A Real Job

Myron and Chuck had worked for Curly a few summers before and knew all the ropes but this was all new to me. I will never forget my first day driving the spreader trucks. They were old International Harvesters. The gears had to be double-clutched. I had no real idea of what double clutching involved. I did know how to drive a stick-shift… synchromesh was the norm for autos in the fifties but these were farm trucks and farm equipment was kept running back then until they rust into obsolescence. Nothing was air-conditioned… tractors, trucks or combines… none of these had any of the conveniences taken for granted. If it couldn't be kept running with a grease gun and set of wrenches… well, I babble.

The first thing Curly did once I got there was to show me how to use the grease gun… grease every nipple under the truck before each shift… check the fluids… radiator and brake fluid.
"You ever use a five gear-shift?" he asked.
"Ya, sure."
"Do you know how to double-clutch?"
"Ya, sure."
"Okay, take a left when you get to the highway and about a half-mile you'll see the break in the fence. Follow the tracks till you get to the hoppers. Chuck will show you the rest from there."
"Ya, sure."

That was all my training so far. I climbed up behind the wheel and got it going in first gear… got it away and over a hill and outa sight from Curly. Okay, I had to shift into second gear now. I pushed in the clutch peddle twice but the grinding of the gears didn't allow me to put it in second gear. "Damn, why didn't I tell him the fuckin' truth…?"

I tried shifting out of first again and again before I got to the highway. Shit, I drove all the way to the hoppers in first gear. Myron slowed and waited for me to catch up then drove his rig... tore up the impossibly steep grade. The dusty ruts wound their way up that steep hill… I mean steep hill. First gear was good for that. Damned hill was straight up! Then, once at the top, the ruts skirted the un-harvested field on a precipice so steep I feared I would be tumbling down it if I made the slightest miscalculation. When we finally got to the hoppers Myron asked, "You fuck, where were you? You must've been crawling… what's the matter?" 

"Damned thing… I couldn't get it in second gear!"
Myron laughed at my embarrassment, "Get in my truck… I gotta show you how we run these spreaders anyhow." I was as excited much as I was embarrassed. This was a real job… a real truck… I watched carefully and listened as Myron showed me how to rev the engine in sync with the transmission. When we got to a part of the field that was level… "Here is where we do what we do. Pull this lever to engage the spreader… keep an eye on the tachometer… 1,500 rpm… you'll get used to it and will be able to tell by the sound of it after you make a few runs."

"How do I know when it is done? I can't see anything back there."
"You go by the feel of it too. The engine will race when the load is empty."
"Gotcha…"
"Just lay the rows down without overlapping. Keep it straight. After you do it a whole shift or two you can do it in your sleep."

We worked twelve hour shifts… in the daytime the thermometer rose to 104 degrees… nighttime was in the thirties… fearfully close to freezing 'til midsummer. We worked either from eight am to eight pm or eight pm to eight am. There was no clock to punch but if you were late for your shift you royally pissed off whoever you were relieving. We were all buddies but… Hell, I always showed up on time. And the dust… man… the dust in the fields… the soil on the tracks… it was driven over and pulverized into a fine power that got into every crevasse of one's body. How did it get into the crack of my ass? It did and other places too. After each shift I went straight to the shower… cleaned the dust out of my hair but wasn't done 'till my fingernails were clean... used the hair on my head as a fingernail brush. I wore a hat, but, for all of us regardless, our hair would be so full of dust that it couldn't be figured for whether we had blond, brown, red or black hair. We all had the same color of skin too. Brown, black or white… we were all the color of the dust…

The color of the dust and our fellow laborers was washed off after each shift in our own places and the division between us and the Hispanics was silently reasserted. In the fields we took breaks together and the only difference was us white boys ate sandwiches while the Braceros ate burritos they heated on the manifolds of their trucks… we couldn't see each other's skin color. But back in town it was another story, they stayed down by the processing plant and, I didn't see any at the drive-in either. It was an unspoken apartheid of sorts.

I loved the night shift out there on the high seas of the Palouse. Deer crossing the beams of my headlights… the sound of the engine purring as I laid down another row of hay… taking a break and laying in the pile of vines at midnight where the fermentation of only a few hours put out enough heat to warm us… talking about our dreams and futures while gazing up into the crystal clarity of the night sky… stars so near and bright that they touched the hills far away from the loom of the light glowing on the horizon from Waitsburg and Dayton. Sweet silence and solitude in spite of the noise from the machines of harvest… it transcended.

