hearing history
sounds of summer times long past
… was another time
Years and years ago, my Dad took us kids on a spring trip and we traveled south.
When I was 9, my brother Paul got married and moved to the suburbs of Washington DC so our usual spring trip destination was to see Paul and his family and visit Washington.
But one year, my brother took a short-term posting to California and my Dad said we were going south.
This was a small group of just me and my sister Lisa and my little brothers Pete, Steve and Al.
It was a trip marked by breakfasts in the pre-Egg-McMuffin era at little local diners with us kids saying, I am not eating those grits.
We went to Shiloh Battlefield and the Land Between the Lakes in Kentucky and stopped at Mammoth Cave.
It was in an odd little gift shop near Mammoth Cave that my mom found The Gong.
The gong was the ugliest wind chime ever made with two hollow mishappen brass cylinders suspended on either side of a lump of iron the size of a golf ball.
It had an Alexander Calderesque quality to it and it gave off the deepest, loudest … GONG SOUNDS you ever heard.
The chime was hung from the ceiling in the kitchen of the cottage where my family spent our summers.
Lucky for us, it took a near hurricane to get it to move at all so we rarely heard it.
It rang more often when the grand kids would reach out from the stairs and take a swing at it to make it GONG.
But when there were storms, we knew it.
And that is where I am today.
I inherited the chime and it has traveled with my family and hung from porches and balconies all the Atlanta area and now, here in South Carolina.
Last night, the county schools were closed down here due to a forecast of ‘HIGH WINDS’ and storms.
As I sat by the window this morning with my morning coffee, I could hear the wind and, from time to time, a soft gong.
The sound echoed in my head to my heart.
Closing my eyes I was back 40 years ago.
On the shore of Lake Michigan.
I was hearing the sound of my family history.
The sound of summer times long past.
Boy Howdy but it was another time.
(You cannot see it, but the chime hung back in the upper left corner just in front of the side of the stairs – those stairs, by the way, were completely open on the bottom with a 20 foot drop to the basement, with no rails and open on one side and spaced vertical poles on the other – that you could reach through and push the chime – parents worried for lots of crawling babies but so far as I remember only my little brother Al every fell through)
No Haiku For You 