After sixty years on this globe, born with an inner desire to write and to publish, I'm grateful to find and to become part of, the Blogosphere. I hope that the next sixty years will be more productive than the first, and I vow to do my best to make that happen! We'll just call the "before" part my educational phase, and let it go at that.
How did we get here from there, and where is "there"? The last shall be first, so let's start with the beginning. As I sit here today, I'm less than 40 miles from where I got my beginning. I wasn't born here, though. I was born during the fire, thunder, death, and horror of World War II. The story is that my mother was driving down to meet my father, who was in the Army and was stationed at Key West, Florida. A sudden urge to drop a kid came upon her while she was passing through Miami. It was her first child, and it was my distressed and crying face that greeted her on the maternity ward one May morning. Since I was born at around 10:30 AM, maybe I have a natural excuse for my tendency toward sleeping late. I was born that way, I sez.
Well, my mother and her contented baby returned to Georgia, where her sharecropper parents lived out in the sticks. I love taking the shortcut from my present home in Vidalia, Georgia, to Lumber City. (Look it up in the encyclopedia. It's a real town. Pop. about 900). That route takes me by the long-abandoned lane that once led to the old, unpainted house where my earliest fond memories started: How many stories I was told later by Mama and others, and the memories that still lurk in the shadows! I am one of those few blessed, or cursed, by memories that go back to about 6 months of age. Pooh-pooh this all you want, I had those early memories authenticated by parents and other close relatives, just to make sure that I wasn't making them up. One memory, dating from about the age of two, stands out.
We lived about six miles from town, in a big old drafty farmhouse. There were fireplaces for heat(?) on cold winter nights, there was a hand-pumped well on the back porch, Mama had a woodstove for cooking, and there decidedly were NOT any electrically-driven devices of any kind in the house: we didn't have electricity. There was a fenced-in yard, to keep babies in and, hopefully, animals out. A constant worry for my folks was that a rattlesnake would get into the yard and inflict one of us with a deadly bite. It was a real fear, as we lived on what is called an oak ridge. Around our farm were lots of "scrub oaks", small scrawny oak trees, and palmetto bushes. There were also gopher holes, all of which kind of territory seems to be a prime habitat of snakes. Rattlesnakes were and are plentiful in this region, and one would be advised to watch carefully when poking around in the woods here. The house and barn, the smokehouse, and the outhouse (yes, we had one and I remember it all
too clearly) are gone today, nothing but pine trees fill the area where we lived and where the corn and tobacco fields once were.
I loved Saturday, when we would pile into the Ford Model A pickup truck and go into town. My little eyes would no doubt shine as us "po folks" roamed about the town. I liked town so much that my little pea-brain hatched a scheme one fine day: I would get on my trusty tricycle and go to town! Yes, this really happened. It was so outlandish that I HAD to be sure of this one, so I verified it with my aunt Lois! Off I went, while the grownups were busy not watching me. Down the lane, and along the unpaved dirt road leading toward town. How did I know which way to go at that age? I have no earthly idea. The whole thought is somewhat scary. A few hundered yards from our lane there was one of those old wooden bridges. This kind of bridge, no longer in existence to my knowledge, was constructed over small creeks, not very long, consisting of planks laid crosswise under runners with the approximate correct distance apart, laid lengthwise over the rest. I made it to the bridge, over it, and got off the road as a car approached. This is where my grand plan fell apart. Adults in a car, especially adults who knew not only me but my parents as well, weren't accounted for in the escape plans. I, along with the tricycle, was taken into custody and returned forthwith to my mother, whose hair, I guess, stood on end as she was apprised of my latest, probably life-threatening, stunt.
In this day and time, when even the shortest moment of not knowing where our kids are provokes alarm, it's difficult to imagine the fright my mother, God rest her soul, must have felt! I remember, though I admit the memories grow a bit fuzzier as the years go by, that my mother snatched me up by the hair (just kidding) and applied the measure of the rod of justice to the end of my bottom. Actually, it was a hairbrush, it was oval-shaped, and it hurt like the dickens! To add "horrifying" to this chilling incident, a few weeks later someone killed a
big rattlesnake right where I had pulled off the end of the rickety old bridge! If my mother had been scared before, she must have nearly had a heart attack when this happened! I love this old memory. It is one of the reasons that cause me no end of happiness today when thinking about my childhood. A different world from that of today existed then. It was a world of security - talking about AFTER the war - where kids could play without worrying about abductions, disasters, terrorist attacks, or any of the problems we face today. I grew up in a simpler time, when worry, for adults at least, was confined to our grades in school, whether we got to church on time, or if we got home from playing in time for supper.
Obviously, I grew up and prospered. OK, so my wife sometimes says that I'm childish! Be that as it may, I survived playing in the river, swimming among snakes and sometimes alligators (we didn't know THAT), roaming on our bikes all over town, getting into stuff that intrigued us, like sawmills, cotton gins, and trains, and anything else that our inquisitive minds drove us to. I don't remember any of my childhood friends getting hurt - OK, Charles Lowery had his leg broken when the Church sign, made of concrete blocks, fell over on him (he was a hero for months afterward) - no one drowned when we found and more or less fixed, a boat we found in the treetops after spring floods. There were 18 (or so) of us in my graduating class - 1961 - and it was many years later when we lost the first of our class. It was Thomas Dewey Waldon, a cousin of mine, who passed away of complications from diabetes, the first to go. That hurt so badly. Then, eleven years ago, just after my wife and I returned to Georgia from living in Colorado, Don Livingston, a particularly close friend, had a heart attack and died. That hurt too, as I gathered with others, lifelong friends, family, and former classmates, to bid him goodbye and celebrate his life among us.
People who don't know me would think I was being boastful or that I was lying were I to tell some of the things I've done, the people I've met, the places I've been, or what I want to do in the time left to me. So I won't do that here. I'm not wealthy. In fact, we're right on the edge of poverty, but I'm rich in great memories, rich in that Jenny and I have two wonderful kids who grew up to be successful, well-adjusted adults in their own rights. We live today on my disability (injured while lifting a patient: I am a paramedic) and Jenny's not-enough salary as a nurse. (One of the best nurses in town, and that's a fact.) We don't live "well", by American income standards; I'd love to have my own laptop computer and can't afford it so we jostle each other over computer time, but the important things: Love of God, a close and loving family, so far 40 years of having each other, and so much hope and optimism for the future, those things find us rich beyond measure!
So we start off with my own blog. I hope we can post things that our readers will find entertaining, informative, and truthful. I hope that each of you will come back time and again to find out what's rattling around in my old brain. I hope someone in Journalism reads this and "discovers" me; I would love a new career in professional journalism. And I hope and pray that what I have to say will inspire and compel each of you to better living and much happiness. Do I sound religious? I hope not, because I don't want to come off that way. I am a Christian, in every sense of the word. I have a relationship with Christ, in that He is Lord, and I try to follow Him. I am, though, human, with all the attendant fallibilities, so you will certainly see my mistakes here. Of course, I am forgiven by my Lord, and I hope you'll forgive me too, if I by chance offend or otherwise bring inadvertent distress to you.
God Bless, let's meet here again, and I'll tell you more of my Story. It may even embarrass me, but I hope it won't embarrass you or anyone else! Thank you for listening......
