|
Story #1
In 1969, after graduating from a little Lutheran co-ed junior college in California, I went, in the fall, for my third year of studies, such as they were, to an all-men’s Lutheran preachers college in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. When the movie Midnight Cowboy came to town, or maybe came back to town, two of my California pals and I, having seen the posters for the film and supposing it to be a western, dressed in cowboy hats and jeans, and went the the theater. My friend Bill West had a little snapshot camera and brought it along and asked a Hoosier in the ticket line to take a picture of us three ministerial scholars posing by the poster. Bill gave me a print, and when I find it again, I will show it to you if I remember. We all admired the movie, as I recall, but it was so painfully bleak that many years passed before I dared to watch it again. I could tell you about Easy Rider in Ft. Wayne, if it had something to do with Texas, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t. New Mexico, yes. And Louisiana.
Story #2
In the summer of 1973, after pretty much flunking out of minister school and getting soundly rejected by the U.S. Army when I tried to join, and driving taxicab for half a year, and moving to Hawaii and getting married to an ambitious teenaged college sophomore there, and doing some more stuff worthy now of reminiscences, I, together with my wife, by then a college grad, her three siblings of middle-school and high-school age, and her mom, flew to Washington, D.C., and borrowed my parents’ 1966 Ford camper truck and drove it to Ft. Wayne for a quick look at the minister school, to which, you see, I had been accepted again as a student, and then went on to Rio, Wisc., so that my Hawaii family could meet my Wisconsin family, and then went on up into Canada and ambled over to the West Coast and more hurriedly traveled down to Disneyland and sent the family back to Honolulu. I could tell you sometime about my conversations with armed guards on the several occasions when I mistakenly carried knives into airports, including the almost Dundee-esque camp knife in the chaos of my camera bag at LAX after our knifeless Disneyland visit, but none of those occasions involved Texas, either. No, it was on the not-so-leisurely drive back to Ft. Wayne by way of Las Vegas and Grand Canyon Park that my wife and I passed through the only small part of Texas and early one morning stopped at a Stuckey’s truck stop and carried our toothbrushes, unconcealed, into the convenience store and headed for the rest rooms, but the store manager, a slender, gray-haired, Vitalised white fellow, somewhat inhospitably remarked, “Ah’d preciate it if y’all wooden be carryin on that way—our rest rooms here are for the payin customers,” which, of course, we might have been, paying customers, in another few minutes, after we’d brushed our teeth and washed our faces, if the fellow had been a bit more welcoming. I offered some gentle words in reply, and the manager did allow us to brush our teeth—“Be quick about it, then,” he suggested—but I have ever after generally managed to avoid taking my business or my toothbrushes to the Stuckey’s truck stops that I might otherwise have been inclined to visit.
Story #3
One of my favorite jokes, or I suppose technically it is a riddle, that I enjoy telling to ladies who seem potentially appreciative of off-color humor, in most any place except the Southwest of the United States, can properly be told only by a man and probably would best be accompanied by the props of a western hat and tight-fitting, belted Levi’s. I push up the front brim of my hat and tuck my chin down toward my chest and puff that chest out like a banty, hook my thumbs under the belt both sides of the buckle, give a huge goofy grin, and say in an exaggerated drawl, “Do you ladies know whyyy us Texuns is alwus smilin?” The audience of course will say, No, why is that? or they’ll say, Yeah, as a matter of fact I do remember that one, but if they say No, why, then I, grinning idiotically, say in the overdrawn drawl, “We gots loooooooong thuuuuuumbs!”
Now, friends, I promised you three true stories, and if you are doubting whether Story #3 is true, I will admit I cannot vouch for the part about the thumbs, but, yes, indeed, that particular joke is absolutely truly one of my favorites.
Bye-bye now, and y’all take care.
♦
|
