Leg Hookers

C'mon eat it you stupid fish.

My dad has always been a guy who was big into pawnshops, a lot of the jobs he had when he was first out of college were referrals from pawnshops for appliance or furnace repairs, He was always, and still is, buying stuff from pawnshop some times he gets great deals on things and is so regular a customer he even has self imposed return policies if he is dissatisfied with a purchase. At one of these pawn shops he purchased a fly tying kit and it had gobs of feathers and string and hooks for making the most delicious looking lures a fish could ever dream of hoping to want. After he brought it home I commandeered it and began tying flies of my own invention at a tremendous pace. I didn't like following the old tried and trues from the recipe book that was in the bottom of the box because I thought it took too long and I could make up my own patterns better anyway. I got really excited about doing it but I wasn't terribly careful with the stuff and at one point I tied a bunch of flies but dropped a hook that got lodged in the carpet. I slid back to get up and use the bathroom when the hook got buried deep in my leg meat. Like I said, I needed to go to the bathroom but it was one of those times that I waited till the last minute because I was so excited about tying flies. I started yelling for help but by the time my mom got to me I had already peed on myself. She rolled me back far enough to cut loose the hook from the carpet and took me to the emergency room where the doctor cut away my pee-pants numbed me up and cut the hook out. All in all a good day, also in several trips we never caught anything on my home recipe flies. Snobby fish wouldn't know quality luring if it hit them in the face.  

TV Time - Or Wasting My Fifteen Minutes

When I was in third grade there was a lot of talk about changing to a four-day school week where we would go to school for about two more hours a day for the four days and then have Fridays off. That hard hitting news motivated the local news to go and interview kids to find out their opinion of the change. The third grade teachers of Santaquin elementary were asked to supply a few well behaved and erudite students to offer their opinions. In the interview I gave all kinds of really good information about how I thought that ten hours was too long for teachers and kids and that it would be hard for the parents of latch-key kids to arrange for child care on the Fridays off. I also made an offhanded joke about how it would make us all miss Dennis the Menice and Duck-tales as they were the cartoons that were on from three to four. I didn't even have a TV so to me it was clearly a moot point but the reporter thought that it was funny. The station called my mom and told he what time the piece would air and that I would be featured in the news so we called all of my aunts and uncles and told them and went over to my grandma's house to watch it. It was the last story so we all had to sit through an hour of news and I was super nervous waiting for how I would look on TV. When the piece came on the talked to a principle a congressman and a parrent and then It was my time to weigh in but the reporter set up my soundbite as being funny by saying that the kids concerns about the extra time in school was more about what we would miss on TV. Then It cut to me saying my bit about the cartoons and nothing else. The reporter chuckles about priorities and then turned it back to the anchors who were giving it the knowing half chuckle of anchor persons. I was mortified and enraged that I had been taken out of context and that I was the punchline to their little news joke. My uncles and aunts all called to congratulate and tease me about missing my cartoons. I tried to explain to all of them it was a joke and I said other good stuff but they didn't seem to care. I guess I learned an important lesson about those vultures at KSL, I just hope that didn’t count against my fifteen minutes or I will sue, 

Smear the Queer

One of the games that we played a lot that would now be very politically incorrect, but I can never remember anybody telling us not to play or at least rename, was a tackling game that you played with a football called 'Smear the Queer'. The game really had nothing to do with sexual orientation, as far as I know, whoever had the ball was ' the queer' so of course you were supposed to chase him down and tackle him. Once whoever was it got tackled he could throw the ball to someone else who had to pick it up if it touched them and then they were 'queer'. Then it began again and 'the queer' tried to run away as fast as they could before they got tackled, on infinitum. There were a few complicating factors in this game first, no one wanted to be 'the queer' as it was bad for your health; and secondly you didn't want to make a popular kid the 'queer' because then they would hate you. For these reasons and because calling me 'all-time-queer' had zero social ramifications for the other boys, sometimes they would dispense with the ball and just chase me down over and over. We would be heading out of class for recess and someone would yell, 'Nate is all-time-queer' and then I would take off, which was a mistake, I should have played it cool and ruined their fun. I was a slow runner so it was just a matter of seconds before I was caught and tackled. They would let me up and give me a head start and then catch me again. It sucked. 

Kids Fighting and Parents with Odd Concerns

Some of our neighbors down the street had a new family move in and they were the type that loves having love-hate relationships and so the stuck one up. I was friends with one boy from each of the families so I often got to hear both sides of the ridiculous small town drama that they cultivated. One day when I went over there a couple of the other younger kids had been fighting and now the parents were outside shouting at each other. My friend and I did a basic down low meander move to get in range but out of reach and listened in on the battle. The parents were both upset about the fight and that one of the kids was bleeding but the kids without the bleeding kid were saying he deserved a bloody nose because when they were fighting, fair and square, when their son was knocked down the bloody nose boy peed on him. The funny part was they were not a concerned about the sheer indignity of being urinated on but that some pee might have gotten into his ear which recently had tubes installed. When He came in and told his parents that he had got pee n his ear they told him to go beat the other kids up. That is how he got his bloody nose, so case solved. When the bloody-nose-boy's parent heard that his had peed in another kid's ear and could have complicated a surgery recovery they calmed down about the nose and punished him some themselves. Interestingly the kid who was peed on went on to become a police officer and the bloody nose kid has been in and out of jail on drug charges.

We Hit Some Kids with Quicklime

There is another park out by where my grandparents lived in the Imperial Mobil Home park that has a river walk path. Sometimes when we would come and visit them we would walk along the river path that had a tunnel to pass under a railroad track, and underneath the freeway, and underneath another road and come out at the other park which had a replica frontier fort, complete with cannon. One time and while we were going down there we found a spot where somebody had dumped off a couple of bags at quicklime that had formed into quicklime rocks in the rain. We didn't know what they were but soon we found out that if you got them wet they would burn your skin really badly. So we found a long old abandoned sock to hold our new treasure. You know? Come to think of it we were always finding clothes all kinds of places. For instance out in the woods you might find socks or underwear, and it seemed like once a year or so some one would find a bra, and it was almost always an enormous one. We would encounter all kinds of clothes that we thought made for good discoveries, but now to my more mature and clothes-buying mind I wonder the chain of events that lead up to leaving clothing in the woods. Never mind, I don't want to know. Notwithstanding its origin we put put the quicklime into the sock and then dipped it in the river to turn up the heat, and by heat I mean caustic chemical burny-ness. Then we went back to the play ground park where we started chasing kids around giving them slaps with the quicklime sock and then refreshing it in the river for more skin peeling tag. I think we played this game until it got dark and we had to go back to my grand parents house but I would love to know how many kids went home with unexplained chemical burns to parents who wanted to know how in the world their kids lost their shirts trying to wash them off in the river. We hid the sock so we could come back and extend our quicklime experiment, but when we finally got back someone, a Luddite no doubt, had thrown it away. 

