{mosimageThe coffee shop is a wondrous place to learn about folks, or tell the others about yourself without really meaning to.
Old J.P. came in Saturday morning all blustery and somewhat shamed. He had recently bought himself a new car and, evidently, was not all that familiar with it yet. He went out on the lot, looked and found his new wheels missing, which is not all that unusual in our neighborhood. Then remembering — Boing! — he had driven his weather-beaten old truck that morning.
A friend of my wife had a long antenna mounted on her new Lincoln. The wife asked if she had, per chance, had a radio installed? “No,” said the lady. “Did you see the big pink ball on it?”
The wife nodded that she had.
“Well, I got tired of losing my car on parking lots so I had the big old antenna put on there with the pink frizzy so I can find the doggoned thing,” she replied.
Tall tales came up and so did the memories lying dormant for decades.
Old J.P. said he and two of his buddies went to a watermelon patch. They didn’t particularly want a melon, but they were there and so tempting. He said the three of them each had a prize and were heading toward the road when a shotgun blast got their attention. There stood the owner in the middle of the field with a double-barrel. He said he and one buddy dropped their prizes, flattened out on the field and began to crawl like crazy toward their car.
The other fellow would not be denied and began to run with his melon, leaping over the fence just as another shot rang out. He fell headlong over the fence and began to scramble toward the car. “Oh, my gosh, he’s been killed!” thought old J.P.
When they finally reached the car, they found robber No. 3 already in the backseat, bleeding from buckshot wounds to the neck and the back of the head.
“We got the heck out of there, pulled over under a street light when we got into town and assessed his wounds,” J.P. recalled. “We found them all to be of birdshot and superficial so we began to dig out the shot with our pocket knives. It wasn’t pretty, but we were getting the job done. The wounds to the head were in a little deeper, but that didn’t deter us from probing and plucking those little lead lumps.”
After a while, the victim looked up at his surgeons and said, “Y’all are giving me a heck of a headache!”
OLD MAN HERR WEBBER lived in the house across the road. There was nothing wrong with Mr. Webber except he was a German immigrant, old and a widower who kept to himself — a perfect victim.
The year before we had poured carbide in his outhouse and waited for the explosion that never came. This year we decided to be a little more aggressive and we made a cannon out of a piece of cast iron pipe that would shoot well. We sat the cannon up down by the road and bore-sighted the pipe on a second-story window. Our propellant was big, red cherry bombs. We fired old Betsy up and hit the window on the second shot. Old man Webber staggered out on his front porch with a shotgun and began to blaze away. We grabbed our cannon and made for the safety of the house.
The grandfather was waiting for us in the yard. He sent my two friends home and ordered me into the house. I didn’t have to ask if he knew where the razor strop might be.
The next morning he grabbed me and we went over to Mr. Webber’s — me to apologize, my grandfather to measure the window. While there the two got into a heated conversation in German. I just knew Webber would go get his shotgun.
Later, I asked the grandfather what the conversation was about. He said he told Webber it was all right to shoot us, but don’t fire toward his house anymore.
OLD J.P. said he had gotten himself a new pup. Soon the dog began to manifest long, lanky legs. “A wolf,” thought J.P., “but a fellow couldn’t name the new pup Wolf.”
Why? “Well, because it wasn’t a wolf, it was just a dog.” Soon, however, the dog had a name: Woof.
One evening the pooch didn’t come home for his meal. J.P. went out on the front porch and began to holler, “WOOF! WOOF! WOOF!” The next door neighbor, also on his porch, looked over at J.P. inquisitively, if not somewhat disturbed.
“I could see him thinking,” said J.P., “but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. You could read his mind.”
Again J.P. called his canine. “WOOF! WOOF! WOOF!”
The neighbor responded with “ARF! ARF! ARF!” and turned and walked back into the house.
ANOTHER FELLOW sitting there said he and his future wife were parked one night and enjoying the evening when he looked and saw her staring over his shoulder. He slowly turned around to see a Pulaski County deputy sheriff leaning on the door watching all the proceedings.
“I don’t know how long he had been there, but it was quite embarrassing.”
Another time, after they were married, he took the new wife out on his boat. Old Mother Nature just couldn’t be contained and the couple were soon enjoying the evening.
“I thought I heard something, but wasn’t sure, but I looked up when another boat ran up next to ours,” the fellow said. It was a game warden running on a trolling motor. “I told him it was OK, that we were married,” said the storyteller.
“No, it ain’t OK,“ said the game warden. “Look, it will be dark in about 15 minutes. Do you think you can wait that long?”
ANOTHER MISCREANT said he and a few friends were down on the creek bank when someone suggested it was a fine day to go fishing. Having a small coil of wire in the trunk, the crew rigged up the wire from a sparkplug into the water. The Ford fired up and everyone awaited the results.
Another of the good old boys went down to move the wire to a more lucrative position when fish failed to float to the top. Unfortunately he slipped and went knee deep into the creek, where he did a good imitation of a windmill when the 40,000 volts went sparking his routine of original unchoreographed moves.
Another grabbed him, but immediately flung him back into the water when the voltage traveled through victim No. l to victim No. 2. The car owner switched off the ignition and the rescue took place. The day was shortened to provide some clearer thinking and the group decided they would just as soon have a beer if they could find someone to sell them one.
WE WERE OUT in the boonies when we found a creek where we could wash off the California dust. We stripped down to our birthday suits and piled in. Two of the other lesser individuals saw some fish. That’s all it took as they pulled the pins on two grenades and tossed them into the water.
Water is an excellent conductive element and the concussion struck us rather forcefully. The last we saw of the playboys that day was them being hustled off in a Jeep before the victims could get a clip into their M-1s and take retaliatory measures on their fellow Marines.
That night there were two new replacements in the quonset hut to take the place of the two grenade tossers who had been sent where nobody knew them and questioned their lack of sense. Last we heard of them they were carrying shovels in an engineering outfit.
Ron Meyer is cartoonist, columnist and former general manager of the Courier. His column appears Friday.
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