It was a crazy idea. But then again it was the Christmas season. And whoever came up with the American idea of Christmas itself had to be a little crazy to begin with.
Think about it. A man climbs a two-story ladder and staples six thousand little lights to his gutter then takes them down in three weeks, that’s not exactly normal.
So we decided we would go caroling one year. I was a young man. We came up with this idea during an employee Christmas party at a Mexican restaurant one evening when they were serving half-price margaritas.
We left the restaurant and chose neighborhoods at random. We sang carols on front lawns until many kindhearted homeowners opened their doors and became so moved by our holiday spirit that they called the police.
It didn’t take long to realize that we didn’t know more than two carols. So eventually we quit singing carols and started singing tunes like “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac, and “Muskrat Love” by Captain and
Tenille. My old coworker Ellen, who is still a close friend, led the singing with a stunning voice that was reminiscent of the late Yosemite Sam.
We had so much fun that we decided to do it again the following year. Our employee manager, Ken, held a few preliminary rehearsals at his house. And by “rehearsals” I mean that we played Texas Hold’em in Ken’s basement.
As it happened, that night Ken’s wife had also invited twenty-four additional vocalists to join our choral group. Ken was not happy about this because these were not just any old singers, these were people who sang in the Southern Baptist choir with Ken’s wife.
I want to stress here that Southern Baptists are wonderful people, don’t get me wrong, I was raised Baptist. I know every word to “Just As I Am.” But many Baptists do not even allow Listerine in…
BATON ROUGE—I am at the Louisiana Book Festival. The downtown is overrun with tents, vendors, and lots of book-people.
Book-people look just like real people, only they aren’t. They have much bigger vocabularies. Many of them have earned doctorates in fields of study like post-Romantic Russian interior plumbing.
These are the kinds of brilliant people who spend two years writing a four-hundred-page dissertation about precolonial usage of the semicolon.
People who use words like “prosaic” in daily conversation.
Prosaic, I just discovered, means plain. Ordinary. Sort of run-of-the-mill. One book festival volunteer (a grad student) used this word—this is the truth—when he was giving me directions to the bathroom.
“It’s just down that hallway,” he said, “to the right, over by that rather prosaic-looking plant.”
He even used the hyphen.
So believe me, these book-people are all very nice, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that some of these well-dressed folks are the kind who—how do I put this?—have never heard of Rusty Wallace.
But it’s a great festival. Baton Rouge really comes alive. It’s not a stuffy literary gig at all. It’s fun. There
are live bands playing jazz and Cajun music. The smell of jambalaya is in the air. Many vendors are serving boudin, which is basically Cajun sausage on crack.
I am standing on the sidewalk, waiting for a ride to my presentation downtown. A black SUV pulls to the curb. A chauffeur wearing a suit opens the door and asks me to get in.
“No thanks,” I say. “I’m waiting for my ride.”
“I am your ride, sir.”
“What?”
“That’s right.”
“You mean this stud mobile is for me?”
He makes no facial expression. “Please, sir.”
I have never had a chauffeur before. On the ride over I am cracking all sorts of jokes to lighten the mood, asking where my mimosa is. Come to find out, chauffeurs don’t find mimosa jokes funny.
He drops me…
He was tall, lean, and young. When he approached me, he hugged me. Then, his mother hugged us both. A three-person club sandwich.
He must’ve been a foot taller than I was. His voice squeaked with adolescence. His skin was freckled. He had a long neck.
He recognized me.
“I liked your books, sir,” he said, through a nervous stutter.
Sir? No way. Such titles are reserved for men who wear penny loafers when fishing.
“I read them all when I was in the hospital,” the boy went on. “I kinda got to know you, and it was like we were friends.”
His mother tells me his story. It’s a long one, and it’s not mine to repeat. He has the determination of a saint and a long road ahead of him. He suffers more than other kids his age. And he might not survive his struggle.
Before he walked away, he told me something. Something that stuck with me.
“You know what I do when I’m down?” he said. “I list ten things I love every
day. I write’em on paper. My dad told me to do that.”
He tapped his finger against his head. “Gotta keep on thinking ‘bout things I love.”
I was mute. I couldn’t seem to find words. I noticed a large moon-shaped scar beneath his hairline. I tried to say something, anything, but I just smiled like an idiot.
He hugged me one more time. His mother took his arm, they walked away. The boy walked with a pronounced limp, holding his mother for balance. And I can’t quit thinking about him.
On the off-chance that he is reading this, I’ve come up with a few things I love:
1. I love Mexican food. In fact, I have had a lifelong love affair with it. A Mexican man I used to work with with used to make a dish called “chilaquiles verdes.” Before work,…
I am not old, but I am old enough to remember a time when music was melodies presented in AABA song form. Back before the internet. Back when we still had ABC Sunday Night Movies, and newspapers were everything.
Dust off your turntable. Play a few forty-fives and LPs. Pour yourself three-fingers of Ovaltine and relax. Today is National Vinyl Record Day.
Now, I know what you’re thinking because I was thinking the same thing. You didn’t know there was such a holiday. Well, there is. And it’s today.
