Tales of the Southwest: A Dead Cat in the Freezer

By Grant McGee   

     

                One of the goldfish in the pond died the other day.  It was a big ol’ fella, homegrown, born and raised in the backyard pond.  I didn’t name it or anything, I just know it was born some time ago.

                “I have a dead fish back here,” I announced to The Lady of the House through the kitchen window.  “Is there some plant you want me to bury it near?”

                “Put it near the rhubarb,” she said.

                I didn’t know the fish personally but I knew it didn’t deserve the dumpster or the toilet.  I always liked the practice of the Native Americans, putting a dead fish in with the squash and corn for fertilizer, at least that’s what they taught us when I was a kid in school. 

We didn’t have any squash or corn but we had the rhubarb.

                We had a fish die-off one cold, cold winter…we lost about a dozen goldfish.  They all got buried at the base of one of those scrubby elm trees.  The next year the thing rocketed up.  From then on I called it “The Fish Tree.”

                People dispose of dead pets in all kinds of ways.  I know of one friend who had a beloved dog cremated.  The container for the dog’s ashes is probably a lot nicer than the one I’ll probably get for my ashes when I’ve “done gone on to Glory.”  Although I did find a nice wooden box at a yard sale recently that I’m keeping my papers in.  But when I’m gone The Lady of the House may want that to put her stuff in.

                Of course there’s always burying the dead pet in the back yard.  I’ve known people to put the decedent in a garbage bag and toss it in the dumpster.

                One friend had read a book called “Sky Burial,” the title referring to the practice of native Tibetans of hacking up the corpses of those who have “gone on to Glory” and leaving them on rocks for vultures and other scavengers to devour.  This practice has its practicality in the Asian nation as the soil is so hard and rocky and wood for cremation fires is scarce.  So my pal took his beloved cat out to a remote High Plains range and left the carcass out in the open for whatever critters to come and devour.

                Sometime later he returned and found nary a trace of the cat. 

                “Don’t say it,” he held up his hand.

                “What?” I asked.

                “You were going to tell me a tale of how a coyote came by, grabbed the carcass and took it to its pups,” he said.

                “Perish the thought I said,” while wondering how the hell he knew what I was going to say.

                I was acquainted with a woman who wanted to have her beloved Dalmatian freeze-dried when it died.  This is apparently a thing that can be done.   I wonder how THAT went.

                And then there was the dead cat in the freezer.

I want to emphasize this was not my cat, not my freezer.

I encountered this when some pals and I helped an acquaintance quickly move out of her digs over in Arizona.

                “Why do you have to move out so fast?” I asked the woman as we dashed about the apartment tossing things in boxes.

                “The landlord found my cat,” she said.

                “I thought your cat died.”

                “She did,” she said.  “I had her in the freezer.”

                We all stopped in our tracks.

                “You put your dead cat in the freezer,” I said slowly.

                “With your ice cream?” asked another pal.

                “Don’t judge me,” said the woman.  “I bury all my cats in my mom’s backyard in Seattle and it’s going to be a couple of months before I go home.”

                “Well, let’s see it,” I said.

                “Of course you’d ask that, Grant,” she said. “It’s not here.  My friend Annabelle is letting me keep it in her freezer.  Her husband has a bunch of deer meat and stuff in it so she figured one dead cat in there doesn’t matter.”

                “So her husband doesn’t know there’s a dead cat in his game freezer,” I said.

                “I don’t know.  I’m just glad she’s letting me keep it there.”

                I was imagining the discovery of the dead cat in the freezer by Annabelle’s husband.

                “Look at me not say anything,” I said.

                “Don’t judge me!  Don’t judge me!”

                “So you’ll be driving cross-country with a dead cat in a cooler?” I asked.

                “No,” she said.  “I’m flying.”

                “And how are you going to get a frozen cat on an airplane?” I asked.

                “In my suitcase, of course.”

                I wondered if she would be making national news like the woman arriving from Haiti who tried to smuggle a freshly-dead human head past customs at the Ft. Lauderdale airport.  It was to be used in her voodoo rituals.

