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entertainment element to painful nonfatal mishaps. Once you determine that your buddy is still able to walk and talk after being hit in the head with a monkey wrench, nothing’s funnier than seeing your buddy get hit in the head with a monkey wrench. Once while helping our neighbor Jerry unload silage wagons, I stood up directly beneath the silo chute and drove my cranium into the apparatus with a resounding thump. For half a second Jerry’s eyes widened withconcern; then as he saw I was still able to stand, he collapsed into giggles. This was a very kind and gentle man, but he just couldn’t keep a straight face whenever someone got whacked.
    Once he did get his. One of his milk cows became deathly and irretrievably ill and was in such discomfort that he asked my brother to come over with his deer rifle and mercifully dispatch it, which my brother did. Then they had to drag the giant corpse out of the barn. So my brother hooked a cable between the cow and the tractor and started slowly pulling the animal out. Somehow one of the cow’s legs got caught on a stanchion and drawn way back. When the leg finally cleared the stanchion, the cow’s hoof whipped around and smacked Jerry right in the kneecap. As he writhed and hopped around on one leg, my brother said, “You alright?” Jerry kept writhing and my brother patted his rifle. “ ’Cause I got one more shell …”
    We all know of friends and family who have been subject to injuries that are not funny at all and in fact have been tragic. So I think the deal here is, whenever we can get away with laughing at the pain, we do. But we also try to incorporate a lesson from the pain, if our thick heads will allow it. When my brother called to tell me about the grinder explosion, he was sitting in his pickup in the Farm & Fleet parking lot. Said he was about to go in and purchase one of those—as he called it—“full-frontal” face masks. “Always thought they were kinda silly,” he said, “but this has been a behavior-altering experience.”
NO LIMITS
    I woke up early this morning and moved the chickens to fresh grass, then drove to town and found myself caught in a traffic jam, which is to say there were three cars between me and the stop sign. This put me in a reflective mood, which was handy, because the vehicle ahead of me was fitted with a plastic license plate holder declaring, THERE ARE NO LIMITS.
    I immediately started tallying up all evidence to the contrary.
    First, foremost, and most problematic, there is a limit to my ability to believe there are no limits. This arises out of certain morose Scandinavian tendencies, festering curmudgeonry, frank peevishness, and a disappointing attempt at the high hurdles in 1982. Also, I was short on sleep and only twelve hours previous had been reviewing our auto insurance, both factors inimical to accepting the concept of there being no limits, even if it says so right there on the back of your RAV4 in all capital letters.
    The last thing I want to do first thing in the morning is impugn the makers of motivational license plate holders, but: there are limits. There are limits to how I’m going to get anywhere stuck behind you at this stop sign. There are limits to my ability to do quadratic equations or choose correctly between who and whom. There are limits to how much ranch dressing you can get out of the bottle even after you leave it propped upside down for a week.
    Getting more personally specific, my ability to grow hair on the topmost portion of my head is irrefutably limited, as is myability to start a chainsaw on the first try without flooding it, to untangle fishing line without yanking on it, or to perform a grand jeté without a scissors lift and better health insurance. There is a scar above my left eyebrow that says my ability to levitate above concrete is fundamentally limited. Just up the road from here sits a banker with a calculator that