Blog a book

UT-OH! Chapter 17: A Pear Picker’s Guide to Happiness

/ Curt Mekemson / 9 Comments
Ladder beneath ripe pears hanging from branches in a pear orchard
This is what you see when you are 5-6 steps down on a 12 or 14 foot pear ladder. Now, imagine climbing up and balancing one step from the top to reach pears in the top of the tree. UT-OH! (I’ve gone over to the dark side here. This is an AI generated picture. My challenge, as always when writing about my youth, is that the photos were few and far between. That’s hard to fathom in the digital age, when I can easily take more photos in one day that I have from the first 20 years of my life. When I pushed the key that asked WP to produce an AI photo for this post, it read my blog and came up with three good suggestions. That may be scarier than standing on the second step! It didn’t catch, however, that the ladder only had three legs. Maybe there is hope.

A number of things combined to pull me out of the puberty blues. For one, I ceased being a freshman. Hormones slowed down, my voice abandoned octave leaps, and I bought a pair of contact lenses. Academics were a plus, even during my freshman year. Lacking a social life, I studied full-time and managed to pull straight A’s. If I couldn’t be ‘ruler of everything,’ ‘sex symbol’ or ‘sports hero,’ maybe I could at least be ‘the brain.’ Was I driven or what?

I also believe that having a job helped. I began working in the pear orchards around Placerville starting the summer of my eighth-grade graduation and continuing through high school. It was a nine hour a day job of hard physical work, one more fit for an adult than a 14-year-old. Dealing with the 90-105° F summer heat of the Sierra foothills didn’t help. But I actually enjoyed the work. And the money. The general rule in our cash poor family was that the basics were covered. We were responsible for the extras, such as dates.

In addition to being hard, there was also an element of danger. Pear picking consisted of hazardous duty without hazardous pay. We were each given a 12-foot ladder, a sizing ring, and as many boxes as we could fill. The pears we plucked from the trees were placed in a canvas bag that fit around our front like a pregnant belly and carried up to 50 pounds. We had the option of working by the hour at $.90 per hour or by the box at $.20 per box. I opted for the per box under the assumption I could earn more.

The ladder was a suicidal three-legged device with two legs playing standard ladder while the third served as the balancing arm we threw out to provide ‘stability.’ I use the quote marks here because the stability was questionable. There was always a chance that you, your bag of pears, and the ladder would come crashing down. The first few rungs were solid; it was on the top four that life became interesting. Even here it was tolerably safe, assuming you focused on easily reachable pears.

The problem was that the best pears had a way of hiding away in the highest, most unreachable part of the tree.  Such premium fruit couldn’t be left hanging, even if it meant taking risks. At least that’s how my ut-oh mind functioned. It was nothing that the boss required. Success meant performing a one-legged-ballet-balancing act. I became quite proficient at the move. Only once did I reach beyond the imagination of my ladder and follow a rapid descent path straight to the ground. Fortunately, the only limbs broken belonged to the tree. I wrote the experience off as a lesson in Newtonian physics.

A greater challenge was entertaining myself for nine hours a day. Reaching out and picking a pear requires a minimum number of brain cells and very few of those are located in the frontal lobes. My favorite ploy was singing at the top of my voice. Harry Bellefonte’s tune about picking bananas was a natural. I adapted it to picking pears. But I also belted out many other popular tunes of the day.  “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight” was a mistake. I couldn’t get it out of my mind; I would wake up in the middle of the night humming it. To this day I have to be careful in bringing it up or it is right back there on the tip of my tongue, waiting to escape. Like now:

“Does your chewing gum lose its flavor
On the bedpost overnight?
If your mother says don’t chew it,
Do you swallow it in spite?
Can you catch it on your tonsils,
Can you heave it left & right?
Does your chewing gum lose its flavor
On the bedpost overnight?”

A more productive form of amusement was challenging myself to pear picking contests. The more I picked the more money I made. When the fruit was plentiful and well sized, I could pick 60-80 boxes a day and earn big money, $12-$16. By the way, that seemingly measly sum is the equivalent of $130 to $180 today. Once I even reached a magical 100 boxes. My goal was to try to match the professional pickers, the folks who made a living helping harvest crops. On really good days, I could. 

Over my five-year career in the pear orchards I worked with Filipino crews, Braceros, and the usual contingent of semi-nomadic types who followed the various crops as they ripened from state to state. Most were good, even excellent workers. Of course, there was also the occasional guy who worked just long enough to buy a gallon of Red Mountain Wine and then disappear.

After my first year of working in the fruit orchards, I graduated to swamper status, which meant I delivered empty boxes to the pear pickers and took out their full boxes. I also learned such fine skills as tractor driving, tree trimming, sprinkler changing, post hole digging and crew bossing. And, I might add, enjoyed most of it. There is a certain satisfaction that comes from doing hard work, challenging your body, and being dead-tired at night. 

I also gained a farmer’s satisfaction that comes from seeing a crop evolve from spring bloom to fall harvest. And finally, as my pear orchard responsibilities increased, the work helped me overcome the puberty blues and regain my confidence. Becoming buff and tanned didn’t hurt either. Working in the orchard with my shirt off, picking pears and stacking 50-pound boxes above my head on a truck guaranteed a tan to die for and muscles from my big toes to my hair follicles. 

Almost on cue, girls reappeared in my life, with Paula being an example. Admittedly it was a slow process, in fact far too slow for my hormone driven fantasies. But there the girls were, tentatively giving me the eye and practicing a wiggle or two to see if anyone was home. There was. Down boy.

Next Monday’s Post: A jay by any other name is still a jay, plus 7 other interesting and fun birds of Costa Rica. This is Costa Rica’s Grey Headed Jay suggesting I don’t interfere with its breakfast.
Grand Tetons National Park: Next Wednesday, April 22 is special. It’s Earth Day 56. Please join me as I take you back to April 22, 1970 where I participated in Earth Day 1 on the Davis Campus of the University of California. Earth Day 1 changed my life and helped to change the world. Its message today is as relevant as ever, and possibly even more so, as so many of the gains we have made are now under threat.

UT-OH! Chapter 16: On First Dates and Squashed Skunks

/ Curt Mekemson / 7 Comments
At this point, just beyond the speed limit sign, I ran over a skunk in the summer of 1958, undoubtably impressing the young woman I was on a date with.

As I suggested in Chapter 14, my freshman year of high school was something of a disaster. My social life tanked, dance class sucked, my political aspirations were reduced to running a friend’s campaign for class president, and my success in sports was mediocre, at best. My short legs and I suffered through a season of cross country running where I was lucky to finish in the middle of the pack. 

Things had to improve. 

Do you remember your first date in high school? Was it a roaring success, so-so, or an unmitigated disaster? How about off-the-scale weird? That describes mine. I had a double date with Paula, Mom and Boyfriend. And I ran over a skunk. It happened during the summer between my freshman and sophomore year.

It started with Paula calling me. There was no way I would have called her. Girls still left me quaking in my tennis shoes. ‘Curt, would you like to go to dinner with me in Sutter Creek?’ Sutter creek was a town in Amador County, about 20 miles away from Diamond Springs over curvy Highway 49. It would be a double date with her mother and her boyfriend. That seemed strange, but somebody had to drive. How could I say no…

I remember very little about the drive or dinner— other than it was at an Italian restaurant. After we had our fill of spaghetti and conversation, we returned to the car. I had visions of sitting in the back and snuggling up with Paula on the way back to Diamond.

Mom and Boyfriend had another idea. They hopped into the back seat and promptly told me, “You can drive home, Curt!” Like they were offering me the opportunity of a life time. It did away with my bold plans. But there was more… 

“Um,” I noted nervously, “I only have a learner’s permit.”

“That’s okay, it will be good practice,” Mom jumped in before I could add that I had only obtained it four days before.

