MILES and milestones TO MONTREaT
Everyone's road to Montreat is a distinctly different one. There
are no two alj-ke; and no two cover the same territory. Some are comparatively
smooth and imcluttered^ but all are rattier long and often tedious. Remember
that each person's own journey through the years to Montreat is unique. Re
member too, that this journey did not just happen. If you were too busy lijith
other things to watch the road signs ana directions all these years, soraocne
else was watching them for you, and has guided you to Montreat.
Your journey proba.bly began about 1936 or 1937. You wore in no
mental condition to realize this then of course. You wore too concerned with
bottles and Ivory soap and strained vegetables. You wouldn't have cared how
many bumps or curves wore in the road ahead even if you had been aw-are that
there was a road. This vjas the road that would eventually carry you to
Montreat,
As long as you were being carried boclly, or as long as you irere
riding in your carriage, the road presented no problems. Then came the
switch to self-locomotion. This surely seemed to bo a slow ano painful way
of traveling, but you wore a very determined little person with an even more
determined little porsonality. Along xttth that unusual knack you developed
for putting one foot in front of the other, there came the overwhelming
desire for controlling the action of your vocal cords. good, hard, con-
ccntra.ted scroaiining, those vocal cords ha.d become Xirell conditioned for yeans
of steady, troublc-froo service. Now to get them down to a slightly more
human pitch, and then air some of those grea.t ideas and plans tha.t kept
filling your brain.
To put it bluntly, you began to talk. Needless to say you were
so pleased with the sound of your very oxm voice, belonging so peculiarly to
you and to no one else, thal you never coa.sed to exercize it to its fullest.
Sometimes you may ha.vo felt that you wore not being fully understood, and no
one seemed to realize that it xra.s because you x:ero having trouble maneuvering
that thing called a. tongue. You x-lshcd you could examine it more closely,
but every time you caught it xjith your hand and got a good grip on it, some
one pulled your fist out of your mouth and began e^q^lalning to grandmottier
tha.t you were beginning to cut another tooth.
Tl'icn you tried another wa.3a—sticking your tongue out as far a.s
possible and then looking down in that general direction as hard as you could.
This took even more explaining on mother's part, beea.usepoorgrancinotner was
quite shocked a.t having been looked a.t xjith such an expression by her former
ly fa.vorite grandchild.
Well, believe it or not, the object of these last seventy volumes
\jv.s to drive homo the fact ttia.t youwero net a.ware of the existance of ''roa.ds
when you were a baby.