Line 'O the day - January 15, 2008

‘If I had the option’ isn’t one of my choices, is it?

Line 'O the day - January 6, 2008

Either I’ve forgotten where I’ve been or just plain didn’t pay attention along the way. Regardless I don’t have any bearings for the way forward.

Riding the Fender; safety is relative

Most tractors have one seat, which you might think would impede two, three or four people from riding on one at the same time. It doesn't. Safety on a farm, in most regards, is a relative term. Is riding the fender of a tractor safe? Most folk would say no, most definitely not, in fact it is rather dangerous. In my experience riding the hub is not particularly dangerous. I'm not saying it's as safe as being strapped into the back of a Motor Trend top safety pick sedan, but I never got ran over by a tractor, nor did my brothers, or anyone else I know. Well I did actually know of a couple old boys who got ran over by a tractor, but the circumstances were different from what I'm talking about here.

So when you're a little one on the farm and the old man is headed out to grind feed or put a bale of hay out for the cows or do something else that you can tag along for you ride on the tractor with him. My dad had this old IH Farmall tractor for the bulk of my youth...

As you can see it's got nice big flat topped fenders. Ideally designed for someone to sit comfortably, though a tad precariously. This is another one of those instances that everyone has, in which you do something and never realize what someone outside your community might find odd or dangerous or whatnot. You always realize there is a bit of danger to it, even as a little kid. Mom and Grandma, or whatever motherly entity might be around at the time, tells you to hang on tight before you even leave the house to chase after Dad. Once you're situated up on the tractor the old man reminds you to hold on. And you do, until you get the hang of it of course.

Very quickly you find you're able to balance pretty well as you're cruising down the road. Then you start exploring your bounds, well at least as much as you can perched atop an eighteen inch wide piece of sheet metal. You don't hang on at all, you're reckless and you ain't gonna fall. Below you there's this massive tire speeding around and around, it's thick tread a blur, and you hang your foot out in front of it. Tentatively you ease your foot toward it and as it makes contact your foot is sent jittering away from the tire. For an eight year old that's fairly exhilarating. Then you reach out with your hand; that hurts, not bad, but it isn't pleasant.

The other main tractor around the farm was grandpa's old Ford.

Accommodating passengers wasn't quite as easy with old blue. Basically you just stood right next to whoever was driving and tried not to accidentally bump into one of the many levers. Unlike the IH, Ford seemed to design their tractor to discourage passengers. Which forces you to consider another option.

On the Ford and also with the International, once there were 3 potential passengers, me and my brothers, you could catch a ride by standing on the drawbar (the little metal tongue on the back that you attach stuff to the tractor by, for those who might not be automatically familiar with the term 'drawbar'). This position was rather dangerous no matter how you saw it. You're standing on a four or five inch wide piece of slick metal, while clinging to any handhold you can manage. Granted you're behind the tractor so if you fall off you won't get run over, unless of course you're pulling a wagon or some other sort of heavy equipment. Odds are you are pulling something, sorta what the damn tractor is for. Even here though you temp fate. You'll lean down and drag one foot along the ground with the tractor going at top speed.

A sort of point I'm wanting to make here is that there are few occupations that might thrust your child into a somewhat dangerous situation, simply because that's the way it is. Riding around on the tractor was a fun thing for me to do as a kid, it'd be a fun thing for any kid. And that opportunity for me to tempt fate by dragging my foot across a tractor tire going 20 mph, wouldn't exist if the old man was a bank manager. Now I suppose there could be fun things for an 8 year old to do if they tagged along with their bank manager parent to work, I don't know what those things are though. My dad's office was a barn yard, to put it in the simplest terms, and a barn yard is a fun and somewhat dangerous place for a child. I reckon mom and dad could have denied me and my brothers the fun of riding around on the tractor, but going back to an idea I hit on in an earlier one of these stories you learn on the fly. You watch dad drive the tractor for a few years, perched on the fender, then one day he wants you to get behind the wheel. And guess what you're a natural at it.

Line 'O the day - October 29, 2007

My hands make me feel like less of a man.


