Peggy’s Prompt ---rattle---45 minutes—021611

Peggy’s Prompt ---rattle---45 minutes—021611


Rattle—shake, rattle and roll, a baby rattle, a rattlesnake rattle, to rattle one’s nerves, where shall I go with this?

I’m rattled, I will be rattled, rattling along a rutted road, I can think of all kinds of past scenarios where rattle was part of my experience, but nothing grabs my enthusiasm. There’s the time when I was very young, and Mama and I were going across the undeveloped lot between our house and our neighbor’s house for me to play with their kids, and Mama heard a rattlesnake near the base of the (only) pine tree on the path. We turned around and went home, and I never saw the snake.


Larry and I once lived down a dirt clay road near Havana, Florida, which is near both Tallahassee and the Georgia state line, and in dry spells it would become a “washboard” road. My little red VW Bug would rattle all the way from our trailer in the woods to the main paved road. I learned to drive in wet clay on that road, too, which in a VW Bug meant to floor the accelerator and fish-tail your way down the road, hoping no one would come from the other direction. Luckily it was a very wide dirt road, so there was plenty of room to fishtail in.



The only outdoor rock concert I ever attended where “shake, rattle, and roll” occurred was so early in the rock and roll era that people today wouldn’t believe how tame it was. It was in about 1957, and held in our town’s football field (not nearly big enough to call a stadium), with the audience seated on only one side of the field. The performers—The Everly Brothers, Bill Haley, and somebody else—The Big Bopper?—sang in front of ONE microphone, with no ‘extras”—no fireworks, laser-lights, fire, fog, nothing. No dope smoking in the audience. No hands in the air, no fingers clicking, no lighters, no screaming. Just applause that rapidly disappeared into the hot afternoon air in the football field. What evolved as rock shows today is like comparing the pyrotechnics of a Fourth of July fireworks display over the Charles River in Boston to a single popper sizzling on the sidewalk in front of the house. But we teenagers were excited just the same. I remember them singing Yellow Polka-dot Bikini, and Love Potion Number Nine, which are probably the only two “rock” songs that I actually know the words to.



And my nerves have been rattled more times than I can count, or even remember. As a matter of fact, I have deliberately sealed off, sequestered, repressed, forgotten most of the times I’ve been rattled. It isn’t my favorite emotional condition, so I usually choose not to replay those moments in my ruminations.