Month: June 2019

Right about now, I long for October. I don’t like to wish time away, and I do love fresh tomatoes, squash and okra….but…

It’s not just the Fall itself, but the things that it brings with it. It seems as October rolls in, families become closer. When the leaves start to turn, and the air turns cool and fresh, pumpkin pies, and jack o lanterns are not long off. Turkey smells, and dressing delights are around the corner. December and Christmas loom in the near future.

I will be 68 this October if all is well. Fifty years since I turned 18, fifty years since I moved off down to West Georgia, fifty years since I met my wife. Fifty years already since Martin and Bobby were killed. Fifty years since Vietnam was in full swing. Fifty years since I dreamed of so many things that have not come true, but have lived through fifty years of joys and sorrows which have been the substance of my life.

Fifty Autumns come this October if my luck and my health hold out. Fifty years and life is so different now than it was then, that it seems like an alien world now sometimes. I feel lost in it sometimes. Much more so than in 1968. I felt at home back then, in those days…in my time, and the time of my fellow boomers.

So when the first Autumn winds start to blow, these memories will blow in with them, and though I will continue to live in the moment, nostalgia will at the same time transport me back in time occasionally. I don’t think there’s any harm in it as long as we do not let the past rule us and ruin our present.

Fifty years from now, we’re going to be in somebody else’s nostalgia trip memories, and I can only hope theirs will give them as much pleasure as mine do for me. I so very, very much hope that.

A short time back, when I was 12 years old, I would look up at the adults surrounding me and think to myself “it will take forever for me to be that old…I have so much time!” And I did have time.

There were days that dragged by. Especially those 12 hour night shifts. There were weeks that seemed to take forever to pass, especially those weeks in December as a child. But pass they did. The days that were dragging by drug faster than I could have imagined. Life happened. I watched it, I lived it, and it has brought me where I am today.

None of you would ever imagine the depth of nostalgia which seems to surround me now. I know I should live for the day, because it is all we are. That movement of time from one second of the present, to many years of the past, in the tic of that clock, in the unexplainable measurement of the passing of our lives which we have invented to total up the sum of our existence, is nefarious and unstoppable.

So we all have more past than we will ever have present, and I long for some of those lost minutes and hours. I realize it’s a waste of the ever ticking clock to yearn for the trail we have left behind, but I don’t care. They are my seconds and I’ll use some of them reliving what has gone before if I wish.

I will fondly remember as much as I can of the good times, and the bad….as I try and drift away to sleep tonight. Sometimes I chuckle, and sometimes tears fill my eyes. I miss the people mostly. Those who I have loved, and even some I didn’t. I see with utter clarity the mistakes I stupidly made. I see a few successes I stumbled into. I see how I could have easily been a better man. It’s like watching a movie you are both the main character and the producer of, and each blaming each other for how things turned out.

Then hopefully I will wake up to a new day, polish my clock, and try to make every one of these remaining seconds count for the good. I know it’s futile, because I know me to well. I’ll find some way to muck up some of that time. Maybe not too much of it though!! Seriously, there are not too many people I can look at now and think “I have a long time left before I get THAT old!” I’d have to visit the nursing home.

Fifty years. That’s a long time. Its actually a lifetime.

I have been wondering what has been up with me this week. I just haven’t been normal. Well, I’m not really ever normal anyway, but I I’ll say what passes for normal with me.

I finally figured it out tonight. I had a premonition. Something which never, ever happens to me. But…as I was taking a photo of the sunset….round, huge and pink tonight… I felt a pang and a pain deep inside. It was as if I had seen this view before. This exact view. It touched me as a sadness, almost as a real physical push as I watched the sun sink all the way down into the ocean. I will never see this again. Perhaps I deduced why.

I had been here, on this beach, near this exact spot, fifty years ago almost to the week…perhaps even to the week, watching the sun sink into the Gulf of Mexico. It was my first trip ever to the ocean in June 1966…

School had let out the last part of May. Daddy and Tom Brown had decided to get together with our two families and go to Panama City beach. They had gotten out the maps and plotted the course down old highway 27.

