Title: 
Life Just Ain't What It Used To Be

Word Count:
734

Summary:
The Tennessee Mountain Man recalls that there was a time when the city was a million miles away and no one went there


Keywords:
city, used, living, god, life, night, new, country, dirty, barn, the view, chores, breakfast, danger, snow, million miles, open, house,


Article Body:
Over the last fifty years or so we have invented all sorts of time saving strategies that have some how managed to leave us with the greatest time deficit ever experienced by man.

Few people live on farms any more where labor is from daylight to after dark. We don't even work in factories today. No. Modern society runs on the service industry from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM.  How misleading!

Why is there no time to sit on the porch and just enjoy God's nature? Oh, yeah... right. Most houses have no porches and the few that do can't be enjoyed for the fear of gangs and hooligans roaming the neighborhood.

And, should one get passed those concerns who can enjoy the sound of cars literally flying up and down the highway just a few feet away, the ever present blaring of car horns, sirens screaming through the night, and the neighbors you don't know living on top of you when the ones you used to love lived a quarter of a mile away.

Back then we visited on a regular basis and got around to socializing with everyone. Now we barely speak, if we do at all, to the guy living thirty feet away. Maybe we will invite him to a backyard barbeque once a year to assuage our consience, but probably not. 

Instead of helping him repair his house, we bitch about the noise he makes during the process, and resent the fact he needs to borrow a hammer rather than taking the time to prepare him a cold pitcher of lemonade made from scratch to quench the thirst he works up.

The Tennessee Mountain Man recalls that there was a time when the city was a million miles away and no one from the country went there unless they had to. In our modern world the city has moved into the country and the new reality is that the farm is now a million miles or so from the city next door. It is dirty. The people there are dirty - never mind that their conscience is clean. The place has a foul odor that assaults our sensitive metropolitan olfactory glands and we dare not venture there unless it is absolutely unavoidable.

At a time when we said grace before every meal, we ate hearty and were in little, if any, danger of being over weight. Now that we think perhaps Grace is the lady living two houses down the street in the home needing it's lawn trimmed we suffer from a national obesity epidemic though religiously practicing our yo yo diet and binge eating.

Computer Man used to get up before daylight to build a fire, do the morning chores, and cook breakfast before going off to a day of work. But that is so passé. Now we get up just in time to gulp down a cup of instant coffee or coffee set to brew automatically the night before while 'nuking' some instant pre-boxed meal stripped of all nutrition to eat while we over charge our metabolic system in front of the boob tube blasting 'The View' into our living rooms and appropriately raising blood pressures.

Man dare not sleep with his face in an open window any more regardless of whether he lives in the country or in the city. Therefore he can't hear the rain on the roof, the barn owl hooting off in the distance, the cry of a new born calf, the mating call of God's creatures that rule the night, the wind whistling through the old barn, nor the defining silence of the new fallen snow.

We used to sleep a little later on Sunday and get up with every action deliberate and geared toward getting us to God's house on time for the morning worship service. Now we repeat the last six days except we are content with getting our religious instruction watching some televangelist because 'The View' is not shown on Sunday television. And, why go to church when some greedy self serving prophet comes to us?

Nope! Life just ain't what it used to be. If you think it is, just open the door or pull out the chair for a lady and notice the looks you get if you manage to escape an outright attack. Listen... did you hear that? I thought I actually heard a child say, "please, excuse me, sir".