More about Flavel

There are some curi-oddities about dad. He always laid his bread on the back of his hand when eating a slice of bread and butter, or a sandwich. I was disciplined once for slapping a piece of bread off Lis or Mona's hand and telling (or yelling) that is dad's way of eating bread. He also said the rhyme regularly, "I eat my peas with honey, I've done it all my life. It may seem rather funny, but it keeps them on my knife." This came up because Pat saw me eating a piece of bread that way a little while ago. It either has to do with Dad being so muscular that he couldn't turn his hand around, or that he ate lunches out in the woods, with dirty hands, and the back of his hands were cleaner. The back's of his hands were pretty hairy things. Maybe not so pretty.

Dad held his Bible that way when he was preaching, also. He would twist his hand around to hold his Bible while he was looking up a passage, but then when he was preaching he would lay it open on the back of his left hand and emphasize with his right hand. He wasn't too charismatic, or the Bible wouldn't have stayed on his hand. I remember him in the chapel, where the Berean Christian Fellowship met. He kept the regular meeting going until I was about 12, although C&MA closed their support of the work when I was four.

After that closure, dad went to work doing anything he could find to earn money. Actually he was doing that before as well. Because the support was meager. I remember as a kid of 6 years old, in the house we lived in on main street, walking into the kitchen and smelling this strange smell. I asked mom what it was, she said beef. She was boiling it for stew in the pot. It was not until I was much older that I realized we didn't have much for meat. I recognized the smell of venison and rabbit and squirrel and grouse or partridge, but not beef or pork. I don't remember fish at that age but a couple of years later Chuck and I were the mighty fisherman, casting using a small coffee can, with a dowel nailed in crosswise as a handle, and a fifty or seventyfive foot piece of 30 lb test braided fishing line tied around the handle and wrapped around the can, with a leader and a daredevil, whipping it around like David's sling throwing at Goliath, and we were able to hit a garbage can at fifty feet. The point is, I think dad made those for us to start with, then we improved them. Chuck always experimented more than I did.
Dad helped me make my first slingshot. He had his eye out for good slingshot saplings and every once in a while would bring one home.
One of the jobs he had was town constable, and that started before I remember. I think it was after 1955. I do remember getting a siren put in our car, and a flashing red light to plug into our accessory plug, although, that is not what the outlet in the car was called then, like detectives have in real life. I was dispatched to blow that siren once when we had an ice storm and the electricity was out, and a fire was called in. Dad was also the fire chief, and he had to go start the fire truck, at the fire hall/jail, which was 25 feet from our yard across LaRocques yard. (That was a narrow house.) I think that was when Langan's burned, that would be Chuck's classmate, Donald.

Mom told of Dad coming back up here occassionally to Danbury on a weekend to cut a couple of loads of cordwood so he would have money back at St. Paul Bible Institute. (Crown College) which used to be in St. Paul. That was before the age of chain saws. So he was a real lumberjack.

I had a terrible habit of hitting my siblings, which they have either forgotten, or forgiven, or are still waiting to get me back, for which they would be justified, but one day when I was seventeen dad had his opportunity, and this is how it went. Mom and Mona and Dad and I were in the kitchen. I whocked Mona hard in the shoulder over some imagined slight, I don't even remember what, but dad whocked me on both shoulders six or seven times, telling me not to do that again. It got my attention. But then was the thing that really got my attention. He started sobbing, telling me how sorry he was, but he had to get my attention.

He was right.

All for now.