Toad

I named him Toad when he was a wee babe. 

Except the womenfolk threw a hissy fit. 

The amusing thing was, they couldn’t come up with a good alternative.

Now we need to be clear on this.  I don’t care for cats.  Never have.  They are too wussy.

But Toad and I have connected, at least somewhat.  For sure at claw and teeth levels.

This fellow named Toad, though, has several things about him that make him a bit more definable, and dare I say, affable.

He showers with me occasionally.  Not so much anymore, but he used to a fair bit.  Most of the time he’ll sit at the back of the shower, batting away at the streams of water and just as much trying to shake them off.  Sometimes he’ll really get into it and will be comically sitting in a puddle of water under the faucet, batting at drops of water coming off the faucet while the shower runs full stream overhead.  Comically, as in delayed comically.  Because I know he doesn’t know he is sitting in a puddle of water, since I have adjusted the temperature of the water to just the right amount of lukewarm, so he won’t realize until he is totally soaked.  And suddenly, he realizes.  He comes flying right by me and out the back of the shower, blasting water everywhere.  Talk about a strung out stringy looking cat.  His name should have stayed Toad. 

He bites. That’s his love language for sure.  I’ll take a lot more abuse from a cat if he bites.  If all they do is purr and sit on your lap, no way.  You ought to see how the womenfolk flitz from room to room when they know he is mad.  I can tell by their panicky looks toward their ankles that he has been denied his food by them and is on the prowl to make up for it.  (The womenfolk have put him on a diet.  I told him it was okay to bite their ankles in this instance.)  Just yesterday, I heard a chirp and then a somewhat agonized yelp from the sweet daughter.  Upon inquiry, it seems she saw the dude stalking her ankles, tried to circumvent the situation, and lost.  Score!  One more thing about his biting; he has redefined unsuspecting.  You try to pet him (rare occasion) and you hear a mild, faraway purr thrumming to life.  You stroke him once more, and, BAM!  They usually aren’t such bad bites, although I’ve had a welt or two last a couple of hours after he sank his fangs in.  Just the other day, I thought I had him outwitted.  I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and thought, “This will have him fit to be choked.  When he goes to bite me, he’ll get a mouthful of sleeve.  Let’s see what his expression is then.”  You know that little bump of bone on the outside of your wrist?  Yeah, well.  There was no sleeve there.  And he laughed at my expression.

He hisses.  All in fun, to be sure.  Sometimes I need to hold him tight, on the odd occasion he has been misbehaving.  He complains and mutters perverse and dire things at me.  And then, suddenly out of the blue, he hisses at me as if I’m the one to blame.  But when I let him go, he never runs off like a mad cat would.  He stays close by.  You can tell he really appreciated the bonding time, even if he didn’t know how to properly show it.

Oh, and one more thing.  He likes pasta noodles.  Cooked, of course, and fed by hand to him one at a time.  

It seemed, backing up a little, that the ladies held a mutiny on his name.  And that was back when he was quite young and easily intimidated.  So, during that time, they came up with the name of Cricket.  I quickly dissented, but it was three against one, if you count the cat in on their side.  And he seemed, as I said earlier, rather intimidated by them.  He thought what he did next was a strategic move on his part.  It was.  It got him named something other than Cricket.  But it took a fair bit of forbearance on my part. 

He started stalking my earbuds.  I couldn’t believe it at first, but then again, cats have never been known to possess huge amounts of common sense.  I came out to the living room early one morning to find my favorite set (I use the kind with wires to hook up to my computer) vandalized.  One bud had a cord, one had nothing at all.  Several shriveled up, chewed on pieces lay nearby.  I bought a $6 pair from Walmart the next time I was there.  I hated them.  One side was loud and the other quiet.  And any time the cord rubbed against my shirt it amplified that scratchy sound to my ears. (I have scratchy shirts)

But I made sure to store them up on the bookcase where the cat was forbidden to jump. 

Until I forgot to store them there.  I wasn’t as surprised to see this set scrapped.  The cat had been looking at them with lustful burning eyes for a few days already.

It dawned on me after that set scratched out that I might be able to get a bargain on Ebay.  I did.  Two pairs for two dollars.  And they worked like the first set.  I was very pleased. 

