Dear Blog Reader;
I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine, and very
thankful. You should be too. Work had an out-of-town visitor this week. The
trip was an overnight event and they asked what there was to do around town for
the evening. I had to think for a minute and respond “after the super bowl we
are all pretty tired and just want to go to bed early and recover from these
nasty measles that we contracted in our giant party for the unvaccinated.” They
were left searching for context. Measles? Party for the unvaccinated? Don’t
worry. They’ll get back to Oklahoma
I am thankful that I took the lovely Beverly
I have to warn you though that the memories revealed on
these pages are about 4-H. Oh I can hear you. “4-H; how sweet. Heart, Hands,
Head, Health; Roger is going to remember all of the good things that 4-H did
for him and how it made him the person that he is today.” Wrong. I want to be
clear. I hated 4-H. I know it provided you with wonderful memories of working
on crafts, baked goods, spending time with your parents at the fair; learning
that hard work paid office in ribbons, and praise and adoration. Good for you.
I am glad for you.
I learned among other things; that in order to win a blue
ribbon in gardening you had to have 5 greenbeans exactly the same height. What?
Where does it say that in the rule book? It does not. It says uniform. They are
uniform. They are uniformly green beans; all five of the stupid things; Red
Ribbon. I learned that Mr. Jeffer’s (the town electrician) son can build a
circuit board where the wire is bent at 90 degree angles, the board is varnished
and labeled with perfect lettering. What? Where does it say that in the rule
book? It does not. It says turn the light on and the light off. There it is on
– off, on – off, on – off; Participant Ribbon.
Finally and most devastatingly, I learned that peanut butter
cookies are not supposed to have cracks. What? Where does it say that in the
rule book? It does not. How are you to keep them from developing cracks any
how? The judge actually said that you are supposed to bake dozens and dozens of
the dumb things and pick the three that may not have cracked. Argh! “Aren’t
they even going to eat one?” I asked my grandmother and coach. “I know they’re
good. I wouldn’t have eaten the uncracked ones if I had known.”
“No dear, they aren’t supposed to have cracks.” She said;
Red Ribbon.
Where does it say that in the rule book?!!!!!?
It appeared that 4-H was mainly for neat people; people who
look good putting on any old thing. People who respond to a compliment about
how they look, “oh this, I just threw it on.”
I learned all of that in my first year of 4-H. After the
lessons learned that first year, the Sharritt family decided that what we
needed was focus. We focused. We focused on showing beef cows and dairy cows.
It is what we did for a living. If that Jeffer’s boy had a genetic
predisposition to grand champion circuit boards, because his father was an
electrician, why couldn’t the Sharritt kids benefit from the Sharritt dairy
farmer genes?
So every summer from Memorial Day through the third week of
July, the Sharritts would try to break 1400 pound steers and heifers to walk
docilely behind a 150 pound kid on the end of a rope like they were a 13 year
old lab for a walk in the park. Three problems with that; the kid weighed 150
(I really did weigh that much a long time ago); the steer weighed 1400 pounds.;
and while man had domesticated beef for farm production, the beef had not been
domesticated to the extent that dogs had. There are many reasons for this. The
first is that if a dog messes in the house you rub his 60 pound nose in it and
put him out. The dog learns to not like having his nose rubbed in feces and
stops; much the same way that I learned not to like gardening, electricity, and
baking in 4-H. A cow messes in the house, it is just a big mess, and since it
is very hard to rub a 1400 pound nose in feces, the cow never moves on to other
acts of domestication like getting a beer from the fridge.
We had every trick in the book to domesticate our cows. We
tied them to the back of wagons and pulled the wagon with a tractor.
We would get a short rope on the halter and hook a secondary long rope to the
halter so that if they broke free its anchor point to the light pole would stop
them from getting free and “fool” them into thinking that no matter how hard
they rebelled they couldn’t get away from the 150 pound child. My favorite
though was we bought a donkey. For the really stubborn beef cows, we would
attach this donkey’s halter to the beef cows halter. The donkey being stubborn
and weighing 900 pounds could set its feet and keep the steer from pulling away
and over time train it to the ways of the halter.
We practiced those tricks in that old red barn. The cows
tied to the feed trough with heavy yellow nylon ropes. They would be washed on the
cement pad in front of the barn that sloped to the north so the sudsy water
would run down over the hill making the grass greener on the other side of that
fence. “Make sure to spray the cold water at their feet first because if you
start up on their bodies the cold contrast on a 90 degree day could kill them.”
The daily feed ration weighed out and written down so that the project book
could be filled out at 11:00 pm the night before it was due. The first and
second hair cuts given to reluctant recipients who wanted nothing to do with
that much domestication. This accompanied by endless circuits around the barn
yard; a 150 pound boy tethered to a 1400 pound cow. You know, I never did learn
to get that memory out of my mind. Where does it say that?
Take care,
Roger
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