Below is a rough draft of humble's rants for your Maine Private Radio show for June 12, 2016

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1. When my friend Winky was very young, he went to the senior class prom with a girl who was wearing a low, low-cut off the shoulder dress. And after a while curiosity got the best of him and Winky said, “What is keeping that dress on you?” She said, “Only the onions on your breath.”

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2. My friend Winky bought a mess of hens and told me he was going into the chicken business. I asked him if he knew anything about breeding chickens and he said, “No, but the chickens do.”

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3. Late one foggy summer afternoon my 19-year-old friend Philip showed up and said he needed help. He was on his way home from the Owls Head Transportation Museum where he volunteers summers. Philip wanted a better front axle for his 1926 Model T. --- The car I was driving to school when I was 17. Philip recently came into possession of that car because 40 years ago his great-grandparents, “Gramp” and Gladys Wiley, were relatives, next door neighbors, and my closest friends. What goes around comes around. In 1953 there was no problem with the front axle on that car so I didn’t see that there should be any problem with it now. For the past 60 or so years it hadn’t done much of anything but gather dust in Winslow Robinson’s henhouse. But Philip said he wanted to put new bushings in the front end to tighten it up. A close inspection revealed that the holes in the axle where the kingpins went in were a little worn and it would be nice if he could have a better axle. There is neither shake nor shimmy in that Model T. A week before Philip let me drive it to my sixty-third high school reunion, and it handled like a dream. How many people do you know who drove to their high school reunion in the same car they drove to school over sixty years before?

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4. I drove the same car that I was driving in high school 63 years ago to my 63rd high school reunion. Not everyone at the reunion was overjoyed to see us pull into the parking lot. There was at least one woman there who turned her head and wouldn’t even look. One cold night she walked three miles to get home when I got stuck in a hole in Victor Dennison’s gravel pit. There are some things better forgotten. On cold days, I took out the front seat and put in the round kerosene heater we’d used in our bathroom when I was a kid. If you have never driven to school on a cold morning with a cozy kerosene stove heating your car, you don’t know what you are missing.

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5. In 1952, more financially secure than I am now, I actually had two 1926 Fords that I drove to school. --- One, the two-door sedan that Philip now drives and, just before that, a four-door touring car which had no top. In December of 1952, I was coming home from school in the touring car when the right front tire went flat. Back then when wheels would come off I’d be slowed down for a day or so, but a flat tire was no cause for alarm and I continued to drive home on the rim. Old Fords had wheels with wooden spokes. By 1952 the spokes were already 26 years old. The one on the right front was obviously decayed because, almost abeam of Bate Makie’s house, the pounding shattered it. The car slid to the right into the ditch, turned 90 degrees to the right and flipped over, dumping me like water out of a teacup.

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6. In 1952 if you were involved in an auto accident that did more than $50 damage, you had to report it to the State Police. Because I’d only paid Tom Bragg $23.50 for the car I’d rolled over, I saw no need to report the accident and was able to hide the car in a nearby side road. That night I played for a dance at Rockland High School with my mother and didn’t dare tell her I’d rolled over in my car until we’d finished the gig. + 7. Did I mention that Philip is learning how to restore antique cars at a school called McPherson in Kansas? I gave the axle business some thought, realized that he was now the Model T expert, and put on my coat. We looked at half a dozen Model T axles in three locations before he saw one that looked good to him. He’d get down on his knees and sight along those axles and find a little bend in each one of them. Do I need to tell you that when I was 17 a bent axle meant absolutely nothing? The problem was with the half rotted wood in the wheels which would sometimes shatter on corners. I know that at least 13 wooden wheels or rear axles broke on me in a two year period. You’ve seen sailors who race boats all sitting on one side so the boat wouldn’t flip over. I remember getting three trustworthy companions to stand on the left running board so the car wouldn’t roll over when I made a sharp left turn into the church driveway. The car didn’t roll but the right front wheel broke and we plowed a furrow up through the church lawn.

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8. The axle Philip wanted still had wheels and the front spring attached to it, so we had to take it apart. When he gently placed the axle in his car and climbed in behind it, he mentioned that Model T axles cost $150 on line. I'm glad Philip found a use for that axle. I’d been saving it for him since his grandmother was 15.

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9. I like to post things that have a happy ending on my Facebook page. This is what I wrote. While I am at the hospital tomorrow for a procedure, I plan to stop in to the knee office first and cancel my appointment for Friday. When I made the knee appointment, I could barely get up and down a flight of stairs because my knee hurt so, but, like so many parts of the body, it healed itself while waiting the 10 days to get in and at present I can hop about like a cricket. I was going to say hop like a frog, but young people don't know what a frog is. The cheeping and peeping frogs of yesteryear that infested our ponds and sometimes littered the roadways, are no more. They have been replaced by ticks. And to this post, long time radio friend, and by long time I mean 30 or so years, long time radio friend Dr. Olga wrote, “Last night the bullfrog serenaded us as we walked the dog and we avoided her catching 4 toads by pulling her away. The ticks aren't as bad since I have been feeding the raccoon and the skunk.”

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10. I got my newspaper column written. When I get a first draft, I print it off on two sheets of paper, staple them together, and let my wife Marsha and my brother Toynbee read it. They always have some good suggestions that make the story better before I send it to my editor. I took some granite paving blocks down to Steve Lindsay and when I got home Marsha had read the story four or so times, trying to make sense of it. It was in such bad shape that she had to sit down beside me in a chair to show me the problems she'd had with it. She'd marked it all up with arrows, showing how things had to be arranged so it would make sense. She didn't understand the last sentence in the story and figured that it must be an allegory. Well. We worked on it for five minutes or so before I figured out that I'd made a mistake stapling the two sheets of paper together and she'd been reading the second page first.

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11. I'm almost through this book. The Future of Life. The author, Professor Wilson, born in 1929, is still active. What he says in this book is the reason I'm putting my land in conservation. No houses to be built on it. The earth needs green woods and fields and swamps and all kinds of bugs on the bottom of the food chain if the earth is to continue to be able to support human beings. Frogs have moved off my farm. They’ve been replaced by ticks. Prof Wilson points out that for a million years, man lived on the savanna in Africa. It was only recently that we moved out to populate the rest of the world. This is why, he says, we have an innate need to see open spaces when we look out the front door. It is why rich people, who can live anywhere they want, have houses on the ocean or on mountain tops where they can see off into the distance. It rings true to me, as I don't want to see houses built on the land across the road from my house. Today there are 6 cows out there, grazing in the assigned areas, and I like it that way. Recently there was a US Senator in Maine trying to get all the federal state parks privatized and sold off. You know more about it than I do. But this man is crazy. There have to be unspoiled areas on this earth if we are to survive. I want to thank whoever it was who made me aware of this book. I think the one I really wanted was $5 or so, and this one, my second choice on the same topic, was only 1 cent.

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12. My friend Winky is a packrat. He has every receipt anyone has ever given him for the past 40 years. You have to turn sideways to walk into his office. He finally told his wife it would be ok to throw out every paper over 12 years old --- as long as she kept copies.

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