The humble Farmer at Bowdoin College, January 31, 2003
Thank you for visiting this page of Rants.
Below are the rants from The humble Farmer
radio show for the week of
April 29 - May 5, 2007
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April 22, 2007 Rants
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1. You might remember my telling you that I do not shout when I need to alert my wife Marsha when she has a phone call. I clap my hands three times. Here’s part of a letter from John who says, “What I'm actually writing about is your terrific suggestion about clapping to Marsha rather than yelling up the stairs. I tried it to summon my wife, but … the light came on in the bedroom.”
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2. Jonathan was kind enough to ask me to be a guest on his radio show last week. Jonathan is an excellent radio talk show host and knows enough to ask questions and let his guest babble. I had a good time, but since then I’ve been able to give some thought to one of his questions. As I recall, he asked me if I felt old. No, of course I don’t feel old. I don’t think that old people feel any older than they did when they were kids. Of course we can’t climb trees or run as long or as fast as we could, but as long as we behave ourselves, most of us experience no pain. But because of his question one thing has started to bother me. When I look at the 16 shirts in my closet and the 20 t shirts in my bureau drawer and the 20 sweaters people have given me for Christmas over the past 50 years, it annoys me to think that I cannot possibly live long enough to wear them out.
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3. You might have seen the boy on television who put out his telephone number on the internet and said that if anyone wanted to talk, he would talk with them. Because it was such a novel idea, it warranted five or so minutes on national television. But for almost 30 years, once a week I’d sit by a microphone and carry on a conversation with one radio friend. And after a few years, some very intelligent people would look forward to these little once a week chats. I think having someone to talk with is a good thing, don’t you? I’m humble@humblefarmer.com and I’d like to hear from you.
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4. What are you to think when the same people who killed the electric car stand in front of TV cameras and say we have to improve electric batteries so we can have electric cars? They are obviously trying to grab a little undue credit. These are the same people who bought up public transportation in the United States back in the 1920s and 1930s and shut it down so the public would have no choice but to use cars. Please remember that the people who say we need more science courses in the schools might very well be these very same people who hope that young people never study history.
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5. Every day the amount of control we have over our lives diminishes and I am not comfortable with it. Over the past 100 years the manner in which we get from one place to another has been gently manipulated until, without realizing how it happened, we are trapped with a gasoline powered automobile. Anyone who has seen the 2006 documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car, knows why this happened. When I was a kid, there were sidewalks and you walked or ran to school (where there were no overweight children) and to the store and to grange and to church and to the post office and to the garage. But now they have widened the road and torn up the sidewalk and consolidated everything so you have to drive 10 or 20 miles to find a store or a school or even a place where you can buy the addictive gasoline. In 1967 when I attended a linguistics conference in Rumania, it was a communist country. I was amazed that no matter where you wanted to go there was a bus that came by every two minutes that would take you there for two cents. No one needed or could afford a car, and because the man walking or riding public transportation wasn’t buying gasoline, communism had to go. Americans who have never lived abroad are amazed when they visit Europe today and discover how easily and quickly one can get around on busses and trains. But I started out to tell you how I no sooner learn to edit my blog when the blog people shut it down and forced me to use a terrible, strange new version, when I got sidetracked onto gasoline and public transportation. Every day the amount of control I have over my life diminishes and I’m not comfortable with it.
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6. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it was John who wrote to me about vicissitudes. A week or two later I noticed the same word in another letter I got from him. We all have pet words we use. If you are a teacher, someday you should tell your pupils that you will give a prize to the student who can do the best job of standing at the front of the room doing an imitation of you, and then require all of them to do it. I’ve done it. Paul Strout, who was probably in the fifth grade at the time, had me down. There were certainly others in the class who could also do a Mr. Skoglund, but I recall that Paul was able to mimic all my favorite phrases, facial expressions and body movements. Try it, if you dare take a minute off from teaching for the standardized test, and let us know what happened. I’m humble@humblefarmer.com
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7. I started talking about John who wrote me a letter which got me off on a Paul Strout tangent about getting students to do imitations of the teacher. John wrote, “I'm married to a Phi Beta Kappa English major so sometimes I just can't keep it all monosyllabic. The only drawback is that it makes it tough communicating at the local convenience store.” The same is true in all walks of life. Most of us can only communicate with people who have similar backgrounds. Two philosophy professors showed up at my wedding on Chebague Island in 1965. Jim Whitten was my professor at Gorham Normal School and Doug McGee was my first wife’s professor at Vassar. I think her friend Doug later taught at Bowdoin. And when I saw these two great men together at my wedding I went over and asked if they’d been able to agree on any thread of philosophical thought. And Mr. Whitten said that they really hadn’t had a chance to discuss anything --- they were still defining terms.