After sunrise and a full night that turned the harsh glare the sun on sore eyes the trucks were parked for the next shift near any road a car or pickup truck could be driven to. They were then greased and taken up what was usually a perilous trek through steep grades following deep rut winding round and to wherever the hoppers were planted. Those hoppers had to be towed up the same tracks too… amazing when I think back on it. No one was killed in the process.

We used Myron's car and one of us always had the opposite shift so we were usually able to get to work in one car. If not, Curly would pick us up and deliver us if we were in different fields. Once one field was done everything had to be hauled out and over to another. Occasionally a truck would break the chains holding it to a reaper and roll down into a gully… the driver… thrown out in a heap of broken bones to the side, would be rushed to a hospital and another would take his place. There were no seat belts… there was nothing but the price of paying attention or the shear luck of making it through that amounted to the best safety gear we had. The tedium of repetition… driving to the hoppers… waiting… laying in one of the heaps of fermenting hay… the fork-lift loaded the truck… driving to the spreading field… shifting int first… pulling the spreader lever… rolling along at fifteen hundred rpm… rhmmmm… maybe ten minutes?... disengaging… tearing back down and up over the deep, powder-dust, ruts to the hoppers.

I have worked hard since then on just about every kind of shit job… but driving those spreader trucks at breakneck speeds up and down and to the sides... sailing through the fields was work… hard, dirty, grimy, dusty work… It was also the unspoken commitment to each other. Once I had a fever… I'd caught a bug… There was no calling in sick. Damn, I had the day shift too. My fever had to be over a hundred and three and so was the temperature out in the fields. I was so weak I could hardly pull myself into the cab. Curly pulled up as I was starting… Ah-ha, I thought, I could ask him for the day off.

Curly just grinned, "Buck it up kid… the harvest doesn't wait until we feel like working." And he drove away.

Ahhh... My first real job!

Dayton Washington

The rolling Hills of the Palouse

 

Myron, his cousin Chuck, and I... the three of us drove down to the pea harvest in Myron's 1950 Ford. The radiator leaked so badly we had to stop every fifty miles or so to refill it. When we finally got there we had prearranged through our boss to rent a room in the basement of a couple of spinsters. There were five rooms down there that were rented out every summer during the harvest season. Each room had about three or four kids of various backgrounds... some were college students while others were kids like us... about eighteen of us... out on an adventure... we were all white.

We were idle... the harvest hadn't started yet... Dayton was a small town of maybe 500 to a thousand in population until the pea harvest. There wasn't much to do but drink beer and wait for Curly to call. Birdseye had a processing plant there and at harvest time the population boomed top a couple thousand. Most were Braceros... Mexican migrant workers employed in the processing plant while the rest worked in the fields driving reaper trucks and so on.

There weren't combines, as used for wheat, for reaping peas in '65'. The operation required a reaper rig to be towed that conveyed the peas, vines and all, to trucks chained to the sides of the rigs on when reaping parallel to the slope of the steep side to keep them from rolling down the grade.... this is what we called Palouse Country. Palouse Country was laid down like giant sand ripples forming the rolling hills of southeastern Washington after the Missoula Ice Dam broke at the end of the last Ice age. Peas and wheat are draped over rounded hills that resembled high seas more than terra firma to me. The Braceros braved the hazards of driving those trucks and rigs.

Once full, the trucks carried their loads to hoppers. The hoppers that swallowed the peas... vines and all on one end, shook the peas from the vines, separating them and shitting out the vines into piles on the other. A fork lift picked up the vines and loaded dropped them into spreader trucks. Spreader truck then took the vines to be spread in a carpet to dry into hay. We, white kids, drove the spreader truck. As mentioned before, Braceros were assigned to drive the more dangerous ones that hooked up to the reapers. I had no idea what or where they were from. I had worked summers in the cherry and pea harvest but, in those days, the harvest used winos from skid-row to do most of the job. I did know some "Indians"... brown skinned... not red....we called Native Americans Indians back then... these guys looked like Indians to me. I had no idea how right I was.

