The Crankies have been treated to some impressive sights while in the country. A hip-high stand of Tripsacum dactyloides (eastern gamma grass) with those dramatic red tassels. Ruminants love the delectable Tripsacum dactyloides; the Crankies respect the venerable genealogy of this early ancestor of corn. 


The gamma grass was in the same pasture as Mrs. W.’s rose installation. Is it too much, really? The Crankies might fill out one of those “how are we doing” cards to let the management know that all these roses are really over the top. Kind of like ’80s big hair and shoulder pads. And what variety of cattle would you stock in this pasture to avoid clashing with that shade of pink? Luckily, Angus goes with everything. 


Finally, a whimsical neighbor is doing his own interpretation of Cadillac Ranch; he has buried three fire engines in his field, leaving the front ends to point merrily to the sky. Second Brother has pointed out that the fire engines were working when they were planted in the dirt and sacrificed for art. Pictures are forthcoming. 

Living and working amidst all this rural charm gives Meta Cranky some insight into Tea Party politics. Her understanding is that Tea Partiers (Tea Baggers? Tea Steepers? Lapsang Souchangers?) is that they want smaller government, and they are very irritated about government interference in their daily lives. MC thinks that she is ready to pull down some major political consultant money, because she has identified the source of this irritation: Tea Partiers are crabby as hell because their Internet service sucks. 

Connect these dots, if you will: Tea Partiers live in Red States. Red States are predominantly rural. Rural states have sucky Internet. Think about it. Tea Partiers listen to Rush Limbaugh because he’s on the freaking radio. Every Dodge pickup in every Red State driveway can access a radio station that carries Rush Limbaugh! If Tea Parties wanted to read The Huffington Post, they would have to drive 30 miles to use the Internet service at Starbucks! MC can hardly believe that she is the first to identify this phenomenon.  

In her time at Cranky Girls’ Farm, MC has acquired an intimate knowledge of the DSL help line of her local telephone/Internet co-op. All the DSL troubleshooters are drop-dead adorable, but MC suspects that they are working with some limited resources.  MC is casting a rather jaded eye on those people who complain that Time Warner is rather too casual about their Road Runner cable. Casual, to MC, is 22 instances (by actual count at the telephone co-op) of dropped service in one day. MC lights the lucky candle and hopes that a new modem does the trick; otherwise, she’ll be even more in evidence at Cranky Hometown library. Their air conditioning and WiFi are an unbeatable combination.


MC hasn’t yet devised her new political consulting career, but she would advise candidates to exploit these two facts: 1) Red Staters would consider voting for the dead corpse of Ted Kennedy if he replaced their dial-up service with DSL and 2) Red Staters are soothed and sustained by the satisfaction they get from mowing their lawns. The immediate gratification of seeing a lawn mowed provides some chemical rush that must be comparable to methamphetamines, which also are tres popular in rural environments. Construct a campaign that combines Internet service with a 60-inch, 25 hp zero-turn lawnmower, and you could get some attention. We’re just saying.
–MC

The Crankies know that you can seriously mess up your karma by gloating about a successful (or not awful) farming endeavor. Casually mention at the coffee shop that you sold your wheat at $5, and you’ve won the instant loathing of the folks at the other table who sold at $2.45 and paid major storage fees. Acknowledging the need for tact and delicacy, Meta Cranky will casually mention, then, that the wheat harvest at Cranky Girls’ Farm was completed yesterday. That small miracle was followed by another: the hay baler fairy worked all night to turn rows of swathed hay into tidy bales of alfalfa. Wait for it: and then it rained this morning.


There’s plenty more grain to cut at Uncle Sid’s and Uncle Michael’s. But still, it’s satisfying to have one item marked off the list without an asterisk that means a field of grain has been  *flooded, *set on fire by welding torch, *damaged by late frost so the yield is cut in half, or *pounded into the ground by hail. Think these are hypothetical examples? Think again. 


So, before the inevitable screwup happens, MC chooses to accentuate the positive. Let’s talk about roses, shall we? These roses came from Mrs. Wymore’s house, which is in the general neighborhood of Hazel’s place. MC never saw Mrs. Wymore’s house when it wasn’t a ruin, but it was a destination in the mid-1930s. Hot, hot. People went there to dance and to buy drink-ables that were friendly and not especially legal. Mrs. W. seems to have been a very busy woman. Friend Marvin,  Major Cranky’s friend, recalls having Mrs. W. flag him down as he walked home from school to call out, “Tell your mother I weaned Baby W. today!” Mrs. W. was not slowed down by lactation.

