Sneezy, Grumpy, and Dopey

We left home at 7:00am yesterday, met Jerry and Tammie along with Elizabeth and Carroll (Tammie’s parents) in Greeneville. They followed us as Carolyn drove to the airport in Knoxville which is about two hours from our house. We missed two turns even with the GPS; it did not tell us to turn off until we were whizzing by the exit. I don’t like the Tom-Tom GPS as well as I did my antique Garmin. We did get to see a lot of Knoxville via backstreets as the machine guided us back to the straight and narrow.  The airport has been newly remodeled and is very nice. It is small compared to big-city airports, having only 10 gates, but it is busy enough with mostly commuter and connecting flights to Atlanta and Charlotte. Due to some kind of foul-up, Keegan had to lay over six hours in Atlanta, but overall, his arrival was only an hour later than planned. It was an exciting moment to see his plane land and then see him come around a corner toward the lobby. When he finally saw us his face split into the grin we have been missing for all these months. He and his dad rode back to Greeneville with us, and we stopped at the restaurant where he worked up until the day he left for basic. His friends were as excited to see him as were his family. We took him to his mom’s house and he stayed there overnight and Carolyn and I finally got home about 4:30pm, both of us dead tired.
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Be well, little Libby.
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Have a Thursday, my friends.
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A man thing

The Burger Bar in Bristol has a bit of a legend attached to it. It is said that famous country music artist Hank Williams ate his last meal from the restaurant just a few hours before he died while asleep in the back seat of his Cadillac. Supposedly, his driver stopped at the Burger Bar and bought take-out burgers for the star and himself. I guess the notoriety is a win-lose thing for the bar; on the one hand the legendary singer ate food from there, and on the other hand the legendary singer died after having eaten food from there.

I consider Hank as the male country singer until the likes of Waylon and Willie came along, and I still consider him the all-time best. However, I wish Hank had kept his dick in his pants the day his son Hank Junior was sired.
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Why does my hearing go away when I yawn? I don't have much anyway.
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I have a theory that concerns men, so if you ladies read this you will probably find it more boring than is my usual stuff. Men, you know how sometimes when we pee it comes out in a double stream and no matter how we try to balance or aim it, one of the streams always hits the edge of the urinal or commode; at times even pooling on the floor. Married men with wives to clean up after them don't worry about the floor as much as do most single men, but the fascinating part is the two streams. When we have a normal single stream hitting the water, it is pretty blasé don't you know. Dull and boring because we have experienced it many thousands of times and when we were drinking beer at our best pace, it felt like a thousand times each day. Now for my little surmise on the double stream. It is my theory that the single stream represents our boring life; sleep, work, eat; on and on. I believe the double stream means there is a coming fork in the road of our lives from which we must blindly choose our path into tomorrow. When the streams are even in flow, it means either way will yield about the same results, but when they are uneven, it means that we must carefully choose our course. The worst of the double streams is where one shoots almost full blast to the target vicinity, but the other sort of dribbles and drips, splashing on the edge of the pot and onto our clothes and shoes and we don't know it until someone else makes fun of us. That scenario means we should follow our normal course but to be prepared for some minor setbacks. Sometimes and especially after having sex, I spew forth a triple-streamer of which at least one of them will usually end up dripping and dribbling until wetting my pants legs or shoes. Sure, it is only a theory, and I damn sure ain't going to test it by hanging around public men's rooms and watching others from the corner of my eye as they take a leak and then with a straight and honest face try to persuade the the double-streamers to write down all that happens to them over the next few days. Justice and science may be blind, but I feel the most blinding outcome from this would be the swollen, black eyes I would carry into the short-term future.
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I will be gone most of the day but hope to be home before 3:00pm.
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Have a very good Wednesday!
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Communication

