Not Exactly Gone with
the Wind
About 1,000 words or 3 pages
Most
people living in the United States today, including myself, haven’t really
lived through much of anything in terms of earth-shattering historical
experiences. We squirm and squeal like
we’re either victims of some huge tragedy or smug heroes of an advanced
technology era, but we’re powder puffs in terms of historical catastrophes or even
having seen significant events of the ages.
We would do well to remember that as we carry on about our causes celebres and other nice social
fine tunings; these are all well and good, but let’s get real, we experience
but faint echoes of troubles past or far away.
I was reminded of this when
visiting a remarkable woman recently: a
Southern belle, now in her 80’s, having risen from poverty in the middle of Georgia
to live many years in Europe and now retire in a comfortable setting back to
the South. I remember having visited
this fine lady once during a storm. We
were catching up on the latest in her small town and the fact that high-speed
Internet wires were just installed when sleet and freezing rain came down and
the power went out while we were sitting in the den. It went dark; I heard fumbling around, and
then the strike of a match.
“Let’s move to the parlor,” she
said, lighting a candle and walking us to the next room. She lit an oil lamp, two sconces on the wall
and a standing candelabra by the piano. She
went to the fireplace and deftly lit the tender and kindling. We finished our chat, and she insisted I
play background music on the piano while she read the paper. One of her dogs curled up by the fire, the
other by the piano as I played.
“What’s really changed most in the
past 70 or so years for you?” I asked,
partly to make conversation but mostly from genuine curiosity.
“Well, for one thing, if you go
into the kitchen right now, it’s completely dark like when I was a little
girl. Normally, when the power’s on, it
seems like there’s this glow from all the little blue and green ready lights
and digital clocks on everything,” she said.
About that time a grandfather clock chimed, followed by a few quaint
cuckoos of another clock, telling us the time without us even having to look at
any blue or green lights.
“And I’ll have to say,” she added,
“that cars start a lot better than they used to. It seems like we had to pump the gas, turn
the ignition and coax them to get them started.
Now they just start with the push of button. Every time.” She thought some more, “And TVs don’t wear out like they used
to. Remember when we had to go up to
the TV and bang on the side of it and fiddle with the vertical control to keep
it from endlessly rolling up?” I had
forgotten about that; once upon a time everyone had to fiddle with the
television to get a steady picture on one of the three or four channels
available.
“I believe I left my cell phone in
the other room, and that’s a big change of late, I suppose,” she said. “It’s cute and handy, but really not that big
a deal,” she added. “I have an alarm
system that’s state of the art,” she said, “but I’m not sure it’s as effective
as the dozen dogs that lived under the house and the shotgun under every
bed.” I remember those dog and shotgun
days; they were still around in my grandparent’s old farmhouse when I was a
boy.
I had just finished a tome of a
book, The Rise and Fall of American
Growth, and indeed there were several chapters about what had really
changed since the middle of the last century.
Most all of the everyday life advances in the past half-century have
been in the form of improvements in communication and entertainment. We may all think things have really
progressed, but it’s not really earth-shattering when things go from one computer
operating system to the next. For the
most part, we get minor updates of things invented a couple of generations ago—and
the updates seem to be for sales purposes, nothing really new.
The phone call came early in the morning from
my little brother about this very lady of which I speak, our mother, a couple
of weeks ago. A tornado, an F3, hit
mom’s house and neighborhood. I was the closest
son and should get there pronto. I
did. Once I got through the workers’ freshly
chain-sawed paths, I got to the remains of my mother’s home. Two of the fifteen rooms had survived as
evidence of mercy in the fury: the
dining room and kitchen. The rest of the
house was demolished. Forlorn, fine-laced
curtains hung some twenty feet up in snapped-in-half pine trees. Thirteen rooms of finery and memories were
drenched and scattered.
My
mother was with her dogs in the dining room, warming coffee on a silver chafing
dish. She poured me some in a Limoges
cup and saucer. Apparently, she had
spent the night on a pile of coats with her dogs and her .22 Beretta (lady’s
edition) pistol by her side and alerted us with her cell phone. She had run water in a bathtub at the
beginning of the tornado watch; and now even though the toilet was open air,
there was at least a handy reservoir of water to use for flushing.
“See if
you can find yourself a chair,” she said, “We can’t sit but a moment. I’m afraid I’m terribly busy.” And I instantly saw the strength of a generation
whose brothers had fought the largest war in history and whose great
grandparents had told stories of the War Between the States. Her
cell phone had come in handy, but it would not have changed things much if the
wind had taken it too.
©Copyright.
2018. JP Harrison. All rights reserved.
