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.