I woke up listening for the traffic out on Highway 24. It was early Monday morning. Time to go to work. Right? It wasn't there. The noise is gone. The road maintenance crews are gonna find it easier to make a living. The monster trucks are gonna quit trying to run us off the road. They won't be there. Soon, just like they shipped all the factories to China, they're gonna send all the big trucks there too. There will be nothing to haul here.
I think about Ms. Pollack's house a lot. She was a widow who rented out half her house to make enough money to buy food. We moved there from Mississippi. It was the first house we lived in after coming to North Carolina. World War Two broke out just before Winter that year in 1941. I was two years old.
It got quiet then too. After World War Two started, that is. Back then, they rationed gasoline and rubber tires because they needed them for the war effort. A family couldn't even buy sugar without a ration coupon. People went back to horse and buggy as the only way to get around. There was only one paved road in that entire county. It was paved with federal money and they called it a "defense road".
I used to play on the front porch of Ms. Pollack's house that was right up next to the paved road. I could hear the horses and wagons coming to that little village on the weekends to shop. Such as there was stuff to shop for. The steel rims that bound the wagon wheels together crunched the small pebbles on the concrete road, and sent some of them pebbles flying when the steel rim rolled up again them. It was an odd sound, and I could hear them coming from a good distance away.
Ms. Pollack's house was on the north edge of town out toward the fire tower. It was a very small village. The south edge of town was only a hundred and fifty yards (137 M) from the north edge of town. It was located on a ridge in the rambling sinks of the the Great Dismal Swamp. Every town and village on the coastal plains is located on a ridge of some aptly named swamp.
Did I mention that it was a quiet little village? Back then, there were so few airplanes around that when one flew over this quiet little village, all the residents turned out into the streets to gawk. Back they was over sixty years ago, and the world was very different than the way it is now. Those differences are going to grow vastly less in the coming months. America is gonna get quiet and sleepy once again.
The Beguine is a dance from Guadeloupe and Martinique from back in the 1930's. I don't know anything about it except what I read on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beguine_%28dance%29
To me it's a drum beat on my digital piano drum machine. #092, to be precise. All I have to do to listen to it is to punch a few buttons, and there it is. Not on #092 though, but several hundred rhythms and drum beats and other odd noises from all over the world.
I think today is when I'm gonna start preparing for a world-wide depression. There ain't gwine be no food for sale at the SuperCenter or it's equivalent in a fairly short amount of time. There won't be any electricity for the poor. No refrigerators to keep the meat from spoiling. No media. No amusement centers. It's gonna be a hard row to hoe.
Of course, I could be just flat wrong, but I've thought it could come to this for a long time now. Running outta gas might just save the world. Well, after enough people die of starvation to get the numbers right.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
