1966 – Please pardon my paraphrase, Mr. Steinbeck, but DAMN, it was cold.

Not to mention, we’d lost power. So, there were 25 cows to milk …. by hand. (Milking machines needed electricity to run.)

The snow was +/- 22 inches deep already. Even if the cows were let out of the barn after milking, they wouldn’t walk to their watering hole. The white stuff was just too deep, and still coming down. They would chew on snow to hold them over.

Oh, did I mention the wind? It was fashioning monstrous drifts. Uncivil drifts ! Drifts that defied anyone to even get within their gravitational pull! They had no business even being on the farm ! This was a regulation blizzard.

It was weather like this that made Dad feel blessed that he had three sons. After all, how would those cows get water?

“EASY!” Enter the carriers, Dan, Dave and Pete .

On the farm there was an old artesian well. You know, one of those cutesy things with a little roof over it and a crankable axle that spooled rope… and a bucket that descended ten feet to the water.

There were two problems: the whole roof and bucket thing had existed many years prior. That arrangement was the fancy of someone’s distant past. It was barely obvious that it had once existed.

A more crude method now existed. It went like this: tie rope to handle of the bucket. Throw bucket to bottom of the well (without allowing weight of the bucket to pull all of the rope down into the water. Note: that may seem obvious, but, after making that mistake, I could still hear Dave saying “Hey, Nimrod, can ya see that won’t work?”

Hefting the full bucket from the bottom of the well was the stuff of freezing toil, but, time and again, we muscled them up.

Problem #2: Humping the full bucket from the well up to the barn. I should say, humping both buckets simultaneously +- 200 feet to the barn, using the path we’d just shoveled.

As though this wasn’t sufficiently disconcerting, one cow would drink both buckets without blinking! Was there an expletive sufficient to express my dismay over this whole miserable episode??

I don’t think so, but slowly the cows got watered.

My good buddy, Niles, recently retired. He surely deserved it. Niles was a union carpenter and worked hard for many years, but he finally took the tools off for good. It has been fun to watch him “adjust”.

Since throwing in the towel myself, I’ve sorta made a study of how people cope with retirement. It certainly varies with the individual.

What is singularly remarkable is the extent to which so many people ARE their job. Their job is the foremost consideration in their day, their week, nay, in their life . Some of these same folks, at career’s end, are woefully ill-prepared for retirement.

Sure, they may have accumulated a healthy savings, a 401-K or a pension, but one is reminded of Peggy Lee’s maudlin lyrics : “Is that all there is? Then let’s keep dancing.”

Niles, on the other hand, has melded into retirement without looking back. There’s been no pining over what on Earth he’s ever going to do all day. He was thinking about such matters a long time ago.

Right now, he doesn’t have time for that. He’s retired!

It is almost sad that some folks will work an entire career, 20, 30, even 40 years then not have the faintest idea what to do in retirement. It’s not that uncommon.

Then there is the person who doesn’t really want to retire because they love their job. Are there really that many of them? It doesn’t matter. To them I say “power to ya ! Keep working as long as you can. Your good health is fortunate.”

I was the exact opposite of this. I wasn’t exuberant about what I did. I mean, it was OK, but compared to being out on the farm… FUGETTABOUT IT.

I couldn’t wait to breathe air that hadn’t been breathed before. The day that I took my last step out of the office was 17 years ago, and, NO I haven’t looked back ! Retirement is bliss.

I wish the same to everyone I know.

Don’t wait too long .

I received an email this morning. Nothing unusual there, but the message devolved to the very quizzical in a hurry. It was rather lengthy, to boot,

I didn’t know the sender, although he had the fairly common last name of Berger. I knew a few kids in school named Berger.

This Berger, however, wrote from his home in Livermore, California. At the tender age of 85, he is still employed there as a Nuclear Physicist.

OKay. As the author of MEMOIRS of a JERSEY FARM BOY, I frequently correspond with Nuclear Physicists. If you wish for me to tell you another one, I can do that, too !

Mr. Berger wanted to enthuse about my book and thanked me profusely for writing it.

His message went on to explain that, as a kid, he lived just outside of our very own Clinton, N.J. That proximity lead him to plenty of farm employment as a youngster. Consequently, he had first hand appreciation for many subjects in the book.

If you’ve read the book yourself (if not, why not ?) you may recall my descriptions of 7th grade. You may further recall my descriptions of the teacher for that grade…. Mrs. Berger!!

Us cruel 7th graders surreptitiously referred to her as Pocahontas . (It’s all in the book.)

Then came the curveball of the day. As Mr. Berger’s email explained, he was Mrs. Berger’s son ! WHOA!

Right away, beads of sweat formed on my forehead. Had I written anything disrespectful about this guy’s Mom?! Pocahontas was bad enough.

Read the vignette. You’ll understand my concern.

Suddenly the distance between slow-dancing bodies gained new focus!

