Farmer Brown's Bad Day
When Walt and I were boys, Pop, our grandfather, loved listening to baseball games on the radio. Not leaving Gina out, but she didn't work at the fishhouse those days in the late forties and early fifties. On 12th Street in St. Andrews our fishhouse was across the street from where the Shrimpboat is now, there's a parking lot there today. Pop's fishhouse was right across the street from us, where Gracie Rae's of the Shrimpboat is, out over the water a red building long ago faded to pink, with a tin roof, a magical place. A magical place. Underneath Pop's fishhouse was stand up, walk around space, we could get to the water's edge and scoop up oyster cats, fat minnows that looked like miniature catfish. Once I saw an alligator gar four or five feet long, lurking near a piling.
Their teeth are to behold
Boys, we played on the great old fishing boats tied up at the fishhouse pier for many years. Long retired, never used or moved in our time. One was Tommy and I forget the name of the other.
And the privy, the outhouse. Red faded pink like the fishhouse. A twin privy. One side was public, the other was Pop's. His door always had a padlock. The padlock was fake, didn't require a key, just pretend you had a key, pop it open and closed. When Pop found out Walt and I preferred his outhouse to the conventional restroom in our fishhouse, he showed us about the lock and told us not to use the public side. The privy was at the end of the lower part of the pier, over the water. Not so elegant as below, but one gets the picture, the sense of it.
Delicacy draws a curtain across the joys of sitting over a cool breeze. Not to mention spiders under the seat eyeing boys' posteriors, etc.
Spiders?
I said not to mention spiders.
But the baseball games. Pop was fairly deaf, and when Pop listened to baseball everybody in St. Andrews listened to baseball. Mind, this was the late forties and early fifties when it was radio or nothing. No TV and no airconditioning with closed windows. Windows open with bay breezes whipping through, and radio full volume. Baseball games pouring out of the windows from Pop's fishhouse across the street and down the block.
The only equal to Pop for baseball game volume was that no-hitter Don Larsen pitched for the Yankees in the 1956 World Series, and the only thing louder than the game all over Gainesville that day was when the game ended and the horns started honking. Not sure that game has ever been equaled.
In my growing up years most guys grabbed for the sport section of the newspaper. Not me: comics, the comic page. Especially Sunday. Favorites? Cap'n Easy. Katzenjammer Kids with the Cap'n.
The Cap'n always had the gout. Li'l Abner. Popeye, with Wimpy at the hamburger stand offering, "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for two hamburgers today." Out Our Way. Major Hoople, a windbag know it all veteran of the Boer War, host of a boardinghouse of strange characters. Host but not boss; his wife Martha was boss, dead serious, and nobody's fool.
One comic strip had a dog with a zigzag tail. On a day of huge excitement the dog might say, "Reminds me of the day I got my tail caught in the screen door."
For all my reminiscing, comics are better now, none better than Calvin and Hobbes. Though Doonesbury is unbeatable sarcasm.
Seems shallow, obtuse to think of comics and baseball after what happened in Boston at the marathon yesterday. What can one say about unspeakable evil, tragedy, shame, atrocity. Outrage is the sense, grief for innocent bystanders. It has come to America and will stay and grow. One has a sense of having lived too long. Overwhelming sadness. Our national golden age is over, long slide into darkness that one doesn't want to share with life.
In a thousand years those studying the rise, decline and disappearance of empires will read about us on page 319. And be asked about us on the exam.
7. Consider civilizations and leaders of history. What did the Romans do that built them up, that sustained them, that made people love them, that made people hate them, and that brought them down? The Babylonians? The Americans? The Assyrians? The British? The Persians? Ancient China? The Greeks? Alexander the Great? The Soviet Union? The Egyptians? The Phoenicians? Napolean? Atilla the Hun? The Holy Roman Empire? For this exam question, select one of the above ancient empires of earth history, and select a more recent civilization; for the two you choose, compare and contrast their rise, their positive and negative contributions to the human condition, and reasons for their fall, collapse or disintegration. What could our modern Chinese civilization learn and profit from their examples? Time, twenty minutes. Weight, 15 points.
