Summers in Alabama

Funny how back in the sixties, before central air conditioning, we survived sweltering Alabama summers without blinking an eye. I don't remember ever getting unbearably hot when I was a kid. We stayed outside all the time, so we were just used to it, I guess. We had a huge fan in the ceiling of our hallway that we used to "cool" the house. We would open all the windows in the house and turn on this monstrous attic fan, which would pull in a nice breeze throughout every room. I always thought the breeze felt wonderful! I would sprawl out on our cold quarry tile floor and let that breeze just blow all my cares away.

Then one day...

Daddy brought home an air conditioner...

Thrill of all thrills, this window unit actually blew freezing cold air into the room. Daddy said he just couldn't bear the heat at home after working in an air conditioned building all day at work - It's all in what your used to.  That was the beginning of the end of attic fan comfort as I had once known it.

Daddy installed the A/C in the master bedroom and kept the door shut, so there was only one room in the house in which we could escape what had suddenly become ungodly, unbearable heat. Many times we'd pile up on Mama and Daddy's bed and watch movies. If there were peas or butterbeans to shell, that's where we'd go to shell 'em. Laundry to fold? Mama's room. We watched TV in there sometimes, too, when we could get away with it. I don't know how many times I got yelled at for leaving the master bedroom door open. "You're letting all the air out!!!!!!!!" (That was what I was actually hoping for.) Once we had a taste of cold, dehumidified air, there was no turning back. After numerous battles over leaving the bedroom door open, or excessive numbers of children invading the master's domain, we ended up getting a second window unit for the den.

Looking back I suppose the summers of childhood were no cooler than they are now - We just can't handle 'em like we used to. If we were smart, we'd go back to the old days of attic fans and open windows, and save ourselves a few hundred bucks a year. Anybody up to up? Let's boycott air conditioning! (Yeah, right.)

Playing School

My sister Pam was my little Mama. She was always looking out for me when I was little. She was the kind of sister that would push me around on my tricycle or push me on the swing when a needed a boost. Pam loved playing school in the afternoons when she'd get off the school bus. Some of my fondest memories from my early (pre-school) days were of Pam taking me into her makeshift schoolroom and teaching me the alphabet and all the phonics sounds, and how to count, add, and subtract. The first time Mother ever took Pam and Donna Jo to the dentist, they came home with a little coloring book called "Hilda the Happy Tooth." Pam thought it would be fun to let her little toddler sister color in it. After coloring a picture or two, I remember her sitting on the bed with me and teaching me the words in the book. I learned how to read every word in the "Hilda the Happy Tooth" book within the week. Pam's playtime became my early childhood education. I was a proficient reader by the age of three. I remember starting first grade and being so disappointed that they were only teaching kids the letters of the alphabet. I already read at a third grade level and could do elementary math! I believe it was those early days with Pam giving me a love for learning that paved the way for my career as an elementary teacher. I love the classroom better than any place on earth, and I love my sister for all the love and care she has given me throughout my adult life, too. (We won't talk about how she treated me when she reached the pre-teen to teenage years. It probably didn't have ANYTHING to do with my coloring all over the face of her favorite doll Betty. Oh, and did a break Betty's arm, too? I don't remember.)

I love my sisters!!!!!! Nobody needed preschool back in those days, because playing school was just another part of entertaining yourself. Yep, times were simple then, when kids were kids. When no swear words were allowed on TV or radio, and Ricky and Lucy slept in separate beds. When Mamas and Daddies ruled the roost and there was no talking back. When going to church was as natural as eating, sleeping, and breathing. When suppers were shared together around the table, and evenings were spent together in the family room catching up on the events of the day. When weekends were for cartoons, yardwork, and church. When neighbors were friends and days were long. These are the misty, water-colored memories from the corners of my mind. This is the way we were.

