The Adventures of Bloggard

Henrietta, Texas, 1948: Mrs. Miller started a dayschool, and off I went. The first day, my mother walked the four blocks with me, to show me how to get there and back. We lived behind Uncle Doc’s medical office, and she worked there as a nurse.

During that first season, I learned about coloring books, and naps and cookies, and how you don’t run while playing a trumpet because falling down can hurt you. I was warned not to eat the castor beans growing beside the house.

In just a few months, Mrs. Miller seems to have learned her dayschool lesson. The dayschool was closed. No more herd of children in her home and backyard.

But my mother made some special arrangement, and though the mob of children had gone, still every day I walked to Mrs. Miller’s, and played with her sons Rex and Mike, until their father came home from work. He’d swing them up and down. He didn’t swing me up and down, which seemed a great disappointment. Then I went home.

That summer, the vacant lot beside their house had grown weeds as high as us boys. A man on a tractor came and mowed the weeds, and a vast torrent of grasshoppers came flying from the devastation.

Quickly we grabbed jars, and captured hundreds of them.

There was then the question of what to do with them, but Rex, the older one, knew just what to do. And so we went around the neighborhood to houses where nobody was home. Doors were generally left unlocked, so it was simple to open the door, shake out a jar full of grasshoppers, and then leave.

I suppose our belief was that, this way, everybody could share our joy.

Sure, that’s what we thought.

Us rascals.

Near Hurnville, Texas, 1952: My grandfather had false teeth, but we children didn’t know that. He’d taken us fishing at the tank, and we’d caught several catfish. At the faucet in front of the washhouse, he was cleaning the fish. “Ugh!” we said.

In reply, he moved his jaw in such a way that his false teeth moved free and jutted from his mouth. “Wow!” we cried, “How did you do that?”

“Can’t you do it?” he asked. We were then quiet for a very long time, contorting our faces, attempting to get our teeth to jump up like his did.

Some years later, now wise to false teeth, we were riding in Uncle Esty’s car from the farm toward Henrietta, late at night. As we drove along the flat, a car was coming distantly, when suddenly, on his instruments, a little green light went off. “What’s that?” my cousin Bob asked, pointing to the little light. Uncle Esty was silent for a moment as we passed the other car.

“That light?” he said, “That means there’s a cow in the road.” And just then, the little green light went on again! Knowing nothing of high-beam indicators, we spent the rest of the journey peering into the darkness, trying to see the cow in the road.

Adrienne tells a story of driving through hilly country one late afternoon, her girls watching the cows wandering narrow paths on the hills. “How do they do that?” they asked.

“It’s simple,” their father told them, “Cows that live on hills have legs on one side shorter than on the other.”

“Really?” asked the girls.

“Sure,” he said. “If they were the same length, the cows would tip over.” This made sense to the girls.

This willful misleading of innocent children is certainly fun,

but it has to end somewhere. I tried it on Lori, then my wife, when we’d just bought the yellow MGB. With new tires from the shop, I was showing her how to drive the stick shift, and she caught on right away.

“Now the one thing you need to remember,” I told her, “is that on a sports car you need to equalize the left and right turns. For example, if you’re driving and you have to make a lot of right turns, then you want to make some left turns too.”

She stared at me in consternation. I continued.

“That helps to keep the tires from wearing unevenly,” I said.

She believed it for a minute.

Well, nearly a minute.

Austria, 1743: A young man wrote to Mozart and said: “Herr Mozart, I am thinking of writing symphonies. Can you give me any suggestions as to how to get started?”

Mozart responded, “A symphony is a very complex musical form, perhaps you should begin with some simple lieder and work your way up to a symphony.”

“But Herr Mozart,” the young man said, “you were writing symphonies when you were 8 years old.”

“Well, yes,” Mozart replied, “But I never asked anybody how.”

Fairfax, California: A former client (of my voicemail company) asked about current rates. After I’d quoted prices, he wanted them cheaper, which I declined simply as unprofitable.