Carolyn is working on a bid to clean a funeral home; I told her at her age, it may be good to get a foot in the door and become accustomed to the place. I suppose you can guess what she told me.
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Looks like document spell checkers will soon be obsolete for everyday non-business communications. With the booming popularity of texting and seeing as it has its own version of the English language which for the most part I cannot read, what good is a spell checker? Parallel with texting is instant messaging which uses texting "words" along with misspelled regular words, bad punctuation, and a lot of gibberish. Well, excuse my old fogy ways but I learned to write an evolved form of the English language and not a revolutionized bunch of virtual ink spittle. I have nothing against texting and IM'ing ... as long as no one expects me to do it or try to read theirs. In other words, Phooey! Ok, I'm just jealous of you young whipper-snappers, but my thought train just does not ride on the instant communication gratification tracks.
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Got the blood work done and made a couple of photos with the Droid camera; haven't checked them yet. Verizon released the latest version of the Android OS last week. I downloaded it yesterday and had a few problems to begin with but they seem to be gone. The camera now has an on-screen shutter release to go along with the mechanical one. Overall, it seems to be a reasonably faster OS than was the version 2.1.
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Yesterday would have been my mother's 91st birthday ...
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Have a swell, gee-whizz Tuesday!
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Wet

New blog site!

Rain and cool was the state of our local weather yesterday and today looks like much the same as bone-chilling drizzle adds fleeting dimples to small, standing puddles on the front porch planks. Have my mornings and evenings of porch sitting come to an end for another year? Will I get another warm day so that I may visit the creek for my autumn bathing ritual? Is there a life more wasted than that of a television weather reporter or "meteorologist" as they like to be called?
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I was a bit ill yesterday with a stomach problem but am better today. The eye allergies have lessened a bit but I am still—as my grandmother used to say—"sneezing my fool head off" and I have a runny nose. Hopefully I am not getting a cold ... or worse. At one period in my life, I went nearly 20 years without ever catching a cold; it was freaky how everyone around me was sick with the viruses a couple of times each year and I never even sneezed. For some reason my immunity ceased a few years back after a serious bout of pneumonia and I am no longer Super Man although I have retained my x-ray vision.
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Tomorrow I will be off to the lab for two different blood tests for two different doctors. Wednesday Keegan comes home from the Air Force for a month's R&R before leaving for a year in Japan and South Korea. We will get up early and make the two hour drive to Knoxville airport to meet him and bring him back to Greeneville where his mother lives. I got all my dates mixed up and thought he was coming in this past weekend and that Jeremy, my eldest grandson, was coming in from Atlanta next weekend and we would all get together for a small reunion. It has been more than a year since Jeremy saw the hills and Keegan has spent many months doing training and schooling at Air Force bases in Texas. Jeremy's birthday is October 13 so we will be able to do a lot of celebrating this weekend coming when everyone is here.
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Possum grapes are getting ripe; they need to be kissed by a light frost to make them sweet.
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Have another wet Worshday!
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Co-Pilot

Our friend Jola has begun blogging on WordPress; welcome, my friend. Click this link to view her blog. It is written in her native Polish language but Firefox and Chrome browsers have Google Translator plugins which allow anyone to read most languages. All the words do not translate, but enough do to make it understandable in English.

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My Flickr friend Kim who hails from Nashville was visiting a friend of hers near Knoxville yesterday and decided to drive on to Johnson City and do some shooting here for a few hours. She got here about 1:00pm but the sky was overcast and there was occasional sprinkles. Carolyn brought us pizza, and we all three watched the remainder of the UT football game on TV while waiting to see if the weather might cooperate. When the overtime game was finally over, the sky had lightened a bit, so Kim volunteered to drive us around in her Honda Pilot SUV and I became the co-pilot of the Pilot. She wanted to shoot in Bluff City, but when we got arrived there was some kind of festival going on and downtown of the little village was blocked off. We took off for Blountville which was the next old town in the area but didn’t find much there. We finally ended up in Bristol and she really likes that town. Meanwhile, the late afternoon light became very good for about an hour. Bristol has plenty of the stuff she likes to shoot which is basically the same things Mark and I like to shoot. As Kim said, “Show me the crud”.  She made a couple of pics of the old sign which arches across State Street, then we hit the back streets on the Virginia side. Darkness began settling in and we turned back toward JC. She thought about spending the night in a motel and shooting in downtown Johnson City early today, but the weather forecast was so bad she decided to make the two hour trip back to her friend’s house in Maryville and rest up before returning to Nashville later today. It is probably best she did so as it has been raining and is chilly here in JC. She brought Carolyn a gift of a potted mum and I will try to get a pic of it if it stops raining.

We didn’t get a lot of photos but Kim is a good photographer and I hope she got one or two good enough to put on Flickr. I was limited because of the low light and had only the 50mm f/1.4 lens with me and I had to do a lot more walking than is usual to get a shot. Kim shoots mostly with film and I will have to wait a few days to see her results.

