When I was a kid, I thought when people left, when I didn’t see them, they just went someplace and stood in corners.

They didn’t live. They just shut off. I was the one was alive.

I guess we proceed through life on that assumption.

There was a station in Omaha did this thing, I think it was April Fools.

They ran this announcement that the phone company was cleaning out its lines, the telephone lines were full of soot, so they had to cleanem out, they asked everyone to put plastic bags on their phones, to catch the soot.

And people did. Even a college, a shopping mall, they thought the phones would blow soot.

But it was a joke.

We don’t visit much, because for a while we weren’t close by, we’d come on holidays, and then I sit there and say something dumb.

It’s hard to marry into a farm family. He cooks for her, brings her an aspirin, but Don says all his life he’s just beat her down. Some people are almost not human.

I don’t understand people like that. We always had books in the house, and Dad was always cheerful, even despite tragic things, like my brother died. . .

The terrible dreams are. . .

There’s like a shadow there, outside your field of vision, you can’t make it focus. Or the water you’re swimming. . .

My seventh graders, they watch these movies, it’s all about something’s there, it’s coming, but nobody sees, but there’s fire inside the walls, and they flick a switch. . .

They really scare me.

My father was always cheerful. He was a dentist. He never talked about teeth.

They got this radar and satellites, maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that, all mixed up.

Is a concept in the church, which if you’re on the stewardship committee, means takin care of the property, or the loot.

But which is a helluva lot more than that, because by stewardship, what they say, we create the material things that serve the spirit, whatever you call it.

Whatever you call it, God, or Love thy neighbor, that stuff.

Which I believe in, and we go to church, and I don’t always agree with some of the stuff they say, like how you should run your life.

That’s not the province of religion, I don’t think.

Religion is Jesus and God.

And stewardship. And the point is it’s the same with the farm.

These movies where the farmers are losin the farm, and they’re real noble, how they love the land. That’s not him. He took the farm away from his old man, let him die in the chicken house. Money-grabbin Pennsylvania Dutch.

But stewardship. . . There’s a point bein made here. . .

I have trouble thinkin. I get so damn. . .

The minister said like, “We’re the world.”

We are the world.

We’re impelled into ways which we’re not responsible for, because one generation and the next, it’s like a digestive process. You don’t think about digestin your food, it just happens. Mouth chewin. Big red mouth.

But we’re talkin stewardship. Major responsibility for the world.

Which I take on.

Frank? What’s doin?

Moved in here, I built the whole back.

You member, the stairs was over there, didn’t go to nothin. I put somethin up to go to.

South field, I cleared that, they said you’ll never grow nothin, I made that grow. I stopped the wash-away.

You looked at this place, an Dad he never kept it up, you said “What you get me into? It’s an old Rag House.”

Member that? Old Rag House, cause it had up rags, papers, lath on the front, insulation. “What you get me into?”

I try to be good to you.

Time we went to that restaurant, they didn’t even have a counter, you couldn’t understand the waiter, some kinda Dago, five dollars for a shrimp? Member that? Walked outa there. Don was a little baby.

And you were in labor, it went on so long you said “Call the vet, he’ll just reach in.”

All little stuff. There in your head.

They say now you’re sposed to love each other. Don’t get married less you do. Then you don’t, you get divorced. Hit her cross the face, you get divorced.

I must never loved her. If I had, I’d left her when she got like that.

I took care. I bought her a wig. I fed her. I cleaned her off.

Won’t that do?