8.
Or maybe in a hundred years. Ten? Once the plane hits it isn't long until the tower collapses.
A century from now I would look back and see that my great-grandfather lived in a far better time of America.
Truth, I can see it now.
There's Judy on Channel 13. It's not real weather unless Judy is giving it.
T
Their teeth are to behold
Boys, we played on the great old fishing boats tied up at the fishhouse pier for many years. Long retired, never used or moved in our time. One was Tommy and I forget the name of the other.
And the privy, the outhouse. Red faded pink like the fishhouse. A twin privy. One side was public, the other was Pop's. His door always had a padlock. The padlock was fake, didn't require a key, just pretend you had a key, pop it open and closed. When Pop found out Walt and I preferred his outhouse to the conventional restroom in our fishhouse, he showed us about the lock and told us not to use the public side. The privy was at the end of the lower part of the pier, over the water. Not so elegant as below, but one gets the picture, the sense of it.
Delicacy draws a curtain across the joys of sitting over a cool breeze. Not to mention spiders under the seat eyeing boys' posteriors, etc.
Spiders?
I said not to mention spiders.
But the baseball games. Pop was fairly deaf, and when Pop listened to baseball everybody in St. Andrews listened to baseball. Mind, this was the late forties and early fifties when it was radio or nothing. No TV and no airconditioning with closed windows. Windows open with bay breezes whipping through, and radio full volume. Baseball games pouring out of the windows from Pop's fishhouse across the street and down the block.
The only equal to Pop for baseball game volume was that no-hitter Don Larsen pitched for the Yankees in the 1956 World Series, and the only thing louder than the game all over Gainesville that day was when the game ended and the horns started honking. Not sure that game has ever been equaled.
In my growing up years most guys grabbed for the sport section of the newspaper. Not me: comics, the comic page. Especially Sunday. Favorites? Cap'n Easy. Katzenjammer Kids with the Cap'n.
The Cap'n always had the gout. Li'l Abner. Popeye, with Wimpy at the hamburger stand offering, "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for two hamburgers today." Out Our Way. Major Hoople, a windbag know it all veteran of the Boer War, host of a boardinghouse of strange characters. Host but not boss; his wife Martha was boss, dead serious, and nobody's fool.
For all my reminiscing, comics are better now, none better than Calvin and Hobbes. Though Doonesbury is unbeatable sarcasm.
Seems shallow, obtuse to think of comics and baseball after what happened in Boston at the marathon yesterday. What can one say about unspeakable evil, tragedy, shame, atrocity. Outrage is the sense, grief for innocent bystanders. It has come to America and will stay and grow. One has a sense of having lived too long. Overwhelming sadness. Our national golden age is over, long slide into darkness that one doesn't want to share with life.
In a thousand years those studying the rise, decline and disappearance of empires will read about us on page 319. And be asked about us on the exam.
7. Consider civilizations and leaders of history. What did the Romans do that built them up, that sustained them, that made people love them, that made people hate them, and that brought them down? The Babylonians? The Americans? The Assyrians? The British? The Persians? Ancient China? The Greeks? Alexander the Great? The Soviet Union? The Egyptians? The Phoenicians? Napolean? Atilla the Hun? The Holy Roman Empire? For this exam question, select one of the above ancient empires of earth history, and select a more recent civilization; for the two you choose, compare and contrast their rise, their positive and negative contributions to the human condition, and reasons for their fall, collapse or disintegration. What could our modern Chinese civilization learn and profit from their examples? Time, twenty minutes. Weight, 15 points.
8.
Or maybe in a hundred years. Ten? Once the plane hits it isn't long until the tower collapses.
A century from now I would look back and see that my great-grandfather lived in a far better time of America.
Truth, I can see it now.
There's Judy on Channel 13. It's not real weather unless Judy is giving it.
T