Good Ol' Days
Letter to my son Jacob
Sunday, 1 April
C L I C K T O E N L A R G E
Picture: 800 x 465 - Wikipaintings
Winslow Homer - Snap the Whip
Welcome to April.
We’re well into Spring and only a couple of healthy months from another
summer vacation. As a kid the first day
of having the summer off was when I savored the thought of twelve weeks away
from school. What an extravagant
blessing to be gone for so long. How was
it the grown ups could be so generous?
It wasn’t like them to allow a kid so much unproductive time to do as
their heart pleased. Sure enough, there
had been an ulterior motive. In the
rural America
Now days most of us don’t live on farms. We don’t grow our own food and sew our own
clothes. If you had baking soda you
could use it to brush your teeth. It you
had a toothache a dab of kerosene on the gum might make things seem a bit
better. There wasn’t any indoor
plumbing. Hopefully the outhouse was well
away from the kitchen because it can get pretty ripe in hot weather. Show extra caution when using it after dark. Sometimes a snake or rodent will startle you
when opening the outhouse door, day or night.
We won’t even mention the spiders that like dark crannies. Also, use your own imagination when it comes
to the bucket of corncobs within reach of where you sit. That’s summer. What about winter? There’s a harsh wind blowing and its bitter
cold, below freezing. You’ve got to use
the outhouse. Rain, snow. sleet – none
of that matters when you have to go.
Bundle up as best you can and trudge your way to the little shack out
back. Let’s hope the leak in the roof
has been fixed.
Anyone thinking those were the good old days hasn’t lived
it. Movies are about entertainment,
putting people in seats with a bag of popcorn.
They will romanticize very selective portions of human existence and
wish away what constituted most of the day.
There was a movie starring Gary Cooper about the real life of Sgt. York,
a World War I hero. In the film Sgt.
York’s wife was played by a beautiful and charming Hollywood
actress. No wonder Cooper was so in love
with her. The real Sgt. York was just as
committed to his wife but she had lost her teeth at an early age and smoked a
pipe. Sgt. York wasn’t any Gary Cooper,
either. No one’s going to buy tickets to
watch tender moments shared by the honest to gosh Yorks
I think our memories are as selective as the movies. There isn’t that much memory space for it to
be otherwise. What amazes me is what my
mind chooses to remember. Often my
memories are of what would seem totally inconsequential moments. Think about it. I bet it wouldn’t take long searching your
memory before you found insignificant incidents that happened many years
ago. They were little moments having no
apparent value. My childhood memories
are filled with them – seagulls hanging out by the school’s trash incinerator;
a particular tree lying on the ground discovered during a walk in the woods; a
cupcake with green frosting in the school cafeteria. I wouldn’t choose to save these memories but
something in my mind decided they were impressive. It’s not just childhood. There are moments throughout life we hold
onto even though they have no punch line, they deserve no crescendo. Something about these moments must seem
wondrous. They are the items of poetry,
often overlooked in our search for grand gestures, but somehow reach to our
very core existence. They share the
stage with moments we select for our scrapbook.
It’s Sunday. You may
find during the course of this day a memory suitable to linger with you for
life. On the other hand, you may have to
wait until Monday, a school day, to find just such a memory. You broke the lead in your pencil writing on
a piece of paper and forty years from now that experience once again comes to
mind.
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