The Story of my Life
Louise Virginia (Weir) Frasier

PREFACE

        Teachers say that if you are going to write a good book, it must be about something that you know about.  I use to say it must be something that the readers know about.  But, I’m only 77 years old, and there is no way that I can write about how things were even fifty years ago and have the readers know what I’m writing about.  No one under fifty years of age can know about the world as it was then:  no public sanitation, very few homes had in-door plumbing and a lot of them didn’t have proper out-houses.  You just hid yourself the best you could and answered the call of nature.

The story goes: A man and a boy were taking their grain to the grist-mill.  It was too heavy to carry, and since they didn’t have a cart, they put it on the donkey’s back.  They were walking along beside the donkey, perfectly happy, when a gaggle of women started whispering, quietly and then louder.

They said, “Why don’t you ride the donkey with the grain?”                                    

So they both got on the donkey, but they had only gone a little way when another group began throwing rocks at them because both were riding the donkey. 

“Why doesn’t the boy ride and the man walk?” they asked.

So the man got off.  Then, shortly, another group of people said, “Shame on you, boy, for riding while your poor father walks.”

The boy got off and the man got on.  But they had traveled only a little way when a group said, “You big lout! Riding that little donkey, you should be carrying him.”

Then they got a long pole, tied the donkey’s feet to it and were carrying it.  But that didn’t please a crowd of people either.  They starting following them and laughing.  The man and the boy carrying the donkey came to a bridge.  The donkey was heavy, they were tired, and they dropped the donkey, grain and all into the river.

So by trying to make everybody happy, in the end, no one was happy.  And the man and boy had lost their donkey and grain.  Of-course the moral of the story is “You can’t please everybody.”

But a writer would have to use another example today because young people can’t imagine walking any where, and they don’t know what a grist-mill is or what grain is.  I know about those things, but it would be silly for me to write a story like that.  That’s the reason you have to let your dormant brain work.  Write about things that you don’t know that you know.

So here is the Story of my life.  Such a good life!

This is the grist mill on Little River on Lookout Mountain.  It had not been used for many years when we moved to the area.  It was at the dam where we used to go swimming during the summer. That's Dot sitting under the wheel