Rotary Phones and Party Lines

Rotary Phone

Kids today with their high tech gadgets, redial buttons, qwerty keyboards for texting, and George Jetson-style webcams, can't even begin to imagine what we had to go through to make a phone call in the sixties. First of all, you picked up the phone receiver and listened to see whether you got a dial tone or a neighbor's conversation. You heard me right  -  a neighbor's conversation. You see, back in the day, several neighbors had to share a phone line (called a party line). If your neighbor was talking on the phone, you had to wait until they were done to use your phone. We had teenage girls on our party line, which meant we had to wait as long as a 12-year-old girl camped out on the sidewalk with her mom waiting to purchase Justin Beiber concert tickets.

Here's how it worked: You pick up the receiver, and Jackie (your next-door-neighbor) is talking to her boyfriend --- you hang up. Five minutes later you pick up the receiver - Jackie is breathing heavily in her boyfriend's ear --- you hang up. Ten minutes later you pick up the phone --- Jackie's yelling at her boyfriend - you decide to listen in --- Jackie yells at you to hang up the phone. Five minutes later you pick up the phone - Jackie's crying --- you hang up and tell your mom, who then picks up the phone and yells at Jackie to get off the phone.

After the Jackie drama, you pick up the receiver and listen for a dial tone. You get one this time, so you stick your finger into the little hole above the 2 on your rotary-dial phone and dial it around clockwise until your finger runs into the little silver finger stopper thing. When you pull your finger out of the hole, the dial rotates back around to the 2 position and dials the 2. When the dial stops, you stick your finger in the hole above the 8 and repeat the process. After spending 2 or 3 minutes dialing a seven-digit number, you either hear the other line ringing or you hear a busy signal. If you hear a busy signal, the whole lengthy process must be repeated, because there is NO REDIAL BUTTON!!!! And heaven forbid if you ever dial the wrong number!

If you're lucky, you get your friend on the phone so you can begin your gossip fest about all the drama going on at school, like who got caught kissing who in the parking lot. Unfortunately, your mother enters the room and you want to speak privately, so you take the receiver, which is attached to the phone base by a spirally, winding, stretchy cord, and stretch it as far as you can. Most one-foot cords could be stretched four or five feet so you could cook while you talked. We just happened to have a cord that would stretch six or seven feet into the next room so we could gossip in private.

I really appreciate the ease and convenience of our modern cordless phones and cellular devices. I DO NOT miss having a cord attached to my phone. I DO NOT miss the royal pain of having to manually DIAL a number. I DO NOT miss having to wait on the love-crazed teenager next door to get off the phone. What I DO miss is the sound the old phones made. I would love to hear once again the distinctive kchrrrrrrr..kchrrrrrrrrrrrrrr......

kchrrrrrr.... of a rotary phone. Yep, those were the days!!!!

Those Old 45's

Some of my fondest childhood memories were around the record player. We had a pretty good selection of  45's back in the day, and we played 'em until they were scratched beyond hope. I remember two songs in particular that we used to go around singing all the time. One was "Big Rock Candy Mountain," which went like this:

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,

There's a land that's fair and bright,

Where the handouts grow on bushes

And you sleep out every night.

Where the boxcars all are empty

And the sun shines every day

And the birds and the bees

And the cigarette trees

The lemonade springs

Where the bluebird sings

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

I just loved that song! I thought it sounded like Heaven! What I didn't know was that it was a song about shiftless, lazy, jobless hobos living off the land. The above verse is the only one I remember - I loved the part about birds and bees and cigarette trees (I thought that was hilarious to imagine) - and I especially loved the thoughts of lemonade springs where bluebirds sing!!!! I just googled the lyrics and found out that the rest of the verses talk about "cops with wooden legs" and "bulldogs with rubber teeth." There's one verse that talks about never changing your socks! Ewwwww!

Another all-time 45 favorite was "Scarlet Ribbons," in which a mother catches her daughter praying for some scarlet ribbons for her hair. I think they were poor or something, or the mom couldn't go out at midnight and buy some, so her heart is just torn in two. The soulful, mournful singer really pulls out the tear-jerking lyrics and has you sobbing into your pillow, when miraculously the little girl wakes up to find scarlet ribbons on her bed. (I think they came from Heaven.) I loved to sing that one, crying and sobbing every time before I could get to the end of it. Anyway, my sisters and I were always singing and making up plays and such.

