The house I grew up in was built in 1913, in that murky era between horses and cars, when a homebuilder had to decide which way the transportation winds were blowing. The man who built the house evidently believed cars were a fad, so he constructed a barn behind the house. My father was always trying to park his too-big car in a too-small stall, like someone struggling into a too-tight pair of pants. Half the back end hung out. While the barn was a bust, storage-wise it was ideal, handily absorbing the flotsam and jetsam of my parents’ lives. Growing up, I spent many a rainy Saturday in that old barn mining for gold.

When my wife and I bought our first home, I began to fill the garage with all manner of useful items over my wife’s objections. We have five bicycles. Their tires are flat, their frames coated with dust, their chains rusted to the sprockets. But it’s nothing a bicycle pump and a squirt of WD-40 can’t fix. I have four bicycle pumps and three cans of WD-40. Supplies aren’t the problem; expectations are. If I fix the bikes, my wife will expect me to repair everything else and sell it all on Craigslist, which I have no intention of doing. There’s no sense raising her hopes only to see them dashed.

I have four lawn chairs I intend to fix just as soon as I find the time to get the webbing to repair them. I bought them 20 years ago at a garage sale. The lady selling them apparently didn’t understand their value. The seats need to be replaced, but it’s nearly impossible to find a good old-fashioned lawn chair anymore. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve tripled in value. With CD interest rates running around 2 percent, I can’t afford not to keep them.

As a general rule, my wife avoids the garage. But every now and then she wanders in, poking around. She invariably sees something she thinks I don’t need and quizzes me about it. Like the time she came upon my watering can.

“Why do we need that?” she asked. “There’s a hole in it.”

“It’s nothing that a little duct tape can’t fix,” I said. I have six rolls, and possibly more, in an old refrigerator.

Her efforts to reform me reach a fever pitch each spring, a season customarily associated with putting things in order. Spring is my least favorite time of year.

In April my wife hints at her intentions. “Wouldn’t it be nice if there were room in the garage to park our cars,” she says. I let her remark pass. It’s only the warm-up.

In early May, always on a Saturday morning, she reminds me the town dump is having a free community day, and that we can throw away anything we want for free.

As if she has to remind me! It’s my favorite day of the year. I drive to the dump and bring back a truckload of perfectly fine stuff other people have discarded. That’s how I got my three-wheeled lawn mower with the blown engine. I’m going to fix it one of these days.

Not long ago, my wife and I were watching television at my parent’s house and a show about hoarders came on. Their houses are stacked from floor to ceiling. A psychiatrist was saying it’s a mental illness, an excuse we trot out when we don’t want to face the truth. Let’s put the blame where it belongs, on architects who 70 years ago stopped designing houses with adequate storage. My parent’s house had a full basement, a full attic, a two-story barn, and three extra rooms with no specific purpose, to be used at the homeowner’s discretion. As a consequence, my parents got along just fine. If the architect who designed our house 22 years ago knew what he was doing, my wife and I wouldn’t have to argue every spring.

The New No-Car Garage The Saturday Evening Post

Uncle Sam wants … your money.

Ever since I was a kid and read that Al Capone was arrested for tax evasion, I have feared the Internal Revenue Service. Think of it, Al Capone had killed a zillion people, and while the police were trying to find proof to arrest him for murder, a skinny nerd with a green eyeshade nailed Capone for tax evasion. Insofar as it is possible, I try never to irritate the IRS.

In an effort to stay on the good side of the IRS, I’ve offered them several suggestions to keep them in the black. For starters, since I’m self-employed, I have to pay my income taxes four times a year. I always forget to pay until the day they’re due and end up paying with a credit card so I don’t get arrested and sent to Alcatraz like Al Capone. I use a Kroger credit card, but if the IRS had a credit card, I would use theirs. Credit card companies make $20 billion a year, give or take a few, and it’s time the IRS got a piece of the action. Using an IRS credit card could earn points toward a tax deduction. If you ratted out your tax delinquent neighbor with the barking dog that poops in your yard, you could get bonus points. It was a great idea, but the IRS hasn’t responded.

Or, consider a lottery play: Powerball recently hit $587.5 million. Two families split the money. Chances are good they’ll do something stupid with it and ruin their lives. Since the lottery and the IRS are both run by the government, it makes sense for the lottery to rig it so the IRS wins. For a $2 investment, the IRS could have made $587.5 million. Before long, the government would be awash in money, free of debt. I sent this suggestion to the IRS, but nothing came of it.

They also didn’t respond to my suggestion they buy metal detectors and hit the beaches on the weekend. There have been thousands of shipwrecks over the years, most of them involving ships filled to the brim with gold doubloons. Nic Davies of Shrewsbury, England, in his first venture out with a metal detector, found 10,000 ancient Roman coins buried in a clay pot. Officials estimate they’re worth a billion zillion dollars. Personally, I don’t care for treasure hunters because they dig holes, don’t bother to refill them, and I fall in them and break my legs. But if the IRS agents found enough buried money so we wouldn’t have to pay taxes anymore, I’d learn to cope.

