CSotD: Humpday on My Mind
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Crabgrass is set in an unspecified past and Tahuid Bondia is reading my mind, because I was just thinking of how, when I was a kid, every boy had a jackknife and how unlikely it would be for any kid to have one today. I know I had one at eight, because we spent that summer being fighter pilots shot down over jungles, which required making spears.
The only training I got was being told to cut away from myself, but I might have read that in Boys Life. I doubt eight-year-old boys are issued knives very often today, and, for that matter, they’ve changed swings into slings which keeps fighter pilots from effectively bailing out. And I’ll bet mommies don’t pack lunches for them to take out into the woods and eat while sitting on the edge of a cliff.
On the other hand, if you go back a couple more generations, you’d run into John Robinson, whose WPA Oral History describes his job on the family ranch at the age of seven:
In the river bottom, there were numerous places where bog holes of quicksand were located. Critters would walk into these holes frequently, and become bogged. If they were not hauled out, the animals would die. Even if I was just a slip of a lad, I could attend to the bogged critters, because the hoss did the pulling. All I had to do was place the loop over the critter’s horns, and with the lasso tied to the saddle’s nub, the hoss did the rest.
I’ll bet he had a pocketknife, too.
All this talk of parental caution is not to downplay the importance of mother-love. Here’s the Maclellan spin on Margaret Wise Brown’s classic, The Runaway Bunny
There’s a certain amount of ablest purity in Truin’s cartoon, because, for someone of my age and fitness level, it’s not a way to jazz up a bicycle but a way to avoid using the car, whereby its weight has no relevance and electricity is better than petrol.
But I’m not seeing a lot of people my age using the things. What I am seeing is people zooping in and out of traffic, ignoring traffic lights and driving on sidewalks or on the wrong side of the road. Bicycles are supposed to be governed by the traffic laws, but you don’t see them pulled over very often.
But isn’t a bike with a motor a motor bike? At what point do we go from a Schwinn to a Vespa to a Harley?
You should have heard all the whining back in 1924. We got over it.
Juxtaposition of Dogs in Bars
I don’t get the point of “Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy?” The intention seems to be to get the dog all stirred up and acting crazy, whereas most of my interaction with my dog is intended to get her to maybe chill out a little bit.
I do tell her she’s a good dog, but quietly, and she is a good dog. I even tell her she’s my best dog ever, but it’s not really a formal ranking. Dogs are like lovers and “best” is a silly concept. Each dog brings who each dog is, after all, and you wouldn’t say, “You’re my third best lover ever!”
Well, I wouldn’t, anyway.
The issue of “outside” is more universal. There was a point at which we had four dogs, and we didn’t dare say the W-word. We spelled it for a while, but they figured out what W-A-L-K spelled, and then they got hip to just W and we settled on “Dub.” But even the word “Go” would cause ears to perk up.
And if somebody left a leash on the kitchen table instead of hanging it up, you had to move it as if you were handling an unexploded bomb. One clink and you’d have four eager volunteers leaping around the kitchen screaming “I’m a good dog! I’m a good dog!”
A dog’s only job is devotion, and they work at it full-time, even if they might not get it right. I say that because we had a fear-biter for nine years, and even that poor twisted little guy was fiercely devoted to our family. Emphasis on “fiercely,” but still.
And if you can’t manage to change undesirable behavior, the next-best solution is to turn it to advantage.
Speaking of unfortunate tendencies, Maeve is finally getting some straight talk about her pattern of sabotaging promising relationships. This has been a very long story arc, so at this point your best move is just to jump in and hang on, but she’s involved in a really good relationship with a guy who has a toxic (adult) daughter intent on fouling things up.
Maeve has, as so often in the past, been assisting in making things not work, but between a patient guy and a good friend, she seems to be undergoing an intervention of sorts. Fingers crossed.
Still on the topic of dysfunction, I’m sympathetic to Darryl and Wanda. I worked at a paper that featured pensions, but after I’d been there a few years, they switched to a 401k system where they would match our contributions 2-to-1, which seemed okay. Then, after awhile, they reduced their contribution and made it a 1-to-1 match. And then they changed it to a 0-to-1 match.
As someone who lived in South Bend shortly after Studebaker went bust and bailed out on its pension plans, I’d seen 70- and 80-year-old women flipping burgers. But now I was a single dad and I’d have loved to keep contributing to that bare-bones 401k but couldn’t afford to.
Now here we are, and I’m seeing 70- and 80-year-olds doing jobs that rightfully belong to kids again, and, like those Studebaker widows a half-century ago, they aren’t doing it because they wanted to spend their golden years running a cash register at Walgreens.
Better to have lost your job, pal, than to have lost yourself in your job. Here’s a famous shot from The Crowd (1928):
Two more days and then rinse and repeat:
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