Season's Bleatings -- 2019

Oliver Rhoads Bohnhorst was born March 10, 2019, to Brendan and Jodi in Grand Rapids, of Michigan, of America, of Planet Earth, of the Solar System, of the Milky Way... he, the babe in arms, a mere microscopic mote drifting through The Universe. But if you get close, Ollie impresses as anything but mere. Behold the grabby hands that slap at a puddle of dripped, pureed peas. Behold the triumphant proclamations: "Buh! Buh! Buh!" Behold the bib drenched in teething drool and how he teeters upright verging on first steps. And behold how he's babbled his way deep into our grandparental hearts. Forever and ever, Amen. The opposite of anything mere, the whole of The Universe in and of himself.

Oliver's skin is as soft as a rabbit's underbelly except for around the nostrils. They get encrusted with dried snot. Elizabeth's skin is just as smooth in spite of her advanced age of 34. Her partner, Andrew, for the record, hides a mysterious complexion under beard. They have festooned their house with a jungle of plants and through their bay window the greenery filters a lovely view over white Grand Traverse countryside. Elizabeth has just gotten a job in a shelter to support homeless adolescents. Those kids have the very best person in their corner.

This fall Brendan and Jodi sold their four-level, in-city house and bought an expansive, one-level in the Cascade area of Grand Rapids. No more stairs! With all that moving out and moving in, taking care of baby Oliver, Jodi maintaining her demanding health care job, Brendan starting a new job... even with all that stress, their complexions remained unblemished. Nary a pimple! Brendan's many tubas have adjusted to the new atmosphere and their dogs now bark at reimagined varmints. New beginnings are born.

Every night before bed, Sue applies a degreasing compound to remove her makeup before rubbing in a new grease to juice up her pores. When in the morning she springs from bed, her skin positively glows! I've put sunglasses on my side table to reduce the blinding sheen. Sue's life-long high school friends and later her life-long college friends (very bad influences, all) held their annual reunions this summer. And to top it off, the women from both groups engineered a surprise 70th birthday party for her. Such unmitigated adoration. Sue returns home from these events so very grateful, her face emitting a rosy hue, but also concealing renewed criminal intent.

In 2019, I caught rainbow trout with a fly rod in the Colorado mountains, caught a pompano in the surf near St. Augustine, and, best of all, suffered an in-grown toenail. I came to believe that in-grown toenails are the hors d'oeuvres en route to Satan's promenade into Hell. I pondered this while my toe's sac of pus finally started to deflate. I came to Jesus and vowed to repent, to improve my ways: go on fewer ice cream binges, keep the D-con fresh and the mousetraps emptied, read more literature with less smut, and give friendly waves to the neighbors, whose names escape me. So far, so good.  I've had no recurrences of purple toe and my mouth is free of cold sores. My conscience and complexion are clear.

And what Christmas letter would be complete without an homage to… The Impeachment of Donald  J. Trump? The hearings, as Democrats and Republicans took their turns, threw me into a fit of ping-ponging between bug-eyed incredulity and gross inflations of intestinal gas. And it’s so strange:  those hot Republican faces took on the blush of a familiar orange hue. It’s either a case of neckties noosed too tight or a somatic reaction to blind allegiance.

Keep your skins moisturized this holiday season. And it’s important to prevent crusty nostrils. For Christmas, you really want that effervescent, pinkish hue.

Peachtree Street

From 1956 to 1960, my family lived in Atlanta. I was in third grade in 1959 and took a school bus to Jim Cherry Elementary School a few miles away. There was a poor African American neighborhood across the street from the school, but, of course, no kids from there attended.

I didn't know any black people other than Ero and Mary. Ero was our old, gentle Negro maid who I remember hummed soft hymns while ironing laundry. I remember playing with cars on the floor nearby, listening to Ero hum in her low quiet voice as she ironed there, her stockings rolled down to her ankles in the heat. One evening, my father drove her home and he let me come along. We dropped her off at a tin-roofed, ramshackle house at the end of a dirt street. A dozen people relaxed on the raised, covered porch while lazy dogs panted beneath. It must have been an odd sight for them to see white people driving into their neighborhood, let alone providing escort to one of their own. They sat silent and without expression as we dropped her off.

