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Country Humor Use it up, wear it out, and all that
By Jack S. Bray
Some people swap off a car when the vehicle begins to need a wash job. Every year or two, they buy a new tractor, new chainsaw or a new boat. They seem to be hooked on bright paint.
I am not one of those people. I try to get the last bit of good out of machinery, equipment and tools. I keep stuff around long enough to get well acquainted with it—and usually with the dealer who repairs it.
My reason, I often say, is to cut down on the ever-larger pile of junk that threatens to crowd us Americans out of a place to stand. In reality, I am cheap.
Admittedly, there are shortcomings connected with trying to make inanimate objects outlast their normal life expectancy.
A few years ago, an editor hired me to cover one of those conventions where everybody gives everybody else an award. He wanted photos of all the awarders and awardees.
About halfway through the awards ceremony, the batteries in my 20-year-old electronic flash conked out.
Not to worry. I had a spare set of batteries charging in my 25-year-old battery charger.
Only they weren’t charging. The charger was on the fritz. I made it through the rest of the awards deal on throwaway alkaline batteries, but it was touch-and-go.
The editor is the kind of guy who likes to gin up things to worry about.
“You’ve got a lot of stuff to shoot tomorrow, too,” he fretted. “What are you going to do?
Do you think you can find a new battery charger on a weekend?”
I’d never heard such crass commercialism.
“No, I’m going to borrow a screwdriver and overhaul the old charger unit,” I calmly told him.
Maybe he didn’t believe me, because he went with me to my motel room and stood there watching while I performed an autopsy on the ailing battery charger.
“Aha, I think here’s the problem right here,” I said. “This little wire of a dingus is not making contact when I put a battery in.”
I straightened out the wire and plugged in the battery charger. There was a sharp “pop” and lights went out all over that end of the motel. I hunted up a photo supply store and bought a new charger.
I suppose you sometimes can overdo this idea of trying to make things last beyond their allotted years.
In fact, if I can get my 12-year-old pickup started, I may go to town and see about trading in this 8-year-old computer on a new one.
Said just right
By Mitch Jayne
One of the joys of growing up in Missouri is that your friends, especially the older ones, keep your sense of proportion honest. When I decided, at 12, to run an extravagant trap line on the Fox River, an elderly neighbor of ours looked at my map and said. “Well, the way out looks good, but it’s way too long coming back.” Which was his polite way of telling me I was about to bite off more than I could chew in distance covered. I thought he couldn’t have put it better.
When I came down to the Ozarks to teach, I found not only the same sense of proportion, but a kind of speech that gets the message through with humor and startling comparisons. If I had proposed that 6-mile trap line to an Ozarker, I’d have heard “Trade ‘bout half them traps for a cowhide, you might have enough shoe leather to run that line.”
After 60-some years of living among people who express thoughts in pictures, I’m still amazed at words you can see. Like the father of a teenage boy who told his son, “Now you go up and dung out your room; don’t make your mother pick up after you!” I had a mental picture of that kid using a shovel, as if cleaning a hen house.
I had no sooner gotten over this exaggeration than I heard another dad make a comment about his high school daughter who was set on capturing a certain boy. “She don’t watch out, she’s gonna tree-top that feller!” he said, using the old term for getting excited and jerking too hard on a hooked fish. Description is never boring in the Ozarks with all our ways of looking at something.
A parking lot just down the hill from my house gets a lot of use on Sunday, and I’ve heard a dozen admiring measurements of the cars parked there from my visitors. “Looks like they’re shoaled-up, down yonder,” or “They’re sure shored-up (piled-up, fetched up, beached-up, wadded-up, kinked-up, tangled-up, yarded-up, stacked-up, mobbed–up . . . everything but parked) down there.”
Most Missourians like adding “up” to adjectives, but Ozarkers also toss in expressions. Not too long ago, a tidy woman would “red-up” her house for company, “trigger-up” for going out and “gether-up” the wash line when it “clabbered-up” for rain. It wasn’t many years back that a kid from “out in the jillikins” told me jokingly that his girl friend “wasn’t much for looks but sure did clean up good,” and an Ozark cosmetic salesman assured my wife that his product wouldn’t “mire-up” on her face.
I suppose those old “up” words will disappear over time, but I’ll bet the expressions won’t. Last week an old river guide from down here visited a cafe in St. Louis and saw his first espresso machine. “Leave it to city people,” he told his friends, “to build a whole daggone steam engine just to make a cup of coffee.” I rest my case.
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