The Old Farmer said, “There’s a good reason we were born with two eyes, two ears, and one mouth. For those of you who are math-challenged, that means you should keep your eyes and ears open twice as much as your mouth.”
That advice comes in handy if you write a weekly column. You never know when the idea for a story might present itself. Over the years a lot of great storytelling has taken place around a pot-bellied stove and in more recent years at local diners where “the boys” gather for coffee and storytelling each morning. If they’re retired, which most of them are, they probably gather for afternoon coffee too. I’m surprised that any local restaurant can stay in business when the boys plunk down a dollar for a bottomless cup of coffee each day. Even more astounding, how can their bladders hold all that coffee? You don’t want to take a bathroom break and miss something. I find that the older I get, the more frequent my trips to the bathroom are, but that’s another story that most older folks can relate to.
Some of the best storytelling took place around those old, wood burning, pot-bellied stoves. They were once used as a source of heat in just about every business in town. The old stove became a favorite gathering spot in those stores.
Here in Westby, the old farmers used to gather at Art Hegge’s John Deere Implement Shop on Main Street. It was a great place to hang out, visit, and tell stories on a cold winter day. They sat on old chairs around the stove. The heat felt good after coming in from the cold weather outside. The radiant heat soon penetrated the heavy winter coats and long johns. Coats were unbuttoned and the chairs moved farther away from the stove to escape the heat. They couldn’t do much about the long johns. Those wouldn’t come off until spring! As the logs in the stove started burning out, the stove lost some heat and the chairs started moving closer to the stove again. You can almost hear the many stories and opinions rising once again from the heat around that old stove.
Many of those old farmers were experts at telling a story. There was never any of today’s hurry up and get to the point attitude. A good story needed to be fleshed out and the important points accented by spitting a bit of tobacco out of the corner of the mouth. When the tobacco juice ran out, another chaw was added if the story wasn’t finished.
Some country humor is brief. Don’t say too much, give only the information that’s needed, and don’t volunteer anything extra. A case in point: One day when the men were sitting around the stove at Art Hegges, he said, “Ralph.” “What?” said Ralph. There was a long silence. Finally Art spoke up again, “Ralph.” “What?!” said Ralph a little irritated. There was another long pause before Art said, “Ralph, it’s your turn to put another log on the fire.” It was a simple conversation, with a minimum of words needed. Ralph got up, threw another log in the stove, and the storytelling continued.
Author Ben Logan has a great story about the use of exaggeration in country stories. When he and their hired man, Lyle, were talking about the wild stories being told by the assembled farmers one day, Lyle told Ben, “I guess some things are just too important to be left up to the truth.”
An old farmer said, “I’m going to live to be 100, if I don’t die first.” He also said, “If I lose my sense of humor, you can start digging.” How true that is. Life’s too short to walk around with a chip on your shoulder or finding fault with everything. You can even find some humor in growing older. While we were having coffee and conversation at Borgen’s Café in Westby recently, my friend James from Gotham said, “I’m at that age where I can hide my own Easter eggs… and have trouble finding them.” Now that’s the kind of humor you’d have found around the old pot-bellied stove years ago.
When we lived in Madison, I was a member of a Wednesday morning breakfast club for 32 years until we moved back to Westby. There were eight of us in the group most of that time. All of us were working when we first joined the group, but by the time we left Madison, most of the group was retired and two had died. We were a very diverse group: liberals, conservatives, Republicans, Independents, and Democrats. We had varied occupations: A real estate developer, a heart surgeon, a lawyer, an aide to Senator Kohl, an appraiser, an accountant, an employment agency owner, and me – an advertising agency owner. What did we have in common that held us together? Most of us came from small towns, had farm backgrounds, and had been in the military. We also think one of our group had been a CIA operative, but he would never admit it.
Needless to say we had a lot of interesting conversations over the years and many of us became close friends. I guess that Wednesday breakfast group was our way of sitting around the old pot-bellied stove that was an important part of our rural roots.
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