Today's discussion about the virtues of electric stoves when compared with the perils of natural gas stoves brought to mind a personage of my early childhood. I only vaguely remember him, having met him when I was an infant, and he having died when I was seven years old, although there exists two old photographs of the gentleman and myself, myself admiring the pigs in the bed of his pick-up truck.
This was in a small town alongside the Platte River of Nebraska, a county famously rich in agriculture and teeming with transport, the most important highway in America, and the most important railway line in America, passing through it.
But both highway and railway were simply thin arterials, little discombobulating life within a few feet away, and all the rest of the county, where life was laid-back, mellow, informal, nonchalant, and small enough that even a deaf child could absorb the world in pieces at a time, without trauma.
His last name was "Shultheis," but somehow in the bibble-babble of a child, he got christened "Old Man Memmerhemmer." Neither I nor anyone else could ever remember how that happened, but there it was. He died at the age of 79 years, and so I first met him when he was either 72 or 73 years old.
I was an infant at our first encounter, myself parked on the front porch of our house, bawling my eyes out for some indecipherable reason. I apparently did that quite frequently, much to the consternation and vexation of the older siblings, who could never figure out what I was so worked up about.
On this particular summer morning, Old Man Memmerhemmer was driving down our street in his pick-up truck, which was later recalled by older siblings as a 1939 Ford, considerably rusting and leaning to one side. He spied the howling infant, and inquired what was wrong.
The older siblings, who of course knew Old Man Memmerhemmer, explained to him they had no idea, after which he leaned over to pick me up, carrying me to the street to look inside the bed of the pick-up truck, in which were resting a dozen or more infant pigs nursing off a big pig.
Apparently I stopped crying, started laughing, and filled the diapers.
And thus began the earliest of my friendships, although I have little or no recollection of it during the first three or four years.
The summer I was three years old, I was struck by an automobile, sent bouncing through the air and along the ground, getting all busted up excepting for the spinal column. Old Man Memmerhemmer had been one of about twenty eyewitnesses to the event, and got considerably aggrieved about it.
Old Man Memmerhemmer was never in any presentable shape to visit one in a hospital, but this being a small town hospital, one floor on a city block, windows close to the ground, and windows with screens operative, he set up a lawn chair on the grass immediately outside the window of the room where I was.
It was usually evening when he came to sit, and quite possibly he was drunk, as he drank a great deal. I have been told he used to talk to me, but I of course would know nothing about that. All I recall is a blurry image of a silhouette of a man outside the window, sitting there until it got very dark.
By the time I was recovered about a year later, and adventuresome again, at the age of 4 years I began riding around with Old Man Memmerhemmer in his pick-up truck, as he drove on the gravel county roads and along the Platte River, giving his pigs an outing.
I have no idea what was up with that; Old Man Memmerhemmer had once insisted to my parents that despite conventional wisdom about pigs, these pigs actually enjoyed such excursions, for the fun and fresh air and all that.
Old Man Memmerhemmer had come from a good background, among the finest first families of the county, but he himself was third-generation, and into considerable decreptitude. I learned later in life he had actually managed to preserve much capital and much land, but by the time I knew him, he was living in just two rooms of what had once been one of the finest rural homes in the county, all else shut off.
According to his obituary, he had once been married, but that had been long before my time, and she had been long gone by my time.
Old Man Memmerhemmer was tall, and rail-thin; as mentioned before, he drank a great deal. My parents however had no qualms about their second-youngest going about with him. Due to the nature of their professions, my parents knew the real histories, the real qualities, the real virtues, the real vices, of everyone, and Old Man Memmerhemmer had passed muster with them even before I was around.
The only thing that discomfitted them was that Old Man Memmerhemmer chewed tobacco, and lots of it. Aware of my propensity to imitate, emulate, people I liked, they feared I would ultimately have to go to kindergarten with a personal portable brass cupsidor.
However, they need never have worried; an equally-strong influence on me at the time was my father's mother, who lived with us for a year in Nebraska, until she got lonely for Pennsylvania, and moved back there. My grandmother had carefully instructed me that if one puts something into his mouth, he should sooner or later get around to swallowing it, not spitting it out.
To this day, I do not even do chewing gum.
I can recall three summers of riding through the county with Old Man Memmerhemmer and his pigs; all the roads and by-roads, all the paths, all the old trails, and along the banks of the Platte River. I had the impression he used to talk, perhaps reminescencing about this place or that person, but alas I had no way of knowing.
One day the autumn I was 7 years old, it was explained to me that I would not see Old Man Memmerhemmer again, at least in this time and place. His was one of the first funerals I had ever attended. Actually, I had no idea what was going on; there were a lot of people in a church, and there was this long closed box, on top of which it was my obligation to place a single white rose.
I knew less what was going on, than a pig knows about Christmas.
Old Man Memmerhemmer was gone, but as it was not the first time someone had evaporated on me, while I missed going out giving the pigs a ride, I got over it.
It was not until I was 8 or 9 years old, a year or two later, that I was told about the demise of Old Man Memmerhemmer; how, one night when he was in his cups at home, and needing heat, the natural-gas stove refused to light up.
Until he opened a lot of valves on the stove, and lit a match.
Half the grand old house was sent soaring to the skies, and parts of Old Man Memmerhemmer were found in three counties (one must admit the house was located near to where four counties intersected).
The biggest piece of Old Man Memmerhemmer that could be found was his left leg, hanging on a tree-branch, looking very much like a stocking hung by the chimney at Christmas.
The older brother who told me this story had a habit of tormenting me, and informed me that the leg was the only thing in that box at the church.
