Personal Sacrifices - Why can't we make them now?

I admit I had a melt down a few weeks ago - anxiety, depression, and physical illness. I have tried to understand why. Being alone is not that unusual for me. I have always enjoyed my private time. In fact, I am relishing the fact that I don't have children who would come in to see me and bring COVID-19 from their outings with friends. I think it was the uncertainty of what I should do to protect myself.  We were getting so many mixed messages in the beginning of this pandemic.

I am grateful I have my own home, and I do not have to go out to work. I can work from home, as I will do soon, teaching a writing class on Zoom. How fortunate I am to be savvy on my computer so I can do that. Many of my generation cannot.

I was thinking today about all the personal sacrifices my parents made in their lifetimes. My father had to go to work when he was just a boy, before there were child labor laws. His father died when he was ten. His childhood was far from normal.

Mother and Daddy lived through WWII and sent their oldest son off when he was only nineteen. They did not know if he would be killed or come home safely. Two of his cousins went to that war and did not ever come home. Those personal sacrifices for the sake of our country were the hardest anyone could ever make.

During the Great Depression when my parents had three little children, long before I was born, they lived above a store they ran. In front of the store were gas pumps and their place was called a filling station. When their customers lost jobs and had no money to purchase the food or gasoline, my family lived off the food on the shelves of the store. They did not buy clothes, groceries, and certainly did not travel. Today, if folks can't take their family vacation to the beach, they are angry and upset. They have not stopped ordering off Amazon and can get almost anything they want delivered. My parents stayed home in Pelham, Georgia. They were not the only ones. Most people had to sacrifice comforts they had once enjoyed.

A friend of mine who has a twenty-something son says his generation has always had what they wanted and won't sacrifice anything now to help stop this corona-virus if it means staying home or avoiding friends and gatherings. I wonder how they would handle the draft. What if they were told they must serve in the military whether they liked it or not in order to preserve our country?

What if food was rationed? They could only have certain foods and only a small amount of it.
What if they could only buy a small amount of gasoline each month? What if they had to make a personal sacrifice to save the lives of their parents? What would be their answer?

That is what is being asked of them now. Make a personal sacrifice that can save the lives of your family and the lives of others.

A nurse told me today that she wore a mask, not for herself, but to protect others. Her grandfather is in his nineties, and she would be horrified if she brought this deadly virus  to him. She also said she was not sure she believed the mask made that much difference, but it was a small sacrifice to make if it saved even one person's life. In the hospital where she works, she said there was around 100 people diagnosed with COVID-19 at this time. That hospital is about thirty minutes drive from where I live. She had been with three of those patients in the last few days.

Recently a smart and caring young woman who wants to come and visit her family, after hearing how the mayor of Atlanta, who was being careful and following the guidelines given to all of us, has tested positive for COVID-19, decided not to come home and is self-quarantined in her apartment. Four members of her family are all sick with the virus. The older of the four is the sickest at this time. Even when we wear masks, and we go out among people, even people we know, we have a good chance of getting sick. Most people don't know where they caught the virus.

Many people are making huge sacrifices because they have jobs they must go to every day. Many are among those with the lowest income, minorities, people of color, and they are dying from this virus. That is the biggest sacrifice. Not missed vacations, missed concerts, missed entertainment. Some are concerned about their future - will they have a job when they finish college? Who knows, but still we all must give up gathering in groups where we could become infected.

I have had to give up going to certain doctors who will not enforce wearing a mask and who will not wear one themselves. I think, if they won't wear a mask to protect me, are they doing anything in that office - sanitizing after each patient, or are they just among those who don't believe there is a deadly virus going around that kills us? Why don't they believe something so obvious?

