I’d had the thought before. My Aunt Imelda (Jean to many) in upstate New York sent me an email that asked a simple question. “Do you ever think of writing a column about the people who literally keep our country running. The people who never make the front-page news, never win Pulitzer prizes or any award for that matter.”

As I ran the idea through my mind, I continued reading. “I think that would be interesting and you must have come in contact with many during your life. None of us could do without these people. The home healthcare workers, teacher’s assistants, nursing aides, bus drivers, and garbage truck drivers: the list is endless. Many of these people work seven days a week and some work 70 to 80 hours a week.”

She brought up a matter that, well, matters. A lot. People cross our paths doing work deemed menial by many. As a wag once said of his job emptying and “reconditioning” portalets, “Hey, somebody has to do it.”

I thought some more about what my aunt said and people I’d not thought about in a long time reappeared in my mind. I saw old Jackson sweeping the bus station lobby in Athens. He looked more like Satchmo or some old bluesman from the Mississippi Delta. He kept the station’s restrooms clean and you could count on him for a wry opinion of the passengers. He possessed a rare kind of dignity when he went about his work.

I remembered the fellow who cut the lawn around the elementary school back in the late ’50s. I could see him in my mind, jouncing along on a lawnmower that could turn on a dime. Sitting upright and dignified, he cut the grass in a precise way. William Gartrell, I believe, was his name. I remembered people like Miss Lucille who long worked for Mr. Wengrow. She’d stand up front of the store, greet people, and help them find things. She was, in my mind, a forerunner to the Walmart greeter.

I kept reading my aunt’s email and other people long forgotten sprang to life. I remembered a man who his coworkers called “The Killer.” He earned his living at Mr. Talmadge Reed’s poultry plant where I worked during the summer of 1965. He sat at the head of the processing line cutting the heads off chickens as a conveyor belt carried the upside down, flapping birds past him. He worked with cool efficiency dispatching chickens with a smooth swipe of the knife. By day’s end he looked like a chocolate-covered cherry bitten in half … brown and blood red, all at the same time. Some times all you could see were his eyes. Somebody had to do it.

And then I remembered the man I wrote about back in the summer of 2008, “a man by the beautiful name of Moses Corley.” His job was simple. Sweep out the classrooms at a college where I taught. I wrote that “if every life is a song, then Moses’s life was a sad, sad ballad.” He’s the fellow who got fired from the best job he ever had for asking a few folks if he could borrow $10. From that point on, his life unraveled. His wife died and he lost his home, lost everything. His supervisor did not respect him nor his struggles. That was the problem.

My aunt’s email continued. “Most are uninsured,” she wrote, “with children at home and somehow they manage to have a ‘life’ of sorts. Some are still going to school trying to continue their education. Most have never been out of the country or on an airplane.”

How true I thought. How many people have I met who, while eking out a living, must also face medical bills. I’ve met many a waitress and waiter hoping to earn enough extra tips to somehow get a semester of college now and then. Traveling? Flying somewhere? Out of the question. Your lifework makes a lot of decisions for you. Automatically.

Those of you who read my columns know that my thoughts on higher education sometimes run contrary to many who laud higher education as the only way to improve your lot in life. I don’t deny higher education’s benefits, but what would we do without everyday people, our unsung heroes. In a world of egos, there are jobs most people simply do not want.

In my column, “The Work of Hands,” I wrote, “I hope we never run out of people who do true work with their hands.” Now I hope we never run out of unsung heroes. And heroes they are.

I worked as a waiter for two years while I was a student at Georgia. It taught me a lot about human nature. When you are a waiter, some people view you as a peon, someone far beneath them. Everyone should wait on tables. The experience will forever change how you treat waiters and waitresses. I once had a large, drunken party that kept sending food back no matter how many times the cooks and I tried to please them. Then they began taunting me, saying unkind things. None of this was missed by the restaurant manager. When one woman insulted me particularly well, he had had enough. Over to their table he went and the message was simple: “Get out of here. Now.”

