By Al Batt, Tales from Exit 22

When spring has sprung, we enter the pothole season.

The pothole season is not for those weak of stomach. Potholes cause motion sickness even in the most experienced traveler. A person could have a bad hair day just from the bouncing.

Potholes are whiplash producing burrs under our vehicular saddles.

We have a pothole with historical significance in our neighborhood. It has a holier-than-thou attitude due to the fact that it is slightly larger than the Grand Canyon. It&8217;s a bottomless pit that swallows tractor-trailer rigs with regularity. I suppose that the transportation officials could throw money at the problem. It would take a casino&8217;s money to fill it.

There are a lot of potholes. Our weather is a great producer of potholes. Hot, cold, expand, contract, pothole.

Potholes aren&8217;t all bad. They slow traffic. If we have a crop of potholes that are high in number and extremely deep, we will eliminate speeding. Off-the-road vehicle drivers can experience the thrill of off-the-road driving without ever leaving the road.

Pothole repair is an annual battle waged by the good people who maintain our roads. It is quite a job filling in the divots in our highways and byways. I expect that any day now they will be injecting Botox into the roads.

The potholes could be put to good use.

They could be used for automobile testing. You can&8217;t judge the ride of a vehicle without knowing the roughness of the road.

The potholes could be turned into swimming pools. In the winter they could be used for ice fishing.

The potholes could be used for landfills. Things that go dump in the night.

Neighbors could bond during pothole-filling parties.

Contests could be run with the winners given the privilege of naming the pothole.

Entrepreneurs could be selling maps to the potholes.

Port-a-potholes could become a viable business.

Charity fundraisers could offer donors a chance to adopt a pothole. Extra money would go toward potholes shaped like a state or a celebrity. Big givers would have the opportunities to send their adopted potholes to college.

For now, we&8217;ll all have to take potholeluck and join with others in an appreciation of potholes across America.

Remember, the potholes bat last.

Walk to work and save a muffler.

May the road always rise up to meet you.

Dinner or supper?

Growing up on the farm, we ate breakfast in the morning, lunch in mid-morning, dinner at noon, lunch in the mid-afternoon, supper after chores, and then lunch again before bed.

Yes, we ate supper in the days before supper was kicked to church.

Now most everyone I know eats breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Only breakfast remains unchanged. Dinner became lunch, lunch became a snack, and supper became dinner.

Some people call their evening meal supper when they eat it at home, but when they go out, they go out for dinner.

I eat lunch or dinner at noon. If the meal is served on a real plate, then it&8217;s dinner. If it&8217;s not, it&8217;s lunch.

I still eat supper.

I&8217;ll continue to do so until I see a painting depicting the Last Dinner.

Shop class

What is so rare as a day in June?

A shop teacher with all of his fingers.

I took shop (industrial arts) in junior high school.

My assignment was to make a breadboard out of a hunk of wood. The wood came from a tree called a board.

The board needed to be planed true. This was to be accomplished by using equipment more frightening than the scariest rides in any amusement park. These contraptions were monsters that thought nothing of taking a finger from any boy whose concentration wavered for even an instant.

My board was really false. By the time I had finished planing my board, it was the proper length for a breadboard, but it was about as wide as a used toothpick. I&8217;d had splinters that were bigger.

I made some money organizing and taking bets on electric sander races so I could buy another board.

I felt sorry for a classmate who was sent to the lumberyard to get a board stretcher. As one who had cut a number of boards many times and found that they were still too short, I recognized the need for such a product, but I knew from personal experience that the lumberyard didn&8217;t even carry sky hooks.

I produced a breadboard, a treasured heirloom that I will leave to my grandchildren so that someday my great-grandchildren will be able to say, &8220;What on earth is this junk?&8221; before they sell it at a garage sale.

Hartland resident Al Batt&8217;s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.