James M. Redwine

JPeg Osage Ranch

Cats and Dogs

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The American Veterinary Medicine Association estimated that as of 2021 Americans had 77 million dogs and 58 million cats as domestic pets. If you currently own or have owned a pet you know the downs and ups of pet ownership, such as having to walk them in blizzards, feed and water them, clean up after them and pay veterinary bills. Or, as Peg might say, “You know, sort of like a husband.”

On the other hand, you could eschew organic pets and buy a pet rock. Pet rocks were marketed first by Gary Dahl (1936-2015). He came up with the idea while sitting in a tavern in California in 1975. Is anyone surprised the Genesis of such an idea occurred in the land of fruits and nuts? But Dahl had the last laugh as he made enough money selling what anybody could pick up for free to buy a tavern in Los Gatos (The Cats), California. Dahl named his bar Carry Nations to mock the prohibitionist Carrie Nation (1846-1911).

Dahl’s friends were constantly complaining about vet bills, the cost of dog and cat food and having to clean up after their pets. Dahl advertised his pet rocks as needing no maintenance and they never die. Also, Gentle Reader, if you, as have I, ever owned a beloved pet you know the very real sense of loss a whole family and often friends too experience when a long-time pet dies from a lingering illness or even worse when a sudden and unexpected loss, say being hit by a car, occurs.

Peg and I just did not want to go through such a trauma again after we lost Haley, our schnauzer. So we no longer have a dog or a cat although we have had several of each. It also hurts when friends or family lose their pets. We know there is nothing we can do to assuage the heartache but, I hope, we listen attentively and neither discount the loss or, much worse, say, “Get on with things, it was just an animal.” I am aware there are many other pets that people are fond of besides cats and dogs. However, a very high majority of domestic pets are dogs and cats.

Just last week one of our nieces lost a long-time good friend, Richard Parker the Cat, and another good friend of ours lost a one-time stray cat that he named Marvin after he had allowed the waif into his home. Both our niece and our friend felt the heavy body blow and now know all any of us can do is commiserate and encourage the owners to concentrate on the joy Richard Parker and Marvin brought with them when they slowly worked into family status.

Another well-meaning but counter-productive bit of advice we often give family and friends who lose a beloved pet is, “I know it hurts now, but perhaps you should get another cat right-a-way.” While we probably do not believe animals are interchangeable, our niece and friend might take our sympathy for a lack of appreciation of the pet’s unique qualities. We could not even fathom such advice for a lost child but somehow we sometimes let loyal pets be thought of as we might widgets in an Econ class.

So, what do we say and do when a family member or a good friend loses a good pet? I suggest we can affirm their deep commitment to the pet by listening and help to fill the gap with shared activities or just a quiet cup of coffee. And of course, here at JPeg Osage Ranch, while we no longer have cats or dogs, we do have skunks, armadillos and various other not so cuddly uninvited guests!

 

The Briar Patch

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Photo by Peg Redwine

Joel Chandler Harris, AKA Joe Harris (1848-1908), was born in the state of Georgia before the Civil War and worked on a slave-holding plantation as a teenager. After the war he became an associate editor at The Atlanta Constitution newspaper. Harris had lived and worked around the evils of slavery and he had absorbed the folk wisdom of slaves who were prohibited by law from formal education. Harris created his fictional writings using Uncle Remus as a wise and shrewd observer of human nature hidden within animal behavior.

Harris intended his writings as compliments to the ability of Uncle Remus to explain human foibles by giving animals human failings such as arrogance. In the story of Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox contained in Harris’ Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, the meanness of the Fox is used by the Rabbit to escape by getting the Fox to “punish” the Rabbit by throwing him into a briar patch. Of course, that is exactly what the Rabbit really wanted.

Unfortunately, due to our current misguided wokeness in many areas, the slave dialect used by Harris now interferes with the appreciation of the literature of The Song of the South and a great number of those pro-African American folk tales are no longer read. However, for those of us whose time of birth helped us escape the ravages of the current misguided ignorance in the area of children’s literature, Uncle Remus is still imparting wisdom, such as enjoying a proverbial briar patch. Or in my case, Peg’s banishment of me to the solitude of our bunkhouse when I got COVID and Peg did not.