This time, though, I had them where they should be, and somehow that dude got them and had them mangled before I caught him at it.

I was informed, shortly thereafter, that I needed to pick up some medication for the cat at the local vet office.

Which I did.  And while I was there, the lady asked me what the cat’s name was so they could enter him into their system.

“His name is Earbud,” I said.

And, thus he is registered, much to his own chagrin. 

Just the other day, my daughter was opening the mail, saw a bill from the vet, and after a moment’s glance threw it down with a sniff of disgust.  (I was going to say snort, but that wouldn’t be the thing to write about a nice girl like her.)

I looked at it, and in plain bold lettering it said, Name—Earbud—Dewormer.

The ladies still call him Cricket, although he and I know the truth of the matter. 

I registered him as Earbud to keep him humble, but he knows, and I know, his real name is Toad.

Ride for the Brand

I first heard that term from my friend Stanlee, as we were walking to his new horse barn.   Supper was out there that evening.  His ranch is located on the bottom side of Texas, right near the Mexico border.  It was a beautiful evening, the way I recall.  They are situated near enough to the Gulf of Mexico that they almost always get a few clouds in their sunsets.  They have their own unique beauty to them, even if they aren’t western Kansas sunsets.

We had been talking, Stanlee and I, about a few things pertaining to life and our families as we ambled towards the horse barn.  The way I recall, my boys and his boys were out riding some horses in the dry riverbed nearby and were just then showing up in the yard.  Of course, yard would need to be defined by Texas standards.  The house was fenced in on all sides, and cattle guards made for free range calves right up to the fence by the house.  In the nearby pasture-turned-holding-pen ranged over 1,500 head of various size and breed of cattle, all supplemented with a steady diet of leftover cakes and rolls from the nearest Starbucks. 

Inside the fenced in area was a nice green lawn, sprawling porch, and backyard firepit.  A few newly planted trees stood still in the warm evening air.  A couple of family dogs lounged in the shade of the house.  With a few timid calves nosing through the fence at us, it made for a very peaceful setting in which to live and share time with friends.

One of Stanlee’s friends rolled up to join us for supper. 

Stanlee told me that just a few days previous, they had a bunch of new calves to work and brand.  He had called this particular friend up to see if he could come help.  He had.  He had dropped what he was working with and came over right away.  And even though the job had taken right up to midnight to finish, and even though his friend had a day job to face early the next morning, he had stayed until it was done.

“He rides for the brand,” said Stanlee.

I’ve pondered that statement in the years since that evening. 

The friend that Stanlee referred to didn’t have much “dude” attitude, if any at all, to him. 

He didn’t wear clothes that gave that look either.

In fact, if I had been asked to pick him out in a crowd, I wouldn’t have been able to.

I’ve come to figure, in the years since, that the fellow who Rides for the Brand ain’t your uppity, showy type of guy.

He’s the kind of fellow you can give a job to, and you know you can walk away without ever having to think about it again.

Because you know the fellow who Rides for the Brand will work at what you gave him to do with quiet resolve, even though the whole world is spinning on around him, and he’ll work at it until it gets done, and done right.

There have been way too many times I have supposed the job I was doing could be done in a lesser way than it should have been.

There have been times when I came up with, what seemed to me anyway, viable alternatives that made me leave early for something easier and more fun.

I’ve known myself to up and quit before the task was even started.

But that ain’t Riding for the Brand, and I know my friend wouldn’t want to hire someone of that caliber.

It takes a fellow with a steady hand, good nerve, and a tough personal standard of seeing the thing through to make that grade.

Ride for the Brand.

Weed Eater

The pressure washer at the John Deere facility where I worked was unique in a couple of ways.  For one, it had a hose that must have been at least 100 feet long.  Someone definitely was thinking when they added that length of hose to it.  The equipment we worked on was large and sometimes needed to be washed down. It was often necessary to use that extra length to get the job done.

The second addon was the nozzle.  Most of today’s pressure washers have several interchangeable nozzles that vary in size.  With a quick snap of the collar, you can have them changed in no time.  But this washer was before those times and only had one nozzle.  But . . . you could slide the nozzle back on the shaft and change it from high pressure to a low pressure, far reaching, high volume, stream of water.  It easily shot a half inch stream of water 60 feet out.

