Back When Water Came From a Hose and Stories Came From Grandpa

By Mark Morgan

www.markmorganbooks.com

I got to thinkin’ the other day about how tough our generation must’ve been, and we didn’t even know it at the time. We drank water out of a garden hose that had been layin’ in the yard since Easter, knew thirty phone numbers by heart, and sat around fires listenin’ to stories that got bigger every year whether they needed to or not.

And somehow, we survived all of it.

Kids today drink bottled water with labels that sound like a science project. “Glacier melt.” “Electrolytes.” “Mineral enhanced.” We didn’t have none of that. We had a green rubber hose hooked to a rusty spigot, and that water tasted like a hot penny and a lawn mower tire, and we thought it was the finest drink on earth.

You didn’t even turn the water on first. You just grabbed the hose and went to drinkin’, and that first mouthful would be hotter than a screen door in August. You’d jump back like you’d been bit by a copperhead, then go right back for more because you were that thirsty.

If hose water didn’t kill us, I figure not much else is going to.

Back then we played outside till dark, and the only way your parents could find you was to either holler your full name across three pastures or call somebody’s house where they thought you might be. And we knew everybody’s phone number by heart too. Grandma’s number, your best friend’s number, the number to the store, the number to the school, and probably the number to somebody you didn’t even like but might need someday.

Now I don’t know nobody’s number, including my own. My phone knows everybody. If I lose that phone, I won’t know how to contact my own family unless I run into them at Harps.

We used to remember phone numbers like we remember song lyrics. Now we remember passwords that look like somebody dropped a box of Scrabble tiles down the stairs.

And the other thing we used to do that nobody does much anymore is sit around fires and tell stories. Not important stories. Mostly stories that started with, “This ain’t no lie,” which meant it probably was.

Somebody would tell about the biggest fish they ever caught, and by the time that story got told five years in a row, that fish was big enough to have its own zip code. Another fella would tell about a deer he saw once that was so big it walked through the woods and knocked bark off trees just by lookin’ at ‘em.

We didn’t care if the stories were true. The fun was in the tellin’.

Now everybody sits in the same room and nobody talks because everybody’s got earbuds in listenin’ to somebody from New York tell ‘em how to live their life. We used to get advice from a man sittin’ on an upside-down bucket eatin’ crackers and drinkin’ coffee that had been reheated three times, and he probably knew more than most of them podcasts put together.

I reckon we had less back then, but we sure seemed to have more time. More talkin’, more laughin’, more sittin’ around doin’ nothin’ that turned out to be the most important somethin’ we ever did.

We didn’t know we were makin’ memories. We just thought we were passin’ time.

Turns out we were doin’ both.

The older I get, the more I realize we didn’t grow up poor or bored or missin’ out on anything. We were rich in ways that don’t fit in a bank and don’t need a password.

We had hose water, memorized phone numbers, and stories told around a fire, and I’m startin’ to think that was about all a person really needed.

And if you ask me, a life where you laugh a lot, remember your friends’ phone numbers, and know how to drink out of a garden hose without drowning is a life that turned out just fine.

Moral of the story:We thought we were just kids passin’ time, but we were actually livin’ the kind of life people spend the rest of their lives wishin’ they could go back to.