David Nelson Nelson's Blog, page 6

Bunkhouse Bits of Bull

Bunkhouse Bits of BullByDavid “Buffalo Bill” Nelson


Moments ago I shined my flashlight into the coffee pot sitting atop a pile of lit-up logs to see if the coffee was ready. I dropped an old horseshoe into the pot and that piece of ferrous floated. Ah-ha, I smiled. It was strong enough and hot enough. I poured a tin cup full. It continued to boil while I walked the fifteen-feet over to my bunkhouse porch here and I sat down on my rocker sippin’ and thinkin’.
I do some of my best thinkin’ long before the sun comes up. I enjoy writing at this time of day as well. I don’t know why, but it’s just easier to make up lies in the dark. It doesn’t matter if it’s late at night around the fire or early in the morning like right now. I like the dark. And, I like to lie. Sometimes, however, the truth does seem to squirt out of my lips. This story is one of those rare moments of truth.
Now, the difference between a storyteller and a liar is a storyteller gets paid. I’m a professional storyteller and a cowboy poet. I am indeed, the Cowboy Poet Laureate of Tennessee. Several years ago our Governor and General Assembly honored me with that title. I figured they were impressed with my lies. Why, when I’m introduced anywhere in the country before my shows, the crowd hears I am the “The Biggest Liar in East Tennessee.” The name of my program is called “Cowboy Comedy Show.” Here’s a link to it. www.cowboycomedyshow.com
I’ll be entertaining some folks up there in my hometown of Dubuque, Iowa on August 6that a location called, “Happy’s Place.” Now, as they say here in Tennessee, “Let me axe ya something. Who couldn’t have fun at a spot named Happy’s Place?”
Speaking of fun, I had a darn, good time these past several days with a couple of old friends who stopped by for a visit. Trixie and I have known them for some thirty-five years or more. Years ago, Lynn and I worked together at an outpatient clinic in Florida where I was the administrator. That was my previous life when I was a physical therapist. Seems a million years ago. She was the best employee I ever knew during my forty-years as a therapist. She only made one bad judgment call in her entire life. That was when she married Merle. Now, that’s not true – but I had to throw a little barbed wire into the yarn here.
The last few nights Merle and I sat and told stories of our youth sitting around the campfire at night. Trust me, we weren’t drinking coffee. There we were, a couple old guys talkin’ places we had been and things that we had seen. Isn’t it funny how the older ya get, the better ya were? By the time we made our fourth trip each to the old horse trough to snag a beer buried in ice, a stranger would truly have admired us.
To hear tell it, we were the fastest, strongest and smartest kids in high school. We had the best cars, the prettiest girls and were the envy of our friends. As for me, half of what I say is a lie and the other half isn’t true.
Somehow or another, we got to talkin’ about toys. Smiles ran across our faces when toys like the hula-hoop, baseball and the slinky were mentioned. As I said before I grew up in town in Dubuque, Iowa. Merle was raised on a farm in the fear northwest corner of Minnesota near the borders of North Dakota and Canada.
In Dubuque you can’t drive five minutes without going up some hill. I even wrote a collection of short stories about my hometown and here in East Tennessee where I currently live. It’s titled, “If The Hills Could Talk.” In Merle’s area it was so flat you could stand on a can of tuna fish and see a hundred miles.
In addition to our Midwest roots, we have another thing in common. Some of our ancestors were from Scandinavian countries. Merle is Swedish and I am Norwegian. That fact, in itself, makes for bona fide reasons to tease one another. I reminded Merle of how the good folks in my area once tried to start a “Sons of Norway Club.” We couldn’t get enough people interested to join, so we allowed the Swedes to join us and we re-named the group. It’s called “The Sons-a-Bitches Club.”
So, back to the stories about toys. Merle lived some thirty-miles from town. He didn’t have access to toys at stores like I did. He had heard about them on the radio and seen ads for them in magazines that were kept in the outhouse.
When he saw the hula-hoop he knew right away he could make one himself. He tore apart a wooden barrel held together with metal rings. He said it was a might bit heavy to twirl one of those rings of steel around his hips, but he managed to have a little fun for five minutes. “I never did see what the big deal was with the hoopla hoop. I had to play with mine behind the barn because if any of my buddies saw me, well, they would not have been impressed.”
Sitting there by the fire, Merle drained the last of a beer, crushed his can and belched. “My favorite toy was the stick.”
