Growing Up Southern: July 29, 2017

I learned about true love in the third grade. I’m talking absolute, undying, ephemeral, unspoiled, transcendent love. I guess I was eight or so.

The object of my awakening was a little older, early twenties I guess. She taught our class, and was named “Miss Roundtree.” Her father was some sort of state politician, but that meant nothing to us. Oh, I had rivals for her affection, no doubt, but that just made me work harder for it. I’m sure she noticed the way I went back over the blackboard an extra time when I was the “erasure monitor.” Diligence is important to a woman.

She had to notice when I put an extra flourish in writing my name, demonstrating a flair for good penmanship. I’m sure she knew that I was the only one who didn’t torment Linda Sue Castleberry.

She even remarked on how my life’s ambitions changed with the subject her teaching.

As we learned to read, I knew I would be a writer when I grew up, and told her so. When we studied nature, I announced my plans to become a doctor. When we moved to math, I was proud to announce plans for a career in engineering. I wasn’t sure what engineering was, but when she told us about a friend of hers who was good in math and became an engineer, that was good enough. I’m sure I would have announced plans for roofing houses had she mentioned it favorably.

But it was science, namely astronomy, that captured me. She had a special affection for it and passed that to me. She made the night skies a place of wonder and amazement. Hooked, I was.

I got off to a rough start in my obsession when I gave a report to the class about a planet that could be “seen with the naked eye.” I pronounced it to rhyme with “snaked” and the other kids laughed at me. Miss Roundtree just smiled. She knew a genius when she saw one.

Undeterred, I began counting the days when I could enter college and become an astronomer. That meant quit counting the days until I could quit school and join the Navy. Life choices can prove difficult. But then, the Navy had, itself, supplanted lighting out for Texas to become a cowboy. Plans change.

Anyway, Miss Roundtree soon had me standing out in the back yard of our house, amidst the South Arkansas mosquitoes and other bugs, staring into the night sky to find a constellation or planet. My mother thought I was crazy. I ignored her. What did she know about love, anyway?

A treat arranged by Miss Roundtree provided both the highlight and the ultimate downfall of my astronomical plans. She arranged for the class members to visit the home of a man in our city who had a telescope.

A real telescope. He had set it up in his back yard and we were allowed a brief look at a marvelous view of the moon. Oh, the wonder and fascination. What a splendiferous lifetime of study and discovery lay ahead. I began to dream of moving to a larger city when I was grown, a city where people would value my achievements. Look out world, here comes Jimmie!

It all crashed the next day with Miss Roundtree’s opening question.

“How many saw the moon through the telescope at my boyfriend’s house last night?”

Her boyfriend? She hadn’t said nothing about no stinking boyfriend. I didn’t even raise my hand. Those jilted in love often behave that way, retreating into themselves so to speak. I felt betrayed, fooled, led on. I had learned all those names of planets and constellations to please a woman who loved someone else.

Recess brought no relief. Even multiple scoots down the “slicky-slide” failed to remove the cloud of bitter disappointment. I ignored a smile from Penny Purdue, one of the prettiest girls in class. My mood was that sour. The sky was even dark and stormy.

To hell with astronomy. Falsely let to its lure, I would show that uncaring woman. She had dashed my plans for fame as a renowned scientist. She would rue the day she had deceived me.

Thus sulking, I heard someone call my name. Don Puckett, a sixth-grader, and the best athlete in school, was yelling that his team needed a right fielder. Me? A third-grader? Hot damn! I had new hope for life.

Anyway, there was always the Navy, or maybe the New York Yankees.

Life goes on.

Growing Up Southern: July 29, 2017

No wonder that the South has produced so many fine writers. It also produces fine talkers, like my sainted mother.

She expressed herself with a fluidity of thought and lucidity, laced with colorful metaphors, similes, and analogies, that a Faulkner or a Fitzgerald would have been envious.

For example, she didn’t threaten simply to punish my many transgressions, she promised she would cut a persimmon switch (or worse still, make me cut it) and “wear you out.” Unlike modern politicians, she was not prone to idle threats.

Some of her style of speaking came from the region.

A person didn’t sit with pride or arrogance. They sat there “like Garrett on snuff.”

Something didn’t operate efficiently, it, ran “like a Singer sewing machine.”