But the roses. One spring about a dozen years ago, MC and Uncle M came upon the remains of Mrs. W’s house and found it surrounded by rose bush. This was not just exuberant growth. We’re talking an acre or two of prickly pink shrubbery. It doesn’t get more heritage rose than Mrs. W.’s forgotten roses, which had been making a living all by themselves for 60 years or so. MC dug up a sample, took it home, and planted it in the wrong spot. Mrs. W.’s roses had put up with drought, flood, grasshoppers, and straying cattle, but they had no experience with shade. Year after year, they languished by the fence under an oak tree, until Uncle Sid decided to replace the corral. MC had to move the rose bush, and about damn time. That’s all they were waiting for. 


 William Wordsworth came upon a field of daffodils and described them as such: “Ten thousand saw I at a glance / Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.” The sandhills are much less forgiving than the Lake Country; if that Romantic poet had wandered upon Mrs. W.’s rosebush, he would have had to pick stickers out of his shoelaces. Still, the Romantics understood prickly charm, and the Poet Laureate certainly would have appreciated Mrs. W’s illegal intoxicants. MC’s heart with pleasure fills.
–MC

Meta Cranky and C2 have landed. MC got the distinct impression that fingers were drumming impatiently as the Crankies drove up the driveway: Combine and two grain trucks parked in the driveway. Field of dead-ripe wheat on the left side of the road. Rows of swathed alfalfa, ready to bale, on the right. A turkey added to the sense of frantic activity, flapping and squawking over the car and into the walnut tree. There was a general impression of where have you been already? In the time it took C2 to get on her hat and sunscreen, Uncles Sid and Michael cut a wheat sample and took it to the elevator (57 pounds/bushel; that’s grade 2; not bad). The Crankies were good to go.

It was a perfect day to cut wheat: a steadily blowing wind and a temp of 102. Miserable for anything except drying grain and getting it into a bin. C2 rode on the combine until its bin filled for the first time and it stopped to empty into a truck. Then she took a Fancy Nancy approach to wheat harvest, setting herself a schedule of bath, nap, and tea party for the rest of the afternoon. C2 figured the combine would still be going when the sun went down, and she was right. She got a second trip around the field in the cool of the evening, wearing a tea party dress never before seen in an Allis Chambers Gleaner. Tres fancy!

Uncles Sidney and Michael were decidedly less fancy, since they had to crawl under combines when wheat straw got stuck,  and shlep the wheat to the elevator in the large, reliable, but not-air conditioned truck. At the end of the day, though, their Significant Others had a lovely dinner waiting for them; we think the combination of successfully cut wheat, air conditioning, and grilled meat products  was a satisfying one.

MC’s Ancient O’Hern great-grandfather famously went berserk at harvest time; apparently the variables of machinery, weather, and human error were too much for him to synthesize as he watched his grain (read: money) being gathered into piles. One of his 10 sons apparently threatened to hit him with a shovel during a grain harvest if he didn’t back off. MC is a little fuzzy on this story. She’s not sure 1)which of the 10 sons made this threat or 2)If the shovel actually connected with the Ancient O’Hern. Contrast this with the Crankies’ harvest experience, where Gardening Friend makes margaritas in fancy glasses, which Significant Others sip as they watch a combine move in smooth circles around a field. MC is thinking that estrogen improves the wheat harvest experience. Not that she can set the header on a combine, operate the dumping mechanism on a truck, or perform any useful labor. But as C2 slathered the assembled females with her Mary Kay perfume samples,  MC couldn’t help but observe that a Fancy Nancy wheat harvest has a certain je ne sais quoi.
–MC

Meta Cranky has been in stricken with a GI ailment. Two days of the usual misery, interrupted only by Cranky #2’s recitations from Fancy Nancy Tea Party. Just when MC was lulled to sleep by directions for making Raspberry Swirls, she’d be elbowed in the ribs to decipher some of Nancy’s fancier creations (“How do you say “s-i-l-v-o-u-s-p-l-a-i-t?” “What does a-l-f-r-e-s-c-o spell?”). Take it from the Crankies: Fancy Nancy is a regular Florence Nightingale.

Enforced bedrest gives MC the opportunity to reflect on similar visitations, some self-inflicted, some not. A vicious bacteria in Cranky Sergeant’s kitchen once took MC down for a solid three days. The unkindest hangovers, MC realized, pale in comparison to food poisoning served to you by your own mother. After days of being able to communicate only by blinking her eyelids, MC heard Second Older Brother enter Cranky Sergeant’s house. “I came to view the body,” he boomed, sympathetically.  MC, busy battling with toxins, was unmoved. Then older brother weighed in with a diagnosis: “This might be morning sickness–maybe she’s pregnant!” Brother’s hilarity was lost on the Sergeant, who could tell the diff between preggers and Staphylococcus. Before she lost consciousness, MC heard the Sergeant giving the orders: “OUT! Get OUT of the house.” Second Brother, and his very sincere interest in MC’s welfare, was summarily removed from the sickroom.

