The Good Old Days

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.”