Mary replaced Ero after Ero got sick. I remember her as a sweet and smiling young woman. She had a baby after working for us for a few months. My father again let me come along when we visited her to take her some money. We drove up through a long stand of woods to a tiny cinder block house with a flat roof and no windows. We knocked on the door and a faint voice beckoned us in. There was Mary on a bed alone in the house with her infant. She had had the baby at home. We stayed less than a minute.

My father in 1959 taped a sentence onto the dashboard of his car. He worked as an outreach professor for the Georgia Department of Education, a job which sent him to Georgia prisons to advocate for educational programs for inmates. He might pass chain gangs along Georgia's country roads, the black prisoners in striped jumpsuits slashing away at brush or picking up trash, their master nearby on horseback. I guess that's how I envisioned black men back then: mean and menacing, but safe at a distance. Years later, I remember Dad telling me how he felt when challenging a system hell-bent on preserving ignorance and cruelty. He tried to bring a message of hope to penitentiary officials afflicted with ears that would not hear and eyes that would not see.

But in his boxy Rambler, off he would gallop on those Atlanta mornings to his appointments, over the hills to the north or over the flatlands and cotton fields to the south, east, or west. He had a wife and four kids to support and a job with meager pay to promote the impossible. He may have felt undaunted much of the time, like a Don Quixote charging forth against all odds. But often he despaired. It was at those desperate times, so he later told me, that he would glance over at the dashboard to gain an ounce of courage, glance over to the meditation he wrote to himself: "Ride 'em cowboy!"

One day we were driving down Atlanta's main thoroughfare, Peachtree Steet. While stopped at a light, a black woman in a colorful sweater walked by on a crowded sidewalk, wearing the exact sweater as my mother. Mom was so mortified that she slunk down in the passenger's seat to prevent any detection by the white people around. My father chuckled at her for feeling humiliated but she frantically stripped herself of the sweater and threw it on the floorboard. She never wore it again.

My actual contacts with African Americans were sparse. I remember going bowling for the first time at my brother's birthday party. Raggedy black boys worked as pin setters. They sat at the end of the lanes on stools and after a ball was bowled, they tossed the toppled pins back into a bin and rolled the ball back to the bowler on the return chute. The boys would then return to their stools and comic books until the next ball. They weren't much older than me, about eight years-old, but how alien they seemed.

We kids knew "nigger" was a bad word and not to say it at home or at school. It was always NEE-gro, you've got to say NEE-gro. But one morning a loudmouthed boy in my classroom let fly the n-word when degrading his family's maid. "You mustn't say that word," the teacher said. "You must say "niggra." How odd that "Negro" wasn't her correction. White people mainly described African Americans as "colored," though my parents never did. They always said NEE-gro, as the educated, northern-born were wont to do. If  the "Negro" moniker was intended to give black people some equivalence, no equivalence seeped into me, at least not in that place and time.

No, I absorbed Jim Crow into my bones. One summer afternoon, my friend, Phillip, and I were walking near our neighborhood church when we observed a young black man hustling down the nearby road. A black pedestrian was an unusual sight in our white neighborhood. "Let's yell at him," I said.

We took positions up a rise and behind a low wall on the church property, a safe distance away with an escape route if he should chase us. On the count of three we would let him have it. "One, two, three," we whispered together and rose from behind the wall to scream, "HEY NIGGER!"

The man froze and turned to see us gazing down at him. "What you want, snowballs!" he yelled, seeming mad as hell. He held his stare. Philip giggled. My heart pounded, ready to run. But then the man turned and quickly went on his way down the road.

I never felt proud, nor right, nor thought the racist taunt was funny. But I wasn't ashamed either, like the way I felt after I shot a turtle dove through the neck with my bb gun. I never shot at birds again after that. But I am ashamed today. Did that man slough ours off as just one more of a thousand insults? Did we fan an inner rage? Did we cause him to lash out at others? Did he cry? Would he forget?

My family moved to Lafayette, Indiana, when I was nine and entering fourth grade. On the first day of school, my teacher asked if I as the new student would stand and announce my name to the class. As I rose and in my distinctive southern drawl, I responded, "Yes, ma'am." The class howled. I stood red-faced. I learned then and there to eliminate that southern "ma'am" from all encounters. And my drawl soon morphed into something twangy without my realizing it.