We Almost See a Boy Who Looks Like a Man Touch a Womans Breast

My grandmother was no given to spending lots of money on our entertainment and rarely took us anywhere because whenever she did it went poorly. Once she took us to McDonald's when my sister and I were quite young and bought us some chicken nugget Happy Meals. We had never eaten too much deep fried chicken skin and pancreas so we were unaccustomed to the food of the civilized world and my sister took one bite and gagged and spit out the lump of deep fried gristle. My grandmother was horrified because of the shame that Christy had brought on her and the family by gagging in a fast food restaurant. She vowed never to take us out to eat again. I think she has stuck to her guns on that one. She did take us out to the dollar movie one time to see 'BIG!' the Tom Hanks vehicle that sees him have a wish granted by a vending machine to turn him from a 13 year-old boy into a man. He did not win his Oscars for this performance. He would go on to win those playing men with the mind of a 13 year old, which, in artistic terms, is better. Anyway, the theater was packed and my sister and I had to sit a few rows in front of my grandmother and mother and little brother and sister. She figured we were old enough to watch a PG movie without direct parental guidance. That is where she was wrong about halfway though the film the man-boy Tom Hanks is about to partake of many pleasure which includes a little bra time with the leading lady, as soon as the actress took off her shirt my grandma was on her feet and hustling as quickly as her chubby little legs could carry her she was trying to cover our eyes before things got really raunchy. Tom Hanks was reaching out to touch the actress's bra-covered breast when my grandma got to us and yanked us up out of our seats and to the exits. She was mortified at the kind of filth that would be permitted in a PG movie and got her money back from the establishment and we went home hearing the whole time about filth and pornography being sold to children I didn't get to see how that movie ended for years until we had a VCR and rented it. That filth was so uninteresting by that point that I didn't even try to pause it to get a better look, and for a 14-year-old that is a pretty low standard.  

A.B.P. and Ruining the Christmas letter

 If my brother and I had a motto, an unspoken motto, growing up it would have been, 'Always be Pranking'. We always did and still mostly do just love a good joke or tease and will go to pretty good effort to pull of a little something or another. It was always really funny to us but sometimes my mom or dad or both would think our jokes were not that funny and we would get into big trouble. One really great joke we pulled off was when my mom, who is not typically a Christmas letter writer, wrote a Christmas letter on our computer and left it there all willy-nilly like she didn't have a care in the world about a couple of boys sabotaging her one attempt at decency. Matt and I found the letter full of all the regular intolerable drivel about how everything is awesome and all kids are smart and cool and how much fun we are all having and how we hope you noticed that we are just a little bit more cool than all of you all this blessed season. No, no and hell no. We sprang into action to fix this travesty of a letter, first of all we removed all references to anything uplifting and included juicy true tidbits about family dysfunction, in a funny and light way, of course. We included information about my dad's rage hitting and uncontrolled anger, about my mom hitting us with back scratchers, little stories about how my mom was starting to wonder if my little sister was retarded or just really, really, really slow. Good stuff. We then most helpfully printed out all the copies my mom needed and helped her send them off without so much as a second glance on her part. Then in a few days the calls started coming in about how that was the funniest thing they had ever read and that she had the funniest sense of humor, and she was really confused because she didn't think the family news she had shared was very funny, and it wasn't. The worse part was is that she didn't just laugh off the joke when she read the letter she got really sad and cried which made us have to apologize profusely for the best joke we had ever masterminded. Now I am not sorry, I am proud of my naughtiness and I would do it again. She learned her lesson though and has never written one of those unforgivable missives again. We do have a great time as a family mocking the pathetic attempts at self-aggrandizement that are foisted upon us yearly. People should let their wicked boys have a stab at editing that trash into something more entertaining, and memorable. 

Rabies Rock

 We were always on the lookout for strange and unusual things that we could collect, hopefully for free, and the we would exaggerate their qualities to our friends who had money to buy actual cool things so that we would then have something that they didn't. For example, my friend may have something like a G.I. Joe Aircraft Carrier, actually not may have, he definitely had a one. There was absolutely no way I could buy something more cool than that, I just didn't have the money to keep up materialistically. Therefore, I would find a fossil, a sharks tooth, a scorpion, or horny toad, then all I had to do was pretend that I had just come into possession of something much-much-more-muchly cool than some silly old aircraft carrier, which I still not so subtly coveted. Subtle-bragging and off-handed dismissiveness of someone else's treasures is a venerable tradition with a beautiful and storied past, present and future. It is basically the best weapon of the second-placer and the also-rans. Anyway, my problem with this is that I was also a little money grubber that was always looking for a way to sell anything I had for a little cash money. So these two competing needs to brag and to sell came into competition more then once but most tragically over something we found and called the rabies rock. We were down walking the train tracks one day when we came upon a rock that was really hard and red and bumpy, in short awesome. We were in the habit, my brother, sister and I of breaking open any cool rock we found hoping against hope that it was a geode. We would take the rocks and put them in my dad's powerful floor vise and hit them with a sledge hammer to hopefully release all of the glitz and glamor and earning potential that is a geode. Not to spoil the suspense but we never found one. This rabies rock though was really hard and no matter how many times we hit it with the sledge it would not break, which coupled with its odd surface and color figured to be an easy and expensive sale. My sister and I made up some fliers and a poster touting it's various qualities and distributed them around the neighborhood. Then we set up a table by the road with this great centerpiece rock and several other curios, or more aptly objects de arte. We had the rabies rock modestly priced at $20 a steal of a value if I ever saw one, we had quite a few lookie-loos but no one with a serious offer on the rabies rock so we slashed the price in a special 75% off sale and finally moved the rock to a neighbor kid for five bucks which got split 60-40 because my sister told me that there was no way to split five dollars evenly, which I knew was untrue but I loved my sister and two bucks is still a lot of penny candy, sugar daddies, black cows, and slap sticks.  

