Ramblings in the Night Part IV, Never say i am BORED

RAMBLINGS IN THE NIGHT PART IV, Never say I am BORED….

            Kids today have it easy. Moms and Dads just about kill themselves to give their kids anything and everything they want. Most kids have no idea what the word responsibility means, let alone the value of a dollar. Kids today have video game systems, and spend many hours of the day and night glue in front of the TV. Cell phones, everybody has one. Social interaction is conducted via the cell phone. Now I’m not complaining, I’m just saying kids have it easy.

            When I was growing up there were two words that were never uttered in the presence of an adult. Those two words were, I’m BORED.” Now if you were crazy enough to make this mistake an utter I’m BORED in front of an adult when I was growing, their response was I can fix that for you. And they would, and it usually didn’t involve anything that was remotely fun. Oh NO, when adults had to find stuff for you to do to end boredom when I was growing up, it looked a lot like work. Mow the yard, weed the flower beds, hoe the garden, feed the animals, chop wood, all these things were up for grabs in the adult bag of tricks to end BOREDOM. Usually it was at your own expense, but Mom or Dads entertainment.

            Today when a kid says I am bored Mom or Dad drop them off at the Mall, shove a fifty or a hundred bill in their hands and say have fun. Most malls have movie theatres, food courts, clothing stores, and other kids who were bored and didn’t have anything else to do. Malls like TV’s have become baby sitters so the kids can have something to do and not worry the parents with, there’s nothing to do, and I’m bored syndrome.

            We had chores growing. Now there is a little used word in this day and age, CHORE.  One of my coworkers told me that her neighbor was raising his grandson. The boy doesn’t know how to do anything. He can’t even mow the yard. When I was growing up, mowing yards is how I made my sending money. I mowed during the summer. I helped put up hay. Hoe tobacco fields, sucker and top the tobacco. I’m sure a lot of you have no idea what suckering and topping tobacco even means. Trust me it’s not fun or easy work. I raked up leaves out of yards in the winter. I raised and sold strawberries.  I did those things to make money. I was taught money didn’t grow on trees.

            I learned responsibility at a young age by doing these things. I can remember going with my grandpa at 6:30AM every morning and milking Pet our milk cow. That was her name, don’t you laugh. I didn’t name her. But I was sure happy to have her. I am a big milk drinker. And Pet gave us the milk we drank. We didn’t go to the store and buy milk; no I walked out to the barn and got it fresh squeezed from the tit. Most kids today if you asked them where milk comes from would probably tell you the local grocery store that mom and dad buy milk from.

            Now what I am about to tell you really happened. I was there and it unfortunately happened to me. I was in my Grandma Rubies kitchen one afternoon. She asked me to go and slop the cows and the pigs. We kept a slop bucket outside the kitchen door on the steps. All the discarded food was dumped into the slop bucket which went into a trough to feed the pigs and cattle. Now this particular day, was sunny, just a beautiful day to be outside. I grabbed the slop buckets and headed off to feed. The trough was about 10 feet from the backyard, across the electric fence in the pasture. Most of the cows were off in other parts of the pasture or down by the creek. Except this one big ole red heifer that weighed 900 to 1000 lbs. Now this girl was some kind of mean. She was just up past the barn on the backside of the pig lot, about a hundred yards away.

            I set the slop bucket down that I was going to give to the pigs and started to dump the bucket for the cows into the trough next to the fence. Man that red heifer saw what I was doing and took off boggity boggity at a high run toward me and the food. When I looked up and saw her coming I sort of froze right where I was. I just knew that she was going to run me over.

            Now the space around the trough was grassless. It had been trampled down and wore out. It really was nothing more than a muddy piss and cow shit muck eye sore.  Well there I stood, froze in place with that heifer barreling down on me. When she gets to the spot where the grass ends and mud waller starts she dug in with her front hooves, to stop herself. When she did that, she caused a stray of piss, shit and mud and God only knows what else, to fly up into the air about 8 to 10 feet and cover me from head to toe in this shit.

            I’m standing there covered in all this nastiness and look up at the kitchen window and see my Mom and Grandma. Both of them are just laughing their butts off. They come out and Grandma grabs the water hose, to hose the muck off of me. My clothes are ruined. They can’t stop laughing. Trust me, I didn’t find this funny not at all, at the time. Now years later it is sort of funny.    

            Yes living and growing up where I did was never dull. And truthfully it wasn’t boring either. Yeah I had to work and had chores. But those things while they seemed harsh and hard helped to make me a better person. I learned what I was taught. Those lessons have helped me to be a better more capable adult. Even though I don’t live on the family farm today. I know how to take care of myself. I can grow a garden where I live and I can even have chickens if I want them.

            It is the life experiences that we have, that are the real teachers. Yeah you can go to school and memorize everything in a text book, make straight A’s, and not have the sense God give a blue jay. I worked at the University of Tennessee for many years. I used to get a new group of resident Doctors each summer. I worked in the Dept. of Radiology. Most of them were nice and easy to get along with. But on occasion you had one who let MD go to their head, and they thought they knew everything. When I would get those know it alls. I would always tell them, that I could take a pet monkey and train them to do the same thing. Learn from memorization. Until the resident doctors invented some new device or helped to find some new breakthrough in medicine, then all they had done was memorize what someone else bleed, sweated, and cried over to advance the cause of medicine. Hence pet monkey….lol

            Life wasn’t all work, when I was growing up. We had free time to play. My cousins and I usually would hit the woods. We spent many an hour combing the mountain behind Papaw Jims house. Those were good times. Shawn and I would go hunting on that mountain. Shawn still lives there today. In the house he grew up in, right above Papaw’s house and the home I grew up in. I visit my family as often as possible. Those were good ole days, where time seemed to stand still.  They are gone, but the memories are still there locked up inside my head.

            It is amazing that since I wrote the first Ramblings, thoughts flood my mind of things that happened during my childhood and youth. Things that I had forgotten or thought I had anyways. I try to write them down as they come to me, so I can discuss them later. Until next time.

Written 26FEB2016