A few weeks ago, a young woman had dinner at our house. After the meal, she kindly helped clean up the kitchen.

At some point, she asked me where to store one of my serving bowls or pans or something.

I said, “Just put it in the dish drainer.”

She scanned the kitchen and then asked, “What’s a dish drainer?”

I didn’t want to laugh at her but thought, “Who doesn’t know what a dish drainer is?”

Every house I was ever in as a kid had a dish drainer sitting to one side of the kitchen sink.

My mind reeled backward to other things that were just givens in 1960s homes. 

There were those metal, knuckle scraping, nail breaking ice cube trays with a lever that, when lifted, eventually released ice cubes.

Most houses had ash trays because most adults smoked. The prominent ash tray of the day was a heavy square, glass one, suitable for use as a weapon, if needed. 

We had a TV antenna planted outside next to the house. When the television acted up, one lucky family member was sent outside to twist the pole of the antenna, calling out often, “Any better?” or “How about now?” After too many negative responses, the antenna twister came back into the house and snarled, “Someone else can go out and twist the stupid thing.”

We sat on plastic seats in the car that, in the summer, got hot enough to burn a layer of skin off the back of the thigh. We tapped the steering wheel and steered in short bursts of motion the first mile or so because it was too hot to hold on to. No AC to cool that thing down. We didn’t have power steering, so the driver strained mightily and leaned almost into the lap of the front seat passenger to make a right turn.

Our phone was mounted on the wall or rested on a table, and when we made long-distance calls, we had to speak to a real person and say, “I want to make a person-to-person call to Sadie Stevens in Mississippi.” The operator eventually got us through.

Every homemaker had a clothes pin bag (New ones made for much appreciated Christmas and birthday gifts.) and a clothesline in the back yard. Inside the house were an ironing board and an iron. These things weren’t stashed away in the closet or attic; they were used once or twice every week.

We went to church every Wednesday night and twice on Sunday. We held songbooks in which hymns and musical notes were printed, and we waved the heat away from our faces with cardboard fans furnished by the local funeral home.

We drank grape Nehi from thick, bumpy (returnable) bottles whose caps had to be pried off with a metal opener, and we licked the back of every postage stamp we ever used. At school, we said the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag every morning and sometimes listened to the teacher read aloud a Bible passage. 

What do you mean, “Which flag?”

Yes, I know these things are old-age indicators, and there are many others. 

My husband and I routinely yell, “You know I can’t hear you if you can’t see me!” and “How many remote controls do I need to switch from watching Amazon Prime to playing a DVD?”

We stare blankly at anyone who says to us, “Just scan the QR code with your phone.”

Our mantra is, “I’m too old to live in this world.”

We’ve become accustomed (grudgingly) to cashiers patting our hands and saying, “There you go, Sweetheart,” when they hand us grocery receipts.

This week my sister sent me a text that read, “I’m making a chicken pot pie for supper using your quick and easy recipe.”

I responded, “What quick and easy chicken pot pie recipe?”

She texted me a picture of a piece of paper on which “Debbie’s quick and easy chicken pot pie recipe 1997” was written. 

Who is the woman who gave her that recipe and where is she today?

I just finished listening to the short autobiography of artist James Taylor. He titled it Break Shot: My First 21 Years.

Being a fan of some of James Taylor’s music, I was interested in the story of his early life.

Unlike many celebrities, who grew up in Appalachian poverty or on dirty streets of cities like New York or London, James Taylor was a child of privilege.

His mother was a socialite with ties to Martha’s Vineyard, and his father was the dean of the Medical School of the University of North Carolina.

Despite their wealth, the family, which included James, three brothers, and one sister, fell apart. Alcohol and drugs were their downfall.

I appreciated James’s telling of life lessons learned in his youth. Among other observations, he made this one.

Memory is tricky. We remember how it felt, not necessarily how it was.

He is right.

I recall specific events of my childhood, of course, but mostly I remember how I felt, the vague, deep-down-in-my-soul feeling that told me who I was.

This was my inner message to myself.

I was safe.

My childhood was spent among the woods and dirt roads of north Arkansas.

