And free sex. It has its good points, but what if I get herpes?
Constant dilemma, the legacy for my generation — the In-Betweeners — is a wearisome thing, and I don’t mind admitting that I’m weary of it.
God knows, I have tried my best to fit into modern life. I bought a new house a year or so ago, and it has a Jacuzzi in the bathroom. One simply has not arrived today unless one has a Jacuzzi (which sounds like the Italian word for getting bubbles up your butt).
I’ve been in my Jacuzzi twice. Once, I had hurt my back playing tennis, and the doctor had said that if I had a Jacuzzi, it would be a good idea to get in it and soak my back in the hot, bubbling water.
The problem came when I tried to get out of the Jacuzzi. My back hurt so much I couldn’t lift myself out. I was rescued several hours later by sheetrock workers who had come to repair a hole in the wall of my bathroom — which was the result of the first time I got into my Jacuzzi and felt those bubbles in my rear. I thought there was something strange in the tub that wanted to make friends, and in my haste to get out, I fell and knocked a hole in the wall.
So if I really am that tired of the dilemmas of modern life, what can I do about it?
First, I have to come to grips with the fact that I soon will be forty, and it’s time I stopped trying to understand all that is strange and new to me. By the time a person is forty, it’s much too late to comprehend anything young people are doing or thinking, and we look silly when we try.
The best thing to do is what our parents did — write off the younger generation as totally gone to hell. If you need evidence, cite the children out in Texas who put dead bats in their mouths in an effort to emulate that nut rock singer I mentioned earlier. These children had to take rabies shots for biting bats, and our parents thought we were strange because we listened to Elvis. (I hope most parents of In-Betweeners now realize that Elvis wasn’t that bad after all, compared to what is happening today. If they have, then rest well, Elvis, wherever you are; all is forgiven.)
But if kids today want to eat bats, there’s nothing I can do about it, so I might as well relax and worry about something I can control. Nothing that I have control over comes to mind right off, but at least that’s something else I can worry about.
After I have accepted the fact that I’m out of step with modernity, I must then look for a niche in which to crawl and rest contentedly with the idea of retirement; I’m too far gone to run in the fast lane.
I don’t know if I’ll ever take what seems to be a drastic step for someone who has been an urban creature for more than half his life, but I do occasionally dream of going home. Back to my roots. Back to Moreland.
Somebody once said to me, “We spend the first half of our lives trying to get away from home. We spend the second half trying to get back.”
Growing up in Moreland is the primary reason I am what I am — a premature curmudgeon, longing for the simple life — and I wonder if moving back would fulfill that longing.
The boys from Moreland. Some of us got away, others didn’t. Dudley Stamps is still living there. He built himself a house on the land where he was reared, and he works on cars. He steadfastly refused to budge from where he was when the changes came.
He built a stereo system in his new house that piped music into all the rooms, and he issued a dictum to his wife that never, under any circumstances, would there be anything but country music on his stereo system. He caught her disobeying his order one day — she was playing a rock ’n’ roll station on the radio — and that may have been one of the things that led to their divorce. At least the man had his priorities in order.
Danny Thompson and Anthony Yeager stayed around home, too, and Clyde Elrod came back. He did just what he said he was going to do; he spent twenty years in the Navy, retired, and now drives the butane truck in Moreland. I was home for a visit not long ago, and he came by to fill my parents’ tank. He told me that he used to go out on a ship for days and sit there and look out on the Indian Ocean, and all he could think about was getting back to Moreland one day.
“We didn’t know how good we had it growing up,” he said.
I enthusiastically concurred.
The other boys from Moreland, like me, still haven’t given in to the urge to return. Bobby Entrekin has a wife and a daughter and he travels, too, so I rarely see him. I’ve lost track of Charlie Moore. Mike Murphy has three kids and his own business, and Worm Elrod is a hairdresser.
