Howdy folks:
Welcome to Michael Perry’s Voice Mail, episode 263. This one’s available to free and paid subscribers alike. Click the player above to listen.
In this episode I explore the evolution and nuances of the Menards rebate form and why some of us are so excited about the new version. Then I tell the story of the exploding pink tape measure. And then it all ends up back at Menards again.
If you happen to be in the Eau Claire area on May 15, I’m doing a live event with my friend Frank Bures to promote his new book. If you can’t make it, the book is available at Bookshop.org and Amazon.
All of my live events can be found here.
Thank you for subscribing and listening.
Mike
MARGINALIA
(Annotations from books Mike is reading, or annotations related to the episode)
I have so many annotations related to today’s story that the regular book marginalia is on pause for this episode.
Below, a sampling of my personal tape measure inventory. Note nothing in pink.
The photo below diagrams the flight of the exploding pink tape measure. This image originally appeared in Voice Mail episode #223, “The Writing Shack.”
The image below is a slide taken by my father the day our Menard pole barn arrived in pieces on a truck.
Below you can see the pole barn as it stood completed on our farmstead:
There are more Menard pole barn photos in Voice Mail episode #174 “Ashley C. Ford and Pole Barns.
In this passage from the essay “A Way With Wings,” from the book Off Main Street, I refer to the crew who built our Menard pole shed:
This snowy picture of the peak of our Menard pole barn (which I can see from my little room above the garage) is the central to the birth of the book Forty Acres Deep.
The Menards jingle. You grew up around these parts you know that baby by heart.
An icon in the Midwestern pantheon: Ray “the Menards guy” Szmanda.
The passage about the Menards jets is in Coop.
Then there was the time I did this.
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See y’down the road!
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