Paula, meanwhile, was waiting for me to open the door for her on the passenger side of the car. It was a plot. She gave me a dazzling smile— and my options dropped to zero. Any further hesitation would be ‘unmanly.’ After doing the gentlemanly thing for Paula, I dutifully climbed into the driver’s seat and miraculously found the keyhole and lights. Gear grinding got us out of town and onto the open road. I breathed an audible sigh of relief. It was short lived. We had just made it past the small town of Plymouth and were on our way down to the Consumnes River when I ran over the skunk.

If you drive a lot on country roads in skunk country, you’ve probably noticed that dead skunks are a significant part of road kill. It goes beyond the fact that they are easily recognized by their smell. There really are lots of them. The primary reason for this is that they believe they are omnipotent. Who in his right mind will hassle a skunk? It’s like petting a porcupine or teasing a rhino.

Unfortunately, skunks fail to recognize the damage a 3000-pound vehicle can do, and how difficult it is to stop, or even swerve when traveling 60 miles per hour or more. Last, but far from least, they don’t realize how easily drivers become distracted. A teenage boy just learning how to drive with an attractive girl sitting next to him is an excellent example.

While my encounter with the skunk was in the summer, the most likely time to find them crossing the road is in late winter or early spring. This is when the males come out of hibernation and go in search of true love, or, at least, sex. The Loony Tunes cartoon character of yore, Pepé Le Pew comes to mind. Skunks are willing to travel 4-6 miles to find a hot date. This often means crossing a road with a focus that has nothing to do with fast moving vehicles. Not being able to see clearly beyond 10 feet doesn’t help either. It’s a disaster waiting to happen. And it may all be for naught. Females often reject would-be suitors as poor material for contributing sperm for future generations, or for some other skunk-ish reason. The rejection is brutal. They have a particularly potent form of spray they reserve for the purpose. “Try to climb on me. Ha. Take that you skunk!”

The skunk I ran over had a similar reaction. He reeked revenge in his final seconds by becoming a virtuoso of glandular activity.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Boyfriend said as the first powerful whiffs of eau de skunk came blasting through the air vents. “It happens all of the time.”

“Yeah, sure,” I mumbled to myself through tongue-biting teeth, “young men always run down skunks on first dates, especially first dates with Mom and Boyfriend along.”

Fortunately, I made it home without further incident.

One might assume that running over the skunk would have ended my relationship with Paula. But there was one more date. It was a testimony to how much Paula’s mother was committed to the relationship that she loaned us her car. I drove it illegally on my learner’s permit. Paula and I went on an old-fashioned picnic to Buck’s Bar, a 49er-mining site on the Consumnes River. I actually had a young woman, out in the woods, alone. Talk about fantasy. As far as I can recall though, and I would recall otherwise, I behaved myself disgustingly well. So did Paula.

Fridays Post: A Pear Pickers Guide to Happiness.

UT-OH! Chapter 15: Puberty Blues and the Dance Class from Hell

/ Curt Mekemson / 19 Comments
The teacher had a large diagram with a pattern that looked something like this.

Something happened between the eighth grade and high school. Here I was a happy, well-adjusted and relatively successful young man one day and a serious candidate for a strait jacket the next. Pimples popped out on my face overnight and my voice became dedicated to practicing random octave jumps. Teenage-hood, which had promised to be a mild adventure, arrived with a vengeance. I was being hormonally challenged; I had a terminal case of puberty blues.

Things started out fine. I left the eighth grade behind with great expectations. After all, I’d become a jock, had top grades, was student body president, and had a girlfriend. Damn, I was even president of the Mother Lode Twirlers, the square dance club. What could possibly go wrong? Everything…?

Take girlfriends, for instance. I expected to lose a little ground in the field of romance when I became a freshman in high school. Sophomore, junior, and even senior boys cruised the hallways in a mad scramble to check out the new crop of freshmen girls. And the older girls weren’t about to date a freshman boy, that lowest of lowly creatures. 

But I didn’t expect to bomb the way I did. I became intensely, almost painfully shy. I would walk down the hallways staring at my feet in fear that some young woman would look me in the eye. If a girl tried to talk to me, any girl, I would mutter inanities and make a run for it. The strangest statements came out of my mouth. As for asking a girl out, the odds were a little less than being struck by lightning, and the latter seemed like a less painful alternative.

It wasn’t that I didn’t notice girls. My body was one huge hormone. I just couldn’t bring myself to do anything about it. I pined for a young woman who sat in front of me in Mr. Crump’s Geography class. She was gorgeous. I was in deep lust. My knee and her butt were mere inches apart and her butt was like a magnet. I had the most intense fantasies of moving my knee forward until it made contact. In my fantasy she would, of course, turn around, smile at me and suggest we get together after school. In reality, she would have turned around and bashed me with her geography book (rightfully so), or worse, told Mr. Crump. I would have died. I kept my knee where it belonged. It is a strong testament to my love for geography that I didn’t flunk the class under the circumstances.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, however, and I was a desperate man. I signed up to master dancing in PE. I would become a combination of Arthur Murray and Elvis Presley. Step, step, slide and swivel your hips. Girls would flock to me. It wasn’t until the day of the class that I learned the magnitude of my mistake. I would have to dance with girls to learn how to dance and there they were, lined up on the opposite side of the gymnasium floor, staring at me.

“God, why did I do this to myself,” I thought as I stared across the distance at twenty females who I knew were thinking, “anybody but Curtis.” 

“Okay, boys,” the female P.E. teacher announced in a stern voice, “I want you to walk across the room now and politely ask a girl to dance with you.” Wow, that sounded like fun.

Reluctantly, I began that long walk across the gymnasium floor. I was a condemned man and the gallows were looming. I walked slower. Maybe an earthquake would strike. Maybe the Russians would shoot off an IBM missile. Maybe one of the surly seniors would throw a match in a wastebasket and the fire alarm would go off.

Maybe nothing.

I approached the line and looked for a sign. One of the girls would smile at me and crook her finger. But the girls looked exceedingly grim. A few looked desperate, like deer caught in the headlights of the proverbial 18-wheeler rushing toward them at 90 miles per hour. I picked out the one who looked most frightened on the theory that she would be the least likely to reject me.

“Uh, would you care to dance,” I managed to blurt out.

“Uh, okay,” she responded with about the same level of enthusiasm she would have if I had offered her a large plate of raw liver. It was P.E. Dance Ground Zero after all, and she wasn’t allowed to say no. We were destined to be a great couple.

“You will put your left hand in the middle of the back five inches above the waist line.” The teacher, who was now sounding more and more like a drill sergeant, carefully described what we would do with our hands. It was quite clear that there would be minimal contact and no contact with behinds. “With your right hand and arm, you will hold the girl away from you.” There would be no accidental brushing of breasts either. What fun was that? I assumed the correct position with marine-like precision. I was going to get this right. I studied the chart the teacher had put up to show us what we were supposed to do with our feet. I listened carefully to the lecture on rhythm and down beats. I watched with intensity as she demonstrated.

All too soon it was our turn. A scratchy record blasted out a long-since-dead composer’s waltz. I didn’t know who it was, but it wasn’t Elvis. With one sweaty palm in the middle of the girl’s back and the other sweaty hand holding her a proper distance away, I moved out on the floor. Step, step, slide, step, step, slide. One, two, and slide the coach barked out. My feet more or less followed the prescribed pattern. More importantly, I avoided stepping on the girl’s toes. I tried a turn and managed to avoid running into another couple. Ever so slightly I relaxed. Maybe things would be okay. Maybe I would have fun. Maybe Hell would freeze over.

“Stop, class!” the teacher yelled as she blew her whistle and yanked the needle across the record, adding another scratch. We dutifully came to a halt. What now?

“I want everyone to watch Curtis and his partner,” she announced.

