Excerpts from forthcoming book "The Wordweaver"

Two for One

Lonnie Ratliff

Long before songwriting was anything more than a distant dream I had developed the habit of listening close to conversations around me and really paying attention to what was being said and trying to just build a larger story, song or movie in my own mind out of what was being said. Some of these little life segments have stuck with me to this day and some have ended up in my songs but this is the only conversation that ever developed into two songs that I am really proud of.

At the time I was working at a DX service station in Pryor, Oklahoma during the day and buying and selling cars on the side. It seems like all my life I have always had some kind of little sideline going on in addition to whatever it was I was doing to pay the bills. Anyway the man who owned the service station was Brice Wallis and like me he always had his hands in everything. In his case I think he turned his extra efforts into money and not just something else to worry about. Brice’s main job was as a post office letter carrier and his two services stations in Pryor were his sideline.

One afternoon we were not very busy at the station and Brice came by and we got to talking and he said there was this little old lady at the end of his mail route who didn’t have any family left and hardly ever got any mail but she was always waiting out on the porch when he came by on his mail route. He said she was always making him some lemonade or cookies and he could tell she just wanted some company and since hers was the last house on his route he would talk to her for a few minutes and he got into the habit of always saving back the junk mail he was supposed to hand out and he always made sure she got something if he could.

Over the years he got to know her from these little 5 minute snippets of visiting and one day he mentioned how the days were getting longer and she said, yes it’s hard to believe that such long days can turn into such short years. Even then I had enough sense to realize that was a pretty profound statement. I also had enough sense to know I didn’t have the talent yet to turn it into a song or story so I just filed it away for future use. This was probably about 1975 and around 1990 I started the song “Long Days” and soon finished it with Canadian songwriter Sharon Anderson. That in itself would have been a pretty unique songwriter story but along those same lines I remembered how my great grandmother used to always just sit and wait for the mail when I stayed with her for a few weeks when I was six years old. She would always just watch the clock and say Lonnie, that mailman is running late today. Her kids had all moved to California like so many “Okies” before them had done and I remember it would really make her day to get a letter from one of them. I also remember they didn’t write very often and I saw how sad she would get when she went through her mail and there was nothing there but a catalog or some other kind of advertisement. In my little six year old mind there was just no excuse for them to treat my grandma that way and it left a lifelong impression with me. I made it a point to keep in touch with my mom up until the day she died with a phone call every week and I would always write a short letter or send her a joke I cut out of the paper or some goofy postcard I had found. I took things from this and added to the story Brice told me about the little old lady on his mail route and came up with the second song from one story when I wrote “Seed Catalog” with my good buddy Tom Mitchell. I have always felt like in both songs we were able to simplify a pretty complex story.

"Long Days"
(Lonnie Ratliff / Sharon Anderson)

Walter Hudson's up at daylight
A habit now of sixty some odd years
There really ain't much reason
'Cause not that much needs doing around there
Forty acres on the edge of town
He paid the bank off fifteen years ago
He buried Martha last November
And for the first time Walter's startin' to feel old

(Chorus)

(Lonnie Ratliff / Sharon Anderson)

Walter Hudson's up at daylight
A habit now of sixty some odd years
There really ain't much reason
'Cause not that much needs doing around there
Forty acres on the edge of town
He paid the bank off fifteen years ago
He buried Martha last November
And for the first time Walter's startin' to feel old

(Chorus)

All those long days
Muscles strained and shoulders bent
All those long days
He thought would never end
Long days without slack
End to end and back to back
They don't add up, the answer isn't clear
How'd those long days turn into such short years

(1/2 Verse)

The old corral is falling down
He'll have to fix that up before too long
That's where old Jett threw Jimmy
And Walter had to make him crawl back on

(Bridge)

Leave those muddy boots outside the door
Or mama's gonna skin you boys alive
Walter hears those sounds from long ago
And like old friends they're welcome to drop by

(Repeat Chorus)

(Tag)
Walter Hudson's up at daylight
A habit now of sixty some odd years

__________________________________________________________

Seed Catalog

She sits by the window and waits for the mailman
By the clock on her mantle he's a little bit late
There may be a letter from her son or her daughter
Well here he is now, she walks to the gate.... but

