Inventions we could live without

Don't throw tomatoes at me.  I think fast food is one of the worst-ever inventions America has dreamed up.  Too many calories.  Too much sodium.  Too little restraint.  A burger joint on every corner, a bulge in every waist.

Along with that, I'd throw in reality TV, Disney World, and fake nails.

What would you add?

How hot is it?

It’s hot. Hotter than hot. So hot that words can’t capture it.

How do you describe the heat that has wrapped its suffocating hold around our necks, squeezing the breath out of us?

The words themselves are clichés. Baked? As crisp as a Viking Range on broil. Steamy? Worse than a Roman bath on steroids. Sultry? More than a King Kong jungle.

You’d think the South would be accustomed to this, but au contraire. It’s torture just to survive a walk across campus. Forget the yard work we started with spring-like enthusiasm. Forget the leisurely evenings on the patio. Forget the resolution to take walks around the block. Even my dogs hide from these much-too-early dog days of summer.

There’s one word I like that seems to come close. Use it if you will. What we have here is a desiccating June.





Andre Dubus

We set the appointment for a crisply sunny September day.  He was to meet me following noon mass at the campus Catholic church, a ritual he observed every day.

It was my first encounter with Andre Dubus, the noted American short story writer and, for that semester, a writer-in-residence at the University of Alabama.

But nothing went as planned.  He emerged from the church, and I emerged from my car, introducing myself as I walked toward him.

“I can’t talk,” were his first words.  Shorter than I, with a powerful chest and arms, this man with the cheeks of a Santa and a slightly graying beard—a former Marine--looked at me and shook his head.

“I just can’t do this,” he said.  “I’m too emotional.”  His damp eyes were sorrowful, a contrast with his powerful physical presence.

“We’ll have to reschedule,” he continued, my introduction still stammering on my lips.

And because there was nothing else to do, we did.

New to my job and to my graduate studies in English, I had prepared for the interview by reading his award-winning short work.  I was ready with my lofty questions and literary analogies, but I wasn’t ready for Andre Dubus. Nothing could have prepared me for that.

So a few days later, I knocked on the door of his campus housing, and we settled in to his study for the interview.  I know some of what was said, because I still have a copy of the published article.  But I have no idea how the 15-minute interview became a three-hour conversation that took its own detours, driven by the electric curiosity of the interviewee.  I just knew I was in the presence of a personality that filled the space around it and somehow enlarged it.  The conversation was energizing and exhausting.

I left that day with my book signed. We never had the drink.

I thought of this as I recently read the haunting memoir by Dubus’ son, the very talented Andre Dubus III.   The oldest of four children of Dubus and his first wife, the son tells a story of life on the edge. 

Parents divorced.  Talented, famous father working for a professor’s meager pay and often absent.  Mother struggling.  Growing up in the rough parts of Boston, often scrounging for food and too often involved in fights that escalate toward violence.  Embracing the violence by learning boxing. Drifting in and out of jobs, relationships. Finding writing as a redemption and, ultimately, knowing his father as a friend.

He movingly writes about his father’s last years and death in 1999.  The elder Dubus had stopped on a freeway late one night to assist stranded motorists, when a car veered toward the group.  Those of us who had known Dubus, even briefly, heard about the tragedy and were on email lists seeking support to help him through a bad time.
  

Because of the accident, Dubus had one leg amputated and lost use of the other.  He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, from his son's account at peace with himself.  The eldest son and his brother built their father's casket themselves, and Dubus was buried in Haverhill, Mass.

One of the only stories by his father that Andre Dubus III mentions in his memoir, Townie, is one that, many years earlier, I asked the elder Dubus about.  It’s called “Killings.”

Here are the published question and answer.

"On the August morning when Matt Fowler buried his youngest son, Frank, who had lived for twenty-one years, eight months, and four days, Matt's older son, Steve, turned to him as the family left the grave and walked between their friends, and said: 'I should kill him.'" --Killings

We had talked about the influence of Catholicism on his writing.  He said it was "entirely" influenced by his faith.  

My question:

"Does a story such as 'Killings' illustrate this principle?  Is the empathy for character there?"

