Never Put a Dime up Your Nose and Other Bits of Mama Wisdom

I’m sure that all mothers, from all countries and all geographical areas of those countries, offer their children words of wisdom as their children are growing up to help them avoid making foolish mistakes, being physically maimed, or embarrassing themselves. Southern mamas are no different. However, I can’t help but think that certain “bits of wisdom” are ubiquitous to Southern mamas, and other bits are unique to my mama, for example:   

1. Happiness is finding a hair in your biscuit. (I once asked Mama how on earth finding a hair in one’s biscuit could possibly make one happy. Her response: “You’re happy if it’s your hair and you made the biscuits.” I guess her point was that no one else ate the hair.)
2. Black clothing attracts everything but men and money. (Granted, black clothing tends to attract lint and dandruff; however, I have news for my mama: I once had a tight, short black dress that attracted plenty of men, and had I been so inclined, which I wasn’t, I’m sure it could have also attracted money.)
3. Never shove a dime up your nose. (I learned the hard way that this bit of Mama Wisdom contains much painful truth.)
4. Always wear clean underwear when you leave the house. (Mama said that it was important to impress the paramedics if you were ever in an accident. After all, it wouldn’t do to have them think you never washed your “drawers.”.)
5. Always take your Christmas tree down before New Year’s Day or else you’ll have bad luck for the entire New Year. (I’m sure she said this because we always had a real tree and by the New Year, it was dry as kindling and shedding all over the living room floor.)
6. If you sweep the floor on New Year’s Day, they’ll carry a dead body out of the house by the end of the year. (I don’t know whom Mama meant by “they” since she never explained; however, she certainly made me hesitant to sweep the floor on New Year’s Day; and, in fact, I never do sweep on New Year’s Day since I’m afraid to push my luck.)
7. If you frown and pout too much, your face will freeze that way. (I guess this is why we kids went around the house smiling like idiots all the time.)
8. There’s no excuse to be dirty because soap is cheap and water is free. (Soap isn’t that cheap today, Mama, and in most places water sure isn’t free.)
9. If you go to bed on a full stomach, you’ll have nightmares. (I don’t know about this, especially since I tend to have nightmares about giant burgers and mountains of French fries chasing me down dark alleyways if I go to bed on an empty stomach.)
10. If you let a boy French kiss you, you’ll get pregnant. (I actually believed this bit of wisdom when I was a teenager, so the first time a boy French kissed me I went home and gargled with an entire bottle of Listerine. Only later did I learn that it took a bit more than a mere kiss—French or otherwise—to get one pregnant.) 
11. Eating dirt will make you wormy. (Well, maybe there’s some truth to this bit of wisdom. Although I hate to admit it, when I was a preschooler, I used to crawl under the house and eat dirt, and, sure enough, I got worms.)
12. A loaf of stale bread from your mama is better than a quarter from a burglar. (Don’t ask me to explain because this is one bit or Mama Wisdom I never understood and still don’t even today.)

Image: Southern Front Porch retrieved from Google Images (2015) www.etsy.com

Picking Potato Bugs--One of the Simple Pleasures of Life

My daddy was a gardener. No, gardening wasn’t his profession. He was employed by Gas Incorporated in Fairburn, Georgia up until he retired at 65. His title was “Installation Mechanic,” which he said was just a fancy term for “all-around flunky.”  Actually, though, Daddy installed gas appliances and gas tanks and repaired them when they malfunctioned, so his line of work could be dangerous at times, and I thought he was brave because I was afraid of gas. Hmm, come to think of it, I’m still afraid of gas, which is why I have a total-electric house, but why shouldn’t I be afraid? Heck, the darn stuff can blow you up.

Anyway, as I said, Daddy was a gardener. He loved growing things. He had a grape arbor. (He even tried making wine at one time, but that’s another story.) He had peach, apple, and pear trees, and, naturally, he had a vegetable garden. His garden was extensive, not simply some little square of earth devoted to vegetables. No ma’am, my daddy planted almost our entire two acres, except for the front and back yards, with just about every vegetable imaginable, or at least the ones that mattered to us Southerners, meaning tomatoes, green beans, crookneck squash, okra, corn, butter beans, field peas, cucumbers, green onions, and, of course, potatoes. And that brings me to the point of this story: potato bugs. Yes, that’s right, potato bugs.  

See, growing up in the country, my siblings and I got to enjoy a lot of pleasures that city kids were denied, and one was picking potato bugs. And, no, we didn’t pick them to eat. It’s like this: Daddy didn’t use any pesticides since, for one, he couldn’t afford to use them because we were poor; and, two, he thought that pesticides were poisonous and no matter how many times or how hard you scrubbed the vegetables, there would still be residue left behind to make you sick or maybe glow in the dark.

As a result of his distrust of chemicals, Daddy devised “natural” ways to counter garden pests, so one summer when these little hard-shelled bugs invaded the garden and proceeded to congregate on the potato plants, Daddy “hired” Vicki, Bud, and me to pick those little critters off the plants. And what was the going rate for potato bugs? Well, it was a penny per bug. Keep in mind, however, that back then a candy bar was a nickel, as was a Coca Cola; a comic book was a dime; and for a quarter, you could go to the Saturday matinee at Fairburn Theater and see a double feature, several cartoons, and a boring newsreel. And, yes, I know I’m giving away my age, but what the heck.

