Judy Hamilton
31st October 2005, 06:27 AM (06:27)
Humor..Good Humor
Humor..Good Humor if you need a chuckle
October 18, 2005
JD Wetterling
My lexicon defines allegory as a work of art in which a deeper meaning underlies the superficial meaning. This story is an allegory—only God and I know which parts are factualized fiction and which are fictionalized facts. It conveys eternal verities about the effects of sin on an incorrigible country boy before God’s saving grace got hold of him.
The most dangerous season in my youthful years was Halloween—the tricks were much more fun than the treats—and the mother of all mischief in those pre-indoor plumbing days was upsetting outhouses. The day has pagan origins, and I can't think of anything more pagan than upsetting thy neighbor's outhouse. Like most sins, it was adrenalin-charged—no other caper matched the testosterone rush so crucial to male adolescent development.
The most memorable sortie of all my Halloween campaigns was the night we laid Gobbler Hollis's big three-holer on its back. There were four of us: Stick, Face, Neg, and me. “Neg” was short for negative, an allusion to his IQ. The other two names had prurient connotations and are best left unexplained.
Gobbler farmed 240 flat-as-a-tabletop acres five miles south of Stronghurst, a village of 950 souls in western Illinois. His outhouse was behind a large coal shed located in the back yard. Both structures, made of wood, were about fifty yards from the back door of the big old two-story farmhouse and twenty feet in front of the barnyard fence.
We had a full moon that night, which was good and bad. It allowed us to see what we were doing, but it was so bright that it also kept Gobbler's attack rooster awake and crowing at the moon. The rooster, with his 100-hen harem, had the run of the barnyard. Our strategy called for a semi-circular approach though the pasture, over a couple of woven wire fences and across the barnyard to the outhouse—out of shotgun range from the back door of the house—but that cocky rooster considered any moving thing inside the barnyard fence a major threat to his masculinity. (He had such a prodigious libido that Gobbler's wife, Glennis, short and beamy, always had plenty of what she called “egg money” tucked in her cleavage. She had room for a lot of egg money.)
We were forced to double back around and make an assault through the front and side yard of Gobbler's house. It was Indian summer, the windows were open and we could hear Gobbler snoring as we sneaked by the side of the house. Gobbler was not a little guy; he had height and awesome girth. If his shoelaces ever got tied, it was because Glennis tied them. He bore an uncanny resemblance to his namesake, both in form and movement. It was his size and terrible temper that had kept his outhouse upright in Halloweens past.
There were several obstacles in the yard to circumvent and remember. Remembering was important because, unlike ingress, which was slow and stealthy, egress would be at top speed and maximum panic.
Once past the side yard we had to traverse the rhubarb patch, which was well above knee high, and six rows of popcorn still standing right behind the rhubarb. Both should have been harvested by now, but Gobbler never got in a hurry about such things. Folks said that with ten kids he had other priorities.
The clothesline, consisting of two strands of number nine wire, Adam's apple high, stretched the width of the back yard. Its only break was midway, where the boardwalk, one plank wide, led from the back door of the house to the outhouse.
Staying in the deepest shadows, we arrived safely at our target hidden behind the coal shed. The hen house was nearby, just ten feet beyond the barnyard fence. In the still of the night we could hear the hens fluttering and intermittently pluck-plucking their way through the night. The rooster stood frozen at the door of his castle, head cocked, watching our every move.
Then we got a second bad break. A cloud floated by and hid the moon. It got dark as the inside of a cow as four adolescent heart rates approached their anaerobic limits. We were panting like pups as we felt our way around the outhouse. The night air was warm and humid, making it a noxious, eye-watering experience.
For all the heavy traffic it had to handle, it was not a sturdy structure. There was only one way to tip it over and that was backwards. The door was in the middle front, facing the coal shed, and opened inward, leaving precious little solid wall for four teenaged vandals to push against, and the coal shed was so close it allowed a very poor angle of attack.
The trick was to carefully tilt the outhouse past the point where it would fall backwards on its own. Anyone who's ever done it, and there are probably very few of us vets still around, knows that to reach that point, especially on those big multi-holers, you had to lean well out across that odoriferous abyss. It can't be a slam-bang kind of thing, like Nagurski slanting off-tackle, or you'll end up face-down at the bottom of the pit. And if you're really having a bad day the unit will settle back down where it came from and there you are without a paddle.