His answer:

"That's not a Catholic story.  That's a father story.  That story was based on a killing which actually occurred in Massachusetts.  In that incident, the father did not kill the murderer.  The murderer was sent to jail for five years.  When he was out on bond, the young man's mother kept seeing him--in the grocery store, in the drug store.  Two friends approached the father and said, 'Do you want me to kill him?'

So I thought:  'What if the father agreed?'  That's where that story came from.  If there's any Catholicism in it, it's one of the universal truths of Catholicism, and that is in the moment that he pulls the trigger he has violated his harmony with nature, and he will never again be back in harmony with nature, because he has killed.

My sense of fatherhood has influenced my writing because I've been a father since I was 22 years old.  I don't remember what it's like not to be a father.  If someone killed a son of mine, I hope that I would have the moral courage to kill that person--if my son didn't deserve to die.  If someone killed my daughter, it wouldn't matter whether she deserved it or not.  I'd go kill him."

Mama tried

She really did.  She did her dead-level best to teach us manners.  With every breath.  It's a Southern thing.

There were hard-and-fast rules.  Never sing at the dinner table. Never talk with your mouth full of food (who wants to see that, for goodness' sake?).  Everyone knows you keep your mouth closed when chewing.  And you better keep one hand in your lap when eating.  By the way, slow down--are you going to a fire?

There were five kids and only a certain amount of energy to corral us into something presentable.  But my mother valiantly tried.  She never stopped giving it her best shot, long after we were adults who should know better.

Some rules related to dress.  No, you are absolutely not going to town in those shorts.  Just scandalous.  You will wear something that covers you appropriately.  No, you will not wear white shoes until Easter.  And surely, you're not wearing THAT in public?  My mother--a beautiful seamstress--knew quality clothing when she saw it.  And she better see it on us.

But the most important rules related to relational behavior.

We knew to say "yes ma'am" and "no sir" under penalty of corporal punishment.  We knew not to "talk back."  Heaven help one of us who interrupted a speaking adult.  Children should listen first and talk when asked.  And then it better be something worth hearing.

We were taught to respect our teachers, our elders, and ourselves.  We knew the difference in being "polite" and "showing off"--behavior that earned us "the look."  Because we were taught the proper way to act.  We were expected to be "well-behaved" representatives of our family.  Sometimes we even succeeded.

When I listen to the casually insulting conversations around me today or the bombastic, self-parodying, self-absorbed incivility of television commentary, I can only reach one conclusion.

Their mamas must have failed miserably.

Re-Purposed

There's something about giving new life to the dead and dying.  Our town is rich in imagination and possibilities for the would-be forgotten structures of another era. 

In another life, the Ritz (above) was one of two movie theaters in this small Mississippi community.  We could, literally, walk from our home on Main Street, pay our 25-cent admission, buy a box of Milk Duds at the counter, and halfway through "The Blob" find a moist chocolate puddle in our hands, squeezed to a sticky pulp during the scary parts of a movie that now seems silly.

Today the former theater is a beautifully restored facility that has new life as a conference center.  A new generation is discovering it as a location for wedding receptions, proms, and civic meetings.  The adjacent Ritz Cafe in an earlier time was the F.W. Woolworth, the place my brother once spent an entire $5 for Christmas gifts for the whole family.  We all received a box of Luden's cherry cough drops, and he bought himself an airplane model.  Who's seen an F.W. Woolworth in decades?  Wedge salads and tomato basil soup have replaced it here.

Farther down the street a flower/gift shop is in the home of a former drugstore, a longtime institution in a once-thriving downtown community.  The orignal  owner's name is still carved in marble over the entrance, but today the space dispenses calla lilies and tablescapes.  The police department has reclaimed a former television station; an appliance store houses the spirit of a long-forgotten department store; and a bank anchors the corner where fashionable ladies once bought fine clothing.  On another corner, the Methodists have reinvented a former hotel as retirement apartments for the elderly.

I love seeing the morphing of places I knew in childhood into something vital and imaginative.  I live in the same house I did as a child, but the town around me is completely new.

It makes me wonder if we can do the same with our "old" selves.

Words that aren't

Is frumpled a word? If not, it should be.

I have an image of wrinkled, unkempt, dowdy, unpolished all wrapped neatly into a compact two syllables. Far better than frumpy because it says so much more. Why use just one paltry word when you can merge two?

