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| My grandfather in the doorway of his house and Patches the wonder dog |
He lived in a house that had no indoor bathrooms and a water system consisting of pumping well water out of the cold water stream outside his front yard. There was really no place to relieve yourself outside the house other than the outhouse. You had to throw rocks against the building to ensure you had no strange visitors while you were doing your duty. Critters liked to rest there for some unknown reason.
Has shack was nothing more than a wood and sheet metal, deep in the heart of nowhere, the kind of place when the weather got cold, the wood burning stove and it's smell became became a very welcome friend. Since the stove was in the middle of the living room, it was hard to ignore, but in reality, the cause of my most prominent scar. While chasing my sister one day decades ago, I fell against the stove and it broke my lip open. That is why I've always worn facial hair there.
My cousin Jim would come down every summer and I must say, looking back on this, why we ended up as best friends, I don't know but we did. He housed at my grandfather's house, we would marvel at how long we could stay outside before someone came looking for us if they ever did. It was different then, you were expected to find things to do and when the nearest house was a half a mile away, other than the wild animals, there was nothing to be afraid of.
One of my more teachable moments was when I threw kittens in the pond, expecting them to swim back every time, and yes one time, they didn't. I was about 8 and I was devastated. We threw firecrackers at frogs and when one of them swallowed a black cat, his ultimate demise was a)a science experiment b) great fun when we saw his eyes bulged out when the black cat went off inside him. We rode horses, sometimes bareback, we caught fish with our hands. Our summers were creative, interesting and quite nostalgic.
Spending time with my grandfather was quite a trip. My grandfather in his drinking days was a mean, nasty, abusive, profane man. He beat his wife, my mother and her siblings on a regular basis. I know that's what led to my grandmother's divorcing him, long before I was here. He was a cruel human being who couldn't keep a job which led to my mother growing up in abject poverty. After he quit drinking, all the rough edges were still there, but he quit his abusive ways. I knew him during this time and really, in the only way he could, showed me his love. He could cuss, oh my God could he cuss. He would start going on something and throw in the oddest words. His creative pontifications on the world were quite verbose. Most people he didn't know were "mange covered sonuvabitchin, scum bag arse holes that couldn't piss in a can if it was at his feet."
Creative Cussing 101.
"Lop eared, long necked cock biting red on the head like a dick on a dog fuzz' ass." One of his favorites. Whenever something good happened, he would say to the effect, "well, the sun shines on a big dicked dog's ass at least once a day doesn't it?"
"Tits on a boar, son, nothing but tits on a boar."
Through all those years, I never ever heard him say the "f" word.
Never, but everything else was game.
The nearest TV station was 65 miles away. Our house was on a hill about 2 miles closer to the station than my grandfather's place, which was down the holler and in a bit of a valley. My house got the three stations on a good day, my grandfather got two on a good day. On a hot muggy August night (the kind I dreaded because I knew school was right around the corner and Jim would be returning to his home), the TV reception at my grandfather's house was exceptionally good. That called for a celebration. In his freezer was a quart of "Fairmount Frozen Ice Milk-Vanilla" just waiting for the correct moment. It was hellaciously hot too. Air conditioning was not something my grandfather ever really knew. Especially in that house.
We were watching some kind of war movie, the three of us, when my grandfather went to the freezer and cut the quart in half, giving my cousin and me half and keeping the other half for himself. The movie was now centering on the effect of war as one of the main characters was holding a dead bird and feeling sorry for it. My grandfather had no use for "pussies" as he called them.
"Poor little bird," said the soldier, "I wonder what happened to it?" That was one step too far for my grandfather and without any hesitation, to no one in general but the TV in particular, he replied on cue, "aw goddammit, the bird is so god dammed small, he got constipated and couldn't take a decent shit, now shoot the sumbitch and starts killing some krauts will ya?"
Of course he said this while Jim and I had our mouths full of Fairmont's best.
To this day, I have never had so much liquid go up my nose, because when you're thirteen, that shit was hilarious. What timing. My sinus cavities gave it up big time for my grandfather and something so fun turned out to hurt...real bad as we both layered his floor with upchucked ice milk that was ejected through our noses.
Oh, he was pissed about that, too.
We couldn't hear him. We were laughing too hard.
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