Debbie found an old dial telephone on a Facebook for sale site the other day. The seller said it was her grandparents. She was asking $25.
   I thought about buying it for memories, but it sold quickly. I bet it still works.
Seeing the old telephone brought back lots of childhood memories.
   I can still see my mom on the kitchen telephone visiting with a church friend or calling a family member. An iron skillet of fried potatoes sizzling on the stove while Mom chatted away and Dad piddled around in the yard.
   Outside of talking in person or stopping to visit, that was the only form a communication we had back in the day.
   Mom kept an address/telephone book in the drawer next to the phone. There were sticky notes and pieces of paper with phone numbers scribbled on them stuck around the edge of the beige-colored telephone.
   The textbook thick Tulsa phone book was in a nearby kitchen cabinet. The Yellow Pages were as thick as a Sears and Roebuck Catalog.
   Some years later, I added a second line in my bedroom. My phone had a long cord that stretched to the bathroom. You never knew when a friend might call while in a business meeting.
   I sort of remember when bag phones came out, but never had one.
  In the 1980s, when I worked for the circulation department for the Tulsa World and Tulsa Tribune newspapers, I carried a beeper.
  What an ancient and cumbersome form of communication. While out checking my carrier newspaper routes, I would be beeped from the circulation desk to deliver a missed newspaper or some other business. I had to stop and use a pay phone or drive back to the zone office and call the desk.
    You don’t see too many pay phones these days. Those things were germ magnets multiplied.
I didn’t get my first cell phone until about 2003. I declined getting one for a few years and finally gave in. Nowadays, like most, my phone seems glued to my hands.
   I don’t play games, outside of solitaire, but I do spend good amount of time on Facebook sharing daily funnies and posting photos of family, friends and other tidbits of news. I enjoy Facebook outside of the Facebook Police censoring our First Amendment rights.
   I don’t know about you, but sometimes I wish we could leave our cell phones at home and get back to visiting with our family, friends and neighbors in person.
   My dad loved to visit. I always enjoyed going with him to his old stomping grounds in the Verdigris River Bottoms and Oak Grove neighborhood east of Tulsa. He didn’t call or plan ahead. I’d drive and he’d tell me where to stop as he relived his boyhood memories.
   We were always welcomed inside where we were offered a meal or glass of iced tea.
   I usually found a chair in the living room and would soon fall asleep while my dad caught up on old times.
   He’d wake me and off we would go to another neighbor or friend, while he shared memories along the way.
   I’m thankful for my life journey, but I do miss the good old days of visiting and catching up with friends and family on the phone and in person. No holiday, special occasion or appointment required, the door was always open and the tea was brewing on the stove.
   Have a great week and always remember that “Good Things are Happening,” every day and always.

   Our mailbox has been filled lately with numerous seed and flower catalogs.
   That means it is the time of the year when folks start planting flowers, vegetable gardens and sprucing up their yards from the long winter.
   Even though I enjoy the warmer weather, I have never had much enthusiasm for planting flowers and gardens.
   One of my last attempts at growing a garden was a few years ago.  We spent a Sunday afternoon planting corn, potatoes, carrots and even okra, a Southern favorite of mine, on a spot of land across from our home.
   It ended up in a weed patch. 
   I think my gardening gene took the last one-way train out of town.
   It wasn’t that way for my parents. They loved fresh veggies and they always grew some type of garden.
   I can remember many summers snapping green beans, shucking corn and helping my mom can tomatoes, all while listening to the pressure cooker whistling Dixie on hot summer afternoon.
   Our kitchen had two nice pantries and both were usually filled with canned food items.
When my folks had the kitchen redone in the early 1960s, they installed a Frigidaire Flair stove.      
   It pulled out from the wall. I ate many meals cooked on that stove growing up in Tulsa.
  I remember many times sitting down at the kitchen table for supper. My dad loved wilted lettuce salads. For those who may not know, a wilted lettuce salad is fresh lettuce with hot bacon grease poured over it from an iron skillet for a dressing. He also enjoyed fresh onions and radishes from the garden. He would wash and eat them on the spot.
   The first family garden I remember was in the late 1960s. My parents and friends of the family from the First Baptist Church in Tulsa, where we attended Sunday services, put in a big garden on a spot of ground in East Tulsa.
   My dad would load the Montgomery Ward rototiller in the back of his 1967 Chevy pickup and I can remember spending many summer evenings at the garden. They grew everything from onions to potatoes to watermelon, cantaloupe, corn, green beans, peas and more food items than the local pantry.
   We never went hungry in the Parker house.
   In the late 1970s, after my parents bought their 20-acre farm south of Tulsa, they grew a big garden on the old homestead with another couple.
   Some years later, my dad bought a DR rototiller. This piece of machinery was as big a Ford Pinto, and powerful, too!
   It was a job tending to the garden and keeping the weeds at bay, so some years ago my mom bought two Berkshire hogs to weed out the garden. She and Dad built a movable pen and those hogs would root out the weeds. After a bit, they’d move the pen so the hogs could continue rooting and tooting.
    I don’t know where they were supposed to be going, but my mom was fussing at my dad to hurry up. In true fashion, he wasn’t in a hurry, but at the urging of my mom, he got ready and off they went.
     When it came to taking care of the farm, Dad never got in too much of hurry.
He was supposed to water the hogs and he didn’t get it done. When my folks returned home, one of the hogs was dead. It got thirsty and died.
    I don’t know what happened after that, but I’m sure it wasn’t good, at least for my dad.
    I probably won’t be growing a garden this year, but Debbie is wanting me to build her some portable planters for her pretty flowers. I have a stack pallets out back, maybe I will tackle that project.
   Have a great week and always remember that “Good Things are Happening,” every day and always.