Precocious Kids

There is no doubt kids are smarter than they used to be. I mean I was probably twelve years old before I had any idea where babies came from. Nowadays kids know all this before they ever go to school. I reckon there are good things about all this. Yet I have a doubt or two about jumping into life too soon. We were content with a stick and wet dirt to draw in, now children have easels, paints, and brushes to experiment with. We used to take a wooden block and use it as a car or airplane and we supplied our own sound effects. Now kids have motorized toys that duplicate the noise of the real thing. Yesterday in the cafe I overheard two kids talking to grownups. One little girl who must have been no more than four years old overheard her mamma say she was unaware of something that had happened. The little girl said, "Where are you from? Mars?" The she proceeded to tell us Mars was a planet. A little boy across at another table kept staring into his glass of milk. After a period of time he looked up and said, "You know the first man that milked a cow must have been really sick."Me thinks they think too much.

Rhyming

Way back, a poem had to rhyme. Now-a-days a rhyming poem is kinda looked down on. Somebody told me that a poet in the search for words that do rhyme sometimes gets sidetracked and departs from his original thought. Seems like the real good poets of the past figured that one out okay. I was also told that even nursery rhymes lost track when making things rhyme. Like Mary, Mary, quite contrary. Maybe Mary wasn't contrary at all. Maybe she was nice and sweet. But none of those words rhyme with Mary. Now country-western song writers have a real advantage 'cause there are so many words in the dialect of country-western that rhyme. Like car, fire, tire, hair, even borrow in the c/w speak are car, far, tar, har, and bar. It just ain't fair. I mean far.

The Importance of What We Call Things

Sometimes I wonder if I had been named let say James Jefferson Whitmire instead of Harvey Lee Whitmire would my life have been different. They change the names of movie stars for a reason. Cary Grant may not have been quite as successful as Archibald MacLeish, but I reckon we will never know that for sure. What made me start thinking about all this was Willard Wannabunk, one of our Harper philosophers, bringing up the subject of nomenclature down at the cafe yesterday morning. He was upset because his wife's doctor had told her she needed a "his-torectomy." And that in addition she was being treated for "him-rhoids" (a little too much information for my taste.) Then he went off on the fact that all his wife's hormones were out of whack. He figures that if we wanted to get real about all these things we should be more specific. There should be "her-mones" and "his-mone" since they are so different. He ended his diatribe with his contention, "If it's important enough for towels, it's important enough for hormones." Hmmmm.

Experts

It has always been a mystery about who becomes and expert and how they achieve that rank. There are genuine experts especially those who have worked in a particular field and have a record of success. And there are those who are self-proclaimed experts. We got this woman in town who claims to be an expert in art. Particularly modern art. She claims she can see things in pictures that escape the vision of the rest of us. Her walls are covered with copies of Dali, Picasso, and a bunch of other artists. Most of her paintings are things she did herself. Wallace Duby, a guy around here who is an expert in being a handyman, was called in to hang one of her works about a year ago. I reckon it was out of meanness, but he hung the picture upside down. She came in and told him it wasn't right. She wanted it two inches higher up on the wall. So he moved it two inches higher and there it hangs today. I was there last week and she asked me what I saw in the picture. I told her I saw a picture that was hanging upside down. She laughed real hard and said, "You people in this town will never get it. It's my impression of The City of New Orleans (a passenger train) coming into the Harper station." "Oh," I said. My imagination is good enough to recognize that if it was the City of New Orleans the passengers were bouncing around on the ceiling of the train, sparks were flying as the metal roof slid down the tracks, and people waiting at the station were running to escape the impending disaster. I even thought I saw a man dialing 911.

Smart People Doing Stupid Things

You don't have to go no farther than to your TV set to see smart people doing stupid things. It's an every day occurrence. I can accept this because I do stupid things myself sometimes and mostly because of Aunt Bessie Foggblunt. Bessie was my daddy's oldest sister and she went as far as two years in college before economic times brought her home to work in the family grocery store. She was a whiz in arithmetic and was up on all the latest news. At one time a group tried to get her to run for the town council and back in that day that was something for a woman to be asked to do. Aunt Bessie was one of the most stable and confident people I ever knew. Except.... Except she had this modesty thing that tended to overrule all her other smarts. She wore her dresses to cover her wrists and ankles, never wore sandals or went barefoot, and always wore gray or black clothes. This wasn't for any particular religious reason. This was strictly because she was shy about her body. From what I could tell by her shape and curves she had nothing to be ashamed of. But that's the way she was. Things got a little out of control when she started wearing sunglasses everywhere, even around the house, even on dark rainy days, even at night. It seems she heard somebody on the radio telling people if they went out in the yard that night they could see the planet Saturn with the naked eye. She later confided to one of her sisters that she had never thought about her eye being naked. So you see this real smart lady had a big hangup and it overwhelmed any and all of her reason. After a few years she gave up the sunglasses. We never figured out why. I made it my mission to complement her on the beauty of her eyes every time I got the chance. Maybe to boost her morale. Or maybe because I was just plain mean back in those days.

For the Love of Mud

Every now and then I think of someone from my past, someone that I remember because of their effect on my life back then. One of these people is Maysue Ripples, a pretty young woman, who went to the church I was brought up in. Maysue was known in all the night spots in the counties that surrounded Harper. She made the rounds. Men would see her on the street and whistle or hoot out her name. She would drop her head and keep walking on. The strange thing is every Sunday she would be at church and at the end of the service when they gave the invitation for sinners to come down and proclaim their allegiance to the true faith, Maysue would be the first one down. She would stand before the group and bawl out her submission to their ways. But the next Saturday night, from all accounts I heard, she would be back in the honky-tonks, back to her old ways. I heard one old man say, "You can wash up a sow, but you can't keep her from going back in the mud." Finally, the church gave up on Maysue and asked her not to return. Then she disappeared from Harper. I never heard news of her after that point. Of course, their were rumors: She ran off with a tent preacher (like my third wife did), she was in New Orleans working as a stripper, she jumped in the Bogue Chitto River and drowned and her body was lying on the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain. Someone even claimed they saw her in a "B" movie from Hollywood. To this day, I wonder about Maysue. Did she decide which path she would trod and leave the other path behind? Or is she still out there bouncing back and forth between the shower and the mud?

Music in the Air

Yesterday, I was talking about Uncle Silas (he's really not my uncle, we just call him that) and his unique ability to hear a song once and then play it on his upright piano. I mean not just the basic tune but all the frills that go with it. After he finished playing that Tchaikovsky piece, I asked him what about the parts that the orchestra plays while the guy is banging on the piano. Uncle Harvey says he can hear the orchestra while he plays and said, "You can't hear that while I'm playing?" When I said no he told me he hears music all day long. Everywhere he goes there is music. He calls it music in the air. "Can't you hear that?" "No," said I. Uncle Harvey looked me up and down then sighed, "It must be hell going through life without a soundtrack."