Category Archives: Human Behavior

One of the Fascinations of Christian TV

Posted on February 3, 2012 by | 17 comments

Maybe I should have explained this on my earlier post.  If my dad’s still alive he’s too old to care, and anyone else who might have once felt anything about it will also be old enough to handle it.

For me, discovering I had a biological half-brother didn’t come as a particular shock.  I’d always figured I probably had a few, maybe a lot.  My dad never made any bones about having been a rounder all his life.  His extra-marital affairs cost him a couple of marriages.

One night during the early 1980s, Dad and I were sitting in the parking lot of the Georgetown, Texas, hospital at 2:00 am, because his wife of the time was inside being treated in the Emergency Room.  They were visiting my wife and me over some holiday.

It was a long wait, and the conversation drifted to women, observations about them, stories about them, puzzlements about women we’d found during our individual experiences with them.  Somewhere during all that the subject of the products of our meanderings came into the discussion.

He said he didn’t actually know how many kids he’d left along his back trail, but one was a sure thing.  He’d first seen the guy on television because someone told him there was a televangelist who bore an amazing likeness, both in physical features and in mannerisms of speech and gesture.

Dad was mildly interested, enough to eventually watch the guy on television.  Which bowled him over.  He said it was like watching a movie of himself speaking at a Toastmaster meeting at an earlier age.  A suspicion dawned for him sufficiently to cause him to find out more about the man.  Where he was from, how old he was, and eventually to find out who the mother of the televangelist was.  He had, it turned out, vivid recollections of her when they both were a lot younger.

He didn’t name the man, and I didn’t give it a lot of thought for a number of years.  But early during my Christian television watching it came back full force.  For a moment I was disoriented, almost as though I watching my dad on television.  I truly was amazed and there was no doubt in my mind I was seeing my biological half-brother.  Just about my own age. 

My lady friend of the time, whom I made a point of having watch him without explaining, commented, “He looks and talks like you.  Weird.”

The man was a moving speaker and a faith healer of some fame.  So one of the attractions motivating me to rise at 3:00 am and watch Christian television was the strangeness of watching him, particularly. 

I always tried to catch his show and his appearances when I could.  If a person’s going to put himself through an experience of that sort, 3:00 am’s not an altogether bad time to do it.

Old Jules

17 Comments

Posted in 1980's, 1990's, Human Behavior, Parents

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The Ask Old Jules Blog

Posted on January 29, 2012 by | 11 comments

Jeanne’s migrating the Ask Old Jules feature from Facebook to a blog to be linked to this one.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Facebook thing, here’s what it’s all about.

Several years ago I used to amuse myself between doing other things by answering questions on a Question/Answer site.  Over the years I somehow managed to build up 13,000 answers to every sort of question imaginable, many of which were inappropriate or off-the-wall enough to forever have them banning me from the site.

I’d send them an apology promising never to do it again, they’d restore my membership, and in no time at all some pencil-necked stuffed-up questioner would report me again and get me banned.  But while all this was going on, Jeanne was religiously copying and pasting the stuff, saving it for her own incomprehensible reasons.

When this blog came to being and nobody was reading it Jeanne decided to use some of the more inane Q/As in her files on Facebook to point people towards the blog.  But a lot of the Q/As were too long to post on Facebook, so eventually the choice was to drop them entirely, or to continue them on a blog.

She’s been working like an illegal alien or some foreigner setting it up, putting some of her art work as headers, generally creating a pleasant blog site.  Her thought is that people reading it might wish to participate by asking questions there.  I welcome any avenue providing me more opportunities along the lifelong journey of discovery to discover what I think.  Especially in an environment where I’m less likely to be banned than was the case in that other Q/A thing.

So beginning February 1st the Ask Old Jules blog will be up and running.  A link will show up in the blogroll. All the old archives from the whatchacallit, Facebook one, will also be stored there if you want to have a look-see to get an idea what she was doing.

Old Jules

Note from Jeanne: Posts here on So Far From Heaven will continue as usual when Old Jules and WordPress are cooperating with each other.
At this time posts are scheduled on Ask Old Jules for Wednesdays and Sundays. That might change depending on participation.  Comments are  welcome as usual, but if you ask a question, it might be used (without your name) as a new blog entry with an answer.
Shorter Ask Old Jules entries will still show up on Facebook from time to time.
And here’s some Leonard Cohen that I’m fond of, even if he’s not singing:

11 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Communication, Creative Writing, Human Behavior, Internet, Writing

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UFO and Certainties About What Isn’t

Posted on January 26, 2012 by | 32 comments

Good morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read.

