Flula!

Y'all, I have kept Flula Borg a secret for too long.  This is the funniest, most adorable (and quotable!) German you'll ever meet... see on YouTube.



Angry Birds (of NYC)



Cats Pajamas, you do kill me.



Chip on a shoulder?



Balls to the Wall.  This is not effektive.



Name Three Germans!



And a bonus...Flula's Austin Texas Interview.

Families.

I don't know what normal parents do with their children on the weekends.  I suppose they take them to ball games, invite the neighbors over for a barbecue, and attend church.  My Saturdays were more like this:

"Okay, get your tennis shoes on and load up!"

"Where are we going?"

"Prairie State Park.  Gonna learn about the American buffalo and Westward Expansion."

The most terrified I've ever been.  Yellowstone, '94.

And that is a real conversation.  I was nine.  My mother had just remarried and moved us from Carthage to a town I couldn't pronounce (Oronogo), population 227.  I kept telling everyone we were moving to Oregon.  

My stepdad, Bob, is such a good man.  I mean "good" in the purest, most full sense of the word.  I once told him that when I became a millionaire, I would build him his own personal Bass Pro, and I meant it.  There were a few quirky things I learned growing up with him though.  I can name every historic home, battleground, and state park in a 50 mile radius, and I know how much zinc, sulfur, lead, etc to load into a buckshot casing.  I know the difference between strip mines and shaft mines, can name hundreds of them in the four-states, and know about their surrounding sub-watershed drainage patterns and potential to become sinkholes.  So...that's different than what you all did on Saturdays?

All day today I've been thinking about the wide array of (seemingly useless) things we learn from our families.  Here's a snippet of mine.  I leave their usefulness to your discretion.

My great great great grandparents, James & Hilda.  The oldest known family photo, 1882.

Our new house had a big yard with a wall of honeysuckle separating ours from the neighbors, a large vegetable garden, and eleven types of trees: Sassafrass, Pear, Red Bud, Loblolly (my least favorite...totally unclimbable), Maple, Silver Maple, Dogwood, Walnut, Lilac, Oak, and Alder.  I learned leaf structures, coniferous from deciduous, and the seasonal affects on them.   I know that early summer pear blooms bring bees in droves, and the sweet midsummer fruits that fall to the ground bring the largest assortment of butterflies I've ever seen.

I know that cucumbers need a fence to grow up on, zucchini plants need space, and that burning your garden after harvest releases nitrates back into that impossible rocky Missouri soil.  I know that garden spiders like their webs high between corn stalks, turtles prefer the taste of low hanging tomatoes, and small snakes eat mice and insects and are actually good for your garden (though once August hits and I can't see over the plants, I don't go near it).  I also know that instead of using chemical pesticides, you can plant peony bushes on the four corners of your garden to attract devouring insects.  Peony bushes bloom most of the summer and are among the most succulent, beautiful blooms I know, until of course they are eaten up.  

Bob in his garden with my neice, '03.

I know that Daffodils glory in March and April, wild orange Poppies in May, Naked Ladies in June, Tulips and Flags in July, and my all-time favorite flower/tree/scent, the mighty Magnolias in August.  My grandparents Floyd & Ginny had a Magnolia tree.  I loved the stout trunk, the thick, crunchy leaves, the pineapple-looking buds that littered the branches, and then finally, that big, beautiful, silky white flower that inoculated the air with its sweet redolence and blew right down into my face.  I was four, and in love with a tree.  It has proven to be a lasting love.

I know strange survival tips, such as the white cambium innards of Pine are edible, rich in Vitamins A & C, and can be eaten raw or dried for a quick immunity boost.  In addition, many poisonous snakes dwell in the mid-south.  Their venom coagulates the blood, and willow bark is not only edible, but contains aspirin (more specifically salicin) which functions as a blood thinner.  Native Americans also used to chew willow bark to relieve headaches and toothaches.

I know that sulfur burns blue, has more allotropes than all the other elements, and can crystallize into a pretty yellow stone. (Roche Jaune. Yellowstone.)  And yes, it is debated if that is how the river, and thus the park, got it's name.  Of course Bob swears by it, pointing to the cave systems discovered in the Rocky Mountain mines during the settlement, but the other, more widely accepted lore is because of the area's yellow-tinted sandstone bluffs.  

