Being Bored Can be Brutally Boring

“I’m bored.”

Sometimes my lips flapped for no reason, but that’s what I said. I have vivid memories of saying that because it was the last time I ever said, “I’m bored.”

I immediately regretted saying it because my father heard it. He had used both ears. He’d grown up in a family with many ears, and the members of that fine family leaned in and listened hard to hear when there was food being put on the table.

Dad might have been able to ignore my proclamation if I hadn’t said it in all caps. I claimed it was the dog talking, but my father used a process of elimination to determine that since the dog had never once said a single word in English before, the speaker had been me.

I admitted it had been me, but I was talking to the dog. My motion was denied.

I don’t think Dad believed idle hands were the devil’s workshop, but he didn’t think I needed any more free time to pick nits.

My father told me to clean the henhouse and be bored no more. Be still, my heart. The henhouse was a red, wooden building housing chickens that were incredibly regular and never once flushed. The ammonia there was strong enough to stunt the growth of hairs in Mr. Clean’s nose, and it made my nose run, my eyes run and even my ears run. It made my feet want to run away.

I wasn’t thrilled by the unexpected opportunity of being able to polish a poultry pigsty to the point it became a poultry palace, but I followed orders and cleaned the henhouse. It was my least favorite job on the farm. My father, what a card, had tossed in a carrot on a stick. If I did a good enough job of cleaning the henhouse of everything but the hens, he’d allow me to use the good grease gun on the combine.

I was pitching poop into a manure spreader that did precisely what its name would lead you to believe it would do, when I had an epiphany. I’d never be bored again. That magical childhood resolution became a rousing success story.

We all have different methods of stifling boredom.

“What do you do to keep yourself occupied?” I asked a fellow the other day. He had told me he was retired.

“I’m a go-getter. My wife works at Kwik Trip. Every day, I go to Kwik Trip and get her. That makes me a go-getter,” he replied. “It keeps me from being bored.”

Dad got me a pony for $7. He overpaid. It was a $6 horse at best. I planned on naming him Trotsky. I wasn’t sure who Trotsky was, but Dad vetoed the name. I went with the naming wisdom of a couple of cowboys who had never squatted with their spurs on. Gene (The Singing Cowboy) Autry’s horse was named Champion, and Roy (King of the Cowboys) Rogers’ was Trigger. I honored both by naming the pony Chigger. I was a cowboy in training, but Chigger considered me a boil on his bun, and the stallion worked hard at eliminating me. He thought I was bad company and threatened me with significant bodily harm by introducing me to a sharpened landscape. My being battered from stem to stern proved annoying.

Riding the pony moved me from bliss to sheer terror in a limited number of hoofbeats. I galloped away from boredom.

A woodworking class and its promise of being a quick way to lose a finger, as evidenced by the instructor’s missing digit, kept boredom from perching like a patient vulture.

I no longer have a horse to frighten boredom away. I depend upon wonderful people, nature, newspapers and books to keep boredom at bay. I even enjoyed chewing my way through William Faulkner’s novels. I’ve learned that if I like birds, I’ll never be bored a day in my life.

Frances Mayes, in her book “Under the Tuscan Sun,” wrote, “Life offers you a thousand chances… all you have to do is take one.”

I took a chance on never being bored.

I’m not bored. I may be a lot of things, but bored isn’t one of them.