It's a seed catalog from some place in Nebraska
With pictures of tomatoes you can grow in your house
She could go see her daughter or son if they'd ask her
But she don't want to put no one out

(Inst)

(Bridge)

The least they could do is drop her a postcard
Some pictures of the grandkids would make her so proud.... but

It's a seed catalog from some place in Nebraska
With pictures of tomatoes you can grow in your house

(Inst)

Oh the kids are all home now but it took a funeral
And it's a little too late for what they're thinking about
The grandchildren stare at those plants in the kitchen
Grandma grew tomatoes right here in her house... from

A seed catalog from some place in Nebraska
She grew tomatoes right there in her house
She could have gone to her daughter or son's if they'd ask her
But she didn't want to put no one out

Tag: No she didn't want to put no one out

Writers: Lonnie Ratliff / Tom Mitchell
Copr. Okie Acres Music (BMI) / Yabut Music (BMI)

________________________________________________________

An early lesson in loyalty
by
Lonnie Ratliff

It was 1954, I was six years old and in the first grade at Sugar Loaf School which was six miles west of Antlers, Oklahoma, on the Miller Road, literally on the line on the map between the colors that indicate the Ozarks to the east and the Great Plains to the west.

We were living out in the country and share cropping peanuts on Miss Melton’s place. It was in the fall and everyone was starting to thrash their peanuts. It took a pretty good crew of people to run a stationary thrasher, and my dad and mom were working on Terry Don Pfaff’s thrashing crew helping thrash other farmer’s peanuts and trading out their labor so Terry Don would come thrash our peanut crop. This barter system was a pretty common practice in Southeast Oklahoma where no one had any money.

My mom had told me that day when I came home from school they would probably still be in the peanut fields but not to worry because they would be home soon, and she would leave some cookies for me on the table. That all sounded fine to me at the time, so I didn’t have a worry to my soul that day when I headed off to school.

Sure enough, when I got home from school there was no one there, but the cookies were right there on the table like my mom had promised, so all was well in my six-year-old world.

I remember that after I ate a couple of the cookies, saving some for later, I made a point of changing out of my school clothes into my play clothes.

At this time I was feeling pretty grownup, being all alone at the house, so I found some old leftover cornbread in the kitchen and took it outside, called the chickens and crumbled it up and spread it on the ground for them to eat. We didn’t have a pen for our chickens, so they just ran around the place, always looking for food and we, in turn, were always running around the place looking for where the chickens hid their nests if we wanted to have any eggs.

I was pretty much enjoying my situation of being all alone at the house and feeling much more mature than my six years due to all the responsibility that had been laid upon my tiny shoulders. If my Mom and Dad had shown up during this well lit envelope of time, everything would have been just fine, but sometimes fate can rock the boat, and fate was arriving quickly with the setting of that Oklahoma sun, and my little boat was heading directly into the dark storm.

I remember Mom saying they would be home before dark and since it was not really dark yet I kept telling myself to not worry; they should be home any minute.

It was right about this time I started telling myself I wasn’t scared and that I had nothing to worry about and trying my best to convince myself that that was true. As the sun dropped lower and it grew darker this would become a pretty hard sell for my run away imagination.

I remember that I was as worried about my parents and thinking that one of them may have gotten hurt. Working around a peanut thrashing machine was pretty dangerous work, and I was able to create some pretty gruesome scenarios that would have done the future novels of Stephen King proud.

Like I said, my first thoughts were for my parents’ safety, but I didn’t have to dwell on them very long before I started to think about myself, and the darker it got the more scared I became.

I knew my parents would be coming home, that is, if they were ever coming home again, from the west up the dirt road that ran by our house. They had taken our wagon and team to Terry Don’s to be used to haul peanuts from the fields to the thrashing machine and, since we did not have a car, that would be how they got home.

I decided I would walk down the road to the top of the hill in the direction they would be arriving and I could see way down the road as soon as I got to the top of the hill about a hundred yards west of our house.

