Neanderpundit

Many years ago, my cousin bought a piece of bottomland along the Embarras river in southern Illinois.

It was abandoned at the time, he bought it on a tax sale, and got it for a song. He went in, sank a shallow well point with a sledgehammer and a ladder, and dug a septic and seepage bed. He borrowed a bulldozer and carved out a flat spot on a bluff overlooking the river, and dragged in an old mobile home.

I think the total cost was around $6000.00, not including his labor, for the whole shooting match, fourteen acres of arable land and about six wooded acres. The gravel for the driveway cost almost a thousand of that 6k.

I loved to visit my cousin, he was living my dream life. We’d sit on his front porch (actually several old skids nailed to tree stumps cut level with his trailer floor) and cast our lines directly into the river, catch fish, eat them for dinner. At night we’d shoot coyotes sniffing around his henhouse.

He never touched the farm, he had a neighbor who plowed, planted, harvested, and he got 1/3 of the crop, and never had to lift a finger. It was a good deal, he always had fresh sweet corn and a very small garden out behind the trailer provided as much fresh produce as he could eat. He had two big freezers which he filled with food he either caught, shot, or grew, and at any moment he could probably live for a year and never lift a finger.

The farm was beautiful. See, bottomland tends to be very fertile, southern illinois growing seasons long, and it was a rare summer he wasn’t able to get two full crops off the land. He was living pretty high on the hog, by my standards.

One spring I saw news footage of people being rescued by DNR boats off the embarras, and to my surprise, I saw as uniformed DNR officials and cops in an Evinrude tri-hull rescue my cousin off the roof of his almost submerged trailer.
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Back here I spoke of some of the perils of childhood. Specifically in relation to frogs.

Now, if you are a kid and you want to ride a bike, you have to have elbow pads, knee pads, a helmet, a pair of gloves, and an operating permit to sling your leg over the seat.

Back in the day, however, there were times when my alleged bicycle had pieces of plywood taped to c-clamps as a seat. Often, when sitting heavily back on this contraption, I wondered if impaling one of my buttocks on the bare metal tube would be less painful.

More to the point, there were a lot of circumstances where I made do with what was at hand, plaything wise. Oh, i had the normal contingency of refrigerator boxes, metal barrel hoops, and a quarter would buy you a solid pound of green army men, plastic so cheap and waxy you only had to sit them in the sun to bend them into innumerable (and often immoral) poses. I loved green army men, and at one point our driveway was paved with a combination of green army men and shingletab.

Long before the Shingletab went down, though, we had a gravel drive. Well, there was some gravel in it, anyway, though it still required regular mowing.

Dad finally managed to scrape together the scratch to lay down some gravel, and the guy came out with a bigass bomberfull, which turned out to be, rather than the crush&run we originally wanted, a bomberload of river gravel.

As a driveway, it was a dismal failure; as a source of entertainment for a 7 year old, it was pure heaven.

The river gravel was perfect slingshot fodder. I would search for specific flat stones and save them for skipping at the lake. And then, one day I saw the stones wet for the first time. We’d come home from mass in a late summer rain, and those stones, wet for the first time, were magically transformed- agates, quartzes, several different types of granite, the colors and the patterns were awesome.

Mom wasn’t by any means a neglectful parent, but I had a lot of freedom, for the day, I was just not allowed out in the rain. I also tended to get myself in trouble anytime I used the garden hose.

So on any given summer afternoon, sun blazing down on the indiana countryside, I could be found sitting cross-legged on the edge of the driveway, next to dad’s 1960 Ford Comet,

Licking rocks.

You see, you had to moisten them to make sure you were getting the really cool looking ones. I’d put them in a big pile and then sit them on the ledge outside my bedroom window so I could sit and stare at the cool colors on rainy summer afternoons.

I did this for more than a year, as I remember, then dad brought in a bomber of shingletab and changed the game forever.

I think it probably explains a few things.

No, I’m not talking about playing Lotto.

I’m talking about playing the game “what if I won the lotto”. It’d have to be a big one, none of this two million dollar BS. I’m talking about one of those 120 million cash payout lottos.

There are some specific things you think about, of course, not having to get up at 5:00 anymore, not having to worry about the cable bill, not having to worry about any bill.

Most lotto winners tend to white trash the whole deal, many are bankrupt pretty quickly. Most of that comes of dragon chasing; trying to find the next thing to thrill or satisfy the need for adventure.

Well, I don’t want adventure. My wants are pretty simple. I’d like to have that big payoff for a lot of reasons, most of them quite selfish, but some of them selfish for friends of mine, people I love, or people I respect.

I’d like to pay off my best friend Mike’s bills and have a contractor come finish rehabbing his 40’s vintage Dutch colonial home.

I’d like to get my friend Jenny a nice little suburban Georgia bungalow with a carport, and put a car into it. And get her training she needs to get a gig she likes more. And a fistful of flight coupons for NYC, where she can satisfy her desire to be in the Apple.

I’d like to buy Velociman’s half rubber team a whole new set of uniforms so they could look real nice when they play.

I’d like to buy a small publising house and publish all of Francis Porretto’s books.

I’d like to get Kim du Toit the winchester 63 he shot as a child. No, not one like it, the exact model 63. I’d like to see the look in his eyes.

I’d like to sign a blank check and have Connie Du Toit redesign my website so it looked nice. Then I’d probably have to have someone talented write it for me.

I’d like to get Acidman a lawyer good enough to make his ex squirm, and get him his son back. I’d like to see the look in his eyes.

I’d like to get my whole family to Florida for a visit with a dear old friend who now suffers from alzheimers. I’d like to make sure his last years are exquisitely comfortable.

I’d like to drop about 100k on this house, and about 100k each on the next-door neighbor’s houses, to help them get ahead of their home improvement projects.

I’d like to get my local parish a monument to our beloved pastor, now gone three years, a decent and wonderful man, an inspired homilist, and a huge loss. I’d like to bribe my bishop to ship our current miserable popinjay of a pastor off to a parish where he can learn the meaning of the word “humility”, and I’d like our former associate pastor to return, and guide the parish who misses him so severely.

I’d probably make sure all my family and close friends were modestly taken care of, funds established to get kids into halfway decent schools, etc.

I wouldn’t want much beyond that. Decent health and a lot of good hunting and fishing, is about all. Well, and plenty of ammo.

What are your lotto wishes?