None of the taunting got to me. Your sense of meaningfulness in work comes not so much from what you do as it comes from your belief that you’re a worthy human being. Without that conviction, any job you get can seem menial. A company president can suffer from this frame of mind as much as the wandering worker picking oranges down in Florida. Of course, the reverse is true. I read of an attorney who fled Poland in World War II only to end up in New York City working as a bellhop. Haughty, aloof, and condescending to his fellow bellhops, they stuck the nickname “The Count” on him for his snobbery. Let’s hope there aren’t many “Counts” out there.

Unsung heroes, however, are everywhere. Laborers, babysitters, folks who pick up trash, the much-maligned ditch diggers and people who make up hotel beds.

Now I’ll admit some jobs seem frivolous. In the city, you run across bathroom attendants, men who pick paper towels up from the floor and hustle tips for offering you a towel, cologne, or lotion. I’ve never felt such a job was necessary. It seems highfalutin, showy, unnecessary, but I’m sure the attendant needed the work, and I’m sure he had his own views on the hotdogs frequenting his restroom.

Unsung heroes see the world in a way others cannot. I read about a man who long worked in the fields and packing sheds. Though the work was backbreaking, he got a lot of pride from his efficiency. He never left marketable crops in the field. A lot of times he picked cotton for a living. And then along came automatic cotton picking machinery. One man who bought the machinery and fired his pickers was gleeful at his big step forward. “When the machines had done their work,” said the newly unemployed picker, “the fields remained white with cotton. What a waste.”

Sure there are jobs nobody seems to want, jobs that pay well but you need a strong stomach to do them. Garbage collector, sewer inspector, and embalmer. The money can be good but the conditions? Not for me. To each his own. That should be our mantra.

My aunt’s email concluded. “Wonderful people work hard and help keep me sane, and some days that is pretty hard to do.” She hit the nail on the head. Unsung heroes, the people who walk among us, near invisible, make life better for all, and yes, they help to keep us all sane, and they keep things running smoothly. They do an honest day’s work. It’s not asking too much to show them the respect they deserve.

Writer Tom Poland Gets His Kicks on Highway 76

And the taillights dissolve, in the coming of night …

Sensing too well when the journey is done. There is no turning back …

– Robert Plant

In a way, the journey was done for many fine two-lane highways June 29, 1956. That’s the day President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, the Interstate Act. Eisenhower, a general to the end, envisioned highways, his “broad ribbons,” laden with tanks and troops, and South Carolina got its share.

Fifty-three years, five interstates, and 757 freeway miles later, a grid of steel, cement, and asphalt makes it possible to cross South Carolina and see little of anything other than interchanges, bridges, concrete barriers, and orange safety barrels. Don’t despair. The real South Carolina is still out there. You can find the state’s true face along forgotten byways and back roads. Among those less-traveled routes rolls U.S. 76, once upon a time a cross-state thoroughfare.

Slung across the Palmetto State like a thin, low-hung belt and cosigning with 176, 378, 301, I-26, I-126, and other roads, 76 runs across the Palmetto State entire. In all, 76 runs 548 miles, east to west, from Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, to Chattanooga, Tennessee.

And it runs through my mind, this asphalt river lost in time. For I have driven every inch of it, and I know that for those who live along its path and those who go to work on it, it flows as essential as ever. On three Sundays, I journeyed its length – past remnants of an old South Carolina and a shiny new South Carolina. My escort? The goddess Change.

Journaling a road: It’s eclectic at best. Perceptions flicker by as fast as the road’s center stripes and the recollections come fast and furious. Ride with me then down a highway and journey through time, geography, history … life itself.

Highway 76 begins unceremoniously, easing into South Carolina from Tar Heel Land. No state sign welcomes me, just a sign heralding my arrival in the Horry County community of Spring Branch. Crossing the Little Pee Dee, I’m in vintage country. A tire swings from a tree near the Spring Branch Country Store. And then Nichols, all 1.4 square miles, arrives.