In the list of words that haven’t yet made it into their proper linguistic respectability, I could suggest a couple of others. My mother used to insist someone was flustrated, thereby neatly combining frustrated and flustered. Usually, I was both by the time we had a conversation requiring that word.

And perhaps we could introduce parsinickety, someone who is both parsimonious and persnickety, a fussy miser. I know plenty of those.

It's called mincing words, I guess.  It could be a lot of fun.  Do you have others?



Stay connected

To admit my age, I remember the first long-distance phone call I ever made.  As a child, I found it almost a Christmas-like experience to be able to talk to a friend who’d moved to another state. A wall-mounted, black telephone with a rotary dial was my lifeline to a disembodied voice. I couldn’t imagine the friend’s new home, her new room, her new school, or her new friends. In fact, I was having a hard time imagining her at all. Her face was dissolving even as we struggled to find still-common ground. I felt that I was speaking to a void.

Today, even the folks closest to us are lost in that void. How many face-to-face conversations do we really have?

We text each other from different rooms in the same building. Increasingly, even those disembodied voices on a telephone—most often a cell phone—are a last resort ONLY if texts, emails, or Instant Messages fail. “Facebook” is a verb, we tweet to complete strangers as though we know them, and we invent, by the moment, new electronic connections to remove us from the messy necessity of human contact.

In the click of our mouse, we can “unfriend” someone. And, as growing cybercrime shows, it’s all too easy to create a persona that masks the truth and causes all kinds of malicious possibilities.

All these connections have created a disconnect that makes communication not only disembodied, but frequently anonymous. It’s easy to assume there’s no responsibility or accountability for the words of an online persona. Tragically, many have found otherwise.

There are good things, to be sure, and I love that part of social media especially. Friends long lost are now regularly in my Facebook news feed. But I’m also alarmed that we’re losing the delicate nuances of human interaction, our ability to “know” another in dimensions that require time and space and all of the human senses.

We tweet, we blog, we Facebook, we email, we post. We “talk,” but does anyone hear?

Tinsel-Down

It's January 4.  And the Christmas lights in our small town are keeping an early morning vigil, sentinels of a season now past. It's the paradoxical season of letdown endings and new beginnings.  It's the season of fresh starts and leftovers.  It's hope for what lies ahead and disappointment for what was left behind. We're in that caught-in-between-time.  Are we waxing or waning?

I never know what to make of the first of a year.  Those of us who don't value sleep stay awake until midnight to cheer the dropping of a ball and a brand-new date on our calendars.  The realists among us know that new date also signals time lost, never to be regained.  Time may be opening a new vista in front of us, but that vast chasm left behind us grows ever larger while what lies ahead is ever-shrinking. 

So, as we start the beginning of new year, I always wonder.  Are we celebrating the possibilities?  Are we whistling at a wake? 

What do you think?

Persephone descending

It's a season of endings.  Glorious, brilliant departures.  The final burst before the drab, dreary Novembers of our souls.  The time in the South when we can revel in the softening sunlight that leaves our days too soon in darkness. In the monochromatic Mississippi winter, we'll look wistfully over the horizon for signs of the first hyacinth. 

Persephone, that goddess of spring, is about to descend into the underworld. This is my favorite time of year, warm with a bittersweet beauty all the more lovely because of its briefness.  Each tree vies with the next for brilliance, dropping their colors even as I stroll by.  

Soon, these flaming canopies will be anorexic arms stretched before a blank sky.  To me, winter is the invisible season:  the in-hiding season, the time of drawing to the fire and crossing your arms against the wind outside the door.  I enjoy this beauty today with the knowledge of its coming absence.

 It's the season I always turn to Gerard Manley Hopkins, who beautifully captured the tension of transience.

Spring and Fall

to a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow's springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

 

I wish I had a river

It's the 12th of November, but it seems to be coming on Christmas.  Or so the signs and non-seasonal decorations tell us.  Last night as I drove home in the post-Daylight Savings Time darkness, I noticed the local county co-op alight with wreaths, ornaments, and outdoor garlands.  It's the same everywhere I look.  It's been that way here in the nearly tropical South since sometime before Halloween, when I passed a fashionable home long after dark and noticed a fully decorated, brightly lit Christmas tree glowing in the living room.

What's going on here?  I'm feeling holiday compression.