“Hey, this is more like it,” I thought to myself. Not only was I surviving my first day of dance class, I was also being singled out to demonstrate. I smiled, waited for the music to start, and boldly moved out on the floor where many had trod before. Step, step, slide, step, step slide. We made it through all of three progressions when the teacher abruptly blew her whistle again.

“And that, Class,” she proclaimed triumphantly, “is not how you do it. Curtis is moving like he is late for an important date with the bathroom.”

The class roared— and I shrank. I don’t know how my partner felt, but I wanted a hole to climb in, preferably a deep hole with a steel door that I could slam shut. And I was more than embarrassed, I was mad. My normal sense of humor had galloped off into the sunset faster than a Triple Crown racehorse.

“You don’t teach someone to dance by embarrassing him,” I mumbled. An angry look crossed the teacher’s face and she started to reply. I turned my back and walked for the door.

“Where do you think you are going, Curtis? Get back here!” she demanded in a raised voice.

“I am leaving,” I replied without turning, calm now with the decision made. The class was deadly quiet. This was much more interesting than P.E. Other kids might challenge teachers, might walk out of a class, and might not even care. But not Curt. This was a guy who always did his homework, participated in class discussions, was respectful toward teachers, and aced tests.

I reached the door and put my hand on the handle.

“If you walk out that door, you may as well walk home,” the teacher barked. “I will personally see to it that you are suspended from school.”

I opened the door, walked out– and went straight to the office of the head of the P.E. Department, Steve O’Meara. Steve worked with my dad in the summer as an assistant electrician, but I knew him primarily as my science teacher.  He was a big man, gruff, and strong as a bull elephant, a jock’s jock. He demonstrated his strength by participating in the annual wheelbarrow race at the El Dorado County Fair. The race commemorated the fact that John Studebaker of automobile fame had obtained his start in Placerville manufacturing wheelbarrows for 49ers.

The County’s strongest men would line up with their wheelbarrows at the starting line and then rush to fill a gunny sack with sand at the starter’s gun. They would then push their wheelbarrows and loads at breakneck speed around an obstacle course that included mud holes, a rock-strewn path, fence barriers and other such challenges. In addition to making it across the finish line first, the winner had to have fifty plus pounds of sand in his gunny sack. Underweight and he was disqualified. Steve was always our favorite to win and rarely disappointed us. He also had a very loud voice.

“What’s up, Curt,” he roared when I entered his office. I knew Steve didn’t eat kids for lunch but you always wondered a little.

“I think you are supposed to expel me,” I replied. He started to laugh until he saw my expression. Mortification and anger on the face of a 14-year-old are never a pretty sight.

He became serious. “Sit down and tell me what’s happening,” he suggested in an almost gentle voice.

Ten minutes later I walked out of his office with a reprieve. I didn’t have to go back to the dance class and could finish out the quarter playing volleyball.  Steve would have a discussion with the dance instructor. I imagine she ended up about as unhappy as I was. At least I hoped so. I entertained a small thought that she would hesitate the next time before traumatizing some gawky kid whose only goal in attending her class was to become a little less gawky. It would be a long time before I would step onto a dance floor again.

UT-OH Chapter 13: Your Mother Chases Fire Trucks

/ Curt Mekemson / 11 Comments
While the Diamond Spring’s Firehouse has been rebuilt from when we were children, it still stands in the same location. It was about a block away from where we lived. The siren was loud. The sign at the top says Station 49. It’s appropriate. Diamond’s first firehouse was built in 1849 along what is now Highway 49.
In comparison, this is the firehouse not all that different from what it looked like when I was a child, which I featured in my last post. As I recall, they did rebuild it once when I was a child. Pop wired it.

If it sounds like parental supervision of our bad behavior was somewhat lax in my growing up years, that’s because it was. There were times when our parents, or at least Mother, provided tacit approval of our misdeeds. Returning the cherries we confiscated from Pagonni’s orchard or the frogs from Pavy’s Pond was never an issue. They were quietly added to the pantry and happily consumed by all, including Pop. No questions asked. 

Once we were even encouraged to break the law. 

Because the dirt road we lived on circled the graveyard, the County decided it should be named Graveyard Alley. No one living on the road was asked for an opinion or informed of the decision. The signs simply appeared one day. Mother was infuriated and fired off a letter to the County Board of Supervisors. She was not going to live on Graveyard Alley! Nothing happened, there wasn’t even a response. 

Marsh and I were given marching orders: Sometime around midnight go out and remove the signs. We carried out the charge with enthusiasm. No neighbors complained about this obvious act of vandalism since they weren’t particularly happy about living on Graveyard Alley either.

The County replaced the signs. We made another raid and this time the County got the point. They changed the name in honor of an old fellow, George Croft, who was an original resident. We all liked George. It became George’s Alley, which it still is today. 

I’m convinced we inherited our trouble making potential from our mother. Pop was a good man who had avoided marriage until he was 38. He was the type of guy who served on the Vestry of the Church, was a Boy Scout leader, and was always available to help out a neighbor. I am sure there were times he wished he had avoided marriage for another 38 years. A lesser man might have said bye-bye and been on his way. But he took his role seriously and pushed on, through thick and thin. 

Mother could be something of a ‘wild child,’ wilder than her wild children. Going to fires in Diamond Springs was an excellent example.

Pop was a volunteer fireman for Diamond. As an electrician, it was his job was to show up at burning houses and shut off electricity. When the siren wailed, he was off and running, as were all the other volunteer firemen in town. It was serious business. 

For Mother and for us, it was high entertainment. We also took off at the sound of the siren, jumped in whatever old car we had, and sped along behind the fire truck. The time of day and activity of the moment didn’t matter. If it were three in the morning, we would jump out of bed and throw on our clothes; if we were eating, the meal would be abandoned; if we were playing, the toys would be dropped. Nothing could compete with a good fire. Our devotion to disaster was right up there in the same league as it is with today’s news media. 

The star performer was someone’s house. There was excitement, danger and pathos. Firemen blasted away with their hoses in a desperate attempt to save the home while the unfortunate family looked on in dismay. But the climax, the Fourth of July finale, was when the roof and walls would crash down and shoot sparks and fire high into the sky. I did keep my oohs and ahhs to myself. Somewhere in the back of my mind a small voice whispered that our family outing was not totally appropriate.

“Your mother chases fire trucks,” one of my little buddies jeered at me in an argument. 

My response at the time had been, “So…,” but later in life I would ponder what the towns-people must have thought about Mother, two or three kids, and a dog always showing up. Pop must have been terribly embarrassed. I remember him telling Mother once to stay far behind the fire engine and far away from the fire. He did it under the guise of being concerned for our safety. I now suspect he hoped we wouldn’t be recognized. But he never did have much success in telling Mother what to do. The siren’s call was not to be denied— for either one of them.

Monday’s Post: It’s back to Costa Rica where Peggy and I will show you a ficus, which I would bet is unlike any ficus/banyan/fig tree you have ever seen before unless you have been in Monteverde. No photos this time, I’m keeping it as a surprise. Here is a banyan tree we visited on the Big Island of Hawaii last year, however…

UT-OH! Chapter 12: Bob Bray and the Wham-O Caper, plus Who Shot Tony Pavy’s Prize Pig

/ Curt Mekemson / 16 Comments
Bob Bray with his wife Linda and the world traveling Bone. Bob and I have been friends since the first grade. Here, he and his wife, joined in supporting me on my trek down the PCT to celebrate my 75th Birthday. (The trek ended up being 750 miles instead of 1000 because of several forest fires in 2018.) We would have been 12 at the time of the Wham-O-Caper.

While I had graduated from my would-be juvenile delinquent days, I was able to pull off a couple of capers without my brother’s influence. The first involved living up to Bertha Bray’s expectations.