I remember well the first time my sisters put me up to "showing off" my talents. The carrying case we had for our 45's had  removable fuzzy, blue, pop-eyed monster cover that just so happened to fit my little 6-year-old head perfectly.

Naturally, upon the realization that the monster head fit perfectly over mine, my "managers" booked me for a hearthside performance of Naked Native Sings the Beatles. They stripped me down from head to toe, put an old towel on me like a loincloth, put a dozen or two Mardi Gras beads around my neck and arms, topped me with the monster head and led me to the fireplace hearth for my first live performance. They cranked up the old 45 of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and turned me loose. It was an instant hit! Many similar performances from the hearth followed over the years, most of them with me fully clothed, I might add.

My other singing performances were less humiliating, but more profitable. I remember Mama telling me she'd give me a dime if I'd sing for her friends. I would have done ANYTHING for a dime! My favorite dime-earner was "Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head." I sang that one for my Mama's best friend, Juanda Gray, while we were riding in the car one day, and she gave me an extra dime. I guarantee you those two dimes got me a bunch of penny candy at Mr. Rucker's grocery!

My oldest sister Donna Jo was my best singing buddy. She could sing alto, so many times we'd get together in the living room where things were nice and quiet and sing songs in perfect harmony. Those were some of my sweetest memories. Donna Jo was my favorite sister when I was little. She never yelled at me or made me feel small or pesty. She loved me and I loved her with all my heart, and would have done anything for her! One day at the bus stop, a boy told me I looked just like Donna Jo. She quickly took me aside and told me to tell him, "Thanks for the compliment!" I obeyed her right away, and I still say that today when someone tells me I look like her.

Yes, the music of childhood from the corners of my mind is one of my favorite misty, water-colored memories of the way we were.

Stove-top Popcorn

Back when I was a kid, we heated our leftovers in the oven or in a skillet on the stove. We bought popcorn kernels (unseasoned) in bags like the ones rice comes in. To pop the corn, you had to put some cooking oil in a pot and heat it up, add the popcorn kernels, and pop on the lid. Once the corn started popping, there was an art to getting every kernel popped without burning it. You had to hold the lid down with one hand and shake, shake, shake the pot with the other, manually tossing the kernels around inside to get them all heated. Once the popping stopped, you dumped the popcorn out into a bowl. In my case, you then had to pick out all the burnt pieces and salt and butter the daylights out of what little was left. The day they came out with microwaves, I thought I had died and gone to heaven! No more messing up a bunch of dishes to heat leftovers, and glory to God! - they came out with microwave popcorn. No more burnt popcorn! (Yeah, right.)
Yes, the microwave oven rocked my world, but somewhere in the back of my mind, microwaving just seems unnatural - There has to be something deadly about cooking food with waves of some unknown power...Whatever imagined health hazard there is to microwave cooking, I'll take it and never look back.

Things That Go "Jump" in the Night

My Daddy was an amazing storyteller. He could spin a scary yarn that would make your hair stand on end and keep you awake for a week at a time. The town of Coosada where I grew up was blessed (or cursed in my case) with the historic gravesite of the first governor of Alabama, William Wyatt Bibb. The fact that this graveyard backed up to our property gave way to a sort of year-round open season on ghost stories and tales of haints in the neighborhood.

The first story I remember Daddy telling was the one about his building our house back in the early 60's. He always swore that it was the truth, but I never heard the exact same version twice, so now that I'm grown, I have my doubts. The story goes that as Daddy was looking over the property on which he would build our house,  a man walked up behind him and started talking to him as if he were a neighbor. He told Daddy that he had once owned all that land, and he hoped Daddy would be happy there. Daddy supposedly carried on a nice, long conversation with this man. Somehow, Daddy later recognized the fact the he had been speaking to the ghost of William Wyatt Bibb. That story never really scared me much, but it was the jumping off point for a hundred more tales of haints and goblins of sorts that kept me shivering under the covers for my entire childhood.

