Al Batt’s columns appear in the Tribune every Wednesday and Sunday.

I was thinking of something the other day.

Thinking is an admirable trait.

Memories can be a challenge. It’s a simple task to make them complex, but a complex task to make them simple.

I remembered a day from my boyhood when I was wearing corduroys – a one-man band of pants made from cacti fiber and sandpaper.

It had been a small, but eventful day. The slightest of days has endless corners.

I carried a book by one of my favorite authors. I planned on reading a bit of John Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley.”

A chicken feather was the bookmark.

The book is a wonderful account of the author’s 1960 road trip around the United States in the company of a poodle named Charley. Steinbeck covered nearly 10,000 miles in a GMC pickup truck with a camper-shell.

My father was a dairy farmer. We were tethered to the barn. We took imaginary vacations by reading books.

I’d just sat down and begun to read when there was a knock on the door. That’s the way it always goes.

“For corn sake!” I whispered.

“Anybody home?” a man’s voice asked.

“Yes,” I answered while barely cracking the door open.

“Is your father there?” asked the man.

“Nope, Dad left before Mom came in,” I replied.

“Well, then, is your mother there?” persisted the visitor.

“No, Mom left just before I got here,” I said.

“Aren’t you ever together as a family?” asked the stranger, dogged in his questioning. “I live in a big city, but my family spends time together. Don’t you?”

“Sure we do, but not here,” I said. “This is the outhouse.”

Apparently, the fellow had thought that he’d happened upon the smallest cabin in the county.

When the visitor knocked on the barn door, he found my father, who was replacing some boards in a calf pen. The guy tried to sell Dad something, but Dad never bought anything from a salesman who bothered him while he was working in the barn.

I decided to take “Travels With Charley” to the roof of the henhouse. The backside of the house of chickens was shaded by bur oak trees and was as fine a place for a boy to hide as there was anywhere on a hot, humid day.

I hadn’t quite made it to the top of the chickenhouse when a neighbor boy rode in on his bicycle. The bike was brand new. It had tassels on the handlebars. A bell on the bike made a piercing, irritating sound.

I looked the bike over with a critical eye, trying to find something wrong with it. Alas, there was nothing not to dislike. It made my rusty but trusty bicycle with a truck’s steering wheel in place of handlebars look pretty chintzy in comparison.

The bicycle’s rider favored odd humor. He asked me, “What’s the difference between a chicken?”

Before I could guess, he answered himself, “One leg is exactly alike.”

He cracked himself up.

He wrote his own jokes.

His tales were nearly as fanciful as those told on the campaign trail. That’s OK. If we locked up every liar, there wouldn’t be room for anyone else in our jails.

He spotted my book and asked, “Whatcha readin’? Something scary?”

My friend and neighbor was fond of books of horror and the occult. A little of that genre went a long way with me.

He began telling me about the bogeyman that lived in the woods near his house. Those woods consisted of a few oak trees and a couple of planted pines. The bogeyman was obviously a master at hiding.

Some of you may have grown up in a bogeyman-free environment and not know what a bogeyman is. The bogeyman was an evil character with supernatural powers that was prone to carrying off naughty children. The neighbor kid loved to tell me about the bogeyman screaming in the darkness. “Hear it?” he’d ask on a darkest of nights.

I didn’t hear it, but I nodded in approval as it made him happy. An easy way to make people happy is to listen to them and agree with them. I listened for that creature for years. I heard many things, but I never heard that bogeyman.

I don’t live in the house near where the silent bogeyman yelled. But sometimes, late on a dark night, I listen intently. And if I don’t hear anything, I know that the bogeyman is out there.

And that I’m not wearing corduroy pants.