I spit some of my beer to avoid choking and looked over at him. “A stick? Your favorite toy was a stick? What kind of stick? Was it the kind with branches used to cover your tracks on the dirt road like the bad guys did in the 1950’s Roy Rogers Show? Was it a stick shaped like a spear that Tarzan used?”
He popped the top off another beer and looked over at me through the smoke from the campfire. “Ya have to remember, we went to town maybe once a month when I was a kid. So all of us kids had to make our own toys. We had to make our own fun. I had all kids of toys for a while. They were all sticks. I kept them in a pile right inside the barn next to one of the milking stations. I used to fight my shadow on the barn wall with a stick I made to look like a pirate’s dagger. My shadow always won,” he cackled.
“I sharpened sticks to look like knives and threw them in into the dirt at targets I had scratched out with my foot. I had one stick that was like a spear. I threw it over and over out in the pasture like a javelin. I rolled an old tire into the yard and tried to see if I could get that spear to land inside that tire. I was always pretty good with eye and hand coordination.”
I put more logs on the fire, wiped smoke from my eyes and sat down. “I suppose next you’re going to tell me another toy was a rock,” I said as I chuckled.
“Well, as a matter of fact, I did use rocks for toys. I painted a series of round circles on the backside of the barn. You know, like a dartboard. I used piles of rocks to throw at my target like I was a pitcher on a baseball team. I kept that pile of rocks next to my sticks in the barn. In the winter I made snowballs with a rock inside each snowball and threw those at the target.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I yelled. “Why the rocks inside the snowballs?”
“The rocks packed inside the snowballs gave just enough weight to make it easy to throw at my target on the barn. I paced off the exact distance of sixty-feet and six-inches from me to the barn. That’s the distance from the pitcher’s mound to the home plate in baseball. I practiced pitching all four seasons up there in Minnesota.”
I furrowed my eyebrows and squinted my left eye. “What was the point? I can understand the boredom, but that sounds more like an obsession.”
“All that practice paid off for me. That’s how I received a scholarship to North Dakota State University to play baseball. I played all through high school as a pitcher and then pitched at the university.”
I nodded and knew he was not telling a lie. I had heard the story about his scholarship and knew he was a graduate from NDSU. Merle was an industrial arts teacher at a high school in a town where I once lived. He coached high school baseball for many years. Later in his career he went into administration and retired from education a long time ago.
It’s interesting that his son won the Golden Spike Award from the University of Georgia and was a pitcher for many years in professional baseball. Merle’s son is now a pitching coach for a major league baseball team that has won the World Series several times.
I sit here this morning in the dark and see the scene so clear in my mind. A little Swedish boy winding up and throwing rocks at a barn decades ago. I smile when I think that maybe, just maybe, Merle and his son owe their success in baseball to a pile of rocks.
The moments of silence after Merle’s story were broken when he stood and walked to the iced down beer. “You want another one?”
“You betcha,” I replied in my midwestern brogue.
The combination of two old friends meeting again in life, sitting by a campfire and drinking beer lends itself to story after story. “So, what was the best toy ya ever had?”
Merle put a plug of tobacco between his cheek and gums. “Without a doubt I thought it was going to be a Slinky. I begged the old man for extra chores so he’d buy one for me one Saturday we went into town. There was only one problem. We didn’t have any steps at the farmhouse. It was all one level.”
I choked, gagged and laughed. Yep, I stood bent over laughing at my moronic friend picturing him with a Slinky and no steps to play with the toy. “What did ya do with it then?”
“I set the toy on an anvil in the barn and looked at it. That’s all I could do. I touched and poked it. Nothing happened at all. I kept waiting for that Slinky to move. Years later, I blew the dust off and noticed how rust had collected on the coiled springs.”
Trixie and Lynn opened the house door to see what all the noise was about out by the fire. The howling from my laughter apparently could be heard inside the house.
My composure returned and I looked over at Merle. “Oh my gosh, that is too funny. Ya know, Merle ya can’t fix stupid.”
I don’t think we realize that great memories are being created as we pass through life. It’s only when we’re older that we reflect on days gone by and smile at such great times.
The sun is over the mountain now and time to end my story. Before I go, I want to say, “Thanks, Merle for the memories these past couple of days.”