This is Marion County, and echoes of the Old South reverberate here. They ring through the pastures, crops, and burnt-out hallways of charred homes. Crumbling mansions remind me that glory once lived here. I attribute this change to I-95 and tobacco’s demise.

From a weathered mansion’s column, a framed deer head stares at 76 passersby. Man’s oldest calling, hunting, thrives here. And fighting too. The town of Marion honors Francis Marion, Revolutionary War hero, and just beyond flows the Great Pee Dee, the river that missed renown in Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home.” Spying the Suwannee River on a map, Foster preferred “Swanee’s” lyrical fit.

Highway 76 can be surreal. A “Broken Arrow” incident, the first, happened at Mars Bluff. A B-47, No. 876, left Savannah’s Hunter Air Force Base for North Africa. At 4:19 in the afternoon of March 11, 1958, it accidentally dropped an unarmed nuclear bomb in the woods behind Bill Gregg’s home. The bomb slammed down in gummy loam and its high-explosive trigger dug a crater 50 feet wide and 35 feet deep. No one died.

Not far away, a gunboat sleeps way down beneath the Pee Dee. The Confederate Mars Bluff Naval Shipyard built the C.S.S. Pee Dee upriver from the 76 Bridge. Because Sherman was coming, Confederates sank the Pee Dee March 15, 1865. Archaeologists plan to raise three cannons from Pee Dee silt in the summer or fall 2010.

Fields and forests fly by until I arrive in Florence, where the Drive In Restaurant claims to have the Pee Dee’s greatest fried chicken. That would please those Chic-Fil-A bovines who take matters into their own hooves and their famous cousin who lived here. In 1925 Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover visited Fred Young’s dairy farm whose Jersey, “Sensation’s Mikado’s Millie,” set a world-champion butter-fat record.

In Timmonsville, “Cale Yarborough” says it all. NASCAR racing through my mind, I approach Cartersville and pass JB’s CB Shop, a reminder of the 1970s citizens band craze. Outside Mayesville, veins of tar run like rivers through 76, now a gravel reminder of Sumter County’s old days. From here came Mary McLeod-Bethune, civil rights leader, unofficial advisor to Franklin Roosevelt, and founder of Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, which she opened for African-American girls in 1904.

Sumter’s regal O’Donnell House commands the eye. Built circa 1840 in the Italianate style, Frank Pierce Milburn remodeled it in 1905 in the Neo-Classical style. Once a funeral home, now a social venue, it’s on the National Register of Historic Places.

So is Sumter’s restored Opera House. Built in the mid-1890s, it houses City Hall offices. Stately and evocative of Europe, I wouldn’t trade this classic opera house for 100 multiplex cinemas.

West of Sumter, the highway’s military character strengthens. Jets from Shaw Air Force Base’s 20^th Fighter Wing scream over Manchester Forest. Across the Wateree River, jets streak over Highway 76 from McEntire Air Base, once known as Congaree Army Airfield.

Close by stands the last old-growth bottomland forest, Congaree Swamp National Park. World-record trees take their place among redwoods and sequoias as arboreal legends. Alas, past car dealerships and fast food restaurants and into Columbia where 76 joins I-126 near Elmwood Cemetery. Here on a bluff, the Broad River purling below, Confederate soldiers sleep.

Approaching Riverbanks Zoo, fall line rapids churn, plummet, stair step, froth, and run white. On zoo grounds lie ruins: a covered bridge and one of the South’s oldest cotton mills, which Sherman burned. Confederates torched the bridge, a futile attempt to keep Sherman out of Columbia.

I-26 soon steals Highway 76’s identity, but thankfully, 76 divorces it near a gleaming Toyota dealership. Now 76 strings beautiful beads together—small towns. It curves into Ballentine, named for E. A. Ballentine, who ran a general store in this Lexington County settlement. Built in 1929, it’s the town’s last original building. Political candidates once waxed eloquent here as wise, old men played checkers by the wood stove.

