Faux Farm Boy

You know you're on a real working farm when just inside the farmhouse door you find an old linoleum floor with a dozen or so pairs of muck boots.

I grew up in a farm town in southern Indiana.

Although the town existed originally as a central hub for all the surrounding farms, it had grown to over eleven thousand residents by the mid-nineteen seventies, and most of us were not farmers.

My dad drove an hour north to work at a factory in Indianapolis, for example, and the closest most of us got to the town's agricultural heritage was by way of the corn syrup solids and soy lecithin in our Twinkies.

As a young boy who was into superheroes, I dressed as Robin most days.

That is my wife's favorite endearing fact about me from childhood.

Mostly, she loves to tell people that I couldn't take the pressure of being Batman.

I reckon that if a real farm boy wore a pair of his mom's old pantyhose under green rubber rain boots and beige plastic training pants with a yellow bath towel for a cape, he'd get his ass kicked on the regular.

I lived in a ranch house with vinyl siding on an eighth of an acre where our indoor-outdoor cat, Speedy Tomato, roamed, so I flew under the radar from farm boy respectability.

But when I was at Casey Cragun's house, I tried hard to be respectable.

At Casey Cragun's house, we wore muck boots.

Casey's family grew corn and beans and raised cows and hogs.

In our middle school days, when our friendship flourished, I was almost as infatuated with the shotgun that leaned casually into the corner of Casey's kitchen as I was with his super hot older cousin, Emma.

Both were forbidden and untouchable.

Emma, because she thought I was a scrawny little creep, if she thought of me at all, and the shotgun because I was clumsy and impetuous enough to be the lead story on the six o'clock news.

We wore muck boots during our pig shit fights.

We would scoop up wads of mud in the pig pen and hurl them at each other.

We took great delight when the viscosity of the mud-shit combo was such that when we threw at our target, our gloves went along for the ride.

An enemy with a glove adhered to his back by swine feces had suffered a most direct hit and was taunted ruthlessly as he reached in vain like a victim from the movies trying to pull a knife protruding from next to his own spine.

We would roar with laughter when the sow manure pulled our muck boots from our white cotton-socked feet.

We were not allowed on the linoleum until we stripped naked and let Casey's mom hose us down while shaking her head in mild disapproval.

Throughout the cold water de-pooping, we laughed and shivered and pointed at each other's shriveled penises.

Funny, Casey's mom never suggested that we read English literature or study for the SATs once we were cleaned up.

I think her opinion of our combined intellect had her feeling relieved that we didn't come back with brown lips from force-feeding each other pig plops.

Sometimes we tried to ride the pigs.