It's easy to hatchet out certain words and give new parlance to accepted ways of expression. But you can't simply extricate bone-deep feelings born in childhood. Even though your father may have been Atticus Finch, we all lived near Peachtree Street. Long ago I let go of the big, vicious lies I learned as truth in Georgia. I like to think that today I'm more like my father. But there's no denying that those feelings, not completely defeated, still lurk darkly within me.

Oh, Madonna

Those were heady days back in 1971 and 72. George and I shared room 226 in Snyder Hall at Michigan State University, I a sophomore, he a socially awkward freshman. Before the leaves started to turn, we became best buddies. The Stones blared and we guzzled quarts of Colt 45. Dozens of boys from the down the hall would wander in and out our open door to appraise our latest rendition of chaos. Neither of us had started to shave.

Some might have said that as copacetic roomies go, we were an unlikely pair. George had a ponytail and abhorred smoke of any kind. I also had a ponytail but adored smoke of several kinds. I fancied myself a revolutionary and joined SDS. George mocked my left windedness and all hell could break when our clashing ideologies were fueled by malt liquor. 

One spring evening an angry mob of student protesters marched past our second-floor window. Hundreds filled the space between Snyder and Abbott halls. The American military that day had bombed Cambodia. I would soon join that anti-war mob, grab a bull horn, and help lead a takeover of the Administration Building. But on that night, half drunk on Colt 45, George thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle. He cranked open the window and screamed, "Go Purdue! Go Purdue!"

George grew up on a pig farm in western Michigan, but his father also worked as a chemist. He was an intellectual, a descendent of blue bloods back in Boston. Visiting George at the farm made for a collision of senses. Inside, family members sat by lamps reading novels.  Outside, pig stink wafted through cottonwoods while chickens in their coops clucked and pigs grunted from within the hog barn.There was a milk cow named Bossie and an old, fur-matted collie snoozing on the porch by a row of high rubber boots ready for chores. Fly paper hung in the kitchen. Meanwhile, George's mother sat in the parlor doing the New York Times Crossword Puzzle. He and his family had shed any social graces out on that farmland of Allegan County

George had no aspirations to acquire his father's pig farm. He hated the place. But he shared his dad's keen aptitude for chemistry and toddled off to MSU in 1971 to major in the subject. The plan was short-lived. By his second semester, he switched from chemistry to English, my major. He would later say that I had had a major impact on his decision. I did argue that his passion for Robert Burns the poet far outweighed any curiosity he might have had about carbon interacting with hydrogen. I did argue that his love for Kurt Vonnegut was unmatched by any love for the laboratory. I did argue that he was a fine writer with a fine wit. But I suspect it was just easier to be an English major when your academic demands were tempered by dormitory mayhem. 

So, George and I, both students now of the humanities, took a course entitled, "The History of Famous Art in Europe from April 12, 1165 to July 29, 1354, Mainly Paintings but Some Really Old Architecture Too." The class fit nicely around important stretches of sleep and priority beer activities. One hundred students, about ninety eight of them girls, attended. We sat up in the back of a darkened, stadium-style lecture hall where the professor presented slide after slide of really, really old paintings.

For ninety minutes one day, the prof presented an endless stream of Madonnas. Evidently, pre-Renaissance Italians just loved their Madonnas and couldn't get enough. With all the proportion of a second grader's crayon drawing, those old painters unleashed a buttload of madonna classics. Slide! Here we have Madonna with Child, and notice how the artist... blah, blah, blah. Slide! You got your Madonna with Saint Agnes, and notice how the saint holds an olive branch... blah, blah, blah. Slide! You got your Madonna with Child and the Saints! Slide! You got your Madonna with Child in the Manger. Slide! Madonna with Saint Ignatius. Slide! Slide! Slide!  Droning and droning, noticing and noticing, the professor persisted in monotone. And each medieval madonna wore the face of an unpleasant woman with uncomfortable gas. Madonna with This. Madonna with That. You could hear a smattering of snores.

At about the seventy minute mark, George gave me a poke and handed me a note. This was odd. In the dim light, carefully, I opened it. It read,

"Madonna with Beard!"  