Angie Rhame opened High Noon here on Valentine’s Day 2007. In walked an elderly woman. “This does my heart good,” she told Rhame. “I was so afraid they’d tear this place down. I have so many memories here.”

A train rumbles by each day at high noon, (thus the name). In the old days as the train rolled through, an attendant snagged a mailbag from a hook and hurled a sack of incoming mail to the ground. High Noon was Farm House Antiques from 1995 until 2006. Proprietor was Carlos Gibbons, father of Leeza, South Carolina’s gift to national television.

Ballentine leads into White Rock, which melts into Chapin. From 76, you’re a stone’s throw from Beaufort Street and its eclectic shops, among them a gallery and NASCAR collectibles shop.

Just inside Newberry County, a thicket veils a vanquished farm. A poignant reminder of lives moved on, this abandonment recalls a time when small farms sustained this country. Sadly, we continue to lose our connection with the land.

Just beyond Prosperity’s old train depot sits the town square. There, Diane Folden runs Diane’s Steak House in a 1935 granite block building. A Swede laid the granite blocks quarried in Winnsboro for $3.25 a day. This was where C. Boyd Bedenbaugh operated Bedenbaugh Mules and Horses. Saturdays, farmers came to buy horses and mules. To gauge animal’s temperament, farmers walked them around the public square before buying them.

From the ’40s until the mid-’80s, the building housed South Carolina’s oldest continuously run seed cleaning business. Mrs. Jenny Bedenbaugh, whose husband’s father originally owned the building, said they separated chaff from soybeans, wheat, and oats. You could say dining takes place in a seedy place.

Imposing timbers inside once separated stables. “Many customers compliment me on the restaurant’s rustic look,” Folden said. It’s a busy place. CNN set up headquarters when she had presidential fundraisers for Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney. An Elvis impersonator gave dancing tips once during Shag Night. “We never have a dull moment here.” I’ll add that though it’s a steak house, Sunday’s fried chicken is fabulous.

Down the road apiece, an old ’50s gas station, now a dusty antiques shop, speaks volumes about I-26’s arrival. Toward Clinton, orange tiger paws adorn a shed’s roof near a Christmas tree farm in 76’s ongoing crazy quilt culture.

In Joanna, on the eastern edge of Laurens County, the Blalock mausoleum dominates the Veterans’ Memorial. Once known as Goldsville, Joanna feels deserted. Beyond its outskirts, kudzu mobs deep woods. This topiary artist gone mad drowns local forests, and somewhere beyond its green masses, I know, farmers struggled to contain red gashes in the earth.

Through Laurens and on to Hickory Tavern. Land rises into green swells as I journey past the silver shoals of the Reedy River and on through Princeton, past aluminum frying pans hanging over some small-but-precious garden plant.

U.S. 178 cosigns with 76 from Honea Path to Anderson – the Electric City, the South’s first city to transmit electricity long-distance. On November 14, 1931, Amelia Earhart flew in to the original airport in her Pitcairn PCA-2 Autogyro, promoting Beech-Nut products. Pondering her fate, I shoot beneath I-85 to La France past Pendleton’s outskirts where Samuel Augustus Maverick was born. Sam moved on to become an ornery Texas rancher, a “maverick” who signed the Texas Declaration of Independence. Thus, did “maverick” enrich our language.

Here in Foothills Country, I roll down 76 even as the land climbs. To my left sits the entrance to the Botanical Gardens of South Carolina and its 295 acres of gardens and bogs. U.S. 76 crosses Lake Hartwell and the Seneca River, where its inundated riverbed joins the Tugaloo to create the mighty Savannah, that great river of sovereign delineation.

Seneca, established 1873, shipped cotton over its rails. Then the mills came. Seneca, today, possesses a homogenized look here and there. Dollar stores, drug stores, and Mexican restaurants. On to Westminster, just outside the dark green slopes of Sumter National Forest. All that greenery makes a doublewide trailer’s bright purple roof appear radioactive. The theme of old and new commingled continues: A classic barn near Westminster faces a mobile home across Highway 76.