                Interesting what a dead fish makes you remember.

                                                                                -30-

Tales of the Southwest: When the Jackrabbit Sat in the Shade

By Grant McGee

                The Great American Southwest is being blasted by a heat wave right now:  120 in Phoenix, 113 in Tucson, 102 in Bisbee, 102 in Roswell, 95 in Clovis.  These are places I’ve been, places where I can imagine that kind of heat.

                The nightly news and the media outlets are making a big hoo-ha about the intense heat.

                This happens about every year.

                It’s nothing new.  I know, I used to live there and lived there in a number of Junes over the years.

                And again they’re reporting that It’s so hot that some planes that were supposed to fly out of Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport were grounded…their spec charts don’t cover temps that high.

                I didn’t hear anything about the tarmac returning to its original fresh asphalt state.

                Yeah, that was the summer of 1990 that that happened in Tucson.  Oh I’m sure it happened before and it’s happened since but that’s the first time I’d heard of it.  It was 120 degrees in Tucson and the tarmac at the airport was so hot that as the big passenger jets rolled across it the tires left rutty tracks on the taxiway and runway.

                I remember that summer because that was my first summer in The Great American Southwest, the first time I got to feel that “dry heat” everyone talks about so much in the region.

                Never felt it?

                Pre-heat your oven to about 300 degrees then after about 15 minutes put your face close to the front of your oven then open that door.  There’s a sample for you.

                That first Southwest summer I had a job as a country music disc jockey in Roswell, New Mexico.  I was making the princely sum of about $10,000 a year and supplementing my income by cruising the backroads around town on my bicycle, collecting cans and turning them in for, ahem, recreational refreshment money.

                It was June and the heat came.

                It was quite like something I’d never experienced before.

                And it was true, it was a dry heat.  It was hot but not a bothersome, smothering heat full of humidity.

                My groovy bachelor pad on the north side of Roswell came equipped with a “swamp cooler.”  If you live in The Great American Southwest you know about these wondermous devices.  If you don’t, I’ll explain:  It’s basically a giant-ass fan attached to the ductwork of your home, a little pump pumps water over fiber mats and the hot dry air is sucked through the wet mats and cooled down a bit.  It ain’t like refrigerated air but it’ll do.  Swamp coolers really don’t work in other parts of the country where there’s humidity.

                The temperature climbed day after day…

                It didn’t really bother me at 5 in the morning when I reported for work...the land had cooled down and the air before sunup was refreshing and cool. 

                It didn’t bother me at work because the radio station owners had sprung for a pretty decent air-conditioning system.  Even though there were scorpions crawling around in the light fixtures overhead it was a good place to be on a hot Pecos Valley day.

                And after work?  I’d return to my groovy bachelor pad on the north side of Roswell, flip on the swamp cooler, drop my duplex temp down from about 95 to 85, pour a quart jar about 1/3 full of dark rum, add ice, pour in a can of Diet Coke then sit around and listen to music.  Oh, and sometimes I’d lay in a lounge chair and watch the ant colony outside my front door, but that’s an entirely different story.

                It was also the summer I had no TV.

                And it continued to get hot.

                Then came the day that it got to 110 degrees in Roswell.

                I need to tell you something about Roswell if you’ve never been there.

                I lived there before the UFO-ologists got there and made a big to-do about the Roswell Incident of 1947 in which an alien spacecraft crashed northwest of the city.  When I lived in Roswell the big things there were cattle, oil and pecans…and a bus manufacturing plant that was set up at the old air base on the south side of town.

                Roswell is a sun-blasted city that sits in the high Chihuahuan Desert.  So I was not surprised by the high heat.  After all, I was in a desert.

                Anyway, then came the day that it got to 110 degrees in Roswell.

                I had gotten off the air and was getting ready to go record some commercials.  I noticed my buds Wayne and Don weren’t around.

                Wayne oversaw things on the country station, Don was the engineer…the Mr. Fix-it of all things radio at the station.

                Then I found them.

                They were out back having a smoke.

