appointment to visit the lab, and when we walked in, carrying our soil samples, or a Tupperware container with a pinch of leaf mold or a fungus thatwas worrying him, or a new strain of potato bug, one of the professors would analyze the situation.
My sisters never came along on those trips, and I loved it that I got him all to myself then—sitting next to him on the bench seat of our old Dodge truck listening to the radio, or just the sound of him whistling, or talking about things in a way that never happened when my mother was around. Stories from the old days, when he was growing up on the farm. The time he spent a whole summer cultivating a pumpkin with the hope of winning first prize in a 4-H competition at the fall harvest fair, and then the night before the competition, a hailstorm had destroyed it. A trip he made to New York City—home of Greenwich Village, home of Dylan!—with his grandfather to the 1939 World’s Fair.
The war, and my father’s obligation to run the family farm, had ended my father’s plans for a college education. He wanted that for me.
Meanwhile, he loved visiting the agriculture professors, and talking with them about issues on the farm. They had the book learning, he had the field experience. “If we could just get together on this stuff,” he said, “there’s no telling what us farmers could grow.”
I loved those days, just my father and me, traipsing over the university campus, carrying our soil specimens and plant samples. After we were done talking with some professor there, my father took me over to the experimental barns where they bred the cattle. They had this one bull there, a new breed they’d been developing, though still in the experimental phase. I asked my father what he meant by that.
“This is a prize bull,” my father told me. “Back home we breed cows the old-fashioned way, but here at the university the students extract the semen from him and inject it into cows they’ve selected for the purpose of improving the breed. Eventually, they hope they’ll come up with a whole new breed, created right here in the state of New Hampshire.”
We were standing outside this bull’s pen at the time. The sign on the front of his stall said his name was Rocky. He was the biggest bull I’d ever seen, though the fact that he’d been confined within such a small space, and he lookedso angry about that, no doubt contributed to the sense you got looking at him that this bull was enormous. I got the feeling he might at any moment break right through the bars and stomp on us, but I felt safe, because I was holding my father’s hand, and I always felt safe when he was there.
I asked him how they got the semen. If I’d known better what it was, I might have felt embarrassed but I didn’t. He would never have talked about these things if my mother was around, but when it was just the two of us, as it often was, my father loosened up considerably.
“One of the things I love about being a farmer,” he said, “is having the opportunity to put together totally different genetic strains and come up with a whole new breed of living thing. Could be a cow. Could be a watermelon. That’s how it is when a man and a woman get together too. You mix up the bloodlines and come up with the best of both, if you’re lucky. Like I did with you.”
Later that night, the bull entered my dreams. He was stomping his huge hoof in the sawdust of his pen, and his eyes were red, and there was drool coming out his flaring nostrils. He was scary, but something about him was exciting too.
When I came down to breakfast the next morning, my mother was at the stove, as usual, making the oatmeal. My sisters were already at their places.
“Did you and your father have a nice time at the university?” she said.
“Yup,” I said. “Very educational.”
Dana
The Idea of Love
T HE FIRST THING people noticed about Val was usually her height, which was closing in on six feet. She stood a little
My sisters never came along on those trips, and I loved it that I got him all to myself then—sitting next to him on the bench seat of our old Dodge truck listening to the radio, or just the sound of him whistling, or talking about things in a way that never happened when my mother was around. Stories from the old days, when he was growing up on the farm. The time he spent a whole summer cultivating a pumpkin with the hope of winning first prize in a 4-H competition at the fall harvest fair, and then the night before the competition, a hailstorm had destroyed it. A trip he made to New York City—home of Greenwich Village, home of Dylan!—with his grandfather to the 1939 World’s Fair.
The war, and my father’s obligation to run the family farm, had ended my father’s plans for a college education. He wanted that for me.
Meanwhile, he loved visiting the agriculture professors, and talking with them about issues on the farm. They had the book learning, he had the field experience. “If we could just get together on this stuff,” he said, “there’s no telling what us farmers could grow.”
I loved those days, just my father and me, traipsing over the university campus, carrying our soil specimens and plant samples. After we were done talking with some professor there, my father took me over to the experimental barns where they bred the cattle. They had this one bull there, a new breed they’d been developing, though still in the experimental phase. I asked my father what he meant by that.
“This is a prize bull,” my father told me. “Back home we breed cows the old-fashioned way, but here at the university the students extract the semen from him and inject it into cows they’ve selected for the purpose of improving the breed. Eventually, they hope they’ll come up with a whole new breed, created right here in the state of New Hampshire.”
We were standing outside this bull’s pen at the time. The sign on the front of his stall said his name was Rocky. He was the biggest bull I’d ever seen, though the fact that he’d been confined within such a small space, and he lookedso angry about that, no doubt contributed to the sense you got looking at him that this bull was enormous. I got the feeling he might at any moment break right through the bars and stomp on us, but I felt safe, because I was holding my father’s hand, and I always felt safe when he was there.
I asked him how they got the semen. If I’d known better what it was, I might have felt embarrassed but I didn’t. He would never have talked about these things if my mother was around, but when it was just the two of us, as it often was, my father loosened up considerably.
“One of the things I love about being a farmer,” he said, “is having the opportunity to put together totally different genetic strains and come up with a whole new breed of living thing. Could be a cow. Could be a watermelon. That’s how it is when a man and a woman get together too. You mix up the bloodlines and come up with the best of both, if you’re lucky. Like I did with you.”
Later that night, the bull entered my dreams. He was stomping his huge hoof in the sawdust of his pen, and his eyes were red, and there was drool coming out his flaring nostrils. He was scary, but something about him was exciting too.
When I came down to breakfast the next morning, my mother was at the stove, as usual, making the oatmeal. My sisters were already at their places.
“Did you and your father have a nice time at the university?” she said.
“Yup,” I said. “Very educational.”
Dana
The Idea of Love
T HE FIRST THING people noticed about Val was usually her height, which was closing in on six feet. She stood a little
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