Advent, to me, is a particular and very special time in the religious tradition I celebrate.  It's come, instead, to mean the Gold Rush of sales promotions, the stampede to living better materially. People actually get up at 2 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving to get those 5 a.m. WalMart promotions.  Me, I sleep in.

We're not in the Southern hempisphere, just the American South, for goodness' sake.  The heart of the Bible belt.  Please, please, please give me some breathing room to celebrate Thanksgiving and time to remember all for which I'm truly grateful.

Give me a river.  A Joni Mitchell blue one.

It's coming on Christmas

They're cutting down trees

They're putting up reindeer

And singing songs of joy and peace

Oh I wish I had a river

I could skate away on

But it don't snow here

It stays pretty green

I'm gonna make a lot of money

Then I'm going to quit this crazy scene. . .

Well, at least part of that is true.  And to all, I say, enjoy the fall while we have it.



What's your definition?

Thinking about the word ‘crisis’ today, because it gets thrown around a lot.

Economic crisis.  Crisis of confidence.  Health care crisis.  Environmental crisis. Crisis of leadership.  Personal crisis.  Identity crisis. Mid-life crisis.

What’s the opposite?  Because we don’t hear much about it. 

If crisis is “disaster,” is the opposite “prosperity”?  “Functioning”?  “All systems go?”

If crisis is “catastrophe,” is the opposite “doing just fine, thanks”?  “Status quo”?  “Issue-free”?

Interestingly, one of the definitions of crisis is “change,” which leads me to wonder if it’s accurate to say, “What we have here is a crisis of change”?  Or is that redundant?

At its heart, crisis is exactly that.  Change is immovably, irrevocably inevitable, as is our instinct to dig in and say, “But not to me.”  And when we face that change—or the necessity for us to change—what do we do?  Why, we declare a crisis.

Some circumstances merit the word.  A Katrina.  A Haiti.  Toxic sludge, toxic oil, genocide.

But what passes for a crisis these days is often a fear that our own circumstances might be affected.  We may have to get by with less.  We may have to do more.  We may have to do something beyond contemplate our next purchase or plan our next vacation.  Something may just grab hold of us and demand—because there’s no other choice—that we face some hard choices.  We may be required to act on principles that spew so easily from our mouths as insubstantial words.

There’s a word for that, too, equally abused.  It’s called character. 

What's the story here?

Everything you see has a story, whether you stop to think about it or not.  I stopped in my tracks, if you will, when I spotted this inexplicably abandoned pair of work boots on a railroad track near a popular downtown restaurant. 

What disembodied, barefooted soul (or sole), left them here, as though literally walking out of them?  Did he have a getaway ride idling nearby in the night, or did he just get too darned hot in the 100-degree Mississippi summer and opt for the freedom of loamy grass between his bare toes? 

Perhaps the erstwhile walker was suddenly abducted by aliens, whisked away into the mysteries of deep space by invisible UFO forces that--for reasons only they know--suddenly abandoned Area 51.  Who knows the story?  What the facts are you see before you:  these boots don't look likely to walk again anytime soon.



Could this be part of the otherworldly contingent, come to collect the now-bootless, and, I'm guessing, vanished, walker?  These neon-glowing butterflies no doubt were the vanguard of larger, more substantial flying objects tracking their prey on a still Mississippi, moonless night.  What harmless creatures could possibly produce such unnatural colors with such persistent luminosity?

There surely are, to keep my punmanship going, more pedestrian explanations for both of these images.  But I so prefer the wild flights of imagination that everyday, taken-for-granted objects can inspire.  Don't you?

Through the Looking Glass

This is a photo of a mirror, reflecting a reflection in a window that's reflected in the mirror. 

Confused? 

Life can be like that.  What we perceive sometimes is nothing more than an illusion of something totally reversed, much as it is in Alice's through-the-looking-glass experience.  It's upside down, backwards, and totally inexplicable. 

Sometimes it's better just to accept that and not try to impose logic on an illogical situation.  Sorry, all you engineers and economists reading this. 

In this world, there's the possibility for dreams, for impossible possibilities such as a Red Queen, and for flights of creative fancy. 

What you don't see in this photo is the phantasm that has inhabited this space for at least the last 50 years, known through footfalls on hardwood floors with no one else in the house, or through music strangely filtering through empty rooms with no apparent source, or through unusual indentations on beds that haven't been used.

