Horn Bar

Last month, my sister’s mother-in-law, Lois passed away, and her funeral and service was in her hometown of Harrodsburg, Kentucky.  The visitation was on a Saturday, and Kristin’s twin brother, Kirk, and I decided to drive down into Kentucky to be with our sister, and maybe help keep an eye out for her own seven year old twins that afternoon.  It might have helped if I could have kept up with them, but they had a forty year jump on me.  So they did what children do at a funeral service….they ran in circles until they were red in the face.

And we did what adults do at a funeral visitation….we shared stories.

And nobody in Harrodsburg, Kentucky can tell a story like Cousin Rex.  That man can spin a yarn.    

Rex grew up in, and never really left his hometown for most of his 45 years.  He mostly grew up in the farm house of his grandparents, and his life around them was full of great memories.  Like the his & hers spittoons beside both Grandpa and Grandma’s sittin’ chairs, as they both chewed pure tobacco from early teen years until they died in their nineties.  

Their farmhouse sat on a modest five acre plot of Kentucky land, made modest only by the hundred acre farms that surrounded them on either side.  For some reason, Grandma never liked or trusted the Phone Company, and when they began to plant telephone poles along their country road, she intercepted them, and made it clear that they would not be planting poles along her front yard, and she waved her shotgun at them to emphasize her resolve. 

Rex naturally supported his grandmother, and on that day in his tenth year, when Grandma had finished making apple pies, she handed him a pie tin of gone-bad apples to toss out into the fields.    

As Rex approached the nearest field, he was forever distracted by the man working on top of the telephone pole across the property line, and the apples never reached the fields.  Instead, Rex started chunkin’ the rotten apples at the Telephone Man at the top of the pole in the next yard.   Once he got his attention, Rex had the guy on the pole duckin’ and hidin’ behind the pole, as best he could.  Rex was out of apples when Grandma came out and began to holler at him.   But the guy on the pole shouted back to Grandma that it was ok, cuz he hadn’t been hit, and it looked like the kid was fresh out of apples anyway.  

I don’t recall if Rex got apple pie after dinner that night. 

You could tell that Rex loved to tell this, and many other stories, and he could easily draw a crowd, just as he had at the funeral parlor.   Then he told us of a business luncheon a few years back he had attended while working for his cable and electronics company.   As the large group of telecommunications workers enjoyed their post-lunch coffee, Rex got to tellin’ his stories, and naturally, the Apple story was widely enjoyed by all.  And then an older, retired gentleman at the fringe of the group stood up, cleared his throat, and said, "The boy’s tellin’ the truth."          Everyone turned to see who had spoken, and one man asked how he could be so sure of it.

"Because it was me on top of that pole dodgin’ apples that day".