In that same vein, the IRS could send its employees out to garage sales to buy Van Gogh paintings hidden underneath dogs-playing-poker pictures. A half dozen times a year I hear of someone doing this. It’s a great way to make some fast money, but when I wrote the IRS, there was no reply. Nothing. Nada. Zip. It’s no wonder our country’s coffers are empty.

To hear people talk, you’d think the IRS was invented by Adolf Hitler. In fact, it was created in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln to help pay for the Civil War. In nearly every presidential poll, Lincoln ranks as our favorite president. The Republicans refer to themselves as the Party of Lincoln, because, if they called themselves the Party of the IRS, they’d never win another office. Don’t get me wrong, I love and admire the IRS and wish them nothing but the best.

We are fast approaching another April 15, my favorite day of the year. Most people hate that day, but not me. (Did I mention my admiration for the IRS?) I’ll spend the weeks leading up to it carefully going over my financial records, making sure to report every dollar I’ve made in the past year, even the $50 my mom and dad gave me for Christmas. If you happen to work for the IRS, I know you’re busy checking everyone’s return. Save yourself the time and trouble, and don’t give mine a second glance.

The IRS Has A Secret Admirer The Saturday Evening Post

There are things I liked as a kid that in my adult years I no longer enjoy, but my enthusiasm for snow has continued undiminished. My Grandpa Hank told me I wouldn’t like snow when I got to be his age. My grandfather was wrong about a number of things, but this was his biggest misjudgment.

I liked snow as a kid because it got me out of school. The cancellations would be announced on WGRT, our town’s radio station. Sometimes WGRT wouldn’t even wait for official word. They would predict the closing the night before, working themselves into a frenzy. My siblings and I would take their prophecies as gospel truth, put on our coats, and go for a walk around the block in the snow. I remember how the snow lit the night, and the smothered quiet, and the feel of snow landing on my exposed neck and running in rivulets to the collar of my long underwear. When we got home, Mom would make us hot chocolate, not the stuff in a packet with the pebble-hard marshmallows you dump into hot water, but the real kind with milk and cocoa and sugar. I would stay up late, sitting at my bedroom window, watching the snow fall, backlit by the street light. Cleo Walker would drive past in the snowplow, the strobe casting and retracting its yellow light against the houses. Cleo was a nice man, but it was hard to feel kindly toward a man working to get us back to school.

There were two sledding hills in our town. One of them was at the park but would be closed whenever a kid rammed into the basketball post at the bottom of the hill and cracked his head open. It was always the same kid, Donny Millardo, who had a permanent crease in his forehead from hitting the post.

The other hill was in our backyard. Kids from all over town would descend on our backyard. I went through 12 years of school without ever getting beat up. All the bullies wanted to stay on my good side so they could sled on our hill. Snow was my salvation. If our yard had been flat, I wouldn’t have lived past junior high.

The only thing I didn’t like about snow were the rubber boots my mother made me wear when the first flake hit the ground in mid-November. They had eight buckles, which iced over and froze shut. I couldn’t unlatch them until the spring thaw. There were five children in our family and I fell toward the end, so I wore hand-me-down boots from my brother Doug, who had the smallest feet in the state of Indiana. I would pull the boots on over my shoes, straining and grunting and stomping until the heel of my shoe cleared the back of the boot. I wore them all winter, even slept and showered in them, lest I snap a bone pulling them back on.

This was back in the day before good gloves. When I was a kid, only one kind of glove had been invented: the brown jersey glove. They were made of a special kind of cotton that absorbed 10 times their weight in water and within five minutes would freeze into an icy claw. I continue to like snow because it gets me out of work. On the days it snows, I shovel my driveway, clean my walks, spread salt, then drive over to my parents’ house and do it all over again. If I really want to avoid work, I shovel out my brother’s house, my sister’s house, and my neighbor’s house. Then I drive to the grocery store and buy doughnuts for the town workers plowing the streets. A good snow can occupy me for eight or more hours, by which time it’s too late to go to work. I can enjoy an entire day off from work and look virtuous doing it, even though I’m playing hooky.

We don’t seem to get as much snow as we did when I was a kid. It wasn’t uncommon, when I was five or six years old, for snow to be up past my knees. I can’t remember the last time that happened. Now it only reaches the top of my boots. I’m no weather expert, but I suspect this has something to do with global warming.

Still, to waken in the morning and see the glint and dazzle of snow upon the ground was, and remains, a deep and wondrous joy. I’m not sure what it was that turned my grandfather against snow, but I hope whatever it was never happens to me.