All GI dramas have their own narrative arc and particular plot complications. C2 had a five-day flu when she was still in diapers. Small Cranky’s illness would have been worrisome since she was so small; it was amplified by her disinterest in the water substitute that would reliably stay on her stomach. Consequently, she pleaded for water like one of the dusty minions in Lawrence of Arabia. MC, lying in bed with small C2, watched these events unfold one thirsty morning like one of those rolling marble games where the ball gains momentum and, with increasing speed and precision, drops through holes and traps to reach its destination. The chronology was approximately this:

For the past few weeks, people entering the Cranky front door have stepped inside and looked quizzically at the bottoms of their shoes. It’s not dog poo, but something equally disgusting: a plum that’s seen better days. Squirrels in the Cranky neighborhood have been working overtime for a month to frantically gnaw on the fruits of the Crankies’ plum tree and then hurl the remainders down to the sidewalk. Where the ants and flies take over. House Beautiful, this is not.

Back in March, this tree gave little evidence that it would create oozing, buzzing Superfund-type sludge. But that blossoming harbinger of spring has been transformed into a source of fruity, fermenting plum smoosh.

Meta Cranky imagines a perfect world in which tender plum trees would sport warning labels that say: “Hey dummy! Don’t plant this by your sidewalk! Only a complete moron would make the mailman walk through plum goo for month and still expect to get the New Yorker on time.” Call it a failure of imagination, but she never envisioned that the wee sapling in the back of her car could block the front of the house and create what Herr Cranky now calls “a jungle vibe.”

Since this tree is all about fecundity, a fraction of its seed-bearing fruits remain in the tree, where Cranky #2 and her BFF tirelessly arrange ladders to remove as many as possible. Cranky #1 led a party of teenagers into the tree, where even more were secured. Since a truly ripe, mouth-ready plum would either have been 1)gummed by a squirrel or 2)pulverized upon impact with sidewalk, the Crankies are picking their plums al dente, letting them ripen, and then turning them into jam.

Meta Cranky’s compulsion to preserve fruity bits in teeny jars is a product of her Red State upbringing. The thickets of ripening sand plums near Cranky Girls’ Farm move the locals to stand in sandburrs, among throngs of snakes and clouds of mosquitoes, to fill feed sacks with very small, very local, produce. The locals take these sacks to granny ladies who then make a tart, red jam. People in Philadelphia eat scrapple, which MC can tell you is big mistake. Those crazy Canadians eat cheese curds and gravy, which might be OK if you’re trying to pack on blubber like a penguin. In the whole universe of local cuisine, you could do a lot worse than plum jam. It’s rather a point of local pride: since this product is not available in stores or on QVC, you’re not going to get any unless you make it yourself. Or someone likes you.

The Crankies’ very urban plum tree stands in for a thicket of Red State sand plums. What we lack in snakes and sandburrs, we make up for with plummy spots on our living room carpet. Cranky #1 declares that the act of jamming satisfies her itch to hoard food. Apparently, children exposed to the Little House books at an early age will expect to hang onions from their rafters and cram their cellars full of potatoes. If they have neither rafters or cellars, they’ll settle for putting plums into mismatched mayo jars.

In 1957, the Cimarron River flooded at Hazel’s house, marooning a few dozen aunts, uncles, and babies for several days. Meta Cranky asked Friendly Cousin about this years afterward, wondering what all those people found to eat. Food wasn’t a problem, Friendly Cousin reported. Before the cellar filled with water, they brought up all Hazel’s canning jars, full of local produce.
–MC

The Crankies are taking a road trip this summer and will stop to view their ancestral homeland. Major Cranky’s Quaker family hailed from eastern Indiana, where Quakers still abound and will let you go to their fabulous liberal arts college for $44,000/year. Just because they’re pacifists doesn’t mean they’re not capitalists.

DAR Matron and Cranky Oil Baron, Meta Cranky’s genealogic-obsessive relatives, have mapped
The Quaker’s DNA, so there’s very little new ground to be covered in the who-begat-whom department. But smaller Crankies might be interested in info that isn’t included in the Indiana Dead Quaker People records.

In every picture MC has seen of The Quaker, he looks like he’s already been dead for three days. We recognize that he might be shown to better advantage in pictures prior to 1949. However, the photo of him with his son, grandson, and great-grandson indicates that they’re all working from the same basic pattern; he might very well have been Quaker eye candy in the 19th century.