One such tale was often told to us on our many camping adventures. These campouts were some of the most enjoyable family times in my memory, even if they were only in our back yard. (We never knew other people actually left home to go camping.) Daddy would get us out in the back yard (which was a stone's throw from the graveyard) under a lean-to made of poles and plastic sheeting. We'd hunker down around a campfire with marshmallows and hot dogs, and when the noisy creatures of the night cranked up their croaks, squawks, and chirps, Daddy would crank up the spooky stories. He told of scary men with blue gums that had such dark skin that you couldn't see them at night. They would sneak up on you in the dark and eat you. He told us to be on the lookout for their white eyes. On most campout nights, this was the point at which I got a horrible stomachache and had to go back inside. Luckily, Mama would always be expecting me, and she'd save me a spot in her bed. I don't know what other tales came after the blue-gummed dark man, but my sisters were brave enough to stick around for them.

One scary story often leads to another, and pretty soon we all came to the conclusion that our house was absolutely and utterly haunted. From time to time, heavy objects and figurines would literally levitate off the built-in book shelves in our den, float in mid-air for a moment, and come crashing to the floor. I'm not sure I ever witnessed these events, but I did hear the crashes, and the explanations of them was told to me often enough and sincerely enough that I came to believe I saw these things levitate myself.

There was a time when my sister Janet and I actually did witness one of these levitating objects in our bedroom. We had a little stuffed beanbag turtle on the headboard of our bed, and we were sitting on the bed talking before lights out, when the closet door flung open, and the turtle was catapulted across the room into the closet by some unseen force. The closet door then slammed shut. I think Janet and I could have won the Olympic long jump at that moment, because I don't think our feet touched the floor from our bed to Mama and Daddy's bedroom door across the hall. I like to think that Pam and Donna Jo were playing pranks on us, but I really can't say for sure.

Needless to say, I very seldom got a good night of sleep at our haunted house. I was always afraid of things that go "jump" in the night. I wouldn't go near windows because I was afraid of what monsters would grab me from the other side. I wouldn't let my feet touch the floor after lights out for fear of what monsters would grab me from under the bed. I kept the cover up as high as they would go with smothering myself to death for fear of vampires that might sneak in and bite my neck. I could always hear the pacing of ghastly feet pacing the hallway outside my door, and I often heard haints scratching on the window screen trying to come in. A kid with a big imagination can take spooky stories and  stretch 'em from here to the moon and back!

If you keep up with my future blogs, you will hear many more of the spooky stories from my childhood that still haunt the corners of my mind. They are misty, water-colored memories of the way we were........Or were we?...

Games People Played

"What on earth are we gonna do?" my kids always ask when I call for a "no electronics" day. Their minds cannot even begin to conjure up fun that doesn't plug into the wall or receive a wireless transmission from the computer. It's time to go back to the sixties and seventies when a kid didn't have to wonder what to do for fun--We had games, games, and more games to play outdoors, neighbor with neighbor!

One particular favorite in our neighborhood was Old Tin Alley, also known as Kick the Can. It was really just a game of glorified Hide and Seek. The person who was chosen to be "It" kicked a can (or a ball in our case), and while "It" ran to retrieve the can, all the other kids ran to hide. The perfect hiding place would be one that could easily be exited, because the whole point was to beat "It" back to "home base" once you were spotted. Hiding up a tree was a bad idea, because "It" would just wait beneath the tree to tag you when you came down (I learned that after a hundred or so tree climbs.) A good hiding place, for instance, would be behind the rocking chair on the porch -- Easy to be spotted, but easy to escape at break-neck speed. Therefore, a skilled "Old Tin Alley" player wasn't necessarily a good hider or seeker, but a fast runner.

Another favorite in our neck of the woods was Red Rover. The neighborhood kids would split up into two teams and form two lines facing each other with their hands held tightly. The first team would decide whom they wanted from the other team and then chant, "Red Rover, Red Rover, send Frances right over." Of course, they would pick me because I was the smallest and could never break through their line. If the kid they called over could break through their line, he got to steal one of their players and take him back to his side. After a jillion and a half rounds, the team with only one player left was the big loser.

