Late on a recent afternoon, Vertis and I were sitting under our wooden pergola down by the pond having a little something to drink. We were listening to Apple Music via a great Bose speaker. Along with our iPad,it allows us to hear nearly any artist recorded in the last 50 years, and I just happened to run across Joan Baez's 75th Birthday Celebration album.
If you are a child of the 1960s, Joan is really a turn-on, and as that clear, silky voice echoed in our backyard as the shadows lengthened, my mind drifted back to when I first listened to her. I was in college and her songs were on everyone's playlist.
We settled in for a pleasant late afternoon of music, starting with a few of her most popular songs. Then we listened to Joan sing with Emmylou Harris on a ballad called "Hard Times Come Again No More." The lyrics popped up on the iPad, and as the two singers' voices wafted in the steamy summer afternoon, memories flooded back:
Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears, while we all sup sorrow with the poor. There's a song that will linger forever in our ears. Oh, hard times come again no more.
'Tis the song, the sign of the weary, hard times, hard times, come again no more. Many days you have lingered all around my cabin door, oh, hard times, come again no more.
If you read the lyrics while the song is being played, it amplifies the impact, and by the time the song was over we were pretty much washed out mentally. All of the turbulent '60s flashed back as we sat there, and we relived some of those times as the song continued, Vertis said it first, but it was on my lips, "I can't take it anymore. Play something else." It wasn't the quality of the voices or the music or the lyrics; it was all of them put together so wonderfully that it left us both basketcases.
Vertis and I have been poor, but we have never really gone through real hard times. We had food on our table and clothes on our backs, and we knew, if we worked hard, we would be OK. As a preteen living on a farm, I went through numerous winters without access to a wholesome diet, but never in the spring and summer when our gardens were putting forth more vegetables than we could consume.
Our whole family struggled to make a living, but we never considered that we were going through hard times. It was just the way things were, and although we had to stretch our money to get along, our family never moaned. "Hard" meant one thing--hard work--and my upbringing was instilled with a work ethic from my father and mother.
Vertis and I married while we were still in college. My mother wasn't financially able to help us with college expenses, and our part-time jobs were all we had to fall back on. Even then, Vertis and I considered we were just going through a tight time financially.
She was working at Baldwin Piano and Organ Factory soldering components for $1.35 an hour as I bounced around the university from job to job, simultaneously. I was student manager of the University of Arkansas' Brough Commons dining hall, an employee of the University Bookstore (where I punched the time clock every time I had a free hour between classes), and in the late afternoons I worked cleaning cases and sweeping floors at the University Museum on the fourth floor of Old Main. We didn't see many movies or go out to Venesian Inn very often, but we got by.
There were a few bumps. When Vertis went to the supermarket and checked out, it sometimes went like this.
"When you hit $15, stop. OK?"
"Sure, just a minute, oh ... that sack of potatoes put you at $16.50."
"Let's see, if I put this jar of peanut butter back ... no, that's not enough yes, the peanut butter and this box of cereal will do it ... I'm sorry, y'all. I've got to put this back on the shelf."
It was a little embarrassing, but Vertis, who could make her soldering console quota at the Baldwin with a couple of hours to spare while wearing gloves to protect those good-looking fingernails, wasn't going to let putting back a jar of peanut butter bother her.
Our parents and grandparents didn't ignore us, and our frequent trips home weren't just because we were homesick. When the spring gardens were in we could count on Vertis' grandparents to load us up with enough vegetables to last for a couple of weeks, and even as tight as money was, we could usually count on someone in the family slipping us a $20 bill.
Most of our adult children and teenagers have never experienced anything like hard times and have no understanding of how to cope with the lack of essential services, food, and other amenities we take for granted. I'm not someone who goes on and on about our kids not knowing what hard times are, and secretly hopes those sassy youngsters find out. Nope, I hope we all have the best of times ahead, and none of us will ever experience what past generations went through.
A comment from a good friend, Dr. Jim Shepherd, points the way back to what were really hard times. "We were lucky to be raised by the Greatest Generation!"
That generation lived through true hard times, but to them it was just part of life. However, as steel sharpens steel, those steel-sharpened young men and women who in the 1940s fought and died for our freedom didn't pick up courage, daring, bravery, and toughness in training before World War II. They had it instilled in them by their fathers and grandfathers, who did really have hard times. Those hard times had a name: The Great Depression.
Richard Mason is a registered professional geologist, downtown developer, former chairman of the Department of Environmental Quality Board of Commissioners, past president of the Arkansas Wildlife Federation, and syndicated columnist. Email richard@gibraltarenergy.com.
Editorial on 07/22/2018