My friends, Myron and Chuck, were pretty good about being open-minded but we still had remnants of racism from where and how we were raised. We used the term "Greasers" for them and they used the term "Gringos" for us. The migrant workers, however, lived in barracks housing provided by Birdseye. Otherwise, we got along fine as we were spending 12 hours a day, seven days a week, in the fields with each other All of us white kids in our basement rooms were hired by Curly, an independent contractor and friend of the spinsters.

Waiting for the harvest to start got us around town... to the local drive-in... the teenage social venue there. I recall PT 109 played damned near all summer but every kid from Waitsburg to Dayton showed up regardless. Myron happened to have the good-looks of the young-bad-boy-Elvis so we met all the prominent town girls there. We obtained a few cases of beer via one of the college boys and threw a bash. At the party we had the \mayor's daughter, the daughter of the owner of the only hotel in town and another one whose folks owned the music store. Yep, these were the upper-crust girls in town.

Sometime in the late hours... just when some of us were getting near to closing-the-deal with the town girls, the police showed up. The whole force... two of 'em. It was a Mayberry town... two cops and a jail right off the lot of a movie set for a Western flick. Someone egged the squad car as it passed by... probably one of the college boys... not sure... could have been a local. We were rounded up and thrown into the local hoose-gow... us boys, that is... the girls were all sent home. The college boys posted bail but Myron, Chuck and I were locked up for the duration. The duration meant until the harvest began.

One incident I still smile at had to do with an Olympia beer label I carried in my wallet. In those days Olympia beer labels were stamped on the backs with a dot system of some sort. Peeling off the label one found these dots: one dot, two dots, three dots and four in a row... I don't know what they were for but it was common among most teens to put the phone numbers of girls on the backs of these labels as a rating system. Supposedly, if a girl's numbers was on a "One Dotter" it meant the barer only got to "first base" with her. Go figure the rest... if her number was on the back of a "Four Dotter" it was a "Home Run"... she went "all the way!"

It so happened I had all the town girls' numbers on the back of a "Four Dotter". It was only a symbolic boast because, of course, I hadn't hit a home run with any of them... yet. When the Sheriff questioned me about the label after going through my wallet, I smirked, "Oh, it is the only paper I had at the time."

"I do know something about these labels," he said. Shit, I hadn't figured on him knowing at all what they meant. These towns people were very puritanical and protective of their girls from those of us who came down from the big cities of Spokane and Seattle, with the intention of corrupting their fair young maidens.

We were locked up though and Curly told the Sheriff he could hold us until harvest began. That was the best way he knew of to keep us out of trouble.

It was a lark for us The jail was an old one with bars on the window in the bull pen that could be opened for ventilation. One of the girls even showed up and passed us cigarettes through it. We had access to our bunks in separate cells all day... there were about five cells. One was kept locked and was occupied by a guy who masturbated at almost every waking hour... breaking only for meals. I don't remember what he was in there for but, as he was usually jerking-off, it was uncomfortable talking with him and no one tried... some sort of sex crime I suspect.

After we recovered from our original hangovers, as the bull-pen resembled a zoo-cage, we goofed off and entertained ourselves at times by pretending we were monkeys; hanging off the bars, hooting, grunting and pounding our chests. I can say this for the times, a small town jail served us well as far as meals were concerned. We had oatmeal in the morning... baloney sandwiches at night and a hot meal for lunch. Lunch was great. We were chained together and paraded down the main street in town to the local restaurant where we sat down to a regular meal. It was, without comparison, the best jail I have ever had the honor to be locked up in! Then we were paraded back to the bulpen and repeated the routine until harvest finally began.

The Red Lion

It was the winter of 64-65 that I started hanging out with what I then thought of as "beatniks" at the Red Lion Cafe and Bar (no relation to the hotel chain). This was during the dismal drought in Rock n' Roll before the Beatles and the Stones. I had just been dumped by my girl and had been kicked off the cross country team for smoking under the bleachers during a football game. Oh yes, I almost forgot, I'd also left home after a dispute with my dad; who had justifiably taken a belt to me for the last time. He rarely ever did that but it was an extreme circumstance as I had kept my little sister out on a double date past three in the morning.


The Red Lion bar was off-limits to most of us our age but the small and cozy cafe had a jukebox with Coltrain, Dizzy, Thelonious Monk and Brubeck on the jukebox. The only things served were onion rings and a thing they called Mexican Pillows... a square, deep-fried, donut-batter deal... and coffee.

