I don't know how unique being raised the way I was in on comparison to how other people were raised in the United States. It was certainly dominated by agriculture. Both in the fact that my father was a high school agriculture teacher, and it was in this capacity that he was the adviser to the Future Farmers of America club in all the little villages and towns on the North Carolina coastal plains we moved to. We move here when I was twelve years old, and our family has remained here since then for the most part. The unique thing about being raised here in this area is that the main cash crop grown in this area was/is tobacco. Lots of it.
One of the most exciting things about moving here was that it was almost big enough to be considered a town instead of a village, but only because it is the county seat of the largest county in the state land-wise. Population-wise, it's not a metropolis. The State capitol is about sixty miles away, and it has grown into a metropolitan area along with the towns surrounding it into The Research Triangle. The big deal about that to a twelve year me was that they had a Boy Scout troop here, and I had heard all about the Boy Scouts well before we moved here.
Joining the Boy Scouts led to an annual collection drive to get money for the Scouts to visit and tour Washington, D.C., our nation's capitol. In the fall, when the tobacco farmers brought their crop to market the scouts were allowed to approach them after their tobacco had been weighed in the woven wooden baskets that are ubiquitous all over tobacco-growing country. Usually it was just a couple of bundles from hundreds of bundles, and it was an act of generosity by the farmers and the buyers. Mostly the buyers. The farmers didn't lose anything because their product had already been weighed and they'd get the money for the full weight.
Going to Washington, D.C. when I was twelve years old was a watermark in my young life because of what I saw there besides the contents of all the museums (which was very exciting, particularly the Smithsonian weapons collection of swords and pistols). I saw snow completely covering the ground for the first time in my life. There might have been as much as three inches of it. There wasn't even any grass sticking up through it in many places. Real snow. The kind you could ride a sled on. I'd never seen a sled before, much less watch some local DC kids sliding down the small hills around the motel there. We don't even have hills here, but there are hills not far from here, like up in the State capitol.
The other thing I saw in DC for the first time when I was twelve years old was Catholic nuns. I'd seen them occasionally in the movies, but not in person, and they were the strangest creatures I'd ever seen. I couldn't figure out why they had to wear costumes like they were in a play or something. As if they weren't actual human beings. The stories among us kids, only one or two of whom had ever seen a nun before, grew to fantastic lengths of fancy.
We also saw some Jewish men who wore those big black hats and had weird-looking haircuts that looked very strange. The closest thing to that us boys from the backwoods had going for us was wearing Bass Weejuns penny loafers, so we'd all look cool. That was nothing compared to what these people. They looked more like grown-ups at a masquerade than us kids trying to seem different did. Of course, I was just as shocked when I passed through Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, and many people out there actually wore cowboy hats and boots as if life really was a movie.
Seeing that some people do things differently than how I was raised to behave was a huge lesson I'd be learning for the rest of my life. I didn't realize how much difference it made to my personality to have done a lot of traveling when I was a kid. I was born in Mississippi, as were my two older sisters and my parents. My younger brothers were born here.
Our whole family would pack up in the summer and travel a thousand miles each way to and from Mississippi to visit our closest relatives at mostly my mother's mother's house. Hardly anybody I ever went to school with here growing up ever traveled to the state capitol sixty miles away. Then, three months after I graduated from high school I joined the Navy and they sent me to California for boot camp. Traveling defined my life and my personality. I never expected to be in any one place long enough to have to apologize for being different.
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.
