Canthook

My late mother would be offended if I made fun of Jenna's wedding. I make jest of almost everything, of course, but a young lady's wedding is something special, Jenna is an innocent bystander in the Dubya cavalcade of clowns, and it wasn't a very funny joke, anyway.

There are a few other categories I hesitate to joke about, because the subject is so distasteful. There was that teacher that went up in the space shuttle and was blasted to bits. The joke was about dandruff, and it was incredibly funny, but every time I went to tell it, the picture that I got in my mind turned my stomach.

And the joke about Jenna's wedding wasn't gross, or anything like that. And it wasn't really about Jenna. There were stories that Jenna was pregnant, but a century ago, pregnant brides were pretty common; you didn't want to marry unless you knew she could conceive. These days, of course, nobody bothers to get married if they're pregnant, which is a shame; studies show that kids still need their mothers the first four years, and their fathers after that.

But anyhow, the joke is that Dick Cheney heard it was to be a shotgun wedding, and, well, I'll let you figure out the bad joke from there. As I said, it wasn't a very funny joke, in the first place. Unless you consider Dick Cheney automatically funny. He seems more tragic than funny, in my opinion.

But there are pictures out, and looking at the pictures, I note one that's very conspicuous by its absence.

After all, it may be a matter of a few seconds or a few minutes, but Barbara is the older of the twins. And it's bad luck if the younger sister marries first. And there's only one way for the older sister to break that bad luck.

So where's the picture of Barbara dancing in the hog trough?

I tried to find a picture of an old-timey wooden pig trough. Hogs don't drink from troughs so much these days. They drink from a nipple.

If you have running water, it's the best way to water hogs. They simply bite on the nipple, and water is released. The hog gets fresh, clean water, and there's no water wasted, no mud puddle around a trough. When the hog stops biting, there's an silicone rubber diaphragm that pushes the head back in place, cutting off the water flow.

It's pretty easy for pigs to catch on. You test the nipple, and that leaves a few drops of water clinging to the end. Hogs smell the water, see it, and lick it. They bite it, and they are startled the first time the water starts to flow, but it takes them only a second to catch on.

Think about it. Even gerbils can learn to drink from a water spout, and hogs are the smartest - and the cleanest - animal on the farm.

But if you don't have running water, it's pretty hard to use nipple waterers. People in cities often don't understand where water comes from, but farm boys always do.

You drill a well in the ground. If the water is shallow, you can put a pump at the surface and pull the water up with a vacuum, but it's a lot smarter to put the pump at the bottom of the well. Centrifugal pumps, after all, don't have close tolerances, so they're cheaper to buy and keep running. At the top of the well, you have a tank filled with a rubber bladder. You fill the bladder with air at low pressure. As the water is pumped into the tank, it compresses the bladder, and the air pressure builds. Pretty soon, you have water under pressure.

Every few years, you need to add air to that tank, because the bladders leak a little - and when the bladder fails, you need a new tank. There's a pressure switch on the tank so that the pump doesn't run every time you draw a sip of water; that makes the pump last longer.

Until the REA came in - REA stands for Rural Electrification Administration - most farmers didn't have electricity. The farmhouse I grew up in was built in the 1920s, by a farmer with an extravagant wife. They lost their farm in the depression. Grandpa bought it, nothing down, from the bank, planted a crop of pumpkins, and paid it off in one year. Were jack-o-lanterns that good a crop during the depression? I don't think so; they used pumpkins for animal feed.

That extravagant housewife had electricity in every room - a single bulb hanging down from the center of the ceiling. It was all powered by a Delco Plant in the rear of the house. The Delco Plant consisted of a small gasoline engine, a generator, and a bunch of batteries. The house ran off low voltage electricity, with #8 know-and-tube wiring. These days, most houses are wired with #14 wiring. A change of 3 digits in wire size indicates a doubling of capacity, a halving of resistance. Thus, #11 wire would have twice the capacity of #14, and #8 would have four times the capacity of #14 wire.

Were they using bulbs that drew that much power? Well, power is a matter of amps times volts - so to get a decent amount of light at low voltage, you had to draw quite a lot more current. A 60-watt bulb draws half an amp of current at standard 120-volts household voltage. At 8 volts, though, it draws 7.5 amps.

Shoot. I started talking about Barbara's trough dance, and now I'm onto electricity. Let's get back to the dancing.

If you don't have power, you probably have to haul the water to the hogs in a bucket. That means you need a trough. I've posted some pictures here of troughs, but most troughs were knocked together by the farmer from a few planks. You want a flat bottom, and the sides are probably angled up. You don't need to be too precise, because the wood will swell when it gets wet, and that will seal any small leaks.

On the other hand, after years and years and years of use, the wood will rot. There are some that say for the older sister to break the bad luck hex, she has to dance vigorously enough to break the hog trough.

Families used to be a lot bigger. I was told about the "Smith" girl (name changed to protect the guilty as well as the innocent) who was first-born in a large family. She was engaged several times, but something always happened. One fellow was drafted, went off to war, and died. Another was gored by a bull. A third guy was struck by lightning. Her sisters, meanwhile, were getting married as they reached husband-high, like clockwork.

Finally, the fourth guy lived long enough to marry her; I suspect it was a short engagement. In any case, at her wedding reception, a half-dozen younger sisters, all married, simultaneously danced in hog troughs. There shouldn't have been any bad luck in her getting married - but there obviously had been, and they wanted to make sure it was all over.

Youngsters, these days, are inclined to be deprived of these older traditions. An old hog's trough isn't exactly tuxedo and beef wellington elegant, and some are inclined to omit this part of the wedding reception.

I hope, though, that Barbara got to dance in a trough. I don't really believe it has anything to do with good luck or bad. It does, however, have to do with one of God's commandments: "Honor thy father and mother".

Traditions are a way of binding together the generations, of making young and old feel a part of the same family.

Most tribes of early times stopped being hunter-gatherers, and formed cities, and they warred against each other. The city-states were basically extended families, and when a son brought in a bride from outside, the head of the family, the pater familias, often had the chore of spending the marriage night with the new bride. In some parts of the world, including the eastern hills of the US, this tradition was still carried out in the 20th century.

There used to be a joke about that. A guy leaves for the weekend to go to a wedding, comes back a day late, and explains he won second prize in the door prizes awarded - he got to spend the wedding night with the bride. His co-workers are astounded, and they ask him what first prize was. "Two dollars, fifty cents, cash money."

The Hebrew weren't formed that way. Instead of one family, they were the survivors of a number of nearly-destroyed tribes, all joined together. Each had their own traditions and pools of knowledge - and when you put their skills together, they alone had the mathematics that allowed them to go to Egypt and help the pharoahs with their accounting.

A loose confederation of tribes, however, might have just as quickly broken apart. They needed a tradition to remind them that they were all one people. That tradition was circumcision - the so-called "pound of flesh nearest one's heart". Circumcision not only identified members of the Tribe of Israel to each other, but they made it impossible to deny that membership to others - which proved, uh, "inconvenient", as recently as the 1940s in Europe.

Barbara's not asked my advice, but if she had, I'd have advised her to dance.

It may seem humiliating now - but traditions are too important to family to toss away idly.

Other Bloggers On These Subjects:
Barbara Bush - brides - circumcision - commandments - Delco Plabt - Pater Familias - hog trough - Jenna Bush - marriage - nipple waterer - REA - traditions - hog trough