Dimon Kendrick-Holmes: Adventures in real America
Hope you had a good holiday season. Hope you got some time to think.
I got some time to think. As I told you last week, we drove to West Tennessee for Christmas and stayed in a log cabin with all the modern amenities except television.
Bess' father, the owner, had even declared a moratorium on personal electronic devices, with one exception: You could use your phone for the old-fashioned reason of calling and talking to someone.
It's amazing how quiet the world is without television, or how many interesting and constructive thoughts you can think when you're not staring at a tiny flashing screen and furiously typing and swiping at it.
In fact, it got so quiet a couple of days before Christmas that we could actually hear somebody about a half a mile away hit a cow up on the county highway. We went up to assess the situation.
The woman who hit the cow had totaled her small SUV but she was OK. She called 911, and the ambulance that arrived happened to be driven by her husband. We also got to meet local law enforcement, farmers and other assorted rural neighbors. We even got to see a cow put down, Old-Yeller style.
It made me think of a quote I memorized in military intelligence school in Arizona when I was supposed to be memorizing the Soviet order of battle and weapons ranges and other important stuff.
Along with five of my classmates, I was part of the elite SABR unit, which in our case stood for Smart Aleck Back Row. (We substituted another word for "aleck.") When class got boring, especially after lunch, we would do things to keep everyone awake. One of these included reciting in unison this gem from Dan Quayle, who was vice-president at the time and quite popular with the media:
"Rural America. It's where I come from. We always refer to ourselves as 'Real America.' Rural America. Real America. Real, real America."
West Tennessee is definitely real America, and maybe even real, real America.
On Christmas Eve, at 5:30 a.m., I remembered that my father-in-law attends a men's gathering every Wednesday morning called the Tell Others Prayer Breakfast. I remembered because he had just shaken awake me and my three sons and told us to go with him.
After what I thought at that moment, I needed to go to prayer breakfast. And so I did, and so did my sons. We didn't have much of a choice.
But as usual it was worth it.
The best part is always drinking coffee with the regulars (average age: 85) before the devotion and prayers.
One time, the talk turned to World War II, and four of the men realized they'd all fought on Okinawa at the same time. They'd grown up together, gone their separate ways, returned and settled down after the war, and it had just never come up.
Things like that happen
all the time in rural America -- or anywhere in America, really -- if you're smart enough to put down your smart phone and pay attention.
I plan to do more of that in 2015.
Happy New Year.
Dimon Kendrick-Holmes, executive editor, dkholmes@ledger-enquirer.com
This story was originally published January 2, 2015 at 10:23 PM.