Well, Neg was so scared he asked if it would be okay if he used the facility before we upset it. We said, “Yeah, but make it quick,” and he opened the creaking door and went on in. The sound of him tearing pages out of the Sears catalogue seemed sufficient to wake the dead. When he rejoined us we went over our escape routes one last time. It would be four different directions approximately thirty degrees apart. Twelve-gauge birdshot probably wouldn't kill anybody, but the pattern of one shell with split wads would be wide enough to put welts on the backsides of four boys running side by side.
Midnight. Zero hour. We took up our positions and four shoulders leaned against the outhouse wall. Slowly, amid grunts and heavy breathing, it began to tilt until we got it to the balance point. Stick, the shortest one of the bunch, was stretched out so far his whole body was trembling. On a whispered count of three we gave it the last tweak it needed to come under gravity's spell. At the same instant the moon came out from behind the cloud, and that macho rooster began to crow.
The rest is just a muddle of sounds and sights overlaid with heart-stopping fright. I remember the deafening sound of crashing lumber as the outhouse disintegrated on contact, followed by the siren sound of Glennis' call to battle. Boy, did she have a set of lungs. I vaguely recall a noise like a hog in a mud wallow. That would have been Stick. (We made him ride in the back of the pick-up all the way back to town.) I'll never forget hearing what sounded like the roar of a distraught bull, followed by someone going through a door without bothering to open it, and followed by heavy artillery at close range. There were the sounds of kids crying and screaming, chickens carrying on like there was a skunk in the hen house, and the yowl of a cat in pain. I decided later, judging from the scratches on my leg, that I must have stepped on the cat during my egress. The only other sound was the dull thud of someone landing hard on the ground. It occurred to me, as I legged it through the night at Mach I, overdosed on adrenaline, that maybe Gobbler was firing deer slugs and somebody was dead, but we learned later that it was just Face trying to decapitate himself on the clothesline.
By grace alone we all escaped with only superficial battle damage. Ultimate good came from that proximate evil (Genesis 50:20): Gobbler got indoor plumbing and, of far greater importance to my immortal soul, I repented, forsook my felonious ways and God forgave the iniquity of my sin (Psalm 32:5).
Submitted by me Judy
author a Nam Pilot Friend
JD Wetterling
www.JDWETTERLING.com
Humor..Good Humor if you need a chuckle
October 18, 2005
JD Wetterling
My lexicon defines allegory as a work of art in which a deeper meaning underlies the superficial meaning. This story is an allegory—only God and I know which parts are factualized fiction and which are fictionalized facts. It conveys eternal verities about the effects of sin on an incorrigible country boy before God’s saving grace got hold of him.
The most dangerous season in my youthful years was Halloween—the tricks were much more fun than the treats—and the mother of all mischief in those pre-indoor plumbing days was upsetting outhouses. The day has pagan origins, and I can't think of anything more pagan than upsetting thy neighbor's outhouse. Like most sins, it was adrenalin-charged—no other caper matched the testosterone rush so crucial to male adolescent development.
The most memorable sortie of all my Halloween campaigns was the night we laid Gobbler Hollis's big three-holer on its back. There were four of us: Stick, Face, Neg, and me. “Neg” was short for negative, an allusion to his IQ. The other two names had prurient connotations and are best left unexplained.
Gobbler farmed 240 flat-as-a-tabletop acres five miles south of Stronghurst, a village of 950 souls in western Illinois. His outhouse was behind a large coal shed located in the back yard. Both structures, made of wood, were about fifty yards from the back door of the big old two-story farmhouse and twenty feet in front of the barnyard fence.
We had a full moon that night, which was good and bad. It allowed us to see what we were doing, but it was so bright that it also kept Gobbler's attack rooster awake and crowing at the moon. The rooster, with his 100-hen harem, had the run of the barnyard. Our strategy called for a semi-circular approach though the pasture, over a couple of woven wire fences and across the barnyard to the outhouse—out of shotgun range from the back door of the house—but that cocky rooster considered any moving thing inside the barnyard fence a major threat to his masculinity. (He had such a prodigious libido that Gobbler's wife, Glennis, short and beamy, always had plenty of what she called “egg money” tucked in her cleavage. She had room for a lot of egg money.)