We human beings love ourselves better for our certainties.  Most of us take particular satisfaction in sneering about the certainties of others when we’ve applied something we pretend is logic to prove theirs are invalid.  Pulls us up by the rhetorical bootstraps in a reality where being intelligent is considered a virtue almost as resounding as being ‘right’.

One of the areas of opinion that breaks down into sneers rapidly involves unidentified flying objects and whether creatures from somewhere else have visited this planet.  The ‘right’ side of the issue is they are fig-newtons of the imagination and declaring it to be so proves intelligence, level-headedness, education and superiority to those who believe otherwise.

The ‘wrong’, ‘stupid’, ‘irrational’, ‘illogical’ side is people who’ve experienced them.  Police, airline pilots, military pilots, lawyers, psychologists, physicians, and thousands of other people who might have been ‘right’ once, but were transported into the camp of ‘wrong’ by personal observation and experience.

A while back I posted about a visit I had with Kay’s aunt, Loretta. [An Afternoon with Aunt Loretta (Proctor)- Roswell, 1947] Loretta’s one of the folks still living who was close-enough to the Roswell UFO incident to have an opinion about it based on her own experiences and observations at the time.  I’ve got a lot of respect for the lady and value what she had to say, even though it’s just naturally ‘wrong’.

But I was backed into a corner of open-mindedness on the issue by a couple of experiences of my own.  One with a lot of other witnesses on California Avenue in Socorro, New Mexico.   The second was long-lasting and relatively close-up and personal.   Back during the Y2K time.

 

Pie Town’s located about 30 miles west of the Very Large Array [VLA] telescopes near Datil, New Mexico.  The village sits almost atop the Continental Divide, an isolated community in the middle of nowhere.

I was in the only telephone booth in Pie Town  around midnight. The town only has a couple-hundred people and there were no lights of any sort in town. Low overcast, 500 feet or less.

Whatever it was appeared above me below the overcast and stayed there while I told the person I was talking to on the phone what was happening.  It stayed maybe 10-15 minutes and gave me the willies badly enough, I got thinking I was the reason it was there.

I told the person I was talking to adios and went to the truck, took a .45 out from under the seat and racked in a round.  It moved a bit about then, not much but some, while I stood there pointing a pistol at it waiting in the dark. It moved a little more, seemed to descend — at least it got larger, and stopped again.

I decided to just get the hell out of there if I could. Cranked up the truck and drove about a quarter-mile and pulled off the highway to make sure it wasn’t following me. It sort of drifted or glided off to the north and vanished into the overcast.

The experience motivated me enough to try to find out whether objects of that particular description and configuration were common, because I’d never heard of one. I occasionally would research various UFO sighting archives on the web.

Years later I found that within a few days of my own sighting an object of almost identical description upset a lot of on-duty military personnel by behaving almost the same way at White Sands Missile Testing Range near Alamogordo, New Mexico, a couple of hundred miles SE from Pie Town. White Sands is an extremely high security area and they take it personally when something intrudes into the airspace over the place, more personally yet when it hangs around and isn’t scared.

There was [maybe still is] a squadron of F117s stationed at Alamogordo [Luftwaffe] at the time, and they scrambled. But the object removed itself before they arrived.

As for my own experience and the times involved — I’m having to best guess. The person I was describing it to on the telephone and I took a stab at it toward the end of our conversation before I decided to evacuate. But things seem longer and it mightn’t have been that long. Afterward, while I was standing there watching and pointing the .45 it’s anyone’s guess. Might have been as little as 5 minutes, seemed a lot longer.

Which is to say, I don’t know much about aliens and the things they fly around in, but I don’t put a lot of value on the speculations of people who know all about what they aren’t.   Even if they’re real smart and have a lot of school-housing.

Old Jules

 

32 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Science, UFOs

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Priorities Floating in a Syrup of Reality

Posted on January 23, 2012 by | 20 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming for a read.

Sometimes I surprise myself with how stupid I am.  Every time I get thinking I’ve plumbed the depths of human folly something comes along to prove there’s another layer down there for me to probe.  One of the ways it all manifests itself in my life has to do with sorting out priorities and shifting things around to accommodate critical paths.  When enough pressure builds behind a particular critical path stricture my focus is drawn there and I begin some new stupidity energy release intended to allow the dammed up whateverness to pass through.

