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Hunker Down with Kes

Talk About Flying Over The Cuckoo’s Nest!

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I’m telling you, your mind can stray if kept indoors too long. This quarantine stuff could lead us into some dangerous health issues or even worse…bad habits!
Like over thinking the inconsequential…
I woke up yesterday with Paul Revere and the Raiders on my mind. How did a rock band from Idaho come up with that specific moniker? Boston is the home of baked beans, a famous marathon and the Red Sox. None of which would seem to fan the flames of a rock musician.
Paul Revere was a silversmith, engraver, tooth maker and Patriot. And he could ride a horse. But he never played for the Raiders! Or wrote songs. Or picked a guitar...
This band that borrowed his name had a decent run in the late sixties. I don’t remember one song they did—which meant they didn’t sing about trains, country bumpkins, a man being sent to prison, divorce, outlaws, stampedes or pickup trucks.
The day before I spent wondering if Starsky was older than Hutch…
Is it an overpass or underpass? This one started long before Covid-19. Me and Ricky Gene, Yogi and Buddy would meet up at Tommie Hill’s Texaco Station and share an RC Cola. Then we’d walk down Pine Street till it came to a dead end.
We’d hop over to the railroad tracks and “walk the rails” out to the bridge over Highway 79. Yogi would get us to lie down on top of the “overpass” and drop rocks on the unsuspecting (and unfortunate) motorist passing below.
Yogi always said overpass because he was thinking like the train. Ricky Gene swore it was an underpass, “Just ask any one of those cars driving by down there!”
Folks, we were eleven years old. Do you have any idea how slow the world moved in McKenzie, Tennessee, in 1958? We didn’t have TV, cell phones, internet, ipads or long range ballistic missiles. We had time to ponder deep and long on what a bridge over a highway with a train track running across the top was officially called.
They’d get mad at me and Buddy for not taking sides. Me and Buddy would get mad at them when this discussion turned into a rock fight! There wasn’t no place to hide up there! You couldn’t jump over the side and retreat only meant you got hit in the back of the head…
We moved away from home years later never really knowing who was right…

I was thinking this morning why in the world would Harold Lloyd Jenkins change his name to Conway Twitty. Now, I can understand Muriel Deason changing hers to Kitty Wells. And maybe Dean Martin looks “more American” on a movie marquee than Dino Paul Crocetti. But Harold Jenkins ain’t all that bad.
Listen, if I had it to do all over again back in ’58, I would have changed Heber Kesley Colbert to Hopalong Cassidy, or maybe Yakima Canutt!
I still don’t know how long a cow can hold its breath underwater. And me and Leon tried mightily to “experiment” this one out. You can’t believe how many times we’d swim a young heifer out into the middle of Archie Moore’s pond and climb up on her head.
We’d pull, push, shove and swear at it! But that cow wouldn’t go under. Neither one of us weighed enough to get the job done. But it was something to ponder on, on a slow day back then…and now.
I have lain awake this week wondering what would happen if a penny dropped out of a helicopter, at say 500 feet up, landed on a man’s head. Would it knock him down? Or out? Or do some kind of permanent harm?
Then I got to figuring what would be the odds of actually hitting a man with a penny from such a height? Of course, Ricky Gene and Yogi came to mind. They’d be on the opposite sides of this one for sure—which would put me and Buddy slap dab in the middle of a penny throwing war!
I’ve been locked up so long I’ve been thinking about eating a big meal and immediately jumping into the Gulf of Mexico and seeing if I get stomach cramps.
If this coronavirus thing lingers, I’m going to reason out all sorts of things…
Do you think handling frogs can really give you warts? It is so dark in those caves how could you possibly tell if the bat was blind.
Remember the singing duo that called themselves the Righteous Brothers…I’m not so sure they were either.
Respectfully,
Kes