The seeds of wisdom spit forth

This past week I gathered with kin beside the stream that flows by my late grandparent’s home in the mountains of Tennessee. The area is now a state park, in the stream one of our cousins placed a watermelon to chill its bright red innards. We shared so much fun that day, as we cleaned up, we discovered the melon ice cold, and it had missed out on all the fun. As I sat on the back porch today looking out watching the grass grow, this image carried me in my mind’s eye sitting similarly on my grandmother’s porch. It was a summer where I spent a lot of time with my Grandma Kitty and Aunt Norma Jean. Flossie, the milk cow, was meandering through the yard headed for a shade tree where she laid down and tried to create a bit of a breeze using her tail to move an almost non-existent breeze.
Grandma was doing a much better job in her rocker with her funeral home fan and her right arm. In fact she managed to move enough that I picked up a bit of the breeze as mother and I went back and forth on the porch swing. Norma Jean leaned back in a ladder back chair against the wall abnormally still for her.
It was one of those days once referred to as the dog days of summer. I never quite understood that except I guess that the similarities with dogs it brought to us humans. We all sat around with our tongues hanging out of our mouths panting or at least so it seemed to me as a kid.
After a while I just couldn’t stand being still so I headed down to the branch to dangle my feet in the water. You know that works a lot better if you take off your shoes and socks. I never said I was real bright back then, or maybe it was just the heat.
Before I knew what had happened I looked around and everyone from the porch had joined me and you know there were smiles on their faces. They actually remembered to take their shoes off.
It was like the branch filled our bodies with a sense of hope. Hope that the heat would pass, and we would once again feel like ourselves again.
It wasn’t long though until I realized it wasn’t me that had drawn the group to the branch, especially when I noticed mother had spread out a red and white tablecloth on the bank beneath a tree. On it was a large knife and a cutting board and a saltshaker but there was nothing else.
What I did not know was that Grandma had a surprise for me. She sent me down into the deepest spot in the branch and told me to reach in for a surprise.
There was a deep green watermelon from the garden that was now cold as can be from the water running over it for most of the day.
I lifted it out and brought it up and set it on the cutting board. My shoes squished with each step.
We all now gathered around as mother cut the watermelon in pieces and we each began eating our fill.
Red fruit with a touch of salt and all those black seeds. How do you be polite with all those black seeds?
I followed Grandma’s lead and realized she was throwing the conventions of proper etiquette out the window. Rather than disposing of them quietly in a napkin, she suggested that we have a contest and see how far we all could reach spitting a seed.
We all took turns, seeing who could get across the branch. It is amazing how far the ladies could spit. They made it to the other side almost every time. Occasionally one fell short and down the branch it floated.
With each round, we found more laughter, each of us eventually won, and by the time we finished the melon, we had almost forgotten how hot it was when we started.
Our heat-induced melancholy was lost to the mischief of a melon and all its little seeds.
An added bonus, next year, the watermelons were so close to the branch, they didn’t even have to be carried and put in, they just rolled in themselves.

Did you ever wonder if 1+1 really is 2?

I often wonder what happened to math in America. I know I had my own trouble with it when I was in school. They always wanted you to follow some method of reaching the answer and show how you reached the answer. Even if you got the right answer, if you didn’t go at it the right way you were wrong.

I realize that we were taught these approaches to aid us in developing a sense of reasoning and help us learn to solve problems.

I greatly admire those underpaid, under supported patriots of education, our teachers. I know many of them took their time to help me through some tough subjects. I have seen first hand, as I have spoken to children around the country, teachers going above and beyond to help out a student. So, please do not take what I am about to talk about as a commentary on the ability of teachers.

I recently went into one of those grocery stores that gives you a card. They scan it before ringing up the things you are buying. If you watch those prices closely as they ring items up, this store is particularly frustrating because the register shows the full price and then shows the deduction for their store savings.

After watching all the prices, the tally had overcharged me around one dollar and twelve cents. I then proceeded to customer service where I shared with them my problem.

I had bought six or twelve of one item which was on discount and one other item. Adding the cost up in my head, I told the clerk what it was suppose to be plus whatever the tax was in that county. This figure subtracted from what I paid the cashier would have been the amount of my refund. The next twenty minutes involved two clerks and either an assistant manager or store manager. They all took the figures I had given them from my head and repeatedly added them up on their calculator. In the end they gave me a refund of over two dollars.

In spite of my attempts to convince them they didn’t owe me that much; I could not convince them. I even took a piece of paper, wrote the numbers down and added them for them. I finally took the refund and went on my way. I figure that twenty minutes must be worth that extra little bit.

