New York City

Here I sit in New York City again.  I find it very interesting but never better than the Osage.  My first visit was in 1970 on my way to live in the Netherlands for a few months.  It was then that I met Ed Sullivan and got a bloody nose riding on a bus going to the United Nations.  I was filled with curiosity and no fear.  Today it is different but the same.  People walking the streets all hours of the day from every walk of life and every country.  There are a few more electronic signs, actually a lot more as I recall there were NONE back then.  The taxi cabs are newer but just as dirty and the drivers don't speak much English.  Probably the biggest difference today is that back then I had no idea what to expect and today I get what I expect:  a lot of cars, thousands of people per block, streets are relatively dirty, bags of garbage stacked at the corners next to what use to be phone booths.   Yes, that is one big difference, there were lots of phone booths with those doors that folded up when you stepped inside.

• What else is different:  
• hair is no longer just brown, black, white, blond or gray but all of those plus PURPLE, PINK, RED, GREEN and sometimes Rainbows of colors.   
• Guys holding hands with guys and tattoos like you would not believe.   Back in the good old days about the only folks with tattoos were ex-Navy guys with anchors on their arms.  
• Shorts, everyone wears shorts but amazingly enough folks are dressed up like they are going to a party and girls are wearing dresses and high heels.  Now I am not speaking about those little short heels but I be you some of these are at least 6 inches.  It has to hurt.  Back in the old days you would never catch me in shorts but here I am today in shorts in NYC.
• Street performers everywhere.  I don't remember any back then but I may have just missed it.  But I am sure the performers back then were not dressed in the costumes like today.  I saw this guy wearing only underwear and a guitar!  Shouna even recognized him from some commercial.  Then there were two girls in itty bitty bikinis playing guitars and Preston gave them a thumbs up and said they were good.  I was wondering what that meant to him?
• Now I will have to say that NYC folks seem to be healthier looking than Oklahoma folks.  I suppose it is because they have to walk everywhere.  
• Soccer, yes, soccer is everywhere with the World Cup going lots of folks are wearing jerseys for their teams.  My son-in-law is from Columbia and he played soccer in college so he is in yellow today and lots of folks on the streets are wearing Columbia colors and USA soccer team colors and jerseys.  
• Believe it or not but I think most folks in NYC are pretty friendly and more so today than back then.  What changed?  Some say it was 9-11 and how it pulled folks together uniting them as one community.  

I do enjoy the city and watching the people but when it gets down to it I really like home and home is where the heart is.  Maybe another way of saying it is where my friends are is where my heart is.  One of my dearest all time friends was raised in Queens NY and he just texted me (WOW, we sure did not have that back in 1970) and I know that my heart is with him and his family just like it is with Edmond, OK and all of my Shidler/Grainola/Osage friends are: EVEN IF YOU ARE NO LONGER IN THE OSAGE.  So yes I do believe home, family and friends define where a  person's heart is.

So what do you learn in the Osage?

• Love is where you give it
• It is a choice to be happy where you are at
• Give the gift of friendship and you will never be lonely

Thanks for your time,

gary@thepioneerman.com

a little divergence from normal

I cannot help but show you some of our flower garden as we are in peak season.  So here are a few pics.  And yes we did get our love of gardening from the Osage.

Thanks for looking,
gary@thepioneerman.com

Anticipation

I am still young but it is a relative term so let me start by saying that when I was very young I anticipated the end of school and the additional freedom it provided.  About the time I was in 5th, 6th and 7th and maybe the 8th grade each summer started off with hauling hay and getting ready for wheat harvest.  As soon as school was out and Bob Scott delivered us home we would head out to load up the fresh alfalfa hay and put it in the barns.  The smell of fresh alfalfa was wonderful.  In fact I liked the smells of farm life of every kind.  I never minded the hogs or chickens or the whatever was in the air.  The sun was warm and the winds were cool and the new babies were popping all over the farm.  It was often that in the night there would be a sow (female mother hog) delivering babies and with anticipation we wanted to know how many!  Generally there were at least 6 but sometimes 10 or more and mostly around 7 or 8 new babies in one litter.  The concern there was that the sow would not rollover on top of one of the babies and kill one or that there would be too many and not enough spigots on the sow to feed them all.  Hopefully that is self explanatory.  Then there were the new baby calves born early winter that were jumping and running and it was fun to catch them as long as the momma cow did not get too mad.  Back to the alfalfa.

