Dwain Walden

It’s funny how sometimes a single comment will spur a cornucopia of thoughts about past experiences.

And so I’m listening to the Florida State vs. Maryland game on my radio and the announcer tells me that the Seminoles have the ball and “they are moving left to right” on my radio.

My first thought was, that’s not necessarily so. If I’m sitting behind my radio it would be the opposite.

And this took me into the past when indeed we often sat “around” the radio. Specifically, we sat around it as we shelled butter beans on the back porch and listened to the Milwaukee Braves.

Among my earliest memories is an old RCA radio that sat on an apple crate. I’m not really sure why we would sit around the radio and watch it as though keeping an eye on that old brown box allowed us to interact more than if we had our backs to it.

And I recall vividly that Saturday morning when I came running through the living room and got my feet tangled in the radio power cord. The casing was smashed to smithereens and life was in slow motion for a few seconds. For the moment my whole world fell into the pit of stomach where it sloshed like a ringer washing machine. The bile began rising into my throat. It was like I had accidentally shot old Tuffy, our squirrel dog.

When the debris had settlled, Hank Williams was still singing “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It.” And so did our radio. I picked up the skeleton and sat it back on the apple crate. I had always wondered what it looked like on the inside. The tubes were still glowing orange, well insulated with little dust bunnies that had accumulated over the years. Even in its naked state, that old radio continued to link our farm house at night to WCKY in Cincinnati, WWL in New Orleans and WSM in Nashville. And of course, to Wolf Man Jack somewhere down on the Mexican border.

I think maybe that was when I first learned the essence of not judging the content by the container. Since then I have heard the analogy adjusted for many occasions: “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover.” “Beauty is only skin deep.” “Clothes don’t make a man.” And from the movie “The Dirty Dozen,” “they’re pretty, but can they fight.”

While I remember that morning when I splattered our radio, I do not remember the day we replaced it. I guess trauma has greater shelf life.

Now back to the radio announcer, I fully understand what he was trying to tell me because most people listening via radio probably were in their cars. So if I had been behind my radio in that venue, I would have been riding on the hood … which also takes me back to some other memories like when we used to ride on the front fenders of the pickup traveling from one tobacco field to the next. But that was when we actually had fenders and they were made of heavy steel. If one fell off on your foot, it would hurt.

By the way, did you know that whether a team has gained a first down or not depends on where the officials spot the ball? Or that a missed field goal could determine the outcome of the game? And it doesn’t matter whether they are moving left or right on your radio. Once I tried “laying hands” on that radio, but the Braves lost anyway.

(DwainWalden is editor/publisher of The Moultrie Observer. e-mail: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com)