Mr. Pearl and The Harbor

Howdy y’all! Southern sayings are rampant. I didn’t realize how noticeable these expressions are until I moved to New York, and was constantly laughed at for my use of the word y’all. My grandpa is a perfect example, with “I reckon”, “Over yonder”, and “Whuppin’ on it” being staples in his everyday conversation. Anyone raised in the South, who has visited there or has met someone from there can attest to the many Southern idioms. Southern manners, along with phrases, are also rampant. A product of these manners is using terms like sir, ma’am, mister, and missus. Out of this tradition comes one of my favorite stories that my Grandpa tells.

As he puts it,

There were a lot of people that my daddy, even though he was older than them, would still call mister. I thought that was always quite respectful, and I did the same. Our mail carrier, whose delivery time you could set your clock to—a quarter to nine every morning—his name was Mr. Pearl. And that’s all I knew him as: Mr. Pearl. One day, he didn’t show up. The next day, I found out why—Mr. Pearl had died. I thought that was very sad because he was such a good man. My dad subscribed to the Austin-American paper, which we got every morning. The next thing I know, the headline in the paper read, “Remember Pearl Harbor.” I thought, “Well, I finally learned Mr. Pearl’s last name.” This whole time when my daddy would say Mr. Pearl, I just figured Pearl was his last name and not his first name. Wow. And it turns out everybody knew Mr. Pearl. Man, did he carry a lot of weight. The biggest surprise of all was Life Magazine—the “it” magazine—which also had “Remember Pearl Harbor” on the cover. And I thought, “God dang, he made the magazine.” It was much later that I found what Pearl Harbor really was.

My grandpa was eleven years old at the time of Pearl Harbor. It is common to hear stories about the devastation and loss, but I like this story because it offers a unique perspective, that of a child in a small town, on such a tragedy that seemingly affected the whole of the United States and the world at the time. He also told me stories of friends and family who had been drafted during the war, but it probably seemed as far away as the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq sometimes feels to me now. Plus the fact that newspaper and radio were the primary news sources for my grandpa and his family back then, possibly making it easier for him to stay more out of touch as a child.

And it doesn’t hurt to have a good chuckle at the moments we look back on and with a face palm and a “Duh!”