— When I was a kid, I used to hear older people say that we were in a bad case of “summer doldrums.” I would always hear the term around the end of July or into the month of August when the temperature would be off the thermometer every day. I remember it being a time when my buddies and I would be suffering from this very serious condition, a sort of listless, dull, depressed, whiney, and low-spirited attitude. I didn’t really know what was wrong with us, but I do remember that we had to be very careful that our Mamas didn’t sneak up and give us a dose of Dr. Belue’s tonic.

Back then most Mamas believed that a dosing with some sort of concoction would cure whatever ailed you. It probably did help you if you were sick and not eating properly, because after swallowing a dose of tonic, you would eat anything to get the taste out of your mouth. However, I digress.

This listlessness or stagnation seemed to take hold of everything during the middle of the blazing, hot summer. The country storekeepers always thought business was off, Church services didn’t have a lot of excitement to them, and the Grit newspaper that we always looked forward to reading each week didn’t hold any surprising world news during the summer doldrums. Farmers even “laid by” the cotton crop to see if it would last until the fall and picking time.

If you remember many years ago when President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn traveled America, he commented about a malaise having the nation in its grip. A malaise is a vague or unfocused feeling of mental uneasiness, lethargy, or discomfort. In other words, Jimmy and Rosalynn had the summer doldrums while they were on that trip, and didn’t realize it. It is easy for me to remember everyone being unfocused and mentally uneasy during Jimmy’s term in office when the interest rate reached around 20 percent, and we were lining up to buy gas in limited amounts for the car. He should have known about the doldrums, being the Southern boy he is.

I suppose people have been looking for a cure for the doldrums since the doldrums began. I remember my Mama making suggestions to us about what we could do that may possibly ease the listlessness and lethargy that possessed us. My Mama sent me for the cure to a school-related camp one year near Cow Ford Landing. It ended with my friends Jesse Green, Don Brownlow, and myself caught smoking while we were supposed to be in the devotional service.

People now do drive-thru ice cream, miniature golf, amusement parks, swimming pools, and even have reading lists to help cure their kids of the summer doldrums. I could take the ice cream, golf, amusement parks, and swimming pools, but forget the reading list. How in the world could reading make a Coleman Hill boy get over the doldrums? I cannot imagine me, Cy Mac Coffman, Mickey Grisham, and the McAlister boys sitting around reading books to cure ourselves.

Daddy always had a good cure for the doldrums, and it worked on me every time. Whenever he heard the pitiful whining resulting from a bad case of the doldrums, he would hand you a cotton hoe, stick a file in your back pocket, and send you out to the Beech Tree field where the Buck grass had taken over the cotton in the basin, or that long terrace near the field next to the Locust Thicket. Eight hours of digging Buck grass out of that red dirt with no companion except a hoe, a file, and a jug of warm water would cause a fellow to have an entirely different attitude around the house the next day. That is the quickest and surest cure for the doldrums that I know about, and I believe it will work perfectly on anyone.

I have been observant of our community lately, especially since the end of the recent elections, and I think the entire nation may again be gripped in the clutches of the dreaded Jimmy-Rosalynn malaise. But it is really the summer doldrums, and we are all looking for a way to amuse ourselves out of it. If not, why would I be writing a column about it? I hope that hoe and file doesn’t turn up.