It's only recently that the logical, organized, show-me person in the household has casually mentioned seeing the, oh, shall we just be honest and call it a ghost?  Those of us who grew up in the household know the spirit, which we consider completely benign, but we've never actually had a sighting.

So the pragmatist among us says it's a female figure, nearly transparent, and floating quietly and quickly into obscurity, as though hiding. Who am I to say otherwise?

In this artwork, drawn by a talented young woman who spent a lot of time in our household--this very house--as a child, a young girl gazes into a mirror.  What does she see?  It's a mystery.  It's whatever we imagine that she sees.

So on a day of infinite possibilities, isn't it wonderful to imagine whatever world your heart desires?  And to wonder if perhaps there's a benign spirit watching, ever so discreetly and carefully, over you?  

Seeking silence

As the frantic activity of another school year begins, I find myself envisioning the calmness of a life in the eye, rather than the fury, of the storm.  Would it be a respite or simply a deadening coda?

The question made me think of a poem written in my 14-year-old youth, my first and last poem ever published.  It's long since lost, but I remember a couple of lines:

Silence is not practiced as much as it once was
This generation has never felt its soft breath or its heart throb

It's hard to imagine the great void of nothing that is silence, the "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is," in the beautiful words of Wallace Stevens.  We don't like silence.  We don't like to experience its weight and the creeping fear of being absorbed by just our own thoughts.  We go to great lengths to avoid being left with them.

So we engineer an orchestra of white noise and electronic distractions to keep ourselves occupied--I hesitate to say entertained--to fill every nook or cranny of brain space that a stray thought can suddenly find.  We overload our senses and deaden our sensibilities.  We've become noisy walking dead.

Only after reading Thomas Merton did I realize that silence is, in fact, a real practice.  It is an absence that is, paradoxically, the presence of something profoundly disquieting, if you'll pardon my choice of words.

Even in a small town, there is the constant rattle of neighborhood noises:  the dogs that won't be quiet, the engines that won't be stilled, the lawnmowers that buzz and drone, the sirens that transport a crisis, the televisions that intrusively pacify.

In the countryside, I begin to find intimations of silence:  the great dome of the sky, the chilling cry of coyotes through a still night, the unimaginable open space that suggests you're alone.  And the knowledge that the vastness will continue, with or without you.  It takes courage to confront that silence.

Thomas Merton understood that.  His journals describe the most meaningful confrontation silence affords:  knowledge of and beyond ourselves.

Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin.  It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

And so, I'm left with another question as I contemplate the demands of silence.  Do I dare? And, do I dare?

Smile when you call me that

One of my favorite classics is Owen Wister's western novel "The Virginian," a tale of a rugged, unpolished frontier cowboy and the softening effect a "civilized" school ma'arm has on him.  He is pitted against an Iago-like nemesis by the name of Trampas, who early in the book refers to the title character by a name that could be considered affectionate or contemptuous.

In a lethal voice, packing a gun loose in its holster, the Virginian tells him, "Smile when you call me that."

Indeed.  The contempt resonating in our labels can be polarizing and demeaning.

You can call me lithe; you can call me slim; but please don't call me skinny.  There's the fire of ridicule in at least one of those descriptions.

And so it is with words that, of themselves, suggest no more and no less than their meanings.  I'm a liberal arts major, for instance.  That means I've studied a broad range of courses in culture, language, literature, philosophy, and other subjects.

I'm pretty proud of being a liberal arts major.  It's a description I like. But the word 'liberal' itself is much maligned, I fear.

In its purest sense, liberal means tolerant of different viewpoints, open-minded, progressive politically or socially.  In its purest sense, conservative means favoring traditional values and customs, cautious and restrained, careful.  Depending on who you are, there's something to admire in either, whichever way your inclinations and beliefs lead you.  There's room for common ground if we happen to be of different minds.

But, I suggest, both terms have been co-opted and corrupted, serving whatever Pavlovian purposes their users intend.  They've been put in a "wrong" and a "right" category, depending on your viewpoints.  A "for" and "against"  A "me" and "you."  A "not on your life will I ever discuss this with you and really talk WITH you" corner.

Surely there's more room for dialog instead of diatribe.  Surely we all have, buried somehwere deep inside us, just a little of the liberal arts instinct to analyze, weigh evidence, and see the possibilities for more than one interpretation. 