                I walked out into the blast furnace of the day.  Even at 1030 in the morning it was approaching 100 degrees.

                “It’s the time of year when the temperature has about the same numbers as the time,” Wayne observed one day.

                Wayne and Don were having their smokes and staring at one of the satellite dishes.

                I looked over at what they were staring at.

                I reckon less than 15 feet away from us was a jackrabbit sitting in the shade of the satellite dish.

                “He doesn’t care we’re here,” I said.

                “No shit,” said Wayne laughing.  “He’s hot.”

                “You reckon he’s got rabies?” I asked.

                “He’s hot, bro,” said Wayne.  “He’s hot, he found some shade and he doesn’t care that we’re standing here.”

                “Did you offer him a smoke?” I asked.

                “He’d probably eat it,” said Don.  “Waste of a good smoke.”

                I looked at the jackrabbit.

                “Whaddya think, little buddy?” I asked the jackrabbit. “How come you’re sitting there and you’re not even afraid of us?”

                There was no answer.

                The jackrabbit blinked.

                “Just as I thought,” said Wayne.

                “What?” I said.

                “You didn’t hear what he said?  He talks real quiet-like,” said Wayne.  “He said, ‘IT’S F*%KING HOT, DUMBASS.”

                We all chuckled.

                It was f*%king hot.

                                                                                                -30-

Appalachian Tales: Songs of The Confederacy

Photo of the set of LPs issued by Columbia Records circa 1960 marking the centennial of the USA's War Between the States aka "The Civil War."  My dad had a set.  Of course he did.

By Grant McGee

                “So what book takes its title from the second line of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’?”

                The Lady of the House caught me off-guard as I walked into the kitchen.

                “Wha…” I barely spoke.

                “It’s a question on ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire,’” she said, looking up from washing dishes.  “I can’t remember the choices.”

                So I stared out the kitchen window and called up the old words.

                “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of The Lord,” I sang loudly, “He is trampling out the vintage… ‘Grapes of Wrath.’  John Steinbeck, ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’”

                “Wow,” said The Lady of the House.  “You’re good.  Guy on TV couldn’t get it even with the answers in front of him.”

                “I can thank my 5^th grade music teacher in Roanoke, Virginia,” I said.  “We had a couple of days of lessons on the songs of The War Between the States.”

                “The Civil War,” she corrected.

                “Warn’t nothin’ ‘civil’ about it,” I said.

                She stopped washing dishes and looked at me over the top of her glasses.

                “Look, Mr. Virginia History, in this house it’s The Civil War,” she said.

                Virginia History:  It’s something I picked up from growing up and going to school in the Old Dominion and my father’s frequent comments about his home state.  His pontifications left me with the impression that Virginia was the cradle of Western Civilization or, at the very least, the state that gave everyone else in The American Colonies the idea to form the United States of America.

                “Anyway,” I said, “She taught us all the songs of The Confederacy.”

                “Oh my,” said The Lady of the House.  “That wouldn’t be happening today.”

                I put my hand to my chest and another ancient song reverberated off the kitchen tiles.

                “And here’s to brave Virginia, The Old Dominion State,

                With the young Confederacy, at length has linked her fate.

                Impelled by her example, Now other states prepar’,

                To hoist high The Bonnie Blue Flag that bears the single star”

                “What’s that?” asked The Lady of the House.

                “’The Bonnie Blue Flag,’” I said.  “Not many folks know it but that was, like, the first flag of The Confederacy.

                “If I give you more than two things to get at the grocery store you need to write up a list,” she said.  “But you can remember a Confederate song you learned in the 5^th grade?”

                “I know, right?”

                I put my hand to my chest again.

                “She taught us a couple of Union songs too,” I said.

                I started singing again.

                “So now I’m with the invalids and cannot go and fight sir!

                The doctor told me so you know, of course he must be right sir!”

                “What’s that?” asked The Lady of the House.

                “’The Invalid Corps,’” I said.  “It’s a song about dudes going to be examined before going into the Union Army and they’re in bad condition so they get sent over to the Invalid Corps.

                I went on singing.