I called my dog as I set out toward the top of the hill where I could get a good view down the road and figured I would see our wagon when I got there. It was a pretty big disappointment as I topped the hill with no wagon in sight, and there was no doubt now that it was definitely getting darker by the minute. I stood there at the top of the hill for as long as I could see anything down the road, then I called my dog, and one dejected scared little boy turned for home.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I heard something rustle in the woods off to the side of the road and away ran my dog to chase whatever demon it was out there lurking in the dark. That was the last I would see of my dog for the night, and it was one sad , lonesome little boy that walked the last few steps back to the most scary house in Pushmataha county.

When I walked in the door I realized I was no better in the house than I was outside, because it was darker in there than it was outside. We did not have electricity, and I had been warned more than once not to ever touch the kerosene lamps we used for light. I had enough sense, even at six years old, to know that trying to light the kerosene lamp was way too dangerous, and I could end up burning the house down or breaking the thin glass lamp globes and cutting myself, plus I was not even sure I knew how to light one, anyway.

Instead of just sitting there in the dark, I crawled up on my mom and dad’s bed and buried my face in my mom’s pillow and just started crying and hoping I could go to sleep and wake up and my mom and dad would be there and my world would be right again. Unfortunately my story was to get a lot worse before it got better. Just as I was about to drift off to sleep I heard something underneath the bed, and, by this time, I was so scared I was way beyond reason, and I knew it was bound to be a rattlesnake.

I lay there with my head buried in my mom’s pillow too scared to move but knowing somehow I had to get off the bed and out of the house before this imagined rattlesnake bit me. It got quiet underneath the bed and I decided to make my move. I eased to the foot of the bed and jumped out to the middle of the floor and headed for the front door. When I got to the front door I opened it then looked back to see my little kitten coming out from under the bed where the rattlesnake was. I scooped him up and headed outside. It would be a couple more days before I even thought of the possibility that Kitty was probably the “rattlesnake” under mom’s bed.

It didn’t seem quite as dark now after my ordeal inside the house, so I hung on tightly to my kitten and heard my dog barking out in the woods. I was pretty disappointed with the dog’s loyalty, but I sure was wishing I had just a little bit of his courage right now.

I headed down toward the barn and crawled up on the pole fence making sure I didn’t let Kitty get away. Our old milch cow, Roz, lifted up her head from the empty feed trough like she thought I would have the answers as to who was gonna feed and milk her.

I felt a little better now sitting here on the fence surrounded by Roz and Kitty, and, for a while, I just sat there quietly, but that feeling did not last long. I got to thinking about how hopeless everything was for me and missing my parents so bad I just couldn’t hold back the tears, and I just kept petting the little cat and wondering what was gonna happen to me.

I finally stopped crying and just sat there quietly watching the world turn black. I am not sure how long I sat on the corral, probably closer to fifteen minutes than the lifetime it seemed at the time, but then the silence and darkness was broken by a car headed up to our house from the East. I remember the last awful thought I would have that night was that someone was coming to tell me something bad had happened to my parents.

As the car drew closer I saw that it was Terry Don’s old Chevrolet and when they stopped and opened the door the car’s interior light light up the most beautiful sight I had ever seen in my life. There was my mom getting out of the car and right behind her was my dad.

I was so relieved I almost started to cry again and when my mom called out “Lonnie!,” my voice broke when I hollered back, “I’m down at the corral.”

I started to put the kitten down ‘cause I knew they would know I had been scared if they saw me hanging on to it, but then I remembered how I felt when my dog had deserted me earlier tonight, so I just held on to the cat and petted it so he would know how much I appreciated his loyalty, and I was not about to caste him away now that everything was okay.

Mom came down to the corral and climbed up on the fence and sat real close to me and started to explain how they had had to work much later than they ever expected, and they had left the team at Terry Don’s and had him drive them home so they could get back to me as soon as they possibly could. I told her it was okay . She took out her handkerchief and wiped my face. She asked me if I had been crying, and I said “A little bit.” She hugged me a little tighter and said “Me too,” and we both sat there on the corral and petted the cat together.