There were snakes, as well as wasps, spiders, scorpions, and even bobcats, though I never saw one.

The terrain was scattered with farm ponds, steep cliffs, creeks that gushed muddy water after big rains, abandoned cars in which nested heaven knows what kinds of critters, dark forests of pine trees, and fields of thick sagebrush.

But I stayed within my boundaries, and I wasn’t afraid.

I was loved.

I grew up in a house with my mom, dad, and three siblings. We lived just a short distance from both sets of grandparents and several aunts and uncles.

All these people loved me.

Every one of them wanted the best for me. I was hugged, snuggled, kissed, and read to regularly.

I was carried to bed when I fell asleep someplace else. When I called out, “Momma,” in the night, Momma always came.

I was pampered when I was sick and comforted when I was scared.

I had birthday cakes and visits from the Tooth Fairy.

Santa came every Christmas.

We had Easter egg hunts at my Aunt Freddie’s house, and big family get-togethers with yummy food and lively games of ante-over.

This little girl hula-hooped and made mud pies in her outdoor playhouse and knew she was loved.

I was valued.

I wouldn’t have known how to voice that feeling at the time, but what I thought, what I did, and how I felt—these things mattered to the people in my world.

My parents insisted that I do my homework, memorize my sight words, learn my multiplication tables, and go to school unless I was sick.

They bragged on me and told me I was smart. Mom and Dad encouraged me to read and write, to learn the meaning of new words, and how to spell them.

Dad, when he saw me reading a library book, asked me, “Who wrote that?” I made a point of knowing the answer to that question and came to appreciate the art of writing.

Not surprisingly, my favorite card game was Authors.

Ours may have been the only family within a mile radius that owned a current set of World Book Encyclopedia.

I was expected to do my best and received praise when I did.

Who can put a value on being valued?

I was a child of clotheslines and wire fences,

Bar soap, mercurochrome, and Vick’s salve,

Of bobby socks and hand-stitched quilts,

Mud-holes and wood stoves.

I was a child of hunting dogs,

And cows mooing for their missing calves,

Of homemade butter and yeasty-smelling kitchens,

Blackberry bushes and creaky wooden bridges.

I was a child of pickup trucks with cattle guards,

Long, cold school bus rides and the smell of burning coal.

I was a child of screen doors and woodsmoke,

Old, embroidered tablecloths thrown across picnic tables.

I was a child of book satchels and Big Chief tablets,

Of nursery rhymes and Dick and Jane,

Black-and-white television and 45-rpm records.

I was a child of the rural South in the 50s and 60s.

James Taylor has his memories, and I have mine.

You have yours.

One summer evening, by the light of a dim kerosene lamp, my Great Aunt Alta (pronounced Altie in the South) told me a story.

The story was about the worst whipping her dad ever gave her.

I watched Aunt Altie’s brown, wrinkled face in the glow of the lamplight. Snuff had stained her teeth, and she massaged her gums with a little, chewed stick she almost always had in her mouth.

“Well,” she said, “One day I rode a horse to my friend’s house. I must have been about 12.

While I was there, we got the idea to cut the sleeves off the dresses we were wearing. We had seen short-sleeved dresses in pictures, and we liked them.

Oh, we were pretty proud of ourselves,” she said, and she cackled.

“Our arms were pasty white, of course, because we always wore long sleeves.

I rode home wearing that dress.

Dad was in the front yard, and he looked up when he heard me come riding in.

He pulled me off that horse and whipped me with the horse’s rein. Then he ordered me into the house to put on something decent.”

I thought about Aunt Altie this morning as I went for my walk. (3,190 steps before 9:00 a.m.)

I wore a sleeveless top on this walk.

I avoid wearing sleeveless tops most of the time. Not out of modesty but out of vanity. My upper arms are flabby.

They haven’t always been so. Here is a picture of me in high school, back when I never gave a thought as to how my arms looked.

My Aunt Altie and Uncle Art lived across the road from my family, and they played a big role in my growing-up years.

They refused to believe, in July 1969, a man had walked on the moon. The news clip of Neil Armstrong stepping out onto what looked like the surface of the moon was filmed in a Hollywood studio, they said.