My cousin Judy had never been to the beach either, so she came along with us.

I don’t remember much about the ride except that it was long. The service stations were few and far between, and if you drank too much coke or water and had to pee…well you just had to hold it. So my brother Mike and I did. Hold it, that is.

We stayed at the “Sea Breeze” motel. It was a run down kind of place. They had a “kitchenette” in the place, and when Momma found roaches in it, both she and Daddy hit the ceiling. Daddy went to the front desk and raised t mortal hell with the manager, who immediately sent us down to a little hamburger joint at his expense, while he fumigated the room. It smelled bad when we got back, but there were no more cockroaches. I gotta tell you that’s one thing Florida was famous for back then…the three inch roaches, and there were plenty of them…just not in our room anymore.

With that problem solved, things seemed to go OK from there on out. We stayed five days as I recall.

I was in awe of the ocean. I still am. I couldn’t get over it at first. I finally took my eyes off of it long enough to go to check out the local “game” spot with my buddy Michael Brown. We both bought t shirts with our beach money, which said “Budweiser” across the front. With those shirts on, and with both of us being quite large for our age..we passed ourselves off to the girls who were there as High School seniors. That’s another story for another day….

On the deep sea fishing trip that my Daddy and Mr. Brown had been planning for ages, we caught a mess of red snapper, and I snagged a 33 pound Red grouper which won the “dollar pot” for the largest fish. Forty six dollars! I went and bought a hat and another t-shirt! It was a great trip. I could write a book about that trip…that summer. But the happiness faded. Mom and Dad got into an awful fight when we got home, over of all things…those damn frozen red snapper. I don’t remember the exacts…but it was a bad one.

We never went back to the beach again as a “nuclear” family…just the four of us, although there were plenty of trips in later years after the grandchildren came along.

The next time I went to the ocean, was after I was married. It was in the spring of 1972, when Paula and and I went with some friends to St. Augustine. That was the year Kirsten was born..in August.

So, June of 1966 to June of 2016. Fifty years give or take a few days. I’ve got the pictures from sixty-six to prove I was here. One in the Budweiser shirt. One with the fish. One by the ocean. Got some goofy photos of Mike that he made in one of those fifty cent photo booths. Got a postcard of the “Seabreeze” motel,..minus cockroaches. Don’t have all the people left though.

All the Brown family are gone. Tom, Tommi, Lynn, Michael B. Mom and Dad…Gaines and Evie. That makes six out of the nine who came, and I have transformed from fifteen to sixty five in the blink of an eye………

Except when I was shooting that sunset earlier tonight and I felt my Dad “push” me like he would do back then. That little playful shove…and then go into his little boxing crouch, like “whatcha gonna do about it”. That’s when I remembered where I was, and when I had been here before. And I had the feeling that when I leave here this time, I will not be back to this magical spot again. Not this same spot.

Fifty years is a long time. It’s a lifetime really.

I remember when the “Doughboy” stood in the center of the “square” out in front of the “Big Friendly” Trion Department Store. I was always in awe of that statue. I remember reading the names on it over and over…some of them familiar names of families who lived in Trion.

The Department store itself was a wonder! There was no other place like it in the world. You could get anything, and I mean anything in that store. I loved going in there as a child. The toy aisle looked like it went on forever! There were Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, and Matchbox cars. There were cap pistols, and a rack next to them with a “bluejillion” packs of caps on it. There were porcelain dolls for the little girls. There were bicycles and stuffed animals. I can remember how wonderful this area looked when it was decorated for Christmas. Big, giant, bright Christmas balls. Rows of tinsel. Lots of the big old huge lights that screwed in and out of the sockets.

