Robert Earl Keene is my idea of what a songwriter/musician should be. He wrote a song about his landlord, Jack Boyette, while he was living in College Station, Texas, called The Front Porch Song. In the song, there’s no mention of porches. The song is about a 70-year-old man who’s happy with his life, busy with his work, and has been passed by in the whirlwind of change that eclipses every fading generation.

The world is becoming uncivilized. Webster’s short version of the definition is: “characterized by taste, refinement, or restraint.” To my personal way of thinking, modern society is lacking in all three descriptions. It may well be that air conditioning and the fact we no longer need a cool porch to retire to in the cool of the evening is, at least, a partial cause.

The porch, front or back, was a major part of life before air conditioning. It was in a rocking chair on my Uncle Jim’s front porch that I heard great stories when I was a boy. Uncle Jim was, for all practical concerns, illiterate. He could cipher enough to figure how much money his tobacco crop would bring but he wasn’t a reader at all. I remember sitting on his little porch on what’s now called Lexington Avenue Extension but we then called it Old Greensboro Road. He had a small piece of paper and a stubby pencil and he put some numbers on it. He handed it to me, a boy of nine. He’d written the number 1961, the current year. “You can turn it upside down and it will still be the same thing,” he said, “it’ll be a long time before that happens again.”

Years later, I sat on my Uncle Roby’s front porch on Chestnut Street Extension. Uncle Roby admired my old Lab, Ernie and he told me dog stories from 70 or 80 years back. He had a cane made from the foot of a deer and Ernie hated that cane so much we had to put it in the house to keep him from glaring at it and barking. We sat there, drank ice water, and talked about his life. It’s my fondest memory of him.

Later, Ernie and I lived in Uncle Roby’s house for a couple of years and we spent a lot of time on that porch in chairs or on the swing. I sat out there one summer evening pondering life and realized for the first time that a mocking bird has a repertoire of several dozen songs consisting of three or four calls in repetition. He sings every song in sequence and when he’s sung them all, he repeats the set.

The best place to go through your tackle box is on the porch. It’s the perfect place to plan a surf fishing trip with friends. Stories are always better on a porch from a rocker. If you’ve built your house right, there’s a place on the porch where you can clean fish or birds. If we could somehow bottle the sleep dogs manage on hard porch planks, we could sell it to insomniacs for a hundred dollars an ounce.

When I built the house Cherie and I live in, I resolved that it must have a porch in the grand tradition of the South. Our porch covers two full sides of the house including what used to be called a sleeping porch. We sleep out on that sleeping porch a lot. Our porch is the best feature of the house. When I drive through the country and I see houses I admire, all have a porch and some comfortable rockers or a swing. Huge houses of brick and stone don’t attract me; I look for a comfortable porch.

Those grand houses often have only a couple of residents. I think many times they’re built as a monument to the life of the owner. With the rusty old tools, the old sink, refrigerator and stove, and the talking deer head, I suppose my front porch is a monument, not to me, but to those who raised me and gave me an appreciation for a simpler time.

I think I’m starting to feel a little like old Jack Boyette, myself these days. I think modern society has blown past those things I believe are most effective in enriching our lives. I miss those days of drinking ice water at the end of the day or a little celebration involving cutting a cool watermelon. Our lives are just too rushed now. We have the lure of 200 channels of air conditioned drivel that we can numb our minds with and most of us succumb to the temptation. Many of us who don’t, sit glaring into a screen plumbing the depths of the internet, or perhaps, we’re slaves to the game schedules of our kids or grandkids.

I guess there’s nothing wrong with any of those pursuits, I suppose, but the temptation of the porch calls me with a stronger note. If you think all this porch business is just the ruminations of an old man yearning for a simpler time, you’re probably right. Bring two good cigars over to my house and we’ll sit out there and discuss it civilly. If everyone would try it, we could put all the laid off carpenters back to work building porches for people without them. I may have just stumbled onto a stimulus package that would really work.