In the early 1970s, Daylight Savings Time was introduced and incorporated into the lives of most Americans. Uncle Art and Aunt Altie refused to reset their clocks.

“We’re staying on God’s time,” they said.

It caused them problems, mostly with television shows. They didn’t own a TV at the time, but they walked across the road to watch our TV some evenings.

It irked them no end the first time they walked into our house to watch The Waltons, only to find the show had already ended.

Aunt Altie was superstitious. You wouldn’t catch her opening an umbrella in the house, laying a hat on a bed, or walking under a ladder.

Once when I had a stye on my eye, she swore she could make it go away.

“Go stand in the middle of the road,” she said.

“Then say out loud: ‘Stye, stye, leave my eye. Catch the next one who comes by.’”

 I followed her instructions.

I don’t remember if the stye left my eye or not, but I felt guilty soon after that incantation when Gene and Shirley Robbins, with their little boy, Tex, “came by” in their old blue pickup.

I avoided the Robbins family for a week or so. I never knew which one of them got the stye. I hoped it wasn’t little Tex.

Uncle Art and Aunt Altie had grandkids living in Kansas. Duane (my age) and Judy (my younger sister’s age) made great playmates when they came for extended visits.

Duane was amazing! He could run further and faster on a dirt road barefooted than anyone else I knew.

He was brave too. He once ate a pokeberry right in front of me, after I had just told him it would kill him.

The pokeberry didn’t kill him, but he died in a car wreck before he was 30. I still miss him.

Though I wasn’t supposed to know this, Uncle Art was a drinker.

It wasn’t easy to come by liquor where I lived. Ours was a “dry” county. But now and again Uncle Art found someone to drive him to the state line where he could buy booze.

When this happened, he stayed away from home for a few days.

Aunt Altie didn’t like to stay by herself at night, so my parents commissioned me to spend those nights with her.

It was on one of these overnight visits, I’m sure, when I heard the story about the whipping.

Young girls staying with lone women at night was not uncommon in those days where I grew up. We provided no protection. Just a bit of company to ward off loneliness.

I also stayed overnight with a woman whose husband was a preacher. When he went away somewhere to hold weekend gospel meetings, I stayed with his wife.

She was a wonderful old woman. Jewel was her name.

She drank her coffee from a tin can because, she said, it kept the coffee hotter longer.

She studied her Bible daily and took notes, writing them in blue ink around the edges of the articles in The Gospel Advocate.

Doesn’t she have notebook paper? I wondered.

She fed me scrambled egg sandwiches for supper, and we played Hully Gully, a game played with dried kernels of corn.

Jewel herself was as wonderful a person as her name, though she had a slight mustache.

I rode my bike to her house when I spent the night. Sometimes she gave me a quart of fresh cream in a Mason jar to take home to Mom.

“Now, if you ever feel like you are about to turn over on that bike,” she said, “or are about to wreck it, throw that glass jar as far as you can. I don’t want you to get cut on broken glass.”

How I wanted an opportunity to throw that Mason jar of fresh cream! It would be exciting, heroic in a way, and would make a good story to tell my friends.

Alas, I never had that chance. The bike, the jar of cream, and I always made it home intact.

I hope my readers aren’t expecting a strong punch line at the end of this narrative. I have none.

I do advise women to wear sleeveless tops when they are young, though, if they plan to wear them at all.

And, remember this: You, today, are creating memories for children who will grow to be adults, like us.

One day, they will set out to do something ordinary, like take a walk.

Then they will think of you, and the next thing they know they will be strolling down Memory Lane.

Make it a nice walk.

My paternal grandmother, Grandma James, was a strong woman.

Due to her mother’s debilitating illness, Grandma, at the age of 10, assumed the role of homemaker for her household.

She raised her own eight children during the Great Depression.

My dad said that without her, his family would have starved.

Those eight children didn’t include her twin babies. Born prematurely, they were buried in tiny boxes in unmarked graves.

Hardship and loss were her companions through much of her life.

Grandma was resourceful and wasted nothing.

She planted and tended a huge garden and canned vegetables and fruit for her family to eat during the winter.

