Boy, do I love rummaging around into the past! The present is interesting enough, but I have a feeling it will be twice as much fun 100 years from now. I suspect that people have always thought that the generations before them were funnier in their ways, more colorful in their speech and spent more hours interacting. In my case, I know this for a fact, since small towns of that day, not having imported humor, made their own in the form of colorful language, local characters and a sense of fun.

Take old "Aunt Nine", who wore an eye shade made of black paper held by hairpins, and emerged like a pop-up witch from her house the minute a child cut across her street corner yard. Holding a notepad and pencil, she would shout that most terrorizing of adult questions: "What is your name? I'm gonna call your folks." It was part of the town's humor that no one told us that she could neither read nor write and didn't have a phone.

Take old man Mullins, who hung pie pans from his trees to keep the birds from "littering" his collection of 12 old Buicks, faced in around his house like clock numbers, and kept goats named Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Gibberish, who perched on the cars. When asked about Gibberish, old man Mullins would solemnly tell us children that this was the saint who spoke in tongues.

Like Crazy Myrtle, who gave her niece 8,000 pennies for a wedding present in a 5-gallon cream can with a brazed-on lid, that no one could lift. Myrtle once scandalized a meeting of the Women's Christian Temperance Union by announcing that her deceased husband had only been bearable "when he had his beak in the jar," ordered a tombstone which was a big stone jug with a grape cluster for his grave, and ran for Mayor one year, representing what she called the "Women's Party, Party."

Best of all, can our new century come up with anyone like Barber Tom, who had on the wall of his shop, a whimsically carved wood paddle. He explained, to a stranger lured into his chair, the paddle was a Swinette, a musical instrument played only in the Ozarks. Townsmen who hung out at the barber's for just such fun, would expound on the virtues of local Swinette players, the best of them all, taking his talent to Carnegie Hall. This would go on for the length of the haircut, leading up to the finale, when Tom would explain that the rest of the instrument was missing of course. When the sucker asked why, Tom would tell him that the Swinette was composed of an octave of different sized pigs which you played by hitting with the paddle.

Taken all around, the past is always safer, and more fun to write about than the present. After all, who's left alive to complain?