I was unprepared. I lost it. I laughed loud and I laughed long. The professor stopped mid-sentence and froze. And all those eyes, those two hundred eyes, they searched the room and fused their gazes upon me. But I was a goner. I was in mid explosion. There! There seared into my brain, I beheld the most precious madonna of all, Madonna with full cheeks of hair.

Before Giotto, DaVinci, Michelangelo, and all the other Renaissance Boys came around, you wouldn't have seen any painters down at the Florence Comedy Club. Those old masters, back in their musty studios, they could have used a guy like George. For hundreds of years, saints just stood around adoring. Baby Jesuses just laid around being adored. And hundreds of madonnas, they just stood or sat there with unpleasant faces. It would have been nice, if one of those Madonnas, just one, would have been depicted sneaking two fingers behind the head of an unsuspecting pope. Rabbit ears!

If you happen to visit Florence, join the throng at the Uffizi Gallery, and visit the madonnas of the Pre-Renaissance. If you get bored and don't mind some playful sacrilege, you can let George be your guide: Madonna with Personal Flotation Device. Madonna with Mohawk. Madonna with Burrito. Your appreciation for art will skyrocket.

I remember him sitting in our dorm room with a book in his lap, laughing at a Robert Burns' verse or at a passage in a Vonnegut novel. His love for a turn of phrase rubbed off on me.
We took a class on Chaucer together and learned to read Middle English. He tutored me. Responding to George's final paper, the professor at first accused him of plagiarism. He hadn't, but his thoughts coincidentally had mirrored a scholar's thoughts. After George stormed the professor's office, the professor became persuaded. George got an A. Besides, cheating was beneath him.

I sometimes wonder what draws people to become friends. Kindred interests, of course, and kindred spirits. I lost it when I read the note that read, "Madonna with Beard." But of the hundred students in that class, how many would have had a similar response if passed the same note at the same time? A minority, I would bet.

One afternoon on an East Lansing street, a group of us were clambering into my parked Pinto when from out of nowhere a large friendly puppy bounced up and jumped headlong into the back seat joining George and another friend. They suddenly became ensconced in a tornado of frenzied dog like three characters spinning full tilt in a clothes dryer. No one could grab the beast as it bounced from floor to roof to front seat and back, its tail slapping faces and its tongue splattering froth as it gyrated.

Springing from some demented recess in my brain, I thought in that moment to shout, "Out damn Spot!" 

And off Spot ran. Look! See Spot run. George howled at the joke but my other two friends comprehended nothing funny. That was a big thing that made good buddies of George and me, to twist from the events of a day some absurd irony.

Two young strangers assigned to Room 226. Kindred spirits, kindred thirsts, kindred points of view. I admired the kid who celebrated a crazy connection between an anti-war mob and a football rally, who was inspired to pass a note in art history class. I admired the kid who grew up on a pig farm and would sit down with a 19th century Scottish poet. He celebrated my hair-brained connection between MacBeth and the puppy in the Pinto.

We got each other.

Bean, the Big Shot

(Transcript of Tom Rhoads' interview with Bean, author of the blog, Poop Ederim, from the WTRB broadcast of Blog Agog, January 22, 2019.)

TOM: Welcome, listeners, to another edition of Blog Agog, the show that highlights the popular and the peculiar in creative blog publications. Today our guest is the producer of Poop Ederim, a site that has gone bonkers on the blogosphere in recent months. Welcome, Bean... you just go by Bean, is that right?

BEAN: Maybe now I should go by Big Shot Bean. The Big Legume. I mean, here I am on your show.

TOM:  Big Shot it is. You've earned it. Now that you're the man with a big shot blog, readers across the country are wanting some answers.

BEAN:  It's "readers across the world," if you don't mind.  I have solid followings in Turkey and Britain, and also a follower in Nigeria.

TOM:  Okay, sure. International big shot then. About your name. Were you named Bean by your parents? Or was that a nickname you picked up somewhere?

BEAN: My last name is Bohnhorst. "Bohn" in German means bean, so it comes from that.

TOM: And "horst"?

BEAN: Storage house. My name means storage house of beans, at least that's what my father always said. I guess you have to put all those kidney beans somewhere.

TOM: Speaking of names, people are intrigued by your blog-title, Poop Ederim.  Your readers have googled it, consulted Merriam-Webster, called the National Weather Service. Nobody can find a clue. What does it mean?

BEAN:  People are googling it? Cool! I wonder what they find.

