Wannaskan Almanac for Thor’s Day, March 22, 2018

    I attended the annual St. Patrick’s Day Party in Palmville this past March 17. I’ve attended many in the last eighteen years or so, I’m guessing, as have many of the other forty or so guests who are typically invited. As it is, we’ve grown old together and rehash this fact once a year as we meet and greet one another again in the warmth of a modest, but stylish artsy home along the south fork of the Roseau River.
    Under several large framed watercolor paintings, and the Irish greeting of “SLÁINTE!” meaning “To your health!” in large hand-cut green letters over a hallway door, and amid the lovely mixed fragrances of Irish stew, Swedish meatballs, baked chicken wings, and a lot of other foods I cannot name, we guests visit at length, standing, sitting or leaning, our varied beverages at ready, smiling and laughing about a variety of lifetime activities and experiences as Irish music plays away in the background and the hosts hurry about, making sure everyone is reasonably content.
    This year, I had invited my college art teacher, Mr. T, of Thief River Falls, to join us. I had renewed our long time association through our Palmville magazine, THE RAVEN: Northwest Minnesota’s Original Art, History, & Humor Journal, now ending publication this year, after 24 years. A longtime subscriber, ' T' had generously donated one of his thousands of artworks, a pen & ink drawing of “The Pickwick Mill”, for the last RAVEN cover. Visiting with him over the last couple weeks, at his studio outside of town, and on the phone, I knew he’d fit right in among the Saint Patrick’s Day crowd although his last name belies a French connection. I was not wrong.     
    Although he too has aged some 34 years, since I was a college student of 32 years of age, his 80-years impressed a good many in the crowd. I remember him as being physically fit back then, a mantra that he’s obviously maintained with weights, diet and exercise. Although he’s changed, as we all do eventually, his voice is the same as well as was his hearty, ready laugh. My wife Jackie and I met in his art class all those years ago ...
    One of the common themes I heard that night was the sad realization that names are often forgotten ‘these days’. A person might recognize someone--even carry on a conversation--but lack the basic knowledge of the person’s name. ARGH!
Of course, they don’t want to hurt the person’s feelings and ask them, but they feel anxious as they rack their older brain to derive some semblance of name recognition within the conversation by encouraging the person to talk more about themselves until, hopefully, their memory wakes up and they can resume talking cohesively and not merely apathetically.
    I remember, one time when I was locked in a fervid embrace by a female relative at a funeral in Iowa, the woman in question told me she only came because she learned I was going to be there. Of course, she looked vaguely familiar, and I had little doubt she actually was a relative--(Hey, those things happen--”You’re not Uncle Everette? Oops, wrong funeral!)-- So I desperately tried to flag someone I knew and gesture, “WHO IS THIS??” And of course, in my waving, wiggling and pointing, she thought I was sobbing and only held onto me firmer. Thank God, for my cousin Max, who caught a glimpse of my discomfort and got close enough to tell me, “It’s Janey.”
(Uffdah!)(They really don’t say that in Iowa. It might’ve been more like,”Galldurnit!”)
    “Well, cousin Janey! Long time no see!” I probably said, affectionately leaning away to get a look at her puffy, reddened tear-filled eyes, “I haven’t see you in a coon’s age. Let’s sit down here and visit a spell. Need a hanky?”
    So I got to thinking after the Saint Patrick’s Day Party, that next year--and maybe for the rest of our lives--except maybe someplace where you don’t want people to know your name--we should voluntarily wear name tags, and not the ones like the vet uses on cattle, stuck through our ear or anything like that, nor tattoos and the like, but something as easily seen, like you’d wear on your chest at a convention, or around your neck at adult camp, something made from a slice of birch and with your name burned into it. Make it fun, if you want. It’s not really introductory as much as it’s positive identification (And, in time, maybe for yourself who knows? At some point, you might want to wear your neck tag upside down so you could read it more easily. Or, in the case of the chest tag, print one version backwards atop the one below so you can read it in a mirror.)
“Oh yeah, my name is . . .”
    
Another thing that has come to mind after that party was, "When did mothers begin telling us to always wear clean underwear?"
    “A Brief History of Pants/Jan 22, 2008” site suggests that the familiar Y-fronted briefs came out in 1935 and since their introduction, competed with boxer shorts for market share. Could we say, then, this, um, ‘suggestion’ was coined since 1936? 
So for 82 years, mothers across the United States, have been cautioning their sons--okay, let’s be equal here--and daughters, to always wear clean underwear. I have to wonder what precipitated this remark. I had three much older sisters and I cannot believe my mother would’ve cautioned them about it. It was just a given. They didn’t have to be told. 
    Of course, I poo-poohed it. What teenage son (or daughter) listens to dere mudder about such t’ings? WHAT?
    But one evening, and it’s gotta be a hundred years ago, I was involved in a glancing head-on collision between a 1970 Volkswagen beetle and a 1968 Firebird, just off Merle Hay Road, in Johnston, Iowa. I was driving the VW. It wasn’t my fault, and thankfully no one was killed. When I got to the hospital, I called my folks. My brother-in-law Erik, answered the phone. I told him to tell the folks that me and Janet were okay and to tell ma, I was wearing clean underwear. 
"The Lord be praised!" I can imagine her thinking.
 What humiliation had she otherwise suffered, for I always strove to be the good son. Hooyah!