by Kathy Brasby | Mar 31, 2015 | Hope
Hollywood’s car chases keep getting faster, louder, more explosive and destructive. Where would we be if Jason Bourne hadn’t destroyed innumerable police cars, several taxis and a few SUVs?
But my favorite car chase included a few cell phones, corn fields and an arrogant thief.
After holding up a convenience store on the Interstate highway in western Nebraska, the young man leaped into his car and raced away. As his speed zoomed over 100 mph at times, he probably assumed he could outrun the State Patrol.
Soon he had the Patrol out in full-force following him into Colorado. The driver soon realized he couldn’t outrun their radios and that reinforcements were assembling in front of him.
A couple of towns flashed by, hardly blips in his vision at his speed, before he swung onto an exit and headed into farm country.
Out where only corn and wheat fields swayed in the wind. No State Patrol. He could hide.
So the driver flew down dirt roads with no worries. He’d lost his trackers.
But he didn’t understand the nature of the rural mind.
Farmers tend those corn and wheat fields. And they know the traffic on those country roads. When an unknown car flashed by at high speed, a farmer grabbed his cell phone and called a neighbor. That neighbor called a neighbor.
Before long, the sheriff was alerted as farmers tracked the car careening through the farmland through cell phone calls.
While the racing thief thought he had outsmarted law enforcement, the network of farmers calmly plotted his course and helped the sheriff lay out a plan.
The sheriff and his deputies blocked the road ahead and behind because they knew exactly where their man had been. And was going. He was nailed.
So, don’t think that you’re hiding in farm country. You’ve never been more exposed.
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Kathy Brasby | Feb 17, 2015 | Hope
The secretary and I were the only two women working in this shop. There’s something about rubbing elbows with a bunch of guys that gives you willies at night.
Let me explain.
The secretary was deathly afraid of mice. This was not a good thing to reveal to a bunch of guys but there it was.
I wasn’t overly fond of them myself but determined not to admit to it. But the guys 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 really 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. 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.”
I decided to ignore Tweedledee and Tweedledum that day.
They didn’t harass me again – not enough hysteria to suit them, I’m sure – but one day our secretary came back from lunch to find a brown lunch bag on her desk. Stapled shut and wiggling.
She ran screaming to the break room, sure they had trapped a live mouse for her.
She refused to enter her office. So the service manager retrieved the bag from her office and brought it out, where he sliced off the top and set the trapped frog free.
Tweedledee and Tweedledum spent the afternoon freshening up the secretary’s desk before she’d return to work. Boss’s orders.
Something good did come out of it, though. Whenever the two guys got the idea to go in search of mice, they remembered four hours of scrubbing a desk and sat down until that idea passed.
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Kathy Brasby | Feb 10, 2015 | Hope
My younger brother was a high school wrestler, which made for an interesting lesson in the folly of letting siblings mature.
His first practice of the season came shortly before my visit home from college. We hadn’t seen each other in a little while and he wanted to get me caught up on things. I could tell he was jazzed about wrestling. And I wanted to re-connect, too.
“Here’s a new move I learned,” he said. We were standing in the middle of the living room with a new carpet on the floor, a good thing as it turned out. “Watch.”
Watch wasn’t really the right term. Stand still and do nothing was a better term because he put one hand behind my neck, one behind my knee, and, whoosh, had me flat on my back.
“Pinned! Just like that. And it’s really easy,” he said. He had enough maturity, at least, to help me get back on my feet without first pressing his knee into my clavicle.
I wasn’t a wimp in the athletic department. I played basketball, softball, tennis, and flag football. I rode horses and faced thundering cattle. I was no fragile piece of china. But I hadn’t ever learned a wrestling move.
There are times when a polite retreat is wise. But I was a college student. Wisdom was like a tree in the mist. Sometimes I saw it, sometimes I didn’t.
“It worked pretty well.” I rubbed my shoulder where I had landed.
He grinned and I wondered when my tow-headed little brother had turned into this six-foot tower of muscle. “I’ll show you how easy.”
“Um, OK.” Remember the part about wise? Not so here.
He shook out his shoulders. “Easy to do. First you grab my neck.”
OK. I duplicated his opening.
“Then you grab my knee,” he said.
I leaned down to replicate his move. Suddenly the walls of the room swirled around me and, with a thump, I was on my back again.
He grinned, dusting his hands off. “That is how you counteract it!
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Kathy Brasby | Feb 3, 2015 | Hope
When the trapped raccoon turned out to really be a restless skunk, people got a little antsy at our house.
