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Tales from Exit 22 by Al Batt

A cat owns my wife and me. We have three litter boxes because cats are territorial about those things.

The cat isn’t always a precious pet. It purrs as it knocks things from my desk to the floor. If the Earth were flat, cats would have pushed everything off it by now.

I think of my narrow boyhood as an outstanding one in which I dabbled in perfection, but I can find no relative willing to back up my claim. I may have grown up as a cat.

I remember being at the home shared by Grandma and my Aunt Eddie. When I became rambunctious and appeared on the verge of (horrors) bouncing a ball around inside the house; they gave me a piece of horehound candy in the hopes it’d curtail my mischievousness. Horehound candy was a hard candy that wasn’t really candy. On the list of desired candy, horehound candy would be somewhere on the bottom. It tasted like something between bad root beer and bad licorice, but it was candy, so I accepted it. It had been a household tonic for centuries. I thought each piece I was given was older than that. It also served as a cough drop. In medieval Europe, knuckleheads used it to ward off a witch’s spell.

If that failed to settle me down, Grandma read the newspaper obituaries aloud. One day, as she droned on about some 200-year-old guy who still played fastpitch softball until he bought the farm in a hospital, I interrupted (horrors) to ask the cause of death.

Grandma wasn’t fond of questions. She could go years without answering one. If she thought I needed to know something, she told me. But she answered, “Old man’s disease.”

I didn’t want to take the chance of riling her with a second question, so I asked my father what old man’s disease was. He knew I’d been listening to Grandma, that I’d had no choice but to listen, and that pneumonia was what finished off a lot of elderly men. Before I could toss another question, he rushed off to fix something he’d been fixing to fix. I figured pneumonia was a word adults made up to get kids to shut up.

Uncle Bill cut my hair, chewing a ragged cigar as he did so. My haircuts were called a hiney, heinie or buzz cut, which were polite words for being sheared like a sheep. Hiney also referred to buttocks and might have reflected what our shorn melons resembled. While getting a haircut wasn’t as thrilling as watching geese fly, I enjoyed sitting in the barbershop and listening to the loafers. Any barbershop worth its salt attracted a collection of loafers, retired men and others who had time on their hands. Some were there because they had nowhere they needed to be, and others were there because they had somewhere they didn’t want to be. They took valuable time off from puttering around the yard to share their bad jokes, gossip and opinions with others.

Mother told me I shouldn’t believe anything I heard there because they were all falsehoods. Father said one man lied and another swore to it. I told my parents I believed nothing I heard there. That was a fib. I was all in. I believed everything I heard from those geniuses. I’ll bet those guys knew what pneumonia was.

My first contribution to that Loafers’ Club meeting was to protest the accusation that I’d been picking my nose on the sly. Despite my claim of innocence, they found me guilty. My second was when Uncle Bill told of how I’d broken through the ice and fell into a Minnesota river in January. This caused so much shaking of heads that I could hear them rattling. One loafer asked how

I’d come to fall through the ice. I told him I hadn’t come to fall through the ice. I’d come to walk on the ice.

My third came after a grizzled sourpuss, who was aging like milk, said he’d tried to put on his pants while he was standing up, lost his balance while perched on one leg, and head-butted an open dresser drawer.

I asked him if that was pneumonia.

Al Batt’s column appears in the Tribune every Wednesday.