Prairie Spy

by Linda, Alan

  Or will they just be two shoes?

  New shoes are attractive, but often pinch.

  Old shoes are comfortable, but less fancy.

  What if we’re all old shoes, someday?

  §

  Pig Time Daylight Savings

  This whole daylight savings time thing has me upset. One wouldn’t think that an hourmore or less, here or there, now or then, spring or fall, could have that much impact, but it does.

  I’ve reached an age that, to be honest, there were times I thought I wouldn’t reach. The young never consider becoming old. It seems impossible, and therefore not important. More important things take up the minds of the young: The opposite sex, mirrors, the opposite sex, cars and trucks, the opposite sex, and so forth.

  Time? Uh uh. Not for the young. Not until you get here, then, at some age, time becomes pretty darned important, which is why I resent people tinkering with it and confusing me. Speaking of time, now would be a good time for my “time” joke.

  I was driving along a rural road one day when I looked over and saw a farmer holding a good-sized pig up in the air so the pig could grab an apple off the tree. Then he held the pig while it was chewed up, hoisting him up once again for another apple. I stopped because, well, because time worries me. I climbed the fence and walked over. “Say,” I asked, “what are you doing?”

  The farmer gave me a look and said: “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m feeding my pigs.” There were several more milling around his ankles.

  “But,” I stated somewhat emphatically, “doesn’t this take a lot of time?”

  “But,” said the farmer back, “what’s time to a pig?”

  Indeed. Back to the subject: Time becomes more important as one begins to see that it’s not going to last forever. I’m beginning to see that. At a young age, exposed to farm tractors, guns and loud rock and roll, I worried that at this age I’d be too deaf to hear St. Peter’s call; now, as confused as I am about what time it really is, maybe my time will be up and I won’t know.

  Which is why I’m worked up over “saving” time, which would seem to be the meaning of “daylight savings time.” For one thing, I now find myself eating supper in the middle of the afternoon, which is fine and dandy, except then it seems like I need another meal before I go to bed, which by the clock is about another half day later. My stomach is confused.

  My head is confused when I now get up and the sun isn’t where it’s supposed to be, supper isn’t where it’s supposed to be, and bedtime isn’t, either. Each time I feel like they’re where they’re supposed to be, I look at a clock and someone has instructed me that they aren’t.

  What really worries me is that if they can do it once, they can do it again. And who does this, exactly? Is there a Commission on Confusing Time somewhere? Is it the government? If it is the government, don’t they have better things to do? Like health care, education, and the budget? Maybe it’s true that government has gotten too large if there is a Committee somewhere arguing about whether or not they should “adjust” my clock some more.

  I’m concerned that I have no power over any of this. I’m concerned that I’ll get up tomorrow and find that my supper, because of some Commission-issued edict, is where lunch used to be. What if there are more Republicans than Democrats on that Committee? Republicans want to cut stuff out, reduce stuff like spending and government in general? A Committee Republican might say: “I make a motion to reduce the 24-hour day to 23 hours, thus saving stuff like printing on plane and train schedules, and when Dexter and Weeds come on the TV.” All in favor, etc., etc.

  Which hour will they cut out? I’m worried that they’ll cut out lunch altogether, which would allow supper to crash into breakfast. Oh, you say, they won’t do that.

  They won’t? If you’re so smart, then tell me who’s in charge of Staylight Savings Time? Yeah, that’s what I mean. That Commission is so buried in Big Government that no one knows where they are, if they did want to complain. It’s certainly not hard to understand their desire to remain hidden. I don’t know anyone who isn’t confused about this time stuff. Their phone would ring off the hook. We’d all be calling to find out what time it really is.

  The last thing about all this that really has me upset is I can’t figure out if I’m an hour older? Or an hour younger. You know, of course, that the astronauts, because they circle the earth repeatedly at speeds around 18,000 mph, and because Einstein proved that time slows as one speeds up, are approximately one one-hundredth of a second younger when we bring them back to earth.

  So don’t tell me you cannot lose an hour here or there. Time goes fast.

  It’ll slip right away on you.

  §

  Pulled Over

  I turned left on a city block and looked in the rear view mirror. There I saw a town cop with his bubble gum flashers all lit up.

  I pulled over to the side and stopped to let him by. I had seen him back there at the school intersection, so I, for once, had come to a full stop at the stop sign. So it couldn’t be innocent me that he was after. Must be someone ahead of me. He didn’t go by. Much less than not go by, he was stopped and getting out of his car and walking up to my car, one hand on his gun.

  The little red Geo is little. Looking up at him gave me a crick in my neck. I kept shifting around, trying to ease the pain. OK, so I looked shifty.

  By this point in life, I’ve earned several tickets. Most of us probably have, as far as that goes. Rural stop signs honestly appear to me to be a total waste of time, and an equally great waste of Newton’s First Law of Motion, which states that a body in motion wants to remain in motion.

  Newton must have never had many stop signs. No one in this century, so full that it is of towns and cities and stop lights and yield signs and automotive congestion, would have ever considered any law except for one that said: A car in motion is unnatural, therefore the Law is: A body at rest wants to remain at rest. Which is the flip side of Newton’s First Law, really.