One day my friend Gregg, who worked in the same vicinity as I, was assigned a weed eater to work on.  This one didn’t run right, and he commenced to check it out in the shop.  We, who were working nearby, quickly got tired of the incessant whine that could bore right into you from any angle.  Finally, someone hollered at Gregg and told him to adjust it outside.  There was a reason he wasn’t adjusting it outside in the first place.  It was cold out there.  But he acquiesced and moved to just outside the shop entrance door. 

For some reason this weed eater carb must have been harder than most to adjust.  So, while that incessant whine was not in the shop anymore, it soon started to grate on our nerves with its rhythmic up and down engine speed.  And, again, for some unknown reason, Gregg seemed to think the best r.p.m. to adjust it was maxed out to the limit. 

I started hearing some grumbling going on again and peeked out the door window.  Now at this point, it is necessary to put a word of defense in for Gregg.  He was doing the best he could, and I seriously doubt anyone of the rest of us could have done any better. 

What I saw, as I peeked out the window, gave instant inspiration for cessation of those engine rev’s. 

Do you know what happens to a guy’s britches when he squats down?  The front part, where you snap or button them together gets really tight, and the back part, which usually fits fairly snug against your back, now gapes open in a bit of a v shape.  Since Gregg was wearing a pull over, and since it wasn’t tucked in, the cavity that leered up at me was simply too much to ignore.

I sneaked around to the other side of the building, where I knew a water fountain was, ran the tap a bit to ensure the coldest water possible, and filled a paper cup. 

I quickly made my way back around, hoping the water wouldn’t warm up too much from my hand.

I waited until we had another full throttle session going on, one of his hands on the throttle, the other on the screwdriver adjusting the carb, and slipped the door open. 

And the water disappeared into that crevice faster than my money does at the end of the month. 

Gone.  Not a trace to be seen.

There was an instant throttle response.  So quick, in fact, that the motor died altogether.  I expected a bit of laughter or some sort of whiplash. 

But nothing. 

My friend uncoiled from his crouched position, and I quickly pasted on a fake Calvin and Hobb’s grin.  The grin drained off my face as the dilated pupils of my friend’s eyes make direct contact with mine.  The way I remember, no words or threats were shared in that moment of friendship, and I, having accomplished what I set out to do, went back to work in the now peaceful and quiet shop.

*****

Several months later, I was hunched up under the gull wing door of the combine I was working on.  These doors swing out and slightly up, making a wide space to work in near the bottom of the door, but a decidedly small space near the top.  And I was near the top, working on a wiring harness that required, like I said, a scrunched-up posture. 

Suddenly, and without any warning whatsoever, I was completely deluged.  At first, it didn’t make any sense.  My mind raced to the possibility of some leak on the combine, but it didn’t smell like any combine fluid, so I dismissed that quickly.  And the deluge didn’t stop.  And it seemed, from deep underwater as it were, I heard some maniacal laughter going on somewhere near the door of our shop.  I was so scrunched up that I couldn’t disengage very quickly, and besides, any quick movement would have resulted in crashing my head against something nearby.  And the deluge still didn’t stop, even after I had extricated myself and was standing on my own two feet. 

I made a mad dash for the source of this mighty confluence, and quickly staunched its flow.  But the damage had been done.  My jeans were a sopping mess, and it was only the start of the afternoon.  By the end of work, I was a chaffed and raw individual.  Thanks of course, to the extra-long hose that Gregg had to string out clear into another shop, and the soaker/flush option on the nozzle. 

I could complain that the discipline meted out to me was enormously out of proportion, but, when it is all said and done, it probably was a fair retribution for the ignominy born by my friend for something not his fault.

Code of the West

I know him by where he sits in the sale barn.  If the auctioneer’s booth were at 12 o’clock, then as sure as the wind in Kansas, he sits at 3 o’clock, 3 rows up from the bottom, across the ring, down a little, and a bit cattycorner to where I sit.

You get to know folks in the sale barn by where they sit and by their number.  Sometimes you get to know their name. 