Present day note:
Without saying much about it, this line is probably one of the most personal and emotionally challenging ones in the whole fucking endeavor.

Doubt

Doubt makes life worth living. Plain and simple, doubt entices us out of bed every morning and tucks us in every night.

I write. I count myself a writer and I try to peck at the keys at some point during every day. Am I any good? Without doubt I might rest on my laurels, of which there are none. I doubt myself and my ability every fucking day. Sometimes I doubt a sentence as soon as I tack on a period or exclamation mark. This isn't negative thinking, but more a drive to be better. I'm hesitant to believe that what I thrust onto the page is any good, and that doubt pushes me to try and make it better.

Faith without doubt is a sad endeavor. Such absolution leaves no mystery in life, no true longing for that in which you've placed your faith. Doubt in my lover's devotion does not frighten me, it makes me strive harder to earn and enjoy her caress.

I was once taught to doubt that the sun will rise in the morning. Life is infinitely better with that as my thought as I drift off to sleep. For when the morning comes and the sun greets me as I wake, doubt is defeated by the gift of a new day.  But then, will it be a good day?

And the fear and doubt of a white page only succumbs after it has been filled with a string of black little letters; coherent or otherwise.

Cake and ice cream

Cake and Ice cream is a normal thing I believe. Friends or family get together to celebrate something and you have cake and ice cream, and you call that gathering 'cake and ice cream'. If no one has heard of this please feel free to tell me I'm delusional. I already no I am, but not in this category. Anyway, I mentioned previously my country family gets together perhaps a little more often than other families I've encountered, and 'cake and ice cream' is what we call these little parties.

First let me lay out quickly the scope of the family I'm talking about. Ernie and Mildred (they even have old timey sounding names, right?) are my grandparents, and they had two children; my dad and his sister. Now they both got married and dad had three sons and his sister had three daughters. Just there you'd have twelve in on the festivities. But my cousins (my Aunt's three daughters, if you're a little slow) were all older than me and my brothers and had husbands, boyfriends and some children when I was still a kid myself. So I'd say from about the time I could really remember there were at least two cousin-in-laws (is that what you call them?) and a couple of what I call my little cousins, which are technically second cousins, but hell they're pretty much sisters, so none of these labels really matter. But the number was always higher than that base figure of twelve. Family friends might show up, Grandma's brother, and all sort of other folk. I'd say the normal cake and ice cream would have sixteen to twenty people in attendance.

These weren't just random gatherings, oh no, we were getting together to celebrate special events. And with upwards of twenty people there were plenty of milestones to draw from. Cake and ice cream is a monthly thing, there's at least a couple birthdays or anniversaries in every month and those need to be marked. It rotated from one house to another, Grandma and Grandpa's, our house, my aunt and uncle's, even my cousins' on occasion. There was usually some gift exchange, but that was a far less important factor to the party. It was just getting together, eating and bullshitting with each other.

Calling it 'cake and ice cream' perhaps I should make a note of those two things. So between Grandma, Mom and my Aunt we had three stellar purveyors of sweets. Being honest, none of them were ever too concerned about the look of their confections, but made damn sure they tasted good. My grandma's chocolate sheet cake is one of my favorite things in the world, it ain't fancy, but you can't beat it, you just can't. Occasionally there'd be homemade ice cream, most often my Aunt's creations. Have you had honest to god homemade ice cream? Don't reckon I have to say much more than that.

I've explained this to people before, what cake and ice cream is, and they can't seem to wrap their heads around the concept. Sure get together from time to time, but once a month no way. Then the task is trying to explain that there are much larger events. We have a big Christmas gathering, the same as most folk. That's the big winter celebration. Then in the spring there is the larger Eckles family reunion. It's a week long endeavor, every year (It might be worthy of its own post at some point in the future). There's usually a wedding to bring everyone together in the summer. And then something, like making molasses, in the fall. Yeah, my uncle makes molasses. From raw cane. And we turn it into a party. But these bigger events pull in a bigger crowd, which is awesome, but changes the dynamic.