I met a whole new group of friends at the Red Lion and we formed a clique of outsiders reading poetry by Ferlinghetti, Corso, Kerouac... anything beat... reading Howl out loud and outrageous! ...talking about the politics of beat art and artists...Jackson Pollack and UFO's... Krishnamurti and Alan Watts... talking about the mad ones... the crazy fuckers who had stepped out of button-down society and got with it... whatever it was.


The civil rights movement in the South had picked up and a group called the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee had formed support groups called "Friends of SNCC" for white folks... (Snick we called it). That was before the Black Power movement split off... leaving pacifism in the dust. We had all become active in Snick.. I remember walking around with signs in front of Woolworths for their lunch counter bias in the deep south.


These were exciting yet extreme times... Johnson hadn't yet made a 500,000 troop commitment in Vietnam but the Berkeley Free Speech movement would turn into the Vietnam Day Committee and that was the hot topic among us. We were part of an undercurrent that most of our society hardly knew existed before then... especially in Spokane Washington. It certainly wasn't posted in the Spokesman Review or the Spokane Daily Chronicle. A few G.I's from the Fairchild Airforce Base came in once in a while to pick up on the abundance of young hip chicks. We heard from them... they were interested only in impressing the chicks... about their colorful and sometimes exaggerated deployments.


 I fell madly, head over heels, in love for the first time with an artist, Linda B., during this period. We made love... for me it was really the first time I'd actually "made love". Previous sex was just that... sex yes, love no. I'm not sure what she was getting out of it but to me... Aaah... the sacrament of Mexican Pillows and black coffee... sweet tasting  to the back ground liturgy of music... of David Brubeck's Take Five on the jukebox... hiding out in the bushes in the snow when her folks came home from a ski trip early one time... Brave new world, here I come! What a fine introduction to manhood I'd experienced... thank ya Jesus!

Ideas (continued)...

(to be continued)

High school: Wearing a Letterman's jacket as a jock, and, having a pecking order implanted in my behavior, I can confess that I too became a bully. One would think that, because of my experience having been the target of bullying, I would have some compassion for others like me. No... that didn't happen. Most certainly, I carefully picked my fights and only pushed around boys I thought I could beat. In those day, (I'm not so sure what happens these days), it was common for any encounter to proceed similarly: Usually in the hallways between classes a challenge was thrown down and it was agreed that we would meet somewhere after classes to scrap. All the rest of the day, as word got around, a crowd would gather at the chosen and agreed on meeting place. One such popular place was the parking lot behind Ron's drive-in. Sometimes I picked the fight; other times, I was picked by someone who wished to acquire or keep, I suppose, a position in the pecking order. By then it would have been a great shame for one or the other to back down. I can remember going through the rest of my classes with a gnawing in my gut, fighting off the fear, pumping up the courage in front of my classmates to face what was going to go down.

*****

My last fight in high school was with a friend I once sparred with (as he had been training for boxing in the Golden Gloves). I was a junior in high-school at the time, as we were about to slug it out, I became aware of a disgust for the crowd that had gathered. My contempt grew... I saw the viciousness of their thirst for a good fight. We threw punches... aware of each other's abilities... kept a distance between blows... hearing the jeers of the crowd... we danced around each other, avoiding blows as best we could.... I'm not sure who began it, but we both grinned at each other as we played like we were Cassius Clay... laughed at ourselves, laughing at the silliness of it all... the blood-thirst of our audience... suddenly, in a shared moment of clarity, both dropped our arms...put them around our shoulders walking out as the Red Sea of our taunters parted before us. I heard from one punk; "Queers!... Why don't you kiss each other!"

We stopped… challenged the loud-mouthed coward to come out and face either one of us. When nobody came forward we walked away, joined our mutual friends, drove up into the hills away from the scene drank vodka and a case of beer at Booze Rock. Drunk... spayed out face up on the hood of a 1950 Ford, I swore to a full moon I'd seek out peace with... I don't know... I was very drunk. But my bullying stopped in the light of the full moon. Sometimes, late at night or in moments of quiet, I think of my adolescent behavior and am proud of us both for what we did but ashamed for those I picked on before. It was a moment of clarity.

