Short bits, mostly humorous

Onion & Herb
 

It’s been quiet up here on the mountain this winter. I was talking with Bob and Jean Kratzmeyer the other day, they live just down the road. They’re part of the Merced Kratzmeyers, not related at all to the Taft Kratzmeyers. Anyway, the Merced Kratzmeyers held a big family reunion this past February. They chose February, not because of the nice weather, which it wasn’t, but so everyone could take advantage of low, off-season hotel rates. Well, Bob and Jean decided they would attend in order to visit with family members they don’t get to see very often.

As you know, we’ve had plenty of snow so Bob went out early Thursday morning to put snow chains on the Ford pickup before starting down the mountain. By the time they got to Wally’s Gas, Pizza and Bait Shop, the chains were no longer needed. While Bob began removing the chains Wally came out to chat.

“Hey Bob, your uncle gonna be at the reunion, you know, the guy who was in show business? Does he still have his dad’s lucky beer bottle?”

Well Bob did know that his uncle, Herb Kratzmeyer, was in fact already there because Herb had talked to him on the phone the night before. “Yep,” he said, “He called me last night. Didn’t mention any bottle.”

The story goes that Herb’s parents, Larry and Mildred Kratzmeyer, met in 1962 at a concert featuring a new rock and roll band, Crease and The Corduroy Rebellion. Larry was working as a part of the cleanup crew. Mildred had gone with two friends, Donna and Maria, who were considering leaving home and becoming groupies. Herb was picking up trash at the end of the show, and he bent down to grab a discarded beer bottle just as Mildred and her friends walked by. When he straightened up and turned towards the trash can, he bumped into Donna, and the beer bottle, which wasn’t completely empty, flipped out of his hand and splashed warm beer all over Donna’s Ricky Nelson t-shirt. Donna became very upset because Ricky now smelled of stale beer and she was concerned her parents would think she had been out drinking, which she hadn’t. Larry apologized profusely and offered to let Donna use the janitor’s closet to rinse out her shirt in the sink; which she did with Maria’s help.

While Larry and Mildred were waiting for Donna and Maria, they passed the time debating the possible stardom chances of Crease and The Corduroy Rebellion which both agreed were pretty slim if not non-existent. Their music having significantly diminished the glamour of being a groupie. Mildred felt embarrassed for Larry so she agreed to meet him later. But when he asked for her phone number, the only thing he had to write on was the beer bottle, which Mildred did using a lipstick.

Events moved quickly for Larry and Mildred and they were amalgamated six weeks later in a grove of trees just above the beach in Malibu in an unconventional ceremony conducted by the self-proclaimed high priestess of the Non-Denominational Holistic Faith of Mother Earth. They joined the Holistic Faith commune and became an early part of the generation that embraced expanding their minds with organic consumables, mushrooms, plant buttons and other substances. The members of the commune were people who came up with creative names for their children like Dweezle, Moonbeam, Alchemy, Goat, Ambrosia and so on. They also publicly denounced personal ownership of all worldly possessions.
 

It was a year later when Mildred gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, and she and Larry began seeking inspiration to guide them in naming the newest members of the Holistic Faith family. It was in the evening, in the hospital, the day the twins were born, when a nurse brought in Mildred’s dinner and Larry looked at it and said, “What is this?”

To which the nurse replied, “That’s vegetable soup with an onion and herb roll, milk and orange Jell-O for dessert. “Would you like some too?” Since it conformed to the dietary restrictions of their faith Larry said that he would. She left to fetch a second dinner tray for Larry when another nurse came in to take Mildred’s temperature, pulse and blood pressure. As she began making notations on Mildred’s medical chart, she asked if they had decided on names for the twins, which they hadn’t. Larry told her they were still seeking spiritual inspiration.
 

Now the members of the Non-Denominational Holistic Faith of Mother Earth attended a lot of rock concerts for the purpose of seeking converts, and selling their herbal supplements. Mildred and Larry, as a result in their participation in the activities of the commune, were both as they say, a little hard of hearing, especially Mildred. When the nurse asked about the names for their children, Mildred was fumbling with the little cardboard carton of milk, trying to get it open, and she knocked the dinner roll off her plate sending it tumbling across her bed, where Larry caught it just before it fell to the floor. It was at that moment, while he was attempting to hand the roll back to Mildred who was still struggling with the little milk carton, another nurse wheeled in a cart with two bassinets containing the twins, perched on top. Because of her hearing loss, Mildred didn’t hear this nurse ask, “Have you decided on names for your children?” She was looking at the roll Larry was holding and asked, “What’s that?” to which he shouted back, “Onion and herb.” So that’s what the nurse wrote down, Onion Kratzmeyer, female, and Herb Kratzmeyer, male.
 

In the 80’s Onion and Herb, started their own singing group. Herb played piano and wrote his own songs, selections you’re probably not familiar with; there was Lost Love Is Like a Broken Flip Flop, Your Flaxen Hair Reminds Me of My Golden Retriever and Your Love Is the Sustain Pedal of My Heart. There weren’t many requests for Herb’s compositions but there were for a lot for songs by another brother and sister group who were becoming quite popular at the time.
 

Struggling through a sluggish rise to mediocracy, they decided to copy the Carpenters, Karen and Richard. Herb bought a suit, white with a huge collar, matching hip hugger pants with massive bell bottoms that made a swishing noise when he walked, and white patent leather boots with 3” heels.
 

