Chawing on Your Ear

I once wrote a story about a man who had his ear bit off by a guy he was tussling with in broad daylight, right in his own neighborhood.

I didn’t know the man. Had never seen his ears. Didn’t know if they were big or small, hairy or bald, pierced or had one of those hubcaps in the center of the lobe.

I only knew that the man got his ear bit off by a neighbor who wasn’t right in the head. He had known that beforehand. Had known that his neighbor walked the streets talking to Jimmy Hendrix and Jesus.

I can’t recall what offense had been taken but whatever it was, he said something that interrupted the running dialogue and before he knew what bit him, his ear was chewed completely off.  Thankfully because this was about the same time as that unfortunate Mike Tyson incident the fellow had enough wits about him to grab the ear, and run for the car. He grabbed a towel first, to staunch the bleeding, and drove himself to the hospital, which wasn’t far up the road at all.

But by the time he got to the ER he couldn’t find his ear.

It was missing.

He went back to the car and searched but still couldn’t find his ear.

So he called his mama, had her search at his home, in the street. She finally found the ear back up behind the gas pedal of his floorboard.

“There were some M & M crumbles stuck to it but otherwise it was fine,” the fellow told me later by phone … with his one good ear.  Doctors were successful at reattaching the bad ear. The whole incident gave a whole new meaning to that catch phrase, “I don’t want you chawing on my ear.”

That story rivaled the one I did later about a woman who said her boyfriend was trying to kill her by putting ear wax into her gas tank.

It’s been hot around here this week. Soaring up to 108, 106. That kind of hot.

“I always imagined you under the canopy of evergreens,” my friend Ken Callaway said to me yesterday. Ken has two good ears and we were talking by phone. He lives in Georgia. I’m headed there this weekend.

Heck no, I told Ken. I live five minutes from the Columbia River. We grown watermelon, asparagus and wheat in this country. Our trees are two feet high and tumble across the grasslands.

Tim and I took the dogs to the river last night. I would have loved to have watched the sunset over the river but it was too dang hot.

It was still hot when we went to bed last night. I was reading the morning paper at midnight when I came across a note in the police log:

9:40 p.m. Man called Hermiston police to complain that it is 102 and his wife has locked him out of the house. She told him to stay in the garage for the night.

I read it to Tim, who was immersed in a Luis Urrea book.

Thankfully, he could hear it because Tim has both his ears.

He laughed too.

It was a nervous laughter.

Studies have shown that as temperatures rise, so do tempers. A 2010 study of violence published in the journal “Weather, Climate and Society,” hotter temperatures coincided with an increase of aggressive crime, particularly domestic violence.

CBS reported this week that as temperature reach triple-digits in Chicago, more than 20 people have been shot, and three have been killed in the last week.

So, take my advice: If your wife locks you out of the house, don’t call the cops. Leave her alone.

What are you doing to keep chill this summer?