Neanderpundit

I haven’t blogged a lot about dad, a snippet here and there. That’s intentional, the wound is still too sore to poke around at.

Dad died when I was 27. I was just a few years past those times when i thought he was an idiot. I consider myself lucky to have gotten to know him as a person, however briefly.

I read Dick’s interaction with his dad, and I smile, because i understand how he feels and what he’s going through.

I never had a chance to see dad wither and die, a massive grabber got him all at once at the end of his work day at Ford, and the next I saw him was on a slab in a local hospital.

It hit me like a hammer.

It wasn’t unexpected. Dad had undergone a lot in his lifetime, had been pronounced dead once before his tenth birthday by the local doctor- “Typhus. Dig a hole. Make a box.” were the instructions he left. Poor as dirt, the old man shot a single shell into a flock of pigeons, dropped a couple dozen birds, gramma made squab soup, lots of fat and protein and poured it down dad in teaspoons. He made it, his heart irretrievably damaged, but alive.

In his late teens he rode the rodeo. Twenty years later he would have been a stock car driver- the rodeo was the stock car of the era, I guess. Before he was twenty he was trampled by a brahmin bull, broken ribs, arms, legs, vertebra, skull, neck, wrists, a mashed potato of a man. They put him in traction expecting his internal injuries to kill him before he finished the day. At the end of the week they started giving him pain medication. At the end of a year, still on crutches, and with parts of him still wrapped and in pain, he hitchhiked twelve miles back to the farm.

In his late twenties, he married my mom. He had a job working for a company tuckpointing industrial smokestacks- and a mason dropped a scaffold plank on dad’s back from seventeen stories up. The broken vertebra and ribs should have killed him if the board hadn’t killed him outright, but he lived, and was back to work before he was thirty. When I was born mom and dad were still paying off his medical bills from twenty years earlier. They had a pepto bismol pink dinette set and a garage- sale bedroom set. I slept in the drawer of the dresser for the first six months of my life. Dad drove a 55 ford pickup with springs sticking out of the seat and mice living in the glovebox. Mom had the “good car”, a hand me down Olds Dynamic 88. It was the ‘good car” because it had an automatic transmission, which is all mom ever drove. And heat. And a radio. Dad’s truck had none of these amenities, though the rotted paper vent hoses did, er, condition it’s air. Well, it put it in some kind of condition. We lived in a rented house across from an empty field, next to the Petrie family, a woman who died in 2003 at 105. They were my parent’s first ‘neighbors’ and mom visited them right up to the death of the youngest son at age 89.

Living in that house, one of my very first memories was mrs Petrie giving me a plastic golf set, two plastic clubs and a plastic ball. THe backyard was flat, so dad gave it a nice close mow, and took me out in the backyard so I could putt the ball around. he took an empty juice can, pounded it in the ground with a hammer, and pulled out the resulting plug of dirt to make a “hole” for me to putt the ball in. He lifts out the plug of dirt and a snake crawls out of the hole. it was like magic to me! “Do it again, dady!’ I yelled. he didn’t. it was still cool. He poked holes in the bottom of the empty can and shoved it into the hole open side up this time, and I spent the afternoon having a grand dime knocking that ball into that hole.

I miss you, Dad, I miss you every day. I’m raising a child of my own, now, and I still don’t know if I’m getting it right or not. It comforts me to think you’re working by my side.

To tell you this story, I have to tell you another one. Or two. Or many.

First of all, you have to understand Mom.

Mom cleans house like dental hygenists clean teeth: thoroughly, quickly, and several times a day. There isn’t a surface in moms house that isn’t sanitary, perhaps even sterile. Odds are, mom’s kitchen counter is a more germ free place than some operating rooms.

Anyway, now you have to know about Kate. My aunt Kate probably never thought of Mom as much of a housekeeper, because Kate cleans. I mean, kate CLEANS.
Here’s some things you might find astonishing or humerous but are actually true facts about my Aunt Kate:

Kate weekly removes all the heat registers in the house and runs them through the dishwasher in the garage.
The dishwasher in the garage is there solely for the purpose of washing such items as the heat registers, the wheelcovers off the car, the BBQ grill, and the mailbox.
The dishwasher in the kitchen is there only for the purpose of washing her “good” dishes, a set of Countess Pattern prewar Havilland Limoges.
The kitchen itself is only used for cooking on special occasions.
The basement has a kitchen too, a stove and fridge (in flawless condition, circa 1946) and a laundry sink (clean enough to store raw meat in)where the “regular” dishes were washed (all Fiestaware)

Everyone ate in the basement because NOBODY went upstairs except for special occasions, and the only occasion special enough I remember was the death of her husband, my sainted uncle ted.

The kitchen sink was where she washed the wall switch and outlet covers. Weekly. Once a month she shampooed the carpet. ON her hands and knees. With a bucket and a brush.

Kate carried a snub-nose 38 special. They were the last white family to live in Gary, Indiana. She weighed 88 lbs all her life from the time she was 18. They had a grand piano on which her daughter took, and later gave, lessons. It was french polished. By hand. She refinished it herself.

Ny Kate’s standards, which were incredibly, embarrasingly high, my mom was a slacker, and that fact was never left unmentioned.

Now I can tell you the REAL story.
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Inspired by Steve’s Hoginator and unwilling to use additional ergs of electricity from the bastard power company, I’m in the process of building a propane powered mini-hoginator. I want to use it to learn how to smoke properly, and what to expect, so i can move on to create a full sized propane hoginator.

I would go ahead and build an exact duplicate of Steve’s grill,because he’s already proven that it works, but for two things: I want to be able to take it camping where there is no electricity, and I want to stick it to the electric company. Plus I like propane. Pictures and details to follow.