Chapter 140
12/21/2006
Horse Sense
horse chips to microchips
Last chapter was well received and some wanted to see the earlier "covered wagon chapters" so I pulled this from the not quite horse and buggy days, but the 1932 archives of bareback riding just prior to the Great Depression. They say Virgil is a one horse town, but Grandpa had at least 5 horses, this one named "Old Doll". That's Dad and his sister (Aunt Carol), still on my electronic internet mail list, behind the house Grandpa built (still owned by bro Bill). I was going to edit Grandpa out of the picture as he distracted from the main subject, but I just couldn't do it. He is symbolic. He was always in the picture, maybe just off camera, but always working providing for the family. Believe he was working on the "new back stairs" to the back porch. I remember them being the newer parts of the house not so very many years after this pic was taken. Although you could buy the whole house kit from the Sears Roebuck mail order catalog, (the 1915 Westly) he just bought the plans, cut the trees up on the farm and ran them thru a sawmill to make the lumber for the building in 1928. I used to enjoy putting on his grey floppy felt hat (could have been a different one- maybe not!).
Carol has on boy's canvass sneakers they bought up in Raquette Lake while camping. She loved them as a self described TomBoy, but I'd never call her that.
If you can read horse language, you know that "Old Doll" was a little apprehensive about posing for this picture. Carol remembers hitching up Doll to the hay rake and making wind rows of the cut grass, but mostly Doll was more of a pet not capable of teaming up with the other larger work horses for hard work, plowing and such. Dad used to ride her up town.
The large opening to the covered back porch area was where wood was thrown in for the kitchen stove. I remember jumping into all the sawdust down there. Grandma would get mad when (I think Lyle) and I would be writing on the back of the green and ivory enamel wood stove with crayons. It was fun to have em melt and smell the wax. They didn't get electricity until 1938 because Carol used Coleman or kerosene lamps to study by until she went to college.
Modern fixtures didn't come in right away either. Took em 13 years later to put in a bathroom when I was 6! Why? Couldn't afford, technology gap, stubborn, fear of unknown, used to old ways, etc. It's not like today's world. I have memories some faint and some vivid of taking a bath in the tin tub in the middle of the kitchen floor, drawing hot water from the copper reservoir in the stove, going down to the crick (Virgil Creek) to draw water, using the hand water pump in the kitchen sink drawing water into a white porcelain washbasin, the hard brown FELS NAPTHA soap, Grandma's manual clothes washing machine that she'd pull a wooden lever back and forth for agitation, the crank ringer to pass the wet clothes thru, the tin corrugated wash board only occasionally used, walking outside with a flashlight to use the "outhouse", the brown oak icebox on the back porch, the crank telephone for our party line (3 short rings for Grandma), one long to get an operator to call out of the area.
Adapting to change: A mere decade after this pic, Dad had gone from controlling the reins of 1 horsepower to controlling 5000 horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines over Germany. Aunt Carol has gone from getting around bareback, to getting around Europe and getting around on the internet. It is a microchip world now. Even horses have microchips in them now. At the Saratoga Racetrack, a backstretch worker was telling us this summer about the Radio Frequency Identification Device implants that replace the tattooed lip system. Identity Management training at a Microsoft facility in Seattle for 3 months is what Certified Microsoftie, Neph David has been chosen to receive in the EDS elite Top Gun program. You can be sure there will be plenty of software on a chip there. [BTY e-list Bob will be there thru the summer.] Whether it's the horsepower micro chips in my Mustang, your cell phone, computer, iPod, or your kids games -it's all chips. That brings me to this next Nano World of Chapter 141. (or as Dad would say, "That's a horse of a different color.")