But if not, I beg you this:  whatever label you affix to me, smile when you call me that. 

The middle of nowhere

This is a view from my car's GPS system.  It's from the county my father was born in, a county he traveled in another time as the sheriff.  He knew these roads without GPS and maps, in daylight and in the wee hours of the morning when there were domestic disturbances usually involving alcohol.

I live here now, traveling highways as familiar to me as the sound of a friend's voice on the phone.  In all my life, I've never heard the name "Vinton," which you'll see in the lower right-hand corner.  It's only 10 miles or so from my house, but I've somehow missed it in following just the well-known Highway 50.

We live, according to this map at any rate, in the middle of nowhere.  No congestion.  No air quality issues.  No long, frustratingly inching commutes. 

On the other side of that, we have few high-end restaurants, no movie theater, no mass transportation, no neighborhood groceries,, and certainly no international airport. 

What we do have is history.  We know each other and each other's parents and children.  We pull together in crisis, flocking to each other with casseroles and pies.  We take care of aging parents and ailing family members.  We share stories and triumphs.  We take pride in our parks and walking trails, the beauty of the space around us. 

It is not a pastoral utopia, by any stretch.  Even in the middle of nowhere there are crime and drugs, abuse and neglect, and there is loneliness.  There's the foul rag and bone shop of the heart beating strongly.

I've lived in much larger cities, but I choose here.  Here in the middle of nowhere I find there's much left to learn.

The beauty of 'beauty' parlors

In the South, they never were--nor will they ever be--'salons.' They're beauty parlors.  Salon sounds just a tad, oh, stuffy and pretentious.

But call it what you will, we don't really go there in search of beauty.  In these chairs, there's therapy and conversation, shared dramas and shared recipes, women who feel secure in letting someone see them at their absolute worst, and yes, the hope that we'll leave looking at least respectable.

Here, you're among friends who don't care that you're sitting right there in public with Saran Wrap matted to a wet head or have a plastic cap tied securely under your chin with just enough hair sticking through tiny holes to make you look like a scurvy survivor.

Here, you can expose your ugly feet for a pedicure, you can burst into sobs five weeks after a hysterectomy and wail, "I'm never going to get better," and no one blinks an eye.  They've seen every mystery hair that sprouts on an aging, ever-sagging face.  They're tender with longstanding customers who arrive on walkers, unsteady and not quite sure they recognize old friends.  They discreetly disguise the thinning patches of once-thick tresses.

Sure, there's every known elixir for hair or face here, and we optimistically cart them home with us.  But that's only a cover for the real reason we keep standing appointments at the beauty parlor.

Their talents are with us through every passage.  The tense piano recitals, the magic of first proms, the graduations, engagements, weddings, and parties.  And there comes a day when you have to pick up the phone and ask, with tears in your voice, "Can you please do my mom's hair for her funeral?"  They'll go on a Sunday for that sad, final hairdo.

Especially then you realize the difference in a parlor and a salon.  One's an image-maker.  The other's with you right up until the end. 

Drawn to the Delta

Why would anyone love it here?  It's flat, it's hot, and it harbors mosquitoes the size of a baseball mitt.  Historically, and now perhaps even more than ever, it harbors poverty juxtaposed by sometimes extravagant wealth.  It is a land of unforgiving extremes.

My mother's family migrated here long before my memory.  Down through Appalachia, down through the foothills of Alabama, where they settled for a while near Mentone, into the anonymity of a small bayou community called Pace.  They scratched a living by being salesmen and homemakers, contracting tuberculosis in the case of one grandparent, and mothering 12 children in the case of the other.  My mother was one of the 12, born in the year of the Great Flood of 1927.

The older ones--of which there were many--shared their resources and their love with the younger ones.  They took each other in.  They took nieces and nephews in.  They worked hard.  They studied hard, valuing the benefits of a hard-fought education then denied to many.   They passed on a musical talent that runs through generations, a reverence for education and industry, and a strong pride of family.

The two youngest of the 12 are now approaching 80, the cousins have scattered, and the third and fourth generations in many cases are strangers to each other.  Our lives are busy, but we decided on a whim to convene as many cousins as we could.  It was time to reunite.

