It's a Grand Time to Be a Hobo

I wonder if they still have Hobos. I know they have homeless people, but Hobos chose to ride the trains and lead the life of nomads. Now when I see trains go by, all the cars look like sealed boxes; not as easy to slip inside one. My Daddy was a Hobo for a while. Back in the early days of the Great Depression. He said there were too many mouths to feed at home so being the second oldest mouth in the family of six boys, he decided to leave home and ramble. I love that word "ramble". I realize that my Father tended to romanticize his life on the rails by the time I came along, but he said he wouldn't trade those years for anything. He claimed Hobos didn't beg or steal. They weren't like gypsies who came to town. They were willing to work for food. I have an idea that he was talking about himself and not all Hobos. Once my Dad joined a circus. Now that was romantic. I imagined him taming wild animals, riding horses bareback, flying on a trapeze high in the air, dancing with the bearded lady. But he didn't do any of that stuff. He packed and unpacked the tent and helped put it up. He was not in the Talent Department but, as he explained, it was important work that he did. No tent. No show. He was a roustabout. Then he worked quite a while as a hired hand on a big farm in Iowa. He lived in a bunkhouse just like cowboys did. He had never seen a farm so big and land so flat. It was here that he encountered his first tornado. The farm owner had an underground shelter where the family and the fieldhands went when they got warnings about a tornado. But being fearless and a little bit stupid at the time, he wanted to stay above ground and see what a tornado was like. But the farmer made him come below. It's a good thing he did or he would have been blown all the way back to South Carolina. When I was in the grocery store recently, I noticed how conveniently so many foods are packed. This would be a great time to be a Hobo. They have little flip top cans of peaches, ready to eat. Little cans of spinach and green beans. (I think they are made for Senior Citizens who are living alone, not Hobos. But Hobos could still carry them and eat them.) They have SPAM SNACK PAKS. It doesn't taste anything like traditional SPAM (not that SPAM doesn't taste great...we used to live off the stuff and I still like it, but my wife says "Your upbringing is showing".) It looks like pate. A very pale pate. But it's not like Potted Meat. We used to eat Potted Meat, too, until I read on the can that it's made from unidentifiable animals (read "roadkills" and "armadillos") and chickens that have been mechanically picked. The poor things! I hated the thought of a bunch of robots mechanically cleaning my chicken, so I am boycotting Potted Meat. By the way, we used to "dress it up" by adding chopped celery, onions and mayonaise. The stores now have peanut butter and jelly "rounds", little sandwiches that are stamped out of the center ofa peanut butter and jelly sandwich; no crust. My grandson introduced me to this treat. And if you are on the South Beach Diet (and who isn't?), you can get packages that have two tiny tortillas, ham, cheese and mayo so you can rip open the box and make a couple of roll-ups. My wife keeps a "Hurricane Survival Box" because we live on an island in South Carolina. So far we have had to evacuate three times but have not been hit (Praise the Lord!). But she keeps a food supply that would make a Hobo drool. When I get hungry and can't find anything decent to eat, I sneak into the Hurricane Survival Box and steal a few Hobo treats. She gets upsets and warns me, "We're going to have to go to a Shelter." On TV, people in the shelters always look like they're having a grand old time...playing cards, watching TV. My wife says if we go to the Shelter, we will have to eat Potted Meat. Twice I have had Hobo Picnics for my children and their friends. Once we went to the dump and spread out newspapers and ate our lunch with buzzards flying overhead. I brought canned foods with flip tops, but I didn't bring any forks or spoons. When they complained, I told them that Hobos don't travel with forks and spoons. They eat with their tongues. Then they wanted a napkin, so I ripped off part of our table-cloth newspaper and handed it to them. Another time I packed each lunch in a bandana and tied them on long sticks so we could hike over to the railroad tracks and wave to people on the train going to New York. I could read their lips, "Oh, look! A Hobo and his family." (It was a slow moving train.) This time I had sardines in cans. I love sardines. But I was the only one that did except for a kid that was with us from California who thought it was Sushi. Just when everyone was turning their noses up at the sardines, my wife arrived at the tracks with a big bag of McDonald's hamburgers. She saved the day.