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"My Treasure" by David Nelson Nelson

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: My Hometown

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: My Hometown

My Hometown

Two Hot Cheeks On A Humid Sunday Morning - 1957

Two Hot Cheeks On a Humid Sunday Morning in 1957
I was raised following the beliefs of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. And why not – my great grandfather was Dr. Michael Reu. His philosophy and writings were part of Lutheran confirmands’ training for decades in America. He was the president of Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa – also for decades. The library is named after him. My Gross Papa (grandfather), Dr. Samuel Salzmann taught at Wartburg for decades. My father was an ordained Lutheran minister. However, because of a divorce I never knew any of these gentlemen – really knew them.
My name at birth was David Nelson Salzmann. Ma re-married a fella whose last name was Nelson. He adopted us and that is why my name is David Nelson Nelson. Pretty unique, huh?
One hot and humid Sunday morning in 1957, sweat dripped from my blond hair on to the church bulletin and made the ink flow faster than the Mississippi River three blocks away. The bells had just stopped pealing after being manually pulled with a rope that dropped through the ceiling at St. Peter Lutheran Church in Dubuque, Iowa.
Men, women and even kids were fanning themselves with heavy gauge paper stapled to sticks. On the paper was a picture of Jesus sitting on a rock telling parables to children. I was eight-years old and wondered what he must have been telling the kids. I also wondered who took the picture of Jesus. I enjoy parables. They are short stories with some kind of moral to the story - unlike what I am presenting here.
The children’s choir was at the ready. Their Sunday best clothing was covered on top with white fluffy capes and they wore black dress-like garments over their lower bodies. They were sweating also. Boys wiped their faces against their white shirts. Girls patted sweat with fancy hankies. They were fanning themselves over 100 mph. There were so many fans flipping, why there was no way a housefly could comfortably land anywhere that day in church.
I fidgeted and twisted on that hard oak pew trying to get my Fruit-Of-The-Looms into a comfortable spot under my long black slacks that were only worn to church. I was irritable. I was cranky. I didn’t want to be there. But, there I was with my older brother by two years ready for the service to begin.
We all stood and mumbled something that I no longer remember. What I do remember, however is the very large lady who stood in the next row in front of us. Her dress was stuck in the crack of her butt. And I mean really shoved in there. Both my brother and I were Cub Scouts at that time. We were taught to always give a helping hand. My brother leaned against the back of the pew, stood on his tiptoes and reached as far as he could. He pulled that dress out from the lady’s butt.
She turned and smacked him right at the end of the Apostle’s Creed being said aloud by all in attendance. Nobody heard the smack. My brother was in shock. So was I. I thought he did a good deed.
So, me being a thinking-type kid, I figured she wanted her dress that way. During the Lord’s Prayer I stepped on top of the leathered-covered kneeler so I could reach the great expanse to her dress. With all the might an eight-year old kid could muster, I shoved that dress back into her butt.
The black eyes that my brother and I had made it difficult to snag baseballs at Audubon Elementary School playground for the next three days. Amen. Amen.
David Nelson Nelson
www.davidnelsonauthor.com

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: Healing The Scars of Child Abuse

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: Healing The Scars of Child Abuse: Healing The Scars of Child Abuse Part One Mary stood swaying back and forth, twisting her fingers together. She looked up at ...

