As my faithful readers know, we were off next for Kansas City, MO (Missouri for those not familiar with USPS abbreviations, more on that later) to pick up the divine states of Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri. Warning is fair I suppose, so know that I have to be more or less polite about these states since I have roots in three of them (Kansas beware!) and warning should also be given to the religious because I may tromp on you a bit, but take heart by knowing that I intend to do exactly that and I know I am doing it, so it is entirely intentional!
My faithful readers will also recall that our trip to New York moved me into Gold Medallion status with Delta (booked travel will move me to Platinum by October!) and I mused that it shouldn’t matter but that somehow it did. Now I can enlighten you as to exactly why it matters. I booked our trip using a two-for-one rock bottom coach fare class ticket offer, meaning that Tim and I paid under $300 COMBINED to fly in and out of Kansas City. Try finding that deal now! Trust me, it can’t be done, not even with Priceline, and remember we were not flying the great cattle car of the skies, Southwest Airlines either. AND I doubt they could duplicate the price we paid anyway. So, we get to the airport and because of the class of ticket, we had to request upgrades at check-in instead of having them clear 3 days prior to departure like they normally would. So, I did that and when we went to the gate after hanging out in the Crown Room, we moved from row 25 to row 2! Think about this: We paid less than $150 each and flew in First Class! THAT my friends is a huge reason why I care about Medallion status. My dear friend Leigh Ann, a former Delta flight attendant, is either smiling, laughing, or retching right now…I wonder which?
Oh yeah, the Crown Room. Unlike most airline lounges, Delta continues to provide free drinks, including potent potables, to its lounge members. Scandal to think that other airline lounges charge. At any rate, with the better part of a rum and ginger ale and a Bloody Mary in the lounge and two more Bloody Mary’s onboard, the flight was uneventful, heck I don’t even remember it! Not to worry, I wasn’t flying the thing. And had we been in row 25, we both have free drink coupons for emergencies such as being in Coach. As I have noted before, drinking after 6 is for amateurs, we are at least advanced if not pros. And yes, I know some of my readers don’t "approve" of drinking, to which I say get over yourselves and secondly, who asked for your approval anyway?
Kansas City is on the border of Kansas so we picked up that state pretty quickly. Eastern Kansas isn’t as flat as the stereotypes have probably led you to believe and there were a surprising number of oil and gas wells in operation. And Kansas state highway signs are this cute sunflower design. I did find myself wondering if the United States Postal Service had considered the other meaning of the chosen abbreviation for Kansas, which is KS. KS to me will always mean that nasty disease caused by HHV-8 (Human Herpes Virus 8) known as Kaposi’s Sarcoma. And yes, the 8 types of herpes virus are related and include such non-stigma laden things as chicken pox and mononucleosis, so get your minds out of the gutter boys and girls, I am NOT taking about blisters in the genitals here! Point is, every time I see that abbreviation I shudder involuntarily and then realize it refers to a state most of the time, and then I shudder again.
One of the only real problems with our wanderings through the US is that one has to interact with people who live there. Kansas tested me on this point for let us not forget that while I am sure Kansas is home to many delightful people it is also the certifiable center of the buckle of the Bible Belt, so you are not long in the state before you see signs equating Barack Obama with Saddam Hussein. I didn’t know that the CIA put Barack into his political power position and kept him there, so I learn something every day! I have to wonder if they will arrange a "trial" and "execution" when they grow tired of him or when he bites his handlers. If they do, I suppose we will all have to call it an "assassination" instead of just murder won’t we? And Kansas is also home to the Westboro Baptist Church and minister Fred Phelps who has built an entire congregation on the motto "God Hates Fags." Phelps has Leviticus on the brain and I am dying to meet him to ask if he is wearing a blended fabric, if he has eaten shellfish lately, or if he observed the Levitican requirement to bathe immediately after sexual intercourse with a woman and to consider himself unclean and to be separated from the tribe until nightfall of the day following such intercourse, for if he has not followed these other Levitican rules, and there are a LOT more besides, then technically as I read it, he will be hated by God just as much as the "fags" he loves to attack. He gathers his good "Christian" followers together to protest and carry offensive signs at the funerals of people who have died of AIDS because somehow disrupting grieving people is God’s work. If so, I remain thankful that I don’t need god or believe in it. And I STILL don’t understand what English cigarettes have done to offend God!
