Sometimes my muse takes me back to earlier days, growing-up times.
In the 40s and 50s things were so different, they appeared
in our lives’ rear-view mirrors as days of wonder:
- Homes with one phone – wired to the wall!
- Days when radios were pieces of furniture.
- Summers when kids could roam dawn-to-dusk outdoors unsupervised and completely safe.
- Days when vehicles were driven with civility and not like Nascar contenders.
We spoke differently, too. Remembering the accent of my high
school principal brings this to mind. He spoke with what I called a Middle
Virginia accent. Yes, about was “abowt.” Great was “gret.”
And weren’t those the days?
Old ladies inserted a “y” after consonants in certain
socially acceptable words. Garden became “Gyaden.” Car was “Cyah.” And most
all A’s were broad.
Yes, indeed those were the days.
Eastwardly, accents became classic Tidewater – a lot like
Middle but with their own personalities. If you were from Norfolk, for example,
it was Náwfok. In
fact, that’s how you can tell a native of Norfolk from the rest of us, even some
of these days
I spent enough time in Tidewater to pick that up. I can
still lay a credible “Nawfok” on you too. And will sometimes just to see if you
get it.
Once, here in Richmond at the beginning of a class on
nonfiction writing, we all participated in an “ice-breaker” to introduce
ourselves to the other eleven in the class. We do things like that these days,
we do.
It worked this way: each of us had to tell the class three
things about ourselves, only one of which was true. The class then had to
choose the one that was true.
Get a bunch of whacky writers together, and you had some interesting
times together.
These were my three:
- I once had a date with Larry King’s first ex-wife.
- I was born in “Nawfok,” Virginia.
- I used to drive a Porsche 356C.
Of course, there was a woman there who was born and raised
in Norfolk who grinned as she smugly chose Number Two. “I’d know that accent anywhere,”
she said.
But I fooled them all – It was Number One!
And those were the days, too.