I suppose I also should mention Little Eddie Estes. Soon after he made that marvelous catch in centerfield to save the game against Grantville, he died in an automobile accident. He was only fourteen. His mother and daddy buried him in the Moreland Methodist cemetery, about three long fly balls from the exact spot where he made the catch.
* * *
While the rest of the world went bananas, Moreland changed very little at heart. Today, Cureton and Cole’s store is boarded shut, and they’re trying to refurbish the old hosiery mill and turn it into some kind of museum that reflects life in the village a hundred years ago. Moreland still respects its past, and I like that.
Steve Smith’s truckstop is gone, but the interstate took most of the truck traffic anyway, and that makes Moreland even quieter. There is still no traffic light and no police department, and they still have dinner-on-the-grounds at the Methodist and Baptist churches. And you still have to drive to Luthersville in the next county to buy a bottle of whiskey. It would do me good to live someplace where the nearest bottle of whiskey is a county away.
They’re still neighborly in Moreland. My Aunt Una and her husband, John, live just up the dirt road from my parents. John came down sick and they didn’t know what they were going to do about plowing their garden.
“One day,” my Aunt Una was telling me, “we heard this commotion out in the garden, and we looked out and there was one of our neighbors — a pilot who bought a farm down here — on his tractor plowing our garden for us. I don’t know what we would have done without him.”
They still plant gardens in Moreland, too, and if I lived there, there would be no reason to set foot in a McDonald’s again. My Aunt Jessie, who lives on the other side of my parents’ house, continues to work her own garden despite her age.
I had lunch with her recently. She served fried chicken, baked chicken, baked ham, cornbread dressing, butter-beans, field peas, green beans, fried okra, sliced homegrown tomatoes, creamed corn, mashed potatoes with gravy, several varieties of cake and three pecan pies she had baked herself, and a large container of iced tea. We sat under a big tree outside and feasted upon her offerings, and there was peace in the moment.
But even if I never take the final plunge and move back home, I know that Moreland is there, mostly yet unspoiled, and that settles me when I’m caught in a traffic jam or waiting for a light to change in the city, as I stand next to a kid with a ghetto blaster on his shoulder, beating out sounds to have a nervous breakdown by. In Moreland, the music you hear is that of one of the church choirs, drifting out the open windows on a soft, still Sunday morning.
And although I remain fearful that the world eventually will go crazy enough to spin off its axis and fly into space somewhere, there are, in fact, occasional glimpses of hope that manifest themselves.
We have a popular, conservative president who once played cowboy roles in the movies. Sigma Pi, my old fraternity at Georgia, was kicked off campus in the seventies, primarily because of drug use in the chapter. It currently is making a comeback. There was even a recent letter to the editor of the Atlanta papers written by a disgruntled University of Georgia student. His complaint was that the university faculty was too liberal for the mostly conservative student body.
I read somewhere that sales on white socks are up twenty percent. Pick-up truck sales have been on the rise for years, and more and more bars are selling beer in longneck bottles. There’s a joint I go to in Atlanta where they have an all-country jukebox, including a complete study in George Jones, and, right ther
e on Peachtree Street in trendy Buckhead, the place is packed every night.
Tobacco chewing and snuff-dipping are in style again, and ridership on America’s passenger trains is at an all-time high. There was a recent month in which there were four separate passenger train accidents, including one in New York where two trains collided head-on. One person was killed and a hundred were injured, and people who prefer planes made a big deal of it. But if I’m going to be in an accident while traveling, I still would prefer it to be on a train. Let two jets run together and see how many walk away.
Traditional clothing is in again. In fact, you’re called a “preppie” if you wear button-down collars today. But I still contend there would be less crime and craziness in this country if everybody dressed nicely. You never hear of anybody robbing a liquor store dressed in a Polo shirt and a pair of khakis and Weejuns with no socks. Check police records if you don’t believe me.