For some unfathomable reason, Bob’s parents bought him a Wham-O Slingshot. I mean, how in the world can you expect a kid to be good when he starts playing with his Wham-O? The fact that I owned a Wham-O as well almost guaranteed trouble. 

Bob and I agreed to meet for a clandestine hunting expedition. It had to be clandestine because I was still on Bertha Bray’s ‘do not invite’ list. Things were going great until we came upon the old abandoned hobo’s shack that was next to the Southern Pacific railroad track about a quarter of a mile from Bob’s home. Typical of such structures, it had been created out of anything that was available for free: old metal roofing, miscellaneous boards, an occasional nail, a thrown away mattress, etc.

Bob and I looked at each other and had a simultaneous thought. Out came the ammo for the Wham-Os: A shiny new marble for Bob and several BBs for me. We took careful aim, counted down, and let fly, using the derelict old building for target practice.

The Wham-O actually comes with a manual that tells you how to use it. It’s a serious slingshot!

To this day, Bob claims he saw his marble harmlessly strike the building while my BBs were smashing a window to smithereens. I of course saw Bob’s marble hit the window dead on while my BBs weren’t even close. The current occupant of the not abandoned home, who was washing dishes behind a willow bush in a small stream, saw something entirely different: two little boys smashing his pride and joy. 

He let out a bellow and came charging up the trail. As he should have. Once again, the Mekemson Gang, along with its newest recruit, was on the run. The good news is that we escaped. The bad news was that the hobo recognized Bob. He went straight to his house. Mrs. Bray’s worst fears had been realized. (For the 50thAnniversary of our Wham-O Adventure, Bob sent me a slingshot. Bertha probably rolled over in her grave. Or maybe she chuckled.)

A prize 4-H pig at the Modoc County Fair in Northern California.

Tony Pavy’s prize pig was another case where Marshall was totally innocent. Tony had a large pond with bullfrogs, a hundred or so acres of scrubland, and a wooded hillside that housed a number of gray squirrels and blackberry vines loaded with the sweet, juicy fruit. His attitude was similar to that of Jimmy Pagonni: Children were not to be heard or seen on his property. 

As with Pagonni, we didn’t allow Pavy to keep us from our appointed rounds. We would slip in at night to harvest his bullfrogs and during the day to harvest blackberries or bring down a squirrel. Tony had a very effective way of getting rid of us. In a very loud voice he would yell, “Mama, get my gun!” and we would streak out of there.

A couple of friends and I were hunting for the squirrels on his hillside when the unfortunate incident with the pig took place. But before I tell the story, I need to digress and provide some background information.

Growing up in Diamond Springs in the 50s meant having a gun and shooting things. At least it did if you were a boy. We graduated from BB guns and 22s to deer rifles and shotguns. Obtaining your first rifle was an experience similar in importance to obtaining your driver’s license, except you could get one a lot earlier. Before we were allowed to hunt, however, certain rules were pounded into our heads. We had to take a course sponsored by the National Rifle Association. These were the years when the NRA’s primary concern was about hunting and hunter safety, not promoting the use of automatic weapons.

I learned from the NRA instructor that it is important to know what you were shooting. This might seem obvious, but flat-landers out of Sacramento often had trouble making the distinction between a cow and a deer. Of a much more serious nature, every so often one would mistake another hunter for a deer. Wear red hats and bright clothes, we were taught. There were other things we weren’t supposed to shoot as well. People’s houses for example. Robins were also high on the list. They ate their weight daily in bugs. It was okay to shoot ‘vermin’ such as ground squirrels, jackrabbits, coyotes and the scrub jays that pecked away at pears. In fact there was a bounty on jays, $.25 per head. Marshall used it as a money-maker.

My usual preference was for watching wildlife, not killing it. I made an exception for gray squirrels. The thrill of the hunt combined with my appetite for a delicious squirrel and dumpling stew my mother whipped up overcame any reservations I had. All of which brings me back to the pig. 

Gray squirrels have about the same appreciation for being shot that you or I might. To avoid this unhappy circumstance, they take off leaping through the trees. The one we had marked for dinner was jumping from limb to limb in a live oak tree on the hill above Pavy’s with all three of us shooting at it when we heard a bellow from the barnyard.

“Mama, get my gun! They shot my pig! They shot my pig! Hurry, Mama!”

I don’t know how fast Mama moved but we flew. By the time Ernie Carlson, the County Sheriff, and a Diamond Springs resident, caught up with us we were far away from Pavy’s and about as innocent as newborn piglets.

“Excuse me, boys,” the Sheriff remarked when he pulled over in his car and rolled down his window, “I don’t suppose you know anything about Tony Pavy’s pig being shot.”

“No, sir,” we replied respectfully in unison. We had rehearsed.  Besides, we were technically correct. We hadn’t shot Pavy’s pig; we hadn’t even shot the squirrel. It was a ricocheting bullet that did in the pig. 

Ernie looked at us dubiously.

“Pavy told me there were three kids about your age,” the Sheriff said as he continued to build pressure, hoping that one of us would break. 

“We’ve been out in back of Ot Jone’s Pond,” I argued indignantly. And we had been. So what if we had arrived there out of breath.

“Well, you kids behave yourselves,” the Sheriff said with an ominous I know you’re lying tone. 

We breathed a joint sigh of relief as he rolled up his window and drove off. Once more we had avoided a fate we probably deserved. I suspect now that Ernie was not one hundred percent dedicated to finding the alleged pig murderers. Tony was not universally loved in the community for several reasons, of which threatening to shoot kids was one. 

For example: My father did some electrical work for him for free. As he was leaving, Tony asked, “Would you like one of my geese for dinner?”

“Sure,” Pop had replied, assuming Pavy was offering it as thanks for his four hours of work. 

“Good,” Tony had replied, “that will be five dollars.” Pop was more than a little irritated. He had a hearty laugh years later when I told him about our adventure with the pig. I wisely avoided telling him at the time, however. His perspective on our miscreant behavior softened substantially with distance and age. 

Friday’s Post: One of my classmates in grade school insults me by saying “Your Mother Chases Fire Trucks.” So what if it was true.

An early photo of the Diamond Springs Firehouse with Volunteer Firemen. The siren that called the Volunteers, including Pop, is on the right.

UT-OH! Chapter 11: Raw Sex, the Nuclear Holocaust, and Being Bonked by a Baseball

/ Curt Mekemson / 13 Comments
This is how I felt after being bonked on the head by a baseball! Just kidding. It’s actually here because I didn’t have a photo for Chapter 11. This one is an introduction to Friday’s post on Costa Rica Butterflies.

There came a time when I grew out of my mischief making phase. Other things took precedence: school, wandering in the woods, church, girls, and even sports. Few of these earned an Ut-Oh. There were a couple of incidents that earned inclusion in this book, however. The first had to do with a girl.

Starting as far back as the third grade, I had a girlfriend, or at least believed I did. The girls didn’t have to agree. My first heart throb was Carol. She was a younger woman: cute and smart. While I appreciated those qualities, what fascinated me about Carol was that she could run like the wind. I was in love with her legs. We both lived within a couple of blocks of school and would walk home for lunch. 

The advantage of going home was we would arrive back at school before the other kids were let out for noon recess. This meant we could grab the best positions for whatever game was being played. My problem was that Carol could outrun me and this meant I was usually second in line. It seemed like a small price to pay for seeing those legs kicking up the dirt in front of me.

Next, I fell for an older woman, the fifth grade sister of one of my classmates in the fourth grade. She had quite a mouth on her and called her little brother pet names like shit-head and fuck-face. I was fascinated to hear a girl talk like that. One weekend, I found myself walking 2 ½ miles following the Southern Pacific railroad tracks to ‘visit her brother’ with my primary objective hearing her speak those ‘guy’ words. She didn’t disappoint…

The Ut-Oh, however, took place when I was in the fifth grade. Judy was a fourth grader with flaming red hair who had several boys in the fourth and fifth grade passionately pursuing her. The competition was fierce. Judy loved it. To encourage us, she cut off small locks of her hair and gave one to each of her admirers. I was surprised she had any hair left but I cherished my locket.

