Life’s American Anthem

I hope you enjoy this pictorial spread as much as I enjoy owning the 50th Anniversary of Life Magazine published in 1986.

It is a really nice coincidence to stumble upon my own box of 1986 memorabilia when looking at it recently.  There is a really interesting story in that little white house with the red barn behind my shoulder.  In the distance you will see the foothills of the Ozarks across a seascape of rice and soybean fields flattened by thousands of years of being worn smooth by the Gulf of Mexico which crept right up to Crowley’s Ridge.  Left a lot of nutritious carcasses on that alluvial plain.  Good cropland, if you can get it.  Most can’t.  And wouldn’t know what to do with it if they did.

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/byways/byways/2588/maps

But, I’d been home on leave for a few days and was about to leave for better parts of the world and discovered I was blocked from exiting.  My father had suggested this photo, asking when would be a good time.  I’d avoided him, having spent my entire childhood standing in odd places and pointing to nonexistent prompts for the right expression to make his photo tell just the story he wanted to tell.  I remember telling my mother I was an adult and he could not just make me go pose for one of his photos.

But, of course he could.  He was Dad.  I tossed my keys onto the black hood he insisted belonged on the car and, therefore, in the photo and hopped up there like a good daughter. (a good photographer might have eliminated that black hood, which matched ONLY the black trunk my father insisted on putting on the blue car from the black 1959 Ford it replaced.  Because the floorboards had holes and my mother refused to let him nail boards to prevent us from dropping through.  He found a new 1959 Ford with a dented hood and swapped the hood and trunk both.  He liked the contrast.)  A better daughter might have done so without grumbling.

I was irritated. Look at my face.  Haha… he told me it would just be a moment or two, then he kept fiddling with where he was standing and the exposure.  He refused to use the automatic cameras on the market which allowed anyone to take a decent photo.  But, once there, on that hood, I settled into lifelong routine of looking up to smile when Dad said “…and now.”

On the back, which I will not show you since it has a personal message to me, it was titled “Oh the Places You Will Go!”

I think it was well worth the ten dollars I paid the proprietor of the junk store for a box of old books.  About halfway down, this Life Magazine and a couple other interesting magazine collectibles in various “conditions” had been stored in some old newspaper sheets.  I gave away some things, hopefully to someone has a different story to tell.

And, I hope it stays gone because I’ve got so much to unpack I don’t want it back. I’m fairly busy out here in the hills of Missouri, raising a few goats, bunnies and chickens.  And big white dogs.

But, today, I thought I’d see if I couldn’t take a few minutes to upload this spread from the magazine.  I hope I can post a simple little story here once in a while about what is going on out here in this part of the world.  If not?  I won’t.

We may not be Who’s out in Whoville, but we are suspicious of both donkeys and elephants out here.  And we like to watch from a distance until we know what the score is.

Enjoy my good fortune at finding that magazine in that old dusty box.

This is in what I would judge Fair to Good condition.  I put it into acid free tissue to keep it clean.  No flatbed scanners for this treasure.  Only crappy flash photos.

When my log home was built, I became friends with the Mennonite family who built the house.  I spent the night one night and this is what breakfast kind of looked like.  But it smelled way better.

No words can possible explain what this mother is doing with her children.  None.  Bed coverings once more more than electric blankets.

True elegance!

I could not even begin to give this image enough meaning to make it worth your time to read instead of just look at the detail and the life in the image.

This just looks better than cubicle life to me.  But, that’s me.

Report card day!  Oh, and Ford does indeed make a quality truck, Dad.  I wish I had that old car now.

The hairstyles speak for themselves.  At least they do for me.

I hope you enjoyed my good luck find in that ten dollar box of dusty old books and magazines.

But, if you think I did NOT know it was in there when I went to ask the owner about the desk, you need to think again.  I’d made an assessment of what was in that box a few weeks earlier when I’d taken it from under the desk to make sure the construction had not been marred on that desk I was determined to buy.   I knew the extra ten bucks the manager proposed was more than fair, considering.  The guy had no idea what I walked out of there with in that box. But, I did.  And I was whistling.

Coyote is a clever bargain hunter.  Beep Beep.

And soon, I’ll tell  you that one if you want to hear.

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