Campers,

Back when you needed cleaned up at Grandma Evans house in the Missouri Ozarks it went like this …

Go down and jump in the creek and be sure to bring a bar of home made tallow soap with you.

In the winter you sent out back to where the well had been pounded into the earth in a circle of around maybe ten inches to whatever depth I don’t know there but when I drove a school bus in upstate New York where they had to put an electric dip stick into the engines when they weren’t running at night cause the oil would freeze up and that’s cold, folks.

Binghamton was the school where my wife taught and we lived in Johnson City across the river around 50 miles or maybe bit more from Niagra Falls and the other drivers were farmers and when I commented on how much water there was here in the Susquehanna Valley with its winding icy roads along the river and streams feeding it.

Well, one said something like …

"Yep, you can just drive a pipe into the ground and have water at a foot or so sometimes."

He was exaggerating but there was alot of water.

Same in Missouri what with the Mississippi and Missouri and many many more.

San Francisco and LA aren’t so lucky.

Again, the talking gene shows up in my writing also and I digress but with information you can use cause I’m a teacher too.

So, anyway, Grandma Evans and her husband Walter Evans had moved from really really out in the woods where literally, a car couldn’t go if the creek rose.

I recall the old people complaining about the new cars built in the ’40’s that couldn’t make even a little rise in the creeks:

"A Model A could get across that thing when it was over a foot up!"

Back to my bath and the hard-on and God.

Where was I cause continuity is important in storytelling?.?.

Use of punctuation or choosing not to is also a part of writing but when you write on these computers you sign a ‘terms and services’ thing without reading that it appears allows them to read every word you write and offer to ‘correct’ what they consider a misspelling and you consider an experiment in redirecting your reader’s …

So, at the ‘new’ place grandma had a well and a paved highway 21 which was a super highway to them.

No need to take your overage of crops to town to sell.

You could just put a stand alongside the highway and a jar where people could put their money and everyone trusted everyone else.

Still doing that in Indiana less than decade ago when I was back to see Loretta and her brood.

You went to the wellhouse and dropped the 3 foot aluminum cylinder on the rough rope until it submerged and you did this by listening and not by computer.

Yanked the thing back up and you were 5 years old and grandma was a moonshiner with a car that looked like Bonnie and Clyde’s all polished tan with running boards and everything.

You pulled the pin at the top of the tube over the bucket and filled it and hung the tube back on the wall and brought the bucket inside and heated the water over the wood burning iron stove and then put it into a big iron tub like you see in cowboy movies, you know?

Total bullshit.

Grandma never had a tub in her life.

Everyone ‘sponge bathed’ until Spring and didn’t fully submerge til Summer!

In the City and County of St. Louis where it is combined like that because, I believe, that in the Civil War, Governor Gamble who had been the dissenting judicial author in the Dred Scott Case and maybe was related to our Grandpa Gambles cause there were many of them as Rodney will attest …

He put the St. Louis Police Department on the State Payroll and if they had gone Rebel he wouldn’t have paid them so Missouri stayed in the Union.

Neat trick huh, but where the fuck was I?

Yeah, hard-on and God and water and writing and the Civil War and Upstate New York and driving a 66 passenger school bus on different runs of 15 minutes to half hour for the kids of different ages and many of them were Foster Kids and worth their own book, right, Ayse?

So, in the City we had water coming out of the mother fucking faucet like the Head of Constaninople of some shit!

Still had to heat in on the stove but the stove didn’t run on wood and you didn’t have to chop any!

Just turn on the valve that ran right from the huge holding tanks on Grand Avenue and branched on down to your own house.

I do recall in the early days having a liquid fuel (kerosene?) heater that I had to go up the slum alley to the service station where guys hung around 55 gallon drums and sang doo-wop songs.

You know, that is actually true.

I saw Jerry Lee Lewis play in a bar across the street from the service station when he was about 17.

The men sat on wooden fruit crates with Hawaiian hulu girls and palm trees pictures on them and my brother was in the Navy and in Hawaii and Japan and I wanted more than anything in the world when I was 4 years old than to get the fuck out of this cold and join the Navy and go to Hawaii where it was warm.

The hulu girls didn’t translate into sex for me yet but then came the first hard-on and wait while I smoke a couple of bowls and check the morning news and it rained well for about an hour earlier around 3 am and I love watching that out my triple bay and you know that.

Pause …

Ideally, I could play some elevator music here but that’s a good ide and I’ll leave you with Neska for the moment but …

I was in the tub with water heated on the stove with my two next oldest sisters and we got the tub last after mom and dad and the older teenage girls and then after I got my boner I got it last.

Alone.

How many times have you been all alone with a hard-on wondering what to do with it?

But, that’s another chapter.

Summing up, I was, maybe 4 years old and "Houston, we have ignition!".

My sisters both started giggling and I didn’t know why and my mom hurried in and looked and called out to my unschooled pop who was working with Hoffa on the docks at Kroger and was reading the New York Times’ Walter Lippmann who was his favorite …

"Jimmmmm!!! Come here!!!!!"

So, pop hurries in and mom twangs my boner and everyone but me thought it was funny as hell and my sisters giggled and still do til this day about that moment and now that I have your attention with talk of sex let’s you listen while I give you my views on God and the Destiny of Man.