                “Some had the ticerdolerreou, some what they called ‘brown critters,’

                Some were lank and lazy too, and some too fond of bitters.”

                “Tick-a-lala-what?” asked The Lady of the House.

                “Some name for some condition back in the day,” I said.  “Maybe for bad gas…but I reckon they would’ve called that ‘malodorous flatulence.’”

                “So for a couple of days back in the 5^th grade the traveling music teacher…”

                “The TRAVELING music teacher?” interrupted The Lady of the House.

                “Yeah,” I said, “she went from school to school teaching her lessons…”

                “So,” said The Lady of the House, “Not ONLY did you go to a school system that taught children songs of the Confederacy but they were too cheap to post a regular music teacher to each school.”

                “Anyway she would come in with her 30 pound record player, set it up, break out her records and the singing would begin.  It turns out my dad had the same records at home.”

                “Of course he did,” said The Lady of the House.

                “There was a big 33 rpm record in a big gray book titled ‘The Confederacy’ and another in a big blue book titled ‘The Union.’  I needed some cash one time so I sold them to a radio station engineer who looked like Colonel Sanders named Gus.”

                “Of course you did,” said The Lady of the House.

                “He was glad to have ‘em, thought they were quite the find.”

                “Of course he did,” said The Lady of the House.  “He looked like Colonel Sanders.”

                “I think in a previous life I might’ve been in The War Between the States,” I said.

                “Yes dear,” said The Lady of the House, turning back to the sink, “My dishwater’s getting cold.”

                                                                                -30-

Tales from the Edge of the Earth: Thinking of Dad on Father's Day

By Grant McGee

                I haven’t written much about my father.  It’s only recently that I’ve been able to find the words to give him the praise he deserves.

                You see Dad was a career man.  What I remember most about Dad was he yelled a lot, it was tough having a conversation with him and besides, he didn’t talk much to my brother, my sister or me.   In our house if you wanted to communicate with Dad, you did it through Mom.

                I finally understood some of what happened in the past as I chatted with The Lady of the House about growing up with Dad.

                “So when you were a teenager your dad was in his fifties,” she said.  “Okay, you and I are in our fifties.  Imagine a teenager in our midst.”

                The thought of it made my hair stand on end.

                I got a lot of things from my dad though.  It was pointed out to me that a goodly portion of my love of music may have come from my father.  His “Hi-Fi stereo” was one of his most prized possessions.  He’d listen to a lot of records by guys like Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Harry James, Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra and Jerry Vale and called it “the greatest music ever recorded.”

                Some of Dad’s “rules” that have stayed with me are ones like:  “You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” or “When the opportunity comes up to advance your career, take it,” or “When you’re talking to someone look them in the eye,” or “Always line up the buttons of your shirt with your belt buckle and your fly.”

                Dad went “on to Glory” 32 years ago.

                I always wanted to talk to him about “the stuff of life” but we never did.

                There was this one time when I was grown that we had a big yelling match and I’m sorry I did that.

                There were times I told my father, “I love you.”  I’m glad I got to do that.

                If your dad is still around why not talk to him on Sunday?

Tales From the Edge of the Earth: Your Rainbow, My Rainbow, Our Rainbow

Actual factual photo of the kind of decal I once bought at Wally-World and displayed in the back of my Subaru "Rosalita" as I drove her around The Great American Southwest....

By Grant McGee

                The rainbow is a sign of peace.

                That’s the way I understood it.  I don’t know where I first encountered that idea, maybe in Sunday school and the story of Noah and the ark and the Great Flood in Genesis in The Good Book.

                When The Flood was all done The Good Lord put a rainbow in the sky and said, “Okay little dudes, I’m not gonna flood y’all out any more.  Every time you see a rainbow that’s a sign of my promise of this to you.”

                That’s kinda-sorta what He said anyway. 

The Good Book has the actual quote, probably sprinkled with some “thees” and “thous” and “doths” but no “little dudes” or “y’all.”

                So if I display a rainbow it’s me saying, “Peace, dudes.”