Some changes, like air conditioning, have been good for us all. Even people who live in the most rural areas of the country have air conditioning now. I have an acquaintance in a small town who sells air conditioning. He told me about getting a telephone call at his office from a lady who lived so far back in the country that the sun went down between her house and the road.
“She wanted to know what kind of air conditioners I had and what they cost. I was telling her about one air conditioner with this many BTU’s and another air conditioner with that many BTU’s. When I finished, she said, ‘All I want is an air conditioner that will cool a b-u-t-t as big as a t-u-b.’”
Still, if we don’t someday cut back on radical change and unchecked progress, we may all get our b-u-t-t’s blown away or replaced by robots. Or else we might end up taking off all our clothes and squatting naked in trees, like Crazy Melvin, from worrying about it.
Maybe it will be us, the In-Betweeners, who finally make some sense out of the world again. We’re still young enough to have the energy to do it, and, as we get older, perhaps we will have the wisdom, too. We’ve seen the old way of life that we were reared in, and we’ve seen the new one that has given us ulcers; maybe we can pick the best of each and produce a world where everybody has a fair chance and an air conditioner. But salad bars will be unlawful.
And if we’re able to do that — if we’re able to lead the way out of the wilderness of frightening modernity and back into the land of simplicity and contentment that we knew as children — then having lived with the dilemmas will have been worth it. Somebody has to do something before the Democrats nominate Phil Donahue for president and he up and picks Billie Jean King as his running mate.
But until that day comes, play me the old songs, bring around my old friends, keep the beer cold, and constantly remind me to cling to the immortal words of the man who sings now in the void left by Elvis, Merle Haggard:
“One of these days,
When the air clears up
And the sun comes shinin’ through,
We’ll all be drinkin’ that free Bubble-Up
And eatin’ that Rainbow Stew.”
CREDITS
ARE THE GOOD TIMES REALLY OVER by Merle Haggard
(c) 1982 by Shade Tree Music, Inc.
All rights reserved Used by permission
RAINBOW STEW by Merle Haggard
(c) 1982 and 1984 by Shade Tree Music, Inc.
All rights reserved Used by permission
HAPPY TRAILS by Dale Evans
COPYRIGHT (c) 1951 and 1952 by PARAMOUNT-ROY
ROGERS MUSIC CO., INC.
COPYRIGHT RENEWED 1979 and 1980 and assigned to
PARAMOUNT-ROY ROGERS MUSIC CO., INC.
OLD DOGS, CHILDREN, AND WATERMELON WINE by Tom T. Hall
(c) 1972 Hallnote Music
All rights reserved Used by permission
OKIE FROM MUSKOGEE by Merle Haggard and Roy Edward Burris
(c) 1969 Blue Book Music
All rights reserved Used by permission
LOVE ME TENDER by Elvis Presley and Vera Matson
COPYRIGHT (c) 1956 by Elvis Presley Music, Inc.
All rights administered by Unichappell Music, Inc.
(Rightsong Music, Publisher)
WALKING THE FLOOR OVER YOU by Ernest Tubb
COPYRIGHT (c) 1941 by American Music, Inc.
COPYRIGHT renewed, assigned to Unichappell Music, Inc.
(Rightsong Music, Publisher)
I REMEMBER THE YEAR CLAYTON DELANEY DIED by Tom T. Hall
COPYRIGHT (c) 1971 by Newkeys Music, Inc.
Assigned to Unichappell Music, Inc. and Morris Music, Inc.
All rights controlled by Unichappell Music, Inc.
About the Author
Lewis Grizzard, Jr., was an American writer and humorist known for his commentary on the American South. Although he spent his early career as a newspaper sportswriter and editor, becoming the sports editor of the Atlanta Journal at age 23, he was much better known for his humorous newspaper columns in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a popular stand-up comedian and lecturer.
To learn more about Lewis Grizzard and Elvis is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself, visit www.newsouthbooks.com/elvis.
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