well you will just have to keep wondering and hope that someday we will let you live with us and teach you the heavy bread secret handshake.

Oh don’t be sad. If you were here, you would have to smell my garlic infused fingers. I know that it is too late plant garlic. But what could I do? With Aug-toner temps being so high. It would have germinated the garlic. It’s green sprouts would have emerged and been frozen in Jan-peril.  Yes, you would be able to dream about pans of lasagna, and tubs of humus, but it would stink to high heaven. That is one thing that reading on the internet deprives one. If you were here and we were having a story telling conversation, you would be able to smell the garlic oils left on my hands after going out and getting  15 ft of garlic in the ground in hopes that the 50 degree weather forecasted this week will be enough to promote healthy root growth and not so much to promote sprouting. We shall see. That sitting around the table, telling and listening to stories, the lingering evidentiary aroma of a task well done, adds so much to the social discourse that is lost with social media. However, don’t even start to think that I am inviting all one million of you over for smokies and eggs for a story. 

All of that being said, I hope that my words can convey the terror that I felt while trying to change a tire at 8:00 p.m. along I69 during a heavy rain. Hopefully, you will not need to see my wild eyed gesticulating, or see me throw my glasses from my face while demonstrating one of the more frightening moments to get the flavor of the fear that I experienced that evening.

Bev and I were out celebrating our foster son’s good grades at Golden Corral. I know that some of you foodies out there are frightened by that sentence. Don’t be such a snob. Where else can you go and get gummy bears to sprinkle over your ice cream sundae? Pure goodness. And there is so much of everything. It is what J.D. wanted. “What J.D. wants”, has been in short supply as he learns to live under different management. We rolled out of Golden Corral and ran through the wind and the rain to the car. We jumped in the car and headed out for the 12 mile trek home. Just as I pulled on interstate, the low tire light lit up. 

That yellow light blazed on my dash and my adrenaline spiked. First, I hoped that the stupid sensor was malfunctioning like it had for nearly a year before I had it fixed. Crap! That’s right. I had it fixed. Plan B: maybe it was just signifying the regular loss of air that all tires undergo. Pump up the tire once a year and the light goes out and there is no problem. I would just drive the eight miles to the next exit, pull into a gas station and check it out. I would be relieved when looking at the tire and seeing that it might be a little low but drivable. I would pull into our nice garage and pump up the tire and be good for another 12 months. Crap! I don’t remember ever having to pump up the tire every once in a while before. That is the other car; the one with the 8 year old rims that may have a bit of pitting around the rim. Sure I have to pump it up every three months but never this car.

Well I wasn’t going to get out on the interstate to check. So, I pushed the gas down harder and and started doing mental gymnastics. If a car leaves St Louis and drives 70 mph toward Indianapolis 231 miles away and another car leaves Indianapolis and drives 100 mph, will the second car lose control if the tire suddenly goes flat? It turns out that at 70 mph you will make it about 6 miles before the telltale shaking will tell you that your story problem is over, and you did not make it to the safe haven exit number 25, and it feels like it is the driver’s side rear that is going down. Congratulations, you get to get up close and personal to oncoming traffic.

Like an Indy 500 crew going over the wall in the final laps of the race, the lovely Miss Beverly and I hop out of the car, open the hatchback and start digging for tires, jacks, and lug wrenches. The lovely Miss Beverly was a great help. She did a great job standing at the back of the car and shining the flash light around the corner at my work area.  During the next five minutes, I had three thoughts that kept passing through my mind in an eternal loop. First, how far will my body fly if someone drifted off the road and hit me at 70 mph? Second, it’s okay if I get hit but I am going to be really sad if the lovely Miss Beverly or the two children in the car get hit. Third, did you know that it has been scientifically proven that the hour between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. is one of the 24 most texting-while-driving hours.

Then at the 5:03 minute mark, things got really exciting. I was just starting to tighten the lug nuts and exhausting my curing thesaurus when a truck came by so close and fast that it blew my glasses off of my face. Yes, BLEW MY GLASSES OF MY FACE!  And let me tell you, Roget’s was able to publish a new edition of curses. Thankfully my glasses landed in a crack between my coat and the car. I recovered, put my glasses back on, turned to page two of the new edition and really started tightening lug nuts. During this frenzied two minutes, two more thoughts ran through my mind. First, Bill Cosby (back when he was funny and a closeted abuser) had a bit that told a story about his mother always telling him to put on clean underwear because you didn’t want to have dirty underwear in the hospital. At this point, he looked at the audience and said, “we all know that clean underwear don’t matter. If you are in an accident, first you are going to say it and then your’e going to do it. It doesn’t matter how clean your underwear were.” My underwear were in great danger of being soiled.

Second, I thought why do people want me to watch the Walking Dead or a hundred other horror films. I don’t like them. They scare me, and at that moment along I 69, at 8:00 p.m. in the dark and the rain, fixing a flat tire 3 feet away from cars going 70 mph with the drivers texting and a foot and a half way from some S.O.B. in a semi, I received my lifetime supply of scared s#*%$t-less.

Take care.


Roger.