  When I’m in motion, and I can see miles in every rural direction, exactly why is it that I must stop? Stopping is more costly to society.

  It’s more costly because I know we’re running short of gasoline. Despite Bush’s best efforts to help us in that regard, our gas is still buried under their sand. In a way, me running a stop sign and not wasting gasoline defeating Newton’s First Law of Motion is supporting our troops in Iraq. If all of us ran stop signs every chance we could, our national gas mileage would improve.

  The cop looked down at me, me sitting down there twitching and rubbing my neck, and asked: “Do you know why I stopped you?”

  Do I know why you stopped me? I thought about that to myself.

  Then I thought to myself: Although he’s pretty young, maybe the same memory thing that seems to afflict me is setting in on him. I get to the bathroom with no apparent reason in mind. I paw through the kitchen junk drawer for several minutes before I realize I don’t know why.

  Maybe this guy pulled me over, and by the time he walked up to me, realized that he cannot any longer remember why. I wanted to help him, but I was completely unable to. I was the pullee. He was the pullor. He was going to have to figure this out himself.

  “You pulled me over because you’re going senile like me?”

  I didn’t say that.

  Then I thought to myself, maybe he thinks he’s being clever. I peered up at him and continued to wiggle my head to release some of the crick in my neck.

  “You pulled me over because I’ve got a trunk full of cocaine and there’s a trail of white powder down the road behind me that ran out through a rust hole in the floor?”

  I didn’t say that.

  “Maybe you pulled me over because you’re going to give me a medal of commendation for helping the war effort by running stop signs every time I see one?”

 
; I didn’t say that, either. I guess I’m not much of a criminal, because I couldn’t come up with anything good to confess to. Working really puts a crimp in criminal behavior.

  “Does that ever work, you asking if pullees know why you stopped them? Better yet, which is the truly stupider behavior: You asking? Or them occasionally spilling their guts?”

  I didn’t say that. Finally, I just shrugged and said: “I don’t have a clue why you pulled me over.”

  With that, he could tell I was way too smart for him. “You’ve got a turn signal out. Better get it fixed.” And he walked off, looking for a stupider criminal down the road.

  Crime doesn’t pay. My neck’s still got a crick in it.

  §

  Retirement Monte Carlo

  The other day it occurred to me that, since I’m in range of retirement, maybe I should call those folks running the nest where I’ve been squirreling away money and find out how much I can count on. I did just that; that’s what this is all about.

  Mind you now, I called them before the stock market melted down a few days ago. That was pretty ominous, that meltdown, and any day now, I expect The Squirrel Nest (that’s where my retirement account is) to call me back and say: “You know that bag of pocket gopher feet in your freezer? That one you’ve been laughingly saving until they go up to a hundred bucks a foot? Well, you’d better count them.”

  I’d better not only count them, I’d better go after a few more of them. The way the stock market is falling, it won’t be long before gopher bounty is worth more than General Motors or IBM.

  So, like I said, I called The Squirrels, talked to a Young Squirrel named Lisa. Although it was confusing, I’ll try to give it to you the way I heard it.

  “Hello, my name is Lisa, and I’m A Squirrel Advisor here at the Squirrel’s Nest, how can I help you?”

  “Well, Lisa, I’m not getting any younger, and I’d like you to tell me how many nuts I’ve got saved, and how many I can count on to have when I retire.”

  “Well, we sure can help you with that, you betcha.” (Will we ever forgive Fargo for this ‘you betcha’ stuff?)

  “Good,” I replied, “by the way, how does someone get the job of Squirrel Advisor?”

  “I have a BS in Nut Marketing, so I get to help folks like you figure out what to do with your nuts. Now, I have some questions: First, do you have any other retirement accounts, like, oh, just for an example, a bag of frozen gopher feet, or, maybe some bags of aluminum pop cans?”

  “Yes, I do, how’d you guess?” Boy, these Squirrels are good. I told her that I still had the gopher fund, but that I had to sell the 47 garbage bags of pop cans to fill the gas tank on the truck with which I hauled them to the scrap yard.

  “Oh, too bad, but we’ll see what the Monte Carlo algorithm says you’ll have left to retire on. Just let me input some of your data into it, and it’ll give us an infinite range of possible retirement incomes.”

  “Wait! Isn’t Monte Carlo a bunch of casinos where high rollers go to flush their nuts down the drain?”

  “Oh, ha ha, sure, that’s what everyone thinks, but no, that’s not true.” Something wasn’t true. My built-in bullpuckey detector was ringing like a church bell on Sunday morning.

  “You’re going to glue a bunch of stick-up notes with different dollar figures to a roulette wheel and spin it, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, ha ha, giggle. I can tell you’ve got a great sense of humor. What we really do is define a domain of possible inputs, generate data randomly from that domain, and perform a deterministic computation on the aggregate results, drop poor nuts out of the resulting analytical disorder, and construct probabilistic financial models that in turn either confirm or deny integral multidimensional possible disastrous investment Nut Trees with complicated boundary conditions.” (She really did say something a lot like this. I asked her to repeat it so I could write it down. She’s obviously a college educated Nut.)