Snow Days The Saturday Evening Post

We are thick in the middle of a presidential election, which has been a rancorous affair, causing many Americans to long for the olden days when we were governed by clueless English kings. I wonder if it’s too late to apologize to the British, abolish Congress, and ask the queen to take us back?

When I was a kid, elections were a happy event, earning us a day off school if we assisted the candidates by passing out their pencils, pens, matchbooks, and rulers. Naturally, as the date neared, every child in town took a sudden interest in the body politic and its attendant obligations. We would rise early and hurry to the voting sites to eat the doughnuts intended for poll workers who were overweight and should have been grateful for our intervention but seldom were. At noon, we would walk to the Dairy Queen and eat hot dogs cooked by a light bulb and revel in the democracy that was America.

At 6 o’clock, when the polls closed, we would gather in the courthouse on the town square and watch through the evening hours as the county auditor climbed a stepladder every few moments to write the latest votes on a chalkboard hung high upon the wall. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, making me queasy, causing me to associate nausea with politics, a pattern that persists to this day.

Around 10, the results from the outlying polls were called in, the numbers adjusted to allow for chicanery and error, and the victors announced. They would step to the podium and humbly thank, in order, God, their family, the long-deceased founders of our town, then end with an unrehearsed and lengthy speech on the general wonders of America and the specific virtues of Danville and Hendricks County, Indiana.

My father, the town board president, had raised the speeches to an art form. In my mind it was the acme of representative democracy, watching the votes accrue beside my father’s name on the board overhead, then listening to him extoll the town that had opened its arms to our family in 1957. With the presidency came the responsibility of keeping the groundhog population at bay, lest they destroy the backyard gardens that everyone had in those days. My father was a crack-shot, like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and the terror of groundhogs everywhere. Most townspeople thought any man unable to exterminate rodents was unfit for public office. To this day, I still half expect presidential candidates to tell us their stance on groundhogs.

Being Indiana, everyone in our town was Republican, except for Bob Pearcy who owned The Danville Gazette newspaper. He also had a maple tree in his front yard that had been twisted a quarter-turn by the 1948 tornado. Pug Weesner, the owner of The Republican newspaper, lost his house in the same tornado, causing some in our town to believe God was a Democrat, temporarily swelling the ranks of that party and ushering Harry S. Truman into the White House.

There was a luster to government service in those days—a regard not only for the office, but also for those who held it. World War II was still fresh in our collective memory, a cataclysmic event resolved by government’s know-how and young men’s courage. If today the less capable are attracted to office, and there does seem to be a weakening in the strain, that was not the case then. The words, “I work for the government” were a statement of pride. One did not run for Congress for the lifetime healthcare; one ran to serve, to help, to make America the “shining city on the hill.” Service to the country was a calling, not a last resort when employment in the private sector didn’t pan out.

Election night, that holy night, was the one school night my parents let me stay up late. By 9 o’clock I would be flagging, so would curl up behind the pillar next to the marble staircase and fall asleep in that cradle of democracy. At 10 o’clock, the last precinct would phone in, and the cheering would waken me.

I would listen to the victory speeches, as one would a bedtime story, lulled to sleep by the soft cadence of freedom.

Voting Back in the Day The Saturday Evening Post

When I was a kid, everything essential to life could be found on our town’s courthouse square. Lemmy Chalfant was the town plumber. His shop was next door to the bank, just north of the Buckhorn Bar, near the dry cleaners, which was beside the post office and across the street from the Hoosier Hotel, alongside the Coffee Cup Restaurant, beside the Johnston’s IGA, across the alley from the office supply store, catty-corner from Baker’s Hardware and Money’s Television and Radio, just down from the Royal Theater and Lawrence’s Drug Store, beside the town’s other bank, across Main Street from Dinsmore’s Basket Shop, which was east of Mingle’s dress shop and Thompson’s Rexall, next to Beecham’s Menswear, down the block from Danners’ five-and-dime.

In the basement underneath the Hoosier Hotel was Floyd’s Bicycle Shop and John Foster’s barbershop. John Foster was one of three barbers in town, none of whom had the least bit of talent in matters tonsorial. Every man in town had tufts of hair sprouting amidst shorn flesh, like a dog with mange who had scratched itself raw. In our town, if a man failed at every other venture, he became a barber in order to share his misery with others.

As town squares go, ours was a doozy, so of course it could not last. The stores died one by one, replaced by law offices, except for the Royal Theater, which has enjoyed a resurgence, and The Republican newspaper, whose editor is a Unitarian democrat.

Of all the stores now gone, I miss Danners’ five-and-dime the most. It sold, among other wonders, hairnets, penny candy, lampshades, and parrots who had been taught to cuss by our town’s juvenile delinquent, Ronny Millardo. His very name was synonymous with wanton depravity. Even the Quaker pastor, who loved everyone, despised Ronny Millardo. Continuing his early penchant for hanging around the ethically suspect, Ronny Millardo moved away, went to college, became a lawyer, and was eventually elected to Congress. His mother, as you can imagine, was devastated.