Matt Pees on Me

 My brother Matt was a pee-er, he just really loved peeing. When we were out on the road and had to make an emergency pit-stop for him to relieve himself he would step away from the car and them try and pee as high into the air and as far a s he could. My mom always called him 'Golden Arches' which is here used not as the registered trademark of a multinational fast-food conglomerate but to describe the color and shape of my brother's handiwork. Anyway it was one of those shared bath times and Matt and I had gotten into a fight we were hitting and punching naked and sopping. Then when Matt had been pushed too far he decided to switch to pee instead of fists and started peeing on me. I jumped out and slopped around the floor, wet feet on linoleum. He would give it a little quick burst and then pinch it off laughing super hard at my futile attempts at finding cover. I finally got over behind the laundry basket and he was just giving me cover fire burst when my mom came in and Matt was standing up naked on the edge of the tub and I was pee soaked and naked hiding behind the laundry hamper. My mom devolved the situation into some bare-bottom spanking time for Matt and to a lesser extent me for starting the fight. I don't think their was a punishment more feared in our household then to be caught red-handed and bare-bottomed and to receive your spankings au natural. Naked and wet is no way to get a spanking I can assure you, but the punishment was not quite sever enough because I can remember at least one other time that Matt fought injustice in this manner.  

Bottled Farts

When Only The Very Finest In Bottled Flatus Will Do, Care Enough To Send The Best.

 As you may have gathered from my previous stories, being poor taught us two very important skills, innovation and industry. Until I was 8 or so my brother and I would bathe at the same time to save my mom hot water and time. It was not the case that our tandem baths went any faster. We would play from the time the bath was warm until it cooled to freezing . Then we would keep topping it up with a little shot of the hot. We would bring in an army of toys and make up all sorts of games with an aquatic or amphibious theme. The funny part was that we had a few measuring cups that we would play with and sometime in the course of our youthful baths we discovered that if they were inverted they would catch gaseous emissions on their rise to the surface. A trick we used extempore for a while enjoying them fresh from the tap, so to speak. We then worked out that we could actually catch those self same farts not just in inverted cups but in plastic bottles. Once in the bottle and capped the fart would stay juicy fresh and full of flavor for quite a while. Really ideal for any fart related prank, one on the shelf was indispensable for emergencies. The other benefit was that anyone, not just the producer, could uncap and squeeze out a bottled fart in a pinch. That is what got my brother and I's little gears of industry churning. We offered our bottled farts at school from 25 cents. Business wasn't exactly brisk but farts were sold. Somehow it never caught on big, something about being ahead of our time. We went back to bottling our excreted gases purely as non-profit pastime. You know? For the love of the game.  

Ketchup Explosion

While we were usually the ones getting baby-sat there were time that we would have another group of kids over to be watched and it turned the normal craziness into pan-delirium. One night in particular we had a few kids over and we were trying to eat dinner, and it was something that required ketchup to choke down. We had a small amount of ketchup left in the bottom of the old bottle so my dad had inverted it and let it all run down but it had been like that for quite some time and had evidently fermented and caused a massive build up of pressure right directly behind the remaining ketchup plug. All the kids were on two long benches, which are just leg traps for tables and when my dad cracked open the lid ketchup liquor exploded up and out of the bottle. It flew into everyone's face and kids were rolling and squirming backwards in the bench trying to writhe free to be able to cry the acidic alcohol our of their eyes. Kids were crying in terror, and pain, and just because and my mom was trying to calm us all down and try and clean up the kitchen and it was not happening. No one died but the roof had a 18” round ketchup stain the endured through several paintings.  

My Dad is Not Impressed

Sometimes parents claim that they want their kids to be proactive and take initiative. This is a lie. what they really want is for their kids to proactively do exactly what they were instructed to do like a good little robots. Every time it seemed like I was going to do something better then was expected or in the parlance 'go the extra mile' I ended up getting in more trouble than if I would have just stayed in bed like a lazy person. I am no lazy person so I was always going too far and making my dad mad. One time when we were at the furniture store I mentioned in the last post my dad was talking at length with the proprietor as he is wont to do. I was bored, bored, bored, booooooorrrrrrreeeeed. So I went out back to their appliance and furniture bone-yard and decided to do a good deed by scrapping out a dryer. I dissembled the whole thing keeping the good parts and stacking up the sheet metal to be recycled. I came back in with a little swagger in my little hips and was trying to play it off cool that I just junked out a whole dryer by myself. My dad went berserk just because I had junked out a perfectly good dryer that was worth more whole then in parts. He was all mad that he had to pay the owners back the retail value of the dryer and only keep the parts. Not one word of praise about how good it was that a 7 year-old was able to salvage a working dryer into parts and metal. I went to the truck, curled up on the floor board and cried until my feel-bads were no longer hurt. 

Of Turtle Shells and Kings

Somewhere either in heaven or most likely hell Buckminster Fuller is happy you are looking at this picture. 

There was one treat that my grandmother would deliver on time and again especially when it was on sale and that was the boiled meaty goodness of a Reams hotdog. Reams was a beyond discount grocery store that had two locations near my grandmothers house one that looked like a turtle shell and one that looked like and abandoned warehouse.

Deals in front muggings in back

Surprisingly, I think that the abandoned warehouse one is the last one still in operation the awesome turtle one was bulldozed for what some people call progress. Why not just paint over the Mona Liza? You manics. Anyway the point was not the building but the creepy deli counter. Every once in a while Reams would run a sale on hot dogs and they would all be ten cents, I know that that just sounded like a crazy old man telling you about how when he was a kid you could buy a whole kidney and have it baked into a pie that tasted like urine for two bits. But ten cents was cheep even then so she would open the floodgates of generosity and let us have as many as we wanted. The hotdogs were in a huge vat of boiling water and the buns were kept unwrapped in a rack above in the steam which made some of them pleasantly warm and moist and others cold and wet. We didn't care we went out to eat so rarely that we didn't know that the deli counter of a grocery store was not technically eating out and that a vat of boiling hot dogs at ten cents a pop was not generosity it was probably the cheapest meal she could feed us ingrate chicken nugget vomiters. The real treat would be if the soda was on sale too and we could get six glorious ounces of Orange Crush now that is living large. Really large.  