A person wasn’t dimwitted, their brain rolled around in their head “like a BB in a barn.”

Someone wasn't driving fast, they were "sacking air."

Faced with an unpleasant task, I just had to “back my ears and do it.” (If you don’t understand, ask a “horse-person”).

Someone didn’t prove annoying, they made one’s a** “crave applesauce.” I ran into a variant of this when I married a girl from Lonoke, Arkansas where “applesauce” was traded for “a dip of snuff.” Same message, regional variation.

Other sayings were unique, as far as I can tell. When I appeared in an unusually disheveled or unprepared manner, she would tell me “you look like someone who was called for and couldn’t come, and when they got there they wadn’t needed.” Now that is someone looking bad.

Sometimes, language seemed home-grown. Running a grocery store along with her husband, she had a chance to connect buying habits with social behavior. When a wealthy person came through, they weren’t simply rich, “they didn’t ask the price of nothin’.” People with poor buying habits didn’t choose poorly, “they didn’t buy one thing they really needed.”

A favorite expression, one that I use a lot, reportedly originated with her father, whom I never met. A high-spirited man, from all accounts, he once vowed, in a huff, to go and tell a neighbor “how the hog ate the cabbage.” Reaching the front door, however, he turned and announced that he’d better not, because, as he put it, “I’ve got my cows in his pasture right now.” You just can’t express things better than that.

Oh, I think about that dear woman a lot, my bother. Standing not much over five feet tall, she could make grown men tremble, fearing an onslaught of her precise and colorful language. I also think about our language skill, and where we are headed with them. People with her language skills are disappearing.

 John Steinbeck, in Travels With Charlie, expressed a fear that technology would erase the variations in dialect among regions of America. I worry, as well, about our skills in basic communication. You only have to listen to young folks these days, and a frightening percentage of adults, insert the word “like” three or four times into one sentence, for no reason that adds meaning or emphasis, to see the danger facing our language skills.

More aggravating still is the replacement of any descriptor of a superlative situation with the single, over-used, exasperating, maddening, annoying, infuriating, irritating, galling, sophomoric, and vapid word “awesome.” It grates.

After all, American English used so endearingly by Wordsworth, Emerson, Twain, Hurston Ellison, Baldwin, Whitman, Cather, and others—this excellent, magnificent, wonderful, marvelous, supreme, consummate, outstanding, remarkable, fine, choice, first-rate, first-class, premier, prime, unsurpassed, unequaled, unparalleled, unrivaled, preeminent language of ours—should not be debased and violated by the lazy and speech-deprived.

It just makes my ass crave applesauce.

A marvelous gift

Sailing to Oblivium: July 27, 2017

Life takes funny turns. It found me, in May of 1966 living at 1016 Masonic Street in San Francisco, a block from Haight and two from Ashbury. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t go there. I landed there, fleeing an Arkansas governed by Orval Faubus, and hoping to catch sight, by some miracle, of what at the time I thought was a great love of my life. It was a girl who had left me standing alone on Fayetteville’s Leveritt Street, and married a SF native.

Hope springs eternal, as they say, in a young heart. I had nothing else to do, and the apartment on Masonic just happened to be available. I had no idea at the time who the hippies were, but I would soon learn.

A miracle did happen. Armed with my college degree and a draft card stating I was “1A,” (better known to my fellow Americans as “canon-fodder”), I managed to land a job with a company in the Mission District. I rode the Haight-Sunset bus to and fro each day and lived a happy life until the Draft Board found me.

Gosh, what things I saw. Masonic dead-ended at the panhandle of Golden Gate Park, across the street from where Ken Kesey and his Band of Merry Pranksters parked that summer and danced the days and nights away for a spell.

There was the local who went out on his balcony overlooking Haight each morning and played “Reveille” on a beat-up trumpet.”

Sometimes, the “Grateful Dead” would hang out on a porch stoop.

It was fun to see the kids begging money, attired in clothing that cost $200 or more.

I thought about this the other night when the family and I watched a documentary on PBS about the Haight-Ashbury. It concentrated on 1967, the so-called “Summer of Love.”

For my memories of 1966, the show left out some things. One was the sight of a Bank of California branch a half block west of Ashbury on the south side of Haight. From opening to closing, a line branch from its door all the way around the block. They were cashing those checks from home so they could keep sneering at me for having a job.