It being Halloween a few nights ago, one of our daughters was describing the Trick or Treating adventures of kids in her neighborhood. Sunshine’s house is located at the end of a driveway, maybe the length of a football field, from the road .

Apparently this location truncates the number of Trick or Treaters at Sunshine’s house. The word is out betwixt neighborhood kids on this house. It’s not that it is more scary than the next. It’s just too far to walk.

Yes, cars can stop right at the mouth of the driveway to disgorge Trick or Treaters, but that’s too awkward. Other driveways in the locale certainly provide more convenience and greater candy-per-stop yield than Sunshine’s distant house, nearly a touchdown away.

Let’s face it: Kids and their parents need to render these calculations simply to optimize the outing, the candy quotient, if you will.

My point is in another direction: what kind of candy-ass kids are being raised anymore ? Are they not wussified enough? Are the taxing rigors of Trick or Treating just beyond the pale ? Are wuss costumes available for next Halloween?

Wait a minute. No costume needed. The kids can come as they are… wusses .

Being out there in the garden wasn’t where I really wanted to be. After all, I’d already put in a few hours in the cow barn. It was hot. Dead summer. The cucumber patch didn’t impel my interest. This was just more of the same. In a word… work.

My flailing hoe kicked up a little stone; nothing unusual about that. My double-take, however, may have been similar to something in a Red Skelton skit. What was on that common-looking stone? I knelt to pick it up.

To my nine year old wonderment, one side of the stone was fossilized with several imprints of tiny seashells. Holding the stone in my hand, I tentatively looked around me, as if to conceive of the next breaking wave! Wait a minute, I sought to reason. This is our garden; a long drive to the nearest ocean. How did this happen?

It slowly dawned on me. In my hand was a connection to another place in time, kicked up by one of the many swipes of my hoe. Perhaps the last time that this stone was “unearthed” was when it was actually formed, an impressionable piece of igneous matter formed by untold volcanic action.

That sounds a bit fantastic, but how else did this happen? And, now many millions of years ago? This farm had obviously been under water. Those seashells had to have an explanation… somehow. There I stood, this momentarily befuddled farm kid attempting to conceive the nearly inconceivable, a connection with when the earth was forming… right there in the palm of my hand.

Who knew what humbling evidence lay beneath the surface, in the very dirt of the Garden State, that dirt that sprouted the veggies that filled our freezer .

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Where the hell is Hoover’s Gap, one might expectedly ask? Oh, believe me, there’s things in the dirt there, too. They tell a story of a different sort, from a much later point in time.

For a while, we owned a farm in middle Tennessee. A stone’s throw from this farm is a tiny Confederate cemetery where are interred the remains of maybe 20 or 30 soldiers. Each of their gravestones reads only three words… “UNKNOWN CONFEDERATE SOLDIER”.

These were the soldiers, at least the Confederate soldiers, who fell at the Battle of Hoover’s Gap. Where are the Union boys who also fell there? They are lost to the vestiges of time, I suppose.

We sat on the porch there at the farm one hot summer day when a gentleman drove up the driveway. He politely introduced himself and explained his unusual hobby. With his metal detector, he occasionally scoured these parts with intent to unearth Civil War artifacts. He asked permission to do so on our fields.

I watched as he began waving his metal detector. He was soon digging in various spots around the farm. In an hour or so he came back up to the porch. In both hands he carried numerous Union minies and Confederate round balls, surely artifacts from the Hoover’s Gap action that had apparently spread over the hill and onto the farm in 1864.

Unbeknownst to me, we owned a civil war battlefield. From there on the porch, one couldn’t have found a more tranquil, a more serene location in the Bedford County countryside. The beauty of the place belied its past.

Slice it however you wish. Dairy farming is dirty work. At least it was in the old days, and I know that cows still get dirty. Their nature hasn’t changed that much since Dad packed in the milking days.

Taking showers and dressing before school wasn’t just a matter of a quick primp ! This milker boy stunk. He needed a serious washing!

With two adults, four kids and one bathroom in the house , time was of the essence in the shower. Dad was the constant proponent of the “Navy shower. ” They had to be quick.

With that said, it wasn’t beyond us to have a little fun with our dirty predicament. In fact, my sister, Sue, often admonished me to wash behind my ears . She claimed that she could dig for potatoes back there.

I was always hard put to believe that there was such an accumulation, not behind my ears, anyway. I’d grown enough potatoes to know better!

Surely you remember the name Art Linkletter. Yes ? No? Maybe?

How best to describe him ? A TV variety show host of a while back. I’m a bit tentative only because I am gradually recognizing my propensity to sound old. I mean, c’mon. How many people have you run into today who were talking about Art Linkletter ?

Born in Canada, he became a naturalized citizen in 1942.

Linkletter, on his more recent show on NBC, featured a section entitled Kids Say The Darndest Things. It was a pretty hysterical series of televised interviews that Linkletter did with little kids as he asked them leading questions, questions that nearly promised the dry, matter-of-fact replies that little ones are prone to deliver.

