Insane Earthlings

When we are children, the world becomes a place of wonder at Christmas time. Everyone seems to be in on it. City and town councils have the streets specially decorated with lights and greenery. Seasonal music surrounds us in the stores and malls. Neighbors bake cookies and treats and leave them at each other’s doorsteps. People smile and wave at one another and exchange season’s greetings. Today I am letting go of my cynicism about Christmas. There are plenty of folks writing about that. I will choose today to remember with fondness the beauty and wonderment that I have experienced at Christmas. This is for my mother, Margaret Franklin, who loved and sometimes lived for all things Christmas.   My earliest memories are of Christmas on Providence Drive in Charlotte. There are only a few years that I recall when our entire family all lived in the same house. We lived in a cozy little cottage style home nestled between Cotswold and Eastover. My parents, two older brothers, and ...

I miss the way my parents talked. I love accents.  Colloquial pronunciations, phrases, and speech patterns seem to be disappearing. I believe that mass communication like radio and TV have played a part in watering down our familiar ways of speaking. When I was a kid in the 70’s, I watched The Brady Bunch and The Partridge family. The actors spoke as if they had no accent at all. Some of it rubbed off on my generation. Migration played a role in softening our accents as well. During my elementary school years, there was only one family that I knew that was from somewhere besides Charlotte. It was a place called New York City. The Carney’s were our next-door neighbors and they spoke very differently from us. When their nephew, Jerry, would visit from New York, it was like some exotic foreigner had come to town. We asked him about the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. We were astonished that Jerry had been to ...

When I was ten years old, I was filled with delicious anticipation whenever I took a little spin on my bike to the 7-11.  The pockets of my camp pants would be heavily weighted down change that I had scrounged around for. It was amazing how careless adults were with their money!  Pennies, Nickels, dimes, and an occasional Quarter or two were everywhere in our house. In junk drawers, under cushions, in little knick-knack dishes, and old beer steins. Once I was satisfied that I had found all the dough I could, I was off to purchase as much candy as my newly found treasure would buy. But, it could not be just any candy. It had to be a carefully chosen mix of good candy that also offered a high return on investment. My profit was sweetness and the goal was to buy an assortment that would last a very long time. It was the 1970s, and the candy racks were filled with varieties that have mostly disappeared from the shelves today. There was logic behind each selection I made. My pocke...

“There are places I remember  in my life, though some have changed  Some forever not for better  Some have gone and some remain.” John Lennon There are places that I remember in clear detail.  In my life, hardly any places remain as they were. However, I can call them up from the files in my brain and magically transport myself to them as they existed before. My mother re-entered the workforce when I was about ten years old. I had lots of time to explore and roam free, by myself. We lived in Charlotte on a street of small cottages between Eastover and Cotswold. These neighborhoods were divided by, Briar Creek, one of Charlotte’s main waterways. On our side of Briar Creek, there was a pocket of woods with trails, a tributary creek, four small lakes, and a real waterfall. I spent countless hours exploring every inch of these woods without supervision. I could never become bored in these woods. There were always things to do. I could build little boats made of twigs and...