Our three-day MLK weekend of heavy winter rain pushed all gray-lovers close to the lemming edge. It seemed like horse blinders were attached to my face with that pink hairstyling adhesive tape we used for spit curls in the Sixties. Gray, an oppressive low-lying cloud resembling an overused kneaded eraser, hemming me in, narrowing my actions and thoughts. If you could watch Kramer feed Rusty the Beef-a-Reeno in the classic Seinfeld "Rye" episode on a twelve-inch black and white t.v. under a failing flourescent light fixture in an underground bomb shelter in North Dakota surrounded by a semester's worth of unwashed gym clothes, you would have an inkling of the grayness of our weekend.
"What are you doing?," we emailed each other.
"I'm hunkering down," we replied all.
"I'm hunkering down."
I never heard such a bunch of hunkering in all my born days. Must be a Texas thang!
"I'm hunkering down... I'm hibernating...I'm hiding under a quilt...I'm making roadkill chili in the crockpot."
"I'm hunkered down... Wearing my son's hooded Hoosier sweatshirt in the house."
Are you hunkered down? Have you ever been hunkered down?
"I'm plum hunkered out and going to bed now."
It has come to this, then. If Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar, we would just hunker down around it and maybe make soup.
Hunker probably derives from Scottish or Scandinavian words for haunches. You have to get down on your haunches to set your guitar on fire. It seems that LBJ popularized the expression "hunker down" during his presidency. Not all that surprising for a man with beagles named Him and Her. I've got some lentils, carrots, and potatoes. If I had a ham hock I could hunker down around the crockpot and make soup.
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