Not much to post, just had this float up in my head again. Sometimes, I'll use this phrase and people will look at me like I recited the preamble to the Constitution in Mandarin:
"I guess you just didn't hold your mouth right."
My old man used to use that phrase -- it just means "who the hell knows why it didn't work?" Mom still does. I'm old, y'all, but I've had people almost as old as my mother look at me like I had fishhooks strung through my eyebrows when I used that phrase. It's perfect to encapsulate the mystery and sheer bastard-mindedness of machines. I like to use it when something doesn't work on the computer, or something fails one time out of ten, usually when you need it most. It's so good, I won't give it up even if people don't understand what it means.
Y'know what that means?
That means I grew up a hick.
I grew up in a little town with only about 900 people in it. The high school was so small, it was decided in the late 60s it would no longer field a football team because they couldn't both field a football team -- with all the risks of injury that entails -- and also cut, strip and hang tobacco at the requisite times. Basketball was okay -- you had to be a real dingus to get hurt playing basketall. No football -- and they still don't have a team, even now that nobody who lives there grows anything but bitter, anymore.
There are other phrases like that, though of course as soon as I opened up this window I couldn't think of a single one.
This isn't a rural expression, but my dad used to say Dicky Nixon was so crooked he bet he had to screw his pants on in the morning. Hunter S. Thompson also used this phrase for Nixon, I believe, but my dad never read any Hunter S. Thompson. He did grow up along the same river, though. Maybe it was something in the water.
It shows, though, if you grew up in a rural area. For one thing, you don't panic and set your hair on fire every time it snows. If it's not that bad, you still have to get where you're going; if it's pretty bad, nobody's going there. We were thirty miles from anything. We drove a lot of front-wheel or four-wheel drive cars.
I don't know, I doubt much of anybody will grow up in the kind of isolation I did, anymore -- between satellite TV and cable, every kid in every nook and cranny of the U.S. will be exposed to millions of hours of more or less homogenous music, bland situation comedy, dumbed-down news and advertising practically from the moment it shoots out of the uterus. That kid in Manhattan sees the same commercial for nutritionally questionable breakfast cereal that the kid in Podunk does, and also the same misogynistic sitcom and the same bullshit newscast. Local news is all about scaring people into going to Walgreen's to buy something to cure them of diseases they won't get, or convincing them the coming snowstorm will be the worst ever in the history of televised news, so stock up on everything before we all DIE!!!
Feh. I'm not sorry I grew up listening to cats screw outside my window at night, hearing a barge tooting down on the river five miles south-southwest and down the hill. Knowing both my grandmothers -- having them live within two blocks of our house. I don't know if my parents liked that quite so much, though it did leave them plenty of places to dump us if they wanted to go somewhere. I remember playing Flinch with my ancient former-school-principal maternal grandmother, who always smelled of stale White Shoulders, and who wore a dress and stockings (not panty hose) every day of her life, right up to the day she died. Yes, she died in a dress and stockings.
My maternal grandmother, bless her, never could drive worth a damn, though. My uncle loved to tell a story on her, of when he tried to teach her to drive. He said that actually, she could drive okay -- she got to where she could shift and use the clutch and all -- she just didn't know how to stop. He said she just didn't ever put on the brakes -- she used to roll up to a wall and let the wall stop her.
Then there was another joke my dad and another uncle used to tell on his mother. My grandfather loved that old joke with the punch line, "wrecked 'im? It damned near killed 'im!"
Once they explained the joke to my grandmother, she couldn't bring herself to deliver the punch line -- not only was 'rectum' (the real punch line) a word she wasn't comfortable with, she wouldn't say 'damned near,' either. So she's just say "bus' him all up!" I hope she never understood that the reason we all laughed so hard was because she couldn't bring herself to deliver the punch line of the joke properly because she felt it was vulgar. My dad and uncle thought it was the funniest thing to ask her to tell it at family gatherings, though.
Nobody has a grandmother like that, either. Dad's mother raised three kids through the Great Depression in an even dinkier little river town than the one I grew up in. My grandfather was half-ant, half-grasshopper -- he'd work all summer doing odd jobs, painting and doing plastering and drywall, then sit in his chair all winter with his spittoon on one side and an old tube radio on the other while my grandmother took in sewing and kept food on the table in winter. The woman fell apart, eventually. Not that she slowed down for five minutes until she had a stroke in her early eighties -- she used to make sauerkraut every late summer, she had an old grater that was about three feet long that she'd stand in a galvanized metal washtub and grate the cabbage in. Never occurred to me until long after she was gone -- they rented a house that didn't have a bathtub. She also bathed in that tub she grated the cabbage in. I got sick on kraut the first time I ever ate it, so I don't have to go around for two or three days feeling like I have a cat hair in the back of my throat from thinking about that. Small favors.
Adieu -- just felt like dropping this in here. If I think of any more 'you know you grew up a hick if ...' expressions. I'm sure there are more of them lurking in my head.
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