Travels With Becky

Forethought

I was thinking about how we Yankees are sometimes misunderstood. For example, you might not know it to look at us, but we are very considerate of other people’s feelings and needs. 

For example, the fella from away was up at the tip of the state on his first ice fishing expedition.  His hosts, Yankees, loaded all the gear – tip-ups, shiners, auger, beer – into the old pick-up and drove across the ice toward a likely cove on Lake Umbagog. The fella noticed a long rope trailing off the back bumper, attached to an empty milk jug, bouncing along the ice as they drove. “What’s that for?” he asked.

“That’s a flotation marker – so if we go through the ice and sink to the bottom they’ll know where to find us.”

Now, that’s thinking ahead!

A good little story

A father and son were fishing from the bank of the Contoocook River. They dozed off. A fog rolled in. The son woke up, alarmed. “Father,” he said, “We ain’t here no more.”

“Don’t worry, son,” the father said. “We ain’t far from here.”

I love this lttle story. I don’t know why.

Down in the dump

Chris Divine told me this story before, but I forgot it. I’m glad he reminded me. True story. 

A woman in town got locked into the dump. She unloaded her wagon, but when she got to the gate it was closed and locked. She went back to the dumpmaster’s little house:  “I’m locked in.”

“Dump’s closed from 12:00 to 12:30. It’s my lunch break.”

“You need to let me out.”

“I’m on a break.”

So she had to wait. She wasn’t happy.

A week later, she returned to the dump with a lock and chain. After unloading, she passed through the gate and proceeded to apply the lock and chain. The dumpmaster said, “ What are you doin’?” (Only, perhaps with more colorful language.)

“I”m finished dumping so I’m locking the gate and going home.”  And she went home.

Fish tale

Naturally at the Squam Lakes Association annual pancake breakfast, we swapped fishing stories. I know this one must be true because it’s the second time I’ve heard it.

Bob’s brother-in-law from Massachusetts tossed a line into a brook and caught a few. Along comes the warden who asks to see a license. The brother-in-law, just visiting New Hampshire  for a couple days, has no license. He says, “I didn’t catch these fish out of this brook. These are my pet trained fish.”

The warden says, “What?”

“I put them in the brook, and when I call them they come back.”

The brother-in-law proceeds to dump the fish in the brook. The warden waits.  After a while he says, “So when do the fish come back?”

The brother-in-law says, “What fish?”

Ouch

At the Squam Lake Association annual pancake breakfast, the cakes were piled high and the bacon crispy, and folks seemed to enjoy the whole deal. Check out all the good work Association does here. 

We got talking about nimrod moves. A fellow said he was  on a construction sight when a colleague nailed his foot with a nail gun to a 5-foot X 8-foot sheet of plywood. The plywood wouldn’t fit in the truck, so they sawed a foot-shaped piece out of the middle and off he went to have his nail removed. Must have looked pretty strange hobbling into the emergency room.

Which reminded me of the story of Dr. Gijs Bozuwa of Wakefield, who displayed a collection of fishing lures and flies in his office. A young patient said, “Dr. Bozuwa, you must really love fishing.”

“No,” the doctor said, “I don’t fish. I pulled all those out of people’s heads.”

Now, that’s quite a collection.

Stalled

My friend Art Slade and I took a ride to Sunapee the other day. Since he lived in Sunapee until age ten, I asked him what was the best way to get there from Northwood. He said through Boscawen, Andover and New London. So we skipped I-89 and took the back roads.

We visited the sites of the hotels his father managed when Art was a little boy. We saw all the new houses on land his family used to own. He hasn’t lived in Sunapee for more than 50 years. A lot has changed. But the Methodist Church Hall where I told stories that evening, he said, hadn’t changed much at all since the last time he was there – dressed as a pirate for a Halloween party.

The story of the night came from a lady who seemed quite prim and proper. She was dining at a restaurant in Concord with a friend, when the friend rose and excused herself to use the restroom. The lady said she didn’t need to go, but then changed her mind and a couple of minutes later took her place in a stall.

She was chatting away to her friend in the next stall, in particular complaining about pantyhose and how difficult they were to get on and off. Her friend didn’t answer. Didn’t say a word. So the lady took a peek under the stall wall and saw . . . a pair of men’s shoes on a man’s feet. Oh no! She was in the men’s room. She heard the man get up and the door swing shut behind him. The water in the sink was running, she said, when she emerged from her stall, but she was sure he didn’t even stop to wash his hands.

Here’s a view of the lake looking very peaceful before Memorial Day. The white cylinder near the middle is a lighthouse. The gray building on the right is a two-story boat house. If you look really hard you'll see the cute little house tucked among the trees on the island.

Literal yankee

Clyde was telling Francis about the disaster at the hardware store. A shelf that held the cans of paint collapsed under the weight, the cans fell, tops popped and it was a big wet mess.

Francis said: “Gorry, Clyde. It must have been a mess – all those gallons of paint spilled on the floor!”

Clyde said: “T’was mostly quarts.”

Carpenter advice

Advice from the sage Perley Colby in Belmont to a young carpenter, something the carpenter has remembered all his long life:

Said Perley: Two things you’ve got to learn to be a good carpenter. 1. Never ever ever make a mistake.  2. How to fix it.

Another carpenter saying:  Measure twice, cut once. That’s good advice in many situations.

There’s another one about how to hold a hammer,  but I can’t quite get my synapses to fire on it.  The gist is you shouldn't hold the hammer close to the head, hold it near the end of the handle. It’s a clever saying. Anybody know it?  Help!  This is the kind of thing that drives the Moose crazy – almost but not quite remembering.

Funny questions

1. A woman recalls that just five days after the birth of her son, the neighbor, Hitch – an old Yankee – stopped by and spotted the infant.

“Do you think you’ll raise it?” he asked.

2. Janice went to parochial school. One afternoon, she recalls, a nun asked, "Would you like to help clean up some dirty habits?"

3. At a gas station in Concord, a tourist driving a car with New Jersey plates seemed thoroughly lost. The tourist asked the gas station attendant, “Where's the statue of the Minuteman?” Right city. Wrong state.

4. The sister-in-law from New York City visited Barton, Vt., in the fall. After a drive to the village, she had a question:  “Is there a convention in town?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I thought it might be some fraternal organization.  I kept seeing men dressed in orange vests.”

What's new in your collection?

 

In Bethlehem, John Rule and I drove past this house where somebody displays their passion for automotive signage and gas pumps. Quite a collection.

Which reminds me of a small story. When Clarence had to admit he collected dump trucks – nobody owns just one dump truck, and once you’ve accumulated three, you’ve got a collection – he added: “Could be worse. I could collect culverts like Cousin Pod.”

I collect stories. They’re free. They don’t take up much space and you don’t have to dust them. What do you collect? What’s the strangest collection you’ve witnessed? 

Which reminds me that in our family, for years, not so much any more now that we’re in the unloading phase of our lives, a standard question in conversation was: What’s new in your collection?