Generally Dad or Larry had bailed up a bunch of hay so Larry or Billy Snyder (Gladys Snyder's son) would help and we would load the hay and put it in the barns.  In the early days you had to buck the bails on your knees and put it up on the truck while one person drove the truck and one person was on the back stacking the hay.  Luckily someone invented a hay loader which would pick up the bails and throw it up on the truck where you would grab it and stack.  I don't know why but it seemed that the objective was to always put on 100 bales on a load.  Typically at our house we had a four wheel flat bed trailer but when we were hauling at Uncle Snyd's we would load on a flat bed truck or a trailer or both.  As you may recall Uncle Snyd was the uncle who spent years in WWII in a prison of war camp run by the Japanese.  He was not very fond of them.

Another great thing about the spring was the anticipation of wheat harvest.  When it came, it came and went in a hurry.  Every combine in the area was hooked up, cleaned up and greased to make sure it was in working order and would stay that way.  During the early years we used an Allis Chalmers combine pull behind which attached to the Allis Chalmers tractor.  It cut a swath of about 8 feet as compared to the new combines which have cabs, radio, air conditioners, 40 foot headers (40 foot cut swath), and no tractor was needed to pull it.  That old combine could even harvest corn when it came time.  I don't remember for sure but I think it held 50 bushels of wheat before you had to dump the wheat into the truck.  It took several loads to fill a bobtail truck with racks on it.  The new ones have about 500 bushel hoppers and the trucks are bigger and most of the time the combine unloads while cutting into a cart which takes the wheat to a semi-truck/trailer which is several times bigger than the old bobtail trucks.  Amazing!  The fun thing was many of the farmers would work together and of course as we all hauled our wheat in to the elevator to sell it there would be a line of trucks waiting to be weighed and dumped at Dale's Feed Seed and Fertilizer store and Elevator.  Everyone got to see each other in one place and everyone was in a hurry to get there then wait their turn.  Everyone would be talking about wheat prices and how many bushels they were making.  I think this was actually an effort to be the best liar about how good your crop was.  We would all take the time to have a pepsi and a babyruth candy bar or a butterfinger while waiting.  It seemed that everyone took a little liberty to spend a little money at this time because it was basically one of the only two times a year a farmer would get income.  Can you imagine only getting a check twice a year and not even knowing for sure how much it might be?  That is farming and ranching.  It is the real gamble in life but one that is loved by many.  Just in case you don't know it the other payment is for when you would sell your calves that are ready to go to the feed lots and it would happen in the fall for the most part.

I think we were helping the Mcconaghy's one year when it was especially hot and I was riding in the back of one of the bobtails full of wheat and someone passed out beer to quench the thirst.  I had never seen my dad take a drink until that day and I got to taste it as well.  I really never cared too much for it but when it is hot and dusty like it gets during wheat harvest it tasted really good.  I was probably in the 7th grade then.

In my mind there was never enough time to get all I wanted done in a day then and still today.  Maybe there is a trend?  But I sure anticipated a break to go fishing after school was out.  It was that time of year when the fish seemed to bite the best and sitting under a shade tree anticipating that cork to go moving around a little just tickled my interest.  I loved it.

So how could it get any better than living in the Osage?

• It just can't
• I have found that life is good everywhere but you have to decide that for yourself.
• Tough times happen to EVERYONE but that is what makes good times and small things seem and feel soooooo good.
• Love living where ever you are and love the one you are with, it is a choice NOT an emotion.

Thanks for listening,

gary@thepioneerman.com