A disadvantage of being retired is that nothing much happens unless one makes it happen, thus depriving the blogger of filler material in the nature of “What I did yesterday.” One can make only so many stories from sleeping, eating, grocery shopping, cats, and wandering in computer games. But I can see that when one is old enough to have been retired for a few years, nothing new is preferable to a lot of the alternatives.
A couple of my favorite really rustic Southernisms:
“I knewn I know’d you!” (On confirming that someone is an old acquaintance.)
“I ain’t done tucken none off yet.” (Way up in the North Carolina mountains we saw a sign on a cabin, “HONEY FOR SALE”. Having been warned not just to walk up to one of those rickety wooden homes, whose residents owned rifles and were perpetually suspicious of strangers, my father called from a distance below, “We’d like to buy some honey.” The mountaineer who was lounging in a rocking chair on the front porch called back, “I ain’t done tucken none off yet. Come back tomorry.” My father returned every day for the rest of our 5-day vacation and got the same answer from the rocking chair every time, “I ain’t done tucken none off yet.”
I may have told the following story, but here it is:
My father grew up on a ranch/farm on the Florida frontier at the beginning of the 20th Century. The noon meal, “dinner”, was the big feast of the day. The men would come in from the fields after working since dawn and join the women and other family members at a long table groaning with roast beef, ham, fried chicken, perhaps leg of lamb or pork chops, bowls of vegetables, corn bread, gravy, and pies.
WHERE MY FATHER GREW UP, AND WHERE THE DINNERS WERE SERVED (Click to enlarge)
Old Man Folks, with his white beard, was too old to plow or herd cows, but his famous skill as a trencherman was undiminished by age. He ate amazing quantities, and at the end of every dinner he would say the same thing as he pushed back his chair and raised his napkin to his lips for a final wipe,
“I enjoyed them few mouthfuls as much as if I’d et a hearty meal.”
Which makes me smile, but may have worn a little thin on my grandmother.
After a special repast he wanted to compliment the hostess and said, “That was a delicious dinner . . . what there was of it.” Realizing his faux pas he added, “And there was plenty of it, such as it was.”
Old Man Folks lives on because rarely a day goes by that I don’t say jokingly about something, “what there was of it . . . such as it was.” Amazingly useful and versatile phrases.