And so to the Delta I went.  A cotton boll towers over the landscape, but the fields now are just as likely to be full of rice, often guarded by the hovering skeletons of irrigation systems designed to thwart the blasting temperatures.  There are more vacant buildings and more abandoned, once-thriving roadside businesses.  There's less activity than I remember.

The Delta is now also home to a chemical industry, a high-end manufacturer of commercial-grade cooking appliances, at least two institutions of higher learning, and, a casino.  "The Help," a best-selling novel set in Mississippi, will be filmed in Greenwood beginning this summer.  None of these places, however, are in the wide open spaces between towns that are shrinking to no more than a couple of convenience stores.

But family is there, shrinking to only a very few of the original 12.  So we gathered to reconnect, meet the children--and sometimes grandchildren--of cousins, tell stories, share our music, remember our past. 

There, in the middle of it, were the "babies" of the original 12, reveling in the cacophony of voices and laughter and discovery.  Here's the life of the party, who will be 80 on her next birthday. 

So much has changed.  But so much continues through what they all gave to us.  We are a rich family beyond measure.  And from California, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, and points around Mississippi, the Delta draws us, always, back. 

The eye of the beholder

H.L. Mencken may have called the South the Sahara of the Bozart, but we beg to differ.

Where others see a weathered brick wall, we see the possibilities for a pebbly palette.  Art can spring from even the driest wells, as Faulkner brilliantly proved.  In our town, built around trains that long since left the station, creativity springs from the familiar and commonplace.

And we didn't need a marketing firm to survey, develop graphs, and give us the plan.  Some enterprising, anonymous paintbrush thought for itself.

The Coca-Cola mural has been a part of my landscape for so long I don't remember why it's there. Not to advertise the business on whose wall it resides.  There once was a grocery store on that corner, and it perhaps dates from a time when groceries were, in fact, within walking distance and not a five-mile drive to the nearest Wal-Mart.

Lest you not feel welcome as you enter our small community, we've also got the art to tell you how happy we are to see you.  And, by the way, you can park in the rear for a commercial enterprise that no longer exists.  

Making efficient use of the space, we also advertise the annual Labor Day arts festival, letting no one forget we're an oasis of the bozart.

But perhaps my favorite wall mural in our town is one I can't really explain.  My cloudy and possibly faulty memory recalls that a class of high school arts students used their talents to give us these images, ostensibly capturing the symbols of our life in small town Mississippi.  Make of it what you will. 

I see the windmill that has become a city trademark; a blues guitar that no dobut represents one of our city's most famous citizens, Howlin' Wolf; children pointing in wonder at something far beyond my ken. 

The fact that I don't understand it is of no concern.  That, too, is a symbol for life in our town. 

Endangered Receipts

There was a time when salads almost always started with gelatin. Lime, orange, strawberry, or just plain.

You could top with whipped cream and nuts if you were really extravagant. If you didn't use gelatin, the next choice usually had something to do with fruit cocktail and mayonnaise.

We've come a long way to arugula.

This is on my mind today because I've been cooking all weekend, and because I've just stumbled on an old cookbook hiding amongst the Cooking Lights.

The pages are brown, and the edges flake when I turn it. In its fragile pages are handwritten recipes my mom wanted to keep: a white cake recipe with three tablespoons of B.P. I take that to mean baking powder, something we rarely use today if we can get a self-rising mix. There's a congealed salad recipe that starts with orange jello, also written in her hand. And in the hand of Aunt Lou, long dead, a recipe for Mama Finch's chocolate pie.

My mother was a wonderful cook, and I've inherited her love of food, if not her talent and time. This well-used paperback cookbook, now without its covers, reminds me of the smells and industry of her busy kitchen as she cleverly--and economically--whipped up meals for five hungry kids.

For the young who read this post, who vaguely remember a time before Iron Chef and Hell's Kitchen, here's an ironic reminder of the past. I leave you with a recipe from this venerable book:

To serve 100 guests (by special request)

Three and a half pounds of coffee

Six gallons cocoa made from three gallons each of milk and water and one pound cocoa

Four pounds of loaf sugar

Five gallons of oysters

260 sandwiches made from 16 loaves bread and four pounds butter

30 pounds ham to boil and slice

10 medium-sized cabbages for cold slaw

20 pies

18 quarts ice cream

10 four-pound chickens and 30 heads of celery for salad

Five quarts of dressing for salad

Bon appetit!