My Hog Fat Affinity

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When I was in grade school, I just hated sitting still and being completely inactive for long periods of time. If my teacher was keeping such a close eye on me that I couldn't risk shooting paper wads across the room with a straw, pinching the kid in front of me, or the like, I got into the habit of chewing on the point of my shirt collar.

I don't know why that was. All I can figure is, I had just developed an affinity for hog fat. All our clothes were washed with lye soap, and as you may, but probably don't know, hog fat is the main ingredient in lye soap. At least in ours. That affinity may have been caused by eating so much salt pork. Or, maybe I was just nervous about what the teacher was going to catch me doing next, and what the end result would be. A little nervous habit.

After Mom started noticing that most of my shirt collars were getting ruined, She laid down the law, and I agreed with her that I had no business doing that, and told her I would stop it. That worked for awhile. But after a little time passed, I would catch myself doing it again. I just couldn't seem to help myself. Mom knew she had to put a stop to that. I had always been a pretty timid and well behaved kid around home, at that point, and Mom hated to have to bring out the big gun, the keen switch, for a kid like me, her baby. It was years later before she brought out the that big gun for me, possibly because some of my siblings seem to have been a little wilder. So, at that point in life, I didn't need the big gun so much. At least according to some of the tales I've been told. My siblings had filled me in early on about what Dad was capable of, and what Mom, possibly the sweetest woman in the world, could do if one of us drove her to it.

Mom, at that point in time, had no shortage of material to make new shirts out of. Those six hundred or so laying hens ate tons of chicken feed, from pretty, decorated feed sacks, during that time period. She could easily have made one new shirt for me after another. IF she didn't have anything else to keep her busy. But Mom was always the busiest woman I ever knew, what with everything else she did around that farm. She pretty well outworked the rest of us three to one. She hatched a plan.

Castor oil was always one of the first lines of defense we had on our farm, when one of us showed sign of being off our feed. In my case, at least, a spoon full of castor oil in a glass of peach juice almost always did the trick, and, unless I was at death's door, I got well really quick, and showed Mom I didn't need any more medicine. To this day, I can't stand the thought of peach juice.

The next time Mom washed my shirts, she ironed them up real nice, as she always did. Then she put a drop of castor oil on the point of each shirt collar. To this day, I work really hard at never, ever letting any shirt collar anywhere close to my mouth. Today, Barbara always finds plenty of reason to gripe at me about spilling food on my shirt, getting ink on the shirt pocket the first time I wear it, or letting battery acid eat a hole in it. But my shirt collars are impeccable.