If you’ll remember my story, we thought we were trapping the raccoon who had eaten our duck’s eggs a week before hatching.
We trapped a skunk instead.
Once the jabbering stopped, we still had the problem.
“I was going to work in that barn today,” my husband said. “I don’t want skunk stink in there.”
True. The skunk needed to leave without leaving his scent.
We called our neighbor, she of great farming wisdom. “Cover the cage with a blanket,” she said. “The skunk won’t spray while it’s under the blanket.”
Sometimes you just have to trust.
So my husband gingerly draped an old blanket over the cage. So far, no smells.
Then he grabbed his rifle. This skunk was not going to be stealing duck eggs anymore. With rifle in one hand and cage in the other, he headed for the far end of our pasture.
But not alone. He called to our older son. “You need to come with me.”
Some say looks can kill but this look could have sunk a ship. Our son had no interest in going to the far end of the pasture with a skunk and a man toting a rifle.
But sons are amazing.
He went.
When the entourage arrived to the little knoll with prairie grass waving in the wind, they decided they were far enough from the buildings to risk uncovering the skunk.
It was our son’s job to pull the blanket off the cage.
With a deep breath – maybe his last for all he knew – he crept forward to the cage and plucked the blanket with the tip of his fingers.
Courage is measured in many ways. But one of them has to be an 8-year-old willing his arm to grow as he slowly – can we say cold molasses here? – drew the blanket off the cage.
It was happy ending time. Nobody got sprayed except the cage and some prairie grass.
But I don’t think our son was in any danger. He didn’t stop running until the house blocked his path.
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Kathy Brasby | Dec 9, 2014 | Hope
My second black eye (see That eye for the first one) earned me a variety of responses.
This one came a few years after I was married.
I stood at the checkout counter of the grocery store with two kids, a full load of groceries, and a deep black swoosh under my eye.
The clerk took my check while staring at the cash register keys and returned my receipt while studying the scale below me.
As I walked to the car, a woman met my eyes (this was in a friendly small town) and then studied the pavement intently.
But a neighbor, who had just arrived in the parking lot, popped out of her car. “What on earth happened to you?”
At church the next day, a friend wandered up to me with a grin on his face. “So does Matt look as bad as you do?”
Matt’s my husband and our friends knew his character pretty well.
But I had to confess over and over that a male member of the family had done this to me.
Here’s the rest of the story:
I was tucking our younger son, 3 years old at the time, into bed and leaned down to kiss him on the forehead just as he moved forward to give me a hug. His hard head crashed into my cheek.
Let me tell you that such a collision paints the blackest swoosh you’ve ever seen.
My experience was simple but it gave me more empathy for women with black eyes not so innocently delivered.
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Kathy Brasby | Nov 18, 2014 | Hope
I knew things were going to get a little sticky when I uncovered an ink refill for a printer that I don’t remember owning. I had cracked open my archive box to find it filled with interesting treasures.
“Archive box” sounds fancy, doesn’t it?
My archive box is a plastic box with lid that contains CDs from programs I’ve installed. What a great idea, I thought when I got it. All my CDs were safely stored in one place and protected from dust and stuff.
I don’t know why the ink refill was in the box. The printer must not have lasted long enough to even earn a refill.
I don’t visit my archive box much but my computer crashed and I was re-installing programs.
But opening that box was like a trip down memory lane but without the warm fuzzy emotions. What I felt was mostly confusion.
For example, I uncovered a CD with a big black question mark scrawled on the label.
What in the world? Who labels their CD with a question mark?
Me, obviously.
Although nobody accuses me of being well-organized (well, someone did once but that was before they saw my desk), I took some pride on my box as a shred of planning.
Every program CD went into that box after installation.
I am proud to say that there were no 5 ½ inch floppies in there. Using my system, that’s a miracle.
So I lifted the lid to pull out the programs for re-installation.
I found programs that won’t run on anything newer than Windows 98. I found programs for pre-schoolers. (Our youngest is 19.) I found a CD from our classical music days.
I’d like to blame this on the kids but they never open the box. They just run the programs and don’t mess with the details.
Wonder where they learned that?
I’m sure there’s a major life lesson in all this. Something about staying organized. Those lessons tend to roll off me like tumbleweeds crossing the prairie.
Sometimes simple is better. So here’s what I learned: I’m cleaning out the box.
That way there’ll be more room for further archiving.
Like this:
Like Loading...
