Don't Blink

One of my wife’s least favorite country singers is Kenny Chesney. I don’t much care about his career….but he did release a song once that totally applied to my recent visit back to Bethalto.

Don’t blink.

The premise of the song is: Life races by….so don’t blink….or you will miss significant and meaningful stuff.

It has been almost nine years since I set sail for Fairfield to accept the presidency of Frontier Community College. Those Fairfield years flew by and now I celebrate my third year in Texas. But always and continually I think about Bethalto. I did 44 years there and no one can recite a complete family tree of multiple generations of Bethaltonians better than me as long as you don’t include Bob Kallal.

Carol dropped me off as she went to her hometown and I stayed with my mother in the old homestead. I slept in the same bedroom in the same bed. I call it the “bully bully” bed because you are always fighting to get out of the sunken middle. Sort of like Teddy Roosevelt trying to get his men up San Juan Hill.

I got out…and walked around town. I stood at the corner of Old Bethalto Road and Second Street where I was a patrol boy in 1968. I walked the stretch of sidewalk that was paid for by townsfolk back in the 1950s so students could walk from downtown out to the then high school. Ahhh, the names…..Bob Klein, Erwin Plegge, Roy Woods, and a few dozen references to the Bethalto Rotary Club.

You know, I once went eleven years with perfect attendance to Bethalto Rotary. Loved it. Sang the song “Smile” with my friends every Thursday night at the assisted living facility out on Morland Road. I was so proud to be a colleague of Plegge, Aghetta, Klein, Gerald Bourland, Greg Wigton and Lowell Brown.

Now they meet in the morning in Cottage Hills. So much for tradition. Don’t blink.

I went to my nephew Sam Watson’s graduation at CMHS and remembered back 35 years to my graduation day. My uncle, Clyde Jones, handed me the diploma. My great-grand mother, Kate Hodge, was standing in the back. She was in her 90s.

We went out to a farm in Meadowbrook….Jerry Kruckeburg’s farm…and I watched most of the folks who were in the National Honor Society (not me) flirt with alcohol poisoning. You know who you are. And at least one of you got drunk….stripped….and danced all natural around the bon-fire.

As I watched the kids file to get their sheepskin in 2010, I noticed that there were no longer children of my classmates graduating. It had now become obvious that I had lived through the next evolution of this game……..it was my contemporaries’ grandkids going through the line.

Before I left, I had the occasion to hear a young man discuss some Bethalto political issues. You see, he was on the city council and knew the pressing issues. I listened from the next room and wondered….Was I that passionate when I was on the city council? Or was I just jealous that he was so connected now and I was not. He knew the dirt. I didn’t.

Don’t blink. Chesney says it best when it croons…..

“So I've been tryin' ta slow it down
I've been tryin' ta take it in
In this here today, gone tomorrow world we're livin' in.”

Not bad advice.

There’s no living in the past….but sometimes I wish I could just escape there for a few hours to see my friends and once again feel the love of a little town on the edge of the prairie where I was nothing more than Louie Dreith’s son….working on perfecting a left-handed lay-up….and dreaming of someday having kids follow in my footsteps in my town….a town that no longer holds my fascination….

Don’t blink.