This is the season for pumpkin and apple pies, and for flu and COVID shots

On a balmy Tuesday morning, Nov. 7, the Old Men of the Mountain met at the Your Way Café in Schoharie. The OMOTM meet early for breakfast — early enough so some of the restaurants are just opening and getting started.

It has been mentioned before that sometimes the OMOTM have their warm-up meeting out in the parking lot. Maybe the restaurants could give the keys to a reliable OF and the OMOTM could open the place up and get it ready. Just a thought.

Again, at the Your Way, the waitress brings her kids to the restaurant in the morning and they help setting up the tables. When this is all done, the littler kids retire to a booth in the front and do their screens or homework while the older still helps out, and, when the bus comes, out they go.

Also, as has happened before, the littlest one held the door open for the OFs and greeted the OGs as they entered the restaurant.

This scribe does not know how many OFs are chefs but a discussion was held on apple coring. Some OFs eat the apple core, seeds and all, but not the stem, but this is pumpkin- and apple-pie season, so it is imaginable that this type of discussion would come up especially if an OF is a collector of old apple corers, or those that were combination corers and peelers.

One OF said he had a brother that all he waited for at Thanksgiving were the desserts at the end, especially the pies. This OF’s brother’s favorite did not require a corer; it was mincemeat pie he went after.

Medical chemistry

There are all kinds of advertisements advising everyone, not only the OFs, to get their shots. This can cause discussions in any group, not only the OMOTM. Some are for getting the shots, and some against. 

One OF advises in favor. This OF practices what he preaches and had his flu shots, COVID booster, and shingles shot all at the same time, but not in the same arm. His body, trying to sort all this out, must be wondering what the heck is going on with all these chemicals pumped into it.

The body is not supposed to use these shots until it is invaded by some foreign germ, if that germ even bothers to show up at all. Boy, there are a lot of smart people roaming this planet. Thank goodness.

As one OF put it, “There are a lot more important people out there than movie stars and football players.”

This scribe at one time asked a doctor friend of his how does the body know what to do with the medications that are used and how do they go to the right place or do the right thing. The doctor replied: “In essence, chemistry. Just plain ole chemistry.”

Apparently (and this scribe is not an expert on this) if a disease is XYZ, it is up to someone to come up with a group of chemicals that are going to knock out XYZ, and that may be MNOP. And if the doctor guesses wrong and thinks ABC is going to do it, it won’t touch it.

Hmm! Not only are we just one great big battery, but a bunch of OF chemical plants walking around. No wonder we sometimes explode.

This scribe wonders if the head is the plus and the feet are the negative, and if the OFs urinate and defecate just to clean out all those unused chemicals the OFs either ingest, or filter in through our pores — a simple OF just wondering.

Dees’ delight

Around this time last year, one of the OFs decided he would purchase a turkey and have an Old Man of the Mountain raffle, and raffle off the turkey. This year, he did the same thing.

This year, instead of a couple of OFs collecting the names to drop in a hat, the OF enlisted the help of the “littlest and youngest” waitress in the mountains to hand out the slips of paper and gather the names, fold them up and drop them in the hat for the drawing.

Then the youngun took the hat to an OF to draw out a name. The first name drawn unfortunately belonged to an OF who had to leave and was already gone, a re-draw was done, and another OF’s name was drawn and went home with the bird.

The OFs would like to thank Frank Dees for putting all this effort in, especially for supplying the turkey.

Those Old Men of the Mountain who met at the Your Way Café in Schoharie, and had their parking lot meeting, were: Bill Lichliter, George Washburn, Dick Dexter, Herb Bahrmann, Miner Stevens, Glenn Patterson, Mark Traver, Joe Rack, Jake Herzog, Marty Herzog, Roger Shafer, Harold Guest, Wally Guest, Jack Norray, Lou Schenck, Gerry Cross, Rev. Jay Francis, Russ Pokorny, Gerry Chartier, Bob Donnelly, Dave Hodgetts, John Dab, Rick LaGrange, Paul Guiton, Doug Marshall, Frank Dees, Henry Whipple, Frank Fuss, and again not me.