I guess I'm as normal as a lot of people when it comes to laying awake at night, unable to go to sleep. It's not a bunch of little things that worry me, it's the little memories that have been hiding in the darkness of my mind because they were considered minor to the reality of life today. I previously created "Sleepless Nights" and "Fleeting Moments" to accommodate a place for these short stories but it turns out there are many of them and I need more space for them, most likely I will have to create other spaces in the future. In the meantime check back to see what else I have added to this post
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Wade was a teller of stories, I doubt I will ever remember even half of them but as they come back to me I will try to pass them on to future generations because they are the things that you wind up trying the hardest to remember.
Grandpa Wade used to tell the story of an old country doctor, As the story goes, the doctor had been practicing for many years, he was well into the time when he should be retired and enjoying life but people depended on him and it was the life he knew. There was a lot of thought about how a man of his age could still do the things he did so one day he was stopped on the street.
"Hey Doc" a man asked. "I've been wondering what it is that keeps you going, what is the one thing that you can contribute to your longevity". Without hesitation the Doctor said "well, every night when I go to bed, I take a shot of whiskey to relax me, every morning when I get up I have another shot of whiskey to get my heart started". With that the old Doctor turned and walked away.
Like many story tellers, Grandpa told this one many times and those who listened would laugh. Was the Doctor real, I don't know but was a good one and considering the medications I take and the doctors I see I'm starting to think maybe the Doctor had a good idea.
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Linda was the oldest of three daughters, her father wanted a son but he had to make do with girls so he set out trying to make them over as tomboys. One of the ways he tried was to take them fishing. Linda related to me how she would always catch the little blowfish that would puff up into a ball shape and had prickly spines. Mostly the girls would play at fishing.
One day while fishing from a small pier in the Indian River, Eileen noticed the Mullet that were jumping out of the water. Mullet do this quite often but why I don't know but according to Dad they jumped out of the water so they could pee. Many years later, after Linda and I were out of the Navy, we were fishing when a fish jumped out of the water, she told me the story and asked if it was true.
Linda's dad continued with his attempts to interest the girls in fishing. One year when they were still young and wanted dolls for Christmas, they were surprised to find fishing poles next to the tree, Eileen laughed saying that silly old Santa had brought dad some fishing poles.
Dad's attempts to turn them into boys continued on into adulthood, at one point he paid for a few lessons for Eileen to learn how to fly helicopters. he wanted Linda to take the exam to be a general contractor. He wanted them to do these things so he could somehow benefit from them financially. Dad would usually tell me about one of his "great ideas" but I didn't always go along with them and tell him so, I wasn't going to let Linda go through with them, she would thank me when I told her.
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Back in the 1970's, I worked as a debt collector for a large bank in Tennessee, I traveled all over middle and east Tennessee and northern Alabama. One day I headed out from Nashville on my way to Chattanooga on I-24, east of Murfreesboro I realized that I needed to go to Shelbyville first. I was coming up to Bell Buckle at highway 64 so I took that exit and turned south.
Highway 64 was a two-lane country road back then that followed the terrain over the hills and around the curves. Going to Shelbyville first was going the put me late to Chattanooga but I didn't worry, there was not much traffic back then and I had a heavy foot on the gas pedal. So here I am in a '73 Impala going like a bat out of hell when I topped this hill.
The road was straight as an arrow with open fields on both sides and at the bottom of the hill sat an old style general store with the high front porch and the road took a sharp 90 degree turn to the right about 30 feet in front of the store. I immediately hit the brakes but the road was damp from a shower so I started to slide, first to the left then to the right and back again and again. Customers were coming out on the porch to watch me, they were probably making bets as to whether or not I will make the turn. As luck, and I do mean luck, would have it, just as I reached the turn I happened to slide to the right so I quickly came off the brake and tromped on the gas avoiding what could have been amess. When I got to Shelbyville, the first thing I did was find a restroom and check my shorts.
You might think I would have slowed down after such a close call but the truth is that after two and a half years on the road with the bank I wrecked two bank cars and accrued several speeding tickets and before each ticket I had slowed down.
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Did you know that men's trousers / pants didn't have belt loops until 1922? Belt loops were invented by Levis and for many years they were only found on the Levis brand of jeans. Prior to this time pants had buttons that allowed you to attach a pair of suspenders to keep your pants from falling down. The style back then was that pants were worn waist high meaning that the tops of the trousers came up to the belly button, it was the boomer generation that started wearing their pants lower. It was during WWII that the buttons for suspenders were done away with as part of the war time reduction of materials needed for the war.
Both of my grandfathers grew up wearing suspenders to hold up their pants. Grandpa Wade needed them because his belly was so big a belt just didn't have anything to grasp to keep his pants up. Grandpa Riggan needed suspenders because he was so skinny his pants would have been falling down all the time. I can't say as I remember either grandfather wearing a belt although I do seem to remember being told how grandpa Wade would pull off his belt to whipp one of his boys.