Basically a way to see 'cake and ice cream' is to imagine it like a regular family eating around the dinning room table one night a week (that's a normal thing, right?). I always felt really close to my cousins growing up and then after I left the country life, as it were, I would meet people and their relationship with their siblings was akin to my relationship to my cousins. And that is what those comforting little get togethers provide, that intimate family connection that gets lost in the regular world. Which has slipped away from me in my wandering days away from our little country homes, in that tiny little corner of the world I come from.

Line 'O the day - September 26, 2007

As a man without a soul, I can still appreciate Buddy Guy.

We can be articulate and say F¿#K at the same time

Or at least I can.

The concept of storytelling for me, and I think a lot of people, is housed inside two elements. First the content, what the story is and how that story unfolds. The second, and equally important factor is the way in which the story is told. Whether you're an author, film director, or stand up comic you tell your stories in a distinctive voice (if you don't use a specific voice your work will suffer for it). Now then, in my not so celebrated career as a storyteller I've written in various styles and attempted to use the correct voice for whatever I was writing.

When writing a screenplay, novel or even a short story a writer is not just tasked with that one voice of the overall story, but the individual characters' voices as well. Your villain should not sound like your hero; the romantic lead's style of speaking should not mimic that of the girl he's pursuing nor his best friend who's in the script to garner a few laughs. This is difficult, and I have failed in adequately giving my characters distinctive voices on a number of occasions. With failure, and helpful readers pointing out your lack of this skill, you learn, and begin to take the idea of voice very seriously. Which leads to my initial point, I use 'foul' language with great frequency in my daily life. Therefore if I'm telling a story from my point of view I'm going to use a great deal of off color language.

I have written entire screenplays with nary a single curse word. I have written articles on this blog, here or here, in which the subject and style I was aiming for didn't call for me to use words like shit or fuck. But in other instances I am very purposefully using such words to project a distinctive voice or illicit a specific response. The Miss Piggy Line 'O the Day (I mention it again cause it's one of my favorites) uses 'fucking' to implant a more visceral idea into the readers mind than just saying 'having sex' would have drawn out. There it's a juxtaposition, the harsh use of 'fucking' laid next to a puppet who's main audience is children. I'm not just writing stuff down (OK sometimes I am), I think about it on that level, of what words I need to use to get the response I desire. Ideally I know my story inside and out as I'm writing it, and I know my characters well enough that it isn't a chore when I'm typing. The process of converting a character's motivations, back story and my own sensibilities should be smooth as I write out a line of dialog. Not effortless, but hopefully fast and skillful.

For something like my farm stories the desire is to give the words on the screen as close a connection to my own spoken voice as I can. The difficulty is that I have the time to think about it, write it out and edit after the fact. We do this to an extant in conversation, but in writing you're inclined to clean it up a little too much. If I'm writing out a story and feel like referring to someone in the tale as a cocksucker, I've diligently weighed the value of using that word. Reckon I could call them a fellatio enthusiast, but then that would alter the way the reader envisions the person or the situation. Right there is another example, using 'reckon' the way I did in the last sentence. Using 'reckon' as the first word in the sentence forces a dialect and a cultural background into the readers mind.

Personally I have never subscribed the old notion that a man who curses has a poor vocabulary. I am very conscious of the words I use and the response they illicit from others. I'm also aware of the societal parameters of language. Again, I can play inside a sandbox and use the tools that are available inside (say, all words save Carlin's list).  But for me, and therefore my personal farm stories having those other words at my disposal makes life and writing more fun. And that's all I'm here for is to have some fun at my keyboard.

Amy takes me for a ride

Amy and Jamie were two mules.

Here are the girls, in team mode.  Amy's on my left there and Jamie's on my right.  I'm about eleven, and my brother is guiding the team from the wagon.  The girls were fairly obnoxious when working together as well.  There are about a dozen things in this photo that proves my upbringing was a little different than the average child in late 20th century America.

