Glen’s a sissy name...

 

Glen’s a sissy name...

  This one is from Creason family lore but Greg used to repeat it for fun. I had a redneck Uncle Hank who had a farm up in Paso Robles when the area was totally rural. Our first visits as children to "the farm" were exciting since the place covered many acres with a dozen cows, pigs, Dandy, a horse, a chinchilla hutch and a bull named Carl. There was a small farmhouse, a barn, an outbuilding of bedrooms above a milk shed and the garage. There was also a natural hot water sulphur spring that was tapped into an old clawfoot bathtub by the barn where you could soak until you were like putty.  Kids could roam about the farm and not be expected to actually work which began very early before we suburban brats ever saw the sunrise. Uncle Hank was a strongly opinionated man who was ultra-conservative and would have been MAGA if he had a chance. He hated communists, homosexuals, non-Catholics, intellectuals and Sigmund Freud (pronounced Frude). There are hundred of tales around the farm but this particular one took place in the mid-1950's when I got to visit the farm by myself and spent a lot of time with Uncle Hank and his boxer dog Jim who would gallop up the stairs to my bedroom when they let him out of the kitchen in the mornings. Aunt Lucille also got up very early to go to work in a bakery in town so for a couple of weeks it was just me and my Uncle on the farm. Some of the stuff he taught me was ignorant but the way of a farm. He let me shoot a shotgun that knocked me on my ass and showed me how to milk a cow and get them out to pasture. He showed me how to make three-minute eggs for breakfast and what made a bartlett pear ready to be picked. During this time he shot small animals with his thirty-ought-six rifle in front of me and when I cried about it he chastised me. It was at this time when he just let me know he would no longer call me by my given name. He said "Glen's a sissy name...I'm gonna call you Mike!"  Truthfully, I was not hurt or feeling demeaned by his comment but since he was an adult I just accepted this new moniker and was happy to be handed a bb gun and told to go shoot lizards. Over the years I loved visiting the farm but it grew less and less until in 1975 when I came up for my Aunt Ladybug's birthday with a full beard and sweet girlfriend Emily. Uncle Hank would not speak to me because he felt I was trying to look like Karl Marx.