But I digress.

Another favorite was Baker’s Hardware, ran by Rawleigh Baker, who also owned the funeral home. We lived down the street from the funeral home and became such close friends with Rawleigh that when my sister went to college, we transported her belongings in Rawleigh’s hearse. Eighty-seven miles from our front door to Ball State University, my sister weeping in shame the entire way, her reputation in tatters the moment we drove onto campus, my father stopping at every corner to ask directions, rolling down the hearse window to introduce himself and his daughter, another proud parent paving the way for his beloved first child.

Smiley Dinsmore and his wife owned the Dinsmore’s Basket Shop. Smiley had the world’s largest false teeth, causing his lips to pull back into a permanent rictus grin, hence his nickname. Dinsmore’s had once been a grocery store and among the back shelves one could still find evidence of Smiley’s life in the food trade, mostly old cans of beans dating from the Civil War era, which Smiley had marked down to a nickel and still couldn’t sell, except to the occasional museum.

When the grocery trade dried up, Smiley switched to baskets. A hand-painted sign stood out front of the store, along Main Street. The sign should have read: “Lady, make that man stop. Let you look. See 10,000 baskets.” Smiley was a fine man, but a poor grammarian, so the sign was devoid of punctuation. “LADY MAKE THAT MAN STOP LET YOU LOOK SEE 10000 BASKETS.” By the time motorists figured out Smiley was selling baskets, they were a block past the shop and in no mood to turn around.

For four years of my childhood, I delivered The Indianapolis News, whose local office was in the basement of Mingle’s dress shop. It was Ronny Millardo who had the idea to drill a hole in the newspaper’s ceiling and peer up into the changing rooms of Mingle’s, where he saw Mrs. Miller, the school librarian, in a state of undress and fainted dead away.

It was my pleasure to deliver newspapers to nearly every business on the square—the hotel, the two lawyers, the banks, the five-and-dime, Lemmy Chalfant’s plumbing shop, and the Buckhorn bar, where I would stand at the door, not permitted to enter, so would fling the paper into the smoky depths, then cross the street to the Coffee Cup Restaurant where Mrs. Smith had a bottle of Coke waiting for me on hot, summer days. Though it did not seem so at the time, in my memory it has become a nearly perfect childhood and one I return to visit time and again in the dappled light of present days.

A Perfect Childhood The Saturday Evening Post

I got cracking right away on the group’s current selection, a bestselling novel that critics had hailed as “a work of extraordinary genius.” But I was in trouble by page three. This was a baleful tale of unceasing misery inflicted upon a gentle soul named Geet, who had the bum luck to be born into a corruption-plagued Third World country where every possible hell was visited upon him by evil government authorities, street thugs, and assorted scoundrels.

But Geet did not suffer alone. With 543 pages of purgatory still ahead, I shared his torment: Geet’s pneumonia on page 36; the theft of his meager possessions on page 98; his best friend’s death on page 255. I dared not imagine the horrors of page 456. I wondered: Was this any way to spend my precious reading time?

I expected the other members to hate the book as much as I did. I was wrong. “I thought the writing was exquisite,” the hostess opined. “It reminds us all of the banality of evil.”

“I agree,” nodded another bookworm. “When Geet had his only remaining foot cut off by the oncoming train, it was obviously a metaphor for the abuses of unchecked governmental power.”

Bewildered by this praise, I worried that I was not smart enough to appreciate a literary work this depressing. When I declared that I thought the book should be required reading for all prison inmates, because it was the worst punishment I could think of, the group was silent. Good, maybe they’ll kick me out! I hoped. However, perhaps in the spirit of diversity, they kept me on as the token non-intellectual.

The next day I listed the book for sale online. It sold within five minutes. The few dollars hardly compensated for my reading agony, but at least the miasma was out of the house. Our next book was less depressing, yet boasted the wildly popular themes of severe family dysfunction and kaballah. Hoping the club would lighten up, I thoughtfully brought the humor books that I was quite fond of to the next meeting as suggested reading. They ignored me again, as one might ignore someone who had accidentally made an embarrassing sound.

I stayed in the club only long enough to get my turn to pick a book and lead the discussion, after which I happily resigned. And I never thought I’d miss the tyranny of the book club—until I read the classic Nicholas and Alexandra. Then I wished I had a group of folks with whom I could strike up conversations that began, “Isn’t it fascinating to consider how Russian history might have turned out so differently if only the Tsar’s son had not been a hemophiliac?” After all, one does not want to sound like a snob. However, I oppressed my husband with my knowledge of the Bolsheviks, Archduke Ferdinand, and Russian supply lines until he begged for mercy.

Reconsidering, I would join another book club, but only if, like the Tsar, I could dictate everyone’s reading material, every month. I might not attract many recruits this way, but I can dangle this tantalizing offer: New York Times bestsellers with misery index of 30 percent or more will not be considered.

