Da fountin of yoot

Years ago I thought I'd try to write a novel in dialect.. a hefty undertaking for any writer especially one who wasn't literate enough to write anything.  Yeah so the Henry Higgins thing  in G.B. Shaw's Pygmalion was quite an inspiration. I tried like bloody hell to merely imitate her dialect and thought I'd gotten it down very well.  The trouble is that my own odd mixture of dialects kept bumping into each other on their way to the page.  Even worse was my education. When I was in high school the academic track kids were not allowed to take keyboarding or auto shop.. we were locked into art and music.  OK so you sacrifice a little here and there and deal with it.  I got to take calculus and chemistry which have had their own positive benefits in my life but I'd sure like to be able to type without hunting and pecking and so dear reader (if there be one) mistakes in my writing are not necessarily caused by ignorance by lack of manual dexterity on the keyboard.  I compensate and spend as much time correcting my errors as I do writing which is a darn waste,
Years later when my children were in high school my wife and I not only encouraged them but nearly demanded they take keyboarding.  When I see my children at the computer, their fingers fairly well dance on the keys.. Academics do have their limitations.  We had a few practical courses, Home Ec for example!  But my clasmates drove the poor lady into a mental breakdown... I kid you not.  She did recover and returned to teaching after our class (or classlessness) graduated. So why do I bring this up now forty-nine years later?  Just to make the point Huckleberry Finn made about a person not getting raised up right not being able to do right later (which Huck does by not informing on Jim),  You see that's the gist of the book.. So I'm being an officious scholarly butt.
Back then we never thought about death.. we studeied no poems about death and not a single member of my high school graduating class was killed in Viet Nam, probably because so many were in college when we were called up by the draft.  Pay back and good fortune.. we were on the academic track to free sex and marijuana which as it turns out wasn't as I said a fountin of yoot.  Here I sit on the eve on my 50th anniversary of high school graduation wondering how and where the time went.  Who doesn't think these things.  Today I decided (which is subject to change an any instant) that I shall not attend a fiftieth reunion.. what's the purpose?  Things were much different back then.  Our high school actually had a rifle team and out here in the sticks boys would bring their hunting rifles to school and leave them in the office or on the racks of their pick ups.  What a schmuck I was.. thinking these damn yokels didn't have a thing, a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out as we used to say.  But those damn farm boys came from stock that was handy and tough.  The Germans and the Japanese never really understood how tough Americans are.  Are we that tough today.. I'd say no but we have technology that makes hand to hand and ground war a thing of the past though we continue to press forward with it.
We weren't the greatest generation.. we were the luckiest.  I know nothing about war and am glad but I have found da fountin of yoot!  It's in our children and their children which as it turns out I have both.  Yes, I' ve known hard times and in many ways my yoot was a tough one.  Why?  Because I was so darned hard-headed and had a short measure of ADD.. which I now say is Adult didn't discipline.  Yes I said it.. my generation was so loved, so beloved that it went its way and disregarded much of the advice our parents and teachers offered.  Lucky are the kids who had strict parents, who went to church, who grew up in good homes with parents who worked and tried to make their lives (that is their kids lives as well as their own) better.  They did it all.  They lived through the depression, a World War and even through parenthood.  But they are falling by the day, each day the world is a little less wonderful as the greatest generation goes off to its reward.  We hope.. no we know they (most of them) will be in eternity waiting for us and many of us with a maudlin bent of mind pray earnestly and ferverntly that what we learned in Sunday School is all true!
Until the older generation began passing in numbers, we children of heroes and saints lived in a fairy land, a Disney World, or as one poet called it A Coney Island of the Mind.  Now as the afflictions that struck down our parents begin to claim us, we ( and I mean me) begin to see things as they are rather than as they ought to be or as we want them to be!  I think one spends the first part of life not thinking about death and the last part thinking about nothing else.  Which concludes today's little shadow dance of inspiration and insipid platitudes. This is what I really started out to say.. the thing about dialects was a warm up. Now that the restraints are off I might just say anything or something but I doubt it.  Go your way, tender reader I won't waste any more of our time.. You know we were always warned about wasting time, but we didn't listen.  Now time grows short, the eyes grow dim, the hair gray, the back stooped and the laughter muffled.
Be of good cheer and don't waste your time.  Gotcha!  The theme of Pygmalion is just this.. you can turn a gutter rat into a society lady but scratch her and she's still a gutter snipe.  Good night.. and as CSN once said.. Everybody I love you. Peace and out!