Some things still puzzle me.

Late one afternoon I walked near an area that was closed, bummed me out; when I turned around there were a couple black guys were standing there. One of them said "What are you doing here,N&&&r?" I looked behind me and around then looked back and said "You must be talking to someone else". They laughed, walking away saying "I didn't know white guys had a sense of humor". I never did figure out had happened.

I was sitting in the S.U.B. at Eastern Montana College (Billings, MT - now a University, used to a 'Normal' school meaning a teacher's college), when this black guy sat down with us and introduced himself. He chatted for a while; told us that he did tan by showing us the tan-line under his watch; then he went off to another table. This was the first time I had ever seen a black guy, let alone talked with one.

I was snorkeling about 200 yards off of Green Island on the Great Barrier Reef, taking pictures and generally being completely blown away by the colors, the fish, the whole 'abundance of life' thing going on. Something bothered me but I don't know what. I looked around but did not see anyone or anything around but I was really, really uncomfortable so I headed back to the beach - just in time get evacuated from the island due to Cyclone Muni. The boat-ride back to Australia was on a trimaran which made the 14 ft swells FUN! There were a bunch of us standing the front of the trimaran riding it like a roller-coaster - up to the top of a swell, then drop 14 feet to the trough; there was nothing like it (the fact that it was a trimaran kept all the motion up and down with very little side-to-side motion). Green Island was swept pretty clean by the cyclone.

I was playing with the fire in the fireplace at our cabin in the tobacco root mountains; this annoyed grandma (seems like everything annoyed her) and she told me to go outside to play. I grabbed a handful of kitchen matches and went out to play. Bored with the tiny flames from burning pine needles, I opened the valve on the 40 gallon gas tank and trickled some gas and the flames got pretty large. When the flames began to die, I opened the valve a little more so more gas would come out; hah, this produced even more flames in a wider pool. This eventually got boring so I wandered off to do something else. Nothing burned down and I did not start a fire; the only reason I can think of that I survived was the gasoline was too cold - it is the fumes that burn not the liquid.

St. Mary's cont.

Most of the people I remember from my time at St. Mary's are from after we moved from 711 W Clark st. A friend name Guy is the only person I remember who lived in that area (sorry for telling everyone that guy in the dictionary meant 'a queer looking person' - at least you had Zorro). Across the street from us were the Prims - Marcia (in my class), Mark (a year behind), Mike - well, you see the pattern developing. All the kids had the initials M. P. and there were at least 5 of them. We were a pack and played all sorts of games; we had a raft on the 'lagoon' that was near the swimming pool (if you went swimming in the lagoon, they would not let you into the pool that day). There was a small woods on the other side of the lagoon where we would drag old christmas trees into a fort. On the street that lead down to the swimming pool was a dairy where we could get really fresh ice cream.

I remember playing British and Mau Mau as a kid; my brother and his friends were the British and us little ones were the Mau mau who were always slaughtered. Think about that for a moment - 1954, Livingston, MT the MauMau rebellion was the stuff of backyard cowboys and indians, cops and robbers play - I think the machine guns were what made them so popular; the "no Annie Oakley" rule did not apply to machine guns. Oh, yeah, the drive-in theatre was pretty close - I remember that we would sneak in under the fence and go to the front row and turn on all the speakers so we could lay out watch the movies. The owner would, at some whim, chase us away sometimes and sometimes not. His son was about our age so the only thing I can think of is that he was making sure we did not see certain types of movies.

The next house we moved to was up on the hill - I think I mentioned that we lived in the second house from the edge of civilization (so to speak). The walk from school to home now included crossing the railroad tracks. Livingston was some sort of rail town, I remember that we had to cross 4 or 5 sets of tracks. In the summers, we would open the ice carts and use the huge trident-like ice pick to break junks of ice off the blocks. We would put nickels, dimes, pennies and sometimes dimes on the tracks and they would get smushed out of shape. Once we put some oil on the tracks where there was a tiny hill on the way out of town. When the engines hit that spot, the driving wheels actually created enough friction heat to partially melt the track - never did that again. The Caseys lived just across the tracks on my way home but they lived on the base of the hill - they were railroad people. I remember running into one of the Casey boys at a train depot in Miles City about 10 years later.

strange triggers

It is cold season again and I have this 'post-nasal' drip thing going so I do that disgusting half snort inhale through my nose to clear it up and -wham- I think of my brother. I don't know why (or maybe I do) he comes to mind with that simple, private act. I miss him. He died over twenty years ago and had gone missing out of my life for 20 years before that. He and his second wife with her 2 daughters moved from Montana to Denver CO and cut the family off nearly completely. Though we were part of it; he said that if he could not have his kids, they weren't his, cutting my niece and nephew out of his life. I think he was upset that we kept his ex-wife as part of family and he sort of made us choose between him and his ex and we did not want to lose contact with his kids.