At the moment the focus is computers.  The one I’m typing on is an old XP machine I bought at a garage sale a year-or-so ago for a strictly online machine for browsing and downloading data.  But gradually for the sake of speed and convenience I sneaked around and allowed myself to do other things with it project-wise.  Stupid stupid stupid stupid.

Now this machine is trying to take a hike into oblivion.  It wants to join the other two computer carcasses stacked over on the futon that once did what it does.  I bought an old XP in a thrift store for $50 to replace this one when I knew this one was going to retire, but a lot of files and settings in the one in front of me now need to be transferred to the next one.  One of those is the modem driver that allows that machine to use the external modem this one uses to go online.  It won’t recognize the modem, absolutely refuses to acknowledge there’s a modem connected to it.

Everyone tells me there’s nothing to transferring this stuff.  I’ve got a cable especially made with a CD to allow this comp to talk to that one and transfer what’s needed.  Both machines are reluctantly willing to admit they’re capable of doing it, each proclaims it’s ready and more than willing to do it.  But then, each points the finger of blame at the other, claiming the other one has something faulty causing it to drag its heels.  Neither will acknowledge a connection is live between them, thought the light on the cable says there is.

So I have a dying machine here I can’t get any of the downloaded or installed programs off of into the other machine, which is bad enough, but worse is the fact the replacement machine doesn’t even have the brainpower to recognize the phoneline modem.  So it’s not figuring on having to go online.

Meanwhile, the offline machine I use for actual heavy-lifting is off the table and residing over with the two carcasses because the power cord, the keyboard, the mouse and screen it uses are being used by the XP intended for the next online one.

A lot of the day yesterday was spent trying to get these two XPs to shake hands and talk to one another.  But today, I think this ‘new’ XP is going into the pile of carcasses where the heavy lifter is now, and the heavy lifter’s going back to work doing what it needs to be doing.

Wasted a lot of time getting there, and more time telling about it.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid.

Old Jules

20 Comments

Posted in 2012, Astronomy, Communication, Human Behavior, Internet

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Finding Non-Virtuous Pursuits: The Challenge

Posted on January 21, 2012 by | 13 comments

I’ve spent most of a lifetime avoiding virtue successfully without having to devote a lot of energy to doing it.  But it’s gotten a lot more difficult.

For instance, I predominantly eat veggies along with some rice.  If I feel the need for protein I throw in some eggs.  Sounds harmless enough.  I’ve got a rice steamer with a platform compartment in the top allows me to steam a mess of veggies and rice faster than I can tell it.  I love it, and it’s easy to clean afterward without using any water.  I run a 1.1 penny US baby-wipe wipe over it after I pour out the vittles and it’s ready to run another race.

But suddenly I’ve discovered not eating meat is at least a virtue, in some cases, a religion.  Wedges me firmly between a rock and a hard place.  I’ll eat a bit of meat sometimes when I can afford it, but honestly I feel better saving the money against the possibility of something coming up so’s I need money.

I’ve got a little sausage in the freezer I had Gale pick up for me last time he was in San Angelo, but in some sense it’s like the quarter-bottle of Y2K Jack Daniels Black Label sitting on the microwave drawing dust.   It’s just too good to use, except on special occasions.

So, for the purposes of not being virtuous, the sausage doesn’t help much more than the Jack Daniels.   I need to come up with some cheap, non-virtuous things I can do that don’t require burning any gas, borrowing a vehicle, or glutting myself more than I do when I cook up a nice Idaho potato, chop up some jalapeno, onion, half-stick of butter and smother it in yogurt or cottage cheese.

Lessee. 

pride…. heck, I’m already up to my Adam’s apple with pride.  Any more pride might be a hazard to my health.

covetousness  Maybe that’s a possibility.  Maybe I can think of something to want really badly.  Nothing much comes to mind, but this is too important to reject out of hand.

envy  … That would be pretty cool, finding someone to envy.  But I can’t recall running across anyone I thought was enviable in so long I’m not sure I ever did.

lust … Nope.  Donealready beentheredonethat with lust.  I ain’t going there again.

anger  …Took me 50-odd years to figure out I was an angry person, same as everyone claimed I was.  Big job of work getting rid of it once I figured out I was.  Anger needs to make a home in people who don’t know the tricks.  I don’t think I could hold onto anger in a way it would find palatable.

gluttony . . .   Gluttony might work. I’ve got 100 pounds of milo maize out there.  Maybe boil some up, put some butter on it, maybe some pepper and onions.  Curry.  But I’d have to drop in some sausage to keep it from metamorphosing into something virtuous.  Something to think about, anyway.

sloth …  Sheeze!  Sloth is absurd.  It’s a red herring they hang out there pretending to offer up hope in case a person can’t avoid virtue some other way.  But hells bells!  When’s a person supposed to find any time for sloth when there’s only 24 hours in a day?  Sloth is BS.  Forget it.

