Along My Way

By Evelyn Chaney Carpenter

This format used for Along My Way book is a series of conversations as if the author is talking to you, the reader, at different times and about different topics each time. This allows you to read for a time, stop, and return later to new discussions. All sorts of happenings and ideas will pop up to tweak your thinking and your interest, to arouse your questioning while you enjoy a different topic you may or may not be familiar with at the time being. Happy reading!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781685265359

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

About the Author

Along My Way

Evelyn Chaney Carpenter

ISBN 978-1-68526-536-6 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-68526-535-9 (Digital)

Copyright © 2022 Evelyn Chaney Carpenter

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

I will be writing to you as if we are sitting in a comfortable chair or on your front steps as good friends do while having a good conversation. My topics will change as I remember things in the past or some current thoughts that need to be discussed. My prayer is that my family will have a good record of my life from which they emerged and that all readers of my conversations will see clearly the history of our great nation through my time along my way.

Today is April 10, 2021. I was born in Alabama on November 23, 1934. On November 23, 2021 my age will be eighty-seven, a good many years to remain doing basically all the same activities. The good Lord has blessed me with fairly good health, a wonderful family of three children, six grandchildren, and four little great grand babies. What more could I ask? And so I begin my memory trip of conversations and hope you enjoy it as you join me along my way from Tennessee now my home.

My name is Evelyn. When I tell folks my name, most of them cannot spell it. So I say to them that it is a compound word with two syllables. They always answer back to me that I must be a teacher and, yes, that I have been for many years. My love for working with preschoolers takes first place.

As I write to you about some of my most memorable experiences in my life, we shall be remembering together some of the highlights of living for a long time in our great USA. In normal conversations, we do not consider sequence to be necessary, so this will not become an issue. Sequence will become clear as our time together goes forward. So many of my family members and dear friends have asked me for stories about my life in such an extended and blessed period of time. I say blessed because I was so lucky to be born in America, to enjoy all the opportunities available to me and to be able to raise my own children under the system of democracy our forefathers planned for all American citizens.

But right now, today, April 11, 2021, I am so afraid for our beloved America! We see every day on the news that starting with the 2020 election, our country has become mired in disarray and questionable political decisions so swiftly being thrust upon us. So I pray that God will guide each and every one of us to do and say the correct things to keep our country safe and free. The whole world needs a free America under democracy! I pray that those who come after me will still be able to live in the freedom granted to the USA up to the present time.

I am reminded of a short poem written I think some time after Hitler was overtaken in Germany. Every oppressive political group must have an enemy to bash in order to grow its number of followers. In Germany, the Jews became the target of Hitler. Having lived there for two years plus, I saw so much of the destruction brought not only on the Jews but also on his own fellow citizens.

We often talked about the terror and hardships the family with whom we had an apartment had to endure just to survive. This family of five lived through a Hitler doctrine they did not approve but had to survive as dissidents as best they could. The mother gave me several pieces of jewelry she had left to buy food and other necessities for her three young children during the war. She painted a dark picture of their time of trying to survive as dissidents until the Americans came. I shall never forget this special family who welcomed us into their home and life. Their oldest daughter married a GI and came to the USA. Her younger sister taught me enough of her language to be able to move among the townspeople for shopping. The youngest child was a boy who loved to make wooden airplanes with my husband. They were a lovely middle-class family.

I remember reading a poem someplace about the destiny of the Jews and others singled out by tyrants. I paraphrase it like this and hope you too recall it, for it is a chilling warning of the present-day happenings in so many countries now:

They came for our top leader who was changing our society for the good for all.

They came for like-minded helpers who worked beside him so faithfully.

They came for private citizens who believed in the constitution being a guide to follow.

And last of all, they came for me but there was no voice left to assist me because I myself had chosen like those taken earlier to not lift my voice in dissent.

We read in history books about the Hitler plan to solidify the hatred of Jews. Hitler and His cohorts destroyed a major public building and blamed it on the Jews. Today we call such actions fake news but in this period of time deleting the building did the job. Hitler had his followers multiplied now. And so began the devastation of a neutral and God-loving group of people, the Jews.

