Bond County

Bond County, Illinois.

How do we know the toothbrush was invented in Bond County?
Because if it had been invented anywhere else it would have been called a teethbrush.

For years, that is all I knew about Bond County. Then last weekend, a new picture took over the task of reminding me of Bond County’s uniqueness.

Driving through the county seat where the courthouse sits in the center of the town square, there were tents, canvas booths, and a petting zoo on the courthouse lawn. On the street north of the courthouse, there was a large trailer, as in tractor-trailer, to be used as a stage. Folding chairs sat in rows in front of the stage and anticipated a small crowd wanting to be entertained later in the day. Something festive was going on!

I assumed the festivities were either a celebration of some civic event or local holiday or marketing ploy sponsored by the courthouse square businesses to attract weekend shoppers. Regardless of its origin or sponsorship, a community event was drawing a crowd from throughout the county.

For a moment, I was not just driving through a small town in Bond County, but every rural town and county south of the B & O in Southern Illinois. I was emotionally back in my childhood, living in another small, rural community, my hometown, in the bottom third of the state of Illinois.

Instead of sitting in a 2004 Buick, I was bouncing along in a 1950, International ¾ ton pick-up truck, affectionately known as the “Flying Blue Goose.” (Yes, it was blue; if goosed, it could hit 80 mph on a flat stretch; but it never could fly unless you count the two-wheels-up when ‘flying over’ the humpback railroad crossing on East Main Street.)

The people milling around the booths and tents could have been my grandparents or the grandparents of my schoolmates, neighbors from Church Street, or all the people that helped my parents keep their mischievous son in check back in the 1940s and ’50s.

One sight that day stands out above all the rest. Right there on the courthouse lawn, a Holstein cow waited for a line of small children to pull up a stool and learn how to milk a cow one at a time. The teacher was a man in bib overalls and a straw hat. An older man, perhaps the teacher’s father, stood by with a smile on his face that displayed his fond approval.

Where else but a small town would the grownups think knowing how to milk a cow is worthwhile knowledge? Where else but in rural America, would the youngest generation learn that milk doesn’t begin its journey to the breakfast table in a plastic jug? Where else but in a county like Bond, would a child learn by seeing and touching that the present owes a debt to the past? In what city or urban sprawl in this technological world and information age offer a child access to a vanishing world of self-reliance and close connection with nature?

WIth the courthouse in the rearview mirror, at the edge of town, I began reciting to Carrol the benefits I had gained from a childhood spent in a small, rural community. Not until I was a teenager did I ever learn an adult would lie to a state trooper to escape responsibility. I thought about how I had to go away to college to learn that for some, cheating on an exam was as natural to them as driving to the coal mine to buy a load of coal was for me.

The picture of a kid learning to milk a cow and my reflections on my own growing up made me realize that I created a hole in my life when I walked away from my hometown more than 50 years ago. I now see that that hole is about the size of a small town and shaped a lot like Southern Illinois.

So, I’ve come to realize that only two places make me homesick: the heaven I have never seen and the small town I can’t forget.

Introducing people I met -- including me

A congregation of Presbyterians in my town annually accepts the task of delivering meals for a week to people who need, or at least want, them. So Carrol and I signed up to deliver meals on Route 9 for three days this week.

Route 9 weaves its path through a trailer park, a housing project, and a neighborhood created more than sixty years ago. It goes through no gated communities, no suburbs with manicured lawns, and the only huge homes on the route have long since been converted to apartments.

The people on Route 9, at least the ones we delivered meals to, aren’t much different than the houses they live in. One resident is blind and lives in a house that isn’t much to look at. Even though blind, she brightens one’s day by her friendliness.

One man lives far back from the street, keeps the blinds and curtains shut, and wants his meal left outside the door. If he were a motel guest, he would probably hang one of those little “do not disturb” signs on the doorknob as soon as he checked in.

The lady with the yapping dog that pants incessantly is leashed to an oxygen tank and comes to the door while stepping carefully around the dog and over the long plastic hose attached to her nose.

The widow around the corner is a living reminder of my wife’s mother after she became a widow; quiet, modest, undemanding, and no trouble to her neighbors. The big difference is that this woman doesn’t have nine daughters and four sons checking on her.

At the last house, the one with the two dilapidated mailboxes, a frail young man is waiting at the door for his meal and the one for the man in the other apartment. He says, “Thank you,” in the same way I say it at MacDonald’s.

Who are these people on Route 9? Who am I?

Each of them lives alone and eats alone. I still eat most of my meals with my wife of fifty years.

Most of the Route Niners have the red, white, and blue Medicare card and pull it out of their purse or billfold regularly because they have medical issues. The most treasured card in my billfold grants me permission to drive. Different cards for different folks.

I suspect a ringing telephone is a welcome sound in their homes. For me, uninvited contact with the world is an interruption and inconvenience.

I eat home cooked meals prepared by someone who loves me. They eat institutional food prepared by a job-holding stranger.

I can see; drive; get out and around; go where I want when I want; eat only the food I like; and have opportunity to do good. The folks on Route 9 qualify for Meals on Wheels.

My ancestor Abraham was blessed so he could be a blessing – and so am I. Other people, a select few really, are put in my life, not for the purpose of comparison, judgment, pity, or example; but for me to bless. For three days, the people on Route 9 made it possible – easy – for me to be the person I am meant to be.