Sweet Times, Sweet Places

The first two decades of my childhood and early adulthood took place during a mellower, and far less complicated era; an era in which T and A Model Fords and mule drawn wagons (and road apples) were still common on the streets and highways of Winston County, Mississippi. Kids scorned warm-weather footwear and went barefooted for at least half the year. Button-down rear-door flap union suits were still fashionable cold-weather underwear for some adults and kids alike. Ice boxes and spring houses were still in use to minimally retard food spoilage. Mules were still plentiful and supplied the horsepower for plowing fields, spinning sugarcane mills, and pulling wagons--to name a few services they docilely supplied. Dug wells, outdoor privies, and coal-oil lamps were still part of the utility network, and crippling polio was the dreaded, fearful scourge of long, scorching summers. During that era, there really was life without computers, the internet, cell phones, navigation and communication satellites, television, nuclear energy, Rock 'N Roll music, jet air travel, antibiotics, the Interstate Highway System, a hard-drug culture, the civil rights and feminist movements, the pill, Viagra, gender and racial balance in the workplace, God-like medical procedures and devices, space travel, and a gaggle of other no-less significant social and technological advances. But, you know what? My generation made out quite nicely, thank you, without these social and technological innovations. Come, let me tell you about a more laid back, less complicated, and some would say, less contaminated era.