Saturday, December 21, 2013
was a kid and rode in cars I used to imagine I held a
big scythe in my hand and cut down all the trees and posts and even
sliced every hill that zoomed past the window. “Yes! yes!” Yelled Neal.
“I used to do it too only different scythe - -tell you why. Driving
across the west with the long stretches my scythe had to be immeasurably
longer and it had to curve over distant mountains slicing off their
tops and reach another level to get at further mountains and at the same
time clip off every post along the road, regular throbbing poles. For
this reason---O man I have to tell you, NOW, I have IT, I have to tell
you the time my father and I and a raggedy bum from Larimer Street took a trip to Nebraska
in the middle of the depression to sell flyswatters. And how we made
them, we bought pieces of ordinary regular old screen and pieces of wire
that we twisted double and little pieces of blue and red cloth to sew
around the edges and all of it for a matter of cents in a Five and Ten
and made thousands of flyswatters and got in the old bum’s jalopy and
went clear around Nebraska to every farmhouse and sold them for a nickel
apiece- -mostly for charity the nickels were given to us, two bums and a
boy, apple pies in the sky and my old man in those days was always
singing Hallelujah I’m a Bum, Bum Again. And man now listen to this after
two whole weeks of incredible hardship and bouncing around and hustling
in the heat to sell these awful makeshift flyswatters they started to
argue about the division of the proceeds and had a big fight on the side
of the road and then made up and bought wine and began drinking wine
and didn’t stop for five days and five nights while I huddle and cry in
the background and when they were finished every last cent was spent and
we were right back where we started from, Larimer Street. And my old
man was arrested and I had to plead at court to the judge to let him go
’cause he was my Pa and I had no mother, Jack I made great mature
speeches at the age of eight in front of interested lawyers and that’s
when Justin Brierly first heard of me because then he was just beginning
to take interest in founding a special juvenile court with particular
humane emphasis on the problems of beat children in and around Denver
and the Rocky Mountain district…” We were hot; we were
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