His email today said: “I can understand your rationale that they are not profit-generating packages, but at the same time, aren’t they pretty minimal to maintain? What’s wrong with a bunch of bread & butter stuff that takes little effort? I could get a $7.95 voicemail from Pacific Bell for less.”

He’s not counted his costs. For the PacBell home voicemail, he must provide the phone line. Including the phone line cost, the PacBell voicemail costs $31 monthly, lots more than ours at $9 to $13.50 which includes the phone line.

But the interesting part is his suggestion to run “Bread and Butter” accounts, even if they are not profitable. I’d ask: how much butter would zero money buy?

To me, that seems like no bread, no butter.

I am reminded of the two cowboys who decided to make some money.

They’d buy produce from the farmers, carry it to the town square on Saturday, and sell it from the back of their pickup truck. They did so, that first Saturday, and sold all the produce. The only problem was that they sold it for the same price they bought it. Adding up their profits at the end of the day, there were none.

“Well,” said one to the other, “We’re just going to have to get a bigger truck.”

Ulloa Street, San Francisco, 1972: I’d flown my MGB across the desert between Christmas and New Years, to start a Masters at San Francisco State, and I’d found a room atop Mrs. Douglas’s house on Ulloa Street. From the windows of this single, high room, I could see the land fall away for twenty blocks to the ocean, and on the hazy ocean horizon, the Farallon Islands.

Dim steamers crept across the edge of the sky, the gulls wheeled and circled around the houses, and the night breeze from the ocean chilled to the bone.

But I ordered a hi-fi stereo receiver and powerful headphones that weighed a ton. I listened to new radio stations, and then sat at my IBM selectric, filled with cheap yellow paper, beside the window gazing to the ocean, listening to the foghorn warning the ships passing by. And wrote stories.

But one day I felt bad. Real bad.

By nightfall, I was doubled over with a pain in my guts. I awoke from troubled dozing to find all the covers heaped high, while I shivered with chills. Clearly I was freezing.

I had a thermometer. Puzzled and dim-witted, I checked it twice. It did indeed claim I was running at 104 degrees. Because my mother claimed that brain damage begins at 105, I called a medical emergency number. I described the pains. Appendix, they said. They said to take off the covers, to open the windows, to douse myself with cold water.

Mrs. Douglas, awakened, kindly gave me ice, and I spent the night pacing naked in that high room, in the dark with the cold ocean breeze flowing into the west window and out the east. Now and again I doused myself with ice water. My mind was blown, and I felt not warm but freezing. I felt like a penitent in torment.

In the morning around five, my fever broke, and I slept. A few hours later, my alarm reminded me to hie myself for medical attention. Diagnosis confirmed, into the hospital, and by three o’clock appendix gone.

During the night, I gained a roommate in the next bed, rather an old gentleman, still out from the anaesthetic. The next morning, I spoke to him. He replied briefly, but something was wrong. We fell to conversation. Here’s what had happened:

He was German, very German. In fact had served, a lieutenant at age 22, as communications officer for Rommel, the desert fox. I didn’t ask much of those days, for I knew nothing about the war, and he was preoccupied.

His story emerged. He’d had an operation on the spine. And this morning when he awoke, he was mostly paralyzed, and he was blind. He was waiting for his doctor, but doctor had gone out of town.

Off and on, we talked. We were in limbo, lives in abeyance, entrapped by the body’s failure. How did it turn out? The good news is that doctor did show up, and reassured the lientenant that a temporary swelling had caused the problem, and that it would pass. He would recover from paralysis; he would recover from blindness.

Did he? I think so; he seemed to be recovering when I left. I wish I could describe the flow of conversation, the way it unfolded in dramatic bits and pieces. But I cannot. I was drained and loggy for sleep, and the ache in my belly seemed far more important than the man next door and a war in a desert far away.

Within three days I had healed up, and things were back to normal. I hardly remembered my days in the desert.