That milo’s looking better and better.  At least until I can think of some more respectable way to clear my conscience without bankrupting myself.

Old Jules

 

13 Comments

Posted in 2012, Human Behavior, Music, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Survival

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White Doves, Rainbow Family and Esoterica

Posted on January 16, 2012 by | 20 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read.

WordPress is being a communist this morning. Or maybe the world came to an end last night sometime but it hasn’t gotten to me yet because I’m so far out in the country.

I was going to regale you this morning with some things I dug up online about building and retrofitting hydrogen generators to internal combustion engines yesterday but on the off chance the world ended last night, I won’t.  The whole thing might be a moot issue.   Talking Our Way Into Oblivion – Hydrogen and Hot Air

I’d also thought I’d share with you a couple of interesting things that appear to occur when the center of mass of a system of orbiting bodies changes, but if the world ended there’s no point getting into that, either.  I suppose I’ll be obliged to break my iron discipline and focus to tell you about a couple of things happened here a while back.

A while back this dove flew in here and spent a few weeks sharing the chicken feed on the ground.

I’d never seen a white dove before.  It’s forty miles to the nearest town of any size, fifteen miles to a village big enough to have a gas station/convenience store.  So I didn’t figure it was a pet.

But when I approached it on the ground it didn’t fly.  At first I thought it was injured or sick.

It had no fear at all.  Nothing seemed to be wrong with it.

A week or two after these pictures were taken it began spending more time higher in the trees and less on the ground.  Then it evidently just decided to move on to whatever was waiting for it somewhere else.

A free spirit.  Sort of reminded me of the Rainbow folk I’ve shared campsites with in remote places and occasionally picked up as hitch hikers.  Didn’t have much in common with the wild doves around here and nothing at all with birds somewhere else in houses with cages.  Marching to her own drum, not letting anything get into the way of doing it.   But not living in fear.

Which behooves me to tell you a bit about the Rainbow Family.

I first attended a Rainbow Gathering as part of a team of New Mexico Emergency Management Planning and Coordination  [EMPAC] personnel assigned to be there with the National Guard during the Taos gathering of the early 1990s.  I’d never heard of the Rainbow group prior to that, had no idea what to expect because neither did anyone else in New Mexico government.

What I observed was Woodstock without the music, a lot of folks who reminded me of my own younger times of long hair, protest, sex, drugs and rock and roll on the family side of things.

On the other side I saw National Guard troops loaded with live ammuntion and no clear instructions and rules of engagement being frequently hassled, treated with condescension alternately with re-enactments of some flower-chile ‘Come Join Us’ pleas from earlier times.  ‘Family’ members running alongside government vehicles engaging in every form of engagement except disengagement.

And  to complicate matters further,  a civilian group of Taos Hispanics who wanted nothing so much as the gathering broken up and out of those mountains they considered their own.

I spent a harrowing week or two up there trying to keep my mind from falling into a state of spacial-time disorientation.  When it was all over we drove back to Santa Fe wiping our brows in relief that nobody’d been shot, beaten to death by locals, no major incidents.   My thoughts at the time were as far from ever wanting to see another Rainbow Family member as they could get and stay on the planet Earth.

I count myself lucky to have encountered many of Family members in other settings during the two decades afterward, picking them up hitch hiking, sharing remote campsites, discovering there’s a side to some part of the Rainbow Family membership I hadn’t noticed in the Taos experience.

Gypsy-like free-spirited, thoughtful and considerate people just doing their own thing, trying their best not to leave any bigger mark where they’ve been than they absolutely must.  Good pleasant folks to spend some time with.

So long, I’d have to add, as a person stays clear of the party-animals and really cool people drawn to the mass gathering.

Old Jules

 

20 Comments

Posted in 2000's, 2011, Adventure, America, Animals, Country Life, hitch hiking, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Solitude, Survival, Texas

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The Price of Solitude

Posted on January 14, 2012 by | 23 comments

Good morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by this morning.

