The Prairie Boys...

When I was a young shiftless lout in some of the more idle moments of my life, My father would look at me and say " Hey , why don't you get up and blow the stink off yourself ! " For a long time I thought it was just a colloquialism found amongst the Greenshields and Hodgins farm boys from Saskatchewan . But I have since learned that others who have fathers with prairie roots said the same thing. Many of these men are gone . They came from even harder men who would be deemed rough and even cruel by any child care standards of today...and yet there was a strange gentility , even a humility and grace that could be seen in these men despite childhoods that knew some large measure of brutality. My father used to cuff me on the back of my head
when I was a misbehaving as a child, he would threaten to "ring one off my balcony" : my balcony being the back of my head. I always thought it a bit comical in later years when my father said that he would "never kick a child" As if hitting a child in the back of the head made him a humanitarian.

The comment he made though was in reference to the way he was treated as were most prairie children during his time. His father, my grandfather, caught my cousins and I when were 6 and 7 years of age touching some precious item on the farm and with less than a warning he began to kick us. I never forgot those moments in light of my father's childhood. I shudder to think about it now and I marvel at the measured moments of my childhood and those of many others I have spoken with. I have seen many of these prairie men as grandfathers in their later years and there is a care and gentility with children amongst them despite their personal experiences or perhaps because of them. Their faces always seemed to have a wisdom born from wars of decision, anguish, personal pain and a lack of control in their lives. I understand now where the comment came from. My father was no more energetic than many other men. he even told me he was as "lazy as the next guy"...I'd doubt it...But there were times in his life he had to convince himself to get up, take on an ugly, seemingly impossible task, and finish what he started.


Even now , many of us who have been raised by prairie fathers long gone would be happy to hear them say again " " "Hey! what kind of bullshit are you trying to pull now ? Get up and blow the stink off yourself !"
I miss those men in our world...