We must make the sacrifices necessary to stop this enemy in its tracks or we will never feel safe going out in the world again. I applaud the young people I know who are doing everything right, wearing masks, washing hands, avoiding crowds and practicing social distancing. If only those who seem to be selfish and uncaring would think of others when they are so determined to have a good time with no precautions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/magazine/personal-sacrifice-coronavirus-world-war-ii.html

Hard Times Then and Now

Recently I came face to face with the effect of our economic downturn. Exiting a local restaurant in our small town, I saw a car parked next to mine with a young man in the driver’s seat. I hardly noticed the other passenger, but as I opened my door, I heard a voice behind me. “Ma’am, ma’am, could you help us?”
I turned to see a plain looking older woman, her lined face worried and beseeching as she hurried around the other car.
“What can I help you with?” I asked.
“Can you help us get some gas? We used our last dollar for gas and we don’t have enough to get to Franklin. We just need enough gas to get to Franklin.”
I looked into the car at the young man, his dark head down, eyes averted, slumped behind the wheel. It was obvious he was embarrassed that his grandmother, or whoever the older woman was, had to beg for a few dollars to buy gas. In thirteen years living in the mountains I’ve never had anyone ask me for a handout. I knew this was not a con job. In my experience, a mountain woman such as this would be way too proud to ask for money unless she desperately needed help.

This incident reminded me of the stories my father told me about the days of the Great Depression. My parents ran a filling station and store in a small town in South Georgia in the 1920’s. They had three children. Business was good at first, but as people lost their jobs, and often their homes, customers stopped coming. However, men who had no money often came and asked for a free meal.
“Most of these men were from up north and were going to Florida hoping to find work,” Mother told me. “They had left their families behind and rode the freight trains, hiding in boxcars to get a free ride.”
I remember hearing an old song by Jimmy Davis, an early country music singer, whose song asked the question, “Will there be any hobos in Heaven?” His words told the story of these men who rode the trains looking for work.

I’ll never forget the sadness in Mother’s eyes as she spoke of these homeless people. Being good-hearted, my parents always fed those who were in need. No one came to buy groceries from the store, but the cans and boxes of staple goods on the shelves of my parents’ store fed my own family until they were gone. My father, who was a frustrated farmer even then, also raised chickens and kept a cow.
I came along many years later but I often heard my father tell why he wouldn’t eat chicken. “Your mother cooked chicken every way she knew how,” he said. “We ate so much chicken that I got enough of it to last me the rest of my life.”
Like many families are doing today, my aunt Judy and Uncle Jimmy and Mother and Daddy still found ways to enjoy life during the depression. On weekends they came together and played Croquet. "We laughed and laughed," Aunt Judy said, just as if the country was not self-destructing around them.

I have friends who are carefully planning for hard times. They not only make a huge organic garden, they save rain water and heat with their own homemade solar system. I might try my hand growing some of those topsy-turvy tomatoes on my deck. With the price of food growing ever higher, more and more folks are planting gardens and finding ways to cut costs. I wonder what else I can raise in a pot on the small sunny spot on my porch.

Stories about Ourselves and Others

Tonight I heard Jo Carolyn Beebe read stories passed down from her parents and grandparents about life in Mississippi before Jo Carolyn was born. She is a genealogist and says that when she is writing she wants to research a person and when she is researching she wants to write a poem or story. The two go hand in hand. My writing is usually character driven and I have some interesting characters in my family background just as many of you. One of my favorite stories was about my Uncle Lewis Hobby.
It is said that during the Great Depression when jobs were scarce, Lewis bluffed his way into a good paying job. He noticed some men working for the Florida power company and thought to himself, "that would be a good job." Having no experience in working as a lineman, Lewis faked it.
He talked with the workers and pretended he knew what they were doing. He asked how he might get a job with Florida Power and was directed to the man he needed to see. Lewis was hired. While others struggled through the depression, Lewis received a regular salary with a guaranteed income.
Lewis lost an arm in an accident, but he did not lose his job. He became a "desk jocky" and there he stayed until the day he retired. He raised a son and lived a comfortable life.
Lewis Hobby had determination and would not accept no for an answer. After he lost his arm, he learned to do everything with his other hand. "The only thing he can't do is button the cuff on his sleeve," his wife Lillian once said. I doubt he ever spent a minute feeling sorry for himself.


Jo Carolyn's stories are much like my stories as we both grew up in the rural south. I remember the ice man coming to put the fifty pound block in the ice box. Ours was a white square appliance that sat on the back porch or in the kitchen.


With her 90 year old mother telling stories of the past to Jo Carolyn, she has a vast store of material for her deep south memoirs. "Special Delivery" is one of her personal essays I like. I'm not sure if it has been published, but it should be.