Category: Reflecting

Growing up on the western border of Southern Appalachia in the 70s and 80s was the end of an era. The people who largely raised and cared for me were adults during the Depression, who had values their children would not share and would, in fact, actively run away from when they got older.

In the years after the Second World War, their children would seek to distance themselves from the hardships their parents had faced, would go to school, would get careers instead of jobs, and would often move to town as soon as they could, and their kids would grow up to smoke dope, listen to rock and roll, and have kids my age.

But that wasn’t my story or my parents. My Dad was born to parents who were older than his peer’s parents, and so we were caught in a warp of sorts. I have always had much more in common with the generation before mine than I did with my own. I was the first generation to leave home and move to the city, in a pattern more in common with people born a generation before me than my own.

So in boot camp, I was the ridiculous kid who crumbled cornbread into his sweet milk in the dining hall unironically. I was teased unmercifully once in college for saying “My Stars!” when overwhelmed with the sheer audacity of something. I had country words – words that did not belong in those august halls of academe.

In fact, I think I miss the words most of all. Words I no longer hear, and that have, for all intents and purposes, disappeared, that remain in collective memory only as the butt of jokes on reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies.

My people did not think about things; neither did they reflect. Instead, they studied on it. One did not do something soon, but directly. It’s been an age since I heard anybody called a peckerwood. And while my current peers are likely to respond to a shock with an expletive, my grandmother would have said, in response to any shocking revelation, “Well, I swan!”.

I don’t think folks swan anymore. And I think we are poorer for it.

It’s sort of like how I lost my accent: I began to try to be broader – to communicate and be heard by a wider audience, both as a kindness to them but also because I suspected, deep down, that they, with their 5 o’clock news vocabulary, were smarter than we were. I tried to have the rhythms and cadence of Mr. Earnest Hemingway and the vocabulary of Time magazine, rather than the impeccable timing of the old men who told stories on the porch of Woodard’s Grocery, or the melodious cadence of those educated men (always men, sadly) who preached revival meetings in vast tents that traveled the Southland every summer.

I know we can’t go back. When I say I will do something Monday week, my people know what I mean – but in our mobile, transient world, I’m probably not talking to my people, but rather to somebody who grew up in Iowa or something. Instead, they need to hear it will happen next Monday, and since everyone on the TV and in movies says next Monday too, I either have to change or risk being misunderstood. And when I do say it the way they want me to, I lose a little bit of my heritage, my difference, and my past in the process.

The world I grew up in, a world I loved and was loved by, no longer exists. People are far more likely now to buy a biscuit at McDonald’s than they are to make them at home, and somebody is far more likely to take the Lord’s name in vain than they are to shout “Diddily Durn!” when they stub their toe against a rock. We can’t go back – it’s progress, they tell us. And our words and our distinctiveness are collateral damage along the way.

In North Mississippi, in the late 1970s, the value of the Sears Catalog cannot be overstated.

It was an endless source of amazement and entertainment. It was my portal into other worlds, where people wore suits and had couches that matched the armchairs and the men wore t-shirts that matched their underwear and the women wore underwear that was not white.

We were dollar store people, sometimes including Kmart and Walmart, darkening the doors of Sears only twice a year – when we shopped for back to school clothes and when we went into the mall at Christmas, when we children were admonished to touch nothing – NOTHING! – and were told in no uncertain terms that we would not be buying any toys here today. After all, maybe Santa would bring us what we wanted.

The catalog was called the Wishbook, but that’s not how I used it, as I had no doubt that there was never any chance of affording anything on offer from there. No, for me it was a Dreambook. I think the closest analog would be the way we use a site like Pinterest now – looking for things that are visually appealing and then using that image as a basis for our imagination to take over. Like, I see how this blogger redid her living room, and although mine is smaller and has fewer windows, perhaps the built-in bookshelves and the hardwood floors would work in my living room as well…

So I pictured a life where I wore a suit like that to work, and where I had a briefcase like that one there, and of course, I would need a gold watch with a snap bracelet and a Cross pen set that matched the watch. I would wear a gold necklace with a little cross on it, too, and a gold money clip. I didn’t know much, but I knew matching was important.

I would have one of those dorm fridges in my bedroom, where I would keep my six-packs of beer. My parents did not drink – nobody I knew really did – but beer is what cool grownups drank, so it was a given that I would have a beer fridge in my room. That bar set was nice, too, and then there was the pool table with the leather pockets and the stained glass lamp that would hang over it. It would all go in the rumpus room in my basement, despite the fact I had never been in a basement in my life, nor did I know anyone who owned a house that had one.

But neither did my imaginings default to so far away as adulthood. You could, back then, purchase Boy Scout uniforms from Sears, and I desperately wanted to be a Boy Scout, but there was no troop for many, many miles. So I imagined starting my own version of the Boy Scouts, and with our own uniforms, and I had found an ancient Boy Scout handbook – at least 40 years old – at a thrift store and we would not only learn things like how to start fires and camp in the woods, but we would also fight crime and assist the police and make the world better. Girls would not be allowed. It was sort of like if the Boys Only club from Little Rascals met the Superfriends and the Eagle Scouts.

I spent hours, laying on the floor of our living room, flipping through that catalog. Dreaming.