Long time Passing

Where have all the flowers gone
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone
Long time ago?

Where have all the flowers gone
They’ve gone to graveyards every one
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

If you’re under, oh, let’s say, forty years old you probably won’t recognize the song. It’s Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”, an anti-war song made popular by the combined efforts of Peter, Paul and Mary and the Vietnam War.

I first heard this song as a second or third grader in the early sixties. I went to a small school in Byron, Georgia, which before Interstate 75 blew through was a very small town. There were about 300 students in the school; grades one through twelve, and the teachers would round us up in the auditorium for a sing-along about once a month or so. (It just occurred to me that younger folks may not know what a sing along was. More’s the pity.)

Mostly the songs were old patriotic standards such as Dixie and The Battle Hymn of the Republic with a few Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly songs thrown in. Other songs were anti-war and anti-segregation protest songs written by beatniks and what in a few years would be called hippies. Of course I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew it was fun and a little thrilling for everyone to be singing together.

The lyrics were handed out on mimeographed paper. Mimeography was a primitive method of making blurry purple copies using smell and ink. The smell of mimeograph ink is as close to a time machine as humans have achieved so far. I guarantee that if you are about my age one whiff of that ink will carry you right back to elementary school. Nothing smells quite like it and more than a few kids were sort of addicted to sniffing the stuff. So I hear.

Our teachers were Daughters of the Confederacy. I don’t mean that they necessarily belonged to that organization, although they may have. I mean they were that old. Their grandfathers and fathers and uncles had fought in the Civil War or as they called it “the War of Northern Aggression”.

So these relics of the Old South would lead us in songs such as “We Shall Overcome” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” and ”The Times They are A-changin’”. I can’t help but think, here in the present day, that those dropped “g”s must have really worked their English teaching nerves.

As I came to hear those songs in later years and in wildly different circumstances I came to wonder why those old ladies sang those songs in particular. In my adolescent arrogance (which in my case is just now starting to wear off) I thought they were just clueless. I got many a chortle over the years by just thinking on it.

Now that I’m older and, one hopes, wiser, I think maybe they weren’t so clueless. I’ve learned that old soldiers sometimes need to tell their stories and that children sometimes listen to them. Those old biddies had long memories and they remember those stories told by the fire on cold antebellum nights.

They might have asked, “Granddaddy, how’d you come to lose that leg?” And Granddaddy might have told them of Pickett’s Charge and Antetiem and Bull Run and of the fetid field hospitals where the only anesthetic was a rag clenched between the teeth and where the doctors were as likely to kill you as a Yankee minie ball and the stinking, ever mounting masses of the bodies of boys who would never be men fighting for a cause that would never be right…

Maybe that’s why they chose those songs. When will we ever learn?