My first step against bullying came during a time when I was still a respected athlete (even though I had recently been kicked off the track and cross country teams). I still wore my Letterman's jacket so I attended a Lettermen's Club meeting that was called to deal with the topic of Beatle haircuts, stove pipe pants, Mod coats and Beatle boots. It is hard to believe now when I think of it. The hair would be considered short by the standards of only a few years later. One of our coaches showed up at the meeting to bring up the topic and voice his disdain for these punks. It was agreed by the group… mine was the only dissenting vote… to confront the boys dressed this way and the idea was to clip the hair of the first one seen after the meeting. I was outraged and followed them out into the hallway where they circled one of my friends, a leader of a garage band. He was of slight build and certainly not a threat to anyone. One of the massive football jocks had his scissors out and the poor kid by the scruff of his neck about to carry through with the Lettermen's Club decision when I elbowed my way into the circle… "If you are going to cut hair, start with mine!"

The jock didn't know what to do. My action completely threw him off guard and the others in the circle of blue Lettermen jackets went silent.. their jeers of "faggot" and "queer" ceased.

One from the circle finally sputtered, "...but you are one of us?"

I had a righteous cause now and I jumped at the opportunity to say, "You cut his hair, you might as well cut mine too, if you do that, I'm NOT one of you."

By that time a teacher saw what was happening and broke up the cowardly circle. I walked away feeling as though I had to do something more about it. I wrote a manifesto and described the incident and the role of the school administration. It was too controversial for the school newspaper. My dad had an old mimeograph machine from the old days when he owned a tire shop. I broke out the mimeograph machine and, though I composed it, my handwriting was sloppy and recognizable; I had Rich, L. hand-write an my anonymous posts in an almost perfect script.

We placed may manifesto on our school's bulletin board, whose space was for posting student events and comments. It was taken down almost immediately as the staff noticed the attention it got from gathering students. We posted it again and again and managed to do so covertly with an update numbering the times it had been removed.. I felt like I was in the French Resistance or something… exposing the administration's complicity in haranguing the unorthodoxy of Mod style hair cuts and attire. I titled my manifesto: PHID… the Preservation of Human Individualism and Dignity. Fid being a mariner term in Webster's: a pin of hard wood or steel that tapers to a point and is used in opening strands of rope.

Then there was a Memorial Day assembly. At that assembly a groups of us… some were jocks who wanted to fit in with the rebels and some were just in on the fun as we joked and poked fun with hoots and disruptions of the various speakers. I wasn't, but they were shocked, as our Vive Principal called out a half dozen names over the intercom at closing announcements ending the assembly. One by one, loud and clear, we were ordered to show up in his office. What happened in that office was a real eye opener for me; a new respect was garnered for the man I had only considered an authority, and an enemy. Also, a heightened disgust for my fellow jocks and classmates was enflamed as much. The students I sat with in the office were respected jocks too but I lost all respect for them as our Vice Principal spoke about his time as a Marine on Iwo Jima and his pals he lost there. My cohorts on the bench were crying… but not from Rasmussen's admonition about honor and respect… One cried out indignantly; "Why did you call out our names over the intercom where everyone could hear it… I have a reputation!" The others protested in agreement.

My God, I thought, these guys didn't hear a word "ole Razz" said. I held my peace and hung my head in shame. No tears… no protests. I hadn't thought about what Memorial Day meant. Hell, my dad was with the Third Army in Europe. What did I think I was doing?

Razz dismissed the others but told Rich and me to stay seated. After the others left he spoke directly to me, "Thank you for listening. I'm proud that you two didn't cry like babies."

I had nothing to say and felt it wasn't enough but I answered, "I'm sorry Razz, I wasn't thinking…"

"That is what I mean," then he changed the subject, "I know that you two are the ones posting on the bulletin board."

"Uh, how do you figure?" Rich said… looking aside at me for support, he continued, "We had nothing to do with it."

"It doesn't matter to me. If you want it printed, clean up the language and present it to the Bear (our school paper) and have printed legit… can you try that?"

"Sure, sounds good to me. I'll suggest it to…" I offered, trying not to blow my cover.

"Rich, you can go now." He then gestured towards me. I want to have a few more words with you though."

*****

After Rich left he brought up another subject that completely smashed any respect I might have had towards my fellow jocks.

"It is a good thing that you are still working out in the gym," I kept up my discipline and tried stay in shape hoping to be back on the team in the spring.

