Summers with the Family

  Since we are among the longest days of the year I find myself thinking of summer.  I especially look to the summers of my childhood.

  When I was young my parents would send me to stay with my extended family for most of the summer. The time was meant for me to learn about their different cultures and history, and give my parents some time without a rambunctious and overly imaginative child. It was fun, I learned a lot. But very little is applicable to my present life. Certainly it formed character as my parents had planned. But what can you do with a long boat and the ability to navigate with only your beard to guide you? Some skills don’t transfer to large American cities.

  Just to clear things up, Vikings do not use maps in navigation. We use what God gave us, the stars, wind and waves, and an innate ability to understand due North by the way our beard curls at the edge. That’s why Vikings are always smoothing out their beards, they are actually triangulating their current position with respect to the sun and the southernmost tip of Norway. I cannot go into detail for reasons related to intellectual property. But it comes down to how you comb your beard and the metal in your helmet. The Vikings are surprisingly knowledgeable about magnets and hair follicles. Using this knowledge in tandem is very useful for navigation, it takes some practice.

  I learned in the same summer that oddly enough the Amish have a comparable trick for plowing their fields in perfectly straight lines. Although for the Amish there are no magnets involved. It is a simple matter of keeping the mules in line with your shoulders and your beard equally aligned between your suspenders. This also requires a few summers of repetition.

  During those summers I developed some intense calices. They would first start out in the open water with ore in hand. Thankfully I had plenty of sea water in which to dunk my screaming hands. Then I would move onto the farm to plow and bail for the remainder of the summer. Soon my hands looked like the leather pouch where my Uncles kept their tobacco. I felt good about myself until I returned to school to find I could not hold a pencil due to the quarter inch of tough skin between my knuckles. But I managed.

  All of this reminds me that someone should shovel the snow off my sidewalk. I would do it but I gave up calices after I graduated from high school.