In America, we the people have a right to vote as we see necessary. We choose the party and persons we feel will do the job of working for every citizen. No one party can ever come into total power, lest we face socialism. Those people elected to any office are obligated to carry out instructions given to them for the good of all Americans. Power grab happens under socialism, when the opposing party has no voice in governing fairly and justly for all citizens. The system of we the people electing congress and senate workers to carry on the instructions given them for all citizens will result in democracy. A one-sided system of a single party doing their own bidding will surely result in socialism or that plan that creates rights for only a few. Right now, our system looks upside down with our laws made correctly being deleted and new ones being created by a stroke of a pen or executive order. Now is the time for speaking up…loud and clear! And a time for everybody to hit the history books and reread the intent of our forefathers who gave us the clear path to follow to democracy for every person…not just a few privileged for total power.

All this current turmoil in our country reminds me of the terrible time in our history when I was born, 1934—right in the middle of the Great Depression. I was brought into this world with parents who could not find jobs, had few skills and minimum education options, and like so many others had lost hope of a better future. I can remember my dad talking about the WPA, a government plan to provide some sort of relief by putting folks to work on roads, etc. My dad finally went to work on a farm as a sharecropper, meaning he did all the work for half of all he produced. We were at least lucky at that harsh time to have food and dairy products. And right now devoid of work, taken from them, like the gas pipelines being shut down by a stroke of a pen called executive order, so many middle class and some highly skilled workers have been trying to survive anyway they can, with great suffering to their families. I know full well how they feel—afraid and helpless. We the people did not instruct the leaders who are wreaking havoc and hopelessness literally overnight to do this! Something is extremely wrong! At the same time, our country is trying to pull out from a virus epidemic, and our top leader is allowing illegal immigrants to pour over our southern borers, devoid of any rules or regulations, much less any vaccines to protect our citizens from a certain death so many of our senior folks have succumbed to. And the news on TV keeps repeating the reason for these illegals rushing toward swift entrance is simply the plan for them to vote, not with we the people and the good of all Americans, but for the youth to grow up to vote the exact opposite. Yes, something is bad wrong! So we the people have to ask if all this power play and spending is heading our country directly into a greater depression this time around. My prayer is that God will send forth those leaders who love America far, far more than those who would change our laws away from the constitution toward their personal power and wealth. I want the USA to continue on the path our forefathers set for all the freedom, security, and prosperity intended for our country so long ago.

I want to share how my country has given me blessings galore from my birth to the present time, simply because our America has been following rules of democracy for all people during my eighty-six years of my lifetime. I write this for my children, their offspring, and future family members to be born whom I shall never get to meet and express my love to them. I want you all to know how things were for me along my way to being alive today. May you listen, learn, and love as we travel along together!

And so I begin: I was the only girl in a family of five children, born in Cordova, Alabama—a place where I played beneath pine trees that smelled so good. Even at my present age, I can still remember my brothers taking me to their school functions in a one room building. I have a picture of their teacher holding me as a baby, her name being Evelyn and a close friend of my parents. Thus I received her name forever, and when I was forty years old, I went to college to get my degree to become a teacher like her!

Upon finishing college, I wanted to teach preschool age children. Since at that time our country did not even have kindergarten, I started my own preschool for children of ages two to six, always filling my classroom very easily with little students from professional parents who realized their children needed early learning. As my school became well-known, more parents from all walks of life joined in also.

All my little students called me teacher, and so did their parents who always pitched in to help me achieve my goals. One parent, Dr. Joel, brought me his microscope, which he had used in med school, so the children could study the Little World as they called our time spent with all children viewing bugs, ants, etc. His kind wife, Stella, would often meet our group of children old enough to go to the huge Davy Crockett pool for a day of fun and nature walks and help them learn to swim right along with me.

Another set of parents, Trisha and KB, would bring the class a day of ponies to ride—always great fun while teaching them to wait turns and patience. All activities taught courtesy to the children as each child was given a time to thank our hosts. Learning was always the foremost goal! My own precious little girl was always in the groups. She just by instinct and desire to be part of the group stopped calling me Mom when the first student arrived in the morning; she too called me teacher. She went back to my being her mom when the last student left for the day. Amazing! She just did this on her own; nobody ever instructed her to do this.

For about seventeen years, my preschool was my pride and joy, and the parents and children still today call in to say hello or to tell me how well they are achieving currently. Such a blessing when I hear this news! But moving