The Quaker left Indiana when his widowed father remarried; his difficult new stepmother helped him light out for the territories to score free real estate in the Oklahoma land run. Late in his life, he spent a weekdays at his son’s ranch. His daughter-in-law Hazel recalled him fondly and respectfully, but her details never offered much personality. The most revealing nugget Hazel shared was his habit of reciting the Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley. Riley delighted in homey country rhymes with lots of dropped g‘s. She heard The Quaker’s rendition of  “How Did You Rest, Last Night?” each morning before breakfast. If she harbored homicidal thoughts about the Hoosier Poet or her father-in-law, she kept them to herself:

“How did you rest, last night?”–
I’ve heard my gran’pap say
Them words a thousand times–that’s right–
Jes them words thataway!

Riley is credited with establishing the Midwest’s cultural identity; he’s got a lot to answer for.

Major Cranky’s stories about his grandfather had more narrative arc. For example, good guys caught some bank robbers in the Kansas flint hills while The Quaker was waiting for the land run to start. The good guys applied frontier justice, and the bank robbers were quickly dispatched, with one exception: the 13-year-old robber. The women of the group, including Mrs. Quaker, demanded that the boy be released, and eventually, he was. When Major Cranky first heard this story, he was horrified: “Grandad, I‘m only 13. Would you have wanted to hang me?” His grandfather, whose Quaker theology opposed war, slavery, and capital punishment, told him: “Don’t. Rob. A bank.”

The Quaker adopted new folkways, and even a new religion, in his new venue. He sang in the choir with the Methodists, and even prayed in public when he was asked to say grace over meals. In the 21st century, his notable feature seems to be his even, balanced sensibility: for fun, he and Mrs. Quaker read the Congressional Record of an evening. Sometimes, maybe, No Drama can be a good thing. Sure, Grace Kelly shoots the bad guy to save Gary Cooper. But she only played a Quaker in the movies.
–MC

There’s a special category of really good friend you make before you’re six. Cranky #1 discovered her BFF at kindergarten meet-the-teacher and hasn’t looked back. Similarly, Cranky #2 picked out her BFF by end-of-business on kindergarten opening day. “She just looked like a really good friend for me,” C2 explained. At the end of her first playdate at BFF’s house, she announced: “I want to be part of BFF’s family.” And to their everlasting credit, best friend’s family didn’t smile tightly and reflexively recoil.

Recently, BFF walked home from school with the Crankies, and en route she reflected on the responsibility of best-friendness. “It’s not easy being Cranky #2’s best friend,” BFF observed seriously. “She hugs me really hard.” Even if your politics and taste in significant others diverge wildly, your pre-6 BFF will remember that your panties had big picture of Cinderella on the butt, and that you used to hug really hard.

If MC’s best-friend-since-we-were-four ever decides to write a tell-all, then MC is in big trouble. People who know the color of the shag carpet in your childhood bedroom are bound to have other intimate details in their files. Happily, the benevolent BFX4 publicly remembers only the least-embarrassing anecdotes. Since her knowledge of Cranky Farm lore is infinite, she is a fabulous reference for C1 and C2. Ask her about testing Cranky Sergeant’s reflexes by putting a rubber snake in the garden: MC collapsed into the strawberry bed while watching her mother chop BFX4’s rubber snake into tiny bits with a hoe. The snake was sliced like a loaf of French bread, Cranky Sergeant was triumphantly flustered, but MC and her BFX4 were transcendentally thrilled with the success of their joke.

The all-day breakfast joint with the gingerbread pancakes and Zen vibe features quotes on the back page of its menu. The one that resonates for Meta Cranky reads something like: “a good friend will visit you in prison. A really good friend will come to your lecture.” Since she read that menu years ago, MC has developed her own list of what a really good friend will do: Be charming to your geezer relatives. Check your head for lice. Help you retrieve an impounded car and keep it a secret for 20 years. These are the friends, as an adult, you are drawn to because of their wit, their braininess, or their selfless generosity. Yet there are other friends who met you when you were just an illiterate mass of narcissistic id, and they loved you anyway.
–MC

How does Meta Cranky know that she’s become a crone? Let’s count the ways. Could it be that she’s the only mommy in the kindergarten hallway gallery whose hair is colored with a gray crayon? Perhaps the most recent Mother’s Day card: “My mommy’s name is Meta Cranky. She is 78 years old.” Then there’s that Wheatsville checker who looked at Herr (and Meta) Cranky’s membership card and announced, with anthropologist-like fascination, that he was born after they joined the co-op. We could have told them that humans mated with Neanderthals! Heck–we lived down the street from Flying Aardvark and Runs Like a Girl!

