Chapter 6

Rhonda and I spent most of the weekend in bed. We still didn't do much in the way of sexual variety; she, having indulged in everything but normal sex with Joey for a couple years, was enamored with normal 'cock-in-pussy' sex.

Sunday, her folks both arrived home and I was introduced as exactly what I'd been in Rhonda Sue's eyes. A birthday gift. Her mother had quite a sense of humor and she accepted me readily. Her dad was civil to me but seemed the gloomy sort, he'd not been a ball of fire while presenting his product to me but he certainly didn't seem to have improved his outlook much so I was a little ill at ease, and after talking to Rhonda privately, I agreed to have supper with them but decided to camp in the motel room I'd booked.

During supper I was pleased to find I was treated graciously by Anne, Rhonda's mom. Her dad, Herman, was another matter. He wasn't ill mannered, rather he had the bearing of someone resigned and defeated by life ... something I'd seen before in my circle of acquaintances in the farming business. Things changed so rapidly that it was all most farmers could do just to keep up with the technology and economics of the business. Not to mention the political angles and chicanery that followed.

I was a farm kid, I grew up as one and that was all I ever wanted to be. Fortunately my dad and mom raised me as if I was a town kid. Many 'rural folks' didn't have such luck or foresight. Dad also had interests other than agriculture. In his free time, mostly during the winter months, he played around with tech toys, something he had picked up in his Air Force stint, as he had been trained in aviation electronics, and became a ham operator after getting out. In fact, he was thinking of making it a career and had worked for a couple years as a tech at Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids.

I still have his R 390A hooked up to a high gain antenna and do some DX'ing once in a while. I even have a KWM-2 SSB tranceiver on a shelf somewhere, not to mention an 18Z-3 High power military HF aircraft tranceiver which I'd never bothered even powering up. Dad had gotten the latter 'under the table' so to speak. Coincidently after a trip through Arizona so I assumed it came out of the Pima boneyard.

But, while dad was a ham and loved it he still loved farming and, when his dad had an accident with a grain auger, he moved back to the farm and took over most of the manual labor. Shortly after, that he married my mom, whom he'd met when she was a secretary at Collins, and they build a house on the farm ... just far enough away from Grandpa's to discourage a quick walk to visit.

I had broader interests including my love of all things technical. I did what all farm kids did in the age of muscle car rebirth, I built up a 64 Ford Fairlane 427 with dad's help and as he described it. I wasnt happy with a 'straight line' car, though so I'd sold that quickly and bought a 93 Mustang Coupe and set it up as a Cobra SVT R to handle road courses. Once I'd gotten the engine up to 450 HP and set the chassis to capture the local road course record in class, though, my interest quickly fell off. The reality being once you beat all the local 'vettes and RX's there's nothing else to prove.

So I decided to go to college and enrolled at Iowa. I planned to go through their ag courses and minor in plant genetics. By the end of my first term, though, I'd had enough. Being around the Ames campus was like visiting another planet. Or maybe I just got thrown with the wrong people. I'd read a broad range of literature and my parents subscribed to periodicals from National Geographic to Time and Newsweek but the atmosphere around this campus was for all I knew about the same as UC Berkeley.

Not that I had a problem with the sexual attitudes and ready availability of pot for the rare occasion I felt a need to get high. Just that the social attitudes were so simplistic and class conscious I felt I was far more mature in my outlook than even most of my instructors. Even as a kid I knew the influence of human nature on perception and these people thopught that it could be overcoma by 'information and education'. I'd read enough history to know they were really talking 'indoctrination'.

So I quit and went home to learn the farming business. I'd listened enough to my dad and grandpa bitch about the demise of the 'Family Farm' that I decided to concentrate on how to survive in the age of agri-business and the rise of the ConAgra's and ADM's. And I paid a lot of attention to our local and state politics.