Book Club Agony The Saturday Evening Post

Farm life changes through the year, each season bringing with it certain tasks. Farmers whittle in the spring on their front porches. I learned that from watching the Ma and Pa Kettle movies. Pa would whittle while Geoduck and Crowbar, his Native American friends, did all the work. Farming is hard work and it’s best to have help.

“We need some helpers around here,” I told my wife. “At least two, but maybe three or four.”

“Whatever for?” she asked. Even though my wife grew up on a farm, she is surprisingly uninformed about such matters.

“Oh, this and that,” I said. “First one thing and then another. Lassoing chickens and such. You know, farm work.”

It was apparent I was going to have to do all the heavy lifting if our farm was to make it.

I nevertheless got much whittling done in the spring before I moved onto the summer work—praying for rain.

I did that all through June, July, and August, spending hour after hour beseeching the Lord. Farmers do a lot of beseeching. I would head upstairs after lunch, lie down on my bed, and beseech. My wife was suspicious and at one point accused me of napping, even though the perfect amount of rain fell, for which I received no credit. Farming, I was learning, is a thankless task.

Autumn is the best season to be a farmer because of the hoedowns and square dances. Again, I was well prepared. In seventh grade, our Phys. Ed. teacher, Mr. Johnson, had taught us to square dance. I learned all the steps—do-si-do, allemande left, and ’round the barn. The last move was my own invention and consisted of repeatedly circling my dance partner until I got dizzy and fell over.

Hoedowns and square dances can occupy one’s entire autumn—to the point of exhaustion—so I was glad to see winter roll around. In winter farmers huddle around the fire or go to the general store and sit on a cracker barrel. Except now crackers come in boxes, so farmers sit on boxes not barrels. It isn’t good for the crackers, but that’s not the farmer’s problem. No, the farmer has a bigger problem—borrowing money from the bank. After the farmer is sufficiently rested, he visits the bank where he is told he owes too much money already. The farmer pleads, the banker refuses to loan him money, and the next day the sheriff shows up and orders the farmer to move. The farmer’s wife spends the rest of the day crying and wiping dishes and the children eat the last of the stale bread. That night, just when matters are desperate, the farmer’s friends show up, a whole crowd of them. A reluctant spokesman is shoved forward, he bows his head, scuffs his boot on the ground, and says, in a shy sort of way, “Well, Dale, (a surprising number of farmers are named Dale) we reckoned we’d help you.” He pulls a dollar bill from his overalls and hands it to Dale. Soon everyone is handing Dale wadded up dollar bills until Dale has enough money to pay the banker and get a new loan.

It is rare to see an individual so well-suited for a vocation as I am for farming. Oliver Wendell Douglas had it exactly right—green acres is the place for me.

Farm Living Is the Life for Me The Saturday Evening Post

But some don’t have any rhyme or reason, others aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, and still more are dumber than a box of rocks. I don’t want to rain on the parade, but it goes without saying that it’s time to take the gloves off and get down to brass tacks, because I’ve got an axe to grind with the silliest clichés since the chicken or the egg.

1. You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat It Too. Really? I thought that was the point of having cake. What else are you supposed to do with it? Throwing it at people sounds entertaining, but might lead to negative consequences. In reality, most of the people that have cake will also eat it too.

2. There’s No Such Thing As a Stupid Question. Not true. There are lots of stupid questions. Asking the police officer who pulled you over, “How many stinkin’ cops does it take to screw in a light bulb?” is a stupid question. Asking your significant other, “You’re not going to wear that, are you?” is a stupid question. Obvious questions can also be dumb. “It’s cold out here, isn’t it?” in the middle of a blizzard, and “did that hurt?” when someone slammed their thumb with a hammer are questions that do not make one look very smart. Perhaps we should substitute a better saying: “Don’t be a jerk if someone asks a stupid question.”

3. The Third Time Is the Charm. First coined by Thomas Edison when he invented the light bulb, “the third time is the charm” has changed a lot over the years. The reason is simple: it’s disheartening to hear “the 10,000^th time is the charm.” It just doesn’t have the same ring to it. We needed something more inspirational, so we now use this abbreviated version.

4. Dirt Poor vs. Filthy Rich. Well, which one is it? I probably don’t understand because I am mired in the begrimed middle class. Or maybe because I am squalidly average. Or verminously run of the mill.

5. Take the Bull By the Horns. I wonder if anyone has thought about what would happen if someone actually attempted to do this. It definitely wouldn’t be pretty. First of all, it’s highly unlikely that someone would be able to grab the horns in the first place, because they’re attached to two tons of hooves, muscle, and anger-management problems. For the sake of argument, let’s say someone does grab the bull by the horns. Then what? What could a 200-pound man possibly do when he has hold of a 2,500-pound bull’s horns?

