I remember a lot of things before the age of 6.  I remember the first house I lived in on Venture street.  I remember going to Kindergarten, my best friend Biff, getting those little live, dyed chicks for Easter.  I remember my great grandparents at Christmas time when I was only 3 or 4 but, for some reason, I really don’t remember my Grandpa Hartman.

I was talking a little genealogy with my Mom last night and I asked her about him.  Her immediate response was, “He was a little different”.  As it turns out, he came from your classic, stoic German stock.  He didn’t care much for kids so our interaction with him was minimal at best.  However, as I find out more about him, I realize that he is probably the source of much of the creativity in my family.  He was an inventor, an engineer, though he never went to college, and was always looking for creative solutions to difficult problems.  What he lacked in social skills he made up for in intellect.  I think my Dad, very intentionally, took the opposite social path but he inherited all of his father’s creativity and inventiveness.

One day, I think I was 13, my dad came home with a very odd package in the back seat of the family Studebaker.  We were all outside playing in the yard when he pulled up, and when he opened the back door out stepped a little billy goat.  My dad wasn’t much for pets so we were more than a little surprised until we heard why.  Our yard was, well, a Pittsburgh yard.  There was hardly a flat spot on it and mowing could be hazardous at best.  There was lawn, but there was also woods and semi-woods and everything in between.  My dad’s idea of a lawn was anything that was some shade of green and you could run a lawnmower over.  So he decided that if we had a goat and a twenty foot chain, we could save our toes from potential amputation via Briggs and Stratton and just stake the goat in a different spot every couple of days.  The goat would mow and we would feed the vegetable garden with the inevitable organic fertilizer shoveled from the goat pen.  Eventually it turned out to be a great plan, but not without a steep learning curve.

As it turns out, male goats are not very pleasant animals.  He got the thing really cheap because, like chickens, they usually kill the males when they’re very young.  Don’t get me wrong, they’re very cute when they’re little, but once puberty sets in, it’s a whole different ball game.  Goatser (not a very creative name) grew very quickly and the bigger he got, the nastier he got.  He started out butting anyone he thought he could push around (a 2×4 to the head stopped most of that) and then moved on to urinating and ejaculating on himself and anyone within squirting range, usually my mother and sister.  He grew to a pretty enormous size and he stunk to high heaven.  Needless to say, Dad wasn’t happy.

So Dad went to the guy he bought the thing from and asked how he could stop this, less than desirable, behavior.  “Well”, the guy asked, “did you castrate him?”.  This thought never crossed my dad’s mind so the answer was, of course, “no”, followed by the obvious, “How do we do that?”.  Dad came home that day with a envelope full of little tiny rubber bands, he called the 11, 13, and 14 year old into the room and presented us with a mission, if we chose to accept it or not!  We were instructed to take a tiny rubber band, stretch it to the size of a large soup can, and snap it over the sizable gonads of, the soon to be unhappy, Goatser.  With wide eyes and a very unpleasant feeling in our nether regions we accepted the challenge.  We decided that there were three challenges in this task, all of which would require all of our imagination.

1)  Stretch an incredibly strong rubber band to roughly 30 times its current diameter.

2)  Figure out some way to either restrain the 200+lb goat or distract him while we sneak up behind him and spring the trap over the offending organ.

3)  Get out of the way after the deed is done.

We worked for hours trying to get that rubber band big enough.  We tried rolling it gradually up a funnel and then rolling it onto a can, but it wouldn’t stretch enough.  We tried get getting six fingers into it, but we weren’t strong enough to pull it big enough to get our fingers out.  We tried clamps and pliers and every tool in the house but to no avail.  After two weeks of wasted summer vacation we went to dad, with heads hung low, and admitted defeat.  Luckily, Dad didn’t seem that disappointed.  I think he, like us, had been feeling, vicariously, the effects of a rubber band on your stuff and he was having second thoughts.  In the end, he found someone who was looking for a new stud on his goat farm and dad traded in Goatser for a much more mellow female.

Years later I was talking to a guy who raised goats and I told him this story.  He looked a little shocked and then told me that those rubber bands were for baby goats and if we had actually been successful the goat would have died, almost instantly, of shock.  I’m still feeling a little funny down low!