One of the many problems with this freak is that he counts on the ignorance and desperation of his followers to get away with his crap. He can count on them being too damn lazy to actually READ the thing he is quoting to them and even if they did, one has to wonder why so called "Christians" are so obsessed with the holy book of the Jews? Again technically speaking, the coming of Christ supposedly eliminated the rules and requirements of the Old Testament and replaced them with the teachings of Christ. The problem is of course that Christ wasn’t a hateful person and his teachings or recorded commentary about homosexuality amount to nothing, zip, zero, never thought to mention it. I guess he wasn’t obsessed with who people sleep with other than to note that whomsoever should be without sin should feel free to cast the first stone, and what do you know, no one could pick one up. Hmmm, how about that! Of course I think the whole thing is a bunch of claptrap invented for ignorant souls who need to believe in something bigger than real to explain the bumps in the night instead of accepting and even enjoying the fact that humans haven’t figured out the whole universe just yet, and hey, that’s OK. I can still sleep at night. For those religious types out there, I am totally fine with whatever you believe as long as you leave off laying it on me, trying to convert me, or judging me for not believing what you do. I don’t judge you as people for not believing that Martha Stewart is a goddess on earth, even though she is, so lay off me for not subscribing to your personal brand of insanity. I greatly enjoy any number of otherwise religious people, but only those who have had the good grace, sense, and even manners, to keep religion what it best ought to be, a private matter between you and your god. Those who have to throw it about a great deal and shove it into my face make me think that they are insecure in their own so-called faith and only by making a public affair of it can they reassure themselves. After all, as Harry Truman noted, a respected Missourian by the way, a neighbor that prays too much worried him because he must have a whole lot to repent for! For the exact terminology, consult my mother.
Now that I have offended at least some of my readers, I beg of them to remember that I only sincerely intended to offend one of them, so the rest of you please don’t hate me, I still adore you and hope that you will still be speaking to me later!
I suppose Kansas must have done at least one or two good things, but the only ones I know of are producing the black oil sunflower seeds that so many of my bird friends love and also being the birth state of the utterly fabulous and glamorous Melissa Athie, my CDC-INFO teammate, world class writer, and all around great gal. Of course ranking right up there with her is Danielle Sassone, but she is from New York, and my bad, I forgot that when I wrote about NYC, but she reminded me, and hopefully she will forgive me. But I can’t adequately explain to those who have not met these fabulous women how intimidating it was to first them with their shining beauty (seriously, major hotties!) and even brighter intellects. You sort of had to think that they should have gotten one or the other, but not both, you know. But with Melissa being a former gymnast and present day exercise maniac and Danielle thinking that the best way to start the day is at 5am with a 10 or so mile RUN, well, you get the idea that they would think that the SRA International (the company they work for) Exercise Competition would be a fun thing to do. They are wonderful and I was in awe of them, which made it difficult to supposedly "manage" them, but we muddled through! Yes ladies, big fans of yours…
OK, reigning back in now. We had to stop somewhere to get Tim some caffeine to counter all that free hooch, and the place that presented itself was Chanute, Kansas. When you pull into Chanute you immediately understand why it is no great challenge for Fred Phelps to find plenty of desperate people in Kansas willing to hate anyone and anything in an attempt to distract themselves from their own miserable existence. The town is half dead and that is being generous. We couldn’t find evidence of any economic mainstay or lifeblood in the place and yet people continue to live there, hanging on somehow. I know it isn’t their fault that times have changed and that their former lives are gone, but I do sort of wonder why they continue to wallow in their own misery. In the day of my grandparents when times were tough where you were, you picked up and moved on to a better place, no matter how hard that was or how much it hurt to do it. Hell, even I have moved about the country in search of the better job and richer life instead of just stagnating in misery and accepting that I couldn’t do any better. That spirit doesn’t seem to have hit Chanute just yet, and perhaps it never will. And perhaps given who lives there it is for the best that it doesn’t.
Times in Chanute are so bad that the Kentucky Fried Chicken place went out of business. Have you ever heard of such a thing? You’d think that fatty gross fake fried chicken would always be in style in the good ‘ole heartland of the US and obesity rates in Kansas would seem to argue that a fast food franchise would do well. I almost forget that Kansasans made me feel svelte, another good thing about them! OK, OK, to be fair, Kansas ranks number 27 in obesity rates in the US, so I shouldn’t pick on them for that, especially given that the other three states we would visit all have higher obesity rates and in case you were wondering, Mississippi is the highest. Want to check out your state? Visit: http://calorielab.com/news/2008/07/02/fattest-states-2008/
Don’t you love Google, the truly omniscient and omnipotent entity in the universe? And if you don’t know what those words mean, Google will tell you even though realistically your grade school vocabulary and spelling training should have prepared you long before now.
