Every once in awhile I get to thinking back to what really were far better days. We didn’t have TV and didn’t need it as Radio provided all the evenings entertainment one could ask.

There were all sorts of dramatic programs, laden with sound effects and narrated by teams of actual actors who played out the scenes in your mind’s eye, the galloping horses, the dark alley, the sinister footsteps on the stairs. It was all so real. The Shadow, Midnight Editor, The Lone Ranger, The Green Hornet, Superman. We would listen absolutely entranced, visualizing it all.

There was no cussing on the radio. No one said Damn or Hell, and there were no dirty jokes. No cussing or nudity in the movies either. When someone got shot in a cowboy or gangster movie, there was no blood. It was real enough as it was without any George Carlin-type filthy mouth or spilled guts and I’d be fine with that today.

In the 1940′s, in spite of so many people having refrigerators by then, a lot of them still had old-fashioned ice boxes, and I remember the ice truck parking next door to make deliveries in the summer at the several 4-plexes down the street, and the ice man would chip off chunks of ice for us kids to eat when we crowded around the back of the truck.

The War was underway and my dad hadn’t yet joined the Navy, and was still running his autobody shop in town. My older brother and I walked downtown to visit him and he gave us a couple of nickles, which we spent at a 5 & 10 cent store nearby. I bought a wood and paper “gun” that made a loud pop when it was swung quickly downward. A folded piece of paper snapped out, caught by the air, with a cartoon picture of Hitler on it.

My grandparents had a summer cabin not real far from Palm Springs, and after the War dad would drive us all out there sometimes to spend a weekend with the grandfolks, if they were there. The cabin had an icebox too. There was no electrical power in that little canyon then, though there is now, and our music came from an old Edison phonograph with those really thick, one-sided records, and our light at night was from kerosene lanterns.

There was a water hole a little ways up in the hills where water was piped down to the cabins, and my brother and I would sneak up there, strip down and go swimming. We had to be careful not to get it stirred up or people would see murky water come out of their taps, as we found out the first time it happened. That wasn’t the last time, either. Small kids have a hard time being careful.

Indians used to live there before white people came along and there were still remnants. An old Indian guy had one of the cabins and he’d found what was left of a war bow. It looked to be missing at least a foot off one end but was still taller than my dad and really thick and strong. I bet it shot an arrow a very long ways, when it was intact. There was a totem pole there too, pretty weather-worn and bug eaten but still recognizable for what it was.

There was a hornet’s nest in a tree not far from the cabin, as you walked up the narrow dirt road, and I noticed it one afternoon and stopped to look at it. One of the hornets noticed me, too, and decided it didn’t like me standing there staring up at the nest. It took out after me and I found myself running as fast as I could back to the cabin. I whipped in the screen door and slammed it behind me and that hornet was so close behind that it made a loud ping from bouncing off the screen. It nearly had me. My parents and an uncle were lounging around outside, saw the whole thing of course, and had a good laugh. I did too after I’d caught my breath and made sure that hornet had left.

Those were such simpler times, it seems now. Even during the war years, they were happier times than now so it’s no wonder that on cold, rainy and gloomy days like today, I think back to them.

That experience with my grandfolks cabin stayed with me all my life. I eventually moved to some very remote woods and re-lived that life, built my own home there, had a wood stove for heat in the winter and kerosene lamps for light at night. I had an old gas refrigerator instead of an ice box but most of the food went into a pantry, I canned food up like Grandma used to, and lived that way for about 25 years and loved it.

I don’t anymore but I find that I just can’t stand living in a neighborhood with neighbors to the left and right of me. I get along with them okay but not having at least 20 acres of rugged land to call my own is more than I can deal with. Which is why I bought 20 rugged acres with a spring on it that’s been known to keep flowing since around 1880 when white people first found it, up in the southern California mountains. Not too much longer and I can get out of this miserable land of gray skies and rain.

Once I feel happy again you won’t have to read rants like this anymore. So wish me Godspeed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Bleats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.