Good Ol’ Days

I was born in January nearly a hundred years ago and out of danger by late March, after a difficult birth and too few family resources for medical care.  My mother was pressed into establishing a boarding house by her husband whose life style required more dollars than he was making at the rubber shops in Akron, Ohio.  She, a girl from the sticks of Georgia and no experience in homemaking was to become housemother to a batch of adults, a new baby, and somewhat irresponsible husband.  The house had no electricity, but was illuminated by gas lamps that required regular tending.  It was heated with coal which also required regular tending including the removal of ash.  Mother washed clothes by hand for all persons in our home, and hung the washings out to dry, through a slanted door leading upwards from the basement to ground level.  (Her younger sister, Pauline, was chosen by their parents to learn how to be a homemaker while my mother was reared to help her father in the cotton field and pecan orchard – all taken together with the standard farm chores feeding chickens, milking cows and slopping hogs.)  Three brothers came along later to help, but they had ways of ignoring duty, or picking it up after my mother became the scholar of the group, and went off to high school.  To get to the church boarding school in Sparks, she rode by buggy to Bainbridge, took the train east to Valdosta, and changed to another train going north to Sparks.  The trip, about 100 miles the way the crow flies took a full day if schedules were followed.  (Education in Sparks was excellent.)

At my birth the jazz age had been born; recovery from World War I was underway with the last American soldiers returned from Germany; the scandals of the Warren Harding presidency had broken, complicated by his death of an apoplectic stroke; prohibition was being made a joke; eggs cost a cent for each if a dozen was purchased, and bacon 20 cents a pound if you wanted a full breakfast including toast from fresh bread at 9 cents a loaf; life expectancy was just slightly over 54 years, a new house with electricity could be had for $7,400.00 but rentals were about $18.00 monthly; a new Ford-T cost $295.00 or so; gasoline was 12 cents a gallon pumped by the station proprietor; average income was about $200 monthly; a postage stamp was 2 cents and a postcard 1 cent; a movie ticket was 15 cents for adults with average attendance a bit over once weekly for the population to see a silent screen and poor acting.  Walt Disney formed his company the same year counting on pictures of animated mice, Mickey and Minnie, to gain a fortune. Electrification was changing everything.  This story can be elongated to strike awe to us, nearly a century later, decades after an American stood on the moon.  The rate of change, the small business nature of a single family, the technology advance and transportation with the domination of the uses of variant fuels has made a different life planet for human beings at this writing.  We do not even know how we have fared with the change to color for media, with value mixtures, with advances of education, with globalization of peoples, with upheavals of traditions, with dramatic increase in longevity of life – and so the story goes.

The wise person considers much of the evidence occupying the attention of society, and looks on the human status of being.  The human being remains the same needing love, freedom, hope, faith, nutrition, family, opportunity, learning, energy, vision, ambition, fellowship, values, and health.  No matter the direction from which they come, they are needs for the individual.  For many it is any port in a storm.  The need is felt, and there are persons to address the issues, sometimes with oddities that are nonsense but couched in stylistic attractiveness; sometimes serious and useful in the short run but leading to dead ends; and, sometimes in the light of the deity creator who is able and eager to share his authority and power to bring immortal meaning and order to persons.  They are willing for change that he incorporates in lives that he will accept in the ultimate meaning of mankind – to participate in loving fellowship with God.  It is reserved for those who find God whom they would choose as the Prince of Peace, the Wonderful Counselor, the ultimate in becoming the Everlasting Father to those who choose the incomparable way and divine meaning of mankind.  Persons are the same, in buggies or cars, in poverty or wealth, in ignorance or education; in health or sickness, in comfort or misery, in lostness or discovery.  Life is legacy with God.