But alas, KFC in Chanute died. But fear not, it was resurrected (bad religious pun totally intended) as a Chinese buffet! This means, according to my dear friends Barbara and Nikki, that Chanute Kansas is a real town for they contend that any real town has at least one Chinese restaurant, or so they said some 17 years ago when helping me move across the US. I have to confess that Tim and I have this morbid fascination with Chinese buffet restaurants even though they are usually really bad. I contend that Sysco Foods provides Chinese buffet items nationwide which is why they are all so bad and besides who really believes that anyone other than Sysco is wrapping all those crab rangoons? Besides, last I checked, the Chinese don’t really eat cream cheese or most any dairy product for that matter, so don’t think that those deep fried cheese and fake crab things are actually representative of Chinese food. But this place had a unique "Chinese" dish all its own. It was, prepare yourselves for this, Hillshire Farms-like sausage fried with bell peppers! And I didn’t even mention the fried okra, so clearly Chinese in origin. And so I watched these fat and happy Kansasans munching this crap passing as food, secure in the knowledge that God loves them since they aren’t fags and that why heck, that there swimmer Michael Phelps is probably eaten these here same authentic Chinese dishes over there in China right now! And we wonder if he is blessed enough to be related to that good man of the lord Pastor Phelps or would that be too much goodness showered on one man, to be blessed with a divine relation like Pastor Phelps AND win all those gold medals? Could god be that kind?
Personally, I left my mark on the place in the old fashioned way, I pissed there, and we left.
Our destination for the night was the Hilton Tulsa Southern Hills. I sort of have to approve of Hilton right now for a couple of reasons. First, they give me 1,000 Delta Sky Miles for every stay since they have a partnership with Delta and they, out of the blue, gave me Gold VIP status in the Hilton Honors program this year, even though I had no history of staying with them. But it was an effective marketing ploy, because now that I have it you know I want to keep it, and the only way to do that is to stay with them! It didn’t work when Starwood did the same thing a year or two ago, but circumstances being different then etc it had nothing to do with Starwood per se. At check in they upgraded us to the executive floor so clearly it was our day for upgrades. Of course we didn’t see the standard rooms so perhaps they were identical, but they make sure you don’t know this! The room was admittedly pretty fabulous up there on the executive level floor 10, and that gave us an even better view of the Oral Roberts University Campus and the world (in)famous Prayer Tower!
As you CLEARLY will have guessed I did not choose this property for its location, which is literally across the street from Oral Roberts University. Good old Oral being a grand-daddy master of hate I sort of don’t care for the guy, but you have to admit that he did figure out some good scams to bilk millions of people of millions of the few dollars they have, all in the name of "Jesus." And yet I could swear that the point of chasing the money changers from the temple was to "render unto Caesar what is Caesars," i.e. to separate faith and worship from filthy lucre, meaning money. Alas, that lesson also seems to not be on the recommended reading, I mean read to the bleating masses over the loudspeakers, list. These quasi-holy rollers must hate a person who has read the book they so liberally mis-quote and use out of context as an intellectual and literary exercise. I am really good at spotting their bullshit!
So there we are next to "holy" ground what with the prayer tower and all, and Kansas taught me that god hates me, so what to do? As a test, I held up the Harry Potter book I was reading at the time, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Year 6 at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, which everyone KNOWS is a satanic masterpiece, to the eternal flame that lights the top of the Prayer Tower to just see what would happen. I would LIKE to say that the flame leapt towards me in an attempt to purify the world of my satanic tome and that only the last minute utilization of a highly skilled simultaneous application of both a Shield and Freezing Charm saved the day, but alas the truth is that nothing happened and my nascent wizarding skills were not needed.
I was sort of hoping that I would get to relive a day from my youth when my Dad’s mother was visiting us in Porterville. I had been at my friend David’s house playing Dungeons and Dragons, which of course is another known satanic pastime. The fact that this was the only time I ever played it, I found it boring, didn’t matter. I knew that a woman who forbade me to read J.R.R. Tolkein in her house because it was satanic because her preacher said so of course, naturally she never read it because that would have required effort, would flip her old lady panties over D&D! This was a slightly evil child’s dream moment! But to be fair, this is same woman who every summer attempted to brainwash me into believing that my entire family was doomed to the fires of hell and that only I could be saved and perhaps with great effort rescue my parents and sister from eternal damnation if only I would accept blah blah blah as my blaady blaady blaady. Now tell me, seriously, is that an ethical, appropriate, loving, or even kind thing to do to a child of all of 7 years of age? We are taught to love, respect, trust and BELIEVE our grandparents, so when one of them is feeding a CHILD this line of shit that directly threatens his home security and life, what does that do? Yeah, she was a piece of work that one and to this day I just ignore her existence. My sister, being a bigger person than me and with plenty of reasons for not being fond of the old hag herself, has had a rapprochement with the village idiot of Chico California, and she tried to get me to do the same by pointing out that the woman isn’t getting any younger, etc alluding to her eventual demise. My response is that when she dies she will just be another dead old woman to me, I won’t care for she lost out on the chance to mean anything to me long ago due to her dangerous combination of ignorance, false piety, self-righteousness, bigotry ("Georgia wouldn’t be a bad place if it wasn’t for all the niggers"), and her need to bring the entire world down to her level. At any rate, I knew D&D would torque her, so I elaborated on what was involved in the playing of the game, provoking her until she burst forth with the declaration that D&D was the devil’s game and that she wouldn’t have a devil worshiper in her home and that I was to leave immediately! Success! I calmly, and oh so satisfyingly, informed her that since she was in Porterville, in my house, that as far as I could see the house was FAR more my house than hers and that if I offended her, SHE could leave. Confronted with this unusual thing called logic, she crumpled like a decades old corsage, and stormed from MY house back to her travel trailer, appropriate housing for trash such as her. Of course victory over an ignorant old hag isn’t much, but at 13 it sort of meant something. It is important to note here that I don’t mean to hurt anyone who does care for Juanita and I certainly mean no offense or foul to my father whom I love and admire more every passing day and wish more and more that I could be more the man he is. My opinion is strictly mine based on my lived experience, the only basis for an idea I can realistically have.
