Month: September 2023

Of all the qualities which set human beings apart from the rest of humanity, there is our voice. It was this means of communication which allowed us to move beyond other species and become social animals.

Our voice allowed our ancestors to pass on instructions on how to do critical things to survive. We began to live less off of instinct and more off of experiences passed down from generation to generation. Language came long, long before the ability to write and so most knowledge was passed down by oral tradition. Since early man tended to live in familial situations, with tight family ties, language probably varied a lot, and then as families stretched out and became tribes the group adopted the most useable language form available to communicate within the entire group.

But, the anthropological aspect is not where I want to concentrate. It’s the spiritual and mystical aspect of the voice to which I wish to “speak”

I’ve had so many wonderful and unique voices which have inhabited the echoes of my mind. My Dad’s laugh…I can never get it far from my immediate memory. He laughed a lot and at a lot of things. He gave me a lot of advice with that voice. I took some of it, and some I wish I had taken. His voice was stilled in 2010.

My Grandfather Jervis’s voice. My voice is a mixture of his voice and my Dad’s, leaning more heavily towards his. He could sing from bass to tenor and I inherited a bit of that. I used to sit around in his living room and listen to him sing his “scales” “Do..do..do……do, ray, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do..do..do..” I got up in front of the congregation where my Grandpa was song leader when I was four years old and waved my hands around like I was conducting the choir. Nobody laughed or made fun of me. I was really proud of myself and I remember it so well. My Grandfather’s voice was stilled in 1991.

My Mom and my Grandmother had similar voices…and they were both worriers. I asked my Grandmother on her 100th birthday what she would have done different if she could go back and go it all over again. She simply said “I’d worry about things less, because all the worrying I did never changed nothing” Her voice was stilled in late 1999. I still dream of her quite often, most of the time in the kitchen. She’s always telling me: “I wouldn’t worry about that, Honey” she’ll say. I still worry…I guess I can’t help it, I get it from her and Mom. My dear Momma….she would always say “I love you” and too many times, “I’m sorry” for things which really were not her fault, not anybody’s fault, just fate and fate alone. Mom’s voice was also stilled in 2010.

In late 1999, I was really scared. The specialist had found a lump on my vocal cords and he was pretty sure it was cancer. I went into surgery wondering if I would come out with a voice…..would I come out with a hole in my throat and no voice. Turned out it was a big lump of scar tissue. I came out with my vocal cords, but it took a year a rehabilitation to even get back to regular talking, much less singing. I have had to be very careful since then. Some days are good, some days not so good. At least I still have that mechanism of communication to use with my family, my friends…(although sometimes I bet they wish I would shut up!)

My voice will be stilled one day, as have been the voices of all human beings who ever lived. I hope I have used it correctly…will use it better, and maybe there will be some memorable phrase “hanging in the air” for someone to remember me by.

Blood for oil? Blood for oil, and somebody else’s at that. Look up Shiite versus Sunni, and you’ll see the crux of the problem over there. On 911, 15 of 19 were from the big oil country. Now we’re their protectors?

Big oil. The United States has been bragging for several years now that “America is self sufficient” when it comes to oil, but now we bristle at that 5% that is in jeopardy?

Money and oil, and drill everywhere. Take the restrictions off everything, and let’s pollute the rivers and air again. Smog over LA that chokes the children so badly, they can’t go outside. I remember those days, does anybody else? I remember when the Chattooga River was choked with all kinds of crap. You couldn’t eat a fish out of it, much less canoe in it.

Why is all of this necessary? Are the oil companies not rich enough yet? Is the water and air so clean we need to dirty them up a bit? I don’t understand the logic, does anybody else?

Money….the source of it in our country, who controls it and how, has brought low the highest in power, and elevated to power the lowest in morality. It has been this way for hundreds of years, but has been controlled more so in this country since around 1913.

As you have seen, even since the financial crisis of 2008, who has been served by the laws and policies which were enacted? The people who were in debt, or their creditors? The common man, or the banks and stock sellers?

Everything is out of the control of the people, because the people cannot even vote for the ones who control the money. They are appointees!

In America, very few rise up above the rigged system to become rich. Most spend their lives working for the man, and paying through the nose for the things they need the most. Not the automobiles or the TV’s! The health care, the drugs which are needed to live, the dental care. All are needed to sustain life, and can be withheld as kind of a “blackmail”

Think about it the next time you consider who controls the money, and what they want you to have. If bread and circuses will do (pizza and football) then America will remain what they want.

We never had Kindergarten at our school. We started with the first grade. It was in 1956 for me. Now, I know that date sounds pretty ancient to a lot of people. Not so ancient to others. But, in terms of the way things have changed in the world, it was centuries ago!
Back then, we were still in the old three “R” mode of learning. And, believe me, some of the kid’s in my first grade class wanted absolutely NOTHING to do with them of the first day of class.

I remember two girls in particular whose Mom’s had to drag them kicking and screaming into the classroom! Both of them later became good students, but oh…not on that first day.
Things have changed so much.

Kids start going to school, or pre-school, or pre-preschool so young now, that some of them will NEVER be able to remember when they started to school, like I can. I think that it’s kind of a shame too. Those two girls (It was Sandy and Alma by the way) had both experienced what it was like to be HOME with their Mommas, and to have a “little kid’s” life prior to being rudely awakened one morning and being told they were being taken to this strange new place, full of people they didn’t know and things they weren’t familiar with. They were definitely out of their comfort zone. (So was I, but I didn’t cry. I would have, but as long as I can remember I have had this “thing” about not letting people see me cry. Guess I think it shows “weakness” or something) only by being taken out of our comfort zone could we learn new things, but we didn’t know it at the time, and we sure were not real happy about finding out.

We had these cool metal desks though, that had big old holes in the bottom of them to stuff our books into when we were not using them. That was the other thing too…books! Wow, for the first time in my life somebody gave me a book that didn’t have Scrooge McDuck on it, and said it was MINE. At least for that year anyway. I felt privileged! I took care of my books like they belonged to me. When we had to scrawl our names into them a few weeks later, after we all learned to WRITE our names, I felt bad about defacing that nice new book. It WAS really new, because 1956 was only the second year that the new grammar school had been open, so everything was still in great shape.

I lived in the same town long enough to see that same school go through the metamorphosis of age to the point where it had to be torn down a few years after the river got up and got into it. Both the High School and the Grammar school had been built on a flood plain, because that’s the land which the Mill gave the town to build them on. They knew the land would flood, and that’s why they never had put part of the mill on them. It was good enough for a school though. We had a lot of floods, but the huge 100 year flood that came about 1990 or so I think it was, finished both those schools off.

Anyway, I did feel bad writing in a book. I still feel bad when I see a book that has scribbling and scrawling and writing all in it. Books are sort of sacred things to me, since all the knowledge that mankind has ever been able to accumulate is written down in books. Guess that’s why I like to read them still, and buy and sell them too. Some people get most of their information off of computers and TV now, and don’t bother much with books. That’s ok for them I guess, but I don’t know what I would do in a world without books. Kinda’ glad I will be gone before people totally stop using them.

But, I digress. I think the point I was trying to make was about how kids miss a lot of their childhood nowadays. They are thrust into the world of learning, and really into the adult world itself much too soon. We think of them as little adults from just about the time they can come up with a sentence that makes sense.

“Time for little Tommy to start to School, he just said his first word!”

It’s a little much I think.