My all-time favorite game to play was Swing the Statue. I don't know if other kids around the world played this or if we made it up, but I LOVED it (mostly because I was very agile and could contort myself into the best statues.) "It" would grab each player by the arm and swing him around and around any number of times and then let him go. When "It" turned you loose, your job was to fall (which was inevitable), and freeze into the wierdest contortion possible. After all the players had been flung into statue positions, "It" got to choose which one looked the funniest. The funniest statue then became "It." A variation of the game was for "It" to secretly think of an animal before he did the slinging, and whichever player looked the most like the animal "It" had imagined beforehand was the winner.

Another honorable mention was "Devil in the Ditch." I think we may have made this one up, too. There was this huge ditch beside Coach Henderson's house (he was our high school's principal, and he lived across the street from us), and that ditch called out to children in the area. A ditch like that just needed kids in it -- it must have been five feet deep and ran the full length of his side yard! The game went something like this: "It" was the devil and the ditch was hell. (Can you guess that I had a good Baptist upbringing?) All the little angels would jump across the width of the ditch, trying to avoid the devil's grasp. If the devil caught you and pulled you into the ditch, you became one of his little demons and worked with him to catch more angels. If a very small angel with short legs (picture me as a six-year-old) had a hard time clearing the width of the ditch, the devil wouldn't have to work very hard to get her into hell. She would just fall into the ditch on her own - her own weak flesh taking her down into the pit... Anyway, the last angel standing won the game.

Other games were Freeze Tag (anybody remember that one?), Kickball, Chinese Chase, and Softball (played in the empty cul-de-sac). The possibilities were endless, and we got tons of exercise. There were very few fat kids back then - We were skinny and we couldn't help it! We didn't know what boredom was except on rainy days! Oh, those misty, water-colored memories of days gone by - when kids were kids, neighbors were friends, and going to church was as natural as eating, sleeping, and breathing...

Who Needs the Discovery Channel?

Critters were a big part of my childhood - from mosquitoes to fireflies - from lizards to snakes - earthworms to inchworms. It was all part of a kid's entertainment back then. We didn't watch the Discovery Channel or Nat Geo to learn about critters -- We discovered them in our own back yards. When you're outside playing all the time, you just naturally learn alot about nature. Mosquitoes and fire ants were always a part of the outdoor scene. I remember getting into ant beds and Mama running out the door and stripping me down in front of God and everybody. She left no article of clothing unturned. She made a poultice of meat tenderizer and water to daub on the bites to help take the sting out. I always thought it was fun to pop the bites when they came to a head. Bees, of course, were to be avoided at all cost. I can't tell you how many times I got stung by a bee.

Other insects were not considered pests, and were much sought after by us kids. We would get excited to find a praying mantis, a gigantic click beetle, a green june bug, or find-of-all-finds a cute little lady bug. A roly poly was always fun to play with, even if Mama did always lecture us when we touched them, "You know what those things eat, don't you?" Thoughts of poopoo germs didn't hinder us a bit. The coolest find was the shell of a cicada (or Katydid) stuck to the trunk of a pine tree in the front yard. One time, we got to see one coming out of its shell. That was a real Nat Geo kind of treat for us. Parker Johnston and I liked to have real funeral services for dead bugs we'd find stuck on the grill of the car, especially butterflies. Parker would get his Bible, and we'd do it up just like a real funeral. We'd put the little dead butterfly in a match box and mourn over it like an old friend, then dig a hole for it in the woods and bury it. What a way to while away the time on a warm summer day!

My sister Janet was a freak. She liked all kinds of critters that most folks were scared of, like lizards and snakes. She would catch lizards and let 'em bite her earlobes and wear 'em like earrings.