Yet leave it to a faceless institution to deliver the unkindest cut. Here’s the latest indignity: MC has contacted her alma mater to see whether it would like to charge her outrageous tuition to take a few classes. Since MC’s path is generally the complicated one, she asked for, and received, especially helpful instructions from the helpful admissions office. In the process of dredging up MC’s historic academic information, Ms. Helpful promised to call if her transcripts were no longer legible. “Come again?’ asked MC. “The microfiche deteriorates over time. But that’s OK. You’ll have time to order a copy from the originals.” The microfiche deteriorates over time? To paraphrase Ms. Helpful: MC has generated documents so old that they require special conservation techniques. Like an original reel of Birth of a Nation. Or a lovely French cave painting.

Wait, there’s more: “That would include your transcript from A&M.” Now this bit of information was fascinating, since MC never attended A&M, although she was once provisionally admitted to library school at UCLA (without applying!). The answer to that puzzler is that MC took a class at a school so long ago that the school’s name has changed. Happens all the time. The creepiest part, however, is that MC has no memory of taking any class at that university. Herr Cranky still owns a working cerebral cortex, and he declares it was a Spanish class. If that’s the case, then why doesn’t MC speak Spanish?

MC chooses to see this loss of memory as an opportunity to create her own reality. Of course she took a summer Spanish class in 1984! If she digs around in the bottom of her purse, she’ll find her diploma from the NASA cooking school and a pay stub from her part-time brain surgery gig. The one at the drive-thru clinic. You think she doesn’t have a license to practice law? She’d show it to you, but the records burned up in that fire they had in San Francisco. You know, the one after the earthquake?
–MC

The school year is drawing to a close, and Meta Cranky has proof. She visited the Kindergarten Roundup for the ’10-’11 crop of small people and recognizes that Cranky #2 soon will be displaced by someone younger and cuter. At Kinder Roundup, MC watched impossibly young parents copying wee children’s passports and presenting a very great number of immunization forms from California. The Crankies’ school is, apparently, very popular with people born in California five years ago. The school professionals inspired friendly confidence in anxious parental units; no child is, as of yet, being left behind.

Meta Cranky felt a twinge as she watched these parents sitting in uncomfortable folding chairs. They’re still thinking it’s about their children, she observed. From her eight years of elementary mommy experience, MC can report: yes, but. If MC ran the public school system, there would be an open bar at Kindergarten Roundup and the principal would share the following info:

Moms and dads. Look around the room. You will be seeing one another quite a bit for the next little while. Unless you come across with $15K/year for private school, win the lottery at the Ann Richards leadership academy (girls only!), bail early to go to a middle school magnet program, or the economy recovers and you get your old job back in California, you will know these faces in exquisite detail by the end of 2017. That’s seven years. About a hundred birthday parties. Want to do girl scouts/boys scouts? That’s 2 meetings/month X 9 months X 7 years. Not counting campouts. Do the math. Now guestimate how many hours you could share with these people doing playground duty, Spring Fling silent auction, or Carnival food booths. I think you see where I’m going here.

Some of these people will be within your comfort zone for friendliness/snarkiness/perkiness/ sincerity/absent-mindedness. Some of them will not. You will do yourselves an enormous favor if you can, at your earliest convenience, recognize your tolerance for these qualities and migrate toward your tribe. Some of these people will laugh at your jokes. Others will ask you, sincerely, if you think the principal can get the janitor to address his butt crack issue.

MC once sold baked goods for an entire evening with two other Veteran Mommies. During their Carnival stint, they were confronted by New Mommy, who had a serious problem with a confetti egg that had been broken inside the building. “I’ll clean it up,” offered MC. “The children should know not to bring them in the building!” steamed New Mommy. “Maybe you should put up a sign if that’s the policy,” suggested MC, helpfully, “Besides, I’ll clean it up.” “The janitors will be SO angry,” New Mommy tossed over her shoulder as she stomped off. Veteran Mommies looked at each other thoughtfully. Then one VM offered kindly, “She’s a Kindergarten Mom. When she’s a Fifth Grade Mom, she’ll know.” The other VM observed: “We will crush her.”

Some kindergarteners are heartbreakingly sweet. Others will be sent to the principal’s office after they squeeze the hamster. You will learn to tell the difference. Similarly, you will learn that you can have a grand time slinging lasagna in the school cafeteria if only you get the right shift.

In summary, Kinder parents: Be smart. Use the buddy system. Be kind to one another. Or it will be a very long seven years.
–MC