Ila helping Mary with her slingshot

I registered for the nature studies class months ago. I didn’t tell Paul about taking the class and he didn’t tell me he was going to be doing Morning Song with his band last week.

When I looked at the schedule I was pleased and surprised to see Hickory Stand on the list of Morning Song performers. Sort of made me feel like I had picked the right week for sure!

Ila taught us how to make sling shots. The finished product wasn’t up to par with the ones Pap made Steve and Paul when we were growing up, but they were fun to make and we all enjoyed trying to shoot small plastic beads with them.

Paul became quite good with the slingshot Pap made him. He could mostly hit whatever he wanted from a pretty good distance away. He said the ones Pap made were a hundred times better than store bought ones. They shot harder and were easier to use because they were made with real rubber.

A few years back I wrote about slingshots and Paul shared the following with me.

“It’s amazing how accurate you can get with a slingshot when there are no sights and you don’t aim it. It’s sort of like pitching a baseball or a cowboy shooter who shoots with the gun down by his hip, just a muscle memory thing. I saw a local news spot on TV back when we still watched WLOS and the Knoxville Channel. It showed two old men who made them in their barn, and they each shot Coke cans off each other’s heads. Although it was short distance, I would never have tried that! As good as I got with one, I can only imagine what Pap, Harold Kernea (one of Pap’s closest childhood friends), and guys like that would have been like back in the day when they used them constantly. It’s all about the rubber, and the way it’s shaped. Store bought ones are no good because it isn’t real rubber and it’s formed as a tube that resists against itself as the pad holding the rock goes forward. The flat, strap-like way of cutting the rubber doesn’t have that resistance against itself. Pap had one inner tube of real rubber left that he was saving in the basement. It was placed up in the floor joist, held up by the X bracing. Sadly, Steve thought it was just there to start fires and burned it. From then on, we didn’t have any good slingshots because they always break eventually and you have to put on new rubber.”

Another serendipitous thing that happened last week. Hickory Stand sung a song about a boy with a slingshot on the very day we made our’s in class.

Here’s Pap and Paul singing the same song many years ago.

“Gone Like A Candle In The Wind” written by Leroy Drumm and Pete Goble

There’s two country graves on a hillside
And a farmhouse that’s wasting away

Fields that I know a man once tended with love
Grow nothing but tall weeds today

The old barn is sagging and falling
Roses grow wild ore the land

The old place don’t look like it did when
It was the pride of my momma and her man

Where is the boy with the slingshot
Who guarded the homestead back then

And where is the life that I used to call mine
It’s gone like a candle in the wind

I’ve seen daddy work in the cornfield
Till sweat soaked the shirt on his back

Making a living the best way he could
With hands that were callused and cracked

Time has made so many changes
In these forty years, I’ve been gone

Well I told mom and dad that some day I’d be back
But, I guess I’ve waited too long

Where is the boy with the slingshot
Who guarded the homestead back then

And where is the life that I used to call mine
It’s gone like a candle in the wind

Now mom and dad are just a memory
And here I am standing alone

Sadly remembering the line someone wrote
That said you can never go home

Where is the boy with the slingshot
Who guarded the homestead back then

And where is the life that I used to call mine
It’s gone like a candle in the wind

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Last night’s video: Cooking a Feast, Foraging, Crafting & Music…Nature Studies Class at JCCFS Was a BLAST!

Tipper

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