As we age, we hope we accumulate wisdom worth passing on to the generations trudging in our footsteps.
You know, the sorts of learnings that can make life easier, perhaps, or maybe philosophical shortcuts to understanding the nature of life and our purpose in it.
Here are a few things I learned while growing up that I hope are useful.
1. Grab the worms, not the digger.
When I was in grade school, my grandpa used to come to our house northwest of Fitzhugh to get fishing worms. He used a couple of electric worm diggers that I am pretty sure he fashioned himself out of an extension cord, a cork handle and 3-foot piece of round steel about the size of a car antenna.
He cut off the female end of the extension cord and soldered the wires to the piece of steel and slid the cork over one end of the steel.
To use a digger, he would plug it into an outlet and shove the end of the steel into the ground where he had seen signs of worms.
Within seconds, worms would begin crawling out of the ground to escape the electricity. My job was to pick them up and put them in a coffee can.
Every so often, I would lose my balance or concentration and brush against the worm digger and get a straight jolt of juice. It felt exactly like the cartoons where someone gets a shock and you can see their skeleton flashing.
Taught me early that you can be doing good and useful things - like getting worms for fishing with your grandpa - but you still have to be alert for those unintended consequences.
2. Beware Bull of the Woods chewing tobacco.
I was at Grandma Solomon’s house one day when I happened across a plug of Bull of the Woods chewing tobacco.
It was a popular brand at the time and there were commercials on tv featuring a quartet of singing bulls who waxed harmonic over the rich and smooth taste of Bull of the Woods. And the baseball ballplayers on the Game of the Week often chewed tobacco, so I figured: hey, I think I’ll try it.
I am pretty sure the tobacco was old and had been left there by one of my uncles, and it was hard to bite off a piece. But I managed.
It did not go well. Less than a minute later, I was blowing chunks all over Grandma’s porch and regretting the influence of tv commercials, my uncles and baseball players.
3. Watch (closely) and learn
These days, you don’t often see people with siphoning hoses, also formerly known as Coal County Credit Cards, but they used to be pretty common.
I had watched Dad and countless other adults use a cut-off garden hose to get a gallon or two of fuel out of a gas tank, so I felt confident when the time came for me to try to it.
Right off, I learned that there is a trick to getting the gas to go into the gas can instead of into your mouth and that was an error that I never repeated.
I can still taste that ethyl swirling around my tonsils and I still remember the lesson I learned about assuming I knew how to do stuff.