Hog drop

As we were leaving the 4th of July parade in downtown Norwalk, a poster for the St. Alphonsus church festival caught our attention. 
There was one event we couldn’t picture: the Hog Drop.

There was some cryptic mention of squares, but that didn’t help us. All I could imagine is that they maybe mark squares on a football field and drop a hog from a helicopter? 

I asked my cousin, a hog farmer in Norwalk, what a Hog Drop is.

At first, Frank scratched his chin a bit and said he didn’t know. Then a light came on in his eyes and he says, “Oh wait a minute… Hog drop…. I know….”

Here comes a line of BS, I’m thinking. Frank, like many of my Schnellinger cousins, puts humor ahead of fact. 

“Yeah, they draw squares with numbers, and you bet on the numbers, and then you set the hog loose, and wherever it drops, you know, like cow pies, then that’s the winner,” Frank says.

I reckon this is complete nonsense and Frank is pulling my leg. I grab the next available cousin and say, “Don’t look at Frank! Tell me what the church festival Hog Drop is.”

Yep. Same description. In farm country, this is a game you play at the church festival.

You gotta love that.

I started this project, The Weight of My Days, exactly one year ago. I’ve written 366 blog posts in as many days. If I live to be 100, I’ll write another 15,886 posts.

A whole lot of those 366 days, I had no idea what I was going to write about when I sat down at the keyboard. I let the day sift through my brain and through my fingers. And finally it would drop.

I wandered around from one topic to another, from ancestors to art, from brain surgery to plumbing, from flowers to flights of fancy.

I practiced, every day, telling a story. I tried to make the stories informative or entertaining, but sometimes I just wrote because I needed to get something out.

I wouldn’t want to bet on those squares, and I wouldn’t like to think of my writing as a hog drop.

But it’s been a lot of fun.

Today’s penny is a 2015. Pretty soon I will get some 2016s.

Featured image is from Wiki Media.