Language Investigation #1

My father was born in a barn. Well, not literally, but he was raised on a farm in rural Illinois. Much of what I heard growing up carried heavy implications of a farm lifestyle. My dad would wake up at 4:00 in the morning to feed the pigs, milk the cows, you know, do farm stuff, and to this day he still wakes up this early. I remember dragging myself out of bed at eight o’clock and he had already read the newspaper, drank a pot of coffee, and in the winter, had already shoveled the driveway; in the summer, he would run three miles. Every morning this happened. I also grew up with his lingo, his Midwest terminology. “Troy, do me a favor and move the davenport so I can get the sweeper under there.” Alright, Dad. I’ll move the couch so you can vacuum underneath. One of his favorite things to say to us, every night, without fail, was “Bedtime in the Rockies!” I suppose this directly correlates to the region in which I was raised. My father moved out to Colorado after serving a term in the Air Force and nearly every phrase was followed with “in the Rockies.” Dinnertime in the Rockies, homework time in the Rockies.
Other than my father, my family really didn’t have a culture-specific dialect. I and my older brother lived with my father and mother in virtual isolation for fifteen years deep in the mountains to the west of Denver. Forests completely surrounded our home; we could not see our neighbor’s houses, and a fifteen minute hike was necessary for a get-together with the new neighbors; in other words, we didn’t know very many people in our ‘community.’ That was kind of the point. My parents lived in Denver until I was five, and moved away to avoid the busyness of city life: the noise, the paved streets, grocery stores, movie theatres. My childhood was spent almost entirely with my brother and our mutual best friend, Nick. The three of us would explore the woods and mountains, fish in the lakes, and build forts. My graduating class had seventeen kids. Our church had fifteen members, all of them over 45 years old. Socializing was never really a concern. I knew how to clean a rainbow trout, but I didn’t know how to lead a group discussion.
Anyway, other than my father’s Midwest slang – my brother and I rolled our eyes at “warsh up fer supper” – we basically used everyday language, no different than other families. My mother moved every two years growing up; her father was also in the Air Force, and he was stationed in a different place for twenty years. My mother went to six different schools, in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Indianapolis, and Denver. She never even got a chance to assimilate into a culture, to pick up on local dialect. My brother and I were raised in a log cabin in a forest. “Let’s go climb the rocks. Let’s build a raft. Let’s catch a rabbit. Mom, we’re camping in the backyard tonight.” “Okay, boys. Don’t burn the forest down.”