by Kathy Brasby | Aug 20, 2019 | Humor, Stories, Travel
Our family has had some fantastic travel opportunities over the years, including spending a week in Cuba. Imagine that we took two teenagers and loads of video equipment into Cuba and didn’t lose anything. Although you could debate that.
All week we had seen El Morro lighthouse and castle across the harbor from Havana, and finally, we found time to visit.
El Moro Lighthouse, Havana, Cuba
From our hotel, we hailed a government-approved taxi which drove us in a cute little Russian car to the parking lot of El Morro. The uniformed driver promised to return in two hours to take us back to the hotel.
Promised. No problemo.
The tour went great. The hosts inside were friendly and helpful.
We bought a few trinkets and then headed out to the parking lot to wait for our promised taxi driver.
We knew the chances of him returning weren’t great, but we’re polite Americans, so we waited.
Three young Cuban men approached us. “Do you want souvenirs?” They pulled out a silver coin. “See? Che Guevara.”
“Not interested.”
So the three men stepped away. I suppose stretching your neck and looking far down the street is probably a universal signal. They quickly figured out we were waiting for a car.
“Do you need a ride? We have a car. Cheap ride. Only $10.”
We’d paid $6 for the taxi ride over so my husband wasn’t paying $10 to these guys. They tried to negotiate but finally agreed on $6.
The windows of the driver’s car were all down, and the driver rushed ahead to open the door. We thought he was helpful.
He was but only because there were no outside handles. I know, I know. Red lights should have been flashing in our brains.
We climbed in and buckled up. There were no liners on the door panels, and we could see all the rods running to locks and windows. We kept our hands to ourselves.
The little car scooted down the highway and then dropped into a tunnel under the harbor. As the car began to descend, the driver pushed in the clutch and turned off the engine. We coasted to the other end of the tunnel.
I’ll bet he saved a tenth of a gallon of gas with that trick.
He started the engine once gravity threatened to stall him, downshifted, and sailed right through a stop sign.
In Cuba, taxi drivers needed special permits to serve foreigners. Our driver had no taxi permit and no permit to take us anywhere. I think his idea was, once you break one law, you might as well break a bunch.
I don’t know what the speed limit was. It seemed irrelevant to our driver. Might as well break another law. We did stay on all four wheels.
He cruised up to our hotel, double-parked in the narrow street, and shut off the engine again. Another tenth of a gallon saved and another law broken.
He jumped out to open our doors because apparently, the inside latches on the doors needed a secret twist before they’d open.
We paid him. In that country, he may have just made half a month’s wages.
We’d just taken an unlicensed taxi ride with an illegal driver in a foreign country and we lived on.
But I gotta be honest. We came away with our possessions and our teenagers, but I think we left our minds somewhere on that lighthouse.
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by Kathy Brasby | Aug 12, 2019 | Family, Humor, Stories
In the days before I had much money or sense – OK, I was still in my 20’s, and that’s the best explanation I have – I got myself a poor person’s cruise control for my car.
This was back in the days when you could drive a dinosaur or, in my case, a Volkswagen Rabbit.
My Rabbit had a red racing stripe down the sides, but it was no sports car. You’d think a Rabbit would be fast, but this one was a hatchback. Not fast.
And who names a car Rabbit anyway? Volkswagen, obviously.
My brother is a mechanic, and so I sweet-talked him into installing a throttle lock. Cost me some chocolate chip cookies, as I recall.
The system had a gadget attached to the gas pedal and another line attached somehow to the brake. When you engaged the button, the gas pedal was locked into place. Pressing the brake released the lock.
It seemed safe to me. All I cared about was if it worked. And it did. My brother was good.
I don’t think you can buy them today. They might be a tad bit perilous now.
I thought I was brilliant at the time. Because the area where I generally drove was flat, the system worked adequately. I’d reach cruising speed, lock in the throttle, and relax. My pace would change with any slight rises or drops in the road but not much.
I was now in league with those fancy-schmancy cruise controls at a fraction of the cost. Cost of the throttle lock plus chocolate chip cookies was less than $100. Sweet deal. What could go wrong?
So, one day, my sister and I took off for Denver in my Rabbit. I don’t remember why she was driving, but we had a good-sized hill to clear on the route.
Those of you who know Wiggins hill on I-76 can visualize our trip.
