Beech Tree News Network

SOUTHERNERS: In the south the hospital is more of a social gathering than anything else, the patient sometimes is given second place.  The occasion is more like a family outing.
Four aging women sat beside the hospital bed of another woman.  The woman in the bed was the patient waiting to go into surgery.  The sick woman was a sister to two of the other women and a double-first- cousin to the other two.
One of the “concerned” said, “Do y’all know that girl that married the Richardson boy?” Wasn’t that Emmie Lou Smith?”
“No, Emmie LEE Smith married Jim Clellan, I’m talking about the girl with the crooked leg.  She married that Richardson boy from the holler.”
“No, she didn’t.  I know who you’re talking about.  She married Odell Blocker; they had that boy who had to go to the pen.”
They talked with such insistence one would have thought the matter needed to be dealt with before the poor sick woman went into the operating room.  The gurney crew came and took the patient; the women were still at it.
Southerners take their fishing real serious.  Two old guys were in the middle of the pond, puffing pipes, talking, and fishing.  A neighbor came and hollered from the bank, “Who’d y’all say your man for president was?”
“Wallace.”
“They just shot him.”
The two old guys went right on fishing.
The great depression of the 1930’s was felt in the south like everywhere.  Perhaps though, the rural south had the advantage over the city dwellers in that they could grow most of their own food.
Like a lot of young men, my old friend Red Coleman had gone to the city hoping to find work.  Like some others he wound up with nothing to show but broke and hungry, no job.
Red went into a restaurant spied a container of donuts on the counter, sat down and began to eat.  When he had eaten them all it was time to pay up.  He told the owner he had not a red cent, but he could wash dishes for the donuts.  The owner agreed.  Red left with his meal paid for.  Red allowed, “I knew I could have gotten food in jail, but I doubt they would have fed me good donuts.”
Some store owners gave hand-outs to those down-and-out.  Here in Morgantown Lige Meredith fixed an old fellow a bologna sandwich for free.  When the old guy had finished he said, “Lige, would you give me a pack of that chewing gum, I’ve got to get the taste of that old boloney out of my mouth.”
The Passing Parole,
Kindest regards,