Early January finds Old Champion purging last year’s no longer necessary financial records and addressing the decades of accumulated correspondence in filing cabinets, crates and shoe boxes full of memories and mysteries.  Can we save everything? Every memento of family and old friends?  Will we forget them if we pare down?  Will any of this be meaningful to our heirs?  It makes for a difficult sweet and sad activity on a cold sunny winter day.  The reminder that these items are tangible, unlike our memories, makes us more likely to save them.

Kaitlyn McConnell and Mike O’Brian popped into Champion Wednesday (with a cranberry pie) and sat around the old wood stove a spell before carrying on with one of their forays into our beautiful Ozarks.   Tim and Sara Tamborino were welcome visitors at the Vanzant Jam Thursday.  Tim has a site on the internet called “The Midwest Bluegrass Directory.”   Therein is a nine-minute-long video of the jam on July 26, 2013.  It was precious to see Norris Woods again and Jerry Wagner in the circle, and Sally Jo Prock dancing and Dwight Collins’ smile and others we miss.  Yet many of the musicians on that video are still playing regularly in jams all around the area.  Thank you, Tim, for some lovely nostalgia including Sherrie’s five pounds of possum on her big bass fiddle.  Tim and Sara are planning a move out west in a couple of years.  They want to be at a higher altitude which will make Tim’s arthritis less unpleasant. He has had three hip replacements, a knee replaced and sundry other titanium instillations.  We are all grateful for modern medicine and grateful for all the work Tim does to preserve the music we love.

Champion Miley Schober and her cousin Reese Kutz celebrate birthdays on January 16th and 17th.  Their grandmother, or maybe great grandmother, is also one of Blaine Denlow’s great grandmothers.  Lucky them!  The 17th is the birthday of Skyline prekindergarten student Natalie Lynch.  Skyline seventh grader Railynn Dixon celebrates on the 18th along with state qualifying archer Jacob Kyle Brixey & Mary Beth Shannon.  For some reason Mary Beth’s sweetheart is called Sparky. He will be sure she has a good time on her big day.  Skyline bus driver Robert Hall shares his day with Champion’s own Betty Henson and with J.c. Owsley of Cross Timbers. Your Champion friends and neighbors expect you all to have wonderful parties full of laughter, goodies, gifts and fond reminiscences.

Among items in the ‘purge’ was a scrap of newspaper with an item from Clever Creek dated March 2, 1898.  It said, “Archie Hancock accidentally shot himself through the hand while monkeying with a pistol in the post office one day last week.”  We only have a vague notion of where the Clever Creek Post Office was, but The General can probably clear that up for us.  Recent events remind us of George Orwell’s “Newspeak.”  It was a clever use of words to encourage conformity and control reality, as in “a war of peace.”  Instead of the word ‘bad,’ they would say ‘ungood.’  ‘Doubleplussungood’ would mean ‘terrible.’   While we consider history and pay attention to what is going on in the world, perhaps we can say, “Doubleplussgood is what it is these days in Champion”—Looking on the Bright Side!

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