Whenever I drove, I disengaged the throttle lock when I got to a long incline.
My sister didn’t.
So up the rise we climbed. Gravity being what it is, our speed dropped.
Cars overtook us. Semi-trailers whipped by. Snails pulled ahead. Sloths waved as they left us behind.
We chugged our way to the top like the little engine that could.
We took a long breath at the summit, like a mountain climber surveying the ridges after an arduous climb.
And then we started down. Gravity being what it is, the Rabbit transformed. Once progressing at a turtle pace, the Rabbit turned into a rocket.
We zoomed down the hill, shooting past the sloths. Racing by the snails. Whizzing past the semi-trailers. Cars were quickly a blur in the rearview window.
“Those people think I’m crazy!” my sister wailed.
It didn’t really matter because we never saw any of that fleet again on our trip.
I’ve been thinking about that car, though. It could be faster than a speeding bullet and more sluggish than a lumbering sloth. Volkswagen called it the Rabbit but maybe a better name would have been the VW Chameleon.
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by Kathy Brasby | Aug 5, 2019 | Country life, Humor
My husband and I have a little hobby farm so that I can raise goats. At least that may be how he thinks of it. He doesn’t raise goats, although he has done a marvelous job of building things for the goats.
But I raise goats. It used to be that goats were the ugly step-children of farming but no more. Now the number of cute baby goat videos rivals cat videos.
But you can’t have cute baby goat videos without the romance of their parents. If you like baby goat videos, you need to know about goats in love.
In our goat herd, we usually keep our buck – the future daddy – separated from the does – the future mommies – so we can control when the babies come.
One bright fall morning, one of our girls had put on her high heels, lipstick, and Chanel Eau Goat before sashaying along the fence line she shared with Rocket the buck.
Rocket got the message: she was in the mood. Rocket was always in the mood, so with great excitement, he pushed his manly head through the fence to sniff her fragrance.
Hearts were drifting above their heads like hot air balloons. Once I caught sight of a little cupid figure floating overhead, I collected Miss Elinore and brought her into Rocket’s pen. She wiggled her hips and lightly danced from the gate to the fence line so that she could lean against Rocket.
He raised his eyebrows in glee and snorted words of love. He’d have brought roses and chocolate if he’d known. This was just what he had hoped for. Love was in the air.
Except for one problem: Rocket’s massive head was stuck through the fence.
He pulled and twisted while Elinore was doing a pole dance beside him.
She whispered in his ear, gave him little smoochies, leaned against his rippling muscles. More and more hearts floated past his eyes.
Rocket began straining against the fence. His front legs were like pile drivers pushing into the ground. His cheeks would have turned red from the exertion if not hidden by that masculine buck fur. The fence bowed with his manly strength.
No go. He was stuck.
The love of his life was slow-dancing at his side, and Rocket couldn’t get his head out of the wire.
I’m not without compassion. I only watched this display for fifteen minutes or so before I went in search of some wire cutters.
I think Rocket’s first lesson of love was to avoid putting your head through places where it doesn’t fit.
But I learned something that day, too: it is unbelievably challenging to cut wire when you’re laughing that hard.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jul 29, 2019 | Country life, Humor, Stories
A long time ago, back when farmers plowed fields with dinosaurs, and spare parts were chiseled from rock, I worked at a tractor dealership.
There were only two women in the shop, the secretary and me. What can you say about working with a bunch of guys who have oil stains on their elbows and grease under their fingernails? It was like having 12 brothers.
That time has given me some great stories to tell. So no regrets. The secretary, on the other hand, might have a few.
The secretary was deathly afraid of mice. We’re talking leap-over-chairs-on-your-way-to-the-parking-lot kind of fear. This was not a good thing to reveal to our crew.
One of the guys came back from vacation one year with a foam rubber animal attached to a thin wire. You could wiggle the wire and make the fake animal squirm along on the floor.
Our secretary almost moved her desk to the front sidewalk that day.
I wasn’t overly fond of mice myself but wasn’t going to admit. I had grown up with brothers, so I knew that you never admit weakness. Bluffing is better.
But the tractor crew still tested me. I was in charge of checking in shipments – large and small – at our business and so one day found a small plastic bag on my desk. This wasn’t unusual, and I flipped the bag to check the shipping tag.
