2005 Soap Box Archives

Gone But Not Forgotten 10/31/05

This piece is dedicated with great respect and remembrance to my Aunt Lois who recently passed away and was my second Momma in the summertime.

If you drive through a small rural town on a Saturday it looks pretty much the same way it does the other seven days of the week. And I’m sure to most of you there is nothing remarkable at all about this state of affairs.

In fact, unless you’ve got quite a few years under your belt and lived in proximity of a small southern town in your youth you probably don’t remember the days when Saturday was the undistbuted king of the week.

I’ll never forget the summers I spent on my uncle’s tobacco farm near Elizabethtown, North Carolina, working alongside the family to get the crop in.

Tobacco farming in those days was a sunup to sundown proposition, five and a half days a week. Of course we didn’t work on Sunday because it was The Sabbath.

But Saturday was magic. It had a special feeling that belonged to no other day of the week.

There was a lumber mill a few miles from my uncle’s farm and at exactly 12 o’clock on Saturday they would blow a big steam whistle and the weekend would begin.

My cousin Murray and myself would drop whatever we were doing, rush to the house to take a bath and change clothes and head for town where we would proceed to celebrate Saturday to the hilt.

Besides being such a special day for the youngun’s Saturday was the day that the housewives did their grocery shopping and the men stood around on the street and talked about weather and the state of their crops.

Well no such mundane subjects interested Murray and me. There were two movies in Elizabethtown and we would usually see them both plus the late show, or owl show as it was known, which showed about nine o’clock at night at one of the theaters.

Murray’s older brother Walton said that Murray and me would go the picture show if there was nothing but a static pile of horse manure on the screen. And we probably would have.

After the owl show let out, hopefully we would be lucky enough to catch a ride but sometimes nobody from out our way would stay in town that late and we’d walk the three miles home arriving sleepy and dreading the regular Sabbath wakeup call. Sunday school was mandatory.

I’ll never forget the taste of the chocolate sodas they made at the drugstore in Elizabeth, the smell of the fresh hot popcorn at the movies and the conversation going on at the barbershop when I would be required to waste Saturday time getting a haircut.

I can’t help but feel that something precious has been lost.
Now country people go to town whenever they need to regardless of what day of the week it is, and I guess that’s good.

But oh what I’d give to experience one of those days of long ago
when Saturday was a holiday, a social event and a time when for a few short hours simple pleasures and a young man feel as if he was sitting on top of the world.

Pray for our troops.

What do you think?

God Bless America

Charlie Daniels

 

©Copyright The Charlie Daniels Band