6. Don’t Judge a Book By Its Cover.Not always true. Sometimes you can. For example, if a book’s cover says “Random House Dictionary,” or “Auto Repair for Dummies” it’s easy to judge what’s inside. Likewise, if someone’s wearing a football jersey, he or she is probably at least a casual sports fan. Someone wearing a bright orange shirt that says “Inmate: 27634,” has probably escaped from prison, and a good judgment call would be to get as far away from that person as possible.

7. A Stopped Clock Is Right Twice A Day. While true, the real problem is that people say this as if it actually means something. There are 60 seconds every minute, 60 minutes every hour, and 24 hours every day, resulting in a grand total of 86,400 seconds per day. This means that a stopped clock is right 1/43,200^th of the time — not a big number and probably why no one pays attention to stopped clocks. If a person is only right 1/43,200^th of the time, I’m not going to pay attention to him or her either. And don’t get me started about a stopped military clock.

8. The Five-Second Rule. Amazingly, people are convinced that if a piece of food is on the ground under five seconds, it’s still okay to eat. While it would be nice if this were true, alas, it’s not. It turns out the ground is not very sanitary. For starters, it’s covered in dirt, which is not very clean. That’s why we refer to unclean things as “dirty.” Furthermore, many things on the ground are really unsanitary, like dog poo. Anything that falls on that, even for only four and a half seconds, is not okay to eat. And why the five second time-frame? How is that more sanitary than six seconds? This rule truly doesn’t make any sense.

9. As Pure As the Driven Snow. Where does snow lie? That’s right — on the ground. We just covered why that isn’t pure. Furthermore, water isn’t so pure itself. That is why we have water purification systems. “As pure as unfiltered, frozen water lying on the dirt.”

10. If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Another. No kidding. This is like a doctor saying, “If you don’t have the flu, you must have some other ailment,” or a detective saying, “if the criminal isn’t here, he’s somewhere else.” Certainly, this cliché is true: by definition we must be referring to a thing when we use the word “it,” so when “it” is not one thing, it must be another according to the English language. It’s just that it’s not very helpful, because “it” could be anything and everything else, or “it” could even be nothing at all.

The 10 Silliest Clichés Since Sliced Bread The Saturday Evening Post

Let’s start with winter.

God did an admirable job with winter. We can all agree there are few sights lovelier than a blanket of freshly fallen snow. Unfortunately, after two or three days, the white stuff turns to a yucky, slushy gray and leaks in over the tops of our shoes. I wouldn’t let the snow fall on roads and sidewalks except for once a year to give the kids a snow day—one of life’s unheralded joys. And after three days all the snow would disappear, just as quickly as it had fallen, to make room for more fresh powder. But I would permit snow to linger on mountaintops so folks could ski.

I would also be much more selective about the location of snow. Washington, D.C., would get considerably more snow than it has in the past—snowfalls of blizzard proportions—which would keep Congress from meeting and further damaging our country. Buffalo, New York, on the other hand, gets too much snow, so I would give them a break. Florida has always gotten off easy in the snow department, so I would give that state a lot more—except for the part of Florida where I go in February. It would remain a balmy 82 degrees.

And I wouldn’t stop there with my winter improvements. It’s nearly impossible to buy coats, hats, and gloves in the winter because stores are already stocking swimsuits for summer. I would strike with lightning any store that sold clothing six months before we could conceivably wear it. While whipping the stores into shape, I’d also crack down on teenage clerks so busy chatting with other clerks that they ignore their customers.

If I were in charge of the universe, I would arrange for my family to receive free Super Bowl tickets, preferably on the 50-yard line. I would also make sure the Indianapolis Colts won the Super Bowl, which would take a miracle since they’re not in the playoffs.  I would strike the other team with boils and a good, old-fashioned Biblical plague or two.  

I’d do something about my garage, too. It’s crammed to the rafters with junk, leaving no room for our cars. My wife and I begin each winter day scraping frost from our windshields. If I were in charge, I’d double the size of my garage. It’s a sorry affair when doubling your garage requires less work than cleaning it, but that’s what happens after living 13 years in the same place.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac landed on my doorstep not long ago. It is predicting a milder than usual winter for my neck of the woods, so I might not get to try out all the changes I have in mind. Then again, the almanac could be mistaken and I could make all those adjustments and more. “Adjustments” sound so much better than “changes,” don’t you think?

The more I consider being in charge of the world, the more I like the idea. I might not stop with winter, either, but move right into spring and do something about snow in April—which should never happen, no matter where you live. As long as I was tinkering with April, I would dispense with April 15th altogether. That day looms over my life like a giant icicle, threatening to come loose from the gutter and cleave me in two.

If I Ruled the World The Saturday Evening Post

Christmas accessories during the 1940s cost virtually nothing. Our tree-topping star was a cardboard cutout covered with wrinkled tinfoil. It looked loopy on the tree, but it was ours. My grandmother made it. Thank God she was a homemaker and not a surgeon.

