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Among the documents I was lucky enough to study on last week's Ag School (This Time It's All About the Eggs) Tour were several issues of The Cooperative Poultryman from the early 1920's.  As I mentioned, albeit in a cheap-and-easy-joke context, on another page of note, The Cooperative Poultryman is a magazine dedicated to poultry co-ops.  It is not, I repeat, not, Lady Chatterley's Lover with a poultryman replacing the gardener.  I found some pretty nifty information in there on everything from marketing plans to improved devices for feeding chicks to discussions on the best breeds for meat and eggs to a fairly scathing editorial in response to another poultry journal editor's suggestion that an organization be formed to encourage people to eat more eggs.  (Considering that the American agribusiness landscape is now rich with such organizations and check-off programs, it is particularly interesting to read of a time when this still a hot-button issue among farmers.)  I also found something...well, you be the judge.

The "something" in question is a tiny little blurb from the June-July 1924 edition of The Cooperative Poultryman, part of a column of tiny little blurbs collected under the heading "Why Not?"  Keeping in mind that we all carry cultural baggage, and that the baggage of today is not the baggage of 80 years ago, and keeping in mind further that the mission of The Cooperative Poultryman is to provide support and assistance for poultry cooperatives, assistance that includes responding vigorously to the critics of cooperatives; keeping all that in mind, I was still surprised by their tweaking of a newspaper belonging to that Captain of Industry and plutocratic nutjob, Henry Ford:

Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent recently made itself ridiculous by printing a series of articles pretending to show that Jews were dominating cooperative marketing and using it to exploit the farmers for their own gain.  There are a hundred Jews in the commission business and speculating on produce exchanges for every one that is connected with cooperative marketing.

It was 81 years ago, says my left brain to my right brain.  Things were different then.  It doesn't work.  My right brain is still incredulous at this editorial response, and at the idea that the correct answer to Co-ops are run by greedy exploitative Jews! was not Henry Ford is not just a plutocratic nutjob, he's an anti-Semite!,  but rather, Nuh-uh!  Your team has WAY more Jews than our team, you big stupidhead!  I realize I'll have to develop a thicker skin, historical-perspective-wise, if I want to get any work done without stopping every hour or so to gibber frantically, but for now, color me flummoxed, boggled and any other moldy old verb that would indicate either staggering naivete or just plain stupidity.

If it is not a truth universally acknowledged, it should be:  There is something about a trip away from home that makes you crave being at home about 12 to 24 hours before you can actually be there.   It does not matter how excellent was the trip, or how wretched is your home.   You might have had such a wonderful time in, say, Scotland, that the very thought of having to go home, back to a place of unfulfilled dreams and grouchy neighbors, filled you with angst and sadness; at some point the "home" switch in your head gets flicked on, and you're a good day away from it.  You could be chasing the perfect wave around the globe; cooking your way around France and Italy; running with the gazelles in Botswana; sleeping on the floor of your studio-dwelling New York City friends after you've gone out for pizza at 1 in the morning and realized that yes, that was Jim Jarmusch walking by; looking furtively at the lace-clad beauties in the red-light district in Amsterdam; riding your bike and eating your way across Iowa; or sitting in a rowboat in the middle of a lake in Canada, not a soul around for miles, mist rising off the surface of the water, the call of trumpeter swans in the distance.  At some point, you must go home, and you will not be denied. 

Unfortunately, denied is exactly what you will be.  There is no getting around it.   There is another should-be-universal truth that the older one gets, the faster time passes except when one wakes up in the middle of the night, at which point time slows down to cold-molasses-like speeds.  I would add that the only thing that makes time pass slower than insomnia is sitting an airport, waiting for your plane to be ready to board.  If it's not a plane, it's a train.  If it's not a train, it's a bus.  If you are are thwarting the collectivist tyranny of the timetable (lest you think that I am being over the top here, that's an almost-direct quote from a letter -- not written by me -- to the editorial page of the New York Times) by being the king of your own destiny (another quote from the same letter-writer) and driving, either your own car, or a rental, there will be something to keep you from Just Being At Home.  There will be road construction, a sporting event, some other cause of stupefying amounts of traffic, the kind where you take one look and just know that a local news helicopter is about to fly over you, dispensing advice to avoid the road on which you find yourself.  Or the road might be as clear as a baby's eyes, but you are 750 miles from home.

You may have ascertained that I am not my usual kicky, roll-with-the-punches self, and for that, dear friends, I beg your forgiveness.  At 4:30 this morning my eyes snapped open and I knew, with dreadful certainty, that they would not be closing any time soon.  I have been awake for five hours and I have not had any coffee, or tea, or anything else that would pick me up and carry me into the day.  There are deep grooves under my eyes where my smile used to be.  I have achieved the unlikely combination of pale (from hours spent paging through egg pricing reports, marketing surveys, feed cost surveys and 80-year-old poultry cooperative magazines) and sunburned (from sitting outside for twenty minutes to make some phone calls).  I look haunted, pained and dyspeptic.

