It dawned on me recently that the way to know if your life has been a success is by being able to hire someone to mow your lawn when you have become too old to do it yourself. You cannot be a failure if you have a lawn to look at and a porch to sit on while you watch some neighborhood kid mow it for only ten dollars. But you are a big-time success in life if you can talk him into mowing it for five.
My dad never had much money because my mom had things to do with it before he got it, and he had to pay my sisters a quarter apiece each week just to be good. It was hard even then, to make them be good for a quarter. He never paid me anything, and bragged often to his friends that I was good for nothing.
It is awful when a poem-making compulsion plays over into your daily life. I myself have been into poetry since I learned to write and as I go through my daily life I make up short poems for the situation. I stopped in a café the other morning to have breakfast, and the poor lady waitress, who had the demeanor of a lady who had too many old timers telling her jokes that week, asked me what I wanted. I told her I wanted bacon and 3 eggs. She asked how I wanted them cooked. I told her I would like them even better that way! She didn’t even smile so I added a poem in good humor, “If my bacon is all floppy, it won’t make me very hoppy, and if my eggs are soft and runny, you won’t get any money.” She just looked at me as if bored, and walked away with my order. Later when I got ready to leave her a quarter for a tip, I asked her what she thought of my poetry. With a bored look on her face she answered in prose… “Men look really weird, when they have egg yolk in their beard!”
Since I am from the Ozarks, and growing older a great deal quicker than I once did, I do not like to be told what to do by some machine. I put my debit card in a gas pump the other day and it told me to remove it quickly. Well I didn’t and I’ll be darned if I will do anything a machine tells me to. I removed my card at my own pace until I couldn’t get the gas pump to give me any gas, so then I sped it up a little. But every time I go there, I take my card out of my billfold really slow, and put it back my billfold real slow, hoping that machine is watching.
Actually I have lived all of my life without credit cards, but I have one now because the bank told me they would give me two and one-half percent interest on the money I have in a checking account, if I would take something they call a ‘debit card’ and use it only ten times in a month. I got to figuring… if I maintain somewhere between 100 and 200 dollars a month in my checking account, which is what I have had on occasion when times are good, that interest comes to almost a dollar every couple of months. It is hard to turn down a free dollar when you have grown up in the Ozarks.
I am having that big “sell everything I have got” sale up here on Lightnin’ Ridge this fall. It was scheduled for September 26 but the heat worries me so I am rescheduling it for Saturday, October 24. If it rains I will have it a week later on October 31. So mark that on your calendar. If you want a list of everything that will be sold that day, let me know via email lightninridge47@gmail.com, or send me a mailing address. My address is P.O. Box 22, Bolivar, Mo 65613. In a month or so I will post all that on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors. Mostly it is boats and trailers and fishing and hunting gear and wildlife art and hundreds of antique outdoor magazines. There is a lot of stuff I have used and accumulated over the years of my life that I have no one to leave it too. The real prize is some of my grandfather’s sassafras paddles he carved before I was born and a couple of his old guns. My age and health have convinced me I won’t be using much of it in the future, and I can’t take it with me when I leave to go float heaven’s rivers with my dad and uncle Norten. I can imagine someone in the future saying, “This fishing lure is one used once by that outdoor writer, Larry Dablemont.” And someone else saying, “Who the heck was he?”
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