I also know him by his brown Stetson hat, vest and long sleeve shirts.  I know him for his bow-legged walk.  And I like to watch his quick, sure scribe, with his left hand, on his buy card.  Neither does it take but a few seconds for all of us there to recognize his brand when his calves start filling the ring smack full with a spanking good pot load of black 8 weight steers.  He knows what he’s doing, and he ought to.  He’s been at it since he was 21, and I’d peg him in his mid-70’s today.  I judge him to be every bit the man today he was then, minus a thing or two he told me about. 

“My dad taught me two things real well,” he said.  “How to work hard and how to cuss.  I’m tryin’ to rid myself of both of em’, but so far, I’ve only been having any reasonable success with one of em’.  I do pretty good, but ev’r now and then I slip a little.”

But so far, what I have described about him doesn’t fall into the Code of the West category.

It was his gesture in the Animal Health store that solidified him in that section of men in my mind.  And it also told me his name was Raymond, not that it mattered so very much.

There were 5 of us standing in line there to get our meds for the calves we had bought or were fixing to buy.  One young buck was filling out paperwork so he stepped off to the side and motioned Raymond forward.  Mickey, the gal behind the counter, asked Raymond what he needed.  He looked back at me and said, “All you gettin’ is a handful of tags, go ahead.” 

I told him I had a fair bit more to get and had plenty of time; that I’d wait for him. 

We talked shop for a while as his order was being filled; he told me some of the meds and implants he normally used, and I told him what I liked to use.

But it was when he looked back at me and told me to go first that I could tell he knew the Code.

That Code is still alive in parts around here.

It’s what had my friends, Lyndon and Ryan, tell me, “Just put a little fuel in it and we’ll be even,” after I had used their truck and cattle pot for a day to haul our stuff to town.  I argued that I had put miles on and got the pot dirty.  “No,” they said, “We need to haul some of our calves soon.  We’ll wash it down then.”

It’s what made my friend Travis call me while I was still at the sale, (he had left and was picking up a few things in town) and offer to come back to the sale if I had more calves than I could bring home in my trailer.

That Code had my neighbor Clyde, tell me, “Just leave your heifers in with our group,” when we couldn’t get the last two that had been on the run caught, and also had him load those heifers up in his own trailer and bring them over to my place.

It’s what made a complete stranger step up to the load out dock I was driving up to and open the gate and hold it for me while I drove through.

It’s also what made 44, that’s his buyer number, not sure of his name, step up to me at a sale barn I was new to and say, “You mean they let you across the state line?”, and then thump me on the back with a grin.  I knew I’d be okay there with him around.

That same code had my friends, Brent, Taylor and Jason, leave what they were doing the minute they heard we had calves out, hop on four-wheelers, and ride, some of them, 9 odd miles, to my area to help out until as many as could be found were found.  They didn’t want pay when it was all said and done, either.

You don’t see the Code of the West so much anymore in the towns and cities.  Sure, they have their dandy western stores where the smooth skinned, soft handed young men and ladies all dressed up in their glad rags greet you at the door and try to imitate all that the code stands for.  I venture a guess they would turn their nose up and find some feeble excuse to leave, should I show up with my rusty, rattly old pickup and trailer that still has a fair bit of that green splash drippin’ here and there on it. 

What those dandies don’t realize, is that all the code really stands for is gettin’ dirty, doing a lot of hard work, and spending a lot of your own time on someone else’s behalf.

But among cattlemen and old-timers like Raymond, the Code of the West still lives.

Keep the Bunk Clean

If there is one thing I want my boys to learn, it’s that.  Although you would really need to talk to my friends, Phil or Sid, to see if it holds any value or if it’s just a bunch of fodder. 

In some ways, I really wonder if we know what we are doing starting calves.  We’ve done it now for close to 15 years, but in a lot of ways, it still feels like we are beginners at it.

We started with two little red bottle calves that we (surprisingly) kept alive and later sold at small profit.  We soon moved on from bottle calves to buying a few calves locally and turning them out on the pasture for the summer. 

Later, we expanded to start calves that we had shipped in. 

It felt good to get a few loads from Texas.  For some reason, Texas and cattle are synonymous in my mind.  As we worked those calves and grew them up it seemed like we were part of a long line of cattlemen, past, present, and on into the future.  I felt bad for one load especially, they came from a sunny mid-80’s south Texas day to a misty cold Kansas day hovering in the mid 20’s.  They did exceptionally well health wise. 