So, with visions of thousands—possibly even millions—of bright shiny copper pennies dancing in our collective heads, Vicki, Bud, and I armed ourselves with some of Mama’s Mason jars and marched out to the area of the garden beside the house, which was where Daddy had planted row upon row upon row of potato plants. Maybe he was envisioning a coming potato famine. Who knows, but he’d sure planted one heck of a lot of potatoes that year.

Anyway, Vicki, Bud, and I set to work, trying to pluck those little old hard-shelled bugs off those potato plants and plop them into our jars. I said “trying,” because there were three problems: one, those bugs wouldn’t cooperate. I guess they didn’t want to be plucked, so they kept eluding our grasping fingers. Two, it was hot as blue blazes out there underneath that Georgia sun. Three, being little kids, Vicki, Bud, and I had the attention span of gnats.

Long story short (Well, not really), my siblings and I soon decided we would much rather be playing cowboys and Indians than picking bugs that refused to cooperate. (The term “cowboys and Indians” wasn’t politically incorrect back then. It was part of our language). This being the case, we did what other kids would do in our situation, we proceeded to drop those Mason jars and chase one another up and down between the rows of potato plants. We then charged into the rows of corn, which adjoined the section devoted to potatoes, where we learned that ears of corn made fine Colt 45’s and the tassels made excellent mustaches. Oh, we also learned two important lessons: One, if you leave potato bugs closed up in a Mason jar underneath the hot Georgia sun, they turn into crispy critters. Two, you do not get paid for a job not done.   

I love and miss you, Daddy. Thank you for the memories.

Photo retrieved from Google Images (2015) farmcenter.com 

Georgia Good Old Boys Love Their Trucks

As I have mentioned before, I grew up in Georgia, and I lived there until 1995 when I was uprooted and transplanted—kicking and screaming in protest every mile of the way—from my beloved rolling red-clay hills to the murky, mosquito-infested swamps of Southwest Louisiana. Moreover, not a day passes that I don’t miss my home state; and like Lewis Grizzard, the late-and-great purveyor of Southern wit and humor, once wrote, “If I ever get back to Georgia, I’m gonna nail my feet to the ground.”

Still, my love of the state aside, I realize Georgia isn’t perfect. For one, its people are quite eccentric, to put it mildly. Not that eccentricity is necessarily a bad thing, although it does leave the state open to ridicule on occasion, for example, as it was up until 2010 when Governor Sonny Perdue finally signed legislation requiring seat-belt usage in pickup trucks.

Up until that fateful day, Georgia was the only state that exempted adults who were either driving or riding in pickup trucks from buckling up when they went caroming around the Interstates, highways, byways, and dirt roads that make up the state’s transportation network. Yet, if you were in a car, that was a different story entirely. In that case, if you didn’t buckle up, you would receive a ticket—that is, if the police caught you. Again, though, if you were completely free to go unrestrained, which, naturally, left you exposed to the possibility of being sent flying through the windshield if your pickup truck collided with another vehicle, a stationary object, or one of the many deer crossing the byways and dirt roads that meander through rural Georgia. Of course, as Greg Bluestein says, “The way some Georgians see it, if they’re going to get thrown through the windshield of a pickup, that’s nobody’s business but their own” (2008, p. 6A).

You have to understand, however, that pickup trucks are a big thing in Georgia, even more so than they are here in Louisiana; but I guess that’s as it should be since Georgia is home to a great many Good Old Boys; and everyone knows just how much Good Old Boys love their pickup trucks. They love them so much, in fact, that they do not want to be restrained in their trucks, perhaps because the seatbelts interfere with their mobility when they want to toss beer cans out the window at other pickup trucks. Who knows? I certainly don’t. The point, however, is that Georgia pickup truck owners are not happy about being forced to wear seatbelts.

And that’s another thing I miss about Georgia—the pig-headed individualism of its citizenry. Believe me, Texans, who are notorious for boasting about their independence and uniqueness, as well as the massive size of their state, do not have a thing on the Good Old Boys in Georgia. The guys back in my home state epitomize pig-headed individualism. If you don’t believe me, just go visit any country/western bar in any small town in Georgia on a Saturday night; and after you order your longneck Miller or Budweiser, which you will naturally drink from the bottle, just sit there and listen to the conversation around you, although you may have to strain a bit to hear it over the Hank Williams Jr. tunes playing on the jukebox. And what you will hear is an entire roomful of Good Old Boys all talking about five things, although not necessarily in this order:

1.      How they can out-drink any man in the room;

2.      How their wife/girlfriend can out-drink any woman in the room;

3.      How they own the best coon dog in the entire Southern United States;

4.      How the deer they shot last season was the largest on record and they could prove except the deer bounced off the truck while they were driving home on a rutted dirt road;

5.      How they own the “baddest truck” on four (sometimes six) wheels;

6.      And how no one, especially a bunch of politicians, “who ain’t got nothing better to do with their time than sit around making up stupid laws,” is going to take away their right to go zooming through the windshield of their pickup truck. Besides, “everybody knows only sissies wear seatbelts in pickup trucks.”

 Ah, Georgia, not a day passes that I don’t miss it.   

Sources: 

Greg Bluestein, “Ga. Mulls seat-belt law for pickups;” Associated Press; The Advocate; January 29, 2008. p. A6

Pickup Trucks Image, retrieved from Google Images (2016) Citybiketrips.com