My main competitor for Judy was Eric. He was an up and coming fourth grader, small, but extremely athletic and an all-around nice kid. Judy let it be known that we were the chosen two. 

We had our showdown at a school movie that provided instructions on what to do when the Russians bombed us. We spent a lot of time in the 50s worrying about that. People began building bomb shelters in their backyards. The teachers would make us crawl under our desks to prepare for the explosion. We were taught to cover our faces with our arms so glass shattering in from the windows wouldn’t blind us. It is not surprising that the traumatized children of the 50’s grew up to be the anti-war advocates of the 60s and 70s. I stayed up one night to watch atomic bomb testing in the Nevada desert over 200 miles away. It lit up the whole Eastern sky and added a touch of reality to our hide-under-the-desk practice.

In the lineup for the movie, Eric aced me out and managed to get next to Judy. A half dozen other fourth graders played honor guard and I couldn’t even get close, but my luck didn’t abandon me altogether. I grabbed the seat immediately in back of her where I could at least monitor Eric’s behavior. The lights went down and the movie started. I strained to keep an eye on Eric. He reached over and grabbed Judy’s hand and she let him hold it. Damn! I could have killed him.

But then, unbelievably, Judy slipped her other hand between the chairs and grabbed my knee. My knee! It was raw sex. The ut-oh bulge in my pants proved it. 

Sports presented a totally different type of challenge. I am not a natural jock. It isn’t so much physical as mental. You have to care to be good at sports and I find other things more interesting. Part of this evolved from a lack of enthusiasm on the home front. There was little vicarious parental drive to see us excel on the playing field. 

Being as blind as a bat didn’t help much either. Like most young people in the 50s, I was not excited about wearing glasses. When Mrs. Wells, the school nurse, came to class with her eye charts, I would memorize the lines while she was setting up and then breeze through the test. As for class work, I would sit close to the black board and squint a lot. While I got away with this more or less in the classroom, it became a serious hazard on the Little League field.

I remember going out for the team. All of my friends played and social pressure suggested it was the thing to do. Nervously, I showed up on opening day and faced the usual chaos of parents signing up their stars, balls flying everywhere, coaches yelling, and kids running in a dozen different directions at once.

“Okay, Curtis,” the Coach instructed, “let’s see how you handle this fly.”

Crack! I heard him hit the ball. Fine, except where was it? The ball had disappeared. Conk. It magically reappeared out of nowhere, bounced off my glove and hit me on the head.

“What’s the matter? Can’t you see?” the Coach yelled helpfully. “Let’s try it again.” My Little League Career was short lived. I went back to carrying out my inventory of the number of skunks that lived in the Woods. This didn’t mean I was hopeless at sports. In the seventh grade I finally obtained glasses and discovered the miracle of vision: Trees had leaves, billboards were pushing drugs, and the kid waving at me from across the street was flipping me off. I could even see baseballs. It was time to become a sports hero.

It says something about your future in sports when your career peaks in the eighth grade. 

Thanks to Mrs. Young, I was slightly older than my classmate and, thanks to genetics plus an early growth spurt, slightly bigger. More importantly, I had mastered the art of leadership: Make noise, appear confident and charge the enemy. As a result I became quarterback and captain of the football team, center and captain of the basketball team and pitcher and captain of the softball team. I even went out for track and ran the 440, but they didn’t select me as captain. That honor went to a seventh grader. I was bummed.

UT-OH Chapter 7: The Death Defying (Suicidal?) Great Tree Race… And the White-faced Coatis of Costa Rica

/ Curt Mekemson / 22 Comments
Have you ever climbed a tree? As kids growing up in Diamond Springs, California, there were dozens that called to us, each with a unique challenge. Maybe the fact that we share 98.8 of our genes with chimps played a role. Nothing spoke ‘challenge’ like the 80 foot tall tree in the Graveyard, however. Peggy thinks at 83, I should stick to smaller trees.
A view of the tree today taken from near the house where we lived. Now, imagine 8-10 year olds racing up and down this tree as fast as they could go.

Two of these large incense cedar trees dominated the Graveyard. From an under five-foot perspective, they were gigantic, stretching some 75-80 feet skyward. The limbs of the largest started 20 feet up, providing scant hope for climbing. As usual, Marshall found a risky way around the problem. 

Looking appropriately graveyard-spooky in its old age, the largest Incense Cedar still dominates the Graveyard. It was probably planted in the 1850s. The large lower limbs (center left) were where Pop built our tree house. It stretched half way around the tree.

Several of the huge limbs came tantalizingly close to the ground at their tips, and one could be reached by standing on the tombstone I used to spy on Demon the Cat when she hid her kittens. But only Marshall could reach it; I was frustratingly short by several inches. Marsh would make a leap, grab the limb, and shimmy up it hanging butt down until the limb became large enough for him to work his way around to the top. Then he would crawl up to the tree trunk, five Curt-lengths off the ground. After that, he would climb to wonderfully mysterious heights I could only dream about.

Eventually I grew tall enough to make my first triumphant journey up the limb. Then, very carefully, I climbed to the heart-stopping top, limb by limb. All of Diamond spread out before me. I could see our school, the mill where my father worked, the woods, and the hill with a Cross where I had shivered my way through at a cold Easter Sunrise Service. I could see the whole world. Except for a slight wind that made the tree top sway and stirred my imagination about the far away ground, I figured I was as close to Heaven as I would ever get. 

I could see forever. A few years after my first ascent up the tree, I borrowed my father’s camera and climbed up the tree and took photographs of the surrounding country. This is looking across Diamond. The distant hill on the left was where the cross stood for years.

By the time I finally made it to the top, Marshall had more grandiose plans for the tree. We would build a tree house on the upper branches. Off we went to Caldor, the lumber mill where Pop worked, to liberate some two by fours. Then we raided Pop’s tool shed for a hammer, nails, and rope. My job was to be the ground man while Marshall climbed up close to the top. He would then lower the rope and I would tie on a board that he would hoist up and nail in. It was a good plan, or so we thought.

Along about the third board, Pop showed up. It wasn’t so much that we wanted to build a tree fort in the Graveyard that bothered him, or even that we had borrowed his tools and nails without asking. He even ignored the liberated lumber. His concern was that we were building our fort 60-feet up in the air on thin limbs that would easily break with nails that barely reached through the boards. After he graphically described the potential results, even Marshall had second thoughts. 

Pop had a solution though. He would build us a proper tree house on the massive limbs that were only 20 feet off the ground. He would also add a ladder so we could avoid our tombstone-shimmy-up-the-limb route. And he did. It was a magnificent open tree house of Swiss Family Robinson proportions that easily accommodated our buddies and us with room to spare. 

It was more like a pirate hideout than a Robinson family home, however. Hidden in the tree and hidden in the middle of the Graveyard, it became our special retreat where we could escape everything except the call to dinner. It also became my center for daydreaming and Marshall’s center for planning mischief. He, along with our friends Allen and Lee, would scope out our forays into Diamond and the surrounding countryside. 

And finally, the treehouse became the starting point for the Great Tree Race. We would scramble to the top and back down in one-on-one competition as quickly as we could. Death-defying is an appropriate description. Or maybe, suicidal. Slips were a common hazard. Unfortunately, the other boys always beat me; they were one to three years older, and I was the one most susceptible to losing my grip. My steady diet of Tarzan comic books sustained me, though, and I refused to give up.  Eventually, several years later, I would triumph.

Marshall was taking a teenage time-out with Mother’s parents who had moved to Watsonville, down on the Central Coast of California. Each day I went to the Graveyard and took several practice-runs up the tree. I became half monkey. Each limb was memorized and an optimum route chosen. Tree climbing muscles bulged; my grip became iron and my nerves steel. 