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I will go with Carolyn to work for awhile, then I will see what kind of photos I got yesterday. The one above is of a small burger restaurant in downtown Bristol where Carolyn, her dad, and her uncles would go when she was a little girl.

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Have a Scintillant Sunday!

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Sore-eyed cat

Eye allergies are terrible today; glad the sky is cloudy as a lot of light hurts. Taking Claritin but it isn’t much relief; just have to wait it out. Back ASAP.

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I hope you don't mind ...

Working Wordpress

I made it through the yesterday without too much trouble; I finally got some more widgets working on WP blog site. The main thing is WP site is much faster to load and publish than is Blogger. Is anyone having problems commenting? This site is aggravating because every comment has to be approved. Is it difficult for y’all to comment? I commented on yesterday’s post from the Droid without any problem; WordPress has a Droid app and a setting so that I can write and post blogs from the phone along with comments. This has been a tiresome and trying affair but if the comment thing doesn’t work out I will go back to Blogger but I will be blogging far less often. Maybe they will get the situation repaired over there; seems like the worst problem is the re-directs they send each page load through.

I took pics of Carolyn’s toes with the Droid camera, but they looked like crap. I will experiment some more but so far inside flash photos are less than lousy. It does very well outside as long as the lighting is fairly even. Of course it was made to make pics of granny and the kids for posting to Facebook, etc. I haven’t tried the video camera yet

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Have a Friday and a great weekend!

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Old and New

NEW BLOG SITE

I will attempt ot post a photoless copy of my blog here for awhile.
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Well, here goes my first attempt at blogging on this version of Loose laces. I hope any of you who read the old one and  decided to come with me will find the transition to be smooth. I will say this; WordPress is a difficult blogger platform to customize because it is not as user friendly as was Blogspot. There is no option here to have comment notifications sent to an email address, therefore I must manually come here and look for them. That means I may be tardy in answering or even that I might miss some; if I do miss one, I will apologize beforehand and say for sure it wasn’t on purpose.
There is a chance this will not work to our advantage; and if it does not work for all of us, I will revert to Blogspot. I feel all of us are in this together; the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts, but I feel each of you is a part of my life and I want to keep it that way.
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The new Communist Chinese made coffee pot was the household sensation yesterday, at least until Carolyn came back from the salon sporting clean and well burnished feet with toenails painted candy-apple red with glitter and small Halloween ghosts painted on her big toe nails. A coat of clear lacquer was applied for protection. Sounds like she visited an auto-body repair shop instead of a beauty saloon; I say saloon instead of salon because women seem to get some kind of inebriated buzz or “high” from the things which go on in such places.
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Have a Thursday!

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Bye-bye Blogger and Blogspot

I am in process of moving this blog to Wordpress.

Blogger has become a voracious feeder upon my comments and photos. I should not have to upload a photo to Blogger just to find it cannot be clicked on and go to a larger size than what is on original post. To make it larger, I must go Picasa Web Album, locate the pic, copy the embed code, go to Blogger Dashboard, locate the post, edit the post by deleting the photo and inserting the embed code, publish, and hope for the best.
Twice this week I have had error codes pop up when making comments and they are lost to cosmos. It is tough for a slow typist like myself to have to redo everything.
Just trying to get onto Blogger Dashboard can be a multi-click endeavor. Similar to Yahoo with Flickr, Google apparently is using its oldest and slowest resources for their blog platform.

Hopefully by tomorrow, I will be regularly posting on the NEW Loose Laces. It will take some time to get the hang of it, and I may not answer your comments in a timely fashion until I am acclimated there. With Blogger, I can have an email notification telling me when someone has left a comment; I don't yet know if that is possible with Wordpress.
Please bear with me until the deed is done one way or another; I hope Wordpress works well enough that I won't have to stop blogging.

Thanks, my friends. ♥

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Diamonds and Rust

Yesterday was one of the quietest days I've had in many years; very little going on at home, the web was fairly still with very few emails and only one of them was important. No one was commenting on my Megashot photos, very few on Flickr, and the blog was much quieter than normal. "Peace, be still."