The Chauga River passes beneath me, a mini Chattooga. Outside local trout fishermen, few know of the Chauga Narrows, a class VI rapid. There’s where the true Earth exists. The Earth too wild to tame.

The Wild West appears in Long Creek, a strip mall that looks like a Wild West town, a place a cowboy can hitch his horse and get a shot of whiskey. No cacti live here in faux frontier land, but apple orchards fill the green folds and creases.

Now the land plunges, turns, and falls away—a roller coaster speed run. Tearing past the Chattooga Whitewater Outfitters, a business owing its existence, in part, to Deliverance and the “land of nine-fingered people.” As if by magic, the Two Redneck Chicks Café appears with twin Confederate flags fluttering, but, no, I’m not in coon-on-a-log, corn-liquor country. I am, however, approaching the land of bluegrass and dulcimer.

Straight ahead looms the river of legend, the wild, unforgiving Chattooga. This river surely is like no other. I walk onto the middle of the 76 bridge and plant my left foot in Georgia, my right in South Carolina, and watch the river run as I take stock of my journey.

Highway 76, once a mere line on a map, now lives in my mind. Between this boulder-strewn river borne of mountains and the Upper Coastal Plain near Nichols lie all my sights, impressions, and notes. I can place my finger on 76’s thread-like presence and know that here hangs a deer head, here lies a sunken gunboat, and here is great fried chicken. Opera houses, mobile homes, charred mansions, and monstrous tractors. It’s all in my head now. The blending of past and present has made my 76 explorations delightfully unpredictable. And best of all, I don’t have to thank Eisenhower for the journey.

Darkness falls on the Chattooga. The taillights of a westbound car dissolve in the coming of night. It’s time to retrace my journey, but there is no turning back. They say you can’t step into the same river twice. Nor can you step into the same road twice. I cross into Georgia to find another way back.

This feature appears in the spring 2010 issue of Sandlapper magazine.

A rat and a cat. Those were two things my Grandfather Walker would not allow in his house. Well there’s one thing I won’t allow in my house. A politician. That’s why I change the channel when one of those bloated, self-important knaves hits the screen. That’s why I hang up when one of their flunkies calls asking for my support and money. That takes me from calm to irate faster than a Maserati can go from zero to 177 miles per hour.

We used to have statesmen and leaders. Now about all we have are career politicians. I get a kick out of this definition of “politician” from the 2008 New Oxford American Dictionary. “Noun, a person who acts in a manipulative and devious way typically to gain advancement within an organization.”

Manipulative and devious. You can’t say it any better can you. Now and then, politicians actually respond to their constituent’s needs and momentarily become leaders, but the politically correct, those oh-so-perfect people walking among us aren’t necessarily thrilled to see government actually working. Case in point: Arizona.

The politicians in Arizona are catching a lot of flack for the tough immigration law they passed recently. They had to do something. Illegal immigrants destroy their property, shoot their dogs, and recently killed a rancher and shot a deputy sheriff. The newsboys are having a field day with that law decrying having your papers checked as a Gestapo-like tactic. Funny thing about papers. I get checked at traffic stops and have to show my license, registration, and proof of insurance. Doesn’t bother me a bit. I’ve got nothing to hide.

What the media won’t tell you is that Mexico passed an even more stringent law in 2000 to protect its borders. Under the Mexican law, illegal immigration is a felony, punishable by up to two years in prison. Immigrants who are deported and attempt to re-enter can be imprisoned for 10 years. Visa violators can be sentenced to six-year terms. Mexicans who help illegal immigrants are considered criminals.

Arizona has a huge problem and it’s attempting to correct it, but critics say they’re “un-American.” You can be sure a lot of these elitist critics don’t live along the Arizona-Mexican border. It’s easy to be holier-than-thou when you don’t have a dog in the fight.

Here’s what I have to say to the critics and politicians making such hoopla over Arizona’s law. “Get over it. God gave you some common sense. Use it. Now shut up and run our country like it’s your house.” Here’s what I mean.

