...Studs Terkel. A fine story about one of our greatest story-tellers. Here's hoping he lives to see an Obama victory, and that the victor is worthy of old Studs.

I don't know if you read these comments,GK, but this was a great essay on old, old age. I want to get to 96, like you do, and I wouldn't mind at all being like the Wonder.

Thanks to the liberal nutballs on City Council (the same ones who voted, in the wisdom of the corrupt Chicago political Machine to call for the impeachment of the President of the United States), smoking cigars in restaurants and keeping a Smith & Wesson revolver in your home became illegal. The Wonder might have found a revolver handy when thieves broke into his flat, eh Garrison?

"Hog Slaughter" by Garrison Keillor.

This is the time of the year when people would slaughter, back when people did--Rollie and Eunice Hochstetter, I think, were in the last in Lake Wobegone. They kept pigs, and they'd slaughter them in the fall when the weather got cold and the meat would keep. I went out to see them slaughter hogs once when I was a kid...

Today if you are going to slaughter an animal for meat, you send it to the locker plant and pay to have the guys there do it. When you slaughter pigs, it takes your appetite for pork fow a while. Because the pigs let you know they don't care for it. They don't care to be grabbed and dragged over to where the other pigs didn't come back.

It is quite a thing for a kid to see. To see living flesh, and the living insides of another creature.

... I was fascinated. I got as close as I could....I got sort of carried away in the excitement of it all and went down to the pigpen with my cousin and started throwing little stones at the pigs to watch them jump and squeal and run. And all of a sudden I felt a big hand on my shoulder, and I was spun around, and my uncle's face was three inches away from mine. He said, "If I ever see you do that again I'll beat you 'till you can't stand up, you hear?" And we heard.

I knew the anger had to do with the slaughter, that it was a ritual that had to be done as a Ritual. It was done swiftly, and there was no foolishness. No joking around. ... With respect for the animals that would become our food. The throwing stones at a pif violated the ceremony, and this ritual, which they went through.

Rollie was the last to slaughter his own hogs. One year he had a accident; the knife slipped, and the animal was only wounded got loose and ran across the yard before it fell. He never kept pigs after that. He didn't feel he was worthy of it.

It's all gone. Children growing up in Lake Wobegon will never have a chance to see it.

It was a powerful experience, life and death hung in the balance.

A life in which people made do, made their own, lived off the land,

lived between the ground and God. It's lost, not only to this world:

but also to memory.---Garrison Keillor. "Hog Slaughter." Thanks.

~

P.S. I love when Meryl Streep reads Wendell Berry poems. I sure lava her.

'The French Lieutenant's Women' and 'Out of Africa' and 'One True Thing" etc.,

I'm only one year younger than Meryl Streep. Does she like younger men? smack.

That was Studs Turkel, wasn't it? I'M not ready for him to go, thank you very much.

Great old age combined with preserved function is a beautiful thing to behold. I am reminded of a couple of trees I see from time to time, huge, tall, ancient specimins of their kind. The numbers of their leaves are often reduced, like the hairs on an old man's head, and what greenery remains is relegated to the very highest branches, where the sun is still bright and life-giving. But their trunks tell their stories, huge boles showing the girth and wearing the scars of decades and even centuries. One that comes to mind is a grey-barked plane tree known locally as the big buttonwood; its road is respectfully bended around it, following the wagon path that was the road's predecessor back in the 18th or 19th Century when the tree was a teenager. Another is a shagbark hickory, now vine-covered but still glorious, that reminds me of a long-legged old Irish wolfhound.

If the subject of the essay was in fact Studs, you got your two bucks' worth for sure.

Don Singleton

Take a second look Garrison. the "old Zepillon" is just resting. He'll rise up and fly circles around you again; any moment. You're counting; playing the numbers game already? Look carefully again...he's not counting the blueberries, no sir.

No doubt.

I know if you read Wendell Berry's poem, 'The Sycamore Tree' you'll love it. (take up bonsai) [?]

I wish I could 'cut and paste' it here. It's a poem I use to copy, and distribute to war wounded.

All people get wounds by mere living. Thanks.

And I hope he does hang around until November.

...of meeting and talking with both Studs and Obama -- see the "left wing" and 5 signatures below the Literacy Chicago logo on this t-shirt: http://flickr.com/photos/jackknife_juggernaut/2020098049/sizes/o/in/set-72157603169084304/ -- I can no longer share Studs' ardor for Obama's ascension given his craven capitualtion on FISA, but it's good to read that he's still chugging along with something to look forward to.

Only one 96 year old Chicagoan says that benediction- that was about Studs Terkel. Heck of a treasure to the city, hell of a treasure to the world.

Wouldn't surprise me if the Wonder lived to Obama's (hopeful) reelection. Man's just got too much to live for to go out anytime soon.

Thanks for the tip. I did read it (at http://inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com/2007/12/553-sycamore-wendell-berry.html) and do love it. Thanks again, and God bless Studs.

Don