I was scanning through this months Southern Living yesterday and happened to read Rick Bragg‘s Southern Journal on the last page…I was captured with the first two paragraphs…
The obituary made me smile. Ellis Ray of Moundville passed away Saturday…he was a loving husband, father, and grandfather, who loved to fish and piddle. He will be greatly missed.
I mean no disrespect. Quite the contrary, I smiled because Ellis, whom I never met, is my brother, bound to me not by blood but by a shared habit. We are piddlers.
Now, I really can’t say when I last looked at the back page of a Southern Living Magazine, but, I know from now on I’ll be starting there. Take a few minutes and go see if you don’t find yourself agreeing about the life of a born piddler…Go on I’ll wait here. I’m sure there is some piddling around I need to do.
Oh, all it took was seeing that ONE WORD, and I was back a few decades, happily ensconced in a family of piddlers. Piddling around was admired, and much to be cultivated. When the puppy did to the carpet what puppies do, it was said that he “made a mistake”, because to say he had piddled on the carpet would be to denigrate a fine word, giving it associations it didn’t deserve.
In the middle of reading this I suddenly thought, “Piddling is Gunkholing Through Time”. This is a revelation, which may require another post to fully explore. But that would be work, and it might be better than I piddle around with the idea a bit first.
It grabbed me the same way when I read the essay. Then I was Google-ing Rick Bragg to read some more of his essays. Now you have me doing the Google thing with “Gunkholing”, only to find out it’s how I seem to live my life…But, you are right. That’s exactly what piddling is.