Visits with Schaefer

Dear Boo and Bubble,

Even though he has been gone for almost 23 years, I still have a very viable relationship with your great granddaddy Schaefer.  How could that be possible you ask?  I have many tools at my disposal to keep Granddaddy alive for me. Sometimes it may happen through my dreams – the vivid, tangible kind that confuse me as to their reality when I awake. Or, on other occasions, it may occur through recollections triggered by my senses - the smell of something like a pot of collard greens coming to a boil on the stove…...or the sound of something like the Moonlight Sonata wafting from an NPR station on the radio…..or, even better….. the sight of something like a Victoria’s Secret advertisement which conjures the memory of Granddaddy’s befuddlement when he saw his first such catalogue and lamented “I was just born too soon.”   

Of all these methods, however, by far the most essential is my copy of his editorial writings for The Greenville News.  I carry it with me wherever I go and, from time to time, when I feel the need of a good visit with him, I will open up its pages and randomly select an offering to read.  His words never fail to evoke a reaction – usually laughter, but sometimes a prick of the conscience – and I seem to always learn something new even though I must have been over every article dozens of times and the pages are getting pretty tattered at this point from use.

Today was one of those days and the spin of the wheel of fortune presented page 9 to me.  I will let you join in on the visit.  I know Granddaddy would be delighted.

The Barnyard Was a Laboratory of Learning

Schaefer B. Kendrick

Sunday, May 1, 1994

What a shame it is that our children today have never seen a setting hen on her nest of a dozen eggs, patiently waiting to hatch out her chicks by the warmth of her body.  Howe, when she was disturbed by human hands to check the incubating progress, she would fuss in chicken language to let the intruder know she didn’t need any help as she was the expert in the this field.

Then one day 12 eggs miraculously became twelve yellow balls of fluff with two tiny legs.  And Mrs. Hen is parading around the barnyard showing off her new brood, clucking instructions as to their proper conduct.  And when there was a loud clap of thunder the biddies imply vanished under the wings of the mother.

The barnyard was a laboratory of learning.  It didn’t take long to discover that the much maligned mule was far smarter than the thoroughbred gaited horse.  If you didn’t have a safety latch on the feed room door, the mule would find a way to work the latch and have his fill of oats.  You learned that hybrid animals can’t reproduce but some atavistic urge causes them, from time to time, to play like.

This learning laboratory taught the virtue of responsibility, surely one of the greatest of all virtues.  It taught that if you take care of your animals they will take care of you.  That they had to be fed each day; that stalls had to be cleaned, fresh bedding straw provided; hat cows had to be milked twice a day and if you didn’t strip them completely, they would go dry.  You learned that these dumb animals would actually show you affection for the attention and care you gave them. You learned that the personality of Billy goat was different from that of an old sow.

The barnyard offered a 100 level course in sex education.  It gave parents a natural setting in which to talk about procreation, and what the natural results are of copulation.  It provided object lessons of the pain in bringing a new life into this world; which could dampen the ardor of the flash floods of passion that sometimes swamped the young and the vigorous.

Sadly, the urbanization of America with it subdivision restrictions, zoning and health laws, have outlawed the backyard non-feral menagerie, and animal husbandry has become a part of academe’s ivory tower.

A story, maybe true, maybe not, will illustrate the point.  A Flatbush native who had spent his entire life in Brooklyn, graduating from Brooklyn Tech, got a job with a large corporation with plants all over the United States.  After his training period, he was sent to a plant located near Travelers Rest, SC.

This veteran of pavement, stick ball, bagels and subways was an exercise freak of the jogging variety.  It was his habit to jog five miles each day.

Shortly after reporting to his job in these rural surrounds, he was out jogging early one morning.  It was a beautiful spring day which inflated his lungs with virgin air the likes of which he had never breathed before.  Down the road he noticed a farmer and a cow in the pasture and it was a curious sight.

The farmer was tugging at two legs protruding out of the rear end of the cow.  The farmer hollered for help, and out of curiosity as much as compassion, this benighted Yankee heeded his call.  The farmer told the Yankee to grab hold of the two legs and pull while he held the cow’s horns.  This fugitive from Flatbush pulled and pulled with all his might and finally the calf was freed of its mother.

The farmer thanks this new bovine midwife profusely for his help.

The young man, breathing heavily from the effort, said, “Tell me something.  How fast was that calf going when it ran into the rear end of that cow?”