Finally, the big day arrived and Marshall came home. He was every bit the big brother who had been away at high school while little brother stayed at home and finished the eighth grade. He talked of cars and girls and wild parties and of his friend Dwight who could knock people out with one punch. I casually mentioned the possibility of a race to the top of the tree. What a set up. As a two pack-a-day, sixteen-year-old, cigarette smoker he wasn’t into tree climbing, but how could he resist a challenge from his little brother.

Off we went. Marsh didn’t stand a chance. It was payback time for years of big brother hassles. I flew up and down the tree. I hardly touched the limbs. Slip? So what, I would catch the next one. Marsh was about half way up the tree when I passed him on my way down. I showed no mercy and greeted him with a grin when he arrived, huffing and puffing, at the tree house. 

His sense of humor was minimal. Back on the ground, his bruised ego demanded that he challenge me to a wrestling match. I quickly pinned him to the ground. It was the end of the Great Tree Race, the end of big brother dominance, and a fitting end to my years of associating with dead people in the Graveyard.

And Now for the Coatis of Costa Rica

Yesterday, Peggy and I drove from Nuevo Arenal to the tourist oriented town of La Fortuna. It was pretty much what one would expect of a town that makes its living off of separating money from the visitors. There were a ton of things you could do for a price. I don’t have a problem with that. People would get their money’s worth and locals could put food on their tables. But I much preferred Nuevo Arenal.

The highlight of the trip was the band of Coatis we came across on our drive over. There must have been a dozen or so. These diurnal, omnivorous animals are actually related to raccoons. They were spread out alongside the road doing their coati thing. They were easily outnumbered by the people who had stopped to admire them.

Who wouldn’t love a face like this?
I found their tails quite interesting…
Especially when they stuck them straight up in the air!
Having had enough of people, they used the curb as a runway to escape.

And I’ll make my own escape here. Once again, I am going to make a slight change in my blog. I’ve decided to speed up UT-OH, my blog-a-book memoir, so I can indeed turn it into a book. I’ll be pulling out tales from my 15-years of blogging and putting them up in chapters on Mondays and Wednesdays. I’ll reserve Fridays for our travel blog covering our present journeys: Costa Rica now, Greece and the Greek Islands in May, and then Northern Scotland and Ireland in June and July.

In my posts on Monday and Wednesday next week, I am going to relate the two experiences that led to my lifelong love of the wilderness: The Pond and the Woods.

UT-OH Chapter 6: Nancy Jo and the Graveyard Ghost—A Twisted Tale of Fright (Or Maybe a Tale with a Twist?)

/ Curt Mekemson / 26 Comments

PLUS A Bonus: Costa Rica Is for the Birds… That’s a Good Thing

A change of plans today. I was going to do a post on unique Burning Man structures, but Peggy and I are down in Costa Rica happily settled into a villa above Lake Arenal. A warm tropical breeze is making me feel sleepy. My ‘get up and go has got up and went,’ as the song proclaimed, galloped off to the north. Pura Vida, the Costa Ricans would say. We are living the good life. Posting a tale I have already written plus throwing up some fun photos of birds that Peggy and I have taken is a lot easier than putting together a Burning Man post. Plus, over half the time I went to research a subject for the post, I found that Google had placed one of my blogs on the subject at the top or near the top of its research list and/or just opposite its AI answer. That’s great for SEO, but it also suggests how much I have already written on the subject.

So, my apologies to those who have tuned in to learn more about Burning Man, but hey, a ghost story makes a great substitute, right? So here it is as a chapter in my ongoing blog-a-book series: UT-OH. I’ll eventually get back to Burning Man. I always do.

Nancy Jo and the Graveyard Ghost

My sister was seven years older than I and lived on a different planet, the mysterious world of teenage girls. Her concern about ghosts makes this story a powerful testimony to teenage hormones. If Marshall and I had a healthy respect for the Graveyard at night, Nancy’s fear was monumental.

This story begins with Nancy falling in ‘love’ with the ‘boy’ next door, Johnny. His parents were good folks from a kids’ perspective. Marshall and I raided their apple trees with impunity, and Mama, a big Italian lady, made great spaghetti that included wild manzanita mushrooms. I was fascinated with the way she yelled “Bullll Sheeeet” in a stentorian voice when she was whipping Papa into line. He was a skinny, ‘Old Country type of guy’ who thought he should be in charge. Papa was the one who suggested the gunny sack method of castration for MC.

I use the terms love and boy somewhat loosely since Nancy at 16 was more in infatuation than love, and Johnny, a 22-year-old Korean War Veteran, was a little old for the boy designation, not to mention Nancy. Our parents were not happy, a fact that only seemed to encourage my sister.

Her teenage hormones aided by a healthy dose of rebellion overcame her good sense and she pursued the budding relationship. Johnny didn’t make it easy. His idea of a special date was to drive down the alley and honk. Otherwise, he avoided our place. If Nancy wanted to see him, she had to visit his home. It should have been easy; his house was right behind ours.

But there was a major obstacle, the dreaded Graveyard. To avoid it, Nancy had to climb over the fence that separated our houses. Her other option was walk up the alley that almost touched the tombstones. Given her feelings about dead people, the solution seemed easy— climb the fence. Marsh and I had been over it many times in search of apples. Something about teenage girl dignity I didn’t understand eliminated fence climbing, however. Nancy was left up the alley without an escort.

While she wasn’t above sneaking out her window, Nancy asked permission to see Johnny the night of the Graveyard Ghost attack. She approached Mother around seven. It was one of those warm summer evenings where the sun is reluctant to go down and boys are granted special permission to stay up. Marshall and I listened intently.

“Mother, I think I’ll go visit Johnny,” Nancy stated and asked in the same sentence. Careful maneuvering was required. An outright statement would have triggered a parental prerogative no and an outright question may have solicited a parental concern no.

Silence. This communicated disapproval, a possible no, and a tad of punishment for raising the issue.

“Mother?” We were on the edge of an impending teenage tantrum. Nancy could throw a good one.

“Okay” with weary resignation followed by, “but you have to be home by ten.”

What we heard was TEN. Translate after dark. Nancy would be coming down the alley past the Graveyard in the dark and she would be scared. Knowing Johnny’s desire to avoid my parents, we figured she would also be alone. A fiendish plot was hatched.

At 9:45, Marsh and I slipped outside and made our way up the alley to a point half way between our house and Johnny’s. Next, we took a few steps into Graveyard where weed-like Heavenly trees and deep Myrtle provided perfect cover. Hiding there at night was scary, but Marshall and I were operating under inspiration.

Marsh stripped the limbs off of one of the young trees, bent it over like a catapult, and draped his white T-shirt on the trunk. We then scrunched down and waited.

At exactly 10:00, Nancy opened the back door and stepped outside with Johnny. Our hearts skipped a beat. Would he walk her home? No. After a perfunctory goodnight, Johnny dutifully went back inside and one very alone sister began her hesitant but fateful walk down the alley.

She approached slowly, desperately looking the other direction to avoid seeing tombstones and keeping as far from the Graveyard as the alley and fence allowed. 

At exactly the right moment, we struck. Marshall let go of the T-shirt and the supple Heavenly Tree whipped it into the air. It arched up over the alley and floated down in front of our already frightened sister. We started woooooing wildly like the eight and ten-year-old ghosts we were supposed to be.

Did Nancy streak down the alley to the safety of the House? No. Did she figure out her two little brothers were playing a trick and commit murder? No. Absolute hysteria ensued. She stood still and screamed. She was feet stuck to the ground petrified except for her lungs and mouth. They worked fine.

As her voice hit opera pitch, we realized that our prank was not going as planned. Nancy was not having fun. We leapt out to remedy the problem.

Bad idea.