Half-rotted and bird-pecked peaches might have been thrown out by some homemakers. But Grandma salvaged every edible scrap and canned or dried them.

She canned more than just what her garden and orchard produced though. When she had an excess of eggs, she boiled and canned them. She canned fish and other meats.

She made clothes for herself and her children. With the scraps of fabric, she made quilts.

She did her laundry, winter and summer, using a wringer-style washing machine and a clothesline.

On washdays, she had her laundry hung on the line before she made breakfast for her family.

That breakfast was cooked on a cast iron, wood-burning stove.

She mended and ironed her family’s clothes, and she gave to other people in the community who had less.

When my sister and I were little girls, Grandma made dresses for our dolls.

Her yard was filled with beautiful flowers, watered with the rinse water from her weekly laundry.

She took in more than one aging relative and cared for them in her home.

Grandma was not a big talker. She enjoyed visiting with relatives and friends, but she didn’t gossip. Prolonged pauses in conversations did not bother her.

If someone did an odd thing, such as naming a new baby Crystalline, Grandma said of the event, “Well, that’s hers fer it.”

By this she meant the new mother could name her baby whatever she chose.

Sometimes Grandma told funny stories, often about her chickens.

As she told the story, she rocked harder in her chair, laughed, and said, “Law, law! You should’ve seen that old hen take off after that hawk!”

I am certain Grandma didn’t graduate from high school. She may not have finished the eighth grade.

But she knew much that I’ll never learn.

I loved my grandma and miss her. I have a taped recording of her voice, but I can’t listen to it.

People who are born into abundance may become strong.

People who are born into scarcity become strong or die.

My love for Grandma includes a deep respect for a woman who did what she had to do.

Pondering the unfairness of life would have used up time she didn’t have to spare.

I was (am) a Baby Boomer, born in 1952.

The following is the first paragraph of Wikipedia’s entry for Baby Boomers:

Baby boomers (also known as boomers) are the demographic cohort following the Silent Generation and preceding Generation X. The Baby Boom generation is most often defined as those individuals born between 1946 and 1964.

Interesting charts listing characteristics of Boomers can be found at:

http://www.wmfc.org/uploads/GenerationalDifferencesChart.pdf

https://emilms.fema.gov/IS0020.18/groups/103.html

These charts also compare Boomers to the generations before and after us. You might enjoy scanning them.

I may or may not be a typical Baby Boomer, but I will share a few of my early experiences. Some will be unique to me; others will be like experiences of my fellow Boomers.

My dad was in the Air Force during the Korean War, but he did not fight. For a while, he was stationed on the Japanese island of Okinawa in the East China Sea. He also spent time in Formosa, today known as Taiwan.

When he was stationed in the States, my mother and I (and eventually my sister) lived at times near Air Force Bases in Missouri and South Carolina, and at an Air Force Station near Texarkana.

When we could not live near where Dad was stationed, my mom, my sister and I lived with my mom’s parents in rural north Arkansas.

I look at that little house today and marvel that my two grandparents, their three teenage daughters, my mom, my sister, and I managed to live happy lives in such a tiny space. But we did. Those were wonderful days for me.

Eventually my dad left the Air Force and became a store owner and Postmaster in the tiny town of Elizabeth, Arkansas. My brother and another sister were soon born, and that is where I grew up.

That part of Arkansas is near enough to the deep south to be miserably hot and humid in the summer but far enough away to be cold and often snowy and icy in the winter.

Our family was certainly not wealthy, but for that part of the country at that time in history, we were more comfortable than many.

I knew for certain I was loved. I never went without food, clothes or a clean bed.

I had cousins and friends to play with. I liked school and made good grades. My parents set boundaries, which we stayed within.

I grumbled about having to sweep floors, wash dishes, carry in firewood and pick up toys from the yard before Dad mowed, but I was not overworked.

I was never afraid of anyone except the Russians.

Mom disciplined her kids with a switch broken off her forsythia bush. Dad disciplined us with a look that kept us on the straight and narrow for a good month.

Since we lived in a rural area, my siblings and I roamed freely. We had never heard the term, stranger danger.

We knew everyone.

We played hopscotch and jumped rope. We hula hooped. We played jacks and kids’ card games. (I was deadly at Authors.)

