J.D.’s Columns

Three Jokes for Renee's Birthday    One        A woman goes to the supermarket and buys two large bags of peanuts then goes to the zoo. When she arrives at the monkey cage, there are no monkeys. A zookeeper walks past.      “Where are all the monkeys?      “Well, it is mating season and they are all inside the building.      “Do you think they would come outside for some peanuts?      “Would you?”   Two       A woman walks into a supermarket dragging two young children. Up and down the aisles she screams obscenities at them. The kids of course act miserable the whole time. No one has a clue what to do or say. As a result, the whole place is in a tense hush wherever the three of them go.      Finally the manager sends over a matronly checker to talk with the woman. The checker says "Good morning,...

Family Snapshots      ( I became an orphan at the age of 78. Three first cousins and my two kids are the only other living pieces of either side of my family. But memories survive. Here are a few of them recently retrieved from the maxed-out flash drive that is wedged between my ears.)           One: My Uncle Darius (pronounced Dare-us) and I are watching a Roy Rogers movie on early television. He is half-cowpoke, half-electrician and wears a 38-inch inseam on button Levis. I am maybe 11. Darius has a five-horse pack string and has twice taken me into the high Rockies on fishing expeditions.        On the little round black and white screen, Roy and Dale and Trigger and Bullet have exposed and nabbed the black-hatted banker who was trying to cheat an older couple out of a chunk of land where oil has been found. Somehow, a half a dozen average ranch workers turn out to be expert musicians,...

The Musician’s Ear   (I heard this story in a café in Banks, Idaho)     “The attack occurred late one Saturday night last July. Let’s make it early Sunday morning. I’d been playing bass in a bar band in and it was our last gig for a month, so by the time we drank a beer and got all of our gear back in the van and I drove an hour home, it was a good three or four in the morning.      Been living out in the woods for thirty years. Bought ten acres when you could still do something like that on musician’s wages, and built the cabin myself out of logs from my own property. Three wives later I still have a roof over my head, but I am living alone.      We’ve had some break-ins in the neighborhood over past few years.  Everybody blames it on the kids or the meth freaks, but some of the thievery has definitely been the work of pros. A kid or somebody strung out on speed doesn’t take the time to sort ...

                               Packy Don Larew Rides Again                                                                  The Sunday morning slows attacked me in a massive shopping center on the island of Oahu. Attired in felt hat, boots, snap shirt, oval belt buckle and Wranglers, two days of R and R beyond wading in the frozen slop in an Idaho feedlot, I was six hours on the downhill side of a last call for double shots of Jim Beam with a beer back at the Waikiki Tiki Hut.      In an effort to atone for Saturday night excess, I went into an Asian imports e...

Rough Carpentry      Sometime in the late 1970's I had the  privilege of working with Claude Avery in and around McCall, Idaho.  Claude had spent years as a Forest Service packer, wrangling a string of mules to carry fingerling fish into high country lakes. After retirement he turned to finish carpentry as a supplement to his Social Security. He was a careful worker, a private person who had worked alone for most of his life, was older than the rest of us on the crew and didn’t much participate in lunchtime chit-chat. This story was told by a fellow carpenter one day when Claude elected to go fishing instead of trimming windows.      “A few years ago, just after Claude retired, they decided to build a new state  forestry headquarters and the low bidder was an outfit from down in the flatlands. The jobsite manager was young fellow with a lot of book learning and not much actual experience. The rest of us on the job called him Dolittl...

Carpenter      (I have worked as a wood butcher several times, rolling logs to the head works in an Idaho sawmill, for a contractor who was obsessed with hunting geese, and as a handydude-remodeler in California and Hawaii. During lunch breaks, while the carpenters were chatty, the drywallers coughed and the painters stared into the distance, I gnawed on my Spam sandwiches and gathered some of their stories. Here is an example from Idaho.)     “Joe Bung and I and were framing tract houses in Boise for an old-timer who believed that job radios slowed things down. He would not let us have tunes except at lunchtime, which was not included in our hourly pay. He was wrong. Anybody who has ever swung a hammer at a sixteen-penny sinker knows that music is absolutely necessary for the sanity of a person who does the same thing day after day after day.      One payday, Joe and I invested in a big ghetto blaster transistor radi...

  One Line Bumper Crop Enclosed find, almost alphabetized, the latest version of my short thoughts, bumper sticky collection.  Don't skinny dip with snapping turtles A penny for your thoughts, a dollar if you flash me. A synonym is a word you use if you can't spell the other one. A truly wise person never plays leapfrog with a Unicorn. Advice is free: The right answer will cost plenty. Alaskans For Global Warming. All I want to do is massage your back. TRUST me... Anarchists of the world unite! Any book worth banning is a book worth reading. Friends don't let friends line dance. Anything not nailed down is a cat toy. Are lightning rods contrary to God's will? Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity. Ask me about my vow of silence. The best things in life are free plus tax. Be ye fishers of men: You catch them. He'll clean them. Beauty is only a light switch away. Bomb Texas. They have oil! A flight attendant is to save your ass, not to kiss it! Cat...