Lighten Up, Jim, It's Spring

Of all the people I know who I still see occasionally, I think Wayne Tanous is the one I’ve known the longest. Wayne and I grew up together in Hettinger. His dad and my dad were best friends. He’s a couple years older than me. Sometime back in the early 1950’s, he and I and his little brother Donnie began jumping in the back seat of whichever of our dads’ station wagons they were going hunting in on Sunday morning and traipsing along behind them in the soil bank fields around Hettinger. None of us was even old enough to carry a gun, but we loved those Sunday mornings. I think his dad’s station wagon was a white Ford “woody” and ours was a grey Pontiac about 50 yards long. Both Catholics, those men had lots of kids to haul around and the station wagons worked just fine for that—as well as for Sunday morning hunts.

The hunts were almost always on Sunday because as small town businessmen, they worked six days a week, as did most businessmen in those days. But as soon as church got out on a fall Sunday morning, we’d swap church clothes for khaki pants and shirts and head out of town. Our dads also fished together, golfed together and ice-fished together. Most of the time they’d take Wayne or Donnie or me, or all of us, with them. Later, as they got a little more secure in their businesses, they would also take Thursday afternoons off too, to participate in whichever of the seasonal outdoor activities beckoned. They worked Saturday afternoons though, because that is when the farmers came to town to shop and they were plenty busy on Saturdays. But Thursday was a slow day, I guess, and to this day, I am pretty sure Thursday is still Men’s Day at the Hettinger Golf Course.

Well, we all grew up, went away to do our Vietnam stints, came home and finished college, got married and settled down, Wayne and I in Bismarck. Donnie started to make the Navy a career, I think, and was killed in a tragic accident many years ago. Later, we both lost our wives to ovarian cancer at young ages, and have only marginally stayed in touch since then. Then both of us old duffers found Facebook, and started pages, and looked at them occasionally. He found out I was writing a blog and started reading it, and once in a while told me he thought I was a good writer. Problem is, we’re both pretty politically minded and we’re on different sides of the political spectrum. That’s never been a problem, just an interesting aside.

But my blog has gotten pretty political from time to time, and I told Lillian (AKA The Woman Of The House if you follow her occasional comments at the end of my blogs) the other day that I was writing stuff on my blog that was going to start making my Republican friends mad. Well, I guess I have. But they seem to get mad in a good natured way. One sent me an e-mail yesterday that started “Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy . . .” and he only calls me that when it is time to tell me I have gone too far, in his opinion.

But the best comment was from Wayne. It said simply “Gee! You sounded pretty harsh about just about everything . . . . Lighten up. Spring is now here.”

Ah, yes, Wayne, thank you for the reality check. You are right. Spring is here. In the spring you plant flowers and take long walks and watch sunsets and do lots of other things to make you smile. Lighten up, indeed. That is today’s agenda. Hit the “Save” button on the laptop and go for a walk. Thank you, Wayne. Advice well taken.

Now tomorrow, though . . .

Oh, in the picture up above, that’s my dad, Whitey, on the left, with Wayne’s dad, Al, on the right. And ten dead pheasants. Either it was a very good year and the limit was five each, or they borrowed a few from Wayne and I to enhance the picture. It was their last pheasant hunt together. Al had moved away to a warmer climate for his health years before, and he had come back to the prairie for one last hunt with his old buddy. They had grown old, but that day they were young again, and there was a bit of a spring in their step. It was a role reversal, Wayne and I watching a couple of kids grinning ear to ear, like they used to watch us, as the pheasants dropped in Duane Cregger's CRP field. It was a joy to behold.