Anyway, I sat on the porch with no Droid and no camera until the sun became too hot; just me, a few birds, and several noisy squirrels. I dozed a bit, watched some neighbors walk their little doggies, and thought old man thoughts. I checked the net a couple of times when I had to go in for nature calls and to make a glass of tea. Carolyn's new coffee percolator came via UPS, and she played with it while she was here.
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Things are slow, so I suppose I will talk about politics and the economy. Both suck.
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Carolyn is off to the salon for regular hair services and for the first time ever, a professional pedicure; her birthday present from me. I'm so good to her.
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For today, I intended to write some of my memories of my school years, but they are skimpiest recollections I have. I remember lazy summer days when there was no school, although not much about the nine months of classroom each year; I may recall and have sufficient notes for a short chapter in a book. I will say this, grades nine through twelve were very traumatic and I wish I could wash them from my mind; my over-sexed hormones were using their after-burners, but my inborn shyness kept me far out of the student mainstream with no close friends and certainly no girlfriends. It is a piece of me which I have much trouble writing about and even more trouble dealing with in the lonely hours of sleepless nights; it is on the periphery of my mind every conscious minute. Maybe putting it all into words will rid me of the demons, but until I do so, I deal with it like tinnitus and try to live around it. For now, I will adjourn to the porch and re-enter my boyish summertime world, thinking old man thoughts.

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Diamonds and Rust lyrics:

I'll be damned, here comes your ghost again
But that's not unusual
It's just that the moon is full
And you decided to call

And here I sit, hand on the telephone
Hearing the voice I'd known
A couple of light years ago
Headed straight for a fall

But we both know what memories can bring
They bring diamonds and rust
Yes we both know what memories can bring
They bring diamonds and rust

Now I see you standing with brown leaves all around and snow in your hair
Now we're smiling out the window of the crummy hotel over washington square
Our breath comes in white clouds, mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me we both could've died then and there

Now you're telling me you're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You were so good with words
And at keeping things vague

Cause I need some of that vagueness now
It's all come back too clearly, yes, I love you dearly
And if you're offering me diamonds and rust, I've already paid

But we both know what memories can bring
They bring diamonds and rust
Yes we both know what memories can bring
They bring diamonds and rust

Diamonds, diamonds and rust

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May your whinger be be sharp on this wilding Wednesday!

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The Shamrock

Last evening I completed reading my first book via the Kindle reader on the Droid; overall, not a bad experience. Barnes and Noble also has a Droid reader for their Nook platform but their titles are much the same as Amazon.
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Carolyn said "Thank you" to each of you for her birthday greetings. If she keeps being nice, I may have to buy her a present for the occasion.
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The photo is of the oldest remaining business--I think--in or near downtown Johnson City. The Shamrock has been on this corner ever since I can remember continuous memories, but I cannot recall if it occupied this building when I was very small. I spent several days just up the street with my dad when I was little, but the only vivid memory of the time was the fresh baked bread scents from the now defunct Kern's Bakery which was located behind the also defunct service station seen here just across the street. Another memory from those days is of walking downtown with my mom and bumping into parking meters as I looked up at the tall, three and four story buildings; very impressive sight for a bumpkin. Actually, Johnson City was a busy little town up until the mid-1980s when the Gospel of Reagan cast an ominous shadow over the political scene and withered its soul. The Shamrock is locally famous for their delicious lemonade.
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Got one of Carolyn's small medical bills paid off today but the electric and water/sewer bills are increasing to more than make up the difference. America, the home of the wealthy and the wealth-free.
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Have a Tuesday!
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Deflated

Autumn allergies are running amok as the pollen increases in this fine weather and sore eyes becomes worse just after a rain when mold and other fungus spores hit the air; it is a double whammy.
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Blogger is getting quirkier than ever; it took three tries to leave a comment on Mark's blog and all of it did not post. Maybe they are trying to put the squeeze on everyone to start using Google Chrome browser. If it gets much worse, I will transfer my blogs to Wordpress which is a bit more difficult to learn to post to but is a better platform overall.
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Carolyn had to work a couple of hours Saturday and again most of the day Sunday; for me, it isn't worth it.
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Some economists see the economy falling into an era of deflation where there is no growth in jobs, investments, and incomes. Most prices will slowly fall and layoffs due to decreasing demand for goods will continue. In the real world where we live, that will be bad on its own account but the worse part is that things like medicines, doctors, and utilities will continue to rise in price at even greater than normal rates. Why? Increasing age of population will make the demand for drugs and services rise and most utilities are are usually owned or controlled by local governments and they  buy from big business which generally have regional monopolies and monopolies always abuse. Deflation is worse than inflation as it takes much more time to recover from its consequences.
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There was something else I wanted to say today, but it has slipped my mind ... hmmm ... oh, yes; now I remember. Happy 64th Birthday, Carolyn!
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Have a good worsh day!
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Sadly Happy

