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Rants week of May 6-12, 2007

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1. Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Do one thing every day that scares you.” I do. Every morning I wake up in a bed next to my wife.

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2. Last week I was in Salt Lake City where I spoke to the state funeral directors. You can believe that funeral directors ooze wisdom. And more than people in any other occupation that you can think of, these people realize the value of play. Play every day. Take trips you can’t afford. Have fun. Listen to this. “You never hear someone on their deathbed say, “I wish I’d worked more.”

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3. Do you play with your kids? Do you go with them on vacations with the money you have saved by not buying a television set or plastic toys? You might want to give some serious thought about what I’m about to say. I heard it at the meeting of the Utah Funeral Directors. “The only thing you can take with you is your memories. You never saw a U-Haul behind a hearse.”

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4. For what it’s worth, one of the more interesting people I spoke with while wandering about in airports last week was an Englishman who said, in the course of our conversation, that he had captured a German boat off Greece during the Second World War. I’ve always wondered how people were captured instead of shot during a war, and he said that they actually sank one boat but the other one ran up a white flag. He said they invited the German officers to have dinner with them, and when I got home I Googled this --- to see if his story might perhaps be something he’d seen on TV, and I discovered that it was not unknown to have dinner with officers who were prisoners. There would be enough good liquor served in hopes of hearing a few things that might help with the war effort. And, after all, you really had nothing personal against these people as they were simply doing the same thing you were doing, which is what they were told. He said while they were eating, there was a report out in the corridor. Wham. One of the guards nearly blew some toes off his foot.

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5. In 20 years you’re not going to find many WWII veterans around. Even today they are over 80 and are worth your attention. The English fellow who was telling me about WWII said that he came to the states in the 1960s and applied for citizenship. He said they asked him if he’d ever committed adultery. Kind of a curious question if you think of it, but he told them, “Yes, in my heart.” And then they asked him if he’d ever had communist ideas, and he told them yes, during WWII he had escorted captured battle ships to the Russians. This man told me that in war you prepare for everything, but what you fail to prepare for is what actually happens. Sounds to me like a first date. I’m humble@humblefarmer.com and I’d like to hear what you have to say about it.

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6. One of my favorite poems by Oliver Wendell Holmes contains the line, “I only ask that Fortune send A little more than I shall spend.” And it is true. No matter how much we have, it is human nature to want more. I have 14 Model T Ford engines, but last week someone asked me if I’d like two more and I couldn’t say no. Drive down the road in any town or village and you will see row after row of storage sheds where people proudly pile possessions --- little alliteration there like you hear in Beowulf --- people proudly pile possessions that they obviously don’t need. For years I’ve coveted my next door neighbor’s old green garage. It sagged on both sides and I knew that some day soon he’d tear it down and build a new one. Before that happened I planned to offer him a couple of hundred bucks for it and drag it home behind my tractor. But I went away for a day and when I came home I discovered he’d burned it down. A couple of hundred? If he’d said to me, “Robert, I’ll let it go for four,” I would have given him as much as $400 for that great storage building. What he did was tantamount to putting a match to 40 ten dollar bills. Remember that no matter how wretched something looks to you, one of your neighbors probably wants it. You might want to keep this in mind if your wife suddenly takes an interest in bowling three times a week.

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7. You know I do it. We’ve talked about it many times. Many mornings I spend ten minutes reading an Encyclopedia Britannica. I pull one off the shelf, open it at random and, unless I’m at the page of chemical elements, I read. A couple of pages past chemical elements I read about Elgin, a city in Scotland. The once splendid cathedral of Moray was partially burned in 1270 and almost destroyed in 1390 by Alexander Stewart, the “wolf of Badendoch.” Edward I stayed at the castle in 1296 and to blot out the memory of his visit the building was destroyed immediately. Now this might sound crazy to you if you are a Swede or a German but my grandmother was 100 percent Scotch, her parents were both from Aberdeen, and I remember some of Grammy’s brothers and sisters. So I can tell you that, yes, I can believe that natives of that country would level a perfectly good building just because they didn’t like someone who spent the night there. You know, if you stop to think about it, this might explain why they tore down the state prison in Thomaston.

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8. I was thinking about arrogance. Is that the word I want? Arrogant or conceited. The word I want describes someone who greatly overestimates his own ability. That is the mind set I’m talking about and you can use any word you want to describe it. Even better, let me give you an example of the kind of person we’re talking about here. At 6:30 every morning this person walks by a bookshelf and pulls out one 973 page volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica to read for 10 minutes in silent study in the bathroom. One morning he discovers that he has volume K in his hand and he quickly returns it to the shelf, thinking to himself, “I read that one yesterday.”

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9. 9. Last week I saw one of the presidential candidates give a speech. I liked what he had to say. But later, while Marsha was watching the same man being interviewed by Tim Russert, she kept shouting at the screen. Marsha said that this presidential candidate planned to continue the war but two minutes later he’d say he was going to shut it down. If you listened long enough you learned that he also had two opinions on gun control, health care, taxation and abortion. No matter what you thought about anything, sooner or later you’d learn that this smooth fellow was on your side. If he can get his message out to enough people, he will certainly be our next president.

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10. Right after Andy Rooney there was an ad for Cialis and it showed two people sitting on some rocks. I asked my wife Marsha, who knows everything, what Cialis was and she said it was for ED. So I asked her what ED was and she said, “erectile disfunction.” Can you believe they talk about things like that on television now? And I looked at that good looking young man and I said, “He doesn’t look like he has erectile disfunction.” And Marsha said, “Well, he is certainly getting paid a lot to pretend that he has.”

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11. You’ve seen gangster movies where they would shoot someone after saying, “Personally speaking, I like you, but this is business.” Bang. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what percentage of legislation passed today on the state and national level has behind it some powerful business lobby? Of course, the more insurance and health care companies make, the more legislation they can afford to buy to help them make even more money. And every big business there is pushes for this kind of legislation until you end up with a state and a country that instead of being By the People, For the People, is by business for business. Thinking about this, I suggested to a funeral director that he probably opposed the seatbelt law. He was horrified and said, “Oh no. We like natural causes.”

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12. A man sitting across the banquet table from me was telling a story about a woman who went on a roller coaster at Disney world. Because I can’t hear all the way across the table the man next to me told me what he said. This roller coaster goes from 0 to 60 in three seconds. You can understand that this is because there are waiting lines at Disney World and the quicker you get them in and out the quicker you’ve got their $6 or whatever it costs to ride on the thing. This ride dips and jumps and goes upside down and then executes some kind of corkscrew motion at 60 miles an hour. She said that the ride really wasn’t all that exciting, but having to listen to some band called Arrowsmith for two minutes was such a terrible experience that she’d squeezed her wedding ring flat on one side.

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13. You know that I don’t follow sports, but I have heard of Ted Williams and Lou Gehrig. And this morning when they showed a picture of Roger Clemens on TV, I knew, without being told, that he was the man who hit people with baseballs.

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