We got a few loads from Alabama.  They were some sharp looking calves.  Austin thought we could walk a load from one pen without an alley to another, straight off the truck.  I disagreed.  But we tried it anyway and about 30 of them split off to go find their mama.  It took most of the afternoon and some good-hearted neighbors help to get them all back in.  I wondered if they would make it or not, as hard as we had run them, but they all did.

But my heart turned to mush when I saw our loads come in from Pennsylvania.  The Alabama calves looked a lot classier, so it wasn’t the Pennsylvania’s looks that drew me in.  They were good looking calves, don’t get me wrong.  It was the long journey I knew they were on that tore me up.  That journey had pulled them off mama 5-6 days before, then to a strange sale barn lot for a couple days that had every bug known to make a calf sick.  Next it put them on the truck for a solid 30 hours, and finally offloaded them here.  Ahead of them waited viruses that were even then maturing inside them, ready to lay them flat out if they ever gave in.  Ahead of them waited pneumonia, so potent they stood gasping in its straight jacket for 3 days before finally giving in to that final, fatal gulp for air.  Ahead of them waited excruciating heat, wind and dust.  Ahead of them waited foot rot, pink eye, and millions of flies.  Ahead of them, humans, with good, but sometimes flawed, intentions.  Ahead of them all this waited, and they had been on such a hard journey already.  I think that is why my heart turned to mush when I saw them offload, and why, when they died, it took something out of me.

Whether they came from Alabama, Pennsylvania, or Texas, one thing remained front and center in my mind when I was out there, getting them started during their first few weeks here.

Keep the Bunk Clean.

Sure, they have some high-powered drugs out there to save your sick calf.  But those drugs can’t begin to turn their trick if your calf’s stomach isn’t working. 

If you see your bunk has more than crumbs in it 4 hours after you fed them, you have something wrong.  And the first thing you need to do is scoop your bunk clean.

I don’t care if you think that feed is still good.  Get off your bum and get busy.  Scoop it out.  That feed in the bunk says one of two things—either you over fed, or someone out there is getting sick, and you had better start giving them all a hard eye until you see who it is.  If you leave feed in the bunk, chances are, it’ll start tasting off and then the ones thinking about getting sick for sure won’t eat. 

Face it.  Your calf has four stomachs.  I don’t know what percent of its body those stomachs take up, but if they aren’t working right, because of too much feed or they are sick, that’s four times more trouble than you and I have when we go off feed.  And the sooner you can get the problem fixed the better.

Now I don’t feel like I need to keep on sermonizing necessarily.  I’m quite sure I ain’t got the qualifications of a preacher.  But I venture to say, if each one of us could do the same for ourselves, be rather diligent, so to speak, about making our mistakes right on the same day we made em’, and keep an eye out for any sickness starting to happen, that life might spin along quite a bit better than we thought.

Keep the Bunk Clean.

Oven Doors

I walked into the kitchen the other day, only to discover that my sins had found me out. 

And who else to show me, but my dear lovely wife.  It’s a wonder some unseen force didn’t stop her mouth cold when it came to uttering the words that sealed her life with mine.

Her life since that day has surely had its questions, much as her parents have had.

She had notified me, only a few times, maybe 3 or 4, that her oven door handle was getting quite loose in its fastening to the door and wondered if I could take a look at it.

I told her I could.

I know I did. 

But I didn’t.

And so, on the aforesaid day, the day of my reckoning, I walked into the kitchen with a light and merry heart.

Until I saw the oven door.

It didn’t resemble itself anymore.  It was completely divested.  If a Western Kansas tornado had ran its path through our kitchen, it couldn’t have done a better job of dismantling that door.

And there sat my dear wife, on the floor, with pieces of it in her lovely hands, and a perplexed look on her sweet face.

Me.  Me to the rescue. 

I could do this.  Hadn’t I worked at John Deere for 7 years and been referred as a somewhat competent mechanic?  (Of course, depending on who you asked.)

We’d have this in a couple of minutes.

The challenge soon presented itself in the form of a small marital spat.

My good wife had taken it apart, and she felt compelled to tell me what piece went where.  I felt just as compelled to tell her that something wasn’t adding up with her descriptions.