Murderers Put Kids in Motorcycle Tires.

When I was 8 I would go to work with my dad at two businesses downtown in Provo that gave him referrals. They were a pawn shop and a furniture store owned by former spouses about half a block away from each other. My dad would go to both to repair machines and take referrals. Sometimes he would need me to run an errand between the two while he was working but the problem was there was a bar right in between that catered to a motorcycle riding clientèle, and if there was one thing that I knew for absolute certain was that motorcycle rider with beards killed kids. I would head out to run my dad;s errands by poking my head out the door of the furniture store and see if there were any motorcycle guys on the sidewalk, if the coast was clear I would just run as fast as I could to the end of the block and pick up whatever I needed and run back really fast. However, if there were motorcycle guys I would stand their in the doorway with just my forehead and eyes peaking around the corner and try and wait for them to go into the bar or drive off before my dad got impatient and yelled at me. If they were just lolly-gagging and my dad was all done waiting I would do a brisk walk watching them intently, all the time having a vivid day-mare type fantasy that their motorcycle tires were filled with kidnapped, murdered, dismembered, and stuffed into tires children. I know it seems more logical to run when the motorcycle-kid-killers were out in the road but my high speed mode was paralyzed with fear and my dads anger was driving the low speed so it won out. Not to spoil the ending but I was never kidnapped and used for motorcycle tire filling. I got lucky I guess. 

Mesa Verde

When we drove to Colorado through the southern way we would leave Utah to the East then go south heading through Cortez. Just outside of Cortez in Mesa Verde which is an Anasazi settlement with cities built into cliffs that was abandoned suddenly in the 13^th century. The cliff palace dwelling is built into a cave that is about 40' down a sheer cliff and now, for tourists, they have some ladders and railing, and it is still super scary. When the Native Americans were living there all they had to climb up and down with were these little carved out hand holds. The hand-holds go down the cliff 40' and then sideways for about 40'. I remember being terrified about climbing down there with the ladder and rail and everything but that I loved it when I was in the cave and houses. How afraid of your neighbors do you have to be to put in a security system like that? Of course that is not the point of the story, the point is we saw a sloppy old lady with absolutely pendulous boo-sums wearing just leather pants and a tube top. The tube-top is a litmus test of sorts, no one that looks good in a tube top looks good because they are in a tube top they look good in spite of the tube top. This lady's massive breasts were barely contained in that bright green holster when she was in repose and when she had to duck, climb, or crawl, as one often does in ruins, she was engaged in full on battle with her own chest to maintain dignity and modesty. My sister Christy and I thought that the fact of her not wearing a bra and fighting and struggling with her tube top was to funny to laugh at discretely and we followed her around to observe her travails, for science. At one point on the tour we had to crawl through a low door way a simple task for an 8 and 10-year old but when we were through we turned around to see how friend boo-sums would make out. She was most of the way through and was getting helped onto her feet when her tube top snagged on the wall and was in danger of disgorging it charges so she quickly pulled her hands back away from the people helping her through and pulled her shirt back up with both hands at the expense of over balancing and careening face first in to the archaeologically significant floor. Everyone else on the tour gasped and tried to help and only Christy and I laughed a few uncontrollably quick barks and then coved our faces to try and stifle our mirth. She had a scratch on her face and was shaken but no worse for wear. Christy and I would act out that sceen over and over in the weeks and months to come.

Don't get me wrong, the place was amazing and it really was one of the highlights of my childhood. I enjoyed the dwellings and museum and the whole shooting match but when the comedy gods smile on you you have got to strike while the hay is cutting bait, as they say. 

Roy and Science

My mom had a younger brother named Roy who we would visit when we went to Colorado. When I was young he and his wife were young and carefree beautiful people who lived in a cabin in the woods in the same area as many rich and famous stars, I remember him showing me Jack Nicholson's cabin and Sally Field's also was in the neighborhood. I didn't have any idea who those people were but he liked to show me so I liked to listen. He would take us out hiking and to look at nature, we learned about lichen and beaver ponds and about iron pyrite which I think should be called other gold not fools gold because it is really gold colored. At the time he was working at laying cable or something like that and since that time he has become a doctor twice, first as a pediatrician and then when he got bored of that he became a psychiatrist. When they were living in the cabin he had a ton of books and toys that adults collect that are not for playing with. He also had great big piles of awesome magazines like the Smithsonian, the National Geographic and the Scientific American. I loved looking through them and seeing all of the pictures and feeling like this was really smart stuff. We had science books at home but geared towards children, you know the ones that have silly experiments that told you how to get an effect but were to dumbed down and never explained the phenomenon. It really was just a recipe and process list so demonstrations disguised as experiments. I wanted to test things that no one knew the answer to and the Scientific American seemed like where that sort of thing was happening. I pour over the pictures and really got interested in science a that point. Roy realized how much I loved those magazines and several times shipped me huge boxes of his back issues to look through and read. I would go through the Scientific American mainly to look at the pictures and read the captions because I had no idea what the text meant. I 9 or 10 years old which is very young for even popular science but not too young for popular science pictures. I read more of the Smithsonian, I loved the pictures and it also had a lot of historical stories. When I was in the fourth grade I read an article from the Smithsonian about a guy who was an American fighting in the French resistance in World War Two. He sabotaged and killed lots of Nazi's but they ambushed him and his wife at a cafe, she was mortally wounded and he had to shoot her to keep her from being captured and tortured. Maybe it was just because I was young but that story had a big influence on how I thought about people and rightness and wrongness. It was hard for me to wrap my idea around the idea that he was killing his wife because he loved her but I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Maybe it was the first time in my life that I considered there may be more important things in life then just being happy and healthy and safe. Roy's gift were definitely a jump start into my lifelong obsession with knowledge and learning, and I really appreciated the respect he showed me and my budding intelligence. He even signed me up to recive the newsletter from the Human Genome Project, which I had no idea about. Every month or two I would get a technical paper on the progress of the mapping of the human DNA it was really nice but way over my head. Not until I was much older did I realize the significance of the project and I was nice to know I had been a spectator even if I was a mostly unaware bystander.