Healing The Scars of Child Abuse

Healing The Scars of Child AbusePart One
Mary stood swaying back and forth, twisting her fingers together. She looked up at her mother, anguish in her face. “Mom, I don’t want to do this again. Please don’t make me do this.”Her mother looked down and ran her hand across the top of Mary’s head. “He’s drunk again and waiting for us. It will be over soon. You know how mad he gets if we don’t go into the bedroom right away.”Moments later, Mary’s mother sat bedside her in the armless chair and nodded for her seven year old daughter to reach under the covers and begin to masturbate her drunken father. Mary’s panties and shorts lay on the linoleum floor as they did every Friday night for the past six months. Her father explored his daughter with his finger while the mother sat bedside and watched.Each Friday evening after closing his office for the week, the drunkard stopped at a local bar for a few drinks. When he finally came home, he staggered into the bedroom, removed all his clothes and yelled for his wife and daughter.Sexual child abuse is a despicable act that by definition includes exhibitionism, fondling, intercourse or using a child to produce pornographic materials. There are millions of Adult Children today who have been sexually abused.The wooden and worn steps once connected the cellar of the 150 year-old home to the backyard above. The opening at the top had been covered over and cemented shut creating a patio outside. The door from the cellar opened and eight-year old Krame, dressed only in his underpants, was shoved into the darkness. It was seven o’clock in the morning.His dad had a sadistic smirk on his face and looked down at his frightened son. “I love doing this to you,” he growled. “You stay locked in here until I let you out. Do you understand?”Krame heard the door lock and was cast into pitch darkness as the forty-watt light bulb was turned off in the outer room. He heard his father climb the steps, walk across the floor above and slam the outside door of the house. The sound of the old man’s car driving away permeated the stillness of the cellar.A few minutes earlier, Krame had been jerked from a deep sleep by his father who apparently was still upset the eight-year old boy had been climbing on the neighbor’s fence the previous day. The boy trotted as best he could with his ear being twisted and pulled while trying to keep up with his dad who led him to the cellar. Krame remembered looking at his mother sitting on the edge of her bed, an unfeeling stare aimed straight at her son. If anything, she looked pissed.That hot, humid day was scorching in the black hole under the house. Seconds seemed to tick at the same rhythm as sweat that dripped from the ends of Krame’s full head of blonde hair. The only sound heard was the pats of moisture that fell to the dirt floor or to those harden stairs. Krame spent the day sitting on those wooden steps in totaldarkness with spiders and cockroaches crawling across his tiny body. It was the heat, however, that was the worst part. Yes, the heat and the lack of water, that Krame reported later, were the most difficult to endure. He remembered the last time he’d had any food was the previous day at lunch. And then, the clinking sound of the metal lock on the wooden door being opened and the blast of light from the overhead-swinging bulb woke Krame. There was an immediate sense of terror because towering over him was his dad. Krame just knew he was to be beaten again with the buckle end of a belt, punched or kicked with those steel-toed work boots. His dad was releasing him from his cell. It was eleven o’clock at night. He had been locked away since early that morning. He was told not to stop for any reason but to go to bed immediately. Krame felt a sense of relief knowing he was not going to be pulverized this night – like so many