                But somewhere along the way the rainbow got co-opted by a group, a movement.

                Right from the get-go let me just put this on the table for you:  Your lifestyle is your business.  And if you live the kind of lifestyle where you’re hangin’ with someone of the same sex and you want to hold hands in public, live together, you want to change your sex, stuff like that, well, rock on.

                I believe we shouldn’t be assholes to each other and I believe we should be happy in our lives. 

Sadly, there are a lot of assholes who have a need to figuratively and literally beat up on others.  They have demons in their own lives they don’t have the guts to confront so they take it out on others.  So my message of “Can’t We All Just Get Along?” is lost on them.

                I got to thinking about this after seeing that some bakery is selling “Pride Tarts” in honor of Gay Pride Month or, ‘scuse me, “LGBT Pride Month.”  They were pastries done in bright frosting the colors of the rainbow.

                I did not feel the need to seek one out and indulge in “Pride Tarts” to support “Pride Month.” 

Besides, I have diabetes and have to watch my carb intake.

                Anyone who knows me knows I’m a big believer in the philosophy of “Can’t We All Just Get Along?”

                I liked what my late buddy Kent had to say about ostentatious displays of lifestyle, no matter what that lifestyle is:  “You don’t see me walk to a room, stand in the doorway, put my hands on my hips and announce to the room, ‘Hi, I’m Kent, I’m straight.’”

                I have a dear cousin, Pat, who is a lesbian.  She and I were once roomies at a groovy apartment at a golf-course apartment complex in south Florida.  She would often come home from bars with different guys in tow and they would retreat to her part of the apartment to…ahem… “play.” 

Then one day I got this call from my mom:  “Pat’s come out as a lesbian!  Did you know she was a lesbian?”

“No mom,” I said.  “When I knew her she was always with a guy.  So she’s changed her mind about partners.  It’s still Cousin Pat.”

There was silence on the line.

“Mom,” I said.  “It’s not the end of the world.”

“Margie thinks it is,” she said.

Margie is my mom’s little sister.  Of course when someone’s in their 70’s and 80’s “little sister” might not be the right moniker.

“I’m surprised,” I said.  “Tell Aunt Margie to tell Cousin Pat she loves her.  Dang, mom, it’s her daughter.  So what if she’s a lesbian.”

I know of a young woman who lives the closeted lifestyle, she’s lesbian.  But to much of the world…read that as the world that swirls around her mother and father…she’s still appears single, telling them “I just haven’t found ‘Mr. Right.’”

I feel sorry for her.

I believe people should be happy in their lives, happy and open.

But back to the rainbow, those rainbow-frosted tarts, peace and all that….

I totally missed the memo in which it was declared that the rainbow had been taken over by the LGBT Movement.

I have missed a lot of memos in my time:  The one that said “Oriental” was no longer allowed as a descriptor of all things from Asia, the new word is “Asian.”  Nor was I told that as an Anglo-American I was not allowed to use the word “tat” to describe a tangle in my hair, that word is for use by African-Americans only…not that I can talk about tangles in my hair anymore as I don’t have that much hair left.  And even though the great Outlaw Country singers Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson had once used the term “shuck and jive” in a song of theirs, it was declared racially insensitive for me to say the same.

So imagine my surprise when I learned that the rainbow decal on my car no longer meant “Peace,” it had been co-opted as a symbol of something else entirely. 

So there I was, driving around The Great American Southwest with my “Rainbow of Peace” decal in the back window of my Subaru two-door sedan.

I got the news of the change back in 1997.  I was manager at a radio station in Arizona and we had hired a new guy to play country music in the mornings.  He called himself “Big D” and was moving in from the great state of Minnesota.  I was to meet him one Saturday at the radio station at the end of his long trip southward.

Big D rolled in to the parking lot of the radio station in his pickup truck and got out.  We shook hands, exchanged greetings and such.

“Can I ask you a question?” asked Big D.

“Yeah, of course,” I said.  I never understood why folks said that, “Can I ask you a question.”  My mom always said, “Just ask the question.”

Anyway…

“Are you gay?” asked Big D.

