We’re All Vagabonds Now and my Father Would Disapprove

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 6/20/21

            No one ever loved their parents more than I loved mine. Both of them worked incredibly hard, my father loving the fields he labored in and my mother preferring the fields with him over housework and cooking. Growing up, I saw my older sisters doing most of the housework while our mother, when not battling kidney stones, was in the fields or huge gardens.

            My father had a high school education which at the time of his graduation in 1910 meant only 11 years of study. The extension to 12 years would come a few years later. My mother made it through the seventh grade. She could read but always had a problem with words that were beyond the “junior high” level. More than once she handed me a magazine or a newspaper to ask how to pronounce a word. More than once she gave up and said, “Why don’t you just read it to me?”

Those times and moments were as precious to me then as they are in my memory now. Teen culture was coming into its own at the time which was the late 1950s. The Four Aces and Perry Como were waning. Elvis and Little Richard were taking over. I enjoyed them all but I was never cool and didn’t want to be. My dear, aging parents who struggled persistently and nobly were my anchor. President Eisenhower was smiling down on the nation and his successor, the young and cultured JFK, afforded the nation an example of class and self-respect.

But something was happening, something that continues to this day if in fact it has not been completed. I’m referring to the loss, or should I say the abandonment, of the cultured life. I know, the very words “the cultured life” sound uppity and pretentious. They remind us perhaps of royalty and social snobbery. But there are other perceptions.

Throughout human history culture has referred to entire civilizations such as Western culture. Today we often speak of sub-cultures such as Southern culture or the drug culture. Pro-lifers often refer to the abortion industry as a culture of death. In short, the word is used widely and differently.

In spite of their station in life my parents qualified for placement with those who sought and lived a cultured life. I base this claim on the definition of culture supplied by the 19^th century British writer Matthew Arnold who still maintains his place in English literature textbooks. Arnold defined culture as an ideal, that being “the best which has been thought and said.” Culture, Arnold asserted, “has its origins in the love and study of perfection.”

 Both of my parents had standards for language, dress, and conversation. You don’t use ugly words. You dress your best and “never go to town looking like a hank” (whatever that word meant).  Also, in conversation you “never talk about people.” That meant don’t gossip or speak unkindly of others.

My father’s bent for perfection extended to the sharpening of hoes, the storing of tools, the straight placement of anything on the mantle, the wearing of ties and “Sunday pants” to church even in the hottest of summers, and enough “hair oil” to control the most stubborn head of hair. My mother was cultured in a different way. Her personal culture personified kindness,  the deepest, unconditional love for her children, and the expert use of the switch whenever it was needed. Neither of my parents gave the word culture a thought and probably never heard of Matthew Arnold, but they still honored his claim that anyone who says he is cultured certainly is not.

The decline of culture in America today is serious. The same is true of Europe. This is not true, we are told, of Asian nations. But here in our homeland, men’s hairy legs and flip-flops are as common in church as white shirts were in 1955. Use of filthy language grows by the day. Social media and politics have no rules at all. We’re all doing that which seems right unto ourselves, including dressing like we’re homeless vagabonds. Where I grew up even the poorest of the poor had more self-respect.

And why does this matter? It matters because like it or not, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” John Donne was referring to humanity, not government.

Cancel culture is another term we’re using these days. Seems to me culture itself is being canceled, at least the kind that my mother and father pursued. Father’s Day is a good time to start canceling our carelessness and engaging in some profitable nostalgia. We would all be happier.

 

Roger Hines

6/14/21