The Good Old Days

I am wondering how many times I have heard the phrase: “I just wish we could go back to the good old days.” Someone usually says this when they are thinking of something wonderful that happened in their past. Perhaps it's because things aren't going so well at present. So I decided to compare the good old days with present day and see what I could find.

My dad's family is from northeast Georgia. My mom's family is from the upstate of South Carolina. Both sides were in rural areas and life was very similar for them in many respects. They lived on farms. To put it better, they lived on someone's farm and worked the land for them. The term is “sharecroppers.” Eventually both sides got their own place to work. You wake up early and have to go milk cows to have milk to drink and cook with. You take the milk and churn your own butter. You plant and work a large garden to have vegetables and raise livestock if you want meat. Now all this means you are having to do lots of manual work. Cows have to be milked and beans have to be plowed and picked. Eggs have to be gathered and cooked and animals have to be butchered and preserved. It's not easy work! If you wanted to go to the bathroom...it was about a hundred feet from the back door with a well beaten path leading to it. If you wanted water...you dropped the bucket into the well and pulled it up yourself. If you want it hot...you put it on the stove. You had to chop wood to keep warm and to cook. I did know some who had access to coal for heating. For cooking...it was always wood.

Life got a bit better with houses being wired for electricity. Stoves and refrigerators helped take a lot of the work out of it. Washing machines took over what a wash bucket and washboard once did. Houses were fitted with plumbing for running water and you no longer had to trod that path to the outhouse. It eliminated the need for chamber pots in the bedroom. Most of us would panic if we had to use what they had to use then.

Today we have our TV's and our music players. Cell phones can go anywhere with us and we feel lost without them. We reheat leftovers in the microwave and complain that it takes all minute! We truly live better than royalty did just a couple of hundred years ago. We travel in hours what it used to take days. If you are cold or hot you go to the thermostat on the wall. You turn it up...turn it down...or turn it off. In case you haven't realized it...these are the “good old days!”

The advances in technology have freed us from a lot of time consuming chores and hardships. They make our lives better is someways and worse in others. Too much idle time is not good for anyone. To try and fit everything under the sun in you schedule is just as destructive. Maybe more. It can make us very impatient. Just be thankful for what you have and use it wisely. We all have a lot more than we realize.

The Job Hunt

I am going to share something personal today. At present, I have been unemployed just a little over two months now. This job hunting thing really stinks! I live in an area that has an 11.5% unemployment rate, and I am not the youngest or brightest person in the job market. I am, however, resourceful enough to know what strengths I possess. I have long since settled down and am not ever late for work or bad about being absent. Still, it is tough to go out there day after day and look for work and get rejection after rejection. A demoralizing process at best.

I used to work in the weave room of a textile mill. It was what my father did before me, and what my brother did as well. One out of every four people in South Carolina was directly employed or received their support from textiles in the early 1970's. I worked at this type of job from the time I was 16 years old until I was 40 years old. Not many textile mills around now folks. Most of those jobs have long since been exported. I did finally find a job after age 40 as an electroplater for a company in the packaging industry. Electroplating was neat work! I got to work with chemicals, perform analysis, and it sure was interesting to see steel turn to copper right before your eyes! It was great fun right up until the company I worked for closed. Still I am sure there is the "perfect job" out there for me. Not being facetious here, I really mean that! If I keep looking and hold fast to my faith, I really believe things will be all right. I think it is more of an issue of timing than anything else at the moment.

I hope this hasn't turned into a downer kind of post. It just happens to be on my mind at the moment. The work that I have done in the past is wonderful to remember, but it is a memory. Lots of work to yet be done! There is pavement to pound and contacts to be made. Never let it be said of me that I did not try. Whatever life throws at us can be overcome. I believe that with all of my heart. I just happen to wear that heart on my sleeve today. You would never have believed that I read Othello, would you? :)

Corn will mess up a pot of chitlins.

Food is one of those things that you just can't live without. I have found some exceptions to this rule. When I was young, about every other Sunday night we would have oyster stew for supper. This might sound fine to some of you, but I do not like oysters. I would avoid this supper just as long as I could. Everyone except me really liked this meal. I would fill the bowl up with as many saltine crackers as I could and be very careful to just catch the broth with the ladle. No oysters in my oyster stew! I hope that all of you know that you can't clean oysters. When you eat them you eat all of them! Anyway, I would just eat the wet crackers and it was all I could do to get it down. Sometimes they would substitute salmon for oysters, but not very often.

About ten years ago, I worked in a textile mill in Greensboro, NC. One of my best friends there was named Gerald. Once in a while he would bring something in for lunch and heat it up in the cafeteria microwave. This was my first introduction to chitlins. Chitlins are pig intestines that have been cleaned out real well. When that microwave finished the room smelled of what used to be inside of the chitlins. Right then! I knew that chitlins were somehow related to oysters. Not really, but they were according to my food chain. Once he found out that I disliked this foul odor, he would bring this same meal just as often as he could. Some days he would bring chicken feet, pig ears and all manner of foul food. One day while he was enjoying his meal, I told him maybe he needed to put a little corn in his chitlins. You don't serve chitlins and corn in the same meal because corn will mess up a good pot of chitlins. If you do serve them together don't stir corn and chitlins with the same spoon. Corn is one of the grains fed to pigs. How clean were those things anyway?

He still brought them after that, but they had somehow lost some of their magic to him after I mentioned the corn. Must have been the thought of it or something. Gerald! If you read this, just know that I am thinking of you and hope your are well. I hope to see you again sometime soon, but you can't use my microwave.