By the way, her church had a geodesic dome structure remarkably similar to the one of the Oral Roberts campus, I wonder if there was a connection. I also wondered why Buckminster Fuller, the dude who elucidated the geodesic structure, became such a love child of the falsely named fundamentalist church. But of course those fools don’t know who he is, they just assume god inspired the architect and probably communicated the design in tongues, or perhaps the snake told them while they were handling it!
I sort of had to wonder what they teach at ORU since it couldn’t be things like archeology, anthropology, geology, well any science really since that might contradict the "truth" that the Earth is only 4,000 years old and those fossils etc were planted by god as part of his design or else, depending on who you believe, are the work of Satan in attempt to mislead us all into believing in demons such as carbon dating and all that devil worship.
The more I looked at the Prayer Tower, and you sort of have to stare it like you would a really bad car wreck knowing that you shouldn’t but also needing to try to take in that much disaster, I had to think that it was equivalent to the Ministry of Truth, where Winston worked in 1984. His job, as some of you know, was to remove mention of people, places, or events which the ruling regime had deemed unreal and to do this he removed pages from books and sent them to a fiery end through a chute at his desk in the Ministry. The flame was there and the attitude of rewriting reality is a core tenet of Oral, so it sort of made sense to me.
The ultimate test though was yet to come. As we were getting hungry, we picked a barbeque place, the Rib Crib, to eat at but on the way there, we noticed that past the giant bronze hands clasped in prayer at the entrance to ORU, there were good Christian boys playing soccer on a field and half of them had no shirts! Well, naturally Tim and I had to go check that out and although we were on campus with very unchristian intent, scoping out boys that is, nothing happened. No lightening, no fire, so vaporizations, nothing except realizing that whatever else all that supposedly good chaste abstaining Christian living does for those boys it did nothing to improve their bodies or appearance. Drat! So much for engaging in a mite bit of corrupting as an evening’s entertainment!
The Rib Crib proved to be excellent eats and if you find yourself in Tulsa, I do recommend it. The journey also allowed us to see something of Tulsa aside from the ORU campus or the admittedly delightful Art Deco skyscrapers of downtown. Tulsa is really a pretty city with an un-coaxed greenness that is totally foreign to a Californian and increasingly unfamiliar to Georgians continuing to struggle with drought. The Arkansas River did look low however, so I had to wonder if the port of Tulsa was still open. Now just to put that into perspective, get a map of the US and note how far Tulsa is from the ocean, and then reflect on the fact that the city is an active port.
Later that night we had a first hand glimpse into the mating rituals of heterosexuals. As part of our VIP-ness with Hilton, we had coupons for two free cocktails in the bar, and not being ones to say no to free hooch, we went. There were not a lot of people there, just one or two business types watching the Olympics on the TV above the bar. Soon enough a female of the species entered. Immediately the slime ball dude to my left started chatting her up and you could just feel his anticipation of diving into this woman’s panties. I had to stifle a laugh, because I was pretty sure that she wasn’t gonna do him. In deference to Tim I refrained from pointing this out to him, loudly, as I have been known to do on crowded Delta MD-88 aircraft when some fool male gallantly jumps to lift up a carry-on bag into the overhead bin for some young chickie. In an attempt at self-defense, I suppose, this woman tries to drag Tim and I into the conversation about something or the other, disrupting my otherwise rapt perusal of USA Today. Tim is horrified and wants to escape immediately but I am intrigued with these behavior patterns about which I know nothing and besides, I am not done with my damn beer yet! Needless to say we escaped unharmed.
The following morning I couldn’t help but notice that the Mabee Center of ORU was hosting a band named Skillet. I gathered that the Mabee Center was the event or convention center for ORU but I was intrigued by the name which I could only pronounce as "maybe." I also sort of thought that evangelical types were anything but "maybe" and figured the venue should have been named something more decided and certain like "absolutely" or "enraptured," something to indicate its superiority. Skillet I further gathered was representative of the oddest of all creations, the "Christian" rock band. For me, there will only be one "Christian" rock band, Faith Plus One, fronted by none other than that famous little boy Eric Cartman from that small but charming Colorado mountain town called South Park. If you don’t watch South Park, you should, but don’t judge until you let yourself get past the language and other gratuitous foulness because even though Lemiwinks is a bit much, you have to admit that there is a lesson in every episode which is usually very sensible, and if you miss it, Stan will outline it for you, although occasionally Kyle has to fill in on that task. Not to worry, Eric never learns anything and Kenny is usually dead by the end.