He continued, "I'm not accusing you and I don't believe you are doing it but there has been a theft… a wallet taken from a locker and you are the number one suspect."

"What the fuck?"

"Like I said, I don't agree but you are banned from the gym."

"But I'm not the thief!... Look Razz, … someone's got to back me on this."

"Can't do it… Coaches agree with your accusers and it is their gym."

I knew it was because I stood up against the hazing… pissed off the wrong people. I was done with it for sure after that.

*****

Then there was sexual conduct. What I thought of as mere sexual aggressiveness was a part of my belligerent attitude back then too. In those days, if a girl got pregnant (referred to as "knocked-up") she had to leave school and, either go to what was called an unwed mother's home (usually a Catholic run joint) or drop out of school altogether. Some, with the means, disappeared a few weeks for a mysterious trip to Mexico. But most usually they got married at a horribly young age with disastrous consequences... before "the pill". Luckily, I never got anyone pregnant that I know of but most of my sexual encounters among my "jock" friends could be described as date-rape today. Sex, for most of the girls, was a high risk adventure, at best, but a lifetime punishment for most.

There was one girl who, it was commonly known, would "put out" to almost anyone. It was said that she once took on the whole football team... again, it was said. All one had to do was knock on her door when her dad was at work... no mom...divorced perhaps... don't know. My friend and I went to her door one day and, to our dismay, dad answered the door. He told us that she was no longer living there and that we ought never come back.

My conscience aches at the memory of the look on his face all these years later. I still didn't "get it" about how I was to treat women but it was a start. I saw in his face a human being deeply hurt and concerned about his daughter and disgust at the way we had participated...

It was a start... feeble as it was...  at becoming an adult... perhaps human.

Where I Get My Take

Where I get my ideas (and the mumbo-jumbo of personal philosophy) I try to express in writing is a mish-mash of my experience in the real and unreal spiritual and material worlds.

I started out as an eager student in the 1st grade. We had a classroom that had the 2nd grade on the other side. Right away I found that the 1st grade material was boring and the 2nd grade, which wasn't a whole lot better but was more interesting. I was always getting in trouble for answering the problems presented when no one over there seemed to know the answer. I was one time gagged and put out in the hallway.... they didn't use Ritalin back then. I still resent the fact that my primary education punished rather than encouraged me.By the 3rd grade I was so bored with school that I would rather stay home and play by dismantling clocks and reassembling them. This could have been the reason I became a sickly kid who'd missed so much school that I was set back to do the third grade over again.

The second time around in the 3rd grade and then from that time on I began acting out... ridiculing teachers and students alike. The 4th to 6th grades were my most miserable because of my frail body and obnoxious behavior I became the target of the class bullies. My father saw me running away from one of those bullies and he told me it was better to stand up to them than to run. So I learned to fight and never back down in those years. Dad didn't know that I taunted the kid all day in class, flipping him off whenever his glowering  in my direction caught my attention. 


It really pissed off ole Butchy  that this skinny reed of a boy was so belligerent. No matter how much he beat the crap out of me I would never back down. This carried on for several months straight through,even though his pummeling of me after class almost every day for a couple of months, that it became an attraction for our school mates. This carried on until my sister, Barbara, interfered and beat him bad enough to chase him off. I was only mildly embarrassed that I had to be defended by my sister but I suppose it wasn't near as humiliating as it was for him to be beaten by a girl. We got over it and became good friends after I got strong enough to beat him soundly after a match for old times' sake the next year.

This rebellious and cynical attitude about people and institutions in general during this period that was followed after into the 7th and 8th grades, but, as I grew into a lean athlete in football, track and field and a pretty damned good speed skater at Cloud's roller rink. I learned to stick to it and never give up when it came to athletics and I even began to become a better student in the classes I enjoyed like art, literature and the rudiments of physics taught at that level. However, I never did let down on my teachers and I was the type of class clown that wasn't very funny at all to my teachers and some of my classmates. My new-found athleticism only made me bolder and attracted the attention of bigger and better bullies.


Around this time I discovered girls and the teaching of The Church became a bother to me. I had been feeling torn between a vocation there or a suspicion that the Church's teachings amounted to little more than sanctified bullshit. A morbid reflection one night... probably after feeling guilty about "spilling my seed"... I resigned to the probability that the grave was all there was to it and the worms got what would be left of me after I die.

(to be continued...)