Submitted by Dr. Harl Delos on Mon, 02/21/2011 - 03:36
There's a cute McDonald's ad running, where a fellow, harried by his cell phone, changes the ring tone to a bird chirping, and suddenly starts enjoys his breakfast while ignoring his phone. The notion is horrifying to me. What if I forgot to change it back! When I am someplace where you're supposed to turn your cellphone off, I don't do that, because my cellphone is my wristwatch.
I don't even turn off the ringtone, because I'd forget to switch it back, and a vibrate isn't worth a damn if I'm across the room from my cellphone (which normally lives on the charger when I'm home - about 98% of the time.) I keep my hand on the cellphone, though, so that if it starts making noise, I can quickly silence it.
Whip-Poor-Wills
I was discussing whip-poor-wills during our recent summer - it's currently a balmy 36F at 12:20 AM with "wintry mix" forecast for later today - with Sherry, a married woman I've only ever met online. She lives in Tennessee, except that she always reminds me that she lives in the Carolinas when I say that.
I don't mean this as a slur on rural country, of course, when I say Tennessee, Carolina, it's all moonshiners and little Opie either way, right? (As Craig Ferguson would say, "we welcome your letters.") I mean, when Maine declared the Whoopie Pie their state cookie, my initial thought was that we ought to send them a thank-you card, and invite them to try our shoo-fly pie, too.
I grew up on a farm, and while I don't love the fragrance of a field newly spread with hog manure, I don't think it's the end of the world if I walk across the pasture barefoot and end up with shit squooshing inbetween my toes. I simply seek out the garden hose and wash it off. I'm drip-dry. And when I go in, I use some warm sudsy water and a wash cloth, but it'll wait until I go in.
Friends With A Babe
So I was surprised to get an email from Sherry a couple of hours after I watched "When Harry Met Sally" on the TiVO. It's three thumbs-up on my TiVO, so it usually gets recorded. It's especially nice as something to watch as I'm falling asleep, because it won't keep me awake, and yet I won't have to watch it again, because I know what's going to happen. A man can't be friends with a woman, because he wants to sleep with her.
The fact that Sherry lives hundreds of miles away in Tennessee, and really lives hundreds of miles from there in the Carolinas (which one? I don't know) doesn't make a difference. It doesn't even matter that on the internet, a man's a real man, and often a woman is, too. The fact that she's a mere child of 30 or 40 or so doesn't make much of a difference either. Any woman under about 25 is too immature for any guy to be safe with, but the reason why there are laws prohibiting statutory rape is because God has most women laying traps for guys about age 12 or so.
Harry Burns: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Sally Albright: So, you're saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?
Harry Burns: No. You pretty much want to nail 'em too.
-- When Harry Met Sally
But this isn't about sex, even though friendly friction seems to make the world go around. It's for the birds. Sherry sent me a YouTube of a Whip-Poor-Will because I mentioned that the summery weather reminded me of the farm I lived on about 25 years ago.
The farmhouse had burned down, but there was still a well and a septic tank, so I convinced Dan, the farmer, to let me pay him rent, and I moved in a used mobile home where I stayed while I finished my math degree. It was back a long stone lane, and the overloaded semis spilled corn and wheat on the rough lane.
Overloading Is SO Dumb
Overloading a semi is a dumb thing to do. You're allowed 40 tons gross weight, so truckers buy aluminum dump trailers, and the put aluminum wheels on their semis, so as little of that 40 tons as possible is truck and as much as possible is corn, or wheat, or soybeans. Then they start hauling for farmers, and farmers want to move their grain to market as quickly as possible, because prices can sometimes change as much as 10% in a day, early in the season. If you're operating near break-even, getting 10% extra can multiply your earnings for the year by three or four.
And if you tell the farmer that you won't carry illegal loads, he hires someone else next year. Carrying a gross weight of 120,000 pounds instead of 80,000 pounds is more than a 50% increase in payload, of course, because you need to subtract the tare weight of the semi in both cases, so the trucker makes nearly twice as much per load. On the other hand, if he gets stopped, the fines for driving overweight are substantial.
