Sunlit Pictures Through a Distant Haze
Can we still smell the grass at dawn and hear the bullfrogs?
Those of us who grew up in the 1940’s and 50’s were incubated in primitive simplicity, where you still shook the glass milk bottle before you opened it and hung wet laundry on a clothesline in the backyard and walked to school if the sun was out. It was a time of slow days and black and white cowboy movies and party line telephones. Your Mama didn’t buy new blue jeans for you, she patched the ones you had.
During the years of World War 2 a lot of things were rationed so that you couldn’t buy beef or pork except on certain days and were limited to small amounts of sugar, milk, coffee and gasoline every month. This wasn’t felt as a real hardship but rather as a challenge. You did without things so that our military didn’t have to. We sang “America the Beautiful” and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” in school between punitive applications of long division under the menacing tutelage of Mrs. Hale.
Our little community of Bluff Park was not incorporated in those years and had no sidewalks, no street lamps and no police so we depended on volunteer fire fighters, the county sheriff and flashlights. There was no need for law enforcement anyway, unless you counted the crimes my fellow juvenile delinquents and I committed on camp-out nights by stealing peaches off Mr. Thompson’s trees or letting the air out of Sam Wright’s tires or firing bottle rockets at cats. You could go on a week’s vacation to Florida and leave your house unlocked. Windows stayed open, wafting honeysuckled air and the music of crickets into your bedroom on summer nights.
To me, school was undeserved punishment for uncommitted crimes. I understood that we all had to be there every day, yes, but so what! I hated every minute of it and wasted my schooling drawing Indian chiefs and palm trees and intricate maze puzzles while suffering the root-canal discomfort of diagramming sentences or Mrs. Bethea’s headache-inducing arithmetic instruction. I remain unconvinced that you can multiply letters of the alphabet and far be it from me to persist in trying.
Escape would come with the sound of the 3 O’clock bell and we’d do a hurried walk home in time to play “pop the whip” or touch football and then go inside to hear another episode of Sky King or Jack Armstrong or the Lone Ranger on the radio.
Back then, radio was virtual magic! Unlike television which came later, with sets designed by people with apparently muted imaginations, radio made it possible for you to create the sets for yourself in your own mind. They were less limited and far more colorful and beautiful than anything you could see on TV.
Every few months the Sky King radio program featured a new ring for us grade-school fans. By “featured” I mean a constant, overblown hype and exaggeration that persisted until that new ring was not merely a thing you wanted … it was something you HAD to have! You’d put your order in and then start checking the mailbox the very next day in case it came early.
The first television set in our community was owned by a neighbor family and they’d have us over some nights to watch while it beamed long minutes of a black and white test pattern on its round screen, followed by a local wrestling match and a string of commercials for nonfat dry milk. Then it would sign off after playing the national anthem. That was it. Just one channel. I can state categorically today that television has not improved since then and you can try proving me wrong if you dare.
Songs on the radio were mostly either stupid or mundane or sweetly innocent, even sometimes shamelessly patriotic. Topping the billboard in 1949 was Vaughn Monroe’s “Ghost Riders in the Sky”, followed by Frankie Lane’s “Mule Train” and Perry Como’s “Some Enchanted Evening”. Dad favored songs by Jo Stafford (which I still admire) and infrequently played the old 78-rpm German recording of “Lili Marlen” that he brought home from the war in Europe. That song was the hands-down favorite of soldiers in both the German and the American armies in WW2. And maybe also anybody else who heard it. It’s still hauntingly beautiful.
Having endured the stress of being homesick in big, inhospitable cities like Rome, London, Paris and New York, it was truly and remarkably a saving grace to carry Bluff Park with me in heart and mind, no matter where I wound up, and to remember climbing the firetower and sharing lunch with Mr. Wilson, the forest ranger who worked way up there on the top and catching toad frogs and lightning bugs and salamanders and hearing the squeak the screen door made before it slammed shut behind me as I jumped off the porch and skinny dipping with my buddies in the creek and my mama’s iced tea in the summer and smelling the rain in a thunderstorm and making a tree house in the pines behind the house with my little brother.
I suppose time flies by at the speed of life when you get right down to it and there’s no way to get any of it back or even slow it down a little, no matter how much you’d like to.
I confess that I’d like to.
But that’s as far as it ever goes. Mama always liked to say “you can’t stop progress” which is about the same thing Plato said over two thousand years ago, lamenting the inevitable devolution of society into mindless servitude.
People imagine that having microwave ovens and algorithms and moon landings and cell phones indicates how smart we have become but I go with Plato on all that and draw the same conclusion he did those long years ago that things, when you get right down to it, just might be going the other way.
(We never minded shaking the milk bottle or hanging out the laundry anyway.)
Just beyond the line below is a recipe first created for Napoleon on an Italian battlefield in 1800 and which, 224 years later, you can make and enjoy in your own home. It’s truly delicious and you will not find it in a restaurant.
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