Almost Dieing by Mom Rolling Over into Warm Springs

There is a little series of warm spring ponds near our house called Warm Springs. It was used by the poor and immigrant communities when I was growing up for a swimming pool, bar, and love making venue all rolled into one. It was not uncommon to find a melange of empty beer bottles, diapers , and condoms washed against its banks. But poor is poor and free is free and you just swim to the side of the public health crises and have fun anyway. There were five ponds and the further in you went the less likely you were to encounter the flotsam and jetsam of hillbilly detritus so we would usually try and get to the fourth pond. The trade-off was that they were harder to get to and the roads were much more of the off-road type. One day when we were driving back in there the road was a little slippery because it had rained the night before and at some point my mom thought that the best idea would be to turn around before things got bad. The really ironic bit is that he decision to turn around was what made it dangerous. She had not planned ahead and turned off the road and downhill toward the canal that connects the ponds and then panicked and tried to back up, but her wheels were slipping because the ground was wet and she had lost he momentum. Fearing that she might slide into the canal and kill us all she made all the kids jump out and she told us to run the two miles or so up the road for help if she slid into the canal and drowned. We stood back and she turned the wheel hard and gunned the engine and then let off the break and manged to turn just a few feet before the canal and drive back up onto the road. We were relived that she didn't die but we also had no more need for excitement so we loaded up and went home. As they say, discretion is the better part of swimming. 

Hook in the Butt

One morning when we were not factory fishing we were just trying to catch fish with a rod and reel. My dad, my brother and I were out in our boat on the lake trying to catch catfish and bass. While they are both fish they are from different tribes with vastly different tastes and cultures. If you want to catch them both at the same time every man and boy has to have a separate pole for each. On the pole you intend to catch catfish with you must rig with a big hook, preferable treble, or as many call it the 'three hook'. Then you put on plenty of weight because the catfish is a bottom feeder. Finally, you put something rotten on the end which is usually a really stinky mush of blood and meat. Ding, ding, ding, ding, breakfast is on! Get it while it's rotten! They eat that, they get hooked, we reel them in, and then we eat them, not just good, good for you. In recent years it has been discovered that all that bottom feeding has proven to be bad for our health as we have since learned that the catfish in that lake are full of toxins and the state recommends that a healthy adult eat no more then 4oz. a week. Well, no Johnny-Law-dog-deputy-dippity-doolittle is going to be the boss of me! Heck, some days I'll eat five even six ounces of that deliciously tainted meat, the chemicals give it flavor. Flavor is something those button down squares at the state department of health are evidently willing to sacrifice for properly developing fetuses and proper kidney function.

Why don't you have a seat right over hear?

Anyway, once we had the catfish pole rigged and cast out into to reeds we would rig up our pole for white bass. White bass are a small but aggressive fish that will attack any king of lure and are a lot of fun to fight into the boat. So we would open up my dad's multi tiered tackle box and rummage through all of the magnificent offerings. Chartreuse soft bodied whip tails, pumpkin and hazel spinners with a day-glow flash, fishermen have more names for colors and lusters then anyone besides interior decorators and nail polish manufactures. We would pluck out a promising looking lure, tie it on and then cast out into the water, preferably as close as possible to the trees, the bass love to hide under the branches of the trees but so do the lure eating branches so there is always some loss. The lures were my dad's so we were not too torn up about snagging and loosing a lure we would just break the line and re-rig. I had been casting a large two-hook fish mimicking lure with no success for a bit so I thought I had better switch up and I cut the old lure off and set it down while I selected a new one. I was tying on when my dad asked in a calmly furious tone where in the hell I had set my old lure. I told him it was right down on that bench he was sitting on. He then told me he had sat on it and that is was stuck in his. . . and at this point he used an ugly and vulgar word to describe his posterior. He went from calmly furious to just regular furious as he tried to pull the double treble hook out of his nethers. The whole time he was struggling to remove or even much less see the hook in his butt he was yelling out oaths of death and dismemberment to my brother and I. He was toward the back of the boat so we moved to the front as far as we could to be out of striking distance. He eventually decided on a top down from the front technique for removing the hooks. He had pulled his pants and underwear down as far as the hook would allow, and we tried desperately not to find this debacle funny. He then got a rusty razor blade from the tackle box and cut away the clothing so he could get a better look at the problem. He had one hook from each treble stuck in and the barbs wouldn't allow him to pull them out so curled up tight and with one foot up on the side of the boat my dad took the rusty razor and did a little surgery to remove the hooks. There was a lot of blood and a lot of cursing and he had to put a shirt into his pants as he pulled them back up to soak up some of the blood. He was understandably cranky about me putting my lure on his seat, even though it was an accident he held me almost solely responsible forgetting it was he who had sat on the lure. We didn't rush home or anything, we kept fishing and when the bleeding stopped he pulled the shirt out of his pants and we went home when the fishing was done. I think since that time I haven't put any hooks on seats, so lesson learned.  

Head fishing

Some of the best fishing I ever did was when I was about six years old and my dad had taken me to work with him and drilled me on my times tables and on spelling the whole time. We went to a lady's house and fixed her refrigerator and she gave me a treat. When we were going home my dad stopped off in a place where the river from Springville flowed into the lake and got out his waders and fishing gear and a five gallon bucket. He put me up on his shoulders and gave me the fishing pole and we waded in. I guess, technically speaking, he waded in, I rode. 

The white bass were spawning and were super aggressive and all I had to do was to dip the lure into the water strait in front of my dad and let it drop about one foot and I would have a fish on. I would swing the pole up and my dad would grab the fish off and put it into the bucket. It was so fun and funny that I was laughing so hard I was almost crying. We fished until after dark and had filled the bucket all the way up with fish, probably 80 or 90. When we got out my dad offed to give the fish to a Vietnamese family that was there fishing and I was really sad that we only kept 10 or so. I really wanted to show my mom and sister how many we had caught. I have had some really good days fishing since then but none better. 