Don't remember exactly when we acquired them, but for a couple years I rode Jamie and my older brother rode Amy.  Amy was a tad bit bigger than Jamie, but beyond that she was a fair sight less obedient.  And so being older and more capable of handling her obnoxious tendencies my brother rode her until the fun of riding wore out on him, about the time he was 15 or so.  At this point I had grown up a little and my younger brother was up for riding.  He took Jamie, since at the time he was 7 or 8 and she was far more docile (and quite frankly a lot less fun to ride).  And I moved up to the challenge of Amy.

Reckon I was 11, maybe 12 when this transition took place.  I was ready for Amy, and she was ready for me.  The incident, that is a favorite story in our family, took place the second time I rode her; or tried to.  The mules were kept at Grandma and Grandpa's house, which is right next door (at some point I'm gonna do a post on where my country family lives, we're all neighbors).  The first time I rode her I saddled her up with just Grandpa, and then I led her across the road to this pasture where I liked to ride.  That first time it was just a short little trip and then back across the road.  Amy performed very well that first time, and her and I got along great for years after, but the second time was a harrowing experience.

That second time my old man was over at the grandparents and think Jake (older brother) was as well.  And we got her saddled up and everything was fine.  Now to be honest I've always been a tad hazy on how it started out.  I think I led her across the road as I had done before and mounted the saddle.  But head strong as she was Amy wasn't inclined to take me out into the bottom pasture that day.  Instead she wanted to head back across the road to the shed where I'd pull her saddle off.  Well halfway across the road I was tugging on the reins trying to get her to turn around, and then she just snapped.  From here on I remember it vividly.

My grandparents' house is at the top of a steep hill, and Amy took out at a sprint down that hill.  The transition from stubborn mule to wild animal happened in a flash and I had no time to react.  I heard my dad yell at me to jump off as we were about halfway down the hill, but she was moving at speed and I was startled and half still wrestling with the reins.  Abandoning ship at that early stage wasn't an option.  At the bottom of the hill real fear set in.  There was a creek and a narrow bridge at the bottom of the hill and trusting Amy to smoothly cross said bridge was a dicey proposition.  It's about this time I released the reins, grabbed the saddle horn and held on for my life.  She blew over the bridge and kept on running.

From here it's a straight shot across a wide bottom, not quite a quarter mile across.  I was alternating screaming at Amy to stop and just screaming from the fear and adrenaline.  But she just kept running.  Unbeknownst to me Dad, Gramps and my brother had piled into a truck and were headed down the hill in pursuit.

A thing to note here is that a mule running is not the most graceful thing.  They don't move like a horse.  It's a choppy gate, and can provide a somewhat rough ride.  And that little journey Amy was carrying me on was about the roughest few minutes I've had.  Finally after we had been running across the flat for a stretch I gained some of my senses back and snatched up the reins.  On the other side of the bottom was another hill and I figured for sure I could get her stopped as we went up it, since she had to be about worn out by then.  But a secondary complication had arisen that caused concern.  The cinch on the saddle was coming loose, and the damn thing started to slip sideways off her.

Now I was wrestling to keep the saddle upright and holler'n at her to stop.  And if she wasn't tired yet I was about spent as we reached the hill and she determinedly trotted up the slope.  She did slow a bit as the incline increased, and veered toward the shoulder.  With the saddle slipping and a somewhat less dangerous speed I finally decided to bail.  There was a pretty deep ditch on the side of the road, but at that point jumping became my only thought.  My dismount was in no way, shape or form coordinated.  I just sort of slid off the side and flopped into the ditch, winding up in a heap.  Dad reached me about the time I was crawling out of the ditch.

And for that briefest of moments, before I was deemed no worse for wear, my dad and grandpa were utterly concerned with my intact health.  Once that moment past, and I was left with only a couple scratches and frayed nerves, the minor fiasco was a massive source of comedy.  And I'm the first to admit it is funny as hell; in that embarrassing, sort of frightful, yet ultimately harmless way.  Like I said earlier, it is a story that comes up often at family events.  There's always someone new to absorb our little family's country fried history, and we've all become decent story tellers.  That isn't exclusive to my family out in the sticks, it's a universal thing I reckon.  Every family has stories, and they share their tales amongst themselves the same as we do.

We might have a tendency to get together a little more than the average extended family.  Which I think will be my next redneck post.