When you leave home for a night, a trip, or even a quick errand, do you leave your door unlocked? I don’t. I secure my borders, arm the alarm system, and if a trespasser thinks he can sneak in and take my flatscreen because he needs to buy street drugs, he’s in for a free stay at the Crossbars Hotel.

Or how about this. You come home from a grueling day at work only to find a fellow with a shaggy head of hair and a nasty 1970 “Give Peace A Chance” T-shirt hooking a hose and a long extension cord to your garage’s outlet and faucet. “Oh,” says this neighbor down the block who hasn’t worked in a year but always has money for cigarettes, “I didn’t think you’d mind if I hook up to some water and power. Mine’s been cut off.”

The next sound you hear is a cord and hose being ripped loose.

Run your country like you run your house.

How about this? It’s a Saturday morning, a beautiful day awaits you after a week of nothing but headaches and work issues. There’s a knock at your door.

“Hi, I’m Betty and I represent the homeowner association’s “No Empty Stomachs Committee.” You have a neighbor with no food to eat. We passed a regulation to the covenant that says people with a garage now have to provide one bag of groceries a week to the unfortunate fellow down the street.

“Are you talking about that shaggy-headed fellow down the street?”

With glee, “Why, yes, that’s him!”

“Lady, you got two seconds to get the hell out of here.”

Run your country like your house.

Check out this scenario. You need some help with your landscaping and a friend recommends a fellow who sounds a bit like Fidel Castro. He even looks like Fidel but you’re a nice guy, and you do need some help. You invite the fellow inside and offer him some tea. He sips the ice-cold tea complete with a sprig of mint and drops a bomb on you in Spanglish.

“Eef you want me to wurk, you speak el español. Yo no hablo English.”

“Excuse me, who’s paying whom here. Don’t let the door hit you in el trasero on the way out!”

Run your country like you run your house.

So here you are watching the Discovery Channel present yet another documentary on what will happen when an asteroid five miles wild slams into the Kalahari Desert. Some fellow with a British accent who sounds like Sir David Attenborough is predicting the end of civilization. “And as a colossal cloud of cosmic dust obscures the sun for years, all life on Earth will perish beneath a mile-thick ice cap and the ecosystem will utterly collapse so that not even a solitary Atlantic puffin survives, not even a microorganism like the lowly but elegant amoeba.”

You find it hard to sleep; holy cow, a rock five miles wide! The coming apocalypse flies through your mind all night. At dawn a sound like a jackhammer awakens you. That pesky woodpecker is back at work on your chimney, and for some reason he prefers Saturday mornings just after sunrise. But no, you can’t just eradicate the little fellow because the little lady across the street, a self-proclaimed ornithologist, has proclaimed it to be the rare “tripled-toed yellowbelly flea-flicker.” She won’t even let you replace the weathered boards it pecks on. The chimney looks like the devil. All the neighbors complain. Out comes the pellet gun.

Or how about this. Let’s say your home sits in a neighborhood near a beautiful park. The problem is all the neighborhood kids take a short cut through your backyard to get to the park. Not only have they worn a path through your beautiful lawn, they also vandalize your possessions. They get a kick out of pushing your fountain over, trampling your flowers, and now they’re even tossing a rock or two at your windows. What do you do? Put up a sign that says, “Please be nice?” Of course not, you catch the little punks in the act, grab them by the neck, and drag them to their house and demand a stop to this nonsense.

Run your country like it’s your house.

Or how about this, a neighbor, in a moment of undisciplined euphoria, spends six months’ budget, $18,000, on a gold Rolex. Then he asks you if he can borrow two month’s mortgage money. Sounds like a member of Congress doesn’t he.

“No thanks, pal. Don’t spend money you don’t have.”

Well, hmmmm you’re thinking, this guy makes sense.