TOM:  One listener was linked to a website having to do with "poop dreams".  Any connection there to Poop Ederim?

BEAN:  Poop dreams? What is that? Confessions of the constipated?

TOM:  So what about it?

BEAN:  What about what?

TOM:  Poop Ederim! The name, where it comes from. All this poop business. You have a funny blog entry called Chasin' Jackie where a grandfather comes up with, like, a hundred rhymes for a toddler's poop in his diaper.

BEAN: I had a lot of fun writing that, dreaming up all those rhymes. Truth be known, my wife helped me while we were on a road trip to Florida. I suppose I do write a fair amount about the butt. My friend, Bill, has accused me of being anally obsessed.

TOM: Are we really talking about this?

BEAN: It all started in first grade, Tom. I was an advanced reader and a proud member of the Blue Birds reading group. We were tearing through The Adventures of Dick, Jane, and Sally when we were introduced to a new chapter word... behind. As was the custom, we went around taking turns reading pages, and that morning is the most memorable of my first grade career. We read, "Look, Dick, look! Spot is behind the chair." Let's face it: six year-olds just love butt talk, and to be encouraged to read the word BEE-hind aloud in front of our teacher, Mrs. Terroff, well, it was pure joy! Dick, Jane, and Sally really came to life. I'll never forget it. Maybe that's where my problem started.

TOM: Let's try this again. Poop Ederim?

BEAN:  Poop Ederim is derived from the Turkish language. It is a bit mysterious, isn't it?

TOM: That's why I'm asking.

BEAN:  Okay, the Turkish language. I went to an American high school in Ankara, Turkey, in the late 1960s as my family lived there. In 1973, I returned to Turkey from college and got a job teaching English to adult Turks at the Turkish-American Association.  It was great fun. I would stand in front of 20 students who were very enthusiastic about learning English.  One of the main teaching techniques we used was "listen and repeat."  I would say something and they would repeat it.  For example, I might say, "Good morning, Mr. Jones.  How are you today?"  And the class would respond in resounding chorus:  "Good morning, Mr. Jones. How are you today?" Then I would insert a different name. I might say "Mrs. Smith", and the class would chant, "Good morning, Mrs. Smith.  How are you today?" And so on. I had such power!

Sometimes I would close the textbook and insert my own names.  I'd say, "Batman."

"Good morning, Batman,” they’d bellow. “How are you today?"

 "Rocky and Bullwinkle."

"Good morning, Rocky and Bullwinkle. How are you today?" Had they ever heard of Rocky and Bullwinkle? It didn't matter.

"You idiot and your idiot horse."

"Good morning, you idiot and your idiot horse. How are you today?" Those trusty Turks could really close the deal. Such fun!

TOM:  I'm getting discouraged.

BEAN:  I didn't know it then, but as I would soon learn, the English word "book" sounds like the Turkish word, "bok", which means, to put it bluntly, "shit". This caused some listen-and-repeat disruption. I unknowingly hurled verbal turds around the classroom. When I modeled, "Hello, Johnny. May I see your book?," the class whimpered. They probably wondered if I liked to hang around public restrooms. Some students pretended not to notice, but there was no ignoring the bok-faced elephant in the room. They probably felt like first-graders reading that Spot was BEE-hind the chair.

I singled out a good student who for some reason was listening but was not repeating. Instead, he was laughing. "Mehmet," I said. "Please stand up. Come on now, repeat after me:  'Yes, Mr. Brown. I will put my book on your desk.'"

Mehmet dutifully responded, "Yes, Mr. Brown...  I will put my b... b... b..."  Mehmet collapsed in howls and others buried their faces in tears. I was so puzzled. I was at a loss.

One brave lady approached me, took me aside, and tried to help. "Mr. Bean," she whispered. "Your English word... book... is our Turkish word for... I don't know. Book is dirty Turkish word."

Incidents like this made me wildly popular. My reputation, I'm afraid, had everything to do with my demonstrated deference to their, well, shit.  Whenever I then asked my students to "look in your book" or "bring your book", we exchanged knowing glances. Eventually, we all got past it.

TOM:  And... so....?

BEAN:  Yes?

TOM:  All that, somehow, in some way, has something to do with, dare I ask, "Poop Ederim"?