I’m having to re-boot my brain, trying to get a fix on this reality I live in this morning.  Spent the night busybusybusy in a sequencial dream I used to have, one of two, the first forty years of my life.  The guy I was in the dream had gotten a lot older these three decades I hadn’t been him, and so had the two others who showed up whom I’ve never known outside the dream.  But one of them turned over a D9 bulldozer, which slid down a slope about 30 feet and fell off a cliff.  I tried to warn him, but he ran down the slope, couldn’t stop, and went off the cliff too.

The guy I am in the dream spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get down that slope for a look, just to satisfy himself whether the obvious was true without going over himself.

Busybusybusy.  It wasn’t exactly old home week, but it never was.  From childhood until the age of 40 I knew those people in that dream but I never cared for them.  I thought they’d passed out of my life. 

I’ve been three weeks without seeing another human being, now I count it up.  Good things usually begin to happen in the mind after three days without seeing anyone, but a few spinoffs do eventually begin to happen triggering the awareness it’s time to have a few hours of human company.

Had an exciting day yesterday, for those of you interested, running some of the tests I mentioned a while back.  Most of the day spent running calculations for the barycentric centers of the solar system and earth at particular moments over the past 15-20 years, comparing it to concurrent events of a particular description.  It’s going to take a lot more work, but it’s looking fairly promising.

Maybe it was all that excitement caused the dream to start up again.  But at least one of those folks probably won’t be coming back into the dream.  I never cared much for him anyway.

Old Jules

23 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Astronomy, Communication, Human Behavior, Solitude

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Exploring Alley Oop’s Home Circa 1947

Posted on January 11, 2012 by | 10 comments

When my mom left her second husband near Apache Junction, Arizona  to move near my granddad’s place at Causey, New Mexico, I was considerable upset about it all.  I’d become overfond of the Arizona guy, liked him a lot despite his human flaws that bothered my mom.

Time proved my level of upset couldn’t be handled by beating it out of me, nor by any of the other usual ways people tried back then to nudge a kid back into being seen and not heard.  The Runaways, 1947

My first step-dad [Arizona] was fond of reading the Alley Oop comic strip to me and I was a huge fan.  Alley was a cave man skipping forward and backward in time thanks to a 20th Century scientist.  Alley even had a 20th Century lady friend named Oola. 

About the only thing I’d brought with me from Arizona was my stack of Alley Oop comic strips.  We’d travelled light across the desert.  And when we arrived in Causey one of the jobs my sisters had was reading those Alley Oops to me, trying to bring up my spirits.  Which I suppose it did until they’d finished reading them to me.

Something more permanent had to be done, and my granddad decided to have a shot at it.  He promised to take me to visit Alley’s home.  Mesa Verde, Colorado.

What a trip that must have been, me pestering him whether we were there yet, how much further before we’d see Alley’s home.  I don’t know how long we stayed, but I never forgot old Alley and his home.  I still had one picture of the cave dwelling he took back then until Y2K.

And of the hundreds of ancient ruins, documented and undocumented, I’ve poked around in during my life, I’ve never visited one, found one, without thinking to myself with a smile that Alley Oop might have lived there, visited there ahead of me.

When Mel King and I were exploring the ruin on Gobbler’s Knob and were driving back to Socorro when he reached into his daypack for something, came out with a human skull it was the first thing I said to him.  “What the hell is that?  You packed off Oola’s skull.  Get it the hell out of this truck!” 

I screeched onto the shoulder and he hid it behind a cedar until  we’d be headed back to Gobber’s Knob so he could put it back where it belongs.

Nowadays I think I have more in common with Alley Oop than with any modern human being.  If there was ever a right time for me to pop out of the gene pool it would probably have been more appropriate temporally in some other Universe where Alley Oop lived and breathed.  It made more sense than this one.

Old Jules

 

10 Comments

Posted in 1940's, 1990's, Adventure, America, History, Human Behavior, Music, Native American, Native Americans, New Mexico, NM, Outdoors, Relationships, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Youth, YouTube

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Unforseen Consequences

Posted on January 11, 2012 by | 10 comments

That vertical rift you see on Old Sol this morning is a consequence of neglect.  While the Reiki cats and I were praying him up this morning Shiva the Cow Cat got distracted looking at the full moon still high on the other side of the sky.  She got out of harmony with the rest of us and the result speaks for itself.

Life’s full of that sort of thing here on this planet.  You can’t have any confidence you can get by with anything.  A couple of titanosaurs in Bolivia a few million years ago have themselves a secret rendezvous and next thing you know it surfaces and human beings are poking around nosing into their business.

