Altar
Call – Opelika-Auburn News
Walter
Albritton
April
28, 2002
Things I miss doing back on the farm
when I was a boy
Among several gag gifts I received on my
birthday last month was a small pillow. We have many cute, little pillows. My
wife loves them. She piles 15 or 20 of them on our bed every day when she makes
up the bed. Why I don’t know. Women are
like that; they do things men don’t understand.
Every night we have this ritual of tossing the pillows off
the bed into a pile on the floor. Exercise perhaps. Now one of the pillows is
my very own. I will never have trouble recognizing it. There are no flowers on
it, no butterflies, no blue birds, no garden scenes. It has only this – two
words: “Old Fossil.” That makes it forever mine.
I consider myself a very fortunate old fossil. I have lived
a long time and I can still remember many of the things I enjoyed doing back on
the farm when I was a boy. Sometimes when I see small boys playing, oblivious
to the harsh realities of the adult world, I recall some of those days in my
own life.
Christmas was not bleak in our home back then. My sisters
and my brother and I did not receive “tons” of toys like kids do now, but we
always had a few things under the tree. My mom handled the gift buying for the
most part. The only gift dad usually bought was one for mom.
All our gifts came from Sears, Roebuck. Mom believed in
that catalog. She went to town once a week for groceries but the rest of the
stuff she bought came in the mail from Sears. In those days the one book that
had better not be misplaced was not the Bible, but the Sears, Roebuck Catalog.
I can still remember how fascinating it was to me to look through that book and
ask mom over and over again, “Can you get that for me for Christmas, Mama?”
Before those days, when I was younger, I thought Santa
Claus brought us everything that was under the tree on Christmas morning. Mom
encouraged us, and helped us, to write letters to Santa so he would know what
we wanted for Christmas. I don’t remember ever thanking Santa for anything; I
just told him what toys I wanted him to bring me.
I lied to Santa back then. I always told him I had been a
good boy. But like most boys, I was never good all the time. Still I know this:
I was a better boy between Thanksgiving and Christmas because mom kept telling
us that if we were bad, Santa would bring us nothing but “cornbread and
switches” for Christmas.
Like most boys I longed for a bike but most years I had to
settle for a pretty yellow dump truck or some other plastic toy. Finally at age
12 I got a bike for Christmas. My joy was short-lived. There were no training
wheels so, not knowing how to ride a bike, I quickly tumbled over on the gravel
driveway, skinning my knee badly.
My parents had one remedy for such accidents: iodine.
Though I always protested loudly, they applied the iodine liberally anyway.
They told me that if the iodine burned, then it was doing its job. My dad had a
standard comment about such injuries: “It will feel good when it quits hurting.”
How parents can raise kids these days without a big bottle
of iodine is a mystery to me. I reckon that is one thing that I failed to pass
on to my boys. They did pick up or inherit a lot of stuff from me. Some of it
stings. Like when I hear them yelling at their children and realize that they
sound a lot like I did when I was their age.
Though I did not appreciate it then as much as I do now, it
was fun growing up on a farm so far from town that we had to “pipe sunshine”
out there. That was what my friends in town said. Back then I wished I lived in
town. But like so many people, I did not know how good my life really was then.
Next week: installment two about things I remember when I
was a boy growing up on a farm.