Earthworm Tractor Co

Miserably slow here at work.  The strangest things come up when you have idle time with the Net.  I may have mentioned to you in the past my interest in reviewing old Saturday Evening Post archives to uncover the author of the Earthworm Tractor Co. fiction pieces I recall reading as an eleven year old.  Searching on Wikipedia I found a very nice entry for The Saturday Evening Post which led to the web site for the current incarnation of the magazine which is now a bimonthly.  A bit more digging found LookSmart FindArticles which produced

Botts and the biggest deal of all: the world's greatest salesman was face to face with the world's toughest customer

which revealed the author as William Hazlett Upson.  As you can see from the link on Upson's name some of the work has been collected in books.  The article linked above recalls all the flavor of what I remember reading as a ten year old, sort of Wodehouse like but not nearly as good as Wodehouse.  Armed with Upson's name finally a treasure trove of information came up on Google and other sources.  Perhaps the material is too dated to be of interest to any eleven year old today.  We shall see since I plan to turn one of the books over to my eleven year old this month.

Before & After

Dear Reader,

 

Rugs, that's what it's all about really. Absolutely the most amazing Dubbya piece recently. Thanks to rj for the heads up on this one. On the way home today Before and After: Telling Time by Calamity by Andrei Codrescu got me to thinking in a similar way about the ampersands in my life, the events that like an ampersand come between the befores and afters that demarcate ones life. Today the third child turns twenty one and that would get anyone to thinking, especially if, as in my case, you would be sixty five when the fourth child graduates from high school.

Before & After

High School

The living with mother of the first child

The first year of college

The first new car - a 1967 Austin Healey

The marriage to the mother of the second child

The second attempt at college

My twenty first birthday

The hospital jobs

The third attempt at college and finally the degree

The sales jobs

The marriage to the mother of the third and fourth children

The death of the mother of the first child

Driving the truck all over America and Canada

The irrepairable death at 250 000 miles of the last new car just last week

This current bout of the blues

Perhaps I just need a broader scope, say, something more like

Before & After

Dubbya

Peak Oil

GWOT

Or, maybe a narrower scope

Before & After

this next bite of birthday cake

writing the next entry in this list

Yup, that's it narrower scope.  Breathe in, breathe out, enjoy.  That's it, enjoy the moment,

Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you ... 

 

Don't drink to much, dear, and drive safely ...  Call, if you're not coming back home tonight, please.

at least for now while the larger scope seems to be, at least in speculative anticipation, thoroughly unenjoyable.

 

Perhaps Codrescu has it right, shared calamity is the ampersand that builds community.  Perhaps that's it, not having anyone who has shared all the calamities of my life.

 

RJ says it helps to write.  Everyday he says write everyday. For me it's like knitting, I simply enjoy the typing.  The prose suffers from that enjoyment of physically plunking down the words I'm afraid.

 

Wondering now if fifty nine is too old to go back over the road in a big truck.  The simple life, 'git 'er done', get it from A to B on time more often than not.  Two hundred and sixty nights away from home more or less but a hundred at home, maybe a few more.  Not all bad, an individual income level that begins to break into the lower levels of middle class, generally all of Christmas week and New Year's week off.  Money in the bank, relatively low stress, low oversight, see America.  Hum!?

 

Join us later for the next entry in the continuing saga of George goes on with the continuing calamity of his life.

 

Cheers,

 

G