On reflection, I feel the need to pause a moment here and explain myself. The thoughts, ideas, and feelings expressed here are not solely the consequence of visiting Kansas and/or Oklahoma. I have been in the process of developing my ideas and feelings about things, as has most everyone, all of my life. Childhood experiences related to my father’s mother (her behavior robs her of the title of Grandmother, a title bestowed only on the worthy) or being beaten in the schoolyard because I didn’t go to church through to adulthood where I realize all too clearly that homophobia remains the only politically and socially acceptable, and even legally defended, prejudice, all have informed and refined my anger and point of view. Recent events in my own life have refined my need to say things because I realize more clearly than anyone reading this possibly can just how finite life really is. But please make no mistake, these travelogues are NOT the result of my dementia, the loss of brain tissue, or any other disease process, rather they are my DEFENSE against all of that, they are the recordings of my more lucid and planned thoughts, a record of a person who lived, thought, experienced life for all that is both good and bad in it. If you are offended, perhaps you should consider WHY you are offended. Have you seen yourself herein and don’t like what you see? If so, do you curse the mirror on a bad hair day? If you disagree with my point of view, that is fine, I have had many people in my life who don’t agree with every single thing I think or feel. The world would be boring if everyone was like me and thought like me. I ask you all to remember that my experiences and views of the world are mine alone and are provided for your entertainment and to some extent for your edification if you are willing to take them as such. And besides, if I didn’t value, admire, love, and respect you as people, you wouldn’t be on the list of people who get to read them anyway. Maybe that explains it a bit more, perhaps not, but I felt it important to try. My final thought on the matter has to do with Pastor Martin Niemöller and the poem generally attributed to him which I first learned when in graduate school. I would provide a link to it but I think that many people are too busy or even disinterested to follow links, so I will just reproduce it here:
In Germany, they came first for the Communists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;
And then . . . they came for me . . .
And by that time there was no one left to speak up.
There are multiple versions of the above, but when asked in 1972 what version he felt was most accurate, this is one Pastor Niemöller chose.
I ask you all to remember the unspeakable horrors committed by the human race over history, not just during World War II, and to remember how many of them were committed in the name of some god hating someone else. Perhaps in a way my tirades are because of my illness but only in the sense that I WON’T be silent and wait for anyone to come for me because life is too precious and too short for that. So I type on despite loosing sensation in my hands because only through giving voice do I make any effort at all to save myself and those I love.
We left Tulsa on US 412 headed east into Arkansas and I have to say that this is a beautiful stretch of highway heading into the Ozark Mountains. If you find yourself in this particular neck of the woods, give 412 a try. It isn’t the fastest road perhaps but it is one of the more lovely that I have had the pleasure to be on. The road climbs without you really noticing it and eventually you will spot wild walnut and pecan trees on the sides of the road along with vistas of the rolling mountains covered in trees as far as you can see.
I have to mention Gobbler Arkansas just because the name is so appropriate. If the word gobbler brings to mind turkeys, it should because there are nothing but turkey farms here. If you have never been near a turkey farm you might not know this, but turkeys stink badly, I mean they REEK! You might not ever want to eat turkey again after you smell where they come from.
The other notable feature of this part of the heartland is the number of carnicerias, panaderias, and similar stores. If you don’t know what those are, I will translate for you. The first is a butcher and the second a baker and they are there to serve the rapidly growing Hispanic populations who work in the chicken and turkey farms that allow you to go to Wal-Mart, further destroying commerce in the US while you are at it of course, and buy tonight’s dinner cheap. But of course we should seal our borders because naturally we don’t want to continue to eat at a reasonable price and we don’t really care about destroying the only economically viable and productive industries in widely different parts of the country by removing our most reliable source of labor, and with our budget deficits we surely don’t need the taxes those workers pay but don’t file returns to get refunds on, which they almost universally would if they did file, or the Social Security funds that they pay even though they won’t ever get the benefits are surely not important to that bankrupt, in more than one sense, system.
