Category Archives: “Dog Days” Diversions

Dog Days Tales: His Eye Is On the Sparrow

One sunny morning in mid-June I was on a train chugging alongside the Hudson River from Manhattan. A few hours later, in my brand new Camp Frontier tee shirt, I inspected the rifle range. It was small, only six target stands, and backed up against the slope of a wooded hill, with nothing behind it for many acres. It looked good: safe, cozy, familiar. This I could handle.

I asked Herbie if I could try out the range. He wasn’t too keen on the idea, but let me take a few potshots. I put two bullets through the bull’s eye, several more close to it, and was getting ready for my last shots when I noticed a fluttering in the trees halfway up the hill.
Lifting my eye from the rifle sight I saw birds flitting through the branches, seemingly unconcerned about the slugs kicking up dirt a few feet below them.

Come on, tweeties, I whispered urgently to them. Come on down here. Let me find out if I’m really still a sharpshooter. Come to papa. But they didn’t.

Everything went well that summer until the morning the killer appeared. Several times a week I met groups of campers at the range, showed them what to do, explained the importance of following instructions, gave out ammunition, and barked the commands:

Grace In Your Face: Remembering Bill Kreidler

My first memory of Bill Kreidler is from St. Lawrence University, at the FGC Gathering of 1984. I was leading a workshop, my first for FGC, on the Basics of Bible Study, and he was in it.

Well, partway in it anyhow. As I recall, he spent most of those weekday mornings perched on the sill of an open window, there on the second or third floor of our old classroom building. I didn’t think he was going to jump out; it was brutally hot, the building was not air-conditioned, and he was trying to breathe.

But at the same time, he did seem to be keeping a safe distance, a space between him and the dangerous book I was waving around, and maybe the bearded breeder who was waving it as well.

During the workshop we spent a lot of time reading aloud the story of David, Jonathan, Saul, and Jonathan’s crippled son, Mephibosheth, as I had culled it from the First and Second books of Samuel. This is a gripping, mournful story, which I called “The Bible as Soap Opera,” and perhaps it went on too long, especially given the weather.

But all through it, there is a clear image of Bill, still on the windowsill, head cocked to one side, paying close attention as we plowed through this saga of love, betrayal, death, and loyalty beyond death. Glancing over at Bill from time to time, I wondered if something about it was sinking in. I now think that it was.

Dog Days Stories: Who Needs A Machine Gun?

It was on one of these trips, in one of those big new stores, on a warm spring day in 1954, that I found the most exciting toy gun in the world.

I had lots of toy guns, usually squirt guns or cap pistols. The cap pistols were almost all long-barreled six shooters, like the ones Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger used in the movies or one TV. The caps for them came in little thin rolls of reddish papers, with a row of dark bumps down the middle. The bumps were the gunpowder, or whatever it was that went BANG when I put them in a cap gun and pulled the trigger.

Caps were always fun, even if my favorite toy gun was broken. I could unroll them on the ground, and take a rock and pound on the dark gunpowder bumps with it. If we hit them just right they’d go POW and make a flash and a little puff of smoke. Sometimes we would find a big rock and smash a whole rolled up roll with it, to see if all the caps would explode at once; but usually they didn’t.

The only trouble with caps was that they got used up fast and didn’t last long. So whenever I found myself in the toy department of a store with a little money, which wasn’t often, I would buy some.

I didn’t have any money at all the day I saw that new gun, and there was only sixty-five cents in my piggybank at home, so I could only look at it longingly.

This was not some glossy cowboy weapon, made to look like it was invented a hundred years ago. No, this was a submachine gun, a weapon of modern warfare, a soldier’s gun. It had a dark blue metal barrel and a wooden stock and a key on one side which I could wind up so when I pulled the trigger it would go rat-tat-tat-tat and shoot a few dozen times like a real machine gun. And I could put caps in it too, so the noise would be really loud.

“Survival & Resistance” A Message from 2006 That is Timely Again

[Note: This essay was originally published in Friends Journal; but it’s now behind their paywall. It still seems timely today; maybe more so.] Quakerism was born in a time of revolutionary upheaval. Yet it learned how to survive when the revolution failed and was followed by decades of persecution. I sometimes hear Quakers waxing nostalgic … Continue reading “Survival & Resistance” A Message from 2006 That is Timely Again →

Dog Days: George & The Cottonmouth

This outhouse looked like the ones I used to see in magazine cartoons sometimes, built like a big phone booth of wide wooden boards, with a slanted roof and three small holes at the top to let the smell out. Inside was a flat bench seat with a hole in it.

The boards were sunburned a dark grey and sanded by the Kansas wind until the looping wood grain stood out in wavy ridges that looked like a giant’s faded fingerprints. I stepped in, pulled the door closed, and sat carefully down on the bench — yes, with a bare bottom.

Of course, my grandparents had a bathroom inside, now. But the outhouse had been used by them and most of their children, summer and winter, for a long time before. To my parents, of course, this was just an old leftover, something to ignore. But I had never been this close to one before. The bench felt warm and ridged, but worn smooth, and much more comfortable than the prickly couch in the front room. Resting there, it felt like I was traveling back in time.

I looked around and listened. The air was dim except for slivers of light coming through cracks between the boards. The outhouse smell was not as strong as it must have been once. Beside me on the bench a thick old Montgomery Ward catalog leaned against the wall. The curling pages were yellow and brown, and about half were gone, used long ago for toilet paper.

It was warm and stuffy in the outhouse, but the sense of mystery deepened as I sat there, as if I was listening to it, hearing something I couldn’t quite make out.

I sat there until a big horse fly started buzzed loudly around my head. The buzzing mademe think of wasps, and I wondered whether there were wasps nests under the bench. Wasps, you know, can sting and sting, and I suddenly thought there was probably nothing they’d like better than a fresh bare bottom.

That thought brought me abruptly back to the present. So I tore a crinkly page, finished and pulled up my pants, and watched the horsefly warily. When it lit for a moment on a dim rafter above me, I jumped and ran, banging the door behind me as I hurried past the edge of the field toward the barn.