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"TRAILING CLOUDS OF GLORY DO WE COME...."
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There are a lot of us still around who remember, before the days when TV dominated everything, what it was like on a summer's evening, to go out and sit on the grass, as dusk was falling. The moon was just coming up in the east, the grass, recently mowed, had that cut-grass smell and seemed to be doing its job of emitting oxygen and cool air. The stars were beginning to show a little bit. Supper (it was supper in those days) was just over.
Usually this lawn-sitting occurred when important company was visiting---uncles, aunts, brother, sisters, cousins! Little boys knew that to have a serious and decent fun family gathering, you needed a couple of uncles. It was just a fact. Supper was probably fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy with biscuits; buttered roasting ears, fried okra, green beans, and sliced cantaloupe, topped off with blackberry cobbler and vanilla ice cream!
The host would grab an old blanket or bed spread and the men and boys would head out to the lawn and spread it, sitting on and around it. Everyone was still getting caught up on family news and the latest on every subject. Keep in mind that those were the days before texting, twittering, tweeting, and emailing; and not everyone had a phone then. So the warm family conversations began in earnest out on the grass, punctuated often by big laughter!
As always in small towns in the summer time, the neighborhood kids would be out long after sundown, running around the street, roller skating, playing hide-and-seek, laughing, yelling, and you'd hear a football thud now and then as it hit the street---even in the twilight. Those were sounds, that money couldn't buy....
After a while the women would file out the door, some with their aprons or dresses wet in front, from washing and drying the dishes; (just as James Agee, the great novelist described women in his American classic, "A Death In the Family," referring to old times in
After the men had been sitting there and talking for maybe an hour, the inevitable would come up---from one of the uncles---just as if it had been scripted! Young as I was, it didn't surprise me. Uncle B. said: "Reckon we should just play a bit of Mumblety-Peg, what do you think?" Several men would reach into their right-hand pant's pockets and come out with a pocket knife! (This was a good thing, don't you see; red-blooded American men could carry a pocket knife then, with no problem from the "politically correct" bunch!)
Mumblety-Peg, which actually has six or seven spellings, was a nebulous knife game, in which knives are thrown from several positions, including over one's back, and stuck in the ground. Some rules allegedly included accurately throwing it into the ground between another's fingers or toes. At any rate, I'd been through this before, and it soon deteriorated into random tosses of the knives and finally everyone tiring of it
The men would continue talking, maybe about Roosevelt or Truman. I'd stretch out on the lawn, smelling that cool grass, and as it got really dark, gazing up at the sky which was filled with stars! Seems like there was less light pollution in those days. I've since read and heard about others' feelings about the stars when they were children. Maybe a lot like mine...At age 8 or 9, it seemed like I felt some kind of affinity, some kinship with those stars up there, that maybe I never felt as much later. Maybe my mind was less cluttered then...Maybe it was because I hadn't been gone from those realms very long: "Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home; heaven lies about us in our infancy." (Wordsworth)
It'd be nice to say that there were many of those family lawn gatherings in my life, but I can remember no more than four or five. The advent of TV and the loss of the big front porches, plus air conditioning, carried us indoors.
But there was a TIME IN THE OLD USA when we sat out on our front lawns on summer's evenings, talked, listened to the kids play, lay on our backs...and mused about the stars and the heavens!
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BY MIL
7/01/12
(Writer's note: Google this question directly: "Did you ever look up at the stars at night
and feel a sense of nostalgia?" Scroll down, Thought-provoking replies.)
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Sent from my iPad
Sent from my iPad
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