I would like to think that he was trying for rapprochement; we had some longish phone calls (listening to him talk was like listening to myself - we sounded so much alike; I remember going to the movies with him and one or the other of us laughing and someone from the crowd would shout "sounds like a Coghlan is in the house"). In the mid-1980s, I took the train to see my grandfather on his 90th birthday; I just assumed it would be a big deal with lots of people but it was just me, grandpa Rusher and his new wife. I spent a couple days with them, grandpa was still pretty sharp and we had some good conversations and he gave me some pictures of family.

Grandpa was a character; he was a worker with his own tools too old to go to war (WWII) so he traveled around the country working all sorts of jobs; a person with his own tools ruled. Grandpa was a j.o.a.t.- he bought up land with money his sons sent home from the war and started a farm for them near Roundup MT. He did a pretty good job for a chicago city boy. When the boys got home from the war, they were `pretty excited about ranching; my father met my mom in Paris, married her and brought her 'home' with him; my uncle had about 8 kids. They bought a Piper Cub plane and used it to get to town and back. The trick with the Piper Cub is that it can stay in the air at 50 mph - that is damn near a hover. Since 'the boys' had families (my brother and me on the way - I was a 'diaphragm' baby, and been lucky ever since), they made a vow to never fly together.

Long story short my father and uncle had an argument/fight/loud discussion and one drove into town the other flew into town; one for supplies the other for laundry. Sometime after the plane was prepped to return to the ranch - ranchers buy their fuel in bulk and pay no (or fewer) taxes on it so in prepping the plane for the return trip, it was prepped for one person. The brothers made up in town; it was getting late so they decided to leave the car in town and fly home. The neighbor heard them prepare to land but they were in the wrong field and pulled out of the landing; the engine spluttered, the plane stalled and there was no time to pull out of the stall. The engine crushed my uncle; grandpa says that my father survived the crash but webbing holding him in his seat failed and he fell and broke his neck. The neighbors were there withing minutes but too late.

After I was born, mom lost it - 2 boys, in a strange land, with almost no English. She moved back to Chatou just outside Paris to her parents little house on Rue de Landes.

But I digress - after celebrating grandpa's b-day I took the train to Denver and saw my brother in his home. We had some good talks.

Furlough over!!

I got the call on Thursday, they are bringing 20 seasonal workers back and I am one. I start on Monday the 21st on a strange shift 10:00 to 6:30 but we will go back to our normal shift of 9:30 to 6:00 on January 3rd. This has been a terrible furlough, I had problems with UI and extensions so I ended up having to take a loan from my credit card. I am going to have really knuckle down during this work period to get my debts paid off so I can be more comfortable during next years furlough - I especially need to be ready by the June 1st.

I hope to take some hot glass classes at Pratt next summer so I can get back into it. I have taken glass blowing classes, bench-work classes (mostly bead-working), and spent a lot of time watching glass blowers at work. I want to take the classes to learn what I can but what I really want is access to their equipment: the polishers, etchers, kilns and so on.

While DW (convention from savings advice to refer to family DW dear wife, DH, DD, et c) was getting her science PhD, we had access to a ceramics kiln that we used to do some hot glass work. We still have many of the items we made and this was about 20 years ago; what we did was mostly fusing mixed with slumping. Around that time I made some life casts of my face (with some help - Hi Kevin) and I want to some slumping projects based on the molds. I made both positive and negative molds and have been dragging them around with me. While in Tucson I found some 3 inch thick pieces of glass that must have been submarine porthole glass that I have some ideas for.

St. Mary's

St. Mary's was a primary school I attended up to 1960. The school had 4 classrooms; 2 on the first floor and 2 on the second floor. Now my memory is getting hazy - I know that on the first floor, entering from the main door, the room on the right was first and second grade; the door on the left was 3rd and 4th grades. Yep, one grade was on each side of the room and the nun would teach alternating classes. I do not remember how the time was split, but I do remember that we had recess. The school grounds were paved with 'big kid' playground equipment. Across the street was an overgrown field with not equipment; that is where the 'little kids' played. About this time weird cards came out with a compliment on one side turned into an insult on the other side (eg. Your teeth are like stars they come out at night - I tried this on one of the nuns and she asked me how I knew she had false teeth, I was stunned as I don't think I really understood until that moment what the joke was).