A dead mouse was stapled inside the bag.
I dropped the gift and looked up to see our service manager and parts manager peering around the corner, eyes big like a toddler hoping for a cookie.
The service manager threw his hands in the air. “It wasn’t my idea!”
And the parts manager put his hands up, too. “I didn’t put that bag on your desk.”
Because I had learned how to ignore my brothers, I ignored these guys, too. It’s a good strategy if you can grit your teeth for a little while.
It worked. No more dead mouse came to my desk.
But one day the secretary came back from lunch to find a brown paper bag on her desk. It was stapled shut and shuddering with mystery.
The secretary ran screaming to the break room, positive that the guys had placed a live mouse on her desk. She refused to return to her office, and the boss came wandering out to see what the commotion was about.
He really needed the secretary to get back to her phone-answering and bookkeeping. So he went in search of the service manager.
Under instructions to “take care of that,” the service manager brought the lunch bag outside. Way too many curious eyes followed him. We all watched as he sliced the top off the bag and dumped out a frog.
So the secretary got a freshly-scrubbed and sanitized desk, courtesy of the service and parts managers.
And every time they thought about another mice trick, they just sat down until that thought passed.
You gotta be tough with brothers around.
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by Kathy Brasby | Jul 22, 2019 | Family, Humor
You know how these projects get started. It’s like If You Give a Moose a Muffin. First, you want a muffin and the next thing you know, you’re buying pool noodles.
Mine got started when I opened a kitchen cupboard to notice a two-quart bottle holding about two inches of gray powder. Like this bottle had beamed in from my neighbor’s house or something. Why hadn’t I noticed this waste of space before?
Worse than one useless bottle was the other jars also holding minuscule amounts of things. Pasta. Petrified cranberries. Old keys. Green lumps.
You get the idea.
Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash
I dumped contents I couldn’t identify and found jars that actually matched. The cupboard shelves look marvelous now. All labeled and sweet.
New problem: the big empty jars loitering on the counter. I didn’t have room to bake, so I did consider making the loiter zone permanent. But that’d never fly with my cookie boys.
I have a closet of sorts where I put extra jars. Because I would rather write about it than do it, I have ignored this closet for years. There are quart, pint, and half-pint jars perched on shelves with more laying on top of jars. Quit cringing.
I have my first baseman glove close by when I open this closet.
It was a Saturday morning, and I really had lots of exciting things scheduled, like watching a movie, reading a few chapters, eating fudge – important stuff like that.
But maybe I should find a place for all those jars hogging space on my countertop. I got the softball glove and eased open the door. Landfills were more organized than this closet.
I started unloading shelves. That would save a lot of glacier sliding.
Going for the sympathy angle here, I have to tell you that I had a lot of jars. I’m talking innumerable. Countless. Profuse. Multitudinous. I’m closing the thesaurus now.
Buried at the back of one shelf was an instruction manual for a landline phone from 2004. We haven’t had a landline in eight years. There is history in that manual. I’ll bet the kids remembered that phone and would want the manual as a nostalgic reminder.
I uncovered a little fountain with a plug-in pump. It didn’t work, but I think it was a birthday gift from one of our kids. Maybe Mother’s day. More sweet memories.
I found notes for the dishwasher we installed in 2006. A memoir of our early years in our house.
There were six pint jars labeled, “Peach. ’09.” I remembered the box of peaches that I’d turned into peach jam. Apparently, I hadn’t remembered long enough to serve any of it.
You know the cans of cranberry sauce you can buy for Thanksgiving dinner? You slide the can-shaped sauce onto a plate and slice it. Well, ten-year-old peach jelly looks just the same. Slice and serve.
I now have two different cupboards organized. But I reminisced over the items hiding at the back of the shelves.
So I called one of the kids. She’s married now, a responsible adult, but maybe I could still trick, er, influence her.
“Hey, I’ve started a time capsule for you. I found the most amazing gems in the closet,” I told her.
“Really?” She sounded more like I had called to tell her the grass needed to be mowed.
“I think you should scoop them up to preserve all those memories.”
“If I come over, Mom, it would be to scoop those things into a trash can. And I think you can handle that yourself.”
Kids. You teach them to think independently, and what do they do? Not collect vintage peach jam, that’s for sure.
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