Still, it was exhilarating, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. There was something childlike and fascinating about the experiment.

Then one morning I found myself at the Southeast corner of Haight and Masonic waiting for a bus, not to take me to work but to the Oakland Induction Center. I remember waiting there with an elderly Chinese man and watching the fog gallop down Haight toward us. (No “little cat feet” crap in “The City”). It thundered that morning, and it doesn’t thunder in San Francisco as a rule.

I’ve thought about that many times. In his book, A Generation of Sociopaths. How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, Bruce Cannon Gibney says my generation supported the Vietnam War but didn’t support serving in the military. I guess I represented the opposite view. I despised the war, but served when my country asked. And it has never forgiven me. Such is love.

By the summer of ’67, I was stationed in Monterey, California and rode the bus up numerous times to The City to visit friends.

Things had changed. Every bus disgorged a group of wild-eyed newcomers. Some, it seemed, were still in their early teens. The streets were filthy. Stores had changed. The fun was forced. The very air seemed to tell the cleansing fog to “begone.” The “Haight-Ashbury,” as it had existed, was doomed.

I guess social experiments turn out that way. There exits excitement, adventure, and a sense of majesty in the beginning. This draws the infectious and the despoilers. Then, the experiment that had existed is doomed, toppled by the gravity of its own success. I only hope we aren’t seeing that in our country today.

Just trying to fit in—a lifetime habit.

Growing Up Southern: July 24, 2017

Playgrounds? We didn’t need no stickin’ playgrounds. Not when we had my daddy’s barn to play in and on. It could keep you busy for a day, easy.

It was a combination thing. It served as a chicken roost and a cow pen and a place to store hay. The ridgeline was just high enough to play “dare you to jump.” Later, when I was grown, it usually housed a cow and calf, and served as a “repair shop” for my brother and his gang. Cartographers would have labeled it a “multi-purpose structure.”

One spot on the roof was ideal for hiding with a slingshot and firing away at unsuspecting birds. Once, I even got close enough to make one change his flight pattern, but mostly we were harmless.

There was a pig pen attached to it and sometimes baby pigs to play with, assuming their momma wasn’t around. We had a young colt born there, once. I can still remember Daddy waking me up one fall morning to “come see what came last night.” All I could see were legs, legs that looked six-feet long, attached to a tiny body. Her mom let us pet her, pleased with the attention and proud of her accomplishment.

It sure was a simpler life then. We would have marveled at all the wasted space of a soccer field, or the trappings of a “ready-roll” sports complex. When we wanted our own baseball field, we cut some small sweetgum trees and made a backstop with some burlap bags daddy gave us. It worked pretty well, at times.

Of course, we never had enough players for teams, so used a system called “workup.” As long as you made hits, you could stay with the batters. Make an out, and you had to start in the outfield and work your way up to batting again as the other kids made outs. There were no winners and losers, just players trying to advance in life as well as they could.

I suppose pals made as a child are pals forever. Mine were, but they are all gone. Some moved to distant places, sometimes where their race received better treatment than in the American South. I missed them but was happy for them. Some went into the military, returning not as boys, but as men, men who no longer played games. Some have died, one after a tragic life of car wrecks, pain killers and alcohol. I heard he had died one morning a few years ago, but it was too late to make the funeral. I’m not sure I would have gone anyway.

Most likely, I’d have preferred to remember him, not in a coffin, but perched on my daddy’s barn watching Jim Fletcher annoy some baby pigs.

 

Fun was where you found it back then.

Growing Up Southern: Pride

They used to hit our grocery store as a crowd, twice a day in season. First it was cotton choppers, later cotton pickers.

These were pre-mechanization days. Both operations were done by hand, by workers hired by the day. It would be hard for us to understand the level of the day-to-day existence led by these folks. I got a sense of it an early age, though.

There were men who owned flat-bed trucks outfitted with sideboards and tarpaulin covers and benches, much like a homemade version of a military deuce-and-a-half. They would pick up hands and transport them to a farmer’s field for some agreed-upon price. Those they picked up ranged in age from early teenagers to the ambulatory elderly.

On the way, they would stop at our store, shortly after daylight to purchase something for “dinner” and, shortly after dark, something for supper and breakfast, if they could afford both. When the crowd hit, the whole family turned out. Daddy would be behind the meat counter slicing bologna or whatever. Mother was the cashier. My sister had a spot in canned goods and produce. I had a Hershey’s chocolate box containing change to accommodate the sale of candy.

