Under the Gnat Line

John Penney    Post Office Box 214          Vienna, Georgia  31092                    [e-mail]
         Cell – 229-942-0857          office – 229-268-5345

Title -           Under the Gnat Line
1693 words
         From about Spring time of the year up through late summer until just about Thanksgiving down here in South Georgia it is universally recognized as the time of the Gnat. Whenever anybody who lived North of Bibb County, Georgia and came visiting down in our neck of the woods they`d somehow almost always seem to pick up a few more cuss words if they was regular people or a couple of new Jesus Praise the Lord sayings if it was against their religion to talk bad about anything or anybody. It always amazed me how much bad stuff some good Christian folks could say about something and never speak a bad word. Go figure.
         One of the most powerful tools in the vast realm of Deep South culture was the ability to sit anywhere outside and not be affected by them God-awful Gnats. I`ve seen grown men  throw up their hands and start speaking in tongues when literally thousands of  those obnoxious little pests would swarm and hover over and around any and all open body parts. I often wondered how something so small, and never a big problem for me,  could  somehow  force a grown man to break down, cry and seldom, but sometimes  go just a little bit crazy. 
         Sure, gnats annoyed most everybody but I just learned early on how to deal with the idiotic little stress-testers.  Stay on the move, if you stop, there they are, try sucking instead of blowing, they don`t have much taste anyway, Do not fan at gnats with your hands cause it attracts the bigger ones, practice blowing out and up towards your eyeballs cause that’s one of their main targets, sometimes you gotta take your bubble gum out and install it in one, maybe both ears or up your nose, whichever area seems to be drawing the most gnats. I got a lot more hints but you need to try these first just to get a feel for which ones help the most.
         Gnat survival was the hardest thing to try teaching to anybody not from Gnat country. We had some kinfolks  on my Daddy`s side that was coming to visit with us soon  from way up above Chattanooga, Tennessee and my job was to look after the two little snotty nosed brat cousins that was gonna show up. I didn`t know these people and all I could see was how my summer was going down the tubes big time and sucking for the whole two weeks those two dummies would be hanging around. They probably would really be ok I guess, but man, I had baseball, my paper route, fishing and a ton of serious stuff that needed doing. Babysitting a couple of Yankee kids was definitely not on my radar! Momma gave me one of  them “Looks” when she laid down the law about company coming so I figured the chances were slim to none about her making my brother Al do anything to help me.. He was our family gift from God! Made me wanna puke.
         My birthday was January 19th, the same as Robert E. Lee,  so I was ten and a half years old when our third cousins Freddy and Donna came to visit. They didn`t know squat about nothing, And neither one had ever even heard of Gnats. When they got there that morning we all had to be in the front yard to greet everybody. It was terrible, that was a Saturday and me and Walter Williams was supposed to be in a marble shootout with Dwain Martin and Billy Ruis down  back of Northern Heights School,  up under one of those massive old Oak trees where the dirt was hard and the shade was cool. In a shootout you get to play for keeps and it was a known fact, I could shoot me some marbles.  Anyway that’s another story,
         From the minute they piled out of that old `52 Chrysler and hit the ground in our front yard my world crumbled and fell apart. Freddy was twelve years old, skinny like a pencil and  just about as red-headed as you can get, not to mention the boat load of freckles and some awesome buck teeth!  I swear he had on a pair of white penny loafer shoes, dress pants and a button up shirt with a collar! To top it all off, he was holding in his arms [ like girls do with both arms wrapped around it ] a book he must have been reading in the car, all I could tell was it had the word Atlas in the title. I doubt if it was Charles either.
         As surprising as it was for me to see a real live, one and only “Howdy Doody Dufus” at my house, in my yard, at ten o`clock on a Saturday morning , in the middle of summer when I needed to be somewhere else real bad, please God I need some help day, Freddy moved over a step and I all of a sudden seemed to be in a picture show watching in slow motion as this perfect, beautiful, golden-haired blue-eyed Angel appeared. I almost fell down when Momma said,
“John Moore, this here is your third cousins, this is Freddy here and this little darling is Donna Lynn,” she was pulling me by the shirt arm the whole time. Have you ever been hit in the head with a baseball? Well, that just about was the way I acted when I first laid eyes on Cousin Donna Lynn. I had been conked upside the head by last count, at least four times in the past year, three fastballs and one foul, none serious but a couple of `em rang my bell pretty loud.  That`s the feeling I was having all over again.  All I could think about when I was saying hello was, how close kin is third cousins?
         “ Just make a fist with your thumb out and then put a marble on top, slide that pointing finger out, when the marble falls down a notch just squeeze around it with that pointing finger to hold it in place, lay your hand flat on the ground knuckle down, put your trigger thumb behind the marble with the fingernail part against it, close one eye, line up your shot and use your thumb to shoot”, I said. Boy, sometimes it don`t pay to let on what you know. Turns out old Freddy is a regular person after all; he just needed somebody to help bring him out a bit. I`d been teaching him and his sister the science and technique of marbles, he was a tad slow. Donna Lynn already knew about backspin, English and was chomping at the bit to get started playing. Boy howdy, she was pretty. All joking aside it was quite a good piece of time before my heart slowed down enough to act natural and be my same old self. I was still thinking on that third cousin deal.
         ‘Well” I said “Freddy, one reason you are having such a hard time learning is because you are too busy fighting them Gnats, if maybe you could just ignore a few of `em then we might be able to get this show on the road”.  He was fanning, slapping and blowing like crazy, all the time fuming and muttering so bad it looked like sooner than later, outside activities would cease. “Look partner, all you gotta do is forget about any Gnats, trust me, once you use all the tricks that I done told you then you should be ok”. 
         All of my pointers about the Gnat situation did not appear to be working for Freddy to good, he was still slap-happy and fussing and threatening to go in the house. That kinda talk was real scary to me because I never went in the house, not unless it was dark out, I was starving or I was sick. I did come in the house when Momma hollered loud, but I could tell the difference between a serious holler and a regular one. The thought of having to go in the house just about got me down. There`s this saying about necessity being the mother of invention! Well I needed to stop them Gnats from harassing Freddy so bad and if I didn`t my Momma was gonna invent something for me to do in the house. “Listen up people, I`m pretty sure I gotta solution for this Gnat problem. “
         We spent the rest of them two weeks doing just about what we wanted to outside and my two third cousins, Freddy and Donna Lynn got along fair with most of them Gnats.  In the end of their vacation it all turned out pretty good. They all loaded up and took off back to Chattanooga and things appeared to be almost normal again.
It`s almost lonesome around here with nobody to look out for except me and my weird brother Al.
  I got me a letter from Donna Lynn today and she says hello, how is everybody, tell all howdy. She says her brother Freddy finally got all his blue jeans sewed back up and thanks for all we done. Right at the end of her letter she tells me I might need to check with the Doctor down here cause for some strange reason her brother Freddie was losing all the freckles on his face where he kept putting that special Gnat salve on his cheeks and maybe somebody ought to start selling that stuff cause it sure helped keep them Gnats off dear Freddy, bless his heart.
You know I still need to check up on that third cousin thing.
          Well my Grandpa must been on to something when he said “ The only thing that`ll keep a Gnat occupied and out of your face for any length of time is  hemorrhoid ointment cream or having a hole in the seat of your britches.” Go figure.