others.Desperate for water, Krame told his dad he had to pee. Meanwhile, his dad stood guard with arms on his hips in the bathroom doorway. The boy knew he had one brief chance to get a drink, one and only one. He flicked the faucet handle, cupped his hands to create a living bowl and slurped water as fast as he could from his tiny palms.Instantly, his father lunged out and shoved Krame’s head into the bathroom wall as punishment for disobeying his orders of no water. “No water,” he said. “None.” Krame was pushed up the stairs toward the hallway where his bed laid waiting. He’d seldom seen such a welcomed sight. It had been some thirty-six hours of no food and no water. Let me repeat that, thirty-six hours without food or water for a hungry and thirsty eight-year old boy.By definition, physical child abuse involves punching, kicking, beating, slapping, burning or biting. Physical abuse also is defined as any non-accidental physical injury that results in bruises, welts, broken bones, scars or internal injuries.Physical neglect is defined as a failure to provide the basic necessities of life including food, water, shelter or medical care. In the case described above with Krame, the eight-year old’s abuse fits both definitions, that of child neglect and physical abuse.  Underlying sexual and physical abuses and child neglect is an abuse that is impossible to see with the naked eye. Emotional abuse includes by definition, failure to offer proper emotional and psychological nurturing needed for the child to grow and develop into a healthy state.Krame frequently heard both of his parents state, ”You’re a no good dirty son-of-a-bitch. You’ll never amount to a damn.”During his entire life – even into adulthood, Krame never heard the words, I love you” from his mother. Another statement he never heard included, “I’m proud of you.” These lapses of parental love are examples of emotional abuse. In my opinion, the abuse from a caustic tongue can be more damaging than being locked away or beaten, kicked, punched and slapped. How would I know this? Because I am Krame!My book, The Shade Tree Choir, tells the life of abuse I experienced from age eight through age seventeen during the 1950s and 60s. There was no one to tell about what happened in that house during those awful years. No one, no support system, and no interventions. In fact, it wasn’t until 1964 that the first modern child abuse reporting system actually became law. By 1969, all states were required to pass child abuse reporting laws. But during my era, and for other victims of child abuse, we were left to fend for ourselves.In subsequent blogs, I will share the results of abuse on children that carry over into adulthood. Maybe, just maybe, the more aware people become of this scourge; a child might be helped in the future.And, oh yes, what about Mary, that little girl in the opening story? While her name has been changed, her story is real. She grew up in my neighborhood and it wasn’t until a year ago after she read my book, The Shade Tree Choir, that she contacted me to share her story. Abusive stories like the ones that appear here today were not and are not unique to my hometown. The reality of child abuse happens all over America, as my emails can attest. People reach out to me and share stories that sadden my heart. Millions of children are being abused every second, every minute and every hour of each day somewhere.In future blogs I will explain the psychological damage that can occur to victims of physical and emotional abuse. I am not an authority on and have never been sexually abused. So I will leave that report to others. I will explain coping techniques for physical survival, defense mechanisms that allowed me to live one day at a time and how I learned to forgive.
Here is a one-minute book trailer for The Shade Tree Choir http://youtu.be/y3EWghb6qnU