You Might As Well Just Walk Away
How substantial is substantial? I've asked a number of drivers over the decades, and nobody ever wants to talk numbers. They just say, "If you get stopped for overweight, you might as well just walk away. They own you." Mind you, this is from truckers who may end up paying $4,000 for windshield wipers. None of their costs are believeable.
But when you spill corn or wheat or beans along the stone drive, birds will eat some of it. Some of it falls between the stones where they can't reach it, and bugs will eat it, and the birds will eat the bugs. And on this particular farm, the birds were whip-poor-wills. Except that they weren't. Em called them that, but whip-poor-wills decidedly favor the woods, and we were barren of trees. And they don't really look like the field guide. I don't know what we really had.
Barns used to attract swallows, and farmers liked swallows. Swallows eat a lot of mosquitoes, and they have a pretty sound. Then the starlings moved in and drove the swallows away. The starlings will land in a tree, and you won't realize how many starlings there are, until all at once, every starling in the tree will launch into the air at once, and the sky turns black, until all the starlings land on branches of another tree 30 feet away. They are an ugly bird to look at, and they have an ugly caw. A swallow is graceful of line, and gracefully swoops, and I could enjoy watching them.
But This Farm Attracted...
But this farm attracted Em's whip-poor-wills, and although I'd lived a few miles away from there for years, I saw so few birds like this that I wasn't sure what they were. They were smartly dressed in their chocolate and white trim, and when I'd drive down the lane, they'd fly up in front of the car, flutter around as sort of a living dust-devil, and then alight behind the car. It was fascinating and magical, and for someone who still had memories of Gregory Peck and Tippi Hedron decades earlier, even a little scarey. I kept my car windows closed.
Sherry says that her place is lousy with whip-poor-wills. Apparently, she lives back in the woods, on a lake. Come evening, a whip-poor-will will start singing on a tree on her side of the lake, and then one on the other side of the lake will answer, and they'll go back and forth for hours.
And here, I said this wasn't about sex. Whip-poor-wills sing for the same reason that a rose is red. Neither one has access to AdultFriendFinder. The rose wants to be felt up by a bee, and the whip-poor-will is so lonesome, he could cry.
It's Going Around, Around Here
There's a lot of that lonesome thing going around. We went to the drugstore, and Blondie didn't have the insurance card that came in the mail last week, the card that I'd handed her, and asked her to put in her purse. An argument ensued, in which I talked in a quiet voice, telling her in no uncertain terms what had happened, and she would tell me to stop yelling, that it hadn't happened that way, that I never gave her a card. I hate the arguments, and I hate being reminded that Blondie is abandoning me, one damned neuron at a time.
I suppose I should keep cards and stuff like that in my wallet instead of letting her keep them in hers, but she feels insulted if I do that. And she's not a little kid. She only is as easily confused and as forgetful as one. And I suppose I really ought to dig through her purse and find the card, but that would only insult her and start another fight, so tomorrow, I need to phone the insurance company, and request a replacement for the lost card.
Harry Burns: It is so nice when you can sit with someone and not have to talk.
-- When Harry Met Sally
Get Lots While You're Young
I'll tell you the same thing I told Sherry, as I closed my email to her. Hug your someone special. Everyone thinks that there's an endless supply of hugs where that one came from, and there isn't. Neil deGrasse Tyson says there's disagreement on how the universe began, but most astronomers agree that we're headed for thermal death of the universe, billions of years from now, but you and I face thermal death of our relationships long before that.
My sister has been widowed twice. Em is dead, and Blondie seems to be racing to that conclusion. My grandparents all lived into their 90s, all except grandpa Harl who met his end suddenly in his 20s, but his twin brother lived to be 97. I used to look at them and think I was blessed with long-life genes, but lately, I wonder if it isn't for the birds.