Pickles by Brian Crane for January 04, 2025

Uh ! No ! It didn’t smell like that.

Much better than her Urn of Ashes like we thought!

Yea, so who get’s to clean up the mess?

Was Earl teaching Nelson how to imitate major league pitchers by putting illegal substances on the ball? That would explain the off-target throw.

The old fellow (b. 1869) next door to us when I was a young boy, chewed tobacco. His wife wouldn’t let him use a spittoon in the house, so he did his chaw outside. He would sit in a chair by his back door and occasionally lean forward to spit into the dirt. I thought it was interesting and took to imitating him. My mother put a stop to that, but my father was amused.

Later, I became his little friend and sat with him as he told stories of his childhood and young manhood before 1900. Oh, how I wish to have asked more questions instead of just listening all the time. But maybe he would have thought me impertinent to interrupt his soliloquy. Sometimes I imagined he was for brief moments transporting us both back in Time.

One person’s spittoon is another person’s vase (vayss).

[… which is another person’s vase (vahz).]

We don’t have to invent time machines. We already have them. And these can take us even into the future!

Books are the real time machines. You can go back to almost any time in the past. Or you can stay here in the present. Or it can show you a peek into future. The comic, Dick Tracy, did that for me as a kid back in the 1950’s. He had a watch that acted like a modern day phone.

Was she related to Colonel Sanders with those herbs and $pices?!

Since it was porcelain was it a chamber pot rather than a spittoon?

I would have thrown it out a long time ago, lol!

Roscoe rules today : )

“Herbs and another word goComics won’t let me use.”

That’s what ole Grandma Durak used to call her cache of non-FDA approved recreational “tobaccos”.

(Goodness, the goComics banned word list is extensive!)

Vase for sale by lady. Slightly cracked.

I think it might’ve been Opal’s mother’s chamber pot that he broke instead of spittoon. People who can’t make it to the john at night sometimes use them (then clean them out the next day, I hope).

“You can miss a spittoon, but you can’t miss the floor” – Thomas Edison

At least that what the tour guide told us on our school trip to Menlo Park – that and the spittoons were situated on the first floor near his seated guests as he projected movies and paced the second floor mezzanine while chewing tobacco

The stunned Roscoe look.

Oy! And she cooked using those herbs…….Eww Eww Eww

No that was the yeast moonshine pee.

Earl, do yourself a favor and don’t tell her about the chamber pot Opal’s been using to grow herbs in.

Sick, dude!!

NASTY.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I wonder about Opal wearing those house dresses. I live in a retirement village and I know of only one resident who wears dresses on a daily basis and that is for religious reasons. All the other women residents wear pants and a top, just like the majority younger women do. I know that my mother, like most women of her generation living in our blue collar neighborhood, wore them. I don’t know anywhere they can even be purchased anymore. When I looked it up on Amazon, the only thing that came up were housecoats.

If you Google “porcelain spitoon”, lots of very pretty ones pop up. But none of them could be mistaken for a vase, even the one labeled as a vase!

Roscoe should be in every cartoon.

Earl should have made a joke about a vase-ectomy…

Was it really a spittoon or possibly a chamber pot?