My Grand Mother has been dead about 5 years now. If she were alive today, she would be 111 years old. Wow! Time flies doesn't it? That's not my point here, but lets look at her life a little, along with others in my family, including myself, and compare them to the children of today.
When my Grand Mother was ten, her mother died. That was in about 1910. She died of blood poisoning from a cut with a hoe. She left behind, my grand mother age 10, an uncle age 6, an uncle age 3, and an infant aunt aged about 7 months. My great grand father, they say stayed drunk for a while, but got up one morning and went back to work on the farm. He never remarried, and lived to be in his nineties.
But lets get to the grit here. My grand mother at age 10, became chief cook, and bottle washer to the family, and mother to all three of her siblings. She raised them, and herself.
When her siblings were up and almost grown, she at about age 20, married my grand father, and they raised three children, one being my mother.
My mother was 16, when she married my father, whom was almost 21, and I was born the month before she turned 18. Due to probably to her small size, she was able to have only me, which is most likely considered a blessing to some.
I started out life, in a two room house, with a corrugated tin roof, and no plumbing. My dad had worked the summer before with his sharecropping Cherokee father, and bought a paint horse, and we had at the beginning no car. If it rained, a car was pretty much useless anyway, as back in the early fifties the roads here didn't even have gravel.
From my grandmother, I learned how to fish, cook on an open fire, and feed babies before baby food, just by watchin her. From my father I learned how to work, and never give up, and I guess I inherited my love of the woods from my Cherokee grandfather. I'm only half, but he tried to show me his ways in the short time before his death. And I learned about Jesus Christ, from my always God fearin mother.
I tried to pass these things on to my own boys with some success, but I guess their just not interested any more. The world has a pretty good grip on them now, it seems.
I never had a toy box, and I can't remember having more than two or three cheap little toys at one time to play with. But I played, and learned, and thrived. Until about 1957, we didn't have a TV, and that was after we had moved to town.
I look at the accomplishments of my grand mother, my grand fathers, my father, and my mother, at so young an age, and then I look at today's youth, and I just shake my head.
You can teach them to fly a plane, at age 6, and set up the most complicated computer games. But you can't teach them to pay attention in school, clean up their room, or even help mow the lawn. You can't whip them, for gettin out of line, and you can't make them work, or you go to jail.
My grand mother, and grand fathers, went from a team of horses to the first maned space flight, and the moon.
My mother and father went from a two room house on a creek bank to the space shuttle.
I went from that same house to town, two businesses, and where-ever I end up.
I wonder now in my old age, where my children, and worse yet, THEIR children will end up. They care not one wit, for their family history. Much less the Country's history, and it isn't just mine. It's everywhere. This country, I believe has lost it's direction, it's moral compass, and it's sense of self examination for what is right, for what isn't. Just my thoughts on a not so appealing world anymore.