Some Ichnogenus Gigandipus in Utah puts his foot off the designated pathway and a few million years later you’ve got the authorities swarming his footprints catching him out.

A lot of people think it’s just cameras, but that’s not right.  Do you think this guy in Kenya a million and a half years ago would have done anything different if he’d known it was going to come out someday?  He’d probably feel he pushed a stale yellow light that turned red before he got through the intersection and the camera got him.  He’s sitting out there somewhere fossilized waiting to get the ticket in the mail.

The planet and the Universe have us brainwashed into thinking we don’t leave any tracks.  But it’s a trick, and if we wake up to what we’re doing, say with our tracks of one sort, it sneaks in and preserves some other sort without our noticing it.

For instance, back when they started replacing real audience laughter and applause on television shows in the 1960s.  Who’d have dreamed they were teaching all the coming generations to be Pavlov’s dog with their emotions responses to what went on around them fed directly off a cathode ray tube?

That Santa Fe Trail on the image above is where the routes for land traffic from Saint Louis to Santa Fe converged before choo choo trains got into the act.  It’s the tracks of thousands of wagons, horses, mules and oxen branded into the landscape.

On the ground it’s abraded vertical walled arroyos a hundred yards wide.  You can follow it all the way from Santa Fe to Saint Louis if you know what you’re looking for.  And you’ll be able to do it again a thousand years from now if the mood strikes you and you have the time.

I’m just wondering what the consequences will be for Shiva the Cow Cat letting her attention drift over to the full moon.

Old Jules

 

10 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Animals, Astronomy, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Science

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Back Just Before Hippies Were Invented

Posted on January 10, 2012 by | 24 comments

1964 was a big year in my life.  I rode the USNS Breckinridge troop ship back from Korea with 2000 other GIs coming home, separated from the army late in June.  Hung around Portales, New Mexico for a while, applied to join the Peace Corps, then hitch-hiked to New York to pass the time until I heard from the Peace Corps.

Beatniks hadn’t yet been displaced by hippies and Greenwich Village was jam-packed with thousands of us implying we were beatniks but carefully not saying so.  Hanging around coffee shops writing poetry, playing chess, saying momentous deep-thinking things back and forth to one another.  Listening to folk singers. 

Being rocked back on our heels in mock, simulated shock and disgust when wheat-straw blondes from Westchester down for the weekend to be beatniks, too, refused our advances.  “WHAT?  You don’t believe in FREE LOVE?”

Which, surprisingly, almost always worked.  Provided you’d done a convincing enough job trickling out the bona fides of being a REAL beatnik.  And wouldn’t even think of hopping in the sack with someone so uncool she didn’t even believe in free love.  Even if she did iron her long hair out straight.

So after I hopped the freight to go back to New Mexico, got thrown in jail in Rochester for taking the wrong train, The Hitch-Hiking Hoodoos, got released to hitch home, things stayed eventful for a while.

A guy from Buffalo picked me up on the Interstate, older guy in his 30s.  When I got in I threw the pillow-case with my belongings into the back seat.  “I don’t know why I picked you up,” he glanced at me with disgust.  “I never pick up hitch hikers.”  

Over the next few miles he questioned me about who I was, where I was from, what I was doing hitching, what I’d do when I arrived, and I explained it all in loving detail.

“Well, I’ve never had any trouble with a hitch hiker the few times I’ve picked them up.  But if I do ever get killed by a hitcher it will probably be some half-baked kid who doesn’t know what he wants in life.”  He thought about it a minute.  “But I don’t have to worry about you.  You threw your gun into the back seat in that pillow case when you got in.”

We talked a lot over the highway between Rochester and Buffalo.  Enough so he didn’t take the Buffalo exit and carried me down to where a tollway squeezed the traffic going south to Cincinnati, Ohio.  He pulled up beside a car with a family in it, man, woman and a couple of kids.  Motioned for them to roll down the passenger-side window.

“Are you going on through Cincinnati?  I’ve carried this guy all the way from Rochester and he’s okay.  He’s going to New Mexico.  But I’d like to get him a ride past Cincinnati.  He’ll never get through that town walking.”

The couple said they were just going to Cincinnati, but we were all watching the traffic edge forward to the toll gates.  “We’d better take him anyway.  He might not get another ride.”

The Buffalo guy was right, but it began the next phase of a long story.  Guess I’d best hold it for another day.

Old Jules

 

24 Comments

Posted in 1960's, Adventure, America, History, hitch hiking, Human Behavior, Peace Corps, Transportation, Youth

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