Things have changed through the years, especially in the past couple of decades. Seems like everyone and everything is dialed into "hurry up." It's like we're in a race to get somewhere. I'm not sure where somewhere is. If anybody gets there, please let me know.
My grandmother, Miz Lena, once told me that if I ever got lost on a country road, to stay on it and bear left, and eventually I'd come back around to where I started. I'm still not sure if she meant that metaphorically or if it was just rural commonsense. Either way, she was right.
Our country has a different vibe to it these days. People are guilty until otherwise proven innocent. Justice and fairness have given way to biased perception and to those who can scream the loudest.
Degrees of guilt that would ordinarily get you landed in the pokey are whittled down to a slap on the wrist. Every day, some fat cat with a wad of money walks away scot-free. We're all witnesses to it, but we don't do much about it.
I believe that when something gets to an unbearable extreme, it changes to the opposite extreme. I'm waiting. Lord, if you're looking this way, I sure would appreciate you giving this phase of our lives a little nudge forward. I'm ready to get back to where we were before we got here, kinda like that country road.
Back in the 1950s, for several years of my childhood, I grew up in the countryside of Middle Tennessee. We were way out there where you could see all the stars in the night's sky, smell fresh air and get a lump in your throat witnessing the birth of a new day. God's imagination is second to none.
In the country, there's enough room for everybody. Freedom. Every once in a while, some fool tries to have things too much his way and finds himself in the courtroom of country justice. No jury, no fancy-dancy lawyers. Those no-good-doers get a firsthand feel for the saying, "You reap what you sow."
Fairness is everything to Southerners. There's only so many turns of the cheek we'll do. Sometimes, country justice is swift and without recourse. I learned at an early age, if you're right and don't give up, nine times out of 10, you win the fight.
My mother taught high school students at the same school that my two younger brothers and I attended. Many times, in those days, out in the country, there was only one school for all grades.
I was in the fourth grade, Mrs. Talbott's class. I had done some chores for her over the past summer. She and her family had a little spread just past Mr. Swikel's place. They had several Shetland ponies.
My job was to get the ponies in the barn, feed them and make sure they had plenty of water. I don't know what it is about Shetlands, but those little guys will bite you good if they get the chance. They'll kick you, too.
Mrs. Talbott was a much nicer lady when we were both civilians. Once in the classroom, she became a completely different person. Mess up, and she'd get after you. They say that people's pets end up having the same personalities as their owners. That was the case, in reverse, with Mrs. Talbott and her ponies, or maybe it was vice versa.
I don't know what I was daydreaming about - probably catching that big fish we called Walter, or about me and my dog, Prince, running side by side across an open field. I used to look down at him and swear he was smiling at me. Sometimes, I would say something to him, and he'd wink.
I could have been thinking about Flora. I was kind of sweet on her. She was a few minutes older than her twin sister, Nora. They were the only twin girls around. I remember being fascinated with twins.
Wherever my mind had wandered, I came out of it, and there was Mrs. Talbott standing over me. Mean eyes. Tapping her foot. Kinda like one of her ponies. She had asked me a question three times. Snapping back from dreams to reality can make you dizzy. She pointed to the door and said, "Out! Go let yore mama deal with you."
All my teachers knew that if they sent me down to the principal's office, there was a 99.9% chance that I'd take off. They must have conferred with one another, because many of them started sending me to my mother's classroom. Mom never seemed to mind. She understood me.
Sometimes, Mom would have me stand up in the front of the chalkboard and read to her students. Steinbeck, Kipling or Poe. Sometimes from the Bible. Mom's Bible was with her at all times, even in her classroom. There was a lot more religion in school in those days. If you did that nowadays, they'd holler. Once in a while, being fair to all seems unfair.
Once again, I was sitting in Mom's classroom. Just a couple more weeks, and school would be out for the summer. I used to wish that I could go to sleep and wake up an hour before school let out.
It was hot. Mom had the windows raised and a fan blowing. Her students were reading a chapter to themselves. I was somewhere between drifting and comatose. Just a few more minutes, and the bell was gonna ring and I would be free. I watched the clock's red hand tick around the numbers. Less than a minute to go.
All of a sudden, the door flew open and in came, pound for pound, the toughest girl in school. She marched straight at a tall, curly-haired boy everybody called "Snaggle-Tooth" and grabbed him by his shirt collar.
She told him, "Yore comin' with me, Mr. Smarty Pants," and dragged him across the floor toward the door. She paused and said, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Stamps. This kain't wait." And like that, she and that wide-eyed kid were gone. Mom didn't even blink.
The bell rang, and everybody got up and ran out. Right below the steps in front of the school, that girl had the boy pinned down on his belly and was pounding him with both fists. While she was smacking him in the back of his head, she was screaming at him about picking on somebody his own size. Her name was Loretta. Everyone pronounced her name "Low-retta."
Loretta was a pretty good-size girl with short-cropped brown hair, freckles across her nose and a little gap between her front teeth. In the warm months, she refused to wear shoes and wore hand-me-down sundresses from her older sister, Shelia, that her mama made from Martha White self-rising flour sacks.
Shelia was a blond-headed senior and the prettiest girl in school. She was one of those girls who was already full grown in her head and built like a woman. Even though she was a few years older, she and Loretta were the same height. Loretta may have even outweighed Shelia by a few pounds. They were much different in demeanor, but they were close.
Shelia had a date with a guy who stood her up one night. The next day, seeing how upset her sister was, Loretta took off walking, barefoot, several miles down the road to the boy's house, pulled him out in the front yard and gave him a "king-size whoopin'."
"Low-retta" was about justice and fairness. Not only did she demand that her older sister be respected, but she stood up for the little, the picked on and the weak. She was really something.
My grandmother, Miz Lena, used to refer to a person's constitution. You could say that Loretta had a very strong constitution. She found strength in knowing that she was righting a wrong, taking up for those who didn't stand a chance.
In the early '70s, after I got out of the Marine Corps, I moved back to Tennessee. One Sunday afternoon, I took a drive and ended up in that little town where I watched Loretta take up for others.
I caught up with Ray Vaughn. Most all of us had always called him Catfish. They still did. We sat out on his front porch, drank a pitcher of sweet iced tea and had us a good visit. He brought me up to speed on what had been going on and who was doing what.
One of the Thompson boys died in Vietnam. Mr. Jenkins had passed on. So had Mrs. Stephenson. Preacher Man retired. He and Ms. Swann were still together but not yet married. Catfish had a story about everyone.
I asked him about Loretta. He told me that her sister, Shelia, was married and had some kids. She was still pretty. He said that Loretta turned out to be really good-looking, had plenty of boyfriends and after she graduated enlisted in the Army. That was the last they heard of her.
I made some kind of comment about Loretta's strength of character. Catfish looked at me deadpan serious and said, "Well, one thing's fer damned sure, they wadn't nobody ever stood up Loretta."
Bill Stamps' books, "Miz Lena" and "Southern Folks," are available on Amazon. For signed copies, email bill_stamps@aol.com.