The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [83]
Then, Jacob would know, he had them right where he wanted them, and he could proceed to explain to them why, for example, the air of Arkansas, being, as anybody knows, the sweetest and purest air to breathe anywhere, is therefore taxable, and it is perfectly justifiable to put a tax on breathing. In the end, the justices yielded, but were so drunk they had to be carried from Jacob’s office. Government labor being cheap, Jacob retained twelve men for the purpose of carrying drunk justices out of his office.
Jacob’s successive successes in the office of governor meant nothing to Sarah; he did not discuss affairs of state with her; to her he was just the same old Jake, and she did not defer to him any more than she would have “back home.” Obviously she missed “back home,” and it was Sarah Ingledew who is credited with the coinage of the adjective “old-timey” in reference to the lost past. Increasingly, for the rest of that century and down through our own century, mass nostalgia would employ this expression that Sarah invented…although nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Today we are even speaking of “old-timey” television, and tomorrow we shall be speaking of “old-timey” gasoline and electricity, but it was Sarah Ingledew who first said, “Jake, I shore do miss them old-timey days back home.” And the governor got a bit misty-eyed himself (although it was hard to tell, because the blueness of his eyes made them seem always watering) and replied, “Yeah, Sarey, them were the days.” (This expression, grammatically corrected, also entered our language.)
Nor was this merely a fleeting mood on both their parts. It lingered, and it infected those around them, who in turn infected those around them, until all of the people were in the grips of epidemic nostalgia. Although the French had identified the disease early in that century, nostalgie had not been identified or named in America at this time, and it would be a few more years before a Missourian, Sydney Smith, having discovered its spread from Arkansas to Missouri, would write his seminal article, “What a Dreadful Disease Is Nostalgia on the Banks of the Missouri!” and still more years before the first English dictionary would define it. But it began with Sarah’s casual remark to Jacob, and soon everyone had it, and because it had no name yet and no one could name it, they simply referred to it as it, and noted that there was a lot of it going around in those days. People would stop one another and ask, “Do you have it yet?” and admit “Yes, I caught it last night, I think,” and all of the Little Rock newspapers ran editorials with titles like “It Does Not Acquit Itself Handily.”
The war was not over, bushwhackers and jayhawkers still roamed and pillaged, but people were tired of it all. Everybody yearned for the old-timey prewar days, but everybody knew that the old-timey prewar days would never—no, never—come again, and because they would not come again people could only wish for them, and because wishing for something that can never be had is wishful thinking, and because wishful thinking is erroneous identification of one’s wishes with reality, then reality is warped into a melancholy dream. In this dream that was life, all the people developed sheep’s eyes, which enhanced their looks at the expense of their vision.
There was only one person in Little Rock who did not catch “it,” and that was Jacob’s ladyfriend (whom we cannot name). Probably the reason that she did not catch nostalgia was that there had been little or nothing in the old-timey prewar days that she had enjoyed; she lived for the future, not in languishing longing for the past.