Me and Jesse - Me and Danny

By Larry L. Sydow

Me and Jesse-Me and Danny describes the adventures and misadventures of two ten-year-old boys living in a small town in western Iowa. The stories are told by two best friends, and are spiced with fantasy, wild imaginations, mysteries which take the boredom out of growing up in a small town. A strange character enters the pictures, turning camping, swimming, fishing, and ordinary exploration into mysteries to be solved. The two precocious pre-teens face a ghost, kidnapping gypsies, escaped convicts, and a suspected spy with a suitcase full of surprises. Daytime battles for supremacy in the "town ditch" and nighttime explorations of a cemetery add excitement to fishing and ghost hunting. The questions often resurface: "Who is Rufus?"" and "Is he friend or foe?" 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Larry Sydow
• Release date: Oct 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201647407

Larry L. Sydow

       Larry Sydow is a retired pastor. He received his B.A. Degree from Midland University in Fremont, NE, and his Master of Divinity Degree from Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN. He previously published “Let Them Answer,” a book of children’s sermons. When he retired, he planned to write a book compiling the best of the devotions he had been writing for almost fifteen years. However, as a Master Gardener, the other writing project on the back burner was a book of the stories medicinal herbs tell.       His writing was interrupted by his first retirement failure by a request that he serve as a nursing home chaplain.  During that time, he began writing science fantasy. The first book of the PARALLEL MISSIONS series, “Parallel Mission, the Journey Begins,” was published in 2017.  He failed retirement a second time when he was asked to fill in for a couple of months for a pastor in Roswell, NM going on medical leave. It was a position that lasted three years, during which he moved to Roswell and continued to write. The results were a continuation of the Parallel Missions Series.      Larry and his wife, Susan, have two children and two grandchildren living in the Seattle, WA area. In 2018 they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. Susan is an accomplished quilter. In addition to writing, Larry enjoys music. He sings, plays piano, organ, and guitar. He has written numerous songs for various occasions, including more than 20 “herb songs” illustrating the stories herbs can tell. ABOUT THE ARTIST     Pat Hittle became an artist quite by accident. Studying to become a theater director, she discovered she needed an art course to design her own scenery. She found that she enjoyed it so much that she studied the masters when she lived in Italy. When she returned to the U.S., she found that people wanted to buy her art, so she started entering shows successfully. Thus, she became a professional artist.

Book preview

ME AND JESSE—PORTALS TO ADVENTURE

Foreward by Larry (Dad)

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I grew up on a farm in northeast Nebraska, uncontaminated by television. Yet, there were times in my life when the simplest of triggers spawned adventures.  Radio dramas set the stage for some battles that made later television shows feel disappointing. On the radio, the Lone Ranger was never beaten down.  Roy Roger’s hat was never knocked off.  Fibber McGee’s closet always called for caution but never had to be refilled.  Gracie Allen made George Burns look smart, and Lucy never failed to drive Ricky Ricardo into his Cuban tirade.  The Shadow was scarier because my parents didn’t allow us to listen, except from the darkness of our upstairs bedrooms—where we knew he lurked in the closet of the spare room.

Movies were few and far between.  Our greatest mysteries, wars, fights-to-the-death, Indian raids, flights from head-hunters, and wild game hunts all took place on our 40-acre jungle, our corn-crib castle, our 10-mile-high mountain of corncobs, our chicken-coop roof-top fort, or our raging shark and barracuda infested creek.  The adventures never ended and never became boring.

What follows is a compilation of stories based on a combination of my experiences and bits and pieces of accounts told by my son, Danny (Dan today), and his best friend, Jesse.  Collecting their stories has become a challenge.  I can compare this collection with making a cake from scratch.  The recipe started with two mugs of their memories when they were ten-year-olds, a few cups of my childhood exploits, a tablespoon of yeasty truth, and a whopping tumbler full of fantasy.  Bake that cake for thirty or forty years in the oven of imagination, and the following narratives emerge.

When the boys were ten, we lived in the small town of Soldier, Iowa, a megalopolis of about 250 people.  I was the pastor of the only church in town—Soldier Lutheran Church.  Jesse Lee lived across the street from us.  The ten-year-old neighbors were so much alike, it would have been easy to think of them as twins, not especially in looks, but in personalities.  Both were exceptionally smart—some said, too shrewd for their own good. They were best friends—most of the time.  Jesse was a few weeks older than Danny, but they were like two peas in a pod.  If one got in trouble, it was an excellent bet they were both in it together. Sports-wise, the big difference was that Danny cheered for the Michigan Wolverines, while Jesse cheered for the Green Bay Packers.  Go, figure!

Despite their tendency to get into trouble occasionally, they were good kids.  A phrase heard often was Me and Jesse or Me and Danny.  I will not pretend I remember how ten-year-olds talk, except the phrases I repeatedly overheard: Me and Jesse or Me and Danny.

Dan and Jesse gave me permission to use their names.  The names of other youths and townspeople are fictitious.  The tales that follow begin with a true story.  Each chapter has some facts and some outrageous fiction.  See if you can guess where fact turns to fantasy.

