The Way It Was

Many years ago in the hills of Oklahoma a young maiden (me) lived. I wasn’t the only member in my family, but since I’m the one writing the story, I thought I would give myself top billing. I had four brothers, two older, two younger and a younger sister.
The more you have, the more you have to worry about. How can you worry about something if you never had it in the first place. Now if you once had it and it was taken away from you that would be different. We never had to worry about the toilet plugging up or running over. We never had one, we had an outhouse. We never had a leaky faucet the entire time we lived there. We never had a running one either. But we had no water bills.
We were truly blessed, but we didn't know it at the time. The upstairs was air-conditioned in the winter and solar powered to a 120-degree heat in the summer. We never received a bill for those services. There was no danger of us suffering a heat stroke in the winter or hypothermia in the summer. We didn’t have high definition and we didn’t even miss it. No water bill to worry about.If we needed a doctor, somebody would go a half-mile down the road to a neighbor that had a phone and call one. We had no phone bills. Doctors were always men, women were thought to be too stupid, but they could be teachers.
When called, he would immediately saddle up his pony, and gallop on out. People needed doctors if they were about to have a baby. When my fifth brother was about to be born, the doctor with the horse was summoned. (I’m just kidding, we had cars by then) The kids were sent to the neighbors to spend the afternoon in order to allow some quiet time for the mother. It was the last time she would ever have any quiet time until the kid grew up. When we arrived home, we all marched by the bed and gazed upon the cute little baby boy. Now comes the problem. What are we going to name this new kid? Everybody chose the name they liked and we put all the names into a hat and Mom kept drawing out names until a name she liked was drawn out. That name was Lyle Gene. She liked the name, Gene better, but Gene Lyle didn’t flow as well as Lyle Gene does. So he goes by his middle name like some of us other kids do. I guess it’s okay, but if you have something legal it has to be put in the proper name and can sometimes be a little pain in the neck. Gene was born July 25th of 1941. It was also the year Grandpa died and WW2 broke out.
A little more of my old history.