Our lopsided star lived in a box with the other decorations: strings of lights, tinfoil icicles removed each year and saved for next Christmas, limp strings of tired tinsel, and colorful glass balls that would break if you glared at them. A handful of angels, stars, and Santas completed the cache.

My grandmother’s house was neither rich nor poor, and it also contained my grandfather (called Pop), my grandmother (called Mom), one aunt, my younger first cousin, and me.

Despite wartime dislocations, we had Christmas. And we decorated for it.

During the second week of December, Pop gathered up available family members and hauled us out into the country to saw down a tree, usually a six-foot cedar. We never used pine trees because they dried out and the needles fell off. The same was, of course, true of cedars, but somehow that subject never came up.

Once the tree was home, Pop nailed two boards to its trunk for a stand, Mom chose its best side, and decorating began. My cousin was two, and I was four, which made us less help and more trouble than a pair of Labradors. We could step on a bulb or two, but that was about it.

We wrapped the tree with strings of lights that were wired in series, meaning that if one bulb failed, they all went out. You had to unscrew each bulb and try a new one. When the string lighted back up, you knew you’d found the bad bulb. Our timeworn tinsel and recycled icicles went on the tree followed by ornaments. Pop ended the tree ceremony with his annual near-fall into the tree as he tried to position the star. Then someone plugged our festive firetrap into the wall, and magic lit the room.

We were ready for Christmas, and we’d got that way inexpensively—a word you use when you don’t want to say cheap. The total investment in decorations, beginning with the free tree, might have reached $20.00—a lavish sum spread out over no telling how many years.

Decorating today is an ornament of a different color. I Googled “Christmas decorations for sale” and looked at what’s available in modern Yuletide festoonery.

The trees are all artificial, and I guarantee they don’t smell like Christmas. A six-footer will cost you over $200.00. For $599.99 you can get a flocked version that hints at having been snowed on.

Traditional ornaments and tinsel ropes remain surprising bargains. Target offers 50 red balls for a giveaway $15.00, billing them shatterproof. Target must sell exclusively to childless homes.

One merchant, with “Recession Busting Prices,” has strings of lights for under $10.00. That’s so cheap you worry that Underwriters Laboratories may be asleep at the switch. But the same merchant also sells a giant pre-lighted artificial outdoor tree for a whimper-inducing $9,999.99. Pop would have sold the house for that.

For $13.99, you can have an 18-inch wreath for the door—a lighted “country twig” creation that looks like a white wire brush for your electric drill. A two-pack of artificial pine wreaths sells for as much as $169.99. But here’s the horrible part: the things come in colors beginning with traditional green and deteriorating to sky blue, sea foam green, and chartreuse.

It doesn’t end there. There’s a Santa suit with a 70-inch waistline, a foam-rubber Santa Claus beer cozy, personalized tree ornaments in birthstone colors, and enough Elvis ornaments to tacky-up Las Vegas.

There are also websites that help you make your own ornaments, but the first one I looked into announced it was going to teach me to make non-edible ornaments out of cookie dough. How much fun could that be?

Merry Christmas.

Hang That Tree Ornament and the Merchant Who Sold It to You The Saturday Evening Post

I grew up in a house on three acres filled with maple, poplar, ash, and oak trees. Because my father believed adversity was good for one’s character, he was careful not to own any lawn tools that actually worked. Our rakes were gap-toothed, missing most of their tines. Ridding the yard of leaves was an impossible task, not unlike Pharaoh ordering the Israelites to make bricks without straw. Nevertheless, my four siblings and I raked from mid-September to the first snow; our evenings and weekends were spent hauling leaves to the burn pile in the back corner of our field where our father would throw buckets of gasoline onto the smoldering piles until the flames roiled in the air like Dante’s Inferno.

By some quirk of nature, after 12 years of modest output, the trees in our yard got off their duffs and produced a bumper crop of leaves that required my attention. In the dozen years since I had raked leaves, a dramatic change in leaf removal had transpired. Scarcely had I picked up the rake when my neighbor wandered over with a leaf blower strapped to his back, herding my leaves into a great pile with an angry whine.

“When we get them all gathered,” he yelled over the scream of his blower, “we’ll run them through my shredder.”

I told him I had planned on burning the leaves in our garden.

“Against the law,” he yelled. “No open fires in town limits.”

A good part of my early years was spent burning leaves, running to and fro among the mounds of deadfall, rake in hand, feeding the fire with fresh tinder, and occasionally leaping a flaming pile like a circus tiger through a burning hoop. How could such jollity be against the law?

“What do you mean, ‘against the law’?” I asked my neighbor.

“The leaves have to be composted,” he yelled.

“I’ll set them out with the trash,” I said.

