My friends call it “Pickin’ and grinnin’.” I don’t pick, I just grin as I listen to the soothing sound of non-electric guitars, mandolins and harpsichords, playing mountain music. Listening to the gentle strumming and waltz-like rhythm, my tension drains away.
I am amazed that I enjoy it. I the late ’60s when I was a teenager, my father had a record of the Millie Pace Trio. He played “I’ll fly away” every morning.
At 6 in the morning I hated Millie’s wailing, “Some glad morning when this life is o’er, I’ll flay away. To a life on God’s eternal shore, I’ll fly away.”
I had a few ideas of ways I could help he get there. I thought it was too much to listen to her twangy high-pitched voice screeching like fingernails on the blackboard.
Then my father declared that it was too much for us to be watching so much TV. So he disconnected the TV and hid the detachable cord where we five teenagers could not find it.
I didn’t get mad. I got even. If our TV was too much, I knew something else around that house that was too much.
I hid the Millie Pace trio where he wouldn’t find’em – right behind the TV where the cord had been. To get the record back, all he had to do was take the cord out of hiding, go to reconnect it and he would find his record.
The next couple of weeks the house was silent in the morning and evening. No “I Love Lucy” re-runs in the afternoon. No Millie Pace reruns in the morning. I didn’t particularly miss the reruns, but evenings without first runs of sitcoms now seen on Nick at Nite was just too much.
I’m not really sure what ended our stand-off. Maybe he wanted to watch a ball game. Anyway one Sunday afternoon, he pulled the cord out from under the cushions of the couch, and I retrieved the cardboard record holder with Millie’s picture and record from behind the RV.
Millie’s wails once again woke us in the morning, except not as often. We cut back on watching TV a little, but it was the Olympics with the first time the pole vaulters flopped after clearing the bar. It was the first time Nixon was sworn into office, before he totally flopped and the first time man landed — thank goodness without any flops — on the moon.
We had to keep up on these earth shaking events — as well a keep on the cutting edge of current sitcoms.
I didn’t realize how much I remembered until recently. For sure not the TV shows. The few reruns I do see are like new (must have been the ones I missed when the TV cord was gone.) I have no idea who won anything at the Olympics. I was too young to vote, so for me the election was only an interruption in my TV shows.
Although I vaguely remember “One small step …” when man walked on the moon for the first time, I clearly remember the announcer Walter Cronkite holding his breath in fear as the spaceship landed.
Best of all, I remember the words that Millie Pace sang every morning as I tried to block her out by burrowing under the blankets. When we attend a “Pickin’ and grinning” I need no help remembering the words to sing along. And I don’t need any blankets to hide under either. I enjoy every minute of it including, “I’ll fly away.”