{"id":135678,"date":"2024-01-03T18:45:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-04T00:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=135678"},"modified":"2024-01-03T16:17:49","modified_gmt":"2024-01-03T22:17:49","slug":"tlv-2023-2024-winter-reading-issue-remembrance-by-stephen-humphries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/tlv-2023-2024-winter-reading-issue-remembrance-by-stephen-humphries\/","title":{"rendered":"TLV 2023\u20132024 Winter Reading Issue: \u201cRemembrance\u201d by Stephen Humphries"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When I was a boy my grandmother told me I was just born an old man. Of course grandmothers don\u2019t lie, so I knew it had to be true, but I didn\u2019t understand it then. Now, a grown man\u2014at seventy, even an old man\u2014though not yet having achieved my grandmother\u2019s wisdom, I still don\u2019t know what she meant or why she said it. Maybe she said it because I\u2019ve always liked old things\u2014drafty old houses, decrepit barns, silent dusty churches, and cemeteries in the dead of winter. I like musty old books, records that go round and round on a record player, and old TV shows that held true to the verities of love and honor, sacrifice and duty, where the good guy always wins, but only after learning a lesson. I like doing many things the old way\u2014pouring cornbread batter into bacon grease sizzling in a cast iron skillet, hand cranking a freezer of fresh peach ice cream, fishing for bream or perch from the pond bank with a cane pole. I sit surrounded by modern inventions\u2014a computer, a laptop, a tablet (definitely NOT my grandmother\u2019s letter writing tablet), a cell phone\u2014all waiting to record my thoughts as ones and zeroes on unimaginably small transistors. I prefer my fountain pen. It may stain my fingers with ink, but it connects them to the paper (itself an ancient invention), paper that then touches someone else\u2019s hands.
I like remembering. I can\u2019t help but wonder if\u2014even hope that\u2014by remembering we are remembered, that remembering solidifies the fluid past. I wanted to say that remembering keeps the past alive, but even educated Yankees know Faulkner\u2019s words: The past is never dead. It\u2019s not even past. For them and perhaps many others those words represent an interesting intellectual exercise, but Southerners, especially Mississippians, know those words to be true. We know that behind the shimmer of an August afternoon, all that was still is, that beneath autumn\u2019s leaves and winter\u2019s frost, the past awaits, unsummoned,ready to burst forth. It\u2019s not so much remembering in fresh growth when spring comes.
Some people say that I remember too much, that I live too much in the past. To them I quote the words of another poet, not a decadent Southern gentleman but a New York Jew. Preserve your memories. They\u2019re all that\u2019s left you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Photo courtesy of Stephen Humphries. Watercolor, artist unknown.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was a boy my grandmother told me I was just born an old man. Of course<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238,"featured_media":135575,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[9714,21527,3,7570],"class_list":["post-135678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-writing","tag-remembrance","tag-stephen-humphries","tag-the-local-voice","tag-winter-reading-issue"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/TLV-Cover-433-WRI-WEB-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1536&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135678"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135681,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135678\/revisions\/135681"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}