Two bodies hurtling at you out of a graveyard in the dark of night is not a recommended solution for frayed nerves and an intense fear of dead people. The three of us, Nancy bawling and Marshall and I worrying about consequences, proceeded to the house. After a thorough scolding, we were sent to bed. I suspect our parents laughed afterwards. Many years later, even Nancy could see the humor in our prank— and laugh as well.

A fun note on The Bush Devil Ate Sam

I often get comments from people who have read my book including a number of my followers and fellow authors. They are always appreciated. I also hear from people outside our WordPress community. Here’s what I found on Gmail yesterday.

Loved The Bush Devil Ate Sam

Hi Curtis,

I just finished reading The Bush Devil Ate Sam, and I have to say, it was such a vivid, immersive experience! The way you bring Liberia to life, the chaos of students strolling in with termites for breakfast, the encounters with the army ants, and the tension of navigating the local authorities, had me laughing, gasping, and completely captivated. It’s clear how much heart and firsthand experience went into every story.

Reading it also got me thinking about my own writing journey. Each book I’ve worked on has taught me something new about patience, perspective, and letting a story evolve naturally, even when it takes unexpected turns. It’s always fascinating to reflect on the ways our experiences shape the stories we tell.

I’d love to hear about your own process with this book. Did you find it easy to translate your Peace Corps experiences into these stories, or was it more of a challenge to capture the humor, the tension, and the history all at once? Thank you for sharing such a memorable and honest perspective on life as a Peace Corps volunteer. Half the fun was getting to see Liberia through your eyes.

Warmly,
Taylor Jenkins Reid

The thoughtfulness of this comment caught my attention. And how well it was written. Of course, I responded to Taylor. But there is more. Taylor is a best-selling author of the New York Times and has won a number of national awards for her writing. Among her books is The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, a book that the book club that Peggy and I belonged to for 36 years had picked to read. An Amazon Prime television series based on one of her books is now playing.

Taylor immediately responded to my comments and asked if I would share my body of work. Now I have to tell her she has it, the rest is tied up in 1500 WordPress blogs. Grin. I must say, I am now inspired to finish UT-OH! asap. You may be seeing a couple of chapters a week. I’d prefer that my body of work include two books.

Costa Rica Is for the Birds. It’s a good thing.

Our villa looks out on a large bird feeder that the staff and guests (including us) of Lake Gardens daily fill with a variety of fruits that the local population of birds love. I hate to confess this as a would-be birder, but I can sit on our couch and take photos of all the action. And action it is, constant drama of who gets to eat when, a veritable pecking order of turkey-size birds down to sparrow-size. A lot more photos will be coming of birds and hopefully other jungle life. This is a teaser.

This is the king or queen of the feeder. A Crested Guan. All other birds are required to leave the platform when they are on it.
When Peggy opened our curtains on our first morning, Peggy found this crew back-lit by the sun lined up for breakfast and snapped their photo.
Up close and personal.
Number 2 on the pecking order was this fellow. We aren’t sure what it was, but our assumption is a fledgling Guam. If so, their parents were not about to share food with them. A bush was just below the feeder that the adults would chase the kids around, and around. It was like the Keystone Cops.
Here are the kids up on the bird feeder.
Number three was a Montezuma oropendola.
Peggy caught a photo of it looking the other direction.
Number 4: A Brown Jay. We recognized this fellow immediately by its call. We’ve spent our lives with various members of the jay family, but never a brown one.
I swear the pretty bird was posing for Peggy. He kept coming back to this lamp outsiide our villa and looking in the window. He didn’t eat fruit, however, He ate bugs. It’s a Social Flycatcher.

That’s it for today. On Thursday, I’ll write about a death defying tree race in UT-OH, one of our many adventures that makes me wonder how we ever lived through childhood. And, there will be more bird photos from Costa Rica.

UT-OH Chapter 6: Searching for God in all the Wrong Places

/ Curt Mekemson / 9 Comments
This photo was taken 2-3 years after our parents sent the Mekemson kids off to Vacation Bible School, but here we are. I’m on the left, my dog Tickle is next, then my sister, Nancy and my brother, Marshall. Tickle got to stay home. He didn’t need religion; he was a good dog.

How to develop a warped view of religion…

I’m continuing with my blog-a-book/memoir/misadventure series today with my first two experiences of organized religion. It was a rocky start.

Pop inherited most of the religious fervor in our family. According to my mother, his mom was a hardline Scotch Presbyterian with a sense of humor to match. One didn’t drink, cuss, smoke or perform any of the other nefarious deeds the devil so cunningly uses to capture wayward souls. Fortunately, he missed some of the thou-shall-nots his mother preached. But he did inherit a sense that church is “good for you,” however, and this meant it would be doubly good for his kids. While Mother had more doubts about religion, even she felt that a little God wouldn’t hurt us. Or, at least she recognized kid-free summer time when she saw it.

Eventually this led to the three Mekemson kids being spiffed up and marched off to Vacation Bible School. My brother, Marshall, and I got a rare midweek bath, clean clothes, and the lecture: No shoving, shouting, fighting or farting. Our older sister, Nancy, bathed regularly and didn’t need the lecture.

In those days, going to church in Diamond Springs meant going to the Community Church, a small, white, box-shaped building that came with a straight steeple and fundamentalist leanings.

Other than the fact that Bible School seriously interfered with my play time, it wasn’t all that bad. I was encouraged to color lots of sheep and no one seemed to mind that they were purple. But the real fall-on-your-knees thing that grabbed my attention was all the stuff about miracles. I was fascinated to know how Noah got all of those animals on one boat, what he did with the poop, and how Christ walked on water. I had so many ‘hows and whys’ the Bible School teacher stopped calling on me. I went back to coloring sheep.

One day we were privileged to witness a true miracle in progress. Somehow, we had escaped from Vacation Bible School only to be corralled into attending an actual kids’ service. I think it was a graduation ceremony meant to put the exclamation point on our lessons. It came complete with hymns, prayers, a sermon and lots of Amens. Then the big moment arrived.

“Would you like to hear the Lord knocking at your heart?” the Minister asked.

“Oh yeah!” “Wow!” “Really?” What little kid could resist? The minister instructed us to bow our heads and close our eyes. He was quite insistent on the eye part.

“None of you little kids open your eyes until I tell you to,” he ordered. Apparently, you can’t witness miracles with your eyes open.

Twenty little children dutifully bowed their heads and screwed their eyes shut. Three didn’t. If there was to be a miracle, the Mekemson kids wanted to see it. So we watched the preacher with eagle-eyed attention. He glared back at us. Whoa, this was getting interesting. Next, he tiptoed from the pulpit to the back of the church. What was he up to?

Bang, bang, bang. He was up to pounding on the back door. Yes indeed, the Lord does work in mysterious ways. We watched the minister tiptoe back to his pulpit.

“OK,” he said, “you can open your eyes now. Did you hear the Lord knocking?”

Twenty little sets of big round eyes popped open and twenty little mouths started gabbing all at once. The minister smiled smugly until his eyes fell on us. You could almost hear what he was thinking and I didn’t think ministers were supposed to think those kinds of thoughts.

“Vacation Bible School is over,” he announced abruptly. “I want you all to think about what you learned today. You can go home now.” We jumped up for a quick escape.

“Nancy, Marshall and Curt, I want you to stay.”

Ut-Oh. We were about to learn that the devil had reserved a special place for us. The Mekemson kids were very bad and downright sinful. We had better change our ways or we were going to spend eternity in a very hot place. We were also being held hostage until the other kids left. It wouldn’t do to have us spread malicious rumors.