My mother always bragged that I could count change before I could read.

I didn’t get much business in the morning. If it had been a good day chopping or picking, though, I sometimes did a brisk business in the afternoon.

The thing I remember though, and I’ll never forget it for some reason, was an item I sold that wasn’t candy at all, and I only sold it on Saturdays.

It was tiny bottle of a cheap liquid labelled “Ben Hur Perfume.”

I valued my job, although it cut into sleep or play time. I felt that, even in dealing with the poorest of the poor—those the Galilean called “the least of those among us”— I was able, on occasion, to bring some small amount of joy in the form of a sweet reward for hard work, or a brief moment of pride and dignity to an otherwise unrelenting life.

A customer?

Some called it “World War Two.” Some, “The Second World War.” Even after Korea and Vietnam, many just called it “The War.” At least the old timers did.

When I was a kid, the veterans of that war were still young, many of them younger than I was when I went to war. We, as kids, had no idea what they had been through. We just heard others talk about someone being “a veteran” as if it sufficed to say that set them apart from the rest of society.

Sometimes they were off-screen. You might hear, “Mizzes Browning had two boys, but that oldest boy of hers got killed in the war.” I also had classmates who lived in a blended family with a stepfather because their own father hadn’t returned from the ordeal.

For others, you wouldn’t have ever guessed that their daddy was a veteran had not a certificate hanging on the wall proudly announced the fact. It wasn’t always pleasant. One young friend's family lived in a rent-house owned by my daddy, not a very high-class place at all. Despite the proof of his service to our country displayed in their living room, the man had few admirable qualities, being prone to drink, and in constant search of a job.

The last time I saw the man, he had been driving a soft drink truck and had apparently made a stop at a sleazy bar on the East side of town and had stayed for a “pick-me-up,” or two. He had driven his delivery truck into a ditch and was proudly hoisting a beer as we drove by. Another playmate’s father suffered a similar fate. After he was found dead in a ditch, my friend only had a plastic model of a B-17 Bomber, the kind his daddy had served on, to remember him by.

They didn’t talk much about the war’s impact on the young men returning from it back in those days. After all, most of them came home, readjusted, and got on with their lives. Why worry about the ones who didn't adjust?

They grew older, those young men. Some didn’t talk much about the war. Others couldn’t talk enough about it. It just depended on the individual. Regimental units held reunions until the men who lived through Pearl Harbor, Normandy, the bombing of Germany, or bloody Tarawa grew too old to travel. The last one I knew personally died this year. It's hard to believe.

They call them “The Greatest Generation” now. They did, in fact sacrifice their future for their children’s future. I’m afraid that, in many ways, we have sacrificed the future of coming generations for our comfort and benefits.

No matter how we may feel about the men we saw grow from proud young victors to feeble survivors, they changed the world for the better. Not many generations can claim that honor.

Note: Facebook friend Annie Marks responded to a challenge to share stories of growing up in the South yesterday. See her memory in the post below. Have your own memory? Send it to me.

Growing up Southern

Shared by Annie Marks:

When I was six some entrepreneurial types bought a peach orchard in Dekalb County Georgia. They knocked down a few trees paved a road, and built six spec houses. My parents bought one. Next door on one side lived Sparky the literal red headed boy next door who would dance with me on Saturday and steal my crayons and break them on Sunday. On the other side lived Linda who was considerably younger than me and followed me everywhere. I loved her and made sure she was included in everything.

You could learn a lot about life living in an orchard. The beauty of the blossoms in springtime was breathtaking. Sitting in a tree one day I saw a twig moving on its own! Turns out it was a very cool bug known for good reason as a "walking stick". Summertime brought the thudding sound of peaches hitting the ground for what seemed to my young mind to be miles. I have never tasted the likes of the homemade peach ice cream (personally hand cranked by Linda and yours truly) or the peach pie that was enjoyed on the picnic tables in the backyards of Gresham Road. But as all life lessons must include, to this beauty there was a dark side. If you have spent any time near an orchard you already know what it is. BEES! In the trees, in the utility shed, lighting on your peach pie, on the ground . You know we went barefoot, right? Aaahhh!! Annie Marks