  Me: “Ha ha ha, choke, gasp. You’re a pretty funny squirrel. Now really, what is it you’re going to do about predicting how many nuts I’ll have when I retire?”

  “I can tell you’ve got a good sense of humor, so if I tell you what we really do, will you promise not to tell anyone?”

  I KNEW IT I KNEW IT! “TELL ME TELL ME ALL.”

  The nice Nut Marketer said: “We get a bunch of numbers from several callers like you and have a bunch of dice made up for each of you, and we shoot Monte-Carlo-rule craps on coffee break.”

  “WHAT!?!”

  “It’s ok. Don’t worry. We’ve got a billion trillion gigabyte computer that cost us about that much in pre-stock-market-collapse dollars, and we’ve found that, over the volatile past months, just by accident, that the dice work about as well. Of course, all things considered, it will help if you live to be at least a hundred and fifty years old. I have to go, it’s coffee break time and the other Nuts have a bunch of new numbers to roll. Do you have any other questions? Hello? Hello?”

  §

  Singing on Wings of Freedom

  Not too long ago one of our friends gave us a pretty little yellow canary, a beautifully miniature bit of living perfection. “Here,” they said, “you take her. She won’t sing.” Perhaps, they speculated, it would be happier at our house, much the same way as an athlete sometimes performs better for another team, or so they may have thought, although I wasn’t sure that such a parallel would transfer from man to beast.

  After two weeks of languishing silently in its cage, the Old Girl decided to cast open its prison door and let it fly about the house. I thought at the time that perhaps the cat had cast a spell on the Old Girl in order to perk up its diet, but so far, the cat doesn’t seem to remotely care.

  But the canary, with its new freedom, sings songs that would tire the Philadelphia Symphonic Orchestra. It sings and sings and sings. In the kitchen. In the living room. Not in the cage.

  Night before last, rather latish in the evening, I answered the telephone to hear a strange male voice ask me if I had time to talk to an old friend. It was a friend so old that I had to ask him who it was. It was Warren.

  Warren and I were very close in high school. He came to our small town in my junior hear wearing a South Carolina accent like a white party dress wears mud. The accent and his brash manner of addressing issues and opinions made life much more interesting. I don’t know, or don’t remember, much about his non-present father, but he and his older brother and mother had a shirt-tail relative living north of our farm, which is where the two boys stayed. There, they worked (sang?) for their supper, doing chores and farming while going to school. Their mother kept house for someone else, several miles away, which is where she stayed. It wasn’t the best; it was the best that could be done.

  It worked out, anyway. The older brother now farms around there on his own place, and Warren, who lived at our house a lot and got on great with my parents, finished high school, got married, worked hard, was successful. He moved back to South Carolina after his marriage broke up, and their son, Darrin, went with him.

  I hadn’t seen Warren since high school, but I kept up with him through my parents, with whom he visited and kept in touch. I felt like it hadn’t been that long at all. Like yesterday.

  Darrin, who would now be 20 years old, is why he called. Darrin and his girlfriend were among six passengers in a car that missed a stop sign. They were both killed instantly. I knew all that. Dad had told me that in a telephone conversation sometime earlier. Dad also mentioned that I might write him.

  I couldn’t. I can write about a lot of stuff, but when I tried to write to Warren, knowing even how valuable the letter would be to him, I found myself unable to. Somehow the mixture of all the dread of automobiles that came with now having teenagers myself, and the hypocrisy of suddenly writing someone not because you’ve been writing to him all along but because his only chil
d had just been killed…somehow it just all turned into painful indecision.

  I told him that, and he said he understood. He said that’s why he called me. I appreciated that, appreciated it more than I could either understand or say. He intuitively sensed my dilemma, and helped me out with it, at a time when he himself was in one of the most hurtful situations in which a parent can find himself.

  He told me all about Darrin. I heard about his gentleness; about his high school wrestling prowess; about the things he said; about the things he was going to do; about how proud old dad was of him; about how old dad always embarrassed him at wrestling meets by being so enthusiastically brash and loud and the typically Warren that I remember. Thank you, Warren, for all that your phone call did for me.

  Almost-16 just asked if she could go swimming with, you know, some of the kids. Steve has his driver’s license now, you know, dad. Ride along. Limber up wings that for her are free of cares, light of worries. Learn what it feels like to sing.

  Sure, I said.

  No big deal.

  §

  Telephones That Crank

  The other day, someone was complaining about cell phone service. “Hah!” I replied. “You should have grown up with the first rural party lines.” Had they, they might not be quite so upset over what we have now.

  You have to understand, though, that growing up in the fifties, the first telephone systems in America— once they reached the rural areas—were regarded with awe bordering on worship. Cranking one and speaking to someone seemed God-like.

  One of the first things I remember being told—and believing—was to stay the heck away from that crank phone on the wall when it was storming. At the young age of five or six, the level of the warning that mom gave us was equivalent to a preacher warning the congregation about the devil. “You stay away from that phone, or you’ll be sorry!”