1–Dad’s Story—The Cave

MY family thought I was the least likely family member to buy the farm or even a portion of it.  The home place, as it was known, was seven miles from Stanton, a small rural village of 1300—plus or minus a few.  I admit I hated farming in my teen years and could hardly wait to leave to go to the city.  After college, I married Sue, the love of my life, a sociology major from Ohio.  With her encouragement, I continued from college to seminary and earned my Master of Divinity degree.  Dan was born two years after his brother.  It was the good life.

Before Dan was born, my parents moved to town.  None of my three brothers or two sisters were interested in farming the land.  Thankfully, someone was interested in buying the house, and they moved it to the other side of the village.  The rest of the buildings quickly deteriorated.  Dan’s grandmother and grandfather rented out the farm.  A neighbor finally leased the farmable land, but the other buildings, with no one watching after them, were vandalized and fell apart from weather, age, and neglect. 

When my parents announced they were willing to sell forty acres of the farm where the buildings had been, I was the first and only one to make an offer, which they happily accepted.  Keeping the land in the family was important, after all. 

By then, the outbuildings, except for a sad-looking hog barn, the chicken coop's foundation, and the storm cave entrance, had mostly collapsed from lack of attention and several strong thunderstorms.  (We always referred to the storm cellar as the cave.)  The old creek still meandered through the bottomland and continued to trickle along from constantly flowing springs.  Some trees I had climbed and played in as a kid had died, leaving tree-skeletons standing like sentinels. However, many living trees still stood, outlining the places where the former buildings had been.  It may have been a foolish purchase to some, but to me, it was a part of my story. 

I vaguely remembered moving there when I was four.  The old house seemed enormous, with lots of rooms, all heated in the cold Nebraska winters by a single oil burner in the kitchen.  The upstairs only received heat when my parents propped open the door to the stairs.  There were registers on the upstairs floor that connected with the downstairs ceiling.  They only allowed a little heat to rise and the sound of the radio to filter up to children who were supposed to be sleeping.  Through the registers, we caught portions of Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos and Andy, or The Lone Ranger rides again!

My parents bought the farmhouse with 150 acres of decent farmland when they were married. It was a couple of miles from the homeplace where my grandparents had lived.  Mom and Dad planted fruit trees by the dozens before they moved there, creating a forest of trees around the house's south, west, and north sides. Many of the fantastic varieties of mulberries–from the small red and purple ones to the very large, very sweet, thumb-sized berries—were still producing when my kids were little. 

Retreats to the now-deserted farm were my unwind time.  Coming out for a few days always jogged my memories of my growing up periods.  I recognized the skeleton of a dead tree south of where the house had been as the last remnant of the apple tree I climbed to fetch golden delicious apples in late summer.  Cherry and wild plum trees, raspberry and gooseberry bushes provided more sweet treats at other times.  We picked the tart chokecherries along the fence line by the bushels for making jelly while carefully avoiding stinging nettles and poison ivy.  My idyllic memories made it seem like we had fresh fruit from the middle of the hot, muggy summers until harvest in September, before the first frost, each ripening in its own season.

What captured my imagination was the forest of elm, oak, and maple trees south of the house.  My parents hadn’t planted them.  Nature did.  They filled the gully with a canopy of green shade, which, as a child, seemed so big and deep it practically went down to the center of the earth. 

This gulley was the location of many wars with renegade Indians, bank robbers, cut-throat murderers, and child-stealing gypsies, all of which required fights of bloody combat, leaving me mortally wounded more times than I could count.  One afternoon alone, I died horrible deaths at least five times. But, on the other hand, I studied to fight with sabers and swords and learned to shoot rifles, shotguns, bazookas, and missile launchers.  I also had a handy Buck Rogers Ray Gun I bought by saving my allowance.  It came in handy for fighting some vicious killers and an occasional alien visiting from Mars.

These woods were host to many venomous serpents, ferocious lions, tigers, panthers, and wolves. Each creature lurked behind bushes and fallen trees, waiting to attack.  They required constant vigilance and split-second responses.  The raging river (almost always dry as a bone unless it was raining) hosted child-eating barracuda, alligators, boa constrictors, and feisty swordfish.

I could follow that canyon of adventure down through the barbed-wire barricade. It passed through a barren, rattlesnake-infested desert.  If you survived the desert, you still had to pass through no-man's-land. It was a (cow patty) minefield littered with explosives.  That led to a mysterious meandering river and additional wild jungles and tribes of headhunters.

It was here where I remember being attacked by herds of buffalo, being charged by several bull elephants, and threatened with deadly violence by an enormous giant beast whose fangs were as large and sharp as the teeth of a hay sweep.

There were other mysteries about this place that drew me back, even as an adult. They were mysteries I never reconciled as a kid.  I still believe they were not entirely imaginary.  They were things I hadn’t dreamed up for fun. 

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My father built the cave (storm cave) that was scary for me as