Our goal for the evening was Springfield, Missouri but on the outskirts of the city, we stopped to eat at Lambert’s. Lambert’s is clearly something of an institution in southern Missouri which started as a small family restaurant that has grown into a giant operation. We signed in, at 4:oopm, thinking that the wait at that time of day couldn’t be too long, but we were told that it would be up to 50 minutes! We were pretty darn hungry having not eaten since breakfast that morning in anticipation of Lambert’s and I think there was a moment of hesitation, but we decided to wait it out. The tour bus full of Menonites, sort of like liberal Amish, was ahead of us so that slowed things down considerably, but we made it inside eventually. There is no adequate way to describe the place for it is huge, noisy, and utterly delicious! The only time I have EVER had food that good was when my Grandmother was still alive and cooking. It was just that good and that familiar, at least to me. My level of familiarity told me, wisely, to avoid the fried okra, but Tim tried a piece, the first and last time he does that! Sorry, but okra is the definition of nasty. Who eats seed pods when there is a choice? OK, my Mother does, but she grew up eating it so perhaps she doesn’t realize they are nasty. But to be fair, I eat bouillon cubes, Wyler’s are the absolute best, so tastes do vary, and that’s alright. Lambert’s does have a guy in the middle of each serving section who tosses rolls at you like baseballs, although we did notice that he would delivery them the normal way for older folks. A server walks about with a can of sorghum molasses for the rolls, but Tim noticed that the can says it is mostly cane syrup not true sorghum, which has a very distinctive taste that many people don’t like, which is why they use a milder product I suspect. I had fried catfish, done correctly by being rolled in simple corn meal, NOT a batter, and Tim had a chicken fried steak that was the real deal of a round steak, not the overly tenderized practically hamburger versions so common to places relying on Sysco (we passed a production and distribution plant of theirs). Lambert’s is the sort of place that reminds what I hate most about the Syscos and Wal-Marts of the world, which is the leveling and destructive effect they have on local ways, foods, businesses, and traditions such that every place becomes just like every other place. Tim and I try to use smaller roads and local businesses and restaurants wherever we go in an attempt, often thwarted, to find remnants of what once was, and I think that perhaps the success of Lambert’s which remains economical for the sheer quantity of food you get and authentic in the taste buds of someone who grew up with this style of food, is due in large part to the fact that it isn’t cookie-cutter plastic Sysco Wal-Mart could be anywhere America. I think there is a lesson in there for all of us, but unlike Stan or Kyle I won’t tell you what it is, instead I want each of you to THINK about what it means to you, and perhaps it won’t mean anything to some of you, obsessed as you may be with saving three pennies in the moment as an off-set to destroying the future of anything resembling community and uniqueness in the future, and if so, then so it is, but for most of you I think you can resonate with the point if you give yourselves a chance.
As you drive along the road of southern Missouri you will inevitably notice, especially wherever the road bed has been cut into the landscape, the large limestone boulders. At first glance they appear so artistic and deliberate that they could be landscaping touches, but eventually you realize that they are there because they were there first, for you are on the top of a limestone plateau. My Mom knows the correct term even if I don’t and I probably have it wrong, but suffice it to say that the limestone is a key geologic feature of the area and that is of course why there are so many caves around here. Limestone dissolves in mildly acidic water, which means that limestone buildings don’t fare well with acid rain conditions. Limestone’s solubility in mild acid is also responsible for the caves because the ground water becomes slightly acidic on contact with the CO2 in the air and other minerals in the ground, and this trickling of acidic water over long periods of time carves out caves and also creates the cave features such as stalactites (ceiling down) and stalagmites (floor up). I like caves and I have visited all of them in California, but Georgia doesn’t have any. I had thought of visiting Marvel Cave but it has the misfortune to be in the Silver Dollar City Amusement Park, well actually it is 500 feet UNDER it, but still you have to cough up $48 per adult to get in, and that just seemed absurd as an entrance price, so I didn’t do it. Reportedly I visited it as a child, although I do not remember this. I will have to find caves that are more reasonably priced for future explorations. I would go back to Mammoth Caves in Kentucky in a heartbeat, and we drive past them every time we go to Louisville, but Tim won’t stop to go there because he is too focused on getting to his final destination to humor me even just a little. Oh woe is me! And if you believe too much of that, you really haven’t been paying attention!
We headed just about due north out of Springfield, headed to the tiny speck on the map called Urbana Missouri to visit my great-aunt June, the younger sister of my maternal grandmother. To my way of thinking, everyone really ought to have a great-aunt June in their lives just because it would enrich life. June is in her 80s, lives alone, and I wouldn’t want to be the person to even suggest that she shouldn’t do exactly what she wants to do, how she wants to do it, when she wants to do it. June is, and by all accounts always has been, FIERCELY independent. Born, raised, and graduated high school in Oklahoma, moved to Los Angeles, and couldn’t wait to get back to farm or ranch, so she moved with her first husband to the same ranch in Urbana that I visited her at LONG before I was thought of. If I remember correctly, always an iffy thing, she told us that this year or next was her 50th year on the place. Her first husband Bill died of a sudden heart attack but June carried on with the cattle and dairy on her own. She told us about being kicked by a cow during milking, which June attributed to her own mistake in handling udders sore from cowpox, and how she drove to the doctor’s house (try that today) to have it seen about. She ignored his advice about keeping off of it and keeping it elevated because someone had to see to the cows and since she lived alone it had to be her.