From Loose Laces

Today would have been my friend's 64th birthday had he lived, but he was taken from us when still in his youth at age 33 years. We miss you still, Fred. I miss your Texas cowboy hat and your western boots, but most of all I miss your sense of humor and your genuine friendship. Today is also the birthday of Fred's daughter, Vanessa. He didn't live to see her grow into a beautiful woman, but he was proud of her and would have been even more proud of his grandchildren. To top it all, September 19 was Fred's and Alice's wedding anniversary. Always acknowledging that he was a bit lazy, he felt it was best to get as much as possible of the important stuff done in one day. Happy Birthday my friends Fred and Nessa, and Happy Anniversary Fred and Alice. Alice is another of my friends who reads this blog each day, but we hardly hear from her.
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As promised, we drove to the market on 107 and down the river road between the Nolichucky and huge fields of freshly picked tomato plants. There are still many tomatoes left on the vines, mostly green, but first hard frost will kill the plants and the tomatoes will freeze and rot on the ground. I am talking thousands of lbs. of usable fruit. It is a huge waste in my estimation, but is how the U.S. agri-business woks these days.
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We drove into JC and decided to torture our arteries with fast-food burgers, wonderful salt-encrusted and fat-saturated french fries, frozen apple pie things that were nuked to piping hot, and deliciously sweet but very weak tea.
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The daytime temps here are once again reaching toward the 90°F mark, and thought the sun is producing long shadows as autumn nears; it will still cook unprotected human hide in just a few minutes. Four days until equinox and then I can begin my countdown to the solstice of winter 2010-2011.
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Have a good Sunday!
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Mind-bent

From Loose Laces

My physical being survived my delve into the Twilight Zone yesterday but I am not sure that whatever makes me "me" came through unscathed. If not, I will still be me but existing in another dimension where shiny DeSotos and Oldsmobiles roam the streets and girls wear poodle skirts to sock hops.

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Going to be out, literally, for awhile and drive to the market and along the river. Carolyn spotted some stuff downtown for me to look at, too. Also, I need to try the camera on the Droid.
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Have a Super Saturday!

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Friday the 13th was delayed until the 17th

Been a trying day; I mistakenly accused one of my Flickr friends of being dead, but was I ever mistaken! Well, at least she knows she has friends and I feel a bit foolish.
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Other than that faux pas, I did manage to find my way to get my shot but I forgot to take papers to have blood work done and I forgot to go to the bank. It is ok to do such when you are old, I suppose; people sort of expect it from my degenerate generation.
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Last night after I went to bed and was reading a novel via the Droid, a thunderstorm knocked out the power and left Carolyn with no TV to watch. I just grinned and lay in the dark, still reading my book. When power was restored a bit later, she was fast asleep and I kept turning the pages. The Droid isn't large enough for optimal reading, but until the dedicated readers come down in price to less than $100, it will be fine.
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The photo is not mine but was made with the Canon S3 I used to own by the man who now owns it. That sentence makes no sense what-some-ever! Anyway, I did the cropping to leave the skull in the pic.
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Well, I guess I'll go see what else I can screw up.
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Have a great weekend.
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Work is the curse of the drinking class

Rossville, Georgia

This morning, Carolyn dropped and broke the carafe of the already ailing coffee pot. I was doing a bunch of taxes and after she settled down, we did the time sheets for payroll. Her employees are down to an average of around 35 hours each every two weeks. Carolyn puts in more than double that and averages only about two dollars per hour more than either one of her employees make. She hasn't had an increase from her largest account in almost six years and there probably will not be one when the new year begins; not a good way to do business but a few bucks a month is better than nothing ... maybe. I hate this time of year when all the tax bills start coming in along with the myriad reports to be filled out. Well, back at it ...
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An unforgettable man

