By Jim Dickson
There was a time in America when baseball was thought to be “The Great American Pastime,” and at the risk of having baseball fans storm my house with torches and pitchforks, I am going to differ.
I think that the once great art of porch sitting was America’s favorite pastime. In the days before air conditioning and television, if you were lucky you had a front porch, and on that front porch were porch rockers. And when the heat of the day was done and the cool of the evening was at hand everyone moved to the rockers on the front porch.
If you were extra lucky you had porch fans which cool things down and keep the bugs at bay. This was the time of the day when little kids sat and listened to the stories that their grandparents told about when they were young and rode a horse to school, held in a one-room schoolhouse with 15 other kids of all ages. There was no electricity, or refrigerators, and they had to do their school work by the light of a kerosene lamp, and you sat there thinking no one can be that old.
If your house was in a city on the street, people would walk by on the sidewalk and say, “Hello, how are you doing? I saw Johnnie hit a home run in the Little League game last night and I bet you were so proud. How is your mother getting along with her new glasses? I hope she is able to see well enough to read. I know that she has missed that. I hope that your son Bill doesn’t have to go to Korea. It seems like that is getting pretty ugly.” The events and the news of the day were passed on and discussed, and everyone knew everyone.
For those people who didn’t have a front porch, and sometimes those who did, there was the front lawn, and on the front lawn there were “lawn chairs.” Lawn chairs were usually made from metal with a metal seat and a metal back mounted on two metal tubes that would sort of rock back and forth. They were painted green, red, and sometimes orange.
On cool summer nights, everyone would get out of the house and sit on the lawn and look up at the dark back sky that was so full of stars that it hurt your eyes to look at them. Your uncle Bill who knew almost everything would point out the Big Dipper, The Little Dipper, other constellations, and planets, and tell you stories about his adventures.
Your mother would have a big pitcher of lemonade and maybe some homemade peanut butter cookies. When you were a little older, you would end the evening by “camping out” on the lawn with an old bed sheet for a tent and a Boy Scout bed roll to keep you warm, going to sleep with your head full of Uncle Bill’s stories.
That all came to an end with the advent of air conditioning and television. Don’t get me wrong. I am all in favor of being cool and having 500 streaming channels to watch, because I am now not much interested in sleeping out in a Boy Scout bed roll in a tent made from an old sheet. But I know this, kids today are missing out on something very special, and people who are inside their houses watching TV in cool air conditioned comfort are missing out on the best part of living in a community of friends.
I am happy to say that we have a great front porch with porch rockers where I read my morning newspaper and wave at my neighbors as they pass by. We also have a wonderful screened in back porch where we have dinner and watch the birds and the critters, and at that point, I don’t miss the A/C or the nightly news at all. We are lucky people!
We live in a complicated world today, but the world has always been complicated. And we have some fences that need mending in this country. Maybe what we need is to sit on the porch and appreciate the world and the friends that we have. Could it be just that simple?
Born, raised and educated in the Southwest, Jim Dickson served in the U.S. Navy Reserve in Vietnam before a 35-year business career. Retired to St. Helena Island, Dickson and his wife are fiscally conservative, socially moderate and active in Republican politics, though they may not always agree with Republicans. Having lived around the country and traveled around the world, Dickson believes that the United States truly is the land of opportunity.