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8. Do you ever go into places where you push a button and take a number and sit down and wait until they call out, “35?” When Timmy Holmes owned Hall’s Market in Tenants Harbor, right in front of the little meat counter where Timmy spent much of his time there was an oak stanchion that supported the ceiling. Timmy drove a nail into this stanchion and right above the nail he put a note that said, “Take a Number,” and below it hanging on the nail there were several pieces of paper and each one had a number on it. This was, of course, a joke. You might agree that it was a brilliant social commentary on our times. Of course there were never lines of people clamoring for product in Hall’s Market and most of the time customers were in the store they were laughing or exchanging jokes with the owner. But visitors who would come into Tenants Harbor on boats would see the sign and take a number. And as soon as they did Holmes would smile and say, “32.” Because only about one radio friend comes to visit me in the course of a year, I think I’ll drive a nail over my doorbell and put up a little sign that says, “Take a number.”
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9. Like most old Maine farmhouses, mine has a shed on the back. You enter my house through that back shed. The last time the front door was open was probably for Larkin Gilchrest’s funeral in 1912. If you look out the window and see a visitor at the front door, you know he is from away. If the visitor comes around to the back, you know it is probably one of your sixth or seventh cousins. Our shed door is open when I’m home and when visitor’s step inside they see a sign. This is what the sign says: “Welcome. You have entered the home of a DOM --- (Deaf Old Man) He wants to see you. He is probably in there but won’t hear you if you simply knock or whisper “yoo hoo.” Following these 6 simple steps will earn you his undying respect and admiration. It is also the easiest way to get it. Pick up this cow bell, walk over to the door and open it. Walk through the library ringing the cowbell vigorously as you scream “Hello in There” at the top of your lungs. Open the second door and continue screaming and ringing until you either attract someone’s attention or are taken out by the dog.”
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10. If you have small children or small grandchildren you might have given them a piece of plywood that has all the letters of the alphabet cut out of it. The kid learns the shape of the letters, which are too large to be eaten, by sticking them back in the proper holes. Children have ways of losing these letters and the ones who occasionally brighten our home are no exception. Although in some northern European countries children do not start school until they are 6 or so years old, in this country they are encouraged to read as soon as they can talk. The fear is that without a proper grounding in reading fundamentals at an early age, they might later fall behind their classmates in school. I recently found a two-inch plywood yellow letter O jammed down beneath some John Gould books on a bookshelf. My wife Marsha was delighted when I showed her the yellow letter O and said that O had been missing for at least a year. The next time the kids visit, grampy plans to get with some remedial work, lest when the kids are in high school they can’t read words like, soon, coon and moon.
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11. END The word “trophy wives” reached my ears the other day and I asked my wife Marsha, The Almost Perfect Woman, if she could explain trophy wives. She said that trophy wives want a cleaning woman and a cook. Trophy wives don’t expect to have to do anything, but lie around all day and expect to be nurtured like a rare, delicate plant or some Obscure Pharaoh [Fair-row] from the 18th Dynasty. Doesn’t this give you the impression that trophy wives must lead shallow, meaningless lives? I don’t like the sound of this at all, because from the way I understand it, I’m a trophy husband.
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Thank you for reading my rants. Come have supper with us at the St. George farm. Your buddy humble
785 River Road
St. George, ME 04860
(207) 226-7442
humble@humblefarmer.com
www.TheHumbleFarmer.com
© 2007 Robert Karl Skoglund