Beech Tree News Network

On the downside of 79 sometimes the passing parade seems only a short glimpse of yesterday… then I look in the mirror and see a face like a barn door;  that’s early in the morning---it improves some up in the day… some. But it‘s a dang-sight better than the alternative… Pall and Curtains.
Some things I regret;  some I don’t… I regret not ever owning a decnt set of jumper cables--- but not owning a baby-blue leisure suit. I do regret if I have wounded some lost soul, or caused one foot ot go astray… or gone in my own willful way. I regret not spending more time with wonderful people I have known… getting to know what they liked for breakfast; the roads they had traveled, who their kids married… or if they like their coffee straight, or cream in it, and their GRANDKIDS! You can know a lot about a person if they like turnips.
But I don’t worry like I did my yesterdays; most worries never come to fruition anyway. I did have some concerns when real young. I had a Lone Ranger coloring book. I heard him on the radio too. He never seemed to live anywhere… maybe in a cave, he and Tonto. I wondered if he went to the bathroom… and where.  Did he have personal hygiene facilities? Did he was his feet at night before he went to bed?  My mother always washed mine before bedtime.
It didn’t worry me, but I was puzzeled why I couldn’t see Asher Sizemore and Little Jimmy sing and play when I looked into the back of our radio--- backs were open then. I had a glossy of them, both in cowboy hats; Little Jimmy in a satin shirt with pearl buttons. They were on the Grand Ole Opry.
They say you grow out of fears when you grow up. Horseapples! I ‘m still afraid of snakes, lightening, and I don’t like loud noises. I got a cap pistol one Christmas, I guess it was six months before I got up nerve enough to shoot it. I was afraid of Omer Vincent’s motorcycle because it was loud. When I was six or seven they came and prepared our road for gravel. They put off dynamite shots, sometimes fairly close by. I don’t think I really heard them much; most of the time I was in the closet with my fingers in my ears.
During the Christmas Season I think of “ Friends who camp along old trails that wind back into the past.” (Louie L’Amour)…friends like Carl Vincent. Last time I saw Carl he was sitting in the back of my daddy’s old panel truck, playing his guitar and singing, “I love you most of all because you’re you.” (BMI,ASCAP,PMS &PDQ.) Carl was Nathan and Pearl Vincent’s youngest boy. Sixty- five years since then. New Cypress is who I am. What I’ve become since then is superfluous.
I do have a Christmas wish list: 35 gallons of chocolate milk-shake (in a clean drum); a long straw about the diameter of a garden hose; a hair brush (my head is tender, and a Jew’s harp. It’s OK to say “Jew”; it is found in the Bible about 82 times.
I’ll probably come nearer getting everything but the milk-shake.
Kindest regards…