Birthday

Today is one of my oldest friends birthday!  I can safely say I have known John 49 years.  John lives in Idaho where we were raised. We lived  in the S.E. section of Idaho’s capitol city in a rural area.  We milked cows, split wood and hauled hay together.  We alternately spent the nights at each other’s house each weekend.  In the summers when were not loading hay, or pulling weeds we were at the Twin Bridges swimming or just hanging out. We were not teenagers yet, Viet Nam was still but a rumble on the 5:00 pm news and the most important item of our days was to be home and be doing the chores before our dads got home.

I am older then John by two months but John taught me many things.  John had a Barlow pocket knife, similar to the knife Tom Sawyer carried; and instructed me in the fine arts of pipe making: corn cob pipes.  On my own I would never have thought to put the basic ingredients together or such an apparatus.  John even knew how to select the finest hollyhock leaves and cure them on the roof of the barn.  I think corn silk was a myth—I believe corn silk would burn too fast and hot.  John always knew what he was talking about. Did you know that a raspberry stem makes a perfect pipe stem.  First you must pith the stem with a wire fine enough to push threw all the segments of the raspberry stem.  
Next carve out the center of a dried up discarded corncob. The pulp in the center of the cob is as wide as you need to house enough of a tobacco or tobacco like product for a good enduring smoke. Drill a small opening in the base of your corn- cob and fit the raspberry stem in snug and tight. There you have it your basic corn corncob pipe.

One of the most profound lessons John  ever taught me was  “buck shot pattern observations”  Across from our small milking barn was the white doored garage: our main storage shed.  We kept everything stored there.  The white doors were two doors on hinges made of quarter or maybe half inch plywood.  They looked a lot sturdier then they were.

When my Uncle George died he left my father all of his guns. Our gun collection erupted from one Remington  single shot 22 L.R.  to more then four rifles and one pistol.  One of these weapons was a automatic 20 gage shotgun. We sometimes would sneak the shotgun down from the attic where my dad stored the guns. We would take the gun out and shoot it just to hear the noise and feel the kick.  One afternoon it had to be around four o clock because my dad was not home yet but would have been home  in short time. I can remember the figure ground effects though to be late afternoon. We had just climbed the gray wood fence separating the  barn yard from the pasture. I was facing the barn with my back to the white doored garage and  John said something like “ Let’s check the pattern on the garage door you want to see what the pattern looks like? ”.  Absent mindedly I said “sure” then my whole world was eclipsed with the explosion of a 20 gage round being fired in close quarters. Smoke seemed to fill the afternoon light as I starred at a hole the size of two fists in the white doored garage.   My oldest sister  had recently moved to our city and had items stored in the path of the shotgun blast. A couple, of her suite cases got pretty will  drilled but her bowling bag got the worst of the carnage—that ball had rolled it’s last frame.  

It seemed something terrible happened as a result from this ill fated experiment but I cannot remember now, and just as well. What is important is that we DID survive to celebrate or fifty-fifth birthdays.  Happy Birthday John many happy returns.