Do you tend to make life more complicated than it needs to be? You know what I’m talking about because we both have friends who see simple, straightforward solutions to everything.
For example, my neighbor Don, who hails from The County, said that it was a waste of taxpayer money to keep people on death row for 15 or 20 years.
I told Don about a man who was released after spending 16 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.
Don said, “That’s what I mean. That wouldn’t have happened if they’d just shot him.”
Will the gentle reader please pause here while I make a confession? This week my topic was the pros and cons of capital punishment.
But there is a powerful force in my home that rules on what you are likely to see under my rubric. The powerful force suggested that you deserved something a bit lighter than hanging and lethal injection.
So, I turned my pen to animal husbandry, which is a safe and pleasant topic.
When you have a few sheep, if anyone in town has sheep they don’t want, at 2 a.m. they drive onto your farm and unload a truckload of fleecy friends under cover of darkness.
So 40 years ago, I had quite a few sheep that people had dropped off at the farm.
In my ignorance, sheep were my second animals of choice, because goats first helped me fight back the inevitable encroaching forest that has taken over so many old Maine farms.
But the goats ate my good fruit trees, as well as the unwanted bushes, and when they started to chew down the buildings, I knew there would be no satisfying them.
Thousands of years ago, there were great forests in many parts of the world until men gave up hunting and gathering to become shepherds and farmers who raised goats for meat, hides and milk.
By the time writing was invented, people were already wandering from place to place, hoping in vain to pasture their flocks in green pastures by still waters. Too late, they learned that goats kill every living piece of vegetation and then glare at you with accusing, protruding eyes because there is no more.
Doesn’t this make war unnecessary? To bring a country to its knees, send them a boatload of goats, sit back and wait.
Do I need to tell you that this attempt to amuse and edify also earned me a big thumbs-down? My wife, who cheerfully watches every episode of “Breaking Bad,” insists that my stories have a happy ending.
Luckily, while reading my diary for 1970, I chanced upon a story Winston Lewis told me about our good friend, the late Ronnie Marsh. Because at one time or another you probably had such a friend, it is a tale that warrants your attention.
Marsh and I go way back. In 1952, he was a football star for Rockland High School. I must have been in Chum Crockett’s composite band, which played for the rumble, because I can’t think of any other reason to attend a football game.
In 1963 or so, I shared an off-campus room with the Marsh Man in Gorham. This was long before the days of cellphones, and he would communicate with his wife-to-be, Sylvia, with the power of his mind. (At the time, we were reading about J.B. Rhine and his ESP work at Duke instead of the mating cycle of the Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis, which would have earned us better grades in Mr. Miller’s biology class.)
Years before, in 1957, Marsh and I worked on the Victory Chimes, a three-masted schooner out of Rockland.
Every week, 20 or more young nurses or secretaries from Boston would sign aboard, hoping to meet a doctor’s son doing post-doc at Harvard, and for seven days and nights on the high seas, they would have to make do with me and Ronnie Marsh. It was the best job I ever had in my life.
There was a time when Winston Lewis lived across the road from Ronnie Marsh.
Marsh was a very laid-back man who would discuss philosophy and boatbuilding and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes well into the night, so Winston had to be careful to turn out all the lights or Marsh, who was a night owl, would come over to ruminate on art or education.
Late one night, Winston got up to attend to an infant daughter who was fussing. He didn’t dare turn on a light, because if Marsh saw it, he’d be at the door.
Although Winston knew pretty well from the smell what he was doing, he couldn’t see what he was doing with the safety pins, so to spare his daughter pain, he turned on a tiny flashlight.
And as soon as he did, Ronnie Marsh knocked at the door and said, “I wouldn’t have come over, but I saw your light.”
The humble Farmer can be seen on Community Television in and near Portland and visited at his website:
www.thehumblefarmer.com/MainePrivateRadio.html
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