Hallelujah.  I have found my academic groove. 

And I have found my groove, dear friends, although whether this discovery is cheering or depressing, I have not yet decided.  We all have a metier, an idiom, to call our own, and apparently mine is to spend hours in an archive, turning brittle yellow pages gently, discovering that once upon a time, East Coast poultry farmers feared being squashed by the Corn Belt farmers, who in turn feared being squashed by the well-organized egg cooperatives of Petaluma, California, who in turn lobbied for trade barriers and tariffs against imported eggs from China.  (Plus ca change, etc., etc.)  What I am going to do with all this knowledge is anyone's guess.  I am not a trained historian; I have nothing but a B.A. in English literature and Russian, and an enthusiastic attitude, along with a fear of screwing things up.  I used to laugh when my mom would say that she wished that someone would pay her to read, without the attendant nonsense of writing about what she had read.  Now I know better.  She's a perceptive one, Mom.

Fortunately, I recognize this tetchiness as the temporary state that it is, and I know what I need to do to get over it.  Ultimately, what I need is a little coffee, a little nap (I know it sounds counterintuitive, but like the human being and fish, coffee and a nap can coexist peacefully within me), the feel of my key hitting the lock, the sight of Lloyd's beautiful hazel eyes.  Once I have all these, I will be fortified to make us a loaf of one of the best breads I know (the recipe is here), which, when accompanied by a little butter, a little sea salt and plenty of jam from one of the best jam masters I know, will further fortify me all the way to the gym, where after I run my ass around for a few hours, I will be bright-eyed and ambitious, ready to read over all of the notes I have taken for three days and get back to work, at which point it will be time for another trip (perhaps to points west?), another round of information gathering, another long wait for home, another chance to do it again, and again, and again.

Ah, yes, I almost forgot about the bread.  Old friends may recognize it.  New friends are welcome to try it. 

dear readers == i've stumbled into a veritable treasure trove of chicken & egg information... i send you these preliminary notes now, just in case there is any truth to the notorious "curse of the cow college" legend, which, as many of you know, has gained considerable credibility with the recent string of untimely deaths among egg researchers who have accessed these archives.

astounding, mind blowing flabbergasting

• largest chicken on record -- "vladivostok vicky" -- at over one and a half metric tonnes (slightly larger than a budweiser clydesdale), vlad-vicky's lifetime streak of 4H best in shows is unlikely ever to be broken.  tragically, this noble champion fell into disgrace when she suddenly entered into an unending series of elective back surgeries just as mandatory steroid testing was introduced to the professional poultry circuit.
• chickens were never insectivorous jungle fowl indigenous to madagascar... that's just a load of shit made up by evolutionists.  actually, chickens were tenderly (if not intelligently) designed by a tough man name frank perdue.
• kentucky fried chicken is actually fried in memphis, tennessee.  in perhaps a related development, ky jelly is manufactured in newark, nj; my old kentucky home currently resides in a waco, tx, trailer park, although there is some evidence that it may have originally been parked outside louisville, which does nothing to excuse the off-shoring of louisville sluggers to moosejaw, saskatchewan.
• if a dog sits on a nest of fertilized eggs for a few weeks, a litter of puppies will hatch.  retrievers, spaniels, setters and other bird dogs tend to have best results.  eggplants, on the other hand, are useless.  they give me gas.  the only plant known to produce eggs is the larch.  the chicken mcnugget is technically not chicken at all, although as far as highly-processed gelatinous cave mold goes, you have to admit it's pretty good.
• according to my sources, in 1963 a rhode island red chicken from jewitt city, ct, juggled twenty-three live chainsaws for more than an hour.
• unlike pigeons, chickens cannot be trained to play checkers.  however, indonesian psychologists have had limited success teaching bantam hens to play scrabble.  apparently the birds aren't half-bad, although they tend to use the challenge rule recklessly.
• wait, someone's coming, i'll be right ba afjkdsl;............

Dear friends,

I am headed out of town for a few days, kicking off the Ag Library 2005 (This Time It's For the Eggs) Tour.  I will be back on Saturday night, although if I can find some cheap and easy internet access on the road, I'll probably be right here, sharing thrilling tales of fifty years' worth of farm commodity reports.

Before I go, though, I simply must thank the person or persons who found me by googling "your pants will be dancing with figs."  You have done me a great service, and you have put a permanent smile -- a genuinely pleased and happy smile, not a contemptuous smile -- on my face.  Thank you.

Until Sunday, dear friends.