My sister and I constructed beautiful hollyhock dolls from the plant’s blossoms and buds.

Our lone brother shot his B.B. gun and climbed and fell out of trees. We still joke that he was fortunate enough always to land on his head, so he wasn’t badly injured.

We played Mumblety peg, which none of my Indiana friends have ever heard of. It involved using a knife, but no one ever got hurt. Google it.

In summer, we tied strings to the legs of June bugs and flew them like kites. We swam in a nearby creek.

We put our black walnuts in the road for cars to run over and peel off the yucky outer husks. We then cracked open the hard shells with a rock and ate the nutmeats, digging out stubborn pieces with bobby pins.

Most mornings, my young siblings and I watched Captain Kangaroo. We loved the antics of the Captain, Mr. Green Jeans, Tom Terrific, and Crabby Appleton. (He was rotten to the core.) We knew by heart the song, It’s Another Be Good to Mommy Day, that was featured on the show .

Our family owned one black-and-white television set, and since we lived in a rural area, we had access to only one TV station, KYTV in Springfield, Missouri. This was (is) an NBC affiliate.

No matter how hard we twisted the big metal antenna pole outside our living room window, we could not access any other station. I routinely watched Bonanza, My Three Sons, Fury, and Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color (in black and white).

The Beatles made their big debut on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. My neighbor, whose television antenna accessed a CBS station, let me watch the show in her living room.

Soon after, my parents allowed me to buy a pair of tennis shoes like these. (Today I found a pair for sale online for $475.)

Keeping with the theme of fashion, here is a photo of me wearing a pair of go-go boots in 1966. I was 14.

Ironically, one of the shows that made go-go boots popular, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In, was banned by my dad. Although it was an NBC program, it didn’t appear on our TV screen.

Dad also didn’t let us watch the part of the Dean Martin Show that featured the dancing Golddiggers.

Among my friends, not one of them had a dad who restricted their television watching. I felt deprived.

Speaking (again) of television, we watched the Huntley Brinkley Report almost every weeknight. As far as I knew, that news show would lead with heartbreaking pictures of the Viet Nam War for eternity.

At different times I had crushes on Richard Chamberlain (Dr. Kildare), Michael Landon (Little Joe Cartwright on Bonanza) and Glen Campbell (singer).

We had party-line telephones and shared our line with two other families. Each family had its own phone number but could use the phone only if no party-line sharer was already using the line.

We could also listen in on phone conversations of our line sharers. We didn’t do much of this, because mostly they just talked about whether we were ever going to get any rain and what was happening on their soap operas.

In elementary school, I said the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag every morning, read a passage of Scripture, and sometimes listened to my teachers pray.

I sweated on a hot school bus half the school year and felt my toes go numb with cold the other half.

In my teen years, girls wore their dresses short, and boys wore their hair long, if their parents tolerated it. Girls either wrapped their long wet hair around empty frozen orange juice cans to get big curls, or they spread their hair across ironing boards and ironed it to remove natural curls.

We went to church three times a week. Each summer, our church had a “gospel meeting.” A preacher from another area visited and preached every night for at least one week, sometimes two. Our family heard every sermon.

I attended Sunday school and Wednesday night Bible classes from the time I was a baby.

While going through some of my parents’ old papers a few years ago, I found a Sunday school assignment I completed. The photo isn’t clear, but it is a rough draft of a report on Queen Esther.

In junior high school my friends and I made gum-wrapper chains long as our arms. Mostly we worked on these chains while riding the school bus.

We made and wore out many paper fortune tellers like this one.

My fortune teller told me I would meet and marry a guy from Indiana. We would have two kids and four grandkids . . . just kidding.

Was I a happy kid? I never thought about it. Life was what it was. I didn’t do much evaluating of my circumstances. I didn’t have everything I wanted, but show me a kid who does.

I had parents (and grandparents) who were always nearby. They loved me, saw that I had everything I needed, set boundaries, and taught me about Jesus.

Paraphrasing King David’s words in Psalm 16:6: The boundary lines fell for me in pleasant places, and I enjoy a wonderful inheritance.