Factory Fishing

As kids the only thing besides work that my dad did with us with any regularity was going fishing. And during the summer we went fishing quite a bit. We are not of that deranged class of fisherman that will go out in the winter time and anytime we tried to join that class we met with disaster. We were, and mostly are, fair weather fishermen. For several years my dad became fixated with cat-fishing in the huge lake that is about five miles from our house. When he got interested in something it wasn't like he just liked to do it a lot, he had to over do it. We used to go out fishing all night long in our boat and set out trot lines. Trot lines are fixed bits of rope tied off to tree limbs over the lake that would have a really stout hook tied to them and be bated with something rotten. We would start out setting them all up and then make the circuit throughout the night cleaning off the fish and resetting the the lines. It was not fun, it was a job and my dad expected us to keep going and collecting an immense amount of fish all night long without complaining. If you complained he would get furious and say we could never come out with him again, which is a sacrifice we were not willing to make. We would take our fish home, sometimes as many as two to three hundred, at 1-4 pounds a piece, for what is known in southern as a 'messa fish.' We would get home and skin them and fillet them and then put the carcases in the garbage cans. Almost every time dogs and cats would tip over the garbage cans in the night, spread the rotten mess all over and my brother and I would have to clean the maggoty mess up. We would eat some of the fish that day usually breaded and deep fried and then we would take some to our neighbors and the rest would go into the freezer to sit for a few years until the guilt of wasting food was assuaged by the passage of time and then it was thrown out. To this day my mom is outraged at my brother and I when we throw fish back and is skeptical about our catch-and-release ethic, she feels that she raised us better then that. She still has an overwhelming desire to put them in her freezer to wait until they are ready to be thrown out in year or two. 

I Bring the Wagon Train In

As I mentioned earlier we spent a lot of of trips to Colorado in various states of danger and proto-danger. One time, and this is when I was fourteen and a half, my mom got really deathly ill with the flu or pneumonia or something and we didn't have enough money to keep staying there in Colorado. Even though she was really sick she decided to start off and try and power it on home. My grandpa filled us up with gas and away we went. We had traveled about 50 miles or so to Denver and my mom was getting worse and worse so she pulled over to rest. She was so deathly ill, shaking and feverish she asked me if I could drive for a little while while she rested. I had this glamorous fantasy version of driving like many kids do when they're 14 or 15; driving embodies coolness and liberation. When she asked me to take the wheel it felt nothing like that, in fact much more like the bottom had fallen out of my stomach and I was cold and feverish at the same time. She was in the passenger seat and I was driving absolutely terrified, so I was driving too slow, but she told me I had to go at least the speed limit or I would arouse suspicion. I sweated, and I could feel it dripping down my sides and down my back as I strained all the way forward and kept the car at exactly 55 emm-pee-aches. Thirty miles outside of Denver I got behind a U-haul trailer going west that was also going only 55 and I rode him for two hours all the way to the Rifle turn off when he turned north and left me to my own devices. When my mom woke up from her nap I had driven all the way from Denver to just outside of Grand Junction. She took back over and drove us home. My back and armpits dried up and I fell right to sleep having been emotionally and physically drained by my ordeal.

Admittedly, in retrospect, it doesn't seem so epic to have piloted a car with an automatic transmission in good weather for four hours on a freeway. All I had to do was push the go and stop peddles and keep it between the 'mayonnaise and the mustard' as the truckers say. The real payoff was that my brother and sisters and my mom didn't tell anybody how terrified I was. That left the door wide open to a much more heroic retelling. In my version I sounded a lot less like a scared teenager trying to help his mom out and more like John Wayne bringing in the wagon train safe and sound, little lady. It didn't go exactly like that but don't tell. 

Ring Bearing and Fighting

When I was about 8 my mom's youngest sister, her only biological sister I guess, she has three step sisters but that is neither here nor there. Well it is here now because I wrote it but rhetorically that is just a cliché which means that the tangential point I just made was irrelevant to the story at hand. The story at hand in case you had lost you way in that rather tedious aside was that my mom's sister, my aunt, was getting married and they thought it would be cute to have me be the ring berrer and my cousin be the flower girl. In fairness, it was cute. They bought me a little suit and I had a pillow with the ring on it and I did awesome during practice but then when the church was full of people I got really scared and my flower girl cousin had to come back up the isle a ways and take me by the hand to get me started. She was my Samwise Gamgee I guess. This was actually this first time we had ever met our cousins from my uncle Rex's family and we hit it off very poorly, we fought non-stop and even broke more stuff then usual at my grandfathers house. My mom told me that one time she was walking down the hall when she saw a kid fly out of a door and hit the far wall. I just realized that fly could imply a high rate of speed, I meant it in the sense of being thrown forcefully out of a room by my grandpa and hitting the far wall. We even got in a fight over a belt of mine that they had stolen and somehow we got on both sides of a door and the three girl cousins were pulling on one side of the belt and Christy and Matt and I were pulling on the other and the cheap hollow core broke in half. More like cracked right down the middle would be more accurate but my grandpa kept describing it overly dramatically as breaking his doors in half. After that meeting we saw the cousins one more time at my uncle Roy's wedding and then never again to this day. 

Battle Chess and Touching Computers

Worth the wait.

The one really good thing about my grandpa's house was that he was always on the bleeding edge of technology. Now, he honestly is not the most personable person and he definitely did not like sharing his toys. I mentioned before that we called him grandpa quack because he didn't really talk to kids, if we tried to talk to him, and this is true to this day, he would not really be interested so in the part of the conversation where he was supposed to respond he would just quack. He also did not like or did not like joke but to show you that he recognized what you said was supposed to be funny he would fake laugh by kind of tisking a few times while he wore a strained smile. So trying to get a read on him was a little bizarre, is really bizarre, and I was never sure of how he really felt about anything. I have since come to suspect he is probably a little Autistic but not so bad as to notice right off the bat. I have come here to day not to talk about my grandpa but of our great shared love of computers. He always had the newest and best and loved them so much, he never wanted us to touch them. That, of course, means I wanted to touch it even more. We were not allowed to play on his computer while he was gone incase we messed it up, I remember specifically him warning us not to touch the mouse while the computer was booting or else it would ruin it. I always wanted to play with it so badly that sometimes I would just go in and sit in his office chair and stare at the black screen and wait for him to come home. The only game he on this computer, was Battle Chess, which if you are unaware is like regular chess except the pieces are animated and act out cool killing sequences when you capture a piece. My brother and I were not very good at chess but we did like watching the action so we would set up the board over and over just to see every piece kill the others. Pretty much did that for hours because the other programs were just spread sheets, word processor and some really boring vocabulary game. But to a nerd a computer is a computer is a computer and as the sailors say, any port in a storm. 