Yellowstone '92.

We visited the green walls of "Hardscrabble" just outside of St. Louis, and learned that Ulysses S. Grant, before Vicksburg and Chattanooga, and well before his Presidency, had a financially strenuous decade of failed farm life in Northern Missouri.  Regardless, when he moved his family, Grant chose to free his slaves instead of profiting a sale well before that was the norm.  This was an honorable man.

We toured the Badlands and Black Hills of South Dakota, and I learned about General Custer and the Indian Wars, in particular Little Bighorn (obvs).  I know how he split his troops into three battalions, how Reno's troops were outflanked from the South, then Crazy Horse and White Bull drove through the heart of Custer's northern skirmish line, and drove the remaining men up on the ridge.  And I know all of the disgusting details of how this battle ended.  This was a dishonorable man.

I didn't formally collect things as a child, but a strong case could be made for languages.  I learned very basic conversational French and Spanish, numeral German and Cherokee, and a bit of Tagalog and American Sign-Language.  French because, well, my birth parents are Kenneth LeRoy Sullivan (Cherokee, French, Irish) and Vicci Lynne Ball (French, Irish, Welsh).  As well, Floyd & Ginny lived in France in the sixties, with their then seven children (there would be eight).  Spanish was orally handed to me from my mother's acquisition of it in Colorado, German numerals from Ginny Max, Cherokee numerals from my dad Sullivan, Tagalog from my Filipino Aunt Adelina, and American Sign-Language from our Carthage neighbor Kim, who was deaf. 

Occasionally while driving you could see the hills blasted out to make state highways.  I would hear about the different sediments, about how that area was once a glacier, then an ocean, and now vastly prairie.  The base sediments contained denser, pressed volcanic stones, the middle ones fossils of prehistoric oceanic things I can't name, and then the malleable yellow and red clays, and finally, just a few layers down, you could find things like bison bones and arrowheads. 

Men and their cars.  Uncle Steve, Great Grandpa Charles, Grandpa Floyd.

And then there's the State of Missouri.  Oh high heaven, how much I was taught about my home state!  

There are the famous Missourians; Harry S. Truman, George Washington Carver, Langston Hughes, Scott Joplin, and of course, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), who once wrote of Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn, of youth and adventure.  I learned that everything else he wrote was snarky and condescending, and the better writers/poets that exposed the soul of nature and adventurous men were Whitman and Frost (Bob's direction).

Then there are the caves.  Six thousand caves, no telling how many of which we visited.  Show caves, like Fantastic Caverns and Branson, were the best, because you wouldn't unexpectedly run into a bat colony or those terrifying tiny albino lizards.  People did weird things in caves.  Many were used as speakeasys during the Prohibition.  I remember a radio show regularly broadcasted out of one in the Boothill, and one particular cave west of Carl Junction hosted an Easter morning sunrise service-- the only time I remember attending church with my parents.  There is no doubt we went simply because it was a cave.

We have swamps, wetlands, and all three types of prairies (dry, wet, mesic...is that takin you back to 5th grade?).  We catch drift rains from Gulf hurricanes, sit on the shaky New Madrid fault line, and are the head pin of tornado alley.  We also hosted the first summer Olympics in America.  St. Louis, 1904.

We like wine.  In fact, we're the third largest wine producing state.  We can't help it...we were settled by Frenchmen.  We don't make Napa wines though; we make wines from breeds of grapes that grow in rocky soil and fluctuating weather.  Keltoi winery in Oronogo was my first ever wine tour.  I've visited countless times since.  Go if you're near.

We also like beer.  A lot.  The German's settled in the Lou, and the rest is history.

I can't even begin to account for the nuanced knowledge I acquired in my childhood, but that, I feel, is a pretty fair snapshot.  I'm sort of glad for growing up in this way, away from television (save PBS and Nickelodeon), learning real things, even if I have no applicable use for it.  So cheers to fall, when the Magnolias fade and the last harvest comes, when the annual rainfall increases, and the river's pitch rises.  Cheers to cool weather and hard cider and bonfires and friends, and all things good in this season.

Great Grandparents & friends, '34.