Who's Going To Fill Their Shoes?

Country music legend, George Jones, released his version of this hit song in the mid-1980s. In it, he sings of the greats of country and western music that have died and laments that there may be no one to fill their shoes. I keep thinking about writing Ross' Book of Lamentations, but it would be too long and too boring to be worthwhile. Instead of doing it all in one big gulp, I've decided to gnaw around those lamentations once in a, hopefully, rare while. I lament the fact that we are losing our oral traditions and it seems that our written traditions may not be far behind. The Library of Congress (or maybe it is the Smithsonian, I forget which) is working on recording interviews with both the common and great people of our country, which seems to me to be a lot like saving one starfish at a time, better than nothing, but not saving a lot of starfish just the same. I think that the time would be better spent building front porches and re-enacting Blue Laws. I read (soon to become a lost art as well) that schools are tending to no longer do annuals / yearbooks. The cost is too high it's said. Tomorrow evening, four of my friends and I are going to get together over beers and share '62 and '63 annuals from each of our high schools. How can you put a price on the enjoyment that will create? What will today's graduates pull out to share when they reach our age, a 50 year old computer file? If there isn't enough money to print annuals, run a campaign to have each high school student take just one step back in the service level of their personal cell phones. I'll bet that would pay for an annual or two! In the years before I left home, Sunday morning was reserved for church and Sunday afternoon was spent visiting at the home of my grandparents. The house had a porch and a fireplace. In warm weather, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends all gathered on the porch and talked of daily news and recounted past stories, some of them many times over. If the weather was too cold for the porch, the crowd gathered in the room with the fireplace. The children played or read in the corners and the adults circled the chairs near to the fire. I heard war stories, depression stories, hard work stories, and sometimes stories that would make me blush and wonder about what "those" words really meant. Those days are gone. I don't think my children and grandchildren would want to sit on our front porch, assuming we had one large enough, and hear us reminisce about Viet Nam, long waits in gas lines, the horror of a front page headline shouting that college students had been killed on campus by our own National Guard. No one wants to hear of racial shootouts in downtown Greensboro or hear that Watts and other blighted urban areas were burned to the ground by people who were so frustrated by their lives that they knew no other way to show it, or where we were when we heard that President Kennedy had been shot and killed, or what we felt when we heard Martin's "I have a dream" speech. No one wants to hear about hundreds of textile and steel plants shutting down and Sara and I put out of jobs more than once. No one cares about student protests that shut down campuses, and fears of race riots so high that many cities imposed total curfews. They wouldn't want to listen to old folks talk about the first man in space or the first to step on the moon's surface. The cell phone, iPod and iPad generation doesn't know what a party-line was or care how funny or aggravating it could sometimes be when multiple families used the same phone line. A couple of weeks ago, I had a great opportunity to sit quietly and listen to a Marine, now in his 80's, tell about being in the first wave to go ashore at Tarawa in the South Pacific during WWII. I was enjoying his stories and asking every question I could think of. I asked him if that had been the worst day in his life. He surprised me by telling me that going ashore on the first day of the Inchon landing in Korea had been worse because he had been wounded there. Wow! Two major battles in two major wars and here was a live and active participant in both. In 2009, I was able to become friends with one of the original Navajo Code Talkers. He could tell stories all day long and I could listen until he could no longer speak. My mother passed away last week. She used to tell us the sweetest story of where she and my dad were and what they were doing on VJ Day. I think that story will die with me and it won't be all that long until no one recognizes the term "VJ Day". My dad told a funny story on himself about being thrown from his cutting horse into a barbed wire fence while working on the family farm and ranch. The horse picked one cow to separate from the herd while my dad picked another. They parted company with my dad coming out the worst for the experience. Do you realize that they aren't even making western movies any more? My favorite thing to do in the whole world (remember my age!) is to listen to the stories of those I happen to meet. Everyone has stories, even the youngest of my friends, my desire is to always care enough to take the time to listen. If you haven't done it, try it, you'll like it too. Just be sure to do it before we are all reduced to having to twitter everything we say. God is good.