For one thing, she was quite sure she knew which hole that the screws were to go in.  The problem being, the hole didn’t have any threads.

I pointed this out to her. (Very kindly of course)

She just as righteously told me that was exactly where she had taken it out.

We carried on, back and forth for a few minutes.  She was guiltless, like usual, and I was guilty, like usual. 

Crowding my mind was the continual thought that if I had tightened that handle earlier, it would have taken only two twists with a screwdriver on two very visible screws and . . .

I didn’t blame my good wife for taking it all apart.  She was doing the best she could.

I finally said we might have to call the local hardware store service man out to put it back together for us. 

Our back and forth solutions weren’t solutions, after all, and 20 minutes into the project we were no farther along than at the beginning.

But then I saw it.  She had been right all along about where those screws went.  She didn’t realize, though, that she was holding the piece they screwed into against the door backwards of what it should have been. 

In a couple of minutes, we had it.

And I was able to play the hero after all, because the spring hinge required me to hold the door piece in place with my forehead and chin, whilst aligning the hole with an icepick with one hand and angling the screw through and starting it turning with a screwdriver with the other hand.

All in one motion.

Just now, the cat aroused himself from the invoices he was laying on and gave me a look. 

I had better get busy, or I’ll have another oven door on my hands.

Damocles Sword

I went under the knife again the other morning.  Or maybe it was a scissors this time.  I’m not sure.

But I am sure of several things.

It hurt.

It caused me stress.

I won’t do it again.

Or if I have to do it again, I’ll ask them to kindly knock me out, in whichever way seems best to them.

I didn’t think it was going to be that big of a deal, really.  I hadn’t worried about it much, if any at all.

I have had several surgeries.  I had a surgery to my stomach.   The shot straight into my gut after the surgery and the threatening stare by the male chauvinist nurse had me helpless and I knew it.  Funny thing though.  As she was charting said shot, I complimented her on her extreme typing speed.  She melted down almost immediately and ventured that she wrote as a hobby.  I told her I wrote a bit myself and we talked over the nuances of the trade.  After that, she was back in the room every few minutes, just hanging around, chatting about life, her family, and asking if I needed anything.  When I was discharged, she walked with us as far as she could go.  I know they train the folks who work in hospitals nowadays how to care professionally, so that even if they aren’t caring one bit on the inside, they have you thinking you are their one and only concern for the day.  But I suspicion her care was a tad more personal than that.

Not long after that one, I had two surgeries to my right knee, (the anesthesia buzz afterwards wasn’t half bad) and one surgery to my collar bone.  Oh yeah, I had that Lasik surgery done on my eyes years ago; that one was actually rather enjoyable.

I know you didn’t ask for a spill on my health; I felt compelled to tell you, nonetheless.

I really expected to be in a hospital long before the first time with my stomach, at age 40.  Afterall, those around me say I’m accident prone.

But since that first surgery, I’ve been doing my time in those sterile halls.  It doesn’t take anything to call up the memory smell of hospital food by now.  Still, with all the practice I’ve had, I can’t seem to make the gowns work.  The front of them does okay, it’s my backside that gets so cold for some reason.  I once took the liberty to tie another one of those gowns on to the back of my front gown; that worked fairly well until the nurse saw it. I got cold back there again after her remodel job.  I have a sneaking suspicion those female nurses spend a fair bit of time conniving together when they know they have an ultra-sensitive, positively bashful, forty something male like me coming in for a surgery.  And I’m sure their suppressed titters turn into gales of laughter once I’m out cold as they poke and prod my excesses, watching the ripple effect shimmy along their shiny table.

A guy loses all sense of manliness and ego in those situations.

And then the wife and family tell all sorts of preposterous stories when it comes to the recovery room.  (Bless their heart)

But this last one was different.

And I don’t want to do it again. 

Ever.

Several weeks ago, Austin called me up and asked if I could help him get a bearing race off one of the axle shafts to our trencher.  I said, sure, I’d be right over. 

I told him there were two ways to get it off.  Try punching it off with hammer and punch first and if that didn’t work, we’d torch it off. 

I was just starting to show him how to punch it off, and I was getting ready to tell him that really, we needed to wear eye protection as bearing races are made of extremely hard material and tended to splinter off at very high rates of speed. 