“Not possible,” he replied. “They don’t want them in the landfill.”

I was glad to see our legislators were doing all they could to keep our landfills clean.

Say what you will about paying down our national debt, that’s a cakewalk compared to the difficulty of getting rid of things. I had just spent six months trying to divest myself of a half-empty can of paint before wrapping it as a birthday gift and giving it to my brother.

I eventually disposed of the leaves by putting them in my truck with the tailgate down and speeding through the countryside until they blew out. It was a trick I’d learned from my father, who’d recently gotten rid of an old toilet in the same manner.

In the olden days, each town had a dump that would accept any form of trash, provided it could be hauled in a station wagon or pick-up truck. The dump was free and open around the clock—in case one had a yearning to poke among the debris for usable items. My first two bicycles were built from parts I scavenged from the town dump. Every family also had a burn barrel in their backyard. Most boys were curious about fire—sometimes dangerously so—but their tendencies toward arson were satisfied by burning trash in the barrel.

Then burn barrels were outlawed and dumps began charging, took up regular hours, and refused to accept old paint cans and leaves. If I were president, I’d make dumps free again and compel them to accept anything people had a mind to throw away. I would also ban leaf blowers and order people to burn their leaves so we could smell the smoke and know winter was on the way.

Smoke Alarm The Saturday Evening Post

Dear Doctor Franklin:

As you get out onto the streets of Philadelphia, you will notice a remarkable number of fat people waddling about. Perhaps your return will cause renewed interest in your recommendation: “Eat and drink such an exact quantity as the constitution of thy body allows of, in reference to the services of the mind.” Indeed, we all should heed this advice from Poor Richard: “Excess in all other things whatever, as well as in meat and drink, is also to be avoided.”

While a younger man, you advocated daily exercise and restrained dining; you seemed particularly concerned about the effects of overeating. Poor Richard advised: “Many dishes, many diseases,” and “He that never eats too much will never be lazy.”

Your warning about eating habits and temperance, especially as it relates to a full belly, certainly makes sense to anyone today who walks out of a dining room stuffed to near explosion: “That quantity that is sufficient, the stomach can perfectly concoct and digest, and it sufficeth the due nourishment of the body.…The difficulty lies, in finding out an exact measure.”

Your words, sir, are truer today than in your own time because the portions served are now so large: “If thou eatest so much as makes thee unfit for study, or other business, thou exceedest the due measure.” Your ideas on due measure appear elsewhere in your writing as well: “If thou art dull and heavy after meat, it’s a sign thou hast exceeded the due measure; for meal and drink ought to refresh the body, and make it cheerful, and not to dull and oppress it.”

We’d all find it easier to resist temptation if we followed your suggestion to “keep out of the sight of feasts and banquets as much as may be; for ’tis more difficult to refrain good cheer, when it’s present, than from the desire of it when it is away.”

In fact, after the huge meal I had last night, I’m going to try your proposal to “fast the next meal, and all may be well again, provided it be not too often done; as if he exceed at dinner, let him refrain a supper.”

The hazards of overeating seemed much on your mind, yet in spite of your Puritan upbringing in Boston and your Quaker readers in Philadelphia, you never invoked divine condemnation of gluttony, only sound recommendations any modern nutritionist would offer.
Today’s experts, for example, grumble that our mode of seasoning food stimulates overeating. Their thought is hardly new, considering this query to your club, the Junto Society: “Whether those meats and drinks are not the best, that contain nothing but their natural tastes, nor have any thing added by art so pleasing as to induce us to eat or drink when we are not athirst or hungry.”

You were also centuries ahead of your time with this advice: “Use now and then a little exercise a quarter of an hour before meals, as to swing a weight, or swing your arms about with a small weight in each hand; to leap, or the like, for that stirs the muscles of the breast.” Moreover, my colleagues have confirmed the value of your observation: “A temperate diet arms the body against all external accidents; so that they are not so easily hurt by heat, cold, or labour; if they at any time should be prejudiced, they are more easily cured, either of wounds, dislocations or bruises.”

Finally, I should inform you that modern scientists have determined that rats kept on sparse diets live longer and remain healthier than those allowed unrestricted access to food. I doubt you’ll find such results surprising, considering this statement posed to members of the Junto Society: “Whether it is worth a rational man’s while to forego the pleasure arising from the present luxury of the age in eating and drinking and artful cookery, studying to gratify the appetite for the sake of enjoying healthy old age, a sound mind and a sound body, which are the advantages reasonably to be expected from a more simple and temperate diet.”

Dr. Green is a member of the Board of Directors of Friends of Franklin, Inc. His book, Dear Doctor Franklin: E-mails to a Founding Father about Science, Medicine and Technology, is available at Amazon.com.

To read the first e-mail conversation and more, visit saturdayeveningpost.com/ben-franklin.

An E-mail to Ben Franklin The Saturday Evening Post