HORSE POOP
Once in awhile Grandpa would sit all us cousins on the at porch at the cottage and tell us stories. My favorite was the horse poop story. He'd say, "when I was about a nine I had got the horse barn every morning before school and shovel poop. That's right. My is was my chore to clean up after the horses; shovel up the poopy straw and put down fresh straw in the barn.
Grandpa said, "You might think the
poop is the bad part of that job. But you'd be wrong. Horse poop isn't so bad, not like dog poop.
The horses: that's the bad part. You go out to the barn, it could be 10 below zero and those horses are sleeping standing, grumpy and cold, big work horses. As you start cleaning one horse says to another 'why doesn't that boy go back in the house and leave us alone ?' Another horse says "I'll take care of it, I'll tell the kid to go back in the house."
Then he'd ask us to guess how a horse tells a little kid to go away. When someone always said, "He kicks you." Grandpa would shake his head say: " You don't know much about horses. They're too smart to kick, they might get in trouble if they kick a kid. No they don't want to be sent to the glue factory, so they don't kick. They are tricky mean."
"They wait while you are cleaning up, wait till your little foot gets too close to one of their big hooves -- these horses weigh of a thousand pounds, -- and when your little foot is right next his big hoof he just lifts that hoof and slides it over your toes. And then he stomps hard. Of course you let out a yell and all the horses look startled and snort and say 'Oh my was that your little foot?' just as innocent as can be.
Well after you've been stomped on 10 times before you're 10 years old, stepped on accidentally on purpose, you'd say what I said: when I grow up I'm not going to live on a farm, and I'm not going to live with horses; I'm going to the move to the city and drive an auto - mobile. And my grandpa was one of the first kids in history to be able to say I'm going to drive an auto mobile because the auto -mobile had just been invented.
Well after you've been stomped on 10 times before you're 10 years old, stepped on accidentally on purpose, you'd say what I said: when I grow up I'm not going to live on a farm, and I'm not going to live with horses; I'm going to the move to the city and drive an auto - mobile. And my grandpa was one of the first kids in history to be able to say I'm going to drive an auto mobile because the auto -mobile had just been invented.
My grandpa would end the story by saying, "Did you know that when the car was first invented you didn't have a license to drive a car?' We didn't know. But we knew what that meant -- kids could drive, and when grandpa asked who would have tried driving back then a nine year-old cousin raised his hand, my grandpa would say, "oh I'm sorry, I need to explain. A nine year-old COULD drive a car, the police couldn't stop them, but adults all over America got together and decided the 12 was a good mature age -- the 12 year olds were allowed to drive.
"Now all over America the twelve year olds were driving autos, to town and out to the back field... but what did the and younger kids think? They thought "That's not fair! If he can do it, I can do it." Grandpa said, "all over America when the car was first invented nine and ten and eleven year olds, were getting in cars and crashing them into the barn, and sliding them into the pond. And when they got better at it, and the adults had gone to town, they were out chasing the bull around the back field yelling Yahooo."
So the car story in the book Reunion is in a way every American families story at the turn of the last century -- either your family, or the family down the street, had a story about some kids who got in the car and got in trouble.
on: what does the word "automobile" literally mean? What is the "auto" part, what is the mobile part, and what does it go without?