And twang.  I felt it drive deep into my left eye.

I went out to the pickup mirror and looked but didn’t see anything serious.  We ended up torching it off and I was back at our house when I had another look since my eye was feeling rather irritated. 

I saw a nice little blood pocket, under what appeared to be the outer layer of the white of my eye. 

The eye doctor said come in right away, even though it was after closing time.

He looked it over.  He thought whatever had hit hadn’t entered the eye.  He gave me some antiseptic ointment that closely resembled Vaseline.  The only way I could get that into my eye was to pull the bottom lid out and lay a ridge of it in there.  Even then it wanted to slide right out, and it hurt like sin.   The Doc told me I must use it, because if my eye got infected it could transmit straight to my brain and I’d have brain infection. 

I told my good wife I thought I had had brain infection for years already.  I think she wanted to agree with me.  It would explain so many things about everything.

*****

A few weeks passed on and all seemed to be doing better.  My eye was still quite red, but there are other things about me not quite up to par, so it rounded out the general picture.

I was combing my hair one morning, looking in the handheld mirror, working on the cowlick that I’ve worked on for forty some years, when I saw it.

Right where I had felt that pain when I got hit, was a rather ugly looking blister, grayish colored, that my bottom eyelid had to climb up and over when I blinked.

I got me back to the Eye Doctor.

He said, “Whatever hit you is still in there and needs to come out.”

He made me an appointment for the next morning with an eye surgeon, saying, “We don’t have the proper equipment here if it’s going to need stitches, or goes to bleeding really bad.”

The stitches thing kind of registered, but not really. 

The lady eye surgeon took a deep look into my eye and said that it was either a blood clot or the piece was still in there and we would definitely need to go in and see what was up. 

“So, if you are ready, we’ll go over to minor surgery and dig it out.”

“Sure,” I said, “Let’s get it done.”

Except the chair she had me sit down in in minor surgery was a dentist chair.

And she was talking about giving me a shot right in my eye to deaden it.

And she had me flat on my back, almost at negative g’s.

And she put this thing, called an expander, under my eyelids to hold them open so I couldn’t blink.

With a blinding bright light inches away, and now that I couldn’t close my eye at all, we were all set. 

She dropped some pain deadening eyedrops in and asked if I was ready. 

She told me I needed to hold still.

“MMMHHHMMM” I thought.  “Hold still or lose my eyesight.”

“We’ll go in here between these two blood vessels.  You still doing okay?”

“I’m going to slit the outer layer of your eyeball and get under it with a Q Tip.  I’ll see if I can work out whatever is in there with that.”

And it starts hurting really bad and I can’t move. 

She didn’t know it, but her left hand held her instruments, and they kept gouging into my forehead. 

“Okay, I’ve cleaned out the layer underneath the outer layer,” (after what seemed like 30 minutes of alternately clasping and unclasping my hands, crossing and uncrossing my legs, and hyperswallowing) “Now I’m going to go down one more layer deeper and swab around in there.  I’ll just make another slit here.” 

I saw that knife (or scissors) coming down again and got ready to depart.  No matter that I was going to spend the rest of my life with that expander propped in my eye like an old-style monocle exposing a full circumference, blood red eye.  It would make a good gag for the upcoming Halloween, I figured.

I gingerly talked myself down from the state of levitation I seemed to be in, and, as effort to calm myself and get my mind on something else, said, “You sure have steady hands.”

“Yeah, you have to in this line of work,” she said.

By now I was watching her take the suture needle and suture, bring it right down close, and saw the graceful movement of her hands as she worked it through the layers.  Until the needle got stuck and she asked her assistant for a forceps to pull it out. 

Her assistant wasn’t very sure what a forceps was, unfortunately, and the needle staid stuck long enough that by the time she pulled it on through, the numbing drops had to be applied once more. 

She finished up and I asked her if I could see that suture needle and thread for interest’s sake. 

“Sure.  We’ll get an envelope, and you can take it home with you.”

I have it with me today, and if I can get a decent picture of it, I’ll attach it later.  It’s smaller than an eyelash and the suture, she told me, smaller than a human hair.

“You did so well,” she said, “You were so calm, (chuckling) you even told me I had steady hands!  Most people aren’t that collected in here.”

Lady, if you only knew.