Unfortunately, what I have just described is a sad trend all across our country. Folks just don’t seem to be able to do basic everyday math problems without the aid of a calculator or cash register. How many times have you walked into a store to buy a candy bar or something, handed the cashier a dollar, and they had difficulty figuring out your change. Now, I’m not saying that we all have to be math geniuses.

My granddad Bill was a farmer most of his life. He went west and was a cowboy in the late 1800’s. If he went to school, it was the school of life. When it came to the math, he needed to raise cattle and hogs, grow and sell crops, buy and sell land, in his head he could figure better than most accountants could with a calculator.

When I was little, my parents made sure I could add, subtract, multiply and divide before they even sent me off to first grade. So those are tools I carry with me. These basics at times were a disadvantage to me in those previously mentioned math problems which required a certain method to be followed. But all in all, I owe my parents and teachers a great debt of giving me the basics.

Maybe folks just depend to much upon calculators. It is easier. I use them myself, but usually just to double check my own solution when adding a chain of numbers. In recent years, I have found myself doubting my own answers derived from figuring in my head. Not that I’ve been wrong that much, but the calculator is so much easier. And it’s never wrong. Just look how well it worked at that grocery store. If I could just find another 999,999 clerks using calculators like that, I could retire

Why are there no new shows like the Waltons?

I have often wondered what makes an enduring television show. One of my all-time favorite shows was “The Waltons.” Growing up, that show reflected most closely the South of my parents and grandparents. I related to John and Olivia, John-Boy, Jason, Mary Ellen, Ben, Erin, Jim-Bob and Elizabeth, Esther and Zeb as if they were part of my own family. Earl Hamner Jr. created this masterpiece of Americana based on his life growing up during the Depression and World War II.

I remember mourning the passing of Will Geer (Grandpa Zeb Walton) as if I had lost my own grandfather. I struggled along with Ellen Colby (Grandma Esther Walton) as she performed through her real-life stroke.

I know that it was a drama and the participants were actors but the characters seemed real to me and made me feel that, the first chance I got, I should move to Walton’s Mountain.

I always enjoyed the characters that gave the show a bit of the out-of-the-ordinary — characters such as the Baldwin Sisters, who brewed up The Recipe, not realizing it was illegal; or Corabeth Walton Godsey, the always-starched well-educated cousin who tried to bring a bit of class and culture to the mountain at Godsey’s General Store.

I had the pleasure of working with Ronnie Claire Edwards, who portrayed Corabeth, while working on “In the Heat of The Night” in an episode titled “Perversion of Justice” and directed by Harry Harris, who also directed “The Waltons.”

For me, getting to spend a few days visiting with her took me back to all those nights waiting to hear that mountain-style theme music emanating from the television speaker.

Like a good Mark Twain story where you just want to pull off your shoes and jump the next raft down the Mississippi, I wanted to pull off my shoes and walk down the old dirt road with all the Walton kids.

Harry Harris and I discussed the Waltons on a couple of occasions. At one point he was trying to get Richard Thomas to return to do a reunion show. Harris gave me the impression that Thomas was reluctant. To my delight, just in time for Thanksgiving 1993, the cast once again gathered around the big table on Walton’s Mountain, held hands and said grace. The success of the show brought other reunions — “A Walton’s Wedding” and “A Walton’s Easter.”

In the back of my mind I still wished I had been there. Already being an actor, the wish was even stronger.

When I ran across the CD “A Walton Christmas,” I could not resist getting a copy and listening to it from beginning to end.

I have never had the pleasure of meeting any of the other regular cast members, although I was briefly around Peggy Rea, who played “Rose,” while Alan Autry and I both worked on “Grace Under Fire.” Unfortunately, I never got to meet her.

I wish that we would again see a positive show like that one makes its way to main stream networks. The closest I have seen of late are the two films that Dolly Parton produced centered around her childhood – “Coat of Many Colors” and its sequel.

If you have never seen “The Waltons” before, or even if your have, I encourage you to pull up a chair and take a trip to a place where life is not always simple, but no matter what comes their way, the family and the community survive together on the solid morale ground of Walton’s Mountain.

Soap, a brush and a baseball bat

I held the Ivory soap close to my nose and breathed in deeply. There was nothing quite like the smell of a fresh bar of soap out of the package. The smell carried me back to my days of late summer evenings of avoiding my bath as a boy.

Needless to say I would always need one after playing ball in the light of the street lamps.
Around the bases were Charlotte, Clay, Bubba, Charlie and Jennifer. Some were on base while others anxiously awaited me as I prepared the swing the bat on Bruce’s pitches.

Read more