memories lit the corners of Jim's mind: 4th of July fireworks in early 20th Century America

Those of you who have been here before will notice that I've changed my blog template and header image for the second time in 2010. Hopefully, you will like it. I took this header photo of petroglyphs near Steens Mountain in Harney County, Oregon, and have had it in mind for my blog for quite awhile. With Blogger's new template designs to play with a change is now easier and the results are much more rewarding than in the past. With this switch I don't expect I'll change the look of Writerquake for some time to come. I'm quite at peace with it.

During the past week I've posted two photos taken by my uncle, James H. Swearingen, and mentioned that I would have a Fourth of July post via a clip from his tapes of lifetime memories of his mother and father that he made when he was an old man in 1982. His memory had not dimmed with age, nor had his oration skills weakened, and what he left for his family after his death three years later is a demonstrable act of family love and legacy. This Fourth of July post is the second clip of Uncle Jim's I've featured and if you are interested in hearing the first one click here. There you can also read how my husband and I remastered Jim's tapes onto four discs and reproduced for family members.

With thanks to my husband for figuring out how to force our software to work within the confines of this aging (and increasingly temperamental) computer, I wish him a Happy Fourth over a well-deserved three-day weekend. Happy Fourth of July to all of you in the U.S. Have a safe and happy holiday. I hope my readers in other countries will find this recorded memory interesting and festive as well.


This memory runs 4:05



My uncle's memories of his boyhood Fourth of July fireworks. James H. Swearingen, Jr. was born in Kansas City, MO in 1901, and the family moved to a property outside the city (mentioned at the end of the tape) in 1909 -- which places these memories in the first decade of the 20th Century.







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. . . shall be scrap and rust

 Limited from Chicago Poems (1916)
         ~by Carl Sandburg

    I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
          of the nation.
    Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air
          go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
    (All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men
          and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall
          pass to ashes.)
    I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he
          answers: "Omaha."


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crack - adjective
INFORMAL. excelling in skill or performance; first-rate: a crack shot, crack troops

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This is another of the photographs taken by my uncle, James H. Swearingen, in 1923 on the "family transcontinental trip by auto."  Please come back for an upcoming post featuring a Fourth of July piece from Uncle Jim's memories recorded on tape in 1982.

He sure was something special and I'm grateful I had more than a few opportunities to spend time with him before he passed to ashes . . .







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Horses, past and future?

The Horses by Edwin Muir

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listn, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.



Photo taken by my uncle, James H. Swearingen, in 1923 on "family transcontinental trip by auto"



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