A look backwards

Yesterday morning I was having coffee with an older gay guy whom I've been getting to know through one of the 12-step programs. He was born in the early 50s in rural NC.

I was discussing Graham's housing propects for next year (still unclear) and mentioned how Mary and I had done a less good job teaching him how to clean a room and a house than my mom had done for Leslie and me -- when she wouldn't let us go outside to play on Saturdays or watch cartoons until our rooms were vacuumed and dusted and our bathroom was clean. My new friend said "When I was growing up, we had a 1-acre garden, so it was dangerous to sit down in front of the TV or you would be sent outside to do something in the garden. It was endless."

He proceeded to regale me with tales of how they largely fed themselves from the garden, how his mom would stand in front of the stove all summer long boiling and canning with no AC. How he was driving an old dump truck and working at a filling station when he was 14, and how if you jump started the truck in reverse the engine would run backwards and you'd have three gears of reverse (still can't quite wrap my head around that one).

His dad had taught agriculture and shop at a local school, which was pretty much a 12-month role because he needed to be teaching kids how to do things like weld so that they could fix carts that were going up and down the tobacco fields.

We talked about reading and how the bookmobile used to come by and drop 20-25 books at the local general store for the summer, including 3-5 books for kids, which he and his siblings would take. How when integration came the school and public libraries were purged of questionable stuff including Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories and things that portrayed the Klan favorably and how they had taken those too to have stuff to read. And also about how astounding it was to catch the first glimmers of gay characters in books and realize he was not alone.

It was one of those conversation that reminded me of how much had changed in just the course of our lifetimes.