Mary Gets Her Foot Cut by a Cup

A Glass Cup is No Mach For Our Hell Raising. 

I think this is the second to last, or penultimate as my computer so helpfully just suggested, medical emergency related to our travels, or is it travails in Colorado. It seems like we were always in some state of catastrophe I can only image with with anxious giddiness my grandparents must have anticipated our visits. We honestly did not spend much time there, maybe 6 to 8 weeks in my whole life and in that brief time we were always going to emergency room, or hospital or something. We were so mind numbingly bored maybe it seemed like a reasonable respite to pop into the local medical facility to break the monotony. This particular trip was necessitated because my brother and sisters were fighting in the kitchen over something and some way a cup, a glass cup that should have been hidden from the hell spawn grandkids, got thrown on the ground. My sister Mary was siting on the counter when the glass was broken and she decided to jump down onto the shards. It naturally cut her foot quite deeply and we all got to hang out in the waiting room of an emergency ward that at least had some magazines with good pictures not like that useless New Yorker. We got out of the house, she got stitches and except for the cup there was no harm and much good done. 

Hip Pop Hooray!

Once, right before we left on our trip out to Colorado I had tried to execute the trampoline triple flip and got damaged. I was trying to jump off the top of the swings then hit the tramp and flip, land, flip, land, flip and finally land. In fairness, everything was going really well all the way through flip, land, flip, land, flip, but then all off the sudden my accumulated miscalculation added up. What was to be my last, and triumphant landing went horribly wrong my foot went through the springs and my leg and went under the trampoline material while my hip stopped on the bar and my head, chest, arms and whatnot continued on with their momentum down to the ground. This little procedure netted me one hip dislocation which we didn't know the time. Of course it was sore but, of course it would be because of how I landed so we thought it would be painful for a day or two, or a month before I could laugh again. My mom give me some painkillers and I was able to walk a short distance to get in the car for our trip and then lounge around letting it heal. Something was happening but it wasn't healing it was getting worse and worse and swollen and painful and I was getting quite the nasty bruise all around my hip joint. You may know a young boy, and you may know that young boys that age are shy about injuries to the groin and discussing them frankly so I was describing the discomfort to my mom in whispered and vague terms because I didn't want anybody to hear anything about my privacy area. I said it hurt badly and then waved a circular pattern around my crotchal region. I guess that did not adequately portray the seriousness of the situation because she gave me some more aspirin and told me to keep sitting down and relaxing. It got so bad I could barely walk when we got to my grandpa's house and my great grandma Gillespie offered to give me some treatment. I had to strip off to my tighty-whities and she gave my hip a massage that hurt magnificently and didn't help in the least. It hurt so bad we finally went in to a doctor who palpated the area, like doctors love to do when it is clearly painful and then ask you if it hurt. He took an x-ray of the damage and saw that it was a dislocation. He came back in and told us what it was and without warning grabbed my feet and presses my thighs to my chest and then rotated my legs until the hip joint popped back it. The procedure was mindbogglingly painful and the days of waiting had made the joint swell and be really tender. But I was brave so I only did a lot of screaming and writhing around on the table. I am sure my mom was overjoyed to spend so much money only to be embarrassed by her son throwing a little show at the doctors office. It took a while to feel good again but to this day and any time I run or hike for long distances left hip just hurts like crazy. Which I think was probably because I had my joint out of socket for a week but who can tell? 

Donna and Madonna

Not my Aunt Evidently.

My mom had three stepsisters from my grandpa's second marriage. They were a lot younger than my mom but still in a separate age group from us kids. They were all in their young teens when we were visiting for Christmas and mostly did their own thing. The middle aunt of the three was named Donna, and maybe it was my southern heritage, but I was absolutely in love with her. When I was 8 I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, she was really cool, and I even wrote down somewhere at the time that I wanted to marry her. When I had my bandages from my facial scar, I would tell everybody that she was the only one who put them on right and I only wanted her to do it. She was very sweet and took really good care of me. She was also into all of the very most cool and teenagerly things and had a poster on the wall with her name on it. It was actually a poster of Madonna in 80's regalia and Donna had covered up the 'Ma'. I didn't know from Madonna at the time so I was under the impression that my cute and cool aunt was the material girl. Since I didn't know at the time she altered the poster to just appear like she was the material girl, the next time I saw that picture of Madonna on one of my friend's older sister's walls I told them that was my aunt. She told me I was a liar and I was not related to Madonna, I argued and ended up crying and going home where my mom broke the news to me.  

Going to Not See the Fake Star Wars

One of the big highlights going to visit in Colorado was that my grandfather worked for the Air Force and could take us to go see some really cool stuff. He had been in the the Air Force as a pilot and he retired and went back to work for him as a civilian, working on the computers that controlled military satellites. When I was young he was working on the base, that had something to do with the Star Wars program. I want to remember, and by all means don't clear me up on this case is not true, that he actually worked on the base that was building the control systems for the Star Wars program. I have come to discover that the whole program was almost completely an impractical money pit for Cold War profiteering. It was cool to think of at the time, I loved the real, galaxy far far away, Star Wars and so anything named Star Wars no matter how misguided it was really got my attention. So, after I had requested a tour 1.2 million times he agreed to take me on base to take a look at where he worked. It turned out to not be as cool as I thought it would be, not so as many hands on projects as I would have liked and a depressingly sparse offering of Laser-from-space-blowing-up-missles demonstration type stuff. The base he worked on was a few weeks from being shut down to non-employees so they had really stringent security protocols to get in and get out. Around the perimeter they had these un-climbable fences all around a no-man's-land and then another fence. The no-man's-land was about 20' of loose gravel that the guard told us was to stop a heavy vehicle if it crashed the outer gate. The same guard pointed out an automatic machine gun placement and snipers in towers. Of course for a young GI Joe fan this was mindblowingly cool. When we went inside we had to be checked in and searched and everything and I was only seven or eight so I don't remember exactly but you had to go into an armored booth where they checked your ID and then scanned your eye, and weighed so they could check if you were carrying something stolen on the way out. If everything didn't check out going in or coming out they would lock you in the booth. I had to go into the booth alone and I was really scared that I would do something wrong and end up in lock-down, but it went fine. It turns out that that given my clearance level and pay grade I could see absolutely nothing, we mainly walked down the hallways we saw his office desk and computer which was not to cool, and he showed us the doors of a couple rooms where he worked but couldn't open because they were secret. The actual highlight was eating lunch in the cafeteria, we left that base and went to the Air Force academy for a tour, that had some fighter jets to look at at least. The big pay off was that I had pictures for show and tell of me in a nd around a very scarily secure military base with the implication of my inside knowledge into the Star Wars firmly in tow. I would show the pictures around an dimply that the really cool stuff was shown to me on a strict for your eyes only protocol. I would have loved to go into more detail but then I would have to kill them. 

