GOOD MORING, FRIENDS

A REMEMBERAMBLE, 1/15/26

Lil Merle is generally the one who tells me it is time to get up. It is no indicator of how bad his need is, to "go," but is an accurate gauge of how bad he wants to go bark at cats. That is pretty much, his main...ugh, only raison d'etre! He wakes up thinking, "deddee and conway over there sleeping like walruses (I have no idea where he learned of walruses, or how he knows they sleep heavily), not caring a whit that there are a plethora (oh, it turns out lil Merle is not as dumb as the babee says he is) of fat, foolish, felines that are in need of a good barking at. He does not consider "cat barking," as a sin, it begs the question, "if God didn't want cats barked at, then why did he make them?" It is hard to fend off that sort of logic, especially in a dog. I hate to say this, but lil Merle has been known to fib occasionally, if he is nagging me to get up and let him out, and I just lie there, he has been known to squeeze out a nefarious, and odorific fart, to make me think it is truly an emergency situation. It is an unfair tactic, because although it is almost certainly a ploy on his part, you just can't take the chance that it is a precursor poot, leading to a cleanup on aisle four! Sadly, well for you the reader, that somehow made me think about medieval castle privies. Some of you are laughing right now about the sudden turn of events, but more of you are recoiling in disgust, but with my writing abilities, I suspect that is a common occurrence. If I had an extra "laugh" emoji, it would be right here, but I don't, so it won't. Now, getting back to the topic at hand, and that was those ingenious old castle privies. They were called "garderobes." Castle builders placed the outhouses on the upper floors of a castle where the family and other occupants "stayed at," as they say. The castles were constructed of stone or brick, and usually surrounded by a water-filled moat. Garderobes were place in several key locations where they would be needed. The masons built them as "bump-outs," on the castle's outside walls, they were small rooms with a toilet opening, usually with a wooden seat, but some were brick or stone. The opening allowed the "waste" to drop from the garderobe to the water-filled moat, way, way, way down "there!"

GARDEROBES: castle wall outhouses

Garderobes were an ingenious invention, allowing waste to dispose of itself, and it made the moat an even more formidable barrier to enemy attacks, by making the water somewhat putrid, and certainly not a body of water anyone would want to swim across. I reckon though, it took some getting used to using a toilet hanging from the side of a high-up castle wall, with nothing between your butt and the "deep blue sea," or rather, shallow brown moat. I will now leave this topic once and for all, and move to some new topic that will leave a better taste in your mouth. Gimme a minute...just let the theme from Jeopardy play in your head as you await my new topic, please. How about a bit of trivia, okay? I just thought of a good one, so what is/was an antimacasser? It is more of a yankee term than a southern one, so it is okay if you don't know. It was not a word I knew until I knew it. That ranks among the dumbest sentences I have ever written! I will close with something I was thinking of with some amusement, and that was something you rarely see these days, and that is an automobile or pickup belonging to a chronic alcoholic, that was never truly wrecked, but was beaten and dented from one end to the other, all resulting from drunken, low speed, crashes, with other parked vehicles, fence posts, utility poles, trees, brick pillars, stumps, lumps, and bumps of all kinds. Y'all likely had one like this in your town. One of our best known examples in Swainsboro was the late, unlamented Glenn Nunn. Don't worry he was childless so no was harmed in the making of this accusation. It was said of him, that if he lived long enough, he would bump into everyone's car. It was told on him that one Saturday, Glenn ran a red light at main and main, striking a man who was driving his pickup truck. Witnesses saw that Mr. Nunn ran the red light, and even he admitted he had run the redlight, when the police came. However! The man whose truck was hit, kept saying, each time Mr. Nunn said it was his fault, the man would protest and answer back, "no, it was my fault!" After a few minutes of this parley, the officer stopped the man mid-sentence, and asked, "how is it that the witnesses and Mr. Nunn say you were not at fault, but you keep saying, "oh but it was my fault?" The man replied, "well, it was my fault, because I saw Mr. Nunn was in town earlier this morning, and I should have took my ass home!" Go take on the day, do something to help another, and babee asks "you got shickens?" We love y'all and take such pleasure from having you meet us here daily.

NUMBERS 6: 24-26, KJV

we boys three, babee conway, lil Merle, & me