I was having lunch with a dear friend not too long ago. In the course of conversation, the phrase “pearl clutchers” came up. I am always intrigued with a phrase that I have never heard, and this one just tickled my fancy.
It did not bother me one bit to ask what the term meant. My friend informed me it was the gesture that some people make when they hear something unbelievable. The hand is raised in exaggerated amazement or disbelief to the neck, just where the knot in a strand of pearls would be if a woman was wearing it.

It was January of his fourth grade year. Charlie was playing quietly in his bedroom, just he and his mother at home.
He heard his father come home about 9:00 p.m. Charlie knew from the amount of noise his father was making that he was either drunk or well on the way. Charlie had learned over the years that when his father was sober that Charlie was to be seen and not heard. Charlie also knew when his father was “on the sauce” that Charlie could most likely make all the noise he wanted.

I wrote last week about a class I took as an undergraduate at Lincoln Memorial University during Winter Quarter 1985 called In Search of Self. Though I might have trouble finding things on my desk that I placed there yesterday, I went straight to the file cabinet at home and found the notebook I kept in that class thirty-nine years ago.

Remember some of those things we had to do in school that we have never had to do since? I went to college, majored in English, taught in public school and community college and have worked in the Union County Public Schools for many years, but never since high school have I had to conjugate a verb or diagram a sentence. I’m sure that you, Dear Reader, can remember many other things you had to do in school that you have never used elsewhere in life.

There is a wonderful episode of The Twilight Zone that features a hunter portrayed by the late Arthur Hunicutt. The hunter takes his dog and goes hunting, but both drown. The story relates how the hunter and his faithful dog make their journey to the hereafter. The farmer is almost lured by trickery into entering hell (which the gatekeeper tries to disguise as Heaven). The gatekeeper tells the farmer that dogs are not allowed in Heaven, so the hunter says he’ll just keep going down the road. A little further the farmer indeed finds Heaven, to which his dog is also welcome.

Lorrie Morgan once did an excellent remake of an old George Jones song “A Picture of Me Without You”. The song asked the listener to imagine several things.
Imagine with me, Dear Reader, an America:

With only 48 states;
When gasoline cost anywhere from 13 to 25 cents per gallon;
When alcohol had been illegal for four years;
When the following products were available for the very first time—
Wheaties cereal;
Dum Dum “suckers” (lollipops);
Iodized table salt;
Kleenex facial tissues;
Locking pliers;
Marlboro cigarettes.

Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see,
and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein,
and ye shall find rest for your souls.
But they said, We will not walk therein. (Jeremiah 6:16 KJV)

The lines are fallen to me in pleasant places;
yea, I have a goodly heritage. (Psalm 16:6 KJV)

I went with my nephew to Subway for lunch yesterday. Subways have a distinctive smell that gets into my nostrils while I eat and seems to stay with me the rest of the day. I have been told this is the smell of the yeast in the bread.

I received an email from a friend last week with the subject line “Anosognosia.” Wouldn’t that be a wonderful word for the National Spelling Bee? The text began, “This is a big word which few can define and fewer use.” Define and use? Most of us would be happy just to be able to pronounce it!

Someone recently stated: “We’re churning out a generation of poorly educated people with no skill, no ambition, no guidance, and no realistic expectations of what it means to go to work.”
In the mid-1940s one Union County teacher in a rural two-room school estimated that he expected 20% of his students to go on to high school. This was higher than a colleague who expected that only about 8% of her elementary students would go on to high school. Interestingly, those teachers had “length[s] of term [of employment] expected” at eight months, one with a monthly salary of $83.