BEAN:  Oh, no. Look, when I was seventeen, I was traveling with my parents and little sister in southern Spain. We went to a fancy restaurant for dinner, white tablecloths, dressed up waiters, and all that. We were served bread, but no butter, and I wanted some butter. So I asked our waiter in my school-learned Spanish to bring us some "burro," por favor. We had just been in Italy and the Italian word for butter is burro. I made an innocent mistake, okay? The waiter looked perplexed but nodded deferentially and strode back to the kitchen. We then noticed through the window back there a major debate going on between the waiter, the manager, and the chef. They kept arguing about something, looked over at our table, then went back to their argument. They must have wondered what exactly I wanted. We were high rolling Americans, after all, and they wanted to do right by us. Finally, the waiter sheepishly and formally approached our table and from under a linen napkin, presented me with a small, wooden box. I opened the box and there inside lay a single, fat cigar. My father just exploded in uncontrollable guffaws. Everybody stopped mid-bite and stared. I wish I had a recording of that conversation in the kitchen. My father told that story a hundred times over the years.

TOM:  Mantequilla.

BEAN:  Pardon?

TOM: Mantequilla is Spanish for butter. Burro is Spanish for donkey.

BEAN: I wanted butter, ordered a donkey, and wound up with a cigar. Burro and bok. Both of those situations were innocent mistakes. And now I am reminded of another one. I have a friend who years ago went to church every Sunday and took his kids to Sunday school. His then six year-old named Sam was obsessed with dinosaurs as little boys are. We would always see them at the beach in the summer and there would be Sam playing in the sand with his toy dinosaurs. So Sam goes to Sunday school every week and my friend noticed that Sam's attitude about going suddenly changed. He became afraid and didn't want to play with his dinosaurs anymore. My friend had a chat with Sam and this is what he learned: the Sunday school teacher talked about God, as Sunday school teachers do, and how God loves and protects them and if they were quiet and still, they could feel God in their hearts. Well, one of Sam's dinosaur toys was the bad guy, the horrible and monstrous Godzilla. It turned out that whenever the Sunday school teacher talked God, which was like non-stop, Sam thought she was talking about Godzilla. He imagined the body of Godzilla whenever she told stories about God, like when on the seventh day of creation, Godzilla rested. Or when Sam learned that human beings are made in Godzilla's image.

TOM: Poor kid.

BEAN: I know, right? Just another innocent misunderstanding.

TOM: All right. Let me try this one... last... time. Poop Ederim... Please tell us. Where does your blog title come from?

BEAN:  You didn't let me finish. Like I said, "poop ederim" has its origins in Turkish, but more precisely, with Roger Price.

TOM: Who is Roger Price?

BEAN: You mean, who was Roger Price. He died tragically some years ago. Roger was the funniest person I've ever known. Maybe the saddest, too. We were good friends in high school in Turkey. Our fathers worked together for the Agency for International Development and Roger and I would knock around Ankara together. One of the first things you learn to say in a foreign language is "thank you." In Turkish, you say "teshekur ederim." Ederim literally means, "I would" and you find it attached to all kinds of terms and phrases. You hear it a lot -- this-ederim, that-ederim. One Saturday night Roger and I are getting drunk at a downtown restaurant called Piknik. The waiter brings us our third or fourth beers, and I, of course, thank him by saying, "Teshekur ederim."

Roger, on the other hand, takes a long swig of his beer, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, smiles up at the waiter, and shouts, "Poop ederim!"

TOM: That's it? What does it mean?

BEAN: It doesn't mean anything. I suppose it could mean, "I would poop," but it was just funny. I was feeling it, and in that moment, Roger's perfect words were a perfect summation of being a half-drunk American teenager on a Saturday night in Ankara, Turkey, in 1969. From then on, as you can imagine, we would say "poop ederim" whenever the time was right.

TOM: So that's where the Poop Ederim comes from.

BEAN. Yep. Sometimes I try to write funny stuff on the blog. I can never hope to be as funny as Roger was. Poop Ederim is a tribute to his humor and and to his memory.

TOM: I'm sure Roger would be very proud.

BEAN: Why, teshekur ederim.

TOM: It looks like that's all the time we have. For readers who are interested, Bean, where can they find your blog.

BEAN: Thanks very much. tombohn.blogspot.com