Random Reflections for the Fourth

Independence Day is probably a good time to stop and reflect about what it means to be an American, and maybe to reminisce a little. I’m proud to be an American. There is nothing wrong with being proud of your ancestry, too, though if you’re like me you may not know much about it. My name came over from Scotland, but there’s been a sight of mixin’ since then.

My maternal grandmother told me about her father. He was German, and still spoke the language – “Dutch”, as Grandma called it. As these were relatively uneducated folks that would indicate that his parents spoke German as their primary language. I might guess that he was a first generation American.

My grandfather, husband to my blue-eyed German grandmother, looked Indian and they say his mother must have been. I don’t know who his father was, and it’s more than likely his mother didn’t know for sure either.

My father attributes his relative lack of body hair to his mother’s “Indian blood”. She certainly had the nose for it. Aboriginal American on both sides? Where’s my casino?

I wasn’t born on the 4th of July, but I didn’t miss it much. I’m sure my mother was glad to download me when she did. It was an extremely hot summer that year, so hot that our hens were dying of heat stroke – that is not a joke. They would just overheat and fall over in the yard. The folks cooked on a wood stove. (You don’t know hot until you have been in the kitchen, at noon on a 98 degree day, with the wood stove going full out and Mom cooking for the thrasher.) We had no air conditioning. We barely had electricity. There was no running water in the house. The outhouse was a fifty-yard dash from the kitchen door. The doctor who delivered me was a notorious drunk. If you’ve ever seen Stagecoach, the Thomas Mitchell character always makes me think of Doc Huff.

Dad and Doc were sitting in the Exchange one day and one of the neighbors came by carrying a big sack of flour, maybe 50 pounds. Doc turned to Dad and said, “Look at that fool a’buyin’ flour, and I’ll bet he ain’t got a drink a’ whiskey in the house.”

One of the things I have always loved and appreciated about my family and our neighbors – many of whom were related one way or another – is their sense of humor. The wit and usually gentle sarcasm was an expected part of any conversation. We rarely told jokes per se. Instead the humor arose naturally from the words and quick thinking.

Doc Huff had a girl from Arkansas that did the cleaning and cooking for him and his wife. He was forever giving her grief about Arkansans and their primitive ways. She took it with great good humor and occasionally got back at him. One day he told a story implying that inbreeding might be responsible for the large number of idiots born south of the border.

“Doc,” she said, “Do you know what we do with them idiots down in Arkansas?”

“No,” Doc replied.

“We send ‘em up here to Missouri, and they make doctors out of ‘em!”

Dinner is what some people call lunch. We never had lunch. Lunch was for folks that didn’t really break a sweat like bankers and clerks in the dime store. If you had breakfast at 4:00am, did the milking and then ran a brush hook or an axe, bucked bales or dug post holes for five or six hours, lunch is simply not adequate. .

One of the dinner time rituals was listening to the radio in order to hear two things and two things only: the weather report and the market report – not the Dow Jones or Standard and Poor, but how much they were paying for hundredweight of stockers and feeders, steers and heifers, gilts and shoats.

I was too young to be a problem in this regard. My brother has the somewhat uncanny ability to laugh until tears run down his face and never make a sound. You can see him vibrate and it looks like he’s laughing, but you don’t hear anything. My sisters do not have this gift. The two of them laughing would cause hyenas to blush with shame. Jackasses from halfway across the county bray in answer to their call.

Inevitably, the news comes on and the trouble begins with a slight snicker. Dad glares across the table at the offender, which causes the other sister to giggle. The weather begins – “High tomorrow –“. One breaks out in audible laughter. Dad puts down his fork.

“Quiet or I –“.

“Rain chances –“

“I’m missin’ it!”

The giggles recede to a low gurgle with hands clasped tightly across mouths. My brother is shaking in absolute silence. The girls try not to look at anyone -- especially one another.

The weather report is done with very little information gleaned from it. Dad still doesn’t know if he should cut his hay and risk getting it rained on before it will bale.

The radio (AM, of course) crackles, “At the stockyards today, four to five hundred pound feeder steers –“

The stronghold is lost. Nothing can be as funny as the price of calves. This is comedy of the highest order. Forget Bob Hope. Forget the Stooges. Uncle Milty might as well be doing Hamlet in drag.

The dam breaks. The eruption of Vesuvius is a cat fart by comparison.

“That’s it! Out! Both of you! Outside right now!”

The girls hurry to obey and collapse at the side of the house. Silent Joe is laughing too hard to eat but at least he can stay in the shade.

Happy 4th of July, and may God Bless America.