At first, I was offended when Peg handed me my toothbrush and a set of clean underwear and locked our cabin door behind me after she forcefully shut it. It was not that I wanted Peg to share in my experience of a sore throat, lethargy and endless amounts of crud being expelled from my body. It was more the feeling that a one-person leper colony was a rather lonely possibility, plus I really missed my favorite recliner and ready access to the refrigerator. Oh, and Peg too, of course.

Be that as it may, Peg sentenced me to two weeks of quarantine with the same lack of ceremony she would have exhibited if a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman had appeared with a sample case. You remember encyclopedias don’t you, Gentle Reader? You know, those things with pages, tables of contents and indexes that went the way of the dodo bird after Google came along. Well, that may call for a different column.

Anyway, here I am alone with the piles of books I never read, the piano I used to play and old photographs of friends and relatives I barely recognize. I have been rummaging through boxes and drawers filled with the most interesting stuff not seen by me since high school. What a strange looking dude I was with dark colored hair and a discernible jaw line. Who was that and who are those undecipherable young people around him wearing weird clothes?

Say, Peg, what is this thing that says Maytag on it? Is this where my clean clothes came from? It must be a miracle machine. How does it operate? By the way, there is no stove out here and after several days of eating the leftovers you sent with me, I am ready for some real food.

By the way, I have done my Paxlovid and am pretty sure I am not Typhoid Mary anymore. On the other hand, the bunkhouse refrigerator is stocked with leftover beer from our Fourth of July Family Reunion and the TV is constantly tuned to Gunsmoke reruns. The bunkhouse is the answer to every boy’s escape from his mother and every husband’s escape from constant inspection by his wife.

Clothes are in a pile where I take them off. The bed never has to be made to drill sergeant standards and every door knob and chair back is a hanger. But the most serendipitous of all? Peg is afraid to step foot in my little slice of heaven. I may claim to be eternally toxic. Bring on that Briar Patch!

♪ All The Grass Is Green ♪

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Photo by Peg Redwine

I like brown grass. It matches the unfallen brown leaves I don’t have to rake and the brown stagnant water in the pond that hides my fish from the ravenous blue heron. Also, brown grass does not engender chiggers. Ah, chiggers, Mother Nature’s reminder that we humans are, in fact, at the top of the insect world’s food pyramid. Here’s how the internet waxes eloquent about chiggers:

“They bite their human host (who invited them?) and by embedding their mouthparts into the skin

cause intense irritation with intense itching.” Ugh!

The omniscient internet says chiggers prosper in grasslands, like the Osage County, Oklahoma prairie, and are most numerous in early summer when grass is heaviest; you know, like now! I have been doing my own field work on chiggers since the mowing season has returned. I can attest that for once the internet is correct; chiggers proliferate in tall green grasses.

My ankles still display chigger bites from those halcyon childhood summer days when I would gayly traipse through the green prairie grasses in short pants and bare feet while the chiggers were rejoicing at the opportunity to embed their heads permanently into my skin and scar me physically and mentally for eternity. Surely someone should have kept me out of tall green grass for the first ten years of my life and surely I should not be communicating with chiggers now as beautiful dry brown grass turns into tall green chigger heaven.

Unfortunately, I cannot convince Peg our yard looks just fine with waving green stems interspersed with golden dandelions. She insists that I do battle with the vegetation that is being protected by battalions of chiggers as ferocious as Ukrainian freedom fighters. I don’t get it. Peg plants countless flowers and even decorative grasses while she insists I attack our yard with a smoking, noisy grass decapitating Kubota dragon. No wonder the chiggers launch counter attacks. I say let bygones be bygones. I’ll forgive those childhood chiggers if today’s marauders will leave me alone. But how can they if Peg demands I destroy their homes?