We were forced to double back around and make an assault through the front and side yard of Gobbler's house. It was Indian summer, the windows were open and we could hear Gobbler snoring as we sneaked by the side of the house. Gobbler was not a little guy; he had height and awesome girth. If his shoelaces ever got tied, it was because Glennis tied them. He bore an uncanny resemblance to his namesake, both in form and movement. It was his size and terrible temper that had kept his outhouse upright in Halloweens past.
There were several obstacles in the yard to circumvent and remember. Remembering was important because, unlike ingress, which was slow and stealthy, egress would be at top speed and maximum panic.
Once past the side yard we had to traverse the rhubarb patch, which was well above knee high, and six rows of popcorn still standing right behind the rhubarb. Both should have been harvested by now, but Gobbler never got in a hurry about such things. Folks said that with ten kids he had other priorities.
The clothesline, consisting of two strands of number nine wire, Adam's apple high, stretched the width of the back yard. Its only break was midway, where the boardwalk, one plank wide, led from the back door of the house to the outhouse.
Staying in the deepest shadows, we arrived safely at our target hidden behind the coal shed. The hen house was nearby, just ten feet beyond the barnyard fence. In the still of the night we could hear the hens fluttering and intermittently pluck-plucking their way through the night. The rooster stood frozen at the door of his castle, head cocked, watching our every move.
Then we got a second bad break. A cloud floated by and hid the moon. It got dark as the inside of a cow as four adolescent heart rates approached their anaerobic limits. We were panting like pups as we felt our way around the outhouse. The night air was warm and humid, making it a noxious, eye-watering experience.
For all the heavy traffic it had to handle, it was not a sturdy structure. There was only one way to tip it over and that was backwards. The door was in the middle front, facing the coal shed, and opened inward, leaving precious little solid wall for four teenaged vandals to push against, and the coal shed was so close it allowed a very poor angle of attack.
The trick was to carefully tilt the outhouse past the point where it would fall backwards on its own. Anyone who's ever done it, and there are probably very few of us vets still around, knows that to reach that point, especially on those big multi-holers, you had to lean well out across that odoriferous abyss. It can't be a slam-bang kind of thing, like Nagurski slanting off-tackle, or you'll end up face-down at the bottom of the pit. And if you're really having a bad day the unit will settle back down where it came from and there you are without a paddle.
Well, Neg was so scared he asked if it would be okay if he used the facility before we upset it. We said, “Yeah, but make it quick,” and he opened the creaking door and went on in. The sound of him tearing pages out of the Sears catalogue seemed sufficient to wake the dead. When he rejoined us we went over our escape routes one last time. It would be four different directions approximately thirty degrees apart. Twelve-gauge birdshot probably wouldn't kill anybody, but the pattern of one shell with split wads would be wide enough to put welts on the backsides of four boys running side by side.
Midnight. Zero hour. We took up our positions and four shoulders leaned against the outhouse wall. Slowly, amid grunts and heavy breathing, it began to tilt until we got it to the balance point. Stick, the shortest one of the bunch, was stretched out so far his whole body was trembling. On a whispered count of three we gave it the last tweak it needed to come under gravity's spell. At the same instant the moon came out from behind the cloud, and that macho rooster began to crow.
The rest is just a muddle of sounds and sights overlaid with heart-stopping fright. I remember the deafening sound of crashing lumber as the outhouse disintegrated on contact, followed by the siren sound of Glennis' call to battle. Boy, did she have a set of lungs. I vaguely recall a noise like a hog in a mud wallow. That would have been Stick. (We made him ride in the back of the pick-up all the way back to town.) I'll never forget hearing what sounded like the roar of a distraught bull, followed by someone going through a door without bothering to open it, and followed by heavy artillery at close range. There were the sounds of kids crying and screaming, chickens carrying on like there was a skunk in the hen house, and the yowl of a cat in pain. I decided later, judging from the scratches on my leg, that I must have stepped on the cat during my egress. The only other sound was the dull thud of someone landing hard on the ground. It occurred to me, as I legged it through the night at Mach I, overdosed on adrenaline, that maybe Gobbler was firing deer slugs and somebody was dead, but we learned later that it was just Face trying to decapitate himself on the clothesline.
By grace alone we all escaped with only superficial battle damage. Ultimate good came from that proximate evil (Genesis 50:20): Gobbler got indoor plumbing and, of far greater importance to my immortal soul, I repented, forsook my felonious ways and God forgave the iniquity of my sin (Psalm 32:5).
Submitted by me Judy
author a Nam Pilot Friend
JD Wetterling
www.JDWETTERLING.com