They don't want to keep up. They want to look back. My roommate
has that attitude, and I try to tell her not to give up, to face
the present, to look to the future. It's all right to remember
bygone days with a grain or two of nostalgia, but there's no need
living in the past.
I was doing just that-remembering bygone days-while I waited
for the choir to finish its anthem. When I was a little girl in
Arkansas, in the section of low Ouachita hills that lies between
the Mississippi River and the Red, our manner was slow and
simple, down to earth as gully dirt. The horse-and-buggy days
were already fading away, but we didn't sense it. The swift pace
that was to come, virtually overnight, was still undreamed of.
There were not many automobiles, no superhighways, no jets, and
no spacecraft. In south Arkansas, the fastest thing on wings was
a thieving chicken hawk, and anything in the sky bigger than a
buzzard was referred to as a "flying machine."
There seemed to be fewer problems then. Nobody had yet
thought to build nursing homes and institutions for this, that,
and every other kind of person with a complaint.
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