Dear Boo and Bubble,
Nostalgia……now, there’s a nice word….. “a wistful desire
to return in thought or in fact to
a former time in one's life,
to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or
time.” It seems every four years when election season
gets into high gear, a case of nostalgia sets in. There always appears to be a
yearning to roll back the clock to a time gone by, to a less complicated
lifestyle, to things more familiar - or as the standard phrase goes – The Good
Old Days.
You’re not quite old enough to have much to be nostalgic
about, but I rather imagine you would pitch a fit if your folks replaced your
IPhones with a land line; or your 74” High- Def color television with an 18”
black and white one with rabbit ears on top; or Google internet searches with
Compton’s encyclopedias. I’m sort of
with you on this, being someone who enjoys today and looks forward to tomorrow. Of course, the past is important – after all,
this Bridge Project is devoted to connecting you with it. But pure nostalgia falls into an entirely
different category. Perhaps I inherited my
perception of it from your great Granddaddy Schaefer. He wrote quite a bit on the topic and I’d
like to share some of it with you now.
The Good Old Days Weren’t Always That Good
(The Greenville News – Sunday, March 7, 1993)
Getting up at the
crack of dawn; feeding, then milking the cow whether you feel like it or not,
stripping her good so she won’t go dry and getting tail whipped in the process;
slopping the hog; feeding the chickens; cutting the stove wood and filling the
wood box; feeding the coal burning Franklin stove; heating water to shave using
the straight razor inherited from your grandpa, needing a good portion of a
roll of toilet paper to stop the bleeding; eating breakfast in the kitchen to
try to stay warm in the dead of winter; drinking milk that reeks of wild spring
onions, it being blue john at that because the cream is needed for something
else; an air-conditioning system that consists of a cardboard fan which has a
picture of Jesus holding in his arms a lamb standing in the midst of a flock of
sheep, the fan furnished through the courtesy of the local funeral home; riding
on dirt roads either eating dust or getting stuck in the mud on tires that are
sadistic in picking the place and the time to go flat; automobiles that have to
be hand cranked to start the motor whose windshield wiper is hand operated, and
when a sudden squall brews up you have to stop the car, frantically get the
curtains from under the back seat, get them installed – just in time for the
sun to come out.
This is what we old
folks call “the good old days.”
The truth is, we
really prefer the homogenized milk that comes out of a carton instead of a cow;
pork from a hog we don’t know on a personal basis; central heat that comes on
automatically in the morning and cuts off at the appointed time at night;
riding on interstate highways in cars that start with the pushy of a button,
are warm in the winter and cool in the summer, having tires that seldom go
flat.
All of which leads up
to a story.
In the 1930’s there
were no automobiles with factory air. An
air-conditioned car was a novelty experienced by a very few.
Now….the hottest place
outside of hell is about 15 miles south of Wadley, Georgia, on U.S. Highway 1
in the middle of August. It was at that
very spot in 1936 where a worn out Georgia Cracker was “thumbing a ride.”
A Yankee was in an
air-conditioned Cadillac on his way from New York to Miami and, needing
somebody to talk to, he stopped and picked up the Cracker who had never heard
of a car being air-conditioned, much less ridden in one.
Driving along the
Yankee asked, “Where are you going?”
“I’m going down to the
Johnson place. You know hit’s just
passed the old Shiloh Baptist Church, which if’n you are familiar with these
here parts, is on this side of Williams General Store. They call it Williams
but hit’s owned and run by Chet Paysinger, old Williams’ son-in-law, you know
the one what has ten girls and a boy.”
The Yankee knew it
wouldn’t serve any useful purpose to say he didn’t know where the Johnson place
was, never heard of Shiloh Baptist Church, wasn’t familiar with Chet Paysinger
or his offspring, and that this was his first trip through Georgia; and
apparently everything he had ever heard about Southerners was true.
Ten miles down the
road the Yankee broke the silence, “What are you going to do when you get to
the Johnson place?”
By this time the
Cracker was shivering from the cold.
“Well, I was a going
thar to chop cotton but with this here sudden change in the weather, we’ll
probably butcher a hog or two.”
