I was cutting weeds with a grass whip, a poor man’s scythe.

I was the Grim Reaper of burdock until the blade of the grass whip broke.

I wondered what William Shatner would do. Then I realized that Shatner wouldn’t do anything because he wouldn’t have been chopping burdock.

I looked for a rock or a stump that might have caused the damage. Nothing but burdock. I couldn’t believe it was capable of breaking a blade until I recalled how old the grass whip was and then I believed.

My great-aunt wanted a child.

She’d been married for a long time. While friends and relatives had baby after baby, she’d had none. She and her husband lowered their hopes of having a large family to having a single child. She wanted a boy, one who’d take over the family business.

Her husband fixed clocks and watches. It was a thriving enterprise. He was good at it, but worked slowly. He fell asleep each night, sometimes at his workbench, surrounded by piles of work still to be done.

One morning, he awoke to find all his work had been completed. He hadn’t done it in his sleep. He stayed up late to see what he could see.

Tiny elves entered the shop and the clever fellows finished the day’s jobs. This went on night after night for six months. Then a union organizer visited the elves and they demanded double-time for working the night shift, medical and dental insurance, a retirement plan and paid vacations. They threatened a lawsuit based on a perceived inequity in advancement opportunities.

The elves got jobs with Santa Claus Inc., and the man went back to being surrounded by mountains of timepieces.

She wanted a son to help her husband. She believed she’d have one. She said, “I don’t care if he’s no bigger than my thumb, I want a son.”

She gave birth to a baby boy. He grew strong and tall. He stood 6-foot-9. She had big thumbs.

He helped his father, and the business flourished.

Then the Army drafted her son. She got it in her head that if he went overseas, he’d be shot. She went to a fortune teller, who, not surprisingly, confirmed her fears. The seer told her that the only way to keep him from being shot was for him to carry a magic trinket that the clairvoyant coincidentally had for sale. As long as he had that trinket, no harm would befall him.

Her son took the lucky charm to basic training. He wasn’t shot while in the Army. He received a medical discharge after hitting his head on too many things.

That was all make-believe, except for the part about the broken grass whip. The world is made of make-believe and that in which we believe.

I write four or five columns a week for newspapers and magazines. I pen books, write gags, ghost write, etc. Is it hard work? Nearly everything we do is hard work. I know guys who worked at Wilson Co. Working in a meat-packing plant, that’s hard work. I worked in a factory where a woman’s job for eight hours a day was to watch product containers zoom by. She made sure inserts were properly fitted into the lids. That was hard work. Writing a column isn’t that hard, but it’s enough of a challenge that most wise writers quit after a short run. The wonderful sportswriter Red Smith said, “Writing a column is easy, you just sit at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.”

Years ago, I arrived home after extended travel. I was exhausted. There were family matters to attend to and I needed to write copiously. It wasn’t a daunting task. It was a series of daunting tasks. I wondered how I could possibly do everything that needed to be done. As happens when doubts appear, things went wrong. Then something went right. While digging through my notes, searching for inspiration, I discovered papers belonging to my late mother. One had a sticky note carrying her handwriting. It read, “Allen wrote this. He is a wonderful writer.”

It was attached to a magazine piece I’d written. It was meant to be mailed to her niece, my cousin. I humbly mailed it. It got to my cousin a few years late, but it has stayed in my heart forever.

It gave me what I needed. Someone who believed in me.

 

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.