Late one summer morning in the early 1950s, a strange occurrence set upon we folk of the small Headtown community a mile from Jonesboro. Up the gravel road came a school bus, but not the ordinary yellow kid carrier. This one was painted silver-gray, and had seen its best days in the Washington County school system. On the sides of the bus where the black block lettering once resided was a nice cursive that read "Paul Good's Rolling Store" in red letters. Paul was a farmer from Fairview community between Jonesboro and Fall branch and he also owned a small country store alongside Highway 81. Paul was probably much like many other people of the area and was descended from Scots-Irish ancestors. He perpetually wore pin-stripe bib overalls while working, and was a man of ruddy complexion who didn't talk a lot when there was nothing to say. He was not real tall, was a wee bit stocky, had lost parts of some fingers in a farming accident years before he came into my life, and he was a very likable person. I was standing on my grandmas porch that day doing whatever it is that seven-or-eight-year-old boys do in summertime. The sight of the bus alarmed me for I figured it was time to go back to school and I was in no way mentally prepared for such an ordeal. When the bus came to a stop in a cloud of road dust in front of our house, I ran inside and told grandma that there was a store parked outside; my two or three years of schooling had taught me to read a little bit. I raced back outside just in time to see the bus door swing open and Mr. Good step out. Right behind me came my extremely shy grandmother and she and Mr. Good greeted each other like old friends; in the country that could be anything from a nod of the head on up to a hearty "howdy". This in itself was amazing to me; grandma usually shied away from strangers like a bird from a snake. What I didn't know was that a week before while I was out exploring the woods and fields, Mr. Good had stopped by and met my uncle who persuaded my grandma to talk with the man. He explained what he was doing, and of course my grandma was very interested; she probably hadn't been inside a real store since my granddad shut his down about ten years earlier. She wasn't peculiar; she was grandma. Well, there he was starting a new route at our house and he would continue being there each Friday morning thereafter for many years. The only time he wasn't there on Friday was when the weather prevented it, when he was too sick, or if he had mechanical problems with the bus. In the latter case, he would make it up on Saturday if possible. The bus wasn't one of the behemoths you see on the roads these days; it would have hauled something like 33 passengers including the driver. Paul had removed all the seats less the driver's, and had installed wooden cubby-hole shelves in their place down nearly the entire length of each side. Every shelf had a small strip of wood across its bottom-front to keep items from sliding out as he bounced along the pothole-plagued roads. In the cubby holes was placed just about everything you could find in a regular rural store except for ice cream and milk; etc., there was no convenient way to power coolers or freezers on vehicles in that era and the coolers themselves were prohibitively large. However, he had an ice machine at his regular store, and he had a small ice box bolted inside the bus that would hold a block of ice, a few dozen eggs, and small blocks of fresh-churned butter. Paul was savvy enough to learn his customer's buying habits and each day he would have special items his people on a particular route usually wanted. The back part of the store held the produce such as sacks or baskets of potatoes, cabbage heads, tomatoes, and whatever was in season. He also left room to haul the large sacks of livestock feed a lot of customers wanted, plus large bags of flour and corn meal. In spring he was sure to carry a variety of garden and flower seed. Behind the rear wheels on the drivers side of the chassis he had a cage installed for carrying chickens. He hardly ever began the day with any fowl aboard unless someone specifically wanted one, but on many days he would trade groceries for pullets. I remember several times grandma would have to trade one or two of her chickens for eggs and butter; she didn't like to do it but it was a necessity when money was scarce. On down the road, someone might trade Paul some eggs for another good laying hen. Paul was a wise and caring businessman, and was well respected by people county-wide. He never failed to go to the wake or funeral home when one of his customers or one of their close family members died, and many times he was asked to help carry the casket. By the late 1950's his notoriety was so great that he and his rolling store were pictured on the cover of a national magazine and there was a nice write-up about him. I wish I could remember which magazine it was, but I don't; my mom kept a copy of it but it was destroyed in our house fire in 1965. One Friday when he was running late, he asked me if I would ride along on the remainder of his route and help him sack and carry items to houses along the way. Of course I agreed after asking my grandma if it was ok, and that afternoon was like a bit of heaven for me. I learned a little about the grocery business, and I learned a lot about the people business. For my service, he stopped at my cousin's newly opened store and bought me a cold Pepsi-Cola. About 30 years later and after I was married and living in Carter County, Paul looked me up. It was about this time of year in the late 1980s and he had potatoes for sale. Remember I wrote that he was savvy in carrying out his business? Paul had a knack of putting small potatoes most of the way to the top in a bushel basket and then placing large potatoes on top. When he came knocking, I knew what to expect, but I cared enough for him that I bought his potatoes anyway. Carolyn fussed when she found the marbles toward the bottom, but a few weeks later he was back and again I bought his potatoes and this went on for several years until one day I heard that he had suddenly become sick and had died. To say the least, the funeral home was packed and people were lined up double-file all the way across the parking lot patiently awaiting their turn to pay respects to an old friend and his family. Paul Good was the most unforgettable character I ever met.
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IdOMusic® Networking Event @ Kats Cafe

