Old Jasper Blankenship came down from the diggin’s last week. He always says he has to get groceries, but we believe he comes down three times a year just so he can amaze us with his new philosophies. He gets most of his new philosophies by running an antenna wire up from the cabin to the top of the ridge, and then listening to the radio talk shows.
“Of course you fellas know what anthropology is, right?” Jasper said. “The study of fascinatin’ human beings, like me. Heck, I didn’t know I was so fascinatin’ until that anthopology professor lady came out to the cabin with those graduate students.”
“Came up to your cabin?” said Doc.
"Sure did. She called me a rural icon.”
“You know, Jasper,” Steve said, “maybe if you took a bath more often, people wouldn’t call you things like that.”
“Go ahead, laugh,” he said, chuckling a bit. “She didn’t come to your house and call you an icon, did she? Well, these students wanted to know about everything. How I got water, how I made my money, how the woodstove worked, how I could live in a one-room cabin. That one was easy, ‘cause you can’t live in more than one room at a time, anyway.”
“That’s true,” said Doc, nodding.
“They seemed to be interested in everything. Everything. So I showed them my ax. It’s a big old double-bit cruiser that I think my granddaddy had at one time. They wanted to know all about it, so I told them it was the very ax George Washington used to cut down the cherry tree.”
“You didn’t!”
“Sure did. I don’t think they believed me at first, but then I explained that the ax had been through 12 handles and four heads since George had it.”
