Coonridge Digest: If it stinks, there’s something wrong

Greetin’s from the Ridge.

I recently walked through the kitchen of a school cafeteria and saw a pamphlet that seemed slightly smaller than the large print edition of War and Peace. It was an instructional manual on how to cook food and keep it safe. Too bad they wasted all that paper. What they really needed was Grandma Gebhardt’s nose.

Grandma had a smeller on her that would have been the envy of the K9 corps. Whether it was a piece of chicken just one day too old or a grandson who’d skipped his bath, Grandma could sniff it out. This tough old farm wife lived by one simple rule: If it smells bad, get rid of it. She modified this rule a bit in the case of her grandkids and the chicken house, but cottage cheese and leftover oyster dressing didn’t escape the detector built into Grandma’s nose.

As we tape up the lid on the year 2000, we would do well to live my Grandma’s simple rule of thumb.. or nose. If it stinks, give it the heave.

An electoral system in which the man with the least votes wins? Take a sniff and toss it! A system of votin’ that varies not only from state to state but from county to county and precinct to precinct? One sniff oughta tell you that this cheese has gone bad, honey.

Somebody recently came up with the astoundin’ discovery that the air on a jumbo jet might be bad for you. Grandma Gebhardt could have sniffed this one out while she was still at the boardin’ gate. Anybody who’s ever flown knows the bitter medicinal smell that comes shootin’ out of the air ducts when they flip on the plane’s air conditioning. Unlike their bottled spring water, this stuff was not captured in the purified atmosphere of the Rockies, then bottled and shipped to the TWA terminal.

If it stinks, there’s somethin’ wrong with it.

Hillary will be paid an $8 million advance for her side of the story by a publisher. Grandma always had this theory: Once you got rid of a stench, the key was Lysol, not bringin’ the dead possum back into the house. Gimme air!

The U.S. postal service ups the ante by a single penny right after New Year’s, leavin’ most households with a drawer full of handicapped Christmas stamps in need of a one-cent prosthesis. One cent? Gimme a break! Why don’t they jack it up to 35 cents then leave us alone for the next ten years? Grandma could have sniffed this one out through the locked doors of a UPS truck.

After promising to bring "only the very best.." to Washington, an amazin’ number of Bush’s "very best" picks happen to be Republican governors and politicos. Wow! Who’d have ever imagined that the best and brightest in our nation just happened to be G.O.P. faithful? Grandma wouldn’t have had to open the fridge to sniff out this old herring.

11th-hour Presidential pardons for convicted felons? I suppose that most Presidents have been guilty of this shame-faced little perk. The stinker here seems to be the befuddled rascal who first came up with the scheme. Unless my high school history teacher mislead me, I thought we’d fought a war to depose ourselves of a king and his whims. Grandma Gebhardt would have pegged this one as a czar-dine long past its fishy prime.

They say that what comes around goes around and in this case, it’s gone around once too often. The current trend in "spin," whether it be political or corporate, is fast-creatin’ a nation of young folks who won’t believe anything. It’s time to stop this top in its tracks. Face it Granny, spin stinks no matter how many times you twirl it.

My vote for the most awe-inspirin’ sight of this millennium is the view of earth from the astronaut’s viewpoint. One delicate ball of swirlin’ blue and white, lookin’ fragile enough to burst if poked. Whether it’s the foul stench of hate or the deadly poisons we’ve created in the name of progress, we’re in need of fresh air – spiritual and otherwise.

Whenever I’d have the nerve to stay home sick from school, my Dad would come and take hard look at me then say, "You know, what you need is a trip to the farm to blow some of the stink off of you." He believed that a good cold day of cuttin’ hedge posts or wrestlin’ hogs could cure any disease. As a result, I seldom missed school.

I send you New Year’s greetin’s from Coonridge. We’re surrounded by clover fields, hog lots, silage, and compost but we can still recognize a new stink when it comes waftin’ our way. I could send you all no finer New Year’s wish than a year in which we simply make it our goal to air things out, blow the stink off – startin’ with ourselves.

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door, but you’ll enjoy the trip.