I remember Jody was a tomboy who always wanted to be a horse in whatever game we played and I remember one of the girls was brave enough to jump on one of the nuns - I was stunned that nuns were people who could be touched and interacted with. I just remembered the name of another of my classmates Pugliano - I remember his name because we teased him by calling him ugly piano (and he did not care because he played the piano; I thought that was unfair because we were trying to insult him, oh well) I lived at 711 W. Clark street at this time (yes, I have used google maps to check the house out). On the way home one day, I met a kid and went to his house to play - I forgot my catechism at his house and so got in trouble when I got home because my parents had to buy another one. I have no idea why I did not remember the kids house. His name, as I learned later, was Danny Gibson and he and his parents thought I might have been trying to convert him by leaving the catechism there - they laughed when they heard how much trouble I got in for losing it.

As you may noticed, a lot of things stunned me during this time.

When I got to play on the big kids playground, there was a merry-go-round - the standard round wooden platform with metal (round pipe-style) rails that radiated out from the center that was useful for spinning it and for hanging onto while riding it. We could get that thing going so fast that kids would fly off of it; often because we would try to stand in the exact middle or just stand up and not hold on. (Did I mention that this playground was paved?). There was a monkey-bar set - oddly, my memory tells me it was both the cubic boxy kind and the rounded kind, odd that. But the real killer (and I use the word on purpose - I believe this device was on every Catholic grade school playground) was a maypole-like swing set that involved chains hanging from the top of the pole on a pivot/bearing. Since the children playing on this were of differing heights the length of different chains were varied. The ends of the chains had solid steel ladder-like hand holds; the short ones that had only one cross bar to hold on to looked kind of like a stirrup. I think the longest had 3 crossbars. So the point of this 'toy' was to run in a circle fast enough to eventually start flying while hanging on. Most people would consider this just a large mace or morning star - think about a playground toy that involved solid steel metal bars swinging freely from a chain - part of the fun of toy was to try to grab one of the bars while it is already moving, essentially running at a tangent to the circle scribed by the swings, grab on and fly. Miss a grab or try for one of the shorter swings and you will be brained.

But if you were caught playing on the emergency fire escape slide (a round metal tube from the second floor to about 14 inches off the ground - I seem to remember it as about 45' angle that flattened to parallel for about the last 5 feet), you would be punished severely like spanked by priest or knuckle-rapped by the nuns. That thing got really hot in the Montana sun.

Livingston MT

Livingston was the big city for me - Roundup MT has a pop <2000 and Whitehall has a pop <2000 and Livingston has a pop >7500. I only have a couple of memories of from before Livingston. One was from Roundup (I actually have been back and seen the hill) from about age 3 0r 4; I was on a hill with my brother and another kid throwing rocks down on cars driving by. A cop car came by so we turned to run, I tumbled down the hill and onto the road; my memory (of a memory of a memory) is of a giant jumping over cars to scoop me up and take me to the hospital. The other was from Whitehall - there was/is a ditch that runs along the street in front of our house but on the other side. For some reason, rather than cross the ditch by bridge I jumped down into and up out the other side. I was using my hands to pull myself up the far bank when I cut my thumb on a tin can - man there was blood everywhere (I still have the scar on my left thumb and that was about 56 years ago).

Day 3&4

Well, I looked up rabbit punch and it is a punch to the neck/base of the skull and is illegal in boxing because of possibility of severe damage to the spine/brain. I see on one of the boxing sites it also says that it can refer to a punch to the kidney/back. Its use possibly comes from a hunters strike to kill a rabbit by breaking the spine.

My left kidney now feels like there should be a bruise from hip to floating ribs - I once took a really bad fall during a judo match and I had such a bruise. My guess is that the stone is now working its way down the ureter to the bladder where the real pain begins. Here is an interesting look at the human body -
kidneys

My doctor asked how the heck could I be getting calcium stones? Well, for about 10-15 years I had so much stomach gas (when I burped, little kids would go "WOW") and I used to go through a bottle of antacids a week. I kept a bottle in the car, a bottle at work and a bottle at home. When we drove around the country, my wife got so fed up with me asking for the antacids, she poured the bottle into the ashtray of the car so I would stop bothering her. Fortunately I had quit smoking and never smoked in this car. Eventually, I was diagnosed with a hiatal hernia and an esophageal ulcer. Once that was taken care of, the dependence on antacids went away. But I imagine that my body has some calcium to get rid of and this is it.

Kids

I don't want to leave the wrong impression; during this time there are long stretches of time that don't have Gerry in them. There was a pack of us that hung out; I think about 10; we would play different tag, kick the can, cowboys and indians, war - all those kid games. The games that stick with me the most are the ones we played during twilight which could last for what seems like 3 or 4 hours. We played kick the can, hide and seek, and an unusual game that I have never heard anyone else play, cougar. Cougar is a hide and seek game with a twist: the 'it' was the cougar and the rest of us would count to 100 and then hunt the cougar with ropes. The point of the game for us was to lasso the cougar and get him back to base; the tricky part was the first person the cougar touched was cougar next so if you were to first person to lasso the cougar, she/he (yeah, we had girls playing to; we were about 7 or 8) could 'climb' the rope and tag the catcher. If you caught the cougar you wanted to make sure there were 2 of you at least. This was really scary fun; a pack of kids running through a neighborhood that is pretty much the edge of civilization in the dark looking for a beast with ropes and laughter. I remember once jumping to avoid one rope and getting caught by to others - by the legs and neck, stretched out flat on my back. I went into convulsions but none of the kids would approach me cus they did not want to be the next cougar - heh,heh a sucker did ease up to see if I was okay and I tagged him as it.

