Sunday Jaunts with the Family. (original) (raw)

As a child, I can remember the excitement I experienced when on a Sunday morning in summer my mother would say to my father, �Roy, it�s time we visited my brother.� Or perhaps she would announce that we ought to visit a family who had once lived on a farm near ours but had since moved to another community close by. I cannot remember my father ever suggesting one of these visits, not even to visit one of his brothers or sisters, several of whom lived short distances away. But he never said, �I would rather not� to my mother, who herself did not drive. Of course, these excursions included my younger brother and me.

On these short trips we would often take roads unfamiliar to my brother and me. Most of the roads were narrow dirt roads in either Hopkins or Franklin County. Sometimes overhanging branches would scrape the top of our car, or a small boulder in the road might damage the car�s oil pan. Some of the wooden bridges were in disprepair and probably should have been condemned.

The road we took one Sunday when I was eight or ten led to a farmhouse near Quitmanwhere Uncle Louie, my mother�s brother, and Aunt Lexie lived. After my uncle contracted rheumatoid arthritis, he lived with his son�s family.

After the noon meal, my brother, my father and I accompanied Uncle Louie to the site of a collapsed bridge on Lake Fork, a tributary of the Sabine River. I had seen rusty metal many times before, but I had never seen as much corrosion on a structure before.

We stood on the bank below the bridge and stared up at the girders. I imagined the look of the bridge when it was new and usable.

If there was an alternate route to our destination that allowed us to take a highway, my brother and I would beg my father to take that route. We two especially liked the highway to Winnsboro, a town south of our farm, because there were two or three steep hills. My parents preferred the dirt road because it passed the houses of several people they had gone to school with or had met at square dances. But occasionally Daddy would take us to Winnsboro on the paved road. An exciting part about the trip on the highway was that Daddy would shift the gear stick of the �38 Chevy to neutral and we would coast down the steepest hill.

The only more enjoyable activity on Sunday afternoons than visiting a different place was seeing a matinee at the picture show. These opportunities were rare. One Sunday afternoon when I was ten years old, my parents decided to drive to Paris, some forty miles from our house. They invited my newly married sister and her husband to go along. When we drove through the courthouse square in Mt. Vernon on our way to Paris, I read on the marquee of the Joy Theatre that Sergeant York, with Gary Cooper, was the film featured that afternoon.

�Mamma,� I called out, as my brother-in-law turned the car away from the square and headed north to Paris, �let me get out. I wanna see the movie. You all can pick me up on your way back from Paris.�

My mother did not think my plan was at all feasible, so I rode with the others to the courthousesquare at Paris, noticing the USO Building. Soldiers came to the canteen when they were on leave from Camp Maxey, a WWIItraining camp a few miles north of Paris. We drove to the entrance to Camp Maxey; then we turned around and drove back home. I never had a chance to see Gary Cooper as the Tennessee hero.

� Robert G. Cowser

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