After being pummeled by twenty minutes of non-stop haranguing, we were finally turned loose. It was pushing 100 degrees outside and Mother was waiting impatiently in one of our ancient, non-air conditioned cars. She lit into us with an intensity that would have made the Minister cry “uncle.” I wondered if our punishment had already begun. But Nancy straightened things out quickly with all of the righteousness of a 12-year-old girl— and forever became my hero. Not only was the minister a ‘lying, deceitful, old so and so,’ she was never coming back to that church again. Ditto.

Marshall, who was seven, sought his own peculiar form of revenge. (He told me about it later out of fear I would tattle.) Our friend, Lee Kinser, lived next to the church and had an old outhouse up the hill behind his home. In-door plumbing had long since replaced its primary use and the daily deposits had turned to dust. The outhouse’s appeal to Marshall was that if he sat on the seat and left the door open, he had a straight shot at the church’s bell. All Marshall needed was his BB gun and a Sunday service. Actually, I think he enjoyed more than one service from his box seat. In my imagination, I can still hear the minister saying to his Sunday congregations, “Do you hear the Lord pinging?”

Brother Jones and a Glowing Jesus

And that was my introduction to religion. Almost. Another fine tutor was Brother James Allen Jones, or some such name long since forgotten. He was a southern radio preacher par excellence in an era when radio still dominated the airwaves. At least it did in Diamond. There was only one TV in town and it certainly didn’t belong to us.

Normally, Marshall and I focused our radio listening time to standard kid fare like the Lone Ranger, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and the Shadow. We would sit glued to the radio with all the concentration of later TV/computer/phone screen generations and listen to such immortal words as “Who was that masked man?” “I don’t know but he left a silver bullet behind.” And then an awed, “That was the Lone Ranger,” as off in the distance you heard “Hi O Silver away!” We knew that Sergeant Preston and his faithful dog King would always get their man, just like we knew the Shadow would open his program with the question, “Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of man?”

The Shadow knew. And so did Brother Jones. He also knew how to ream it out. On Wednesday nights, we belonged to him. I am sure the devil quaked in his hooves to know that he had such a ferocious opponent. Brother Jones was more than fire and brimstone, however. He could cure anything. After his show the lame would walk, the blind would see and the deaf would hear. Even hardened criminals would fall on their knees and start sobbing. It was at the conclusion of the show that Jones was at his finest, though. It was time to go for the gold.

“I can see you now. I can see you sitting in front of your radio.” The good Brother would start out in his most hypnotic voice, repeating himself so people would get the message right.

“I can see you reaching in your back pocket. I can see you reaching in your back pocket and taking out your wallet. Praise the Lord! I can see you opening your wallet. I can see you opening your wallet and taking out a ten-dollar bill. Hallelujah! Now you are taking your ten-dollar bill and laying it on the radio. I am blessing you and your ten-dollar bill. Lay your hand on the radio. Feel my blessing coming through. Do you feel it? Do you feel it? Hallelujah and Amen Brothers and Sisters! Now I can see you getting out an envelope and a pen. You are addressing the envelope to me, Brother James Allen Jones. You are now taking the ten-dollar bill and placing it in the envelope. Thank the sweet Lord! You are closing the envelope and stamping it. The first thing you will do in the morning is mail it to me. Blessed are those who give! In return, I will mail you a fine gift, a genuine picture of Jesus Christ that glows in the dark.”

I always wanted the genuine picture of Jesus, but I was a little concerned about its glow in the dark qualities. Marshall and I had been given a cross that glowed in the dark at Vacation Bible School and Marshall kept it on our dresser. It scared me, like the tombstones in the Graveyard. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and there it would be, glowing at me. You couldn’t turn it off and Marshall wouldn’t let me shove it in a drawer. My only solution was to hide under the covers. Can you imagine the trauma of growing up with a glowing cross that forces you to hide under the covers? Who knows what damage a glowing Jesus might have caused.

As you might surmise, by this early point in my life I had already developed a somewhat warped view of religion, not to mention a frustrated pair of parents. But they weren’t about to give up. Their savage little beasts would be tamed. It took Tarzan to show me the light.

Next on my parent’s road map to religious enlightenment was the Episcopal Church of Our Savior in Placerville. This time they used a different tactic, bribery. After church, we stopped at Tom Raley’s grocery store and were allowed to buy a Pepsi and pick out a comic book. I would eagerly search the rack for the latest issue of Tarzan, and, on really lucky weekends, find one. It was like winning a gazillion dollars in the lottery. The mere thought of joining the ape-man on his romp through the jungle was more than I could resist. I became a devout Episcopalian.

Next on our Burning Man focus series, we will take a look at some unusual structures that are built at Burning Man.

“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.” Obviously.

Next on UT-OH: Nancy Jo and the Graveyard Ghost— a terrifying experience.

UT-OH! Chapter 5: How MC the Cat Almost Lost His Danglies

/ Curt Mekemson / 10 Comments
Finding a photo of MC the Cat is impossible, given that he never was around long enough to have his photo taken. Looking solemn, I’m on the left holding my dog Tickle— who did have a role to play in this tale. My brother, Marshall, is on the right holding Happy and her puppies. The size of the pups suggests that there was a question about who the daddy was. Maybe that’s why Tickle is looking disgusted. The Graveyard where MC disappeared, looms in the background.

No story of our family pets and the Graveyard is complete without MC the Cat. He was the exact opposite of Demon. She was as dark as the Graveyard on a moonless night; he was as white as the ghosts that lived there. She was loving and tame while he was as wild as a domestic cat can be— a throwback to his ancient ancestors. He was not a climb-up-on-your-lap type of cat. His one passion in life was spreading his seeds as far and wide as he could travel and still make it home for dinner. He was a tomcat’s Tomcat, a legend in his own mind. 

His one challenge was his small size, which meant that he often came out on the losing end in his battles with larger toms. He would arrive home beat up and battered. One time a chunk of his ear was missing. Another time it was the tip of his tail. How he managed that, we didn’t have a clue.

I encouraged my cocker spaniel, Tickle, to break up the fights to minimize the damage. He loved his job. He would dash to the door at the first yowl and fly off our porch in full bark when I turned him loose. Other than giving Tickle a purpose in life, his efforts had little impact, however.

Pop decided that drastic measures were called for. MC would have to lose his offending appendages. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of money in our household for veterinary bills. But there was a solution. We were a do-it-yourself kind of family. For example, cocker puppies are supposed to have their tails cut off fairly soon after birth. My dad would take the litter, tie thread tightly around their tails, and then break out the tool he used for cutting tin. Snip, YIP! And it was over.  

Obviously, neutering a full-grown tom cat was a bit more difficult. Our Italian neighbor, Papa Passerini, offered an Old Country solution: “All you need is a pair of tin snips, a burlap bag, gloves, a pocket knife, and a rope.” 

Alarm bells should have gone off— massive alarm bells heard all the way to Italy. But they didn’t. Pop moved ahead with the suggested medical procedure.

While MC had never been a paragon of feline domesticity, he’d at least let me pat him on the head if food was involved, as long as I was quick and limited myself to one pat. He even managed a brief purr when I picked him up the morning of his ‘operation’ and carried him up to Passerini’s. Any previous pretensions of tolerating people ceased instantly, though, when his legs were tied up and he was dumped into the dark gunny sack.

When Pop cut a slit in the burlap with his pocket knife and reached a gloved hand through, he was met by claws of fury. MC had shed his ropes faster than Houdini. No one, but no one, was going to grab him by the testicles, pull him up to the slit, and cut them off with a pair of tin snips. He clawed his way out of the bag and became a white blur as he disappeared into the Graveyard. And there he would stay. After that, I would only see him at dinner time, and then, only after I put his food down and walked several feet away. 

The good news, from MC’s perspective, was that he was able to continue his tomcatting ways with all parts of his anatomy intact right up until he reached old age and quietly wandered off to tomcat heaven. Where, according to rumor, he was twice as big, had eternal youth, and a long line of lovely female cats stretched off to infinity eagerly awaiting his services. It was probably fake news.