Onion was fascinated with pictures of the actors from early westerns and had fallen in love with the dangling strips of leather fringe on their outfits. The women of the Holistic Faith commune made a striking white leather dress for her with fringe draping from the sleeves and bottom of her skirt, and they added rhinestones so that she looked sort of like a tall, thin female rendition of Liberace mixed with Pocahontas.
 

On stage their attire was stunning, especially Onion’s with all the little rhinestones, not too many, about 60, tastefully placed to accentuate her movements while singing. She tried really hard to imitate Karen Carpenter, even convinced Herb to go to a local pawn shop and buy a used drum set for her to play while they sang, just like she’d seen Karen do on TV.
 

So, with the blessings of their parents, and in their new outfits, the musical duo of Onion and Herb left the Non-Denominational Holistic Faith of Mother Earth, and went on the road playing mostly in hotel lounges hoping to make it big in pop music.
 

Onion had a decent voice, not a great voice but a decent one, but she had no sense of instrumental rhythm. One early critic likened her efforts on the drums as akin to listening to an 80-car pile-up in the fog. Herb convinced her to sell the drums and stick to using her voice, movements, and her rhinestone studded outfit with the fringe, to captivate the audience.
 

It was right after they sold the drums that Onion discovered she had another talent. In the glare of a single spotlight, she could control the reflections from her rhinestones and actually focus them on individual members in the audience. One night, in a Comfy Night-of-Rest Motel in Savannah, Georgia, Onion randomly selected a man in the back of the room as the target for her new-found talent. By the time the show got rolling and Onion began her focused reflections, her recipient was working on his third large Jamaican rum, served with a slice of pineapple and a little umbrella, and his eyes were, shall we say, a little more dilated than usual. Frank was his name and he had been in the Merchant Marine. Onion began flicking her left wrist and then her right, carefully playing the little flashes of the light from her rhinestones across Frank’s eyes, and despite his inebriated state he believed she was sending him a message, a very personal message, in Morse Code, which said, “Meet me backstage after the show. Please don’t keep me waiting.”
 

Well, Onion wasn’t waiting for him after the show, but since he was there, and being the polite girl she had been raised to be, she graciously listened as he expressed his undying love for her, all the while tapping out “Will you marry me?” in Morse Code on her dressing room counter with his right index finger.

After several minutes of his annoying tapping, she looked into his eyes; “Who are you? I don’t even know you.” She got up and left him there, still tapping.
 

To make a long story short, Frank and Onion were married six months later in a small church in Miami in a ceremony conducted by a Methodist minister.
 

“A Methodist?” her mother exclaimed, “and in a building? What happened to your commitment to the Holistic Faith in Mother Earth? What will your father say? Is that even legal?”
 

“It’s fine, Mother, Herb was there. I wore a white dress, a headpiece of wild daisies and carried a bouquet arrangement I picked from the bin behind the mortuary just down the street. You would have been proud.”
 

Well, Larry and Mildred were proud and in a showing of their blessings, sent Onion and Frank a wedding gift containing some of Mother Earth’s newest herbal remedies, which were intercepted by a large German Shephard and confiscated by airport security as they left on their honeymoon, resulting in they’re spending a week in a holding cell in Orlando rather than on the beach in Costa Rica.
 

The following year, Onion ended her music career, just before the birth of their first son, Paul. Over the next three years she gave birth to two more boys, John and George, but despite their best efforts she and Frank never managed to conceive a fourth. “And we had the perfect name all picked out,” she told her mother.
 

After George was born, Onion and Frank traveled for a while, passed through Elk Grove, California and decided to stay because it brought sweet memories of their early days in the commune. Frank got a job as a custodian in an office building and Onion became an adjunct university professor. She teaches selective music history, a series of classes entitled, Morse Code - An Emotional Essential to Love In The Modern World.
 

Herb tried a solo gig for a while but without his sister he fell flat, told his friends, “There isn’t any spice left in the act. I’m quitting, moving back to Los Angeles with my new wife, Simone. We’re gonna start over. It’s not the same without Onion.”
 

They bought an abandoned warehouse in Century City, converted part of it into an art gallery for Simone and a small studio for Herb where he writes commercial jingles for pharmaceutical companies and repairs bicycles. They turned the loft into an apartment where they live with their six cats, two dogs and one myna bird. Not long after Herb and Simone got settled his father Larry, who had achieved the sixth level of Engramatic Thetanism in the Non-Denominational Holistic Faith of Mother Earth Commune, died, or as the members would say, progressed onto the dianetic level of existence. Following the Service of Holistic Memory and Diffusion of Incandescent Recollections, which involved a lot of chanting and twirling, Herb sought out his mother.

“Son,” she told him, “No one in the Holistic Faith retains any personal property, everything belongs to Mother Earth, and is shared equally, allowing us to be holistically free from the bonds of avarice. You know that, dear.”
 

“I know Mom,” he pleaded, “but isn’t there anything to remember Dad by, a photograph, pair of broken sandals, a lock of his hair?”
 

“Honey, we’re all grieving. I can’t think of anything.” At that moment a beam of light burst through the clouds and shone on her face. “Wait, stay here,” she told him as he watched her run to the commune’s bus and return with an old Converse tennis shoe box and thrust it at him. “Here, take this. It’s all there is. It’s yours now.”
 

Herb opened the box, and tears began streaming down his face. “Mom, you kept it,” he said as he read, T-R-2-1-8-8-0 written in faded red lipstick across the label of an old Hamm’s beer bottle.
 

That’s all the news there is this week from here on the mountain. Be kind, find a reason to smile, and write a letter to someone you love.