Lost

Rain on the skylight. Pitter-patter. Not cold enough for snow or ice but nice to hear the rain.

Read the story. I used to draw a lot.

Patchy Frost

37ª this Tuesday morning with patchy frost.

Buddha and Me

Buddha and Me in 1953 at Kamakura, Japan

Along Twin Creek

Along Twin Creek

Twin Creek is old. Several Indian Tribes either lived here nearby or moved through this area on their way south to hunt in what is now Kentucky or north to the new settlement at Greenville, Ohio. and were referred to in this context as Bodéwadmi, a name that means "keepers of the fire" and refers to the council fire of three peoples.

George’s Coal
By Abraham Lincoln

Looks so much like raw hamburger like George Myers used to eat for lunch. I was a little boy of 6 or 7 years and used to set on the porch with George and his wife, Ida, and watch the Model A's and Model T's go past on the road in front of their house (now state route 722). When it was time for lunch, Ida called us in and George ate his raw hamburger and Ida ate something she cooked up, and she gave me a sugar cookie to eat.

Those were the days when finishing the 8th Grade was all the education anybody needed, according to George. That’s as far as he went and as far as anybody in his family had gone to school. George did real good on his 8^th Grade education.

George owned two coal yards and everyone in town paid him for the coal either he delivered or they picked up. He owned the ground on the east side of the railroad tracks where the D&U train parked coal cars on the siding by his coal piles.

George paid the Harleman brothers $20.00 to unload the coal cars and throw the coal on what soon became mountains of fresh coal. That coal was burned by every home in Gordon, Ohio. People used it in kitchen cook stoves and living room heating stoves until summer when the stoves stopped burning and houses were heated and air conditioned by opening doors and windows.

Those were the best of times and the worst of times and we all remember them with smiles.

At Gordon School, one-half mile west of town, in the country, is the two-room red brick school house called, “Gordon School.” The teacher had been there for many years teaching the first through the eighth grade. Her name was, Beatrice Brown, and she was a spinster who lived with her mother in Arcanum, Ohio.

She was strict and kept an orderly school with absolutely no nonsense of any kind allowed. Each grade got a recess for about 30 minutes when they finished the day’s lessons in any subject. Everyone had to go outside to play and some play days were better than others.

After the hour-long Noon recess ended, and everyone had to go back into the school house. Coal shed keys laying on your desk meant you had to go out to the coal shed and get two buckets of coal to feed the furnace at the back of the room. So the coal in the mountain pile across the tracks back home ended up in coal buckets at school keeping me and the other 23 kids warm in the winter.

George Meyers, the raw hamburger man, had somebody fill up his dump truck with coal and haul it out to school and shovel it through the coal shed window where it formed the coal pile us kids filled up the coal buckets from.

I remember during the War Years, when mother and I rode a train from downtown Dayton, Ohio to Hinton West Virginia. We saw miles and miles of train cars loaded with West Virginia coal outbound for places like Gordon, Ohio where I lived.

We also burned a lot of corn cobs because they were free and when mother didn’t have any money to buy coal with we used free corn cobs that were shoveled through the coal window in our shed.

(576 words)

Iwo Jima Revisited

On Iwo Jima I came across this Japanese Pillbox not far from Mt Suribachi. All of the men once in it died defending this place and now it is silent. Look how thick the concrete was on the end. A lot of hopes and dreams died that day just like they died at Pearl Harbor.

Toilet Trained

Toilet Trained
by Abraham Lincoln

Toilets were necessary when I was born in 1934. That is one of the first lessons I had to learn: pooping and peeing were human functions but parents were not thrilled when their cute baby did them in a diaper momma was going to have to wash, so the diaper could be pinned on the clothesline, in the sunshine, with wooden clothespins, on number 9 clothesline wire, that had to be washed off, to make it clean for clean clothes to hang on.

The first lesson was to use the toilet; but it was a creepy place and if you leaned over and looked at the bottom of the seat, it was covered with bugs and big spiders that might bite your bottom-end poking through the hole in the toilet seat.

Dad called our outside toilet a privy; and it didn't start out being the dilapidated structure it was, leaning askew, practically setting in the alley behind our house, but it was where adults went to do their business. I was too little to crawl up and set on the seat so I had to use a chamber pot.

There was a white porcelain pot and matching lid that sat by the kitchen stove. Anybody could use it, but I grew up thinking it was my pot and I was unhappy to raise the lid and see what looked like momma's tea filling the pot. Momma had to empty the pot in the toilet before I could use it. It was clean enough for me to pee in when she set it down beside the kitchen stove.

My mother was proud as punch when she realized she got me "toilet trained," because she didn't have to wash dirty diapers and hang them out to dry in the sunshine. She told anyone who came to our house that her little boy was toilet trained and she told people she met at the grocery store that I was a big boy now; and they smiled.

I had blond curls in my hair and momma wanted me to be a girl so bad that she often dressed me in one of the dresses she made for her little girl. I suppose I looked like a girl with blond curly hair. The men laughed at the way I looked and my dad didn't appreciate it so he took me, one day, to see Henry Meyers.

Henry had a little house with a big chair that swiveled round and round. He spoke to my dad and then Henry told me he would give me a penny if I sat still. I agreed and he slapped a board across the arms of the barber chair and told me to set down.

My big curls began to fall down around me and all of them ended up around the barber's chair on the floor. Dad paid him some money and Henry gave me a penny. I held onto that penny all the way home. It was the first real money that I ever earned.

I smiled at Tommy Rice, the village blacksmith, who stood up straight and smiled back and said something to my dad. Dad took out a big wad of Mail Pouch Chewing tobacco and stuck it in his mouth and spit out the ball already in his mouth before he said, I hope his mother likes it; he looks like a boy now and not a girl.

We walked on home and opened the door and went inside and mother screamed my name and came over to the door where I stood and hugged me, and I think she even kissed me. She cried because all my beautiful blond curls were gone. She gave my dad the dickens but I called it the "devil."