I say the blames for my chigger discomfort falls squarely upon Peg’s pathological need to impress the neighbors. Neighbors? We live in the country! Our cabin is a quarter of a mile from the main county road. Nobody ever sees our yard unless you count FedEx and UPS drivers who deliver Peg’s ever regenerating plants for her to plant and the chiggers to nest in. If I did not mow the yard all summer no one would see or care; well, except Peg of course.

But the real problem is not Peg. The real problem is the United States government that can send out trillions of borrowed dollars to encourage people not to work and trillions of borrowed dollars to help Ukrainians blow up Russian tanks, planes and ships but cannot spend a Depression Era dime to eliminate chiggers. It is time we returned to those thrilling days of yesteryear when instead of spreading armaments we spread insect killer, not DDT, of course.

Let’s hear it for dead chiggers and live, itch-free people. That’s a better campaign slogan than “Ban the U.S. Supreme Court” or “Raise a statue to Sammy Alito.” Well, excuse me a moment. I’ve got to go get Peg to type up this column for the paper and I can see out the window she is gleefully planting even more insect habitat.

Happy Birthday, Peg!

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Happy Birthday, Peg! Photo by Jim Redwine

We are almost one full month into spring, the season of renewal for some wives and ennui for their husbands. There is something about damp earth that calls out to such wives as Peg much as the Sirens called out to the crew of Ulysses. Though it would not be politically correct, the Devil is pushing me to try to lash Peg to the steering wheel of her Mini Cooper so she cannot frequent every garden center within twenty-five miles of our cabin.

Peg must have beaucoup amounts of potting soil, countless plants and varieties of seeds, containers of metal, clay and plastic and every conceivable fertilizer and pesticide that is touted by Peg’s countless Facebook friends as the newest miracle agents to produce award winning vegetables and flowers. Of course, beds must be prepared and organized by color, variety, time of planting and varmint prevention. Do you need to ask, Gentle Reader, whom Peg has in mind for these tasks?

I am not a Nancy Reagan type of astrology buff but I do wonder if Peg’s birthday that falls during the first half of April may have influenced her pathological need to commune with the earth. I offer the following horoscope (taken from the internet) as evidence to support my position: under the sign of Aries the first half of April, “Is an amazing time to chase your most precious goals.” I should also include the astrological caution that April will be, “a month of ups and downs”; that will certainly be true for me as I follow Peg’s orders.

I am aware that one must not fall into the Cassandra dilemma of ignoring the claimed wisdom of the stars. You may recall that Cassandra had been both blessed and cursed by the gods. She had the gift of prophecy but no one would believe her so disaster still occurred, including the fall of Troy in Homer’s The Illiad. Therefore, I will keep in mind the prediction in Peg’s horoscope that April will be a great time for her to reach her spring goals of recreating the Gardens of Babylon on the rocky, arid soil of JPeg Osage Ranch. However, I see nothing in any bird entrails or other devices of divination that calls for me to be involved.

The problem is, just as Cassandra, I may be correct but Peg refuses to recognize it. Her position is that my lot is cast as her garden Sherpa and I had better get off the couch. The only saving grace that I see is that both football and basketball seasons are over, the World Series is months from now and the Cardinals probably won’t be involved anyway. And, by the time you read this article, the 2022 Masters Golf Tournament will be history. Perhaps the better part of valor is for me to just accept my fate and conceal my amusement when the deer eat the tops off of everything Peg has planted but the marigolds.

Happy Birthday, Peg!

A Cuppa For Peace

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Post Card from Moscow Coffee Bean. Photo by Peg Redwine

Starbucks Coffee Company has suspended operations in all 130 of its Russia based coffee shops as a protest to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The first shop opened in September 2007 in Moscow. Peg and I were in Moscow in 2003. We are Americans. We drink coffee. We were in anguished caffeine withdrawal almost the whole week we were in Russia. I applaud Starbuck’s gesture but worry about those people who are forced back to the pre-2007 coffee-less culture in Russia. Of course, the blame lies with Putin but the headaches are visited on the Russian proletariat as war is visited by Putin on the Ukrainians.

