I’ve been to a few recent state and regional meetings of Rural Electric Coops and heard some real good news. Folks have woken up their representatives and senators. They've told them charging people in mid-America a carbon tax on their electric bill is not very popular with voters. This is good; keep contacting them, about this and any other issue that disturbs you. The voice of America is strong and you can make a difference. Enough politics.
I guess the funniest things I’ve heard and recalled were some stories about cats. I like cats. They are ten times better than smelling a dead mouse. This week a rodent succumbed to Warfarin inside our house. Mother and I were on our hands and knees, emptying kitchen cabinets looking for the deceased one, thinking, as we sniffed, we must be getting closer. In the end we gave up. It will have to wear out. Whew.
The first story came from an ex-lineman who now serves his coop in Oklahoma as a board member. He was a young man working back then, and kept a pickup basket truck at his home at night and on weekends, in case of an outage. One Saturday he got a call from his boss that some important politician had called him and he had a problem. His wife’s pet tom cat had gotten into a serious fight and was way up in a tree in his yard and could not be coaxed down.
“Go over there and see what you can do,” his boss said.
So the lineman drove over there and the man came out to show him the reluctant feline way up in a tree top. The owner said how his wife loved this cat and how upset she was he wouldn’t come down for her. However, this lineman knew about cats. He realized that a cat mad enough after a fierce fight would attack anyone that tried to catch it. But, he set up and climbed in the basket. He also took up with him a fiberglass stick he used on hot wires. The reach of his bucket left him short several feet from this spitting tom cat’s location in the tree top. So he tried to dissuade him with the stick. The wind was blowing hard and he was like a flag up there, getting lots of sway. His best chance, he felt, was making the cat get down further so he could reach him. But the angry cat wanted no part of him. A gust of wind came by, and he accidentally poked the ol' tom out.
The cat fell to the ground, and the lineman shook his head. 'Poor thing,' he thought as he let down his bucket, 'he may die.' But to his amazement the cat leaped up, and in an amazing burst of speed, ran inside the open front door and began crashing lamps, vases and glassware. He could hear the man’s wife screaming, “Get him out of here."
The lineman smiled, “I never stayed to see what all he broke. I simply drove home.”
It was a real deep snow that fell one winter day and the entire country was paralyzed. I couldn’t get out of my driveway, but some of the other Tyson field men who lived in town made it to work, and went up to the Randal Road hatchery and helped pull baby chickens all day and boxed them. Chickens hatch despite the weather or any other event.
Bob Baskin, who ran the Tyson hatcheries, had an office in that building. The next afternoon when things had settled from the snow problems, Bob was leaned back in his office chair and absently reached down and opened the file drawer on his desk. Like a jack-in-the-box, this furry white cat came squalling out of that drawer, ran up Bob’s arm and soon, according to him, was running around on the walls of the small office until Bob managed to open the office door, upon which the feline sought his freedom and was never seen again in the building.
No one knew who planted him. No one ever admitted doing it, though Bob had his suspicions. For years, a way to get a good laugh was to ask Bob if he had any more cats concealed in his desk.
Western novelist Dusty Richards and his wife Pat live on Beaver Lake in northwest Arkansas. For more information about his books you can email Dusty by visiting www.ozarksfn.com and clicking on 'Contact Us' or call 1-866-532-1960.