One of the most vivid memories of Christmas, was when I was four years old and I got the “Hopalong” Cassidy outfit and guns. I don’t think I took that outfit off for a week. I didn’t find out until years later that Dad had put that outfit and those guns on “layaway” almost 6 months before Christmas and had paid a little a week on them until he had them paid for. I don’t know what happened to them. My Mom was NOT a person to let something lay around in the house and take up useful space if it was not being used. I surmise that I probably wore them out using them the first year or so I had them, and they got tossed out in the move we made to Simmons Street. One of those guns go for about 120 dollars now on Ebay.

Mom got me even worse when I went off to college my freshman year. I had MY closet in my room filled with all of the Marvel comics that I had bought over the years. I had the first issues of a lot of them, plus the subsequent early issues. I had my old baseball cards which I had taken good care of, in a couple of shoeboxes. Mantle, Maris, Aaron. They were all there. We were not allowed to come home from school for the first month, if I remember correctly…it was one of the rules. The first time I came back home, I opened my closet and my stuff was gone! I know everybody says it, but in my case it was true….my Mom had thrown my comics and cards out. I cried then…but I cry harder now when I see how much some of those collectibles are worth.

Back to the Big Friendly though, there was a fabric department, a hardware store, a grocery store, a drugstore, a funeral parlor…? Yes, there was…a funeral parlor upstairs in the Big Friendly. The way the store was laid out, you could drive around the back and be at “ground” level. And so…the departed could go in and out the “back door” without creating an issue throughout the rest of the store.

Across the street from the Big Friendly you had the Post Office on the corner. Next to the Post office was the Barber shop.

We had one of the most modern and wonderful places called the “Y” The mill had first built a swimming pool sometime around 1934, and then built the “Y” up around it. It had an inside heated pool, a gym, a pool and ping pong room, a weight room, a theatre on one end, a snack bar….this place was WAY ahead of its time. In 1973, our class of 1968 had our five year reunion there….not long before they tore it down. I loved that place and often wished there had been some way to save it. It would have really been a historical landmark if it could have been saved.

If we wanted to, we were allowed to leave school for lunch back in those days. A lot of us opted to do so…lunchroom food being what it was. A lot of times we went up to a little place over near the mill which served burgers, fries, and dogs. I think Mr. Colbert owned the place. We thought the food was decent, and he also had a jukebox which was somehow filled with the most current songs. That was the first place I ever heard a Beatles song, the Rolling Stones, many of the iconic groups of those days first came to me over the jukebox in that dive.

We had to cross over a little bridge leading out to the burger joint. There was a creek which ran out from under the mill which flowed into the river at that point. It started into the mill as normal colored water…but being as there was a dye house at the mill back then, it would come OUT of the mill almost any color you could imagine. I used to like to guess what color the water was going to be every time I crossed over that bridge. I had no idea the colored “water” going into the river was polluting it.

The river is cleaned up now and it’s one of the cleanest in the State. There are kayakers going up and down it every day, and I believe that there are some great game fish in the river now.

As much as I long for those “bygone” days every now and then, I realize that memories are sometimes much sweeter than the actual living. So, I try to live everyday now hoping to give the people who are around me…especially the little ones, something sweet to remember.

As we baby boomers age and die, we will likely be the last generation of human beings who would/could if we chose, put away our computers, our smart phones, and other advanced technology, and still be able to survive without the use of them.

If I chose to, and many times I wish I would, but if I made a concerted and extraneous effort, I could live the rest of my life without personally using advanced technology. That’s not to rule out the fact that it could still be used on me.

I might move to Alaska, build a cabin, and live out my life as a survivalist. It wouldn’t be pretty, probably not very long, but I could do it.

In the future, as technology and the biology of humanity continue to merge…humans will be so dependent on technology, that we would not be able to function, or simply die without it. Our phones may one day soon be so “smart” that they will be implanted in us, and will interface with us through our nervous and autonomous systems. (They will be a lot smaller, not larger as they are now)

Other aspects of technology will take over, or assist our biological systems, and we will become part human/ part computer. My son points out that we are already “Cyborgs” because machines now do much of our thinking for us.