The only name I remember from this time period was a kid named Gibson, Danny I think. He had some molds for making toy soldiers and we would go searching through old tire lots looking for the lead weights used to balance tires and he would melt it down and pour it into molds (environmental and kid friendly products). I had met him years earlier when I lived at 711 W. Clark st. I can still remember that address so I imagine that my parent spent a lot of time getting it into my head as I was about 5 at that time and going to kindergarden. The only things I remember about the house was that it was a corner house and I was not allowed to go into the basement but I used to roll marbles down a couple vacuum cleaner tubs to knock my toy soldiers down and there was a hole where the marbles disappeared down. We would sit on the picket fence and "hi goodbye" to the people walking past. We thought that was the funniest thing.

I went to Catholic school and the kids from the public schools would call me a cat licker; as you can imagine this got old fast so I started calling them pub lickers cus they went to public school. This seemed make them uncomfortable and asked me to stop calling them that, duh.

Stone day 2

My left side is kinda feeling like I got rabbit punched (not to self: why is a punch to the kidneys called that?) a couple days ago. Yes, I have been punched before. I went to work out earlier today - ended up just doing stretches in the sauna. The side stretches were not too bad. The pain should recede in a day or so until the stone gets to my bladder and tries to get out; that is going to hurt a bit and probably bleed somewhat.

My brother....

We lived in Livingston MT and use to walk all over the mountains in the area. The county (Park County) had a pretty famous fishing contest; the prize for the largest trout was $1,000 - this was in the 1950s so that was about $17-20,000. Up on the hill was a fish (for the contest) and a P (for the county). We grew up pretty wild as our house was the second from the edge of the development. The fish and P was just up the hill from us; we (Gerry, my brother), Gail (see first blog) and I dug a fort in the eye of the fish. We fought mock combat using a grass we called spearweed that grew on the hillside - the stuff would not travel far when thrown but if you were close enough, you could throw a handful and have most of them stick. We were far enough north that we would have long periods of twilight - if we had to be home by dark, we could push that to almost 10:30.

There were a lot of gulleys in the area; one was about 1/2 a mile from home and pretty deep. I was about 8 or 9, Gerry about 10 or 11 and Gail was born between us and I am 63 now so I don't know how deep it was but I remember that we had to scrabble up a fairly steep slope to where the cliff started and the cliff had to at least twice my height. Where the slope met the cliff face we built another fort; the entrance was large enough that we could crawl in on our hands and feet. About 3 or 4 feet in we hollowed out the fort until it was large enough for the 3 of us to sit and talk. Once we finished this part we then started digging up so that had another entrance/exit. I remember being out there late one night standing up on top of the cliff while Gerry and Gail were digging second entrance, the night was moonless and I could see the huge sky full of stars and I heard a nighthawk cry - the cry is really spooky, very piercing. I have driven past/through town on the freeway and it looks like the housing development has expanded up over the hill so the fish and p is gone - or at least moved.

One year we bought a bunch of fireworks including roman candles and played war. You haven't played war until you have fired roman candles like a rifle, shot bottle rockets and thrown firecrackers. My parents didn't like Gail much; dad was a banker and I think they thought the Maroneys were not status enough but also he was a big, hulking kid who was awkward and broke things without meaning to.

My memories are racing each other for outlet and I don't know if I should start another post or what.

Gerry, my big brother - he was a boxer so he would chew 5 to 10 sticks of gum at a time (so did I because he did) to strengthen his jaw. I don't know if it worked but I do know that though I have not been in a lot of fights, I have been hit in the face some and it only pissed me off; never knocked me down. We were close while we lived in Livingston but after we moved to Plentywood MT he got a girlfriend and I seldom saw him. It is true that we moved after I got out of 6th grade (go St. Mary’s Braves - well, I remember it was Indian related so it may have been changed) so I was 13 and Gerry was 15 so we were probably doomed to split up 'cuz those 2 years are real important. Gerry married his sweetheart while he was a jr. - his daughter was born shortly after that all

Passing another kidney stone

Woke up this morning with kidney pain on the left side - this is the 3rd or 4th time. Doc said she no longer needs samples as they all turn out to be calcium crystals. I think I will keep this one for my self.