Published: August 25, 2008 11:51 pm            

To lament or not to lament

In 1961, my late husband Harrell and I had just moved to Irving from Big D. We had two children under three years of age and were extremely happy to be out of the traffic and complications of apartment living and into a neighborly small town atmosphere. As the years passed, however, Irving became a bustling city itself.

Unknown to me at the time, Paul Grume, a leading Texan humorist and columnist for The Dallas Morning News had written a book titled “A Texan at Bay,” which was described as a “very funny lament for a time that has vanished, leaving mankind at the mercy of the modern world.”

My idea of a lament is that it is usually serious, not funny. But, don’t get me wrong. I like humor, and I know from experience that it is a great deal better to laugh than to cry over spilt milk.

When Harrell and I moved to Navarro County and he and I were driving around Corsicana, the place of my birth, I could hardly recognize it. You see, I had always found my way around by looking for particular buildings, houses or other landmarks. And woe is me! Some of the main ones in my memory were gone. Where, for instance, was Corsicana Hospital and Clinic, where I was born on the day after New Year’s in 1937? And where was the Carnegie Library, where I spent so many hours reading my way down every shelf of books, undaunted by the thickest volumes of Charles Dickens?

Yes, the modern world had taken over Corsicana while I had been looking the other way. So when my friend Frances Westbrook gave me the book by Crume recently, reading it brought back many of my feelings about my hometown.

Crume talks some about money and the value that people put on it. For example, he says that “a $20 bill isn’t worth more than $10 ordinarily.” I might have to lower it even more myself. As soon as a $20 bill is broken into change, it actually disappears, leaving maybe a so-called “thin” dime if a person is lucky. Crume also said that money depreciates between the time that it is received in the paycheck and the time that it takes to get over to pay a bill.

Anyway, while he was writing about the value of money, he brought up the subject of Corsicana. He starts a new paragraph with these words: “I have observed a lot of other people in the same hock shop lately.” Now, he didn’t say the hock shop was in Corsicana, but he didn’t say it wasn’t. He just continued the paragraph with this sentence: “At Corsicana, a man parked a new Cadillac Eldorado with an out-of-town license tag in the front of Levermann Paint Store.” Then he tells about how that man dropped a bunch or pennies in the parking meter. A native of Corsicana told him there wasn’t an “extra charge for parking a Cadillac.” The man replied, “Pennies are just about the only kind of money I have now.” We might say, “Join the club!”

We, too, are looking for a solution to our experience of hard times. True, they are nothing like the ones our parents experienced, but they cause us to pause nevertheless. Crume proposed this solution. His advice about money was just to “quit using the stuff.” He said, “Be a man. Get off the habit.” His reasoning was that money has caused “more quarrels, more heartaches, and more broken homes than alcohol and other women put together and many a young man has ruined his life by drifting into the money habit and then finding his supply cut off.”

The song says, “That’s the way the money goes. Pop goes the weasel.” The pop we are hearing may be our bubble bursting. It seems that our imagined unlimited supply of oil and gas has proved to be out of our control. Food prices are rising, and the utilities are going up as well. It is times like these that I am glad I know how to do without. If there was one thing my parents impressed upon me it was that “Money does not grow on trees!”

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Gelene Simpson is a Daily Sun columnist. Her column appears on Tuesdays.

        

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