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When I was a kid of maybe eight years old, mom got into this mode of canning some foods to help cut down on cost. The family at this point consisted of four kids and two adults. We would go to grandpa Riggan's farm and pick peas beans and other vegetables that she would can. I was not real big on vegetables but I did like the blackberry jams she made and grandpa's farm was loaded with patches of blackberries.
Picking blackberries was that difficult, there were many berries on a stalk and you just had to pick off the darkest one as they were the ripe ones. Sounds easy enough until you get into the blackberry patch. First off, although every stalk was covered in berries not all of them were ripe, you may get four or five berries but then you moved on to the next stalk. The stalks were thickly entwined with each other so it was too hard to go from one to the other. The difficulty came from the stalks, in addition to being covered with berries they had three or four times as many thorns that were designed to prick, stick and scratch your hands and arms and legs if you wore shorts. They would snag any bits of clothing and when you would try to pull away it was inevitable that another would grab you from another direction. Even the best picker arms would be covered in tiny red spots of blood from encounter with the thorns, some thorns would break off from the stalk and you would have to stop and pull it out of your skin.
But thorns were not the only issue. Blackberries patches were thick with the stalks that could reach four or more feet high with thick grass at the base and small leaves on the stalks. All of this was a prime home for "chiggers". I can't say that I ever saw a chigger as they were a minute little bug that you would need a microscope to see but they were the most irritating little varmint on the planet. Chiggers favorite places on your body were the waist line where your pants snugged tight against the skin or the ankles where your socks stopped. They would bore into the skin and take up residence causing a small bump that would itch like crazy, the more you scratched the more it itched. You could squeezed the bump and get some clear liquid to come out but the bump would still itch.
The only way to rid your body of the chiggers was to cover the bump with nail polish, it smothered the chigger and he would die after a day or two. Mom didn't always have clear nail polish and any color would do so there were times that we would look like spotted aliens from space.
Another benefit from blackberry picking was that they were ready to eat at the moment they were picked so you would often pick two handfuls, one for the container, one for your tummy. All of this for a jar of jam or a pie but it was worth it and we did it every year.
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Back in my childhood, mothers, grandmothers and aunts wore aprons everywhere or carried a handkerchief or had a rag or used dish cloth in there pocket. Thes clothes were for the soul purpose of aggravating young children with dirty faces. It seemed that all women back then had this fetish about dirty faces. They would sneak up from behind you and put their and pull your head back hand on your forehead then the rag / cloth would come out. They would actually spit on the cloth and proceed to clean you face while they lovingly scolded you for getting dirty. I had a lot of dirt removed with granny's or mom's spit and lived to tell about it, since then I have never been too concerned about germs because I figured that their spit sort of inoculated me.
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Back in the 1950's, people of my parents generation," The Greatest Generation", had some habits that were hold overs from their parents. For instance, the husband made the money and the wife tokk care of the home and kids, my mother didn't work out of the house until all of us kids were out of the house, she was in her late thirties before she got a drivers license. Dad would give mom money to pay the bills because she was better at balancing the check book but he always held back money that in some cases was his play money. I have doubts that mom even knew how much money dad made.
One of the things dad liked to do was play poker with his so called buddies. I can remember times when dad would come home and tell mom that she would have to fend off the bill collectors because he lost his whole paycheck playing cards, then there were other times he would come home and give her several hundred dollars to catch up on the bills, this irritated mom to no end.
There is an old saying that goes "too many straws will break the camels back", well one day mom reached her breaking point. Dad had lost his paycheck again and as usual he came back a week or two later and gave her several hundred dollars to catch up on the bills. She got the bills caught up then she went down to the local "Western Auto Store" and bought a new washer and dryer.
I don't know for sure when it started but I wouldn't be surprised if this was dad's straw also but dad started wearing a money belt.
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Dad was a Democrat, at the time the Democrat party was strong in the south and always had been. He had some strange ideas about certain things, one of them was paying taxes. I sometimes thought taxes were the real reason behind having five kids, the more kids you have the less taxes you paid. For years, dad would go to the bank and borrow money on a short-term loan to pay his tax bill, he also always claimed the maximum number of dependents allowed when it came to the deductions on his paycheck.
I was in my twenties when one day dad was complaining about taxes and the interest the bank charged him on the loan. I told him he should claim zero on his deductions, that would have more money taken out of his paycheck but when he filed his income taxes he would at least break even and maybe get some back. His answer was "hell no, I don't want the government using my money for free". So dad went on taking out loans to pay his taxes and paying interest to the bank.
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You know you're getting old and any inkling of modesty has flown the coop when a female nurse inserts a catheter in you and you didn't even blush.
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