I laughed.

“What?” I said.  “Where did that come from?  Was it something I said?  Is it my hair?”

“No,” he said.  “It’s just that you have a rainbow in the back window of your car.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “It’s a sign of peace.”

“Not where I come from.  It’s a sign that you’re gay.”

“Well how about that,” I said.

“I mean I’m okay about it if you’re gay, I’m just wondering.  I worked with a gay dude in a machine shop.  Seemed like a normal guy.  So I’m okay if you’re gay.”

“I’m not gay,” I said.  “There’s been more than a few times in my life I’ve had crushes on women who turned out to be lesbians but that’s another story.”

This is actually true.

More times than I can recall in my single life my heart would just go all a-flutter over some gal only for me to discover that she and I were from different “tribes.”

“I think it’s ‘cos you’s lookin’ for a cowgirl,” said my buddy Wayne in his Texas drawl, waxing philosophically and therapeutically one eastern New Mexico day many years ago.  “Lots of times there’s only a fence line of difference twixt a cowgirl and a lesbian.  And you’s lookin’ for a cowgirl in the city.  That ain’t no place to find a cowgirl.  Now out here, there’s plenty of cowgirls.”

Made sense to me.

And it was a lot cheaper than trying to figure that mystery out with a hundred-dollar-an-hour therapist.

Anyway…back to the Arizona story…

After my “crushes on lesbians” comment, Big D just stared at me for a moment.  A big, dumb, blank stare.  He furrowed his brow.  I could tell right away my attempt at getting a chuckle out of this guy was a dud.

“Why would you have a crush on a lesbian?” he asked.

“Never mind, dude,” I said.

After that I would be driving around southern Arizona and see the rainbow in my back window and wonder…

Should I take it down?

I ended up leaving it in my window until it faded away.

It was my rainbow too.

Nobody ever said anything else about it anyway.

So here’s to The Rainbow and whatever it means to you.

And…

Peace, y’all.

                                                -30-

TALES FROM THE EDGE OF THE EARTH: ADVENTURE AT A BANK

By Grant McGee              

     

                Down the coast in Panama City, three guys are in the county jail there. 

                They tried to rob a credit union.

                One can imagine them sitting around in one of the guy’s super-cool bachelor pad and plotting out “the job,” how the three of them would “live like kings” after “the heist.”  One can imagine that anyway.

                But apparently they were so inept they were busted at the scene.  Now some suits will be looking to tack the inept ones collective asses to a tree or bury them under the jailhouse, whichever works best for the lawyers involved.

                Reading about this I remembered a conversation I had with a fellow who came into my bicycle shop a few years ago.

                When folks came in to the bicycle shop I got to talking to them about other stuff besides bicycles.  I might ask what was their hometown, a question that seemed to unnerve a few folks from Mexico, by the way.  I just wanted to know where they were from, like if I had been there or what it was like.  It’s not like I wanted to turn them in to someone.  I saw my curiosity as part of being conversational but it also took my brain on a trip out of town for a bit.

                I also got to hear some great stories.  Like the story “Roy” told me about his dad being detained by the police in New Orleans.

                “Roy” is not his real name, I have this thing about lawyers and lawsuits.  Maybe you do too.

                “Why was your dad detained by the cops?” I asked.

                “Well, he was going into the bank to make a deposit and on his way in he saw this man coming through the door so he held it open for him.”

                “So my dad’s the friendly type and he says, ‘How you doing today, workin’ hard?’ to the man leaving the bank, and the man says to dad, ‘Sure am, gotta make that money you know.’  And dad smiles at him and says, ‘Have a nice day.’  And the man leaving says, ‘You too.’”

                “So dad walks into the bank and everyone is looking at him and the place just felt weird,” Roy says.  “Turns out the man who just left, the man dad talked to, had just robbed the bank.  The cops arrived on the scene and spent some time talking to dad.  Why did he hold the door, did he know the guy, stuff like that.”

                I saw all of this in my head as Roy told the tale.

                Soon Roy was headed out the door and I went back to the shop to work on more bicycles.