So, I am glad I have lived in the age in which I have lived. I am happy to have been guided by my own human emotions, which have been in daily interaction with other humans like me. I am glad to be 66 years old, and not 6 or even 16. All of the coming changes, the new paradigm of which I have been speaking for so many years, may be seen as beneficial and needed for our race to survive. The coming super humans may be able to solve problems and differences which now plague us, and they may finally be able to be at peace with each other, and reach out to the mysteries of the Cosmos.

Yet, I’m glad I will have already taken my place in history.

I once climbed all the way to the top of Fort Mountain with my daughter on my back, with her singing “little bunny foo-foo” the entire way up and “bopping me on the head” every time the song called for it. Which is a lot. I made it up that steep and fairly long trail with some breath to spare. I would hate to say how long ago that’s been. Someone would probably have to carry me up now!
It’s a shame how most of us cannot stay at optimum operating conditions for our life span. I blame it on lack of options, and lack of willpower.
When I worked at Rome in the eighties, I had to leave home before there was time to fix a healthy breakfast, so I fell into the habit of eating those HUGE honey buns which Mrs Winners used to fix. I think they weighed 3 pounds and had about 3,000 calories. It was fast food for lunch, and sometimes for dinner. Who had the time to cook?
When Paula and I worked at Crown Crafts together for ten years we never had time to fix breakfast. We had to get to Calhoun by 7 am. So it was biscuits from the burger joint across the street which Mr Chow would conveniently bring over to the plant by the box full everyday like clockwork at 7:30 am. Then it was off to Arbys or some other fast food joint for lunch. Then, whatever we could tiredly scape up for supper for the kids. Our poor kids. Having parents who worked like we did…commuting two hours a day to 9 hour jobs. I feel so sorry for them. Kirsten helped us out a lot when she got older.
And so on it went….through my working career. I lived in Trion all my life practically, but always had to work out of town. I paid heavily for my choices in 1999, and again in 2014. Years of neglect, years of bad choices, years of stress and strain on the body.
I get out now once in a while and walk. I walk with the grandkids, and I do a little metal detecting every now and then for exercise ( believe me, you DON’T find the treasure they tell you you’re going to when you buy the detectors) I was piddling around over where they tore down the old Apartments…digging my umpteenth corroded Lincoln penny and sweating like a pig. I looked up and saw the Mayor and his wife drive by, peering out their window…so now my spider senses are tingling about even getting to do this much longer!
I slung my metal detector over my shoulder and started walking back to the truck. I had a bit of a headache, but back somewhere in the recesses of my brain I could hear a little voice singing: “little bunny foo foo, hopping through the forest, scooping up the field mice, and bopping them on the head”
I think Father time, and NOT the good fairy, has turned me into a GOON!!

You get your computer, your phone, your iPad or your kindle and you “open” it up to Facebook. You see a lot of these words: hate, lie, swindle, crook, kill, murder, hurt, bad, awful, terrible, death, die…..you get the picture…right?
I have used some of those words before. They are words invented by humans to describe emotions or actions of a negative nature. I’m guessing they are used twice as often as words describing things of a positive nature. Really though, I just want to talk about one word.
Love.
What does it mean to you?
I know it means different things to us at different times in our life. There are several different “types” of love so they say.
The kind I’m talking about is the kind of love which brings tears to your eyes by just thinking about it. It’s the kind that you think about when you imagine you are living your last day here on earth. That kind of love.
Regardless of what your beliefs are, or what your religion is, or if you do or don’t have one. At least try for that kind of love. At least think about whether or not you have it, or can get it.
Or…if you don’t have it or don’t want it….please see a psychiatrist quickly.
But seriously, I think of it every day. I think of my family…especially the little ones, and the future this world may hold for them. I want more than anything in the world to be around to protect them, advise them and help them. But, I won’t always be…
So, I figure the best thing I can do for them while I’m here is to love them. To be with them. To pick them up when they fall. To try and teach them respect.
Thank goodness I’ve got my wife to help though! I need it. She knows about the kind of love I’m talking about.
Then, no matter where the final road leads I believe I’ll be able to go down it in peace.