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Have an unforgettable Wednesday!
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The original "sack" dresses

Eliza Jane Shaw Oliver Creasy

Phillips family reunion 1948

The top photo is my maternal great-grandmother wearing a dress made by her from feed or flower sacks, 1920's. My grandmother kept this dress hanging in her closet all through my childhood, but I do not know what its eventual fate was. It was red and white checkered.

The bottom photo was made very shortly before my grandfather Joseph died and when most of his kids gathered to celebrate his 85th birthday in 1948. My grandmother is Ada, and she is also wearing a dress she made from feed or flour sacks. "Dot" is my mother, "Roy" is my uncle who I mention often in my family tales, and Iva is my still living aunt whom I turn to for verification on some of my memories; her recollection is as good or better than mine and she is a treasure trove of good stories from the 1930s. Snotty nosed little boys were not allowed in the photo which suited me just fine.
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A grocery holiday

When I was a very small boy, most of our food was home grown. My grandmother cared for a large garden which would feed at least six people for most of the year and we raised a hog for meat. The unfortunate porker usually met his fate around Thanksgiving so that we would have fresh ham for the holiday. The remainder was salt cured and then placed in cotton sacks and hung in the smokehouse or was canned and used as needed.
As with most families, there were always things to be bought from a nearby country store or a grocery store in town. A week or so ago I wrote about one such country store and now I will tell you a little about the in town store shopping. One hog is never enough to provide for a family for a full year. One reason is that my grandmother insisted on taking most of the fat for cracklings or to make lye soap. Cracklings are made by scraping the fat from the inside of a hog's hide and baking it. Ever eat a pork rind? Same idea except crackings were small yellowish looking pieces and very greasy. They were mostly added to cornbread of which we ate a lot. We had no such things as "shortening" back then to cook with; everything that needed grease for cooking was done with hog lard. Seeing as how grandma used most of the fat to keep us clean by making soap, we had need of buying cooking lard elsewhere. From the early 1930's until about 1942, the family was fortunate because my granddad owned a grocery store next door to their house. Failing health and war rationing forced him to close the store. The local store for us then became Arney's which I mentioned earlier, but sometimes we were in need of things from town and a trip to the grocery store was called for. Such a trip meant one of my uncles walking or hitching a ride to Jonesboro and a visit to Baskett's Grocery Store which was located where the story telling headquarters building now sits. My uncle would hand Mr. Baskett a list and he would deliver the order at his convenience, usually the same day and my uncle would ride back home in the green Ford pickup truck. It was a big day for everyone when the truck backed up to the front porch steps; other than the groceries, it was much like a holiday. I would usually get a candy treat, my mom would get a tube of lipstick or some other accessory, my uncles would get cigarettes, my grandmother would get a large sack of feed for her chickens and a another huge sack full for the hog if it was getting close to killing time and she would get spools of thread if needed, and granddad would get a plug of chewing tobacco and a newspaper. My grandmother was especially pleased with her livestock feed, for she would use the empty sacks to make herself dresses and underclothing by using her very old Singer foot-treadle powered sewing machine. The sacks were usually made of cotton and looked like they had come from a fabric seller. Nearly all of my mom's and aunt's clothing was made by hand from feed and flour sacks when they were growing up. These occasions only came around no more than once each month and after my granddad died in the summer of 1948, they became less frequent. There were no more hogs raised for slaughter and her flock of chickens dwindled to none over the next few years. But times were still good for a young boy in the country, and were about to become better for both grandma and me as a new and more convenient way of buying groceries was introduced into our bucolic lifestyle; namely Paul Good's Rolling Store. More on that later.
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Have a pleasantly exciting Tuesday!
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