32 oz. Sp(l)it 4 ways

One memory that is gross to me in retrospect that felt not only right, but good at the time was sharing drinks through one straw. When we went on a long trip or shopping and we'd been good, my  mom would reward us by getting a 32 ounce fountain drink like a root beer or Sprite. We would only get one cup for all three or four of us and we would all be sitting in the backseat. We would have the one massive cup and one straw and start on one side of the car take a sip, pass it to the next kid, and sip. And so on, back and forth, until it was just ice slurping dregs. It is absolutely disgusting to think about the hygienic state of my own kid's mouths and more importantly, noses, and thinking what state that straw and remaining fluid must have been in makes me shudder. I think anyone who has ever shared a cup with a kid will know right away the floaties I am talking about. Beyond the horror of retrospect I did have the advantage of being better at math than my brothers and sisters so whenever we got back into the car I would counter-intuitively give up the coveted window seats for a middle one. This was because I knew that if you're passing back and forth instead of just back and then resetting or just fourth and then resetting, the person the middle got almost double the drinks. The view out the window is not as good as twice the liquid sugar and all that tasty, tasty slobber and oral detritus. Yum.  

Unjustly Spanked

This author, constant reader, has been spanked many times and depending on how you feel about that kind of discipline you may thing it was always unjustly. I would disagree, while unpleasant it was at times a quite effective punishment and richly deserved. This is a story though that will rattle the foundations of even the most pro-spanking it was the time I was unjustly spanked. As we were driving back home from Provo, which is about a 20 or 30 minute ride, sister and brother were fighting over something and they had crossed over into the punching/kicking part of the fight and jumped up on each other looking for blood. I was being quiet, looking out the windows kind tired and their fighting and jumping on each other was bothering me. My mom yelled at them and tried to give them a smack over the back of the seat. Then she did the dreaded follow through on the oft promised, “I will stop this car right now.” She stopped the car to dish out the medicine, it the from of a little vitamin 'S' for the bottoms of the fighters but they saw her coming and jumped over me and pushed me toward the door that they had been sitting next to. My mom wrenches open the door to nip naughtiness in the bud once and for a little while and she snatches me out without checking Ids. That is a clear violation my constitutional rights as set forth in the Miranda ruling. I get two or three spanks into it before she realizes from my entreaties and protests that I am not my brother, for some reason this tickles her and she sets me down and starts to laugh. My wicked, and spank deserving brother and sister also find it quite hilarious that I got spanked because of their strategy. A good laugh ended the fight and the rage went out of my mom so we loaded back up and drove home with those wicked three laughing at my misfortune and I, whimpering and sulking in righteous indignation. I then knew how those wrongly imprisoned for crimes they didn't commit felt, well, not exactly, but close. 

Wading in The Cement River Full of Glass

Down the road from where we lived in Provo and where we would later come to visit my grandma and grandpa was some sort of huge shallow irrigation canal that went right past a park. It was about 12 feet wide and just a few inches deep and every ten feet or so it had little steps. So being free made it particularly in my 'Other Mother's' price range and we would load up and go down and wade for hours while she read her book in the shade. It was really slow-moving, shallow and fun to play but a one time somebody came along and drank a bunch of beer and smashed the bottles on the sides and ruined it for everybody. From then on that they put up a little fence around it and signs that said it was full broken glass and that nobody could use it anymore. I think that is when I decide that even if you were a good tax-paying republican you couldn't just smash up your empties anywhere you wanted all willy-nilly, you should do it in an abandoned lot or up the canyon somewhere. 

Pee-shoe and the French

When my dad was at 19 he served a mission in for the LDS church in the France-Belgium region of Europe. He learned to speak French and made some French friends, people who later moved to Utah. They had a few kids about our age and on occasion we would go and play with them. What I remember most is that they had a boy a little younger the Matt and I who was named Pichu. Which we thought was hilarious because we would always mispronounce his name to make it a joke as in Pee-Shoe, or in the phrase, 'Pichu, pees in his shoe'. We thought it was pretty dang funny verging on hilarious and for some reason he thought wasn't that funny, but we are talking about a boy who comes from a country that considers Jerry Lewis the end-all of comedy. We always thought that they were funny with all their French habits, and French-speaking, and their high toned mother who would get so mad that she would first start yelling at us in English and then loose her rhythm in her second tongue way and then pick back up yelling at us in French. This was really bad for the contrite because it was just so silly to be yelled at in French that I would have to keep a smile from creeping up the best I could or she would give me a un-funny French slap. The problem was that the French phrase for 'quickly' or 'with all due haste' is 'tout de suite' and that to me sounded like 'too sweet'. When I wasn't being yelled at I was teasing her son and daughters telling them they better clean up 'too sweet'. It is not a funny joke as you may have noticed but it was enough to make me giggle when she was yelling at us to stop fighting 'too sweet', 'too sweet'; poker face. . .giggle. . .slap.

In regards to the French, generally in the west it is considered okay to mock their language and their culture, and how they surrender quickly, and often, but people often times are under the delusion the French are great lovers, great cooks and are all top-shelf sommeliers. While there may well be great French lovers, and knowing wine is 50% snobbery and 50% condescension they probably have that wrapped up as well, but insofar as great cooking is concerned this family definitely made up the exception. There's nothing in the genes and there's nothing the national character I guess because every time we went to their house they served some nameless glop kind of casserole. The worst thing they made and which was completely culinarily unforgivable was rice in a bowl that they would top by pouring ketchup until it was completely covered and then mix it loosely down in. Her kids loved it and it was absolutely disgusting to me, they would do the ketchup thing to Mac-n-Cheese as well, but being a good American boy I never surrendered and never ate that crap without a fight.