Best Online Gambling Sites: Where to Play and Win Huge

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A Circle Unbroken

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by the Night Writer
(Originally written, September, 2019.)

All my life, there has been music playing. And growing up, that meant country music, so I started watching the Ken Burns country music series on PBS, expecting to hear some familiar songs and stories. Turns out, the music isn’t the only thing familiar. I see the images, and hear the voices, and always the images and voices of my family are superimposed in my mind.

From the hard times of my grandparents’ hard-scrabble beginnings, through the challenging post-Depression and war years of my parents’ childhoods, to the records they brought home as adults and the radio stations they tuned to, country music was the quilt that patched it all together. My grandfather was born on a farm in rural Missouri (though almost all of Missouri was rural then), his large family scraping an existence and posterity out of the soil. When he was six, their house burned down and the family lived in the barn and outbuildings until his father could afford to rebuild. His annual clothing allotment as a boy was a pair of new overalls, two union suits, a shirt or two in good years, and cheap shoes that would be worn-out pieces of flapping cardboard by the spring, when it was time to go barefoot anyway. I saw the b/w images of the Carter Family, and the Maddox Brothers and Rose, but it was also the barefoot boy with the slingshot on the rocky farmstead that I was seeing.

The pictures and home movies of the young stars like Johnny Cash and others were a punch in the gut. The wavy hair, skinny arms in short-sleeve shirts, the wistful smiles, the hands holding a can of beer and a cigarette (when they weren’t holding a guitar) – that was my father and his brothers relaxing after their many labors as I was growing up in a succession of backyards in Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and Indiana. I see the pictures, and I know that even though they couldn’t see the future that I have seen, they believed in it.

And, of course, the series has to run now, in late September. Today is my father’s birthday, he would have been 84. He knew the roots and the rocks stretching back behind us, but never knew his great-grandchildren, yet the circle – as they say – is unbroken. And, as the song says, “I can’t stop loving you.”


https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/country-music/episode-guide…

Man-talking

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Whenever I come across this Norman Rockwell painting, I always think of the times in the 1960s when my grandfather would take me with him around the holidays to visit his work friends. He was a trouble-shooter for Shell’s Fuel Oil business, and I think he knew every Jobber (Distributor) in the upper Midwest. Their offices were little more than large garages with cement floors and a desk or counter and huge fuel oil stove (about as tall as me, back then) for warmth. He’d show up with a calendar, and a gift, usually a bottle of something. The Jobber’s wife or daughter would be at the desk handling the paperwork, and a steady stream of drivers and mechanics would stop for a gab with my grandfather as they passed through. He was a natural networker, before we called it “networking”.

These men would be wearing greasy khakis or fatigue pants, Eisenhower jackets, and caps like those in the painting, or sometimes, overalls or A2 jackets with fleece collars. They’d see us, and the caps would be pushed back, chairs drug around if they were handy, and they would talk the jovial arcania of man-talk that I barely understood, but tried to absorb. At some point, one of the men would say something like,

“Well, fellers, I better git. Got 200 gallons of No.2 for Ferguson out on Redbud, then some stops in Burlington. Y’all have a Merry Christmas.”

It was a heady mixture (or maybe it was just the persistent smell of petroleum). Whatever was said is nearly inaccessible in the depths of my brain now, but the smell of fuel oil, or a glimpse of this painting, brings a lot of it back.

Ready to serve

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by the Night Writer

Something from the files I wanted to preserve here. Originally from March 14, 2013.

Our house was built in ’48 and when we moved in 16 years ago I wanted a retro feel in the paneled basement so I got some tin advertising signs for out of date products. One in particular featured a line of green John Deere A Series tractors, circa 1940s, with the motto, “Ready to Serve.” I liked this one a lot because it reminded me of my grandfather and his love for the farm. I kept it over my desk so I looked at it often.

Turns out there’s someone else who loves tractors: my grandson, Benjamin. When he visited this last week I brought him downstairs and took the picture off the wall. I told him a little about my “pawpaw” and gave him the sign to take home to his room. He was delighted. Now my wall is a little barer but my heart is a little fuller. A memory of a grandfather becomes a memory of another grandfather, and like the A Series, ready to serve.