Aunt June is full of stories and she likes to share them. Not to worry about her remembering them either, for I don’t think she has forgotten a thing in the last 80 years. She will tell you that she works find-a-word puzzles to keep her mind sharp, something she clearly believes is important and whatever she is doing to accomplish that, it is working very well. She will tell you to the month when she planted the trees on the property, she knows everyone’s birthday, death anniversary, and other significant times in family life.
I learned from June about the time my grandmother ran away from home at 15 to go off to western Oklahoma to be with my future grandfather. June marveled that Daddy didn’t beat my grandmother half to death, but she is pretty sure he didn’t. June was 8 at the time and I don’t doubt for a minute that she would have remembered. June gets lots of phone calls, being a very popular aunt, she had no children of her own, and at the conclusion of one of these calls from someone who is probably a second cousin or something of that sort, the son of my great-uncle being something that I don’t know the name for, June pointed out that in our family there were some parts that were very nice and some parts that were, well, not so desirable. I sort of choked a minute on that one because most of my family is not quite that honest, but June is nothing if not honest! And in reality, June observation is no doubt not only true of my family but true of every family.
One of the first things June told Tim was that her new house, new 20 years ago but far newer than the original house, was built with an all steel frame, nine inch thick walls, and solid concrete foundation. I forgot that Tim wouldn’t understand the significance of this but I did. The original farm house, which is still standing, had a severe termite infestation that eventually forced the abandonment of the house. Even in times that I had visited it there were parts of the floor that you didn’t step on because the floor was unstable from insect damage. June is secure in the idea that this will not happen again!
The milking barn is still standing as is the red silo. June will give you directions to her place but when she does so she won’t tell you the street number, although there is one, instead she will tell you to look for the red silo because she is very clear and very proud I think that hers is the only red silo for some 15 miles or more around. Our GPS system doesn’t respond to directions involving silos however, so we did get the street number. June has succeeded in getting the USPS to deliver to her door instead of her having to walk down the driveway and across the road to get to that mailbox, but she noted that they won’t come up the drive if it is too icy, which irritates her mightily since she pointed out, quite accurately, that if it is too damn icy for the post office it is too damn icy for her!
June told us about how the insurance man who had carried her farm policy for years made her mad over raising rates after a lightening strike killed a heifer and she filed a claim. As June put it, she went ape-shit, she whispered that part, and set out to dump him even if he had been her insurance man for 40 years. When she did, she proudly walked into the town café and told him she was done with him for everyone to hear! June was also consistently clear that while she did eventually remarry, that farm and that house were hers. Carl, her second husband, lived there, but it was hers and that was that. She was highly irritated with marketing calls telling her that she had credit card balances when she was quite clear that she had NEVER had a credit card, didn’t want one, and that she had no debt because HER house was paid for long ago by HER. If you want to get June hot just suggest that she owes anyone anything. She is justifiably, in my mind, enormously proud that she paid for her 160 acres of land in full and that it is unquestionably hers, and when you think about it, that is rather a significant achievement for anyone, especially for a woman of her generation.
June will tell you that one of her favorite things to do was to mess with children. One of her favored ways to do this was to send kids to gather eggs back when she had a hen house, especially if the child in question had no familiarity with the behavior of hens sitting on a nest. Hens are not keen on giving up those eggs see, and they will peck at you, but a kid who has never gathered eggs won’t know this. She told of one little boy that she sent to the henhouse to gather, but not before she managed to get into the upper story of the house to watch from above as he tried to get those eggs. She eventually gave herself away by laughing as he would try to get those eggs but would dart back from the hens pecking at him. She also remembers a little boy asking about a spot or something on the forehead of her husband Carl and how she told him that it was there because Carl had made her mad one day so she hit him in the head with a log from the woodpile! The next day, she calls out to this little boy and he comes around the corner, June has Carl in a headlock with a raised log ready to hit him again! Of course June and Carl had planned this for their own entertainment, but the kid was scared to death and ran screaming! I should know because I was the little boy she did it to some 34 years ago! June remembers this very clearly, and she reckons she ought not to have done it, but I think there is a part of June that is sort of pleased with herself that the joke was so effective, and to be very clear, I remember it well also and despite what some of you might think, I remember it fondly as it seems all the children that June has played a joke on do, for to this day June has lots of contact with people she has known from birth on, all of whom just adore their Aunt June.