Sunday, November 5, 2017

All Sweetness and Light

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. It leaves my keyboard trying to come to terms with being beatified. No one more was more surprised than I. My sect is not big on saintly things. I had no aspirations to sainthood but there I was earning my wings like Clarance in “It's a Wonderful Life.”

 I learned of my spiritual promotion on the way home from work the other night. I was in the process of stealing (no the irony isn’t lost on me) several copies of Branches from the self service paper dispenser at work. Branches is a small freebie newspaper published semi monthly here in Indianapolis. Based on their advertising, I am assuming that their target audience is New Age believers. With that kind of spiritual pedigree, I am assuming that they have the expertise to make judgements about the hierarchical ranking of spiritual beings. 

So yes, I was taking several papers from the dispenser to shred up to feed to my worm farm that I keep in the garage. They do yeomen’s work chewing up our compost. I take the newspapers and grind them up into bite size nuggets. This balances out the carbon-nitrogen levels that make my worms very happy. I figure that the stealing is actually a good thing. At least, I justify that stealing in this case is a good thing. Everyone is helped all around. Branches can charge a higher ad rate to “Classes at New Age People” because the readership is so high. The paper’s aren’t ending up in the landfill. And the worms benefit from the karmic bs. It is a win win win.

Right there on the front of the July - August 2017 edition, are a bunch of bee keepers with angel wings. I never studied iconography in school but even I could get the picture with their graphical representations. Beekeepers are doing the Lord’s work. I am a beekeeper. Therefore, I am doing the Lord’s work; hence the spiritual promotion. No one was more surprised that I. I went to work that morning, a worker bee in my cubicle, can came out a beekeeping angel. Who knew?

Actually, I am not much of a beekeeper. I have an expensive hobby that involves keeping boxes with frames of wax foundation. Some bees hang out and do what they do. I know that there are beekeepers out there who are in their hives every other week from April through September. They are searching for the queen, treating for parasitic mites, and naming all of the new larvae. They know every time that pesticides are being sprayed in a four county radius. They are harvesting honey after the spring flow and the fall flow (if there is enough nectar). There are even beekeepers who make hard candy to put in the hive to help the bees get through the winter. These people are keeping bees. I just happen to know where some bees hang out.

These are all important tasks. They make the hive stronger and less prone to sudden hive collapse. That is a good thing. The fewer hives that collapse the more bees we will have. And since flowers are horrible at unaided sex, the more bees that we have the more flower sex there is and hence more fruits and vegetables. Some predict that the world order is threatened by the factors that contribute to sudden hive collapse. Beekeepers by their actions help or single handedly prevent civilization’s collapse. You deserve those wings buddy. Saving the world through flower sex is certainly more important than what that chump Clarence did by massaging the space time continuum while Jimmy Stewart got his head right. Let the bells ring I say.

I have a theory about why the bees are having trouble. Bees forage for pollen in a three mile radius from the hive. That is a lot of space to cover with those little tiny wings. Who watched bees for long enough to figure that out? And how did the researcher know that one bee flew that far? What if you were watching a bee and he flew close to another bee that was whose hive was a mile and a half away. The researcher got confused which bee they were supposed to be watching and switched their focus mid flight so that bees really only fly a mile and a half. I know difficult right. But I digress. So bees can supposedly forage up to 3 miles away for pollen. There should be plenty of pollen by any standard to keep a hive flourishing with in a circle that large.

But wouldn’t it be better if the pollen were closer? What would happen if we let the dandelions take over our yards and the bees only had to fly 7 feet to get pollen instead of three miles? The same principle applies in our every day lives. Let’s say you had an option of keeping your refrigerator in your kitchen or in Aunt Betty’s kitchen 3 miles away. Sure you could get in the car or on your bike and navigate the three miles for the sandwich fixings. You could survive on that. But would you get all fat and sassy that way. Heck no! You would get your sandwich made, get it back to the house, sit down at the table, say a little prayer and then cuss because you forgot to put any mayo on your roast beef sandwich. 

Are you going to get up from the table and get all of the way over to Aunt Betty’s house for a little dab of mayo? NO! No mayo is going to make you skinnier. And forget about a mid-evening ice-cream sundae.  You aren’t going to get fat and happy doing that. No you are going to be skinny and puny and won’t have much energy for that birds and the bees thing. In short, if your refrigerator is kept three miles away your hive is going to collapse. So I get out there and plant as many high pollen plants that I can. I encourage that first flush of dandelions in the spring and keep planting buckwheat until 3 weeks before frost in the fall. We have mint plants, sunflowers, white clover through out the front yard. Yes, Sharritt Farms is a fat bee paradise. We have “caution o-bee-se in the area” signs posted all around the farm. Sharritt bees have it good.

Am I doing the Lord’s work? I have my doubts. It is important to not read too much into all of the little things we do that just happens help a little bit. I think the world suffers because we beatify the little things; things that just have to be done. It probably started with participation trophies in little league. Yeah, we need to get in there, do our best, play hard, and pay attention. We have to do that for the health of the team and for that matter for our own enjoyment. But that doesn’t make us a star. Bee keeping doesn’t make me a saint. It doesn’t even make me a good person.

It just makes me a guy who loves a little honey in his tea.

Take care.


Roger