“The Cost of Years And Beers” Tanka 141

a sure sign i’s old:

scored two eighteen-packs of beer

a double-sawbuck!

yet some fifty years before

same would set me back six* bucks!

 

*(not really, since beer came in sixes and 24s and the case extra a month dad got at the Navy Commissary’s hootch annex probably set him back  from $2.80 or $3.50 to at most five bucks.  I only claimed mine once or twice and don’t think my older brother Glenn ever did take off the laundry room stack.  All that was required was to have it in a number 3 washtub with a block of Truck Ice in the trunk and to take it somewhere where it would be consumed off-road and out-of-public-view.  Got stopped by Sanford (Florida) PD but once and was told to open the trunk and the cop counted all 24 and said: “just checkin’. Your dad said you’d be on your way to the woods.  See’s you stay there!  The Soutwest Volusia County Constable, too, had been notified that Osteen probably would be served Sunday afternoon with a big deposit of empties and call him if there was a problem.  In those days I had a 68-mile three a.m. racecourse in my home county of Seminole in which I and dad’s car could threaten road-lined oak trees without a headlight in sight.  No wonder youth today has only public and equally stupid crime with which to pass the time.)

“As The Worm Turns”

old, fat, and cold-slowed –

living a languid dirt life:

not me! nightcrawler!