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Whatever happened to the humble but loveable handkerchief?
I don't mean the fancy square of silk decorating a suit jacket, nor the monogrammed Sunday handkerchief that showed up under Christmas trees.
I'm talking about a big ol' pocket rag meant to mop sweat and carry snot.
For us farm kids growing up in the 1960s, the only tool more necessary than a hanky was a pocketknife. I also hoped to have a stray quarter or two for a bottle of RC Cola and a Hershey bar at the general store, but mostly I wandered through boyhood with a handkerchief and a jackknife.
Which reminds me of another use for the handkerchief -- cleaning your pocketknife after a recess of whittling sticks or etching football plays in the playground dirt. Of course we carried pocketknives to school. We needed them for show-and-tell.
As for hankies, we dipped them in ditch water to keep bullfrogs comfortable in our pockets until we got the little guys home and into our sisters' underwear drawers.
We marched into the woods to hunt grizzly bears with our pocketknives. When we caught one, we'd carry the meat home in pouches made from our hankies. Daring adventures for sure, but we dared to do it -- mostly because no grizzlies roamed within 2,000 miles of our woods.
The uses for hankies seemed endless: parachutes for when G.I. Joe jumped off the top of the swing set; rags to clean mud from bicycle tires; even flags for tree forts. We made the flag poles from dead branches we sawed from trees with our pocketknives.
Farm kids carried jackknives to open feed sacks, cut baling twine, tighten screws on wobbly machinery and to pry caps off bottles of RC Cola if we happened to have found a quarter or two.
Summer vacations for farm kids were spent baling hay under a hot sun. We needed solid work hankies to swab the sweat out of our eyes and for blowing our noses after field chaff set off sneezing fits. We learned pretty quickly to remember which corner of the hanky was for which task.
A great philosopher once said that the handkerchief is a device for conveying what you don't want in your nose into your pocket. Nor do you want to spread it across your brow. Gross!
Fifty-some years later, both the workhorse hanky and useful pocketknife have disappeared. Guys use tissues. Seriously? Can you imagine the ribbing we would have had to endure as kids if we were squeamish about cramming good clean snot into our pockets? Sissy. And when was the last time you tried to keep a bullfrog comfy in a wet tissue?
Now guys wear hankies on their heads. There's just no way to put a handkerchief to practical use and then wrap it around one's head.
And don't even try to take a pocketknife to school -- or anywhere else, for that matter. In the old days, a jackknife marked you as prepared as a Boy Scout. Now, you're a terrorist. And a disgusting one at that if you've also crammed a loaded hanky into your other pocket.
I do manage to jingle a quarter or two in my pocket on occasion, but my 60-something body no longer tolerates cola, and coffee costs $2, not 10 cents.
No hankies, pocketknives, quarters or bullfrogs -- it's a sad turn of affairs. I'd wave a white flag, but I can't. It was my hanky.
Catch bullfrogs with Cole at burtseyeview@tribtoday.com, the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook or @BurtonWCole on Twitter.