| Back In Time..... Do you ever think about your life and how it used to be when you were growing up as a child....how simple things were...the little things you might have done better or events you wish you could live over again. I am sure everyone has these moments that they would like to go back and just savor the moment in time. The memories come back to me of times I wish I could re-visit or I could have put them in a time capsule to open up whenever I wanted to and maybe talk to the loved ones that are no longer with us or make a little change in that particular memory that could change the world or if not the world, at least our own lives. Below are a few of mine that I would like to share. |
Back In Time... I could revisit the many times my family and I went to Grandpa Bailey's house on MacArthur Drive in Rockingham and fished in his pond above the hill. Back In Time...that I could attend one of those old fashioned homecomings we use to have at the old Pee Dee church. Back In Time...when my Dad was alive so I could tell him how much I loved him - which I am sure those words were never spoken enough. Back In Time...when I could go back in time and enjoy living in our old house on Ellerbe Road and listening to tales spun from my Grandma Heavner - a lady that spoke her mind and loved to dip that snuff. Back In Time...and I could join my Uncle George Moody in a checker game, which I never did. Back In Time...it would have been me that ran across the road in front of our house on old Ellerbe Road to get that dictionary from Grandma years ago, instead of my younger brother Keith - he was hit by a car. I was older and that probably would never have happened. Back In Time...I could go back and play baseball with my childhood buddies when I was a kid in our neighborhood. Back In Time...there was a way to bring back all those fun times my family had every summer going to the Cherokee Mountains for vacation when I was a child and especially going to the outdoor drama Unto These Hills. Back In Time...I could revisit the many times me and my brother Randy and cousin Mike McKenzie and other neighborhood kids would go to the river hills and camp out on the rocks below Blewitt Falls dam. Back In Time...that first trip going to school in the first grade and getting on that schoolbus with friend Marcus Comer ....because it was so funny, his uncle was trying to get him on the bus and he threw his uncle's hat on the ground, stepped on it and squashed it flat! Back In Time...the many times my mom tried to help the Postons that lived up on Cartledge Creek Road by inviting their daughter Margie to go to church with us. Back In Time...all the times mom and dad took food and clothes down to Five Points to Bennett Napier, whom was mostly blind but he could play the keys off of a piano. Back In Time...going on camping trips with the Boys Club in our church. Back In Time...watching my Grandpa Bailey give a fire and hellstorm testimony in church right before he passed away. Back In Time...hanging out at Smith's Store up the street from my house with friends Jerry and Woody Jenkins, Bubba Smith, his sisters Daphne and Pally, cousin Judy Heavner and friend Jenny Sue Jenkins, Joe Brigman and others. Back In Time...working with my dad putting up chain link fences..I hated it most of the time but would like to go back and give him a little more help. I remember once we were putting up a fence around the Wallace Motel in Wallace, SC and my cousin Jimmy Heavner helped us. Dad had heart problems and he would have to literally laid down on the ground to get relief from angina pains. Back In Time...going with dad to a JP Stevens picnic at the Hannah Pickett plant in East Rockingham and listening to Arthur Smith and The Crackerjacks. Back In Time...when family friend Homer Benoist of Five Points Grocery would deliver groceries to the house after mom called in her list....unheard of these days. Back In Time...my uncle John Heavner came to the house and gave the boys (all 4 of us) haircuts on the backporch. Back In Time...when all the kids in the neighborhood used to play behind my house - where Beverly Hills sub-divn is now - we could stay out all day running around those woods - digging tunnels, playing cops and robbers, in winter skating on ice in the little branch behind our house. Back In Time...my 3 brothers and I would wrestle behind the house and go inside itching so bad it hurt. Back In Time...when I shot friend Murphy Comer between the eyes with a BB gun that I thought was empty...I would have made sure that gun was not loaded. Back In Time...when we used to walk home from school and stop off at John's Poolroom in Pee Dee. Back In Time...when we used to play baseball in the lot across from the Old Great Falls school, which is no longer there. Back In Time...eating lunch in the L J Bell grammar school and how I loved those peanut butter sandwiches and soup. Back In Time...playing marbles on the playground at that school, shooting them into a box or a can to see if you could win more. Back In Time...swimming in Ledbetter lake with my Dad, Mom and brothers. Back In Time...walking down the aisle during graduation, thinking you were king of the hill. Back In Time...family picnics at Indian Lake. Back In Time...learning to skate at the old Rockingham Skating rink. I guess I could go on and on with memories like these. But time stands still for noone. About the only way these memories will ever come back in living color is when we leave this old earth and join our loved ones in the great beyond. I sincerely hope that everyone that reads this is ready to meet their maker because you just never know when it is your time to enter into eternity. This is some of my memories of how it was growing up in Rockingham, North Carolina - a small textile town in the South in the 50s' and 60s'. |
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| So, as the Train of Life keeps chugging along, another page written of my Childhood Memories of.... Rockingham Remembered. |