Reading through Glenn Bolick’s new book today certainly brought back memories.

My mother, Margaret Sims (1915-2004) was a woman some southerners might call a card. One might say, she was as sharp as a tack. I don’t know anyone other than Glenn Bolick that was exposed to as many crazy sayings. Actually, many people might have heard this a time or two, but it requires a character to remember it all and recall it for the world.

Most people know about being dumb as a bag of hammers or dumb as a door post.  Old as dirt and as strong as an ox. Some of these things only made sense to people who lived in the same neighborhood. A few have survived into the 2000s and are used for humor or when recalling what the old timers had to say about things.

My father, Frank, had a sense of humor and enjoyed making up sayings that only my family understood. All my life my parents said, “Gah-lay, I haven’t seen you since Ring was a pup.” At times it came out “since Ring died.”

I was thirty years old before I found out that Ring was a bird dog my father owned before I was born. She was a favored member of the Sims family because she was a great hunting dog and barked to alarm my father when a stranger came into our yard. Believe me, my father hunted, and fished as much as possible, which may have been five days a week (like a lot of people play golf now).

The Ring sayings were passed to my children and my sons sometimes say, “Remember how grandmother talked about Ring?” It’s now an inside joke, but sometimes, when I get around Glenn Bolick or Amy Michels I pull out the Ring saying. They accept it like I’m supposed to be passing observations and mentioning Ring. To this day, neither has asked me who Ring is.

That may be funny, however it really defines how sayings came to be. They were merely references that family members knew about and passed to friends, relatives, and then used around younger generations. Do the math. It doesn’t take more than three generations for sayings to catch on among a lot of people. That can add up into the thousands.

OK, all of this has a point. Remember there was a world without television. People spoke to each other then. That was way back before 1960, before television captivated everyone. When I was a child, neighbors came to our house and sat on our screened-in side porch and shared lemonade and home-baked cookies. They talked about nothing in particular, but they entertained themselves with talk, sometimes they shared jokes, and often they related funny things that had happened at work, church, or the ladies garden club meeting.

My dad was talkative, even more than my mother. He talked about how to grow camellias. He had the most beautiful camellias in Columbia, South Carolina. He laid out pathways. In the spring people came from miles around to see his camellias and azaleas in bloom. This was his great social outlet. The moment he could take center stage and charm his visitors with talk. And with it all, I knew he was throwing in something about going over yonder or havin’ a time of it.

My dad didn’t mind saying he was going down the road a piece. When children got nosey and asked where he was going he’d say, I’m going to see a man about a dog. For several years I thought he might come home with a dog. After that he changed his destination to seeing a man a bout a sewing machine. One day I told him he need not bother because mother had a sewing machine that worked fine.