But wait, all is not well. Out by my driveway I see folks gathering with signs saying I’m unfair. They say I’m selfish. They say I should leave my doors unlocked so the homeless can find shelter in a storm. They want me to contribute to a collection so the guy down the street can have water and power and give him groceries too. What a deal. He gets everything and still doesn’t have to work.

Another sign says “Learn Spanish. It’s fun.” And the woodpecker? I have to watch my house fall apart so it can raise a brood of fuzzy-head chicks. And one more thing, they tell me, is coming. The homeowners association plans to build a sidewalk through my backyard so the kids will have a nicer path to the park. “You’ll find it advantageous not to have to cut as much grass,” reads the memo they sent.

Well you know what. No deal on any of the above. I don’t care what these people think. You know why? Because they don’t value hard work and sacrifice. Because they pervert altruism to legitimize being sorry and no-count. Worst of all, they don’t even live in my neighborhood. They’re professional protesters with no dog in the fight, but they’re such good people aren’t they. Baloney.

If I let them have their way, I won’t have a home I can be proud of. If I give in to them, they’ll drag me down with some foolish pie-in-the-sky idealism not grounded in common sense.

My grandfather felt his house was all the better for not having rats and cats in it. Our country would be all the better if we vote out all the career politicians and replace them with leaders … if there are any left who will run our country like you and I run our household.

An email came my way May 8 from one of you, the readers. It began “As I was reading your last column a thought occurred to me about families. There is a recurring theme in your columns. It is closeness with family. You speak with such fondness of your mother, your sisters, even your brother-in-law.”

“Even your brother-in-law.” That comment made me smile. The writer isn’t aware that Joe and I were roommates at Georgia and that was how he met my sister, Brenda. A brother in my life was not a possibility until Joe came along. The emailer went on to write, “The thought of families not being close is so foreign to me, but I see it more and more often.”

How right she is. More and more often, distance separates families, geographically and worse, emotionally.

The world I grew up in was close and filled with family togetherness. I grew up with family nearby, and not just some family members, but both families entire, my mom’s and my dad’s. Practically all my kin lived in the same county, a small county that nonetheless seemed boundless through the eyes of a child. That childhood land, a stretch of dissimilar terrain swept across what seemed an immense country. In the north end, boulders and outcroppings shot up from a landscape that plunged to creek beds; in the southern end, shimmering ponds dotted gently rolling pastures. It was like two different lands and far apart. I’m talking about the distance from one set of grandparents to the other.

Funny thing about a child’s eyes, distances seem enormous, when in truth they’re a hop, skip, and a jump. As a boy that trip seemed like a journey to Memphis. I’ve never measured the trip but I would gauge that it’s about 28 or so miles from Danburg to Double Branches.

How I wish all my family lived within 28 miles today. What a difference that would make. No more having to plan trips; just hop in the car and visit. Lonely? Well surprise a daughter, my mom and sisters, but no, it’s a long drive and time is short.

The sad truth is the world I grew up in does not exist anymore. Families no longer live close by one another as a rule and on top of that life demands much more of people’s free time than ever. And so, my children’s lives, and perhaps yours too, are all the poorer. No regular Sunday dinners anymore, difficulties in celebrating birthdays, no dinners together just for the heck of it. To do that requires two tanks of gas and a cross-country drive. A mere 28-mile drive goes into my family round trips 15 times. It adds up to a day, eight hours of driving along an asphalt wasteland.

My daughters and I are in constant contact via email and cell phones, but it’s no substitute for living near each other. Aware of a past they never knew, I am forever holding up a measuring stick: comparing my days as a boy to my daughters’ situations. What a simpler time that was when we all lived nearby. It was a time when grandmothers measured your growth as regularly as sunrise. Stand against the door jam, and let a Phoenix Oil pencil scratch out your height. Things changed didn’t they. Now the pencil marks a path across a map. If you have grown children living within 15 minutes of you today, how fortunate you are.