                And I chuckled to myself.

                I could see me doing the same thing as Roy’s dad.

                Holding that door.

                With a smile and a “Have a nice day.”

-30-

TALES FROM THE EDGE OF THE EARTH: THINGS BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD

Found one of these by the side of the road.....

by Grant McGee

            When you’re riding around on a bicycle you find stuff, you see stuff you might not see when zipping by in your car.

            Just the other day I was out for a walk and found a neat-o name-brand folding box-cutter.  I went home and looked it up on The Great and Powerful Internet and found out that brand new it cost 20 bucks.

            Some stuff I see isn’t collectible, but it’s kind of like art…there’s a message….a story there.

            The message of most of the stuff is litterers have no consideration for others:  drink cups and bags from fast food joints, cans, bottles filled with body fluids tossed out by truckers… unspoken messages from people thinking in the moment, not thinking of others, people whose parents didn’t teach them good manners.  People just chucking stuff out their vehicle window, now that’s another story.

            It’s the curiosity trash that makes me think, ponder stories that may have happened.

            There was the pile of 20 or so beer cans with a pregnancy test perched on top of them.  What happened there?  Did someone park by the side of the road and have a small soiree to celebrate something?  And what did the pregnancy test read?  Hell, I don’t know.  I reckon I should’ve looked.

            Then there was the September 1969 issue of “Gent” magazine I found.  If you don’t know what “Gent” magazine was it was this:  A girlie magazine.  Open it up and there’s pictures of “nekkid wimmen” in there.

Probably the story here is some guys were cleaning out someone’s stuff, say, someone who died.  Then they found this girlie magazine from 1969.  They’re hauling the stuff off in a pickup, driving down the road laughing and pointing at what the readers of the late sixties found risqué.  Then the one holding the magazine says laughingly, “can you believe this stuff?”  Then he chucks it out the window.

            I found a fancy IPhone one of those high-dollar cell phones.  I was just tooling along on my bicycle and there it was in the grass.  The screen was smashed, it had moisture on the inside and dirt on the outside.  What was the story?  My first thought was it had been in someone’s purse, the purse had been snatched and the thief for some reason tossed it.  Maybe some rancher had it sitting on the seat of his pickup and, forgetting it was there, set a heavy load on it and it was smashed.  In his anger at having just destroyed the expensive device he tossed it.

            I’ve seen all kinds of women’s underthings by the side of the road.  Black underthings, white underthings, purple, leopard spotted.  I don’t throw my perfectly good underthings out by the side of the road, I’ve wondered why these people did.

            Of course, there’s the lone shoe:  how did the shoe come off going down the highway and/or where is the other one?

            I’ve found some good music, mostly cassettes, mostly Country (the Judds, Reba McEntire), Conjunto and Norteno.  Probably they were “eaten” by a cassette player and the owner chucked the tape out the window.  I just crack the case open and put the tape in a new case.

            Come to think of it, I’ve always looked around when riding my bike, a scooter or walking.  You never know what you’ll find.

            And then there’s the stuff I find by the side of the road I can’t haul on my bicycle.

            Not too long ago I rode by a perfectly good rug that was in front of a house, rolled up and laying by the side of the road.  I rode back and told The Lady of the House.  We have this ongoing project where we’re taking second-hand rugs and laying them out across the backyard…cuts down on the yard work and we are slowly replacing the old rugs with paving stones.

            Anyway, she and I dash back to the rolled-up rug.

            “Now if there’s a body in it, just drop your end and we’ll nonchalantly get back into the car,” I said.

            “So you didn’t smell anything as you rode by?” she asked.

            “No,” I said.  “It looks like a perfectly good rug.”

            So we pulled up to the rolled up thing.

            I got out, looked around.  No one was looking out the window of the house.

            We loaded it in our trunk and pulled away.

            “You’re my favorite scrounge,” said The Lady of the House patting me on the arm.

            Coming from The Lady of the House I considered that a high compliment.

            I smiled as yours truly, The Scrounge, and The Lady of the House drove home.

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