It would gross everybody out, but we'd beg her to do it time and time again. She would catch snakes, too. I kinda got to liking snakes because of her. We once chased a black racer near the creek in our woods for a whole afternoon, but never caught it. I remember the time Janet caught a beautiful green tree snake and brought it into the house.

My sister Donna Jo was deathly frightened of snakes, and it caused a huge uproar. We kept it in an aquarium for a few days, but Mama made us let it go because Donna Jo made such a fuss.

Aside from household pets, there were other critters that made their way into our home by abandonment or illness. Many a stranded baby bird was nursed back to health at our house. Janet would squish up worms and put them in a syringe to feed the babies.

Janet was a real sucker for hurt critters; we always thought she'd become a veterinarian, but she became a nurse instead (and a good one, too!!!!) Many a stray cat found a home at the Pouncy house, too, until Daddy hauled it off behind our backs. We had rabbits, gerbils, hamsters, squirrels, baby birds, cats, and dogs around the house all the time. Daddy had his hunting dogs, too. We named them Jack and Sue after our neighbors. I'm not sure they really appreciated that, but we got a kick out of it.

Those were the days! The Discovery Channel in our own back yards! I love those misty, water-colored memories of the way we were!

The Age of Innocence

Time moved slower in the sixties and seventies. I don't understand how it could have been that way, but it was. Kids were kids. We had our household duties, like cleaning the dishes after meals, and cleaning the house from top to bottom on Saturdays, but somehow there was always time to play. After school, there was always time to walk down the road to Mr. Rucker's grocery store, where a kid could get a Coca-Cola in a real glass bottle for 25 cents, and a free piece of candy thrown in from time to time. The store was right next to the Coosada town Post Office, which sat right next to the railroad tracks. We kids used to put a penny or two on the tracks, and come back later to see if we could find it smashed flat. We never had any fear of being abducted. We had free run of the whole town of Coosada. If we wanted to ride our bikes all the way to Millbrook, that was fine. We would roam the neighborhoods looking for anybody that wanted to play Old Tin Alley or cut bike trails in the woods. We could always sneak through Mr. Hall's pasture to get to the old swimming hole, sometimes getting shot at (he probably wasn't aiming.) Our biggest fear was getting attacked by neighborhood dogs, hence the solution of always carrying a big stick.

When we got off of the school bus every afternoon, we went inside for a snack and then hit the neighborhood. We'd stay gone until dark, or until Mama would honk the car's horn to call us back home for supper. We didn't have computers, video games, or even much television for that matter. We only got four or five TV stations, and that depended on the strength of the signal to the bunny ears wrapped in tin foil on top of the TV set. Saturday mornings were reserved for cartoons like Roadrunner, Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Foghorn Leghorn, and Porky Pig. Rainy days stunk because we couldn't play outside. Inside days consisted of card games, jigsaw puzzles, singing and dancing to the 45's on the record player, or making up skits to perform on our makeshift stage (the large fireplace hearth.)

Yep, times were simple then, when kids were kids. When no swear words were allowed on TV or radio, and Ricky and Lucy slept in separate beds. When Mamas and Daddies ruled the roost and there was no talking back. When going to church was as natural as eating, sleeping, and breathing. When suppers were shared together around the table, and evenings were spent together in the family room catching up on the events of the day. When weekends were for cartoons, yardwork, and church. When neighbors were friends and days were long. This was the Age of Innocence - and it was mine.

Write 'em Down Before You Forget 'em

Long, long ago - back in the early 1960's - I was born. Things were different back then. Way different. I have decided to write my own personal memories from those days, because I'm not sure how much longer I will have a memory at all. My mind is slipping. I could blame my memory loss on any number of things: an unhealthy lifestyle, gallons of diet coke over the course of my lifetime, being pulled from too many directions, and having kids. Whatever the cause, I am becoming more and more forgetful.

Memories are just naturally funny things anyway; the longer they sit there in your mind, the more distorted they get, and you can never be sure how accurate they are. My three sisters share many of the same memories from my childhood, but we all have different versions. That's just the way it goes. These are MY memories of times past. They are misty, watercolored memories of the way we were...