It would seem that there is a fair number of what June calls black snakes in the area. They would get into the hen house every now and then to eat the eggs and one time June went to gather eggs and found one in a nest. Being a wise farm woman, June just called the dog, Brother, who promptly grabbed that snake, took it into the yard, and proceeded to shake it vigorously. June remembers egg yolks spraying out of that snake’s mouth as the dog shook it about! I HATE snakes with a passion, as did June’s husband Carl, so I would not have wanted to witness this, but it didn’t seem to bother June too much. I suspect she was mad at the snake for eating her eggs! Another snake got into the quail pen and ate nine of the young quail, and June was clear on the position in which the snake swallowed the quail, which leads me to believe she cut it open and found out. But the most terrifying snake story was about the one under her bed at night. The old house had a few holes in it, as you might expect, and there were mice coming in, so June laid out glue traps under the bed. Her bed that is, because June will tell you that she doesn’t like to sleep with anyone, instead she likes to have the whole bed to herself so she can stretch out and move around. So she wakes up in the night to hear this "thunking" sound, turns on a light, and sees a snake trying to get out a hole in the corner of the room, but it can’t because it has two glue traps stuck to it! What to do? She wakes up Carl, who is not amused given his hatred of snakes and June finds this part sort of funny, the scared look on his face when she wakes him in the night with the news of a snake in her bedroom. She tries to think of something to use to pick the snake up and all she can think of is a pair of long-handled pruners on the porch, so she gets those and grabs the snake with them and carries it out to the concrete porch, where she then proceeds to chop the snake up with an axe. She will proudly tell you that the marks from that axe chopping that snake are still on the concrete and we are pretty certain that Tim would later use that same axe to hammer a bird feeder support pole into the ground. Tim also noticed that the pruners are still out there as well.
Tim and I both agree though that they best June and a wild animal story has to do with what June called a "big daddy coon," which the rest of you will recognize as a male raccoon. To make sense of this, it helps to know that June likes roosters and she had one that someone gave her after Carl died which would wake her every morning and she sort of came to rely on that. Later in the day he would wander over to the sliding glass door so that they could look at each other. Well one morning the rooster doesn’t crow and June knows without looking that the rooster has to be gone. Later, when the Mennonites to whom she sold some dairy equipment came to pick up the items, they found the feathers of the rooster and knew he was gone. Well, June told us that she has "have-a-heart" live traps so she set one out with a can of tuna in it. I was sort of impressed by the live trap since I hate to kill anything other than an insect. We had mice in the basement here and we tried live traps but the damn mice wouldn’t go into them so we had to resort to the more traditional, and very effective, snap traps, but I did try the non-lethal method first! So I was impressed that June was going to do a trap and release. Well, the next morning she finds the big daddy coon in that live trap and she promptly shoots it in the head with her .22 while it was still in the trap! OK, so much for catch and release. Come to find out that the purpose of the live trap is to trap feral cats, which she doesn’t like, but unlike Carl she doesn’t kill them, instead she takes them over to a nearby creek and releases them. But big daddy coons who kill a rooster, those she just calmly shoots in the head.
It is fair to say that June has slowed a bit in recent years but as much as she isn’t fond of raccoons and cats, she does love birds, especially the purple martins. She maintains at least 30 nest boxes for them around the house and looks forward to their arrival every year. She is also hosting at least 5 hummingbirds this year and we sat on her front porch watching them perching on the barbed wire fence and eating out of the feeder she keeps for them. One year a newly hatched hummingbird was caught in a rainstorm, so she took it in the house in a jar until the rain stopped and then released it back outdoors so it could fly away. She told us that she has a dress with bright red flowers on it, and that one hummingbird came right up to her on the porch thinking it was a real flower. And that is the image I like to carry away with me of my great-aunt June, sitting on the porch with a hummingbird hovering nearby believing that flower is real.
We headed back to Kansas City for the night and a flight out the next day. We decided that in Kansas City one had to have barbeque, so we gave Gates’s BBQ a try. It is spicy and oh so yummy if a bit messy. It is a very popular place and if you are not a person of color you will stand out, but not to worry, all that yelling going on isn’t directed so much at you as it is just the general behavior of the place. If you watch you will see that they yell at everyone. The only drawback to the place from my perspective was its unfortunate sharing of the same name as the certifiably insane banshee of a woman who was the former project co-manager of CDC-INFO. I think the name Gates will live in infamy for the balance of my life and no matter that I knew it was a BBQ place in Kansas City, somewhere in the back of my mind was the image of a woman with greasy blond hair and a urine soaked shoe demanding the absurd, ill-advised, and/or impossible. But for those of you who are not haunted by this particular nightmare, if you find yourself in Kansas City and you like BBQ, go to Gates’s, you won’t be disappointed and if you leave hungry it will truly be your own fault!
The return flight was uneventful except for our final approach through the clouds which heavily resembled a ride at Six Flags except of course that we were not attached to steel rails when my stomach was in my throat! But all is well that ends well and as always thank you for reading and sharing in the adventure. In a couple of weeks we head off to Minnesota for the balance of the Midwest and prairie states and provinces, so who knows what new adventures await!
P.S. There are no pictures from this journey for which we apologize but that’s just the way it is.