I wish I had some examples, but as you might imagine, I haven’t watched Art Linkletter in a dog’s age.

I can only share with you something that my granddaughter said earlier today that reminded me of this whole thing in the first place.

Maria is a good bit older than the kids normally interviewed by Linkletter, but she retains the capacity to say the darndest things.

She was speaking with Grandma about her athletic pursuits when she observed, “I like everything about Cross Country except the running.”

If you’ve previously read my meanderings, you will know of our gargantuan family garden.

This is the way it was: We only milked a herd of cows 365 days a year, two times per day. There was plenty of extraneous work appurtenant to dairying, 365 days a year.

For awhile, we had a flock of 500 laying hens to feed Dad’s egg route.

Then there was fence repair, filling potholes in the lane, painting the barns, patching barn roof leaks, scything thistles, trapping groundhogs and forking untold tonnage of manure and wet bedding from heifer pens and spreading it in the fields.

This, of course, this assumes that the manure spreader was working.

Last but not least, there was the garden. The damned garden. Is it any wonder that we didn’t burst with enthusiasm about seeding, hoeing, weeding, watering, culling, picking, freezing… not to mention HILLING POTATOES!

What’s that, you say. Hilling potatoes ?

I would not disparage you if you asked, “what the hell is hilling potatoes?”

I almost felt like cracking wise with Dad ! “Is there any more shit you can pile on this day ? Now you want hills on the potato plants? Should I get a bulldozer?”

That, of course, I never said, but, oh, was there temptation!

Meanwhile, “hilling” was a simple enough growing method, but a miserable job, especially in the heat of Summer. The guys doing the work mound dirt in a circle around each potato plant; not burying it, but a substantial build up of soil forming a circle around the plant.

This allowed the plant to continue to grow, including more root growth which meant more potatoes.

Here’s a secret for all of you Potato Heads: At harvest time, the potatoes that grow in the newly mounded soil, the hills, are much easier to gather from the ground . The soil just falls of of them.

That simple fact may win you the daily double on JEOPARDY some day, just because years ago you kept your nose to the grindstone and hilled those potatoes to near delirium! Congratulations in advance!

“We make money the old-fashioned way…we EARN it.”

Some time ago, John Houseman repeated that mantra in a TV commercial for… for who? What company? What was the company’s business?

Hey, if you recall that one, you were watching an effective commercial. It was for Smith Barney, the wealth management company. (They’ve been sold since then.) One version or another of Houseman’s ad ran for many years. His gruff, determined nature became synonymous with the company.

He always repeated the slogan. We EARN it, repetition being a tenet of advertising.

Surely there are other very notable ad campaigns. Given the huge money being spent on them, it is interesting that some are more effective than others at getting their message across.

What others come to your mind ?

For the fun of it, allow me a quick quiz: Below are the lyrics from a jingle or two that have received TV ad time, either currently or in days past. From these lyrics, name the product or company being advertised:)

1. Everywhere I go, there’s always something to remind me of another place in time…

2. Wherever wheels are turning, no matter what the load , the name that’s

known is ????? , where the rubber meets the road.

3. What’s in your wallet. (Not from a jingle, just ad copy)

4. My beer is ?????, the dry beer. Think of ?????, whenever you buy beer.

5. ???? is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one.

End quiz. How did you do ?

There’s an ad running currently that always piques my attention. OK, she’s a pretty blond, but aside from that ! She’s alone in a bar, having a beer and watching a pool game. Her quarter is up and she promptly clears the table, taking a bunch of men aback. Between shots she throws some darts, bullseye, of course, then pins some dude at arm wrestling. What a woman !

It occurred to me that, for as many times as I’ve watched this ad, that I had no idea what the ad was for. Some brand of beer, I guess, but how effective is the ad? I was entertained, but…

I won’t spur this horse, but the reader is encouraged to make note of the stellar ads still swirling in your mind. It might be fun to compare notes .

One deserves honorable mention : EXCEDRIN headache #3 (Stuck In Traffic.)

People saw the comedy in ranking their headaches and the reason for them. I believe this was back when Bristol Myers still owned the pill. The campaign was brilliant.

There are days, believe it or not

When I awaken in a vacuous state !

What will be the subject today ?

I need only to concentrate.

So I wonder , but dreamily

Is it too early in the morning ?

Is the hour not quite conducive ?

Don’t wish my readers to be scorning !

Something is bound to bubble up

From my fragile eggshell mind.

A topic will avail itself .

I’m not sure yet, which kind .

Ah ha ! That’s the move.

Once before, I felt this lurch .

I’ll simply change my venue,

And sit up on the writer’s perch !

There now ! This should certainly do .

Here I can pluck something from the air .

There’s tons of topics about which to scrawl.

I need only determine where .

There’s one, floating loftily

But leaving not a clue.

Unsure what it’s about,

As a topic, will it do ?

And so the blogger acquiesces

To his vapid state of mind.

Hoping tomorrow will offer

An angle not so blind .