Pondering the imponderable....

"After all is said 'n done, life turns out t'be pretty much a waiting game."

Beattyville, in mem’ry, at least, wuz a magical place for kids…The ‘It takes a village’ thing so popular a few years ago wuz spot-on for the kids of Beattyville back in that long ago day….There wuz a war going on ’n the parents must have been hardpressed to keep body ’n soul t’gether…many a house in those days had one or more stars hanging in a window (signifying sons or daughters in the military) ’n all too often, we’d see a house with a black bow which meant that someone had given all that was t’be given….’n there wuz also a lot of shortages…autos on blocks, their tires hanging on the wall of the garage…gas wuz rationed ’n hard to come by so people walked or rode the bus, often a combination wuz necessary in order to get to town to work or shop…there wudn’t a lot of toys or candy or soda pop, for that matter….

Somehow, at least in mem’ry, it don’t seem like it mattered very much…we had the streets ’n alleys of Beattyville to wander pretty much as we wished…plus we had ‘The River’ ’n we had ‘The Hills’…

The Ohio River wuz brown ’n wide ’n dangerous, of course, but paddlewheelers right out of Mark Twain churned the water...the sandy banks were lined with willows ’n water maples ’n occasional treasures t’be found by intrepid beachcombers ’n the green hills wudn’t just a backdrop…the lower slopes were covered with honeysuckle, rising to steep ridges whose rocky cliffs overlooked the village below ’n the river wide…

There were caves in those hills, dark ’n mysterious, with hidden passages ’n bottomless pits where danger lurked for small boys…but there wuz candles ’n torches ’n fear to conquer….

My brothers grandson, Noah, told his mother that ‘he felt sorry for Grandpa becuz he hadn’t had any toys to play with as a child, no video games, not even television.…’  

During WWII, there wuz even less…toys were hard to come by as manufacturers turned their skills to making stuff for ‘Our boys’ as they were called by those at home…

But, in Beattyville, kids were kids ’n imaginations worked overtime to turn sticks into horses or swords or the fancy of the moment…’n there were stories from the elders…from the grandparents living among us…stories of hidden treasure, river pirates ’n marauding Indians fighting over that ‘dark and bloody ground’ that became Kaintuck, between the Shawnee tribes north of the river ’n the Cherokee ’n Chickashaw tribes south of the Cumberland, The Great Meadow, they called it, so treasured that no tribe wuz able to take up any sort of permanent residence there…

Less than a half-mile downstream from Beattyville is the site of the first (far as we know anyway) ‘white’ settlement in Kentucky…the remains of a French ’n Indian fort…Back in the day, the French were pretty durn aggressive comin’ down from Canada, making their presence known on what was then, the western frontier….until the French ’n Indian War, that is (not quite sure why it wuz called that but there y’are)….anyway, after that war which the French lost ’n had to pull back to Canada (wonder what might’a been if the French from Canada had been able to join up with the French from Louisana)….ah well, pondering the imponderable is just one of the things that old people do well….