Sorry if I bored you with the motorcycle trip.  For some reason that was one of those stories that I had to get out of my system.  I’ll try (not promise) to keep things a dab more interesting for a while before another one of those long drawn out, pointless tales.

    Do you ever wonder what made you the way you are?  Everybody has had a series of experiences that helped shape them into the person they are today.  For some reason, it seems like one bad experience negates ten good ones.  You read about the bad childhood of serial killers and how alcoholic parents have alcoholic kids.  Hopefully you don’t fit into either of those categories, but you probably had something which, when you look back, you wish had never happened.  Maybe it was something of your own making or, perhaps, someone else’s.

    When I was about four or five, I remember having to stay with my mother’s cousin or her husband, Grover, a few times.  I wasn’t really happy about it, but they had a son about my age and we could play together.  I was scared of Grover because he was a rather gruff fellow.  For the life of me I can’t picture his face but I remember him wearing an olive green uniform.  He was a truck driver and slept during the day which wasn’t conducive to baby-sitting.  I should also point out that, to the best of my recollection, I never saw a copy of “Parent” magazine or “Psychology Today” around their apartment.  So, I’d bet his parenting skills were based on what he learned from his parents.  While he was asleep, we’d run loose around the apartment complex and play.  They had a big incinerator that people used to burn garbage.  It seemed huge and it was rusty with no sign of paint anywhere.  I can still see the curved door and the rivets that held it together.  We’d open the door and look inside to see all the smoldering trash.  My memory tells me that you could see daylight coming in from the top.  When you’re four, peeping in an incinerator is an adrenaline rush.

    Grover took us to a slaughter house one day while I was staying there.  Four years old and getting the slaughter house tour!  Woo-Hoo!  We stood and watched as they shot the cows in the head and they fell through a trap door.  We even got to go up to the place where the guy stood and looked at his gun. We walked all over the packing plant.  The floor was a river of blood and odd chunks of no telling what.  I got a souvenir bullet to take home, but have no idea what happened to it.  I looked at that bullet so many times I could draw you a picture of it today.

    I haven’t the slightest idea if this influenced me negatively in my adult life.  I know whenever I smell garbage burning, or something that has that particular odor, I think of the old rusty incinerator. And honestly, I haven’t been in a slaughterhouse since then.  I hope nowadays they have one of those “You Must Be This Tall to Enter” signs at the door.