That Little Voice

My Granddad was ‘old school’.

I’m talking very old school. He was born in Georgia two years after the Civil War, on land that is now part of the National Park Service’s Chickamauga Battlefield, located just south of Chattanooga, TN.

It was a short battle in September of 1863, but a significant one for the families who eked out a living on that farmland. And my grandfather’s mother and father, aunts and uncles, were displaced and dislodged from their homes following the campaign.

But the south was not lost on my mother’s father. He retained much of the southern charm and beliefs he was taught as a youngster.

I’ve written previously about walking with him to his office every day when I was a youngster learning lessons on the proper strolling protocol of the sexes. For instance, the gentleman always walked on the outside of the walkway next to the street in order to protect the lady from getting garbage dumped on her from second floor windows and from mud splattered by passing horses.

He also explained a woman took two steps to a man’s one.This he pointed out as I stretched my legs to stay in step with him.

But what I remember most about this gentle man was a term he used early every morning when I would join him in the kitchen as he listened to the radio and drank his first cup of coffee. We were alone, the rest of the family still sleeping, and he would greet me with a smile, a pat, and the instruction: “Go wash the sleep out of your eyes.”

I would rush to the bathroom, splash water on my hands and face, and immediately return to the kitchen chair sitting next to him. As a youngster I had no idea what ‘sleep in my eyes’meant, but later in life I determined it certainly was a nicer way than saying “Go wash the gunk out of your eyes.”

I would have better understood what he meant, but ‘sleep’ was a much more civilized word than ‘gunk’.

Another word he used which was not in my limited Oklahoma vocabulary was ‘reconnoiter.’This word puzzled me for years until I grabbed a dictionary to look it up, which was a stretch since I didn’t know how to spell it, and still don’t.

He must have learned it back in the day after the war because it appears to be a military term meaning, among other things, patrol, search, gather, explore, spy, watch.

Granddad’s usage seemed to be about changing directions or changing plans, or reconsidering options.

As the first white English teacher in the Indian Territory, which is now the state of Oklahoma, I doubt my Granddad’s instructions made any more sense to those young Indian students as they did to me years later.

Explain how you translate ‘wash the sleep out of your eyes’ and ‘reconnoiter’into the Choctaw language? Beats me.