There’s the mileage kind of family distance that can be overcome with effort and there’s that distance called “apathy” that turns families into something more akin to strangers. I know people who seldom visit their close relatives. In fact, they plan things so they can avoid family. In fact, they brag about how long it’s been since they last saw a brother or parent or child, and one fellow once told me, “I hope it’s that much longer until I have to see them.” Hard to believe, for me anyway.

There’s no apathy among my family members but there are miles aplenty. One daughter lives in Lawrenceville, 210 miles from Columbia, a drive of 3.5 hours, and the other lives about 208 miles away near Raleigh, a drive that’s close to four hours, due to a long stretch of backroads highway. And so I live smack dab in the middle of a desert you could call “No Daughterville.”

I grew up old school. You go spend time with your family. And so I have lived my life with a rule I never discuss but I will now. Never live more than two hours from your family roots. From my court to my mom’s driveway is 102 miles, a 100-minute drive. That childhood trip of 28 miles? Well, it seems more like a fantasy these days. Yes, how I wish all my entire family lived within 28 miles today.

I had a chance to live in Charleston once but passed up the job offer, and a firm in Chicago wanted to fly me up for an interview a while back. I declined. Move more than two hours from your family roots and in a sense lose your family.

I realize, of course, that our money-hungry, ambition-driven society scoffs at my little rule. “You have to go where opportunity is.” No, not really. Take a map and an old-fashioned compass. Place the point on your town and draw a circle equivalent to 120 miles out. Unless you live in a desert, you’re sure to find opportunity within a two-hour drive.

So, what does it mean when your family is scattered? Well, for me, it means having to pass up certain special days, and it means having to spend a lot of time traveling the American version of the autobahn, an interstate highway. Time spent driving from point A to point B holds the potential to be a vast wasteland for sure. Seems all you do is drive. You can, however, put it to good use. Being alone with your thoughts for hours and hours isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You work things out, and besides, there’s satellite radio, music, and talk radio to keep you occupied. The miles go by, time goes by, and each minute brings you closer to your destination, family.

So, what does it mean to our society with families scattered in all directions? Not much good I’m afraid. Family ties bind us into a more cohesive, cooperative society. I think of family closeness as a sort of glue. Blood is blood, and togetherness repairs many a hurt feeling and bridges many a chasm.

Members of family used to live close together for reasons of practicality; often they owned land, family land, and often they worked that land together. Then the city beckoned; folks began leaving the farm. My nuclear family still lives on family land, a rare thing today that, as the American Express ads go, is priceless. If you don’t think so, live in a good-sized city on a sliver of land where your neighbors never speak. You share a ZIP code … that’s about it.

I was young once living in a land called yesterday. Once upon a time in that land, families lived close by each other. They shared meals, good times and bad. And once upon a time, family lived, worked, and played in the same small communities. Moms stayed home with the children and raised them right. That was back in a time when no one talked much about assisted living centers. You took care of your own.

Now you get brochures from places with names like a grove of trees … “Arbor Rest” with marketing copy camouflaged as sentiment. Copy like this: “The day comes when loved ones with Alzheimer’s need a soothing, secure place like home—a place where bountiful windows nurture time and season awareness. There comes a time when innovative care makes a difference for all—the patient and the family. Call our admissions counselor.” I know of what I speak. I wrote that brochure copy.

Long-term care insurance is a hot commodity these days that reflects the fact that families scatter like a covey of quail flushing to all compass points. Moms go to work since many homes require two paychecks today. Who has time to take care of an elder? Besides, children grow up and move away to seek new opportunities. Who’ll take care of you? No worries, the assisted living centers rise to fill this vacuum. Whereas families once lived close enough to care for the old, they turn that over to places with names like trees today.

Family togetherness? Now being together means booking airline tickets for some, and most of the time making a long drive that can wear you down once you’ve done it 200 times or more. Still, the reward comes at the end of the road. Time with your loved ones.

And when you’re not with family whom can you rely on to fill all those empty days and nights?

Well let’s see … Well, I guess that leaves friends. They’re the new family in the 2000s. At least they are close by … for awhile.