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: Christmas Tree: To Decorate or Nor to Decorate

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: Christmas Tree: To Decorate or Nor to Decorate: “A Christmas Story: To Decorate or Not to Decorate” © I haven’t decided if I will decorate for Christmas this year. Last year on Decemb...

Christmas Tree: To Decorate or Nor to Decorate

“A Christmas Story: To Decorate or Not to Decorate” ©
I haven’t decided if I will decorate for Christmas this year. Last year on December 24th, I promised I’d never do it again.
The seven-foot tree that cost me nearly $100 lost lots of needles driving home from the tree-getting place. Earlier that day, I’d spent two hours dragging boxes of ornaments, tinsel, lights and the tree stand from the attic. Twice I slipped on the pull-down stairs and cut my ankle in two different areas. The extra large Band-Aids stopped the bleeding.
It was already dark when I pulled my pick-up into the driveway. The motion lights illuminated my path to the garage where the stand was ready to accept my Douglas fir tree. I loosened the four screw-like holders by turning each one no less than fifty-seven times. They were in the closed position so the stand could fit into the original box. My tennis elbow flared up a bit.
Singing “Silent Night,” I walked back to the truck to slide the tree base into the stand. Crap, I thought. It didn’t fit. The tree’s circumference was too large for the base. I had to trim my seven-foot tree to a spot where the diameter would fit the stand.
My head hit the door jam in the crawl space under my shop when I was looking for my chainsaw. Something wet started running off my bald head and down the side of my face. I had cut my head entering the thirty-inch high opening. I wiped my face and smeared something red onto my shorts. The stain was a brighter red than the previous blood trails from my ankle injuries earlier. I used another extra large Band-Aid for my head.
Back at my pickup, I kept walking over to the motion lights so they would turn on and I could see exactly where to cut the tree. After some fifteen attempts to start that damn chainsaw, it finally cranked. My tennis elbow became more painful and my shoulder began to throb from my rotator cuff repair earlier that year. My fingers nearly stuck together from the sap and I had difficulty releasing them from the trigger on the saw.
A thump was heard when eighteen-inches of tree fell to the driveway. I shimmied. I pushed. I wiggled that five and a half foot tree into the stand. The tree base was so close to fitting into the stand. The ball-peen hammer dented the bottom of the stand slightly when I finally hammered it into place.
The throbbing in my left thumb from where I’d hit it with the hammer was tolerable. That pain was nothing compared to my elbow each time I turned the screws into the tree base. My shoulder didn’t hurt at all dragging that tree down the sidewalk into the front door. That’s because I’d used my other arm. There was a carpet of needles on the sidewalk behind me and into the living room. It sure enough smelled like Christmas.
Ten minutes later the scent of pine needles was replaced with the smell of 10% ethanol gasoline. I washed my hands in it to eliminate the sap. There was a little poof when I lit a cigar. The singed hair on the back of my hand fell to the floor and I noticed a small burn spot on my hand. Another Band-Aid covered the blister. I figured if I was going to be dumb, I had to be tough.
I spent the next two hours in the garage untangling lights and testing each one trying to locate the dead one. When one light goes out they all go out. I sipped on bourbon and smoked my stogie.
My wife, “Trixie” met me in the middle of a three thousand light string. The very last one was loose. She plugged the string into the electrical outlet and stood back up. “What happened to your eyebrows? They’re gone.”
More singed hair fell to the garage floor as I wiped my barren frontal bone. Oops. Moments later I looked into the bathroom mirror and smiled. I was void of eyebrows. Now, there was a bloodstain on my face and side of my head, an extra large Band-Aid on my baldhead, and another on the back of my hairless hand. I thought it was pretty funny.
The Christmas CD of the group, Alabama must have comforted out cats. They came out from under the bed and into the living room to help us decorate. I got another glass of bourbon.
Initially Trixie and I asked each other where one ornament and another was purchased during our twenty-five years of marriage. We took our time and talked of trips we had taken across America. It was our tradition to buy Christmas ornaments wherever we visited. The throbbing in my left thumb and the blister on the back of my right hand intensified. I sipped more bourbon.
The damn cats kept lying on the ornament boxes and shredding the worn out tissue paper that protected the trinkets. I managed to break three ornaments when I lost concentration while pushing the cats off the coffee table. It seemed like the Christmas music got louder.
After some forty-five minutes Trixie and I stopped talking about our special ornaments and were more focused with hanging them on the tree. I turned off the blaring music. Three times of hearing the same songs was enough. Twice I had to pull tinsel from the cats’ paws. “Peaches” scratched my hand and forearm. Darn it. I was bleeding again in more spots and I was out of the extra large Band-Aids. There were now two medium sized on my left forearm.
Then the critiquing began. We walked around the tree at least ten times each. Following our Christmas tradition, Trixie pointed to the tree’s bald spots. I didn’t care. I bumped my throbbing thumb and drug my blistered hand across branches to hook ornaments in places that Trixie said were barren. And then I quit. I sat down and glared at Peaches. She ran off into the bedroom carrying a small wooden ornament in her mouth.
 No fewer than nineteen times I must have heard the following statements. “How does this look? Is this straight? Do you see any empty spots?”
I rubbed the top of my head in disgust and made it bleed again. I sat on the couch giving pressure to the wound with a paper towel. My shoulder pain intensified and my elbow hurt from pushing down on my head. The other cat did a dive off my legs and I was scratched and bleeding in a new spot. I didn’t care. I finished my bourbon and fell into a trance.
Trixie turned off all the interior lights and went outside to admire our work. I tagged along. It was a pretty sight. I noticed how quiet it was walking on the sidewalk over the bed of pine needles.
We returned to the inside, turned the lamps on and Trixie’s eyes were fixed staring at the tree. She looked at me and said, “The tree is crooked.”
Our divorce is final in two weeks.

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: Fifty Coats of Grey: A Spoof

David Nelson, Author & Cowboy Poet | PALS: Fifty Coats of Grey: A Spoof: Fifty Coats of Grey The crunching of the gravel under her tires was muffled by the sounds of the trailer skirting flopping in the wind....