In 2003 Peg and I, after long and frenzied searching, located one coffee shop, The Coffee Bean, in Moscow. As this was our first trip to Russia we had been unaware of Russian culture which at that time considered one cup of instant coffee in tepid water good enough for such foreigners as we. The cold turkey shock treatment made us acutely aware of a society where vodka and cognac were more available at breakfast than coffee.

I do not expect Putin to come to his senses on his own so his war on Ukraine will most likely play out as such debacles always have. There is the initial shock and awe, then the search for weapons of mass destruction, the trading of lies and misinformation, then death, injury and misery followed by years of confusion and remaking of history by the survivors.

I do wonder what Putin’s thought process was that led him into this tar pit. He keeps making public statements and allegations about NATO and Ukraine’s belligerence. His statements and actions appear to arise from paranoia, what most of the world sees as an unreasonable fear that Ukraine and the other pre-1991 Soviet Union countries along Russia’s western border will be used as bases for the United States and our allies to attack Russia.

Putin may have reasoned that as Ukraine was steadily building up its ties to democracies such as America, if he did not strike now, he would have no viable defense to a stronger Ukraine that might become a member of NATO later. Such an analysis seems ludicrous to us but it is not our thought process that is in question. If Putin believes it, even if it is false, then his actions may make sense to him.

He also may have been misled by the relative ease with which Russia took over Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. In today’s attack his objective may have mainly been to take over that part of Ukraine, such as Odessa, that borders the Black Sea. But then he made a common tyrant’s mistake. He got too greedy and decided to grab what was left of the remainder of Ukraine beyond Crimea.

By this time, Gentle Reader, if you are still with me, you are asking, “What does any of this have to do with coffee?” Okay, as Fareed Zakaria might say, “Here’s my take”. I hope the Russian people will have become so hooked on coffee after 2007 that this forced Starbuck’s withdrawal will cause them to see Putin for the despot he is. Then perhaps the aroused common citizens will rise up and replace the warmongering Putin and his incompetent military leaders. If the Russians feel anything similar to the way Peg and I did in 2003, revolution is not so farfetched.

JPeg Osage Ranch Coffee Bar. Photo by Peg Redwine

Crackers of Gold

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Golden Crackers!
Picture by Peg Redwine

Over the years I have managed to enter the market on the backend of several financial bonanzas. I passed on pet rocks in 1975 and have regretted it for fifty years. But I think I am in on the ground floor of the next gold rush, saltine crackers! Those of you who read this column for advice on how to retire early may wish to listen up. That group does not include Peg, who as many spouses, does not recognize my genius when it arises.

I happened to notice about a couple of months ago that America had a dearth of saltine crackers. Saltines are important to me, and maybe you too. My fallback diet is crunchy peanut butter on crackers. It is quick, easy, tasty and there is no clean up required. Unfortunately, for the last couple of months I have encountered empty shelves at Dollar General and even Walmart when I searched for saltines. And even though I have researched the topic vigilantly, via Google, I cannot find a rational answer to my plea, “Where are the crackers?”

So, when I found a box at Hometown Foods, see the photo for proof, I grabbed it. I felt like I had discovered that first nugget of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848. My excitement was dampened by Peg’s response to my plan to try to corner the market, at least within twenty miles of our cabin, on saltines. When I called our son, Jim, who is our financial advisor, he once again sided with Peg. I explained to him I wanted to convert my IRA to cash and buy all the saltines I could find. He mumbled something about a guardianship and hung up.

As you know, Gentle Reader, no prophet is known in his own country, but I can clearly see our barn filled with boxes of saltines, if I can find them, that will jump in value each day, especially with that maniac Putin destroying our stock market as he tries to destroy Ukraine. Now is the time to reach for that brass ring I have just missed out on so many times before.

So, darn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. And if you wish to invest with me in my plan to corner the market on saltine crackers, you better hurry because I can feel the rest of America about to jump on the roller coaster. Please do not mention any of this to Jim or Peg.