Paradise (and body parts) Lost

My father once told me that smoking was the only thing in his life that gave him any pleasure. Right to my face he says that. I don't think it even occurred to him that his statement could quite easily be taken badly by his offspring. It could also be argued that I shouldn't have taken it as a slight, but it was.

My failure as a son has mainly to do with the fact that I was never into hanging out in junkyards with toothless hayseeds who deliberately surrounded themselves with mountains of trash because something inside of it might be of value to someone. Fer instance. I remember one fieldtrip to a junkyard down in Plattsmouth, Neb. so my dad could go looking through mountains of wrecked cars for an intact rear windshield for some ancient piece of shit of his own. While he searched, my sister and I sat in the car and waited for about an hour... like dogs. When he returned it was with a cut hand and no windshield.

One might well ask, how expensive could any rear windshield be? The answer is not that expensive, but even if it were $50 with free installation, it would not have been as sweet as finding one in a junkyard for $20.

I grew up in a junkyard actually. My dad, always the admirer of other people's shit, kept his own little pile all around our house. There were several old cars, axles, tractors, plows, mowers and weeds, tons and tons of weeds growing in all the cracks. A completely dilapidated school bus my grandmother used to use to house chickens was the item that made sure no one driving by could fail to notice that our house had a small yard and a much larger junkyard attached to it.

After my parents got divorced, it was my mother's no. 1 priority to get rid of the embarrassing piles of rusted metal that had closed in on us over the years. Well, no. 2 if you count getting rid of my dad. My father put off the junk removal for over a year until my mother brought in another junk collector to take all the junk away for free, afterall, he was getting an amazing pile of crap in exchange. Suddenly, rather than take my sister and I out for pizza, it became my dad's primary focus to hang out with the junk dealer and move all his detritus. That was how he lost the tip of his pinky finger. He got it caught in a trailer hitch. That is the kind of thing that only happens to hicks like my dad. You don't see too many accountants or state senators who are missing parts of their bodies that they "got caught in a trailer hitch."