This morning, my friend told me about this holiday. I got pretty excited because (a) I have not listened to my vinyl records in a long time, and (b) I couldn’t think of squat to write about this morning.
The thing is, I am like most modern Americans. Usually, I listen to music on my phone, which has terrible sound quality.
Ray Charles, for instance, singing over a crummy cellphone speaker is not nearly the same experience as listening to him sing over a crummy record-player speaker.
So I went to the attic, found my heavy boxes of LPs, and hauled them into the living room. I dropped them on the table, smiled at my wife, then announced in a nostalgic voice, “I think I pulled my groin.”
Whereupon
I collapsed onto the sofa and screamed for fifteen minutes. I really tweaked it good, too. I now walk like John Wayne after his yearly colon exam.
But I have my father’s records to keep me company. My mother’s, too. Most of these albums have been with the family since my childhood. Such as:
—“Hank Williams Sings”
—“Walt Disney’s Country Bear Jamboree”
— “Four Tops Live”
—“Beach Blanket Bingo” (Frankie and Annette go skydiving!)
— “Love is the Thing” by Nat King Cole
—“The Music Man” (1957 Original Broadway Cast)
— “Willie Nelson and Family”
— “Songs, Themes, and Laughs from the Andy Griffith Show”
—“Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music” by Ray Charles
I am listening to albums on an Amplitone suitcase turntable with a brand new needle. They take me back in time. These songs resurrect people I…
You are reading my 1672nd column. That is, unless you quit reading right here and don’t get to the end. In which case, I’ll save you some time and give you the final sentence right now:
“Strawberries and empty bladders.”
You probably wonder how I’m going to work a ridiculous phrase like that into a column. Well, it looks like you’ll never know, will you? Because you’re in such a hurry, Mister Big Shot.
To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure if this day would ever come. Throughout the lifetime of this blog-column thingy, there were many moments when I wasn’t even sure I would survive the night.
Mainly, I am talking about hurricanes.
I live in Northwest Florida, where the Panhandle rubs Alabama’s underbelly. We get hurricanes upwards of four hundred times per year. Some of these storms are catastrophic (Opal, Ivan, and Michael). Some aren’t bad at all.
So you never know with hurricanes, that’s the scary thing about them. They can either kill you, or
they can cause mass confusion at Walmart while people stock up on milk and bread.
I don’t know why milk and bread are so important during deadly weather, but people go NUTS about it.
You cannot visit a store without seeing crazed citizens running around Piggly Wiggly pushing carts that are filled with stolen Colonial bread and 2% milk jugs. These people are often screaming passages from the book of Revelation aloud, and their children have Kool-Aid mustaches.
The reason I tell you about hurricanes is because I have done a lot of writing during actual hurricanes.
One time I wrote you during Hurricane Irma. I was in my garage with my wife and mother-in-law. We were all wearing bicycle helmets—my wife insists on wearing hurricane helmets.
At the time, my mother-in-law was asleep in the cot next to me with her…
The answer is, nothing. Nothing makes me special. But she certainly makes me feel that way.
We are driving to a restaurant. I am dressed up. She is dressed up. We are not talking, just driving. The radio is playing Don Williams’ song, “Amanda.”
“...Amanda, light of my life,
“Fate should have made you,
“A gentleman’s wife...”
Soon, we are in a swanky restaurant. All the servers wear black. The appetizers come on square plates, doused with sauces that have fancy names that I can’t pronounce. Everything here costs more than a summer cottage in Maui.
Napkins are spread upon our laps. My wife and I are not talking because we are nosy. At the table next to ours is an elderly man with a woman who looks about twenty-one.
The man kisses her. She giggles. When the old man’s waiter arrives, the man orders aged Scotch. His date orders expensive merlot.
Our waitress arrives. My wife orders sushi for an appetizer. I’m still looking.
When the sushi comes, it looks frightening. The lime green stuff that comes with it looks
like guacamole, but it is actually nuclear horseradish that will disfigure your sinuses for life.
My wife loves sushi because she is more cultured than I am. She has been to foreign countries, she knows the difference between good wine and Boone’s Farm, and she is sharp enough to win Wheel of Fortune.
Somehow, she married a guy who has never been anywhere or done anything. A kid who was once at a famous bar in New Orleans with his buddy, where the bartender offered him a free glass of thirty-seven-year-old Scotch. And this kid—who has always been a few clowns short of a circus—refused the Scotch and ordered Coors instead.
I’ll never forget it when my buddy said, “What were you thinking, you big hick? That Scotch probably costs two hundred bucks per glass.”
My only defense was that I was a fool. And God…
This week alone, I received letters from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin; Fayetteville, North Carolina; Chanute, Kansas; Oswego, New York; and Atlanta, Georgia.
Today, I got home to find my mail-lady stuffing my mailbox, using her fist to cram letters and manila envelopes in the government-approved receptacle.
That poor woman. She’s having a hard time because our mailbox was the recent victim of “mailbox baseball,” which is a game played during the summer months.
The rules of the game are loose, but it involves speeding cars filled with teenagers beating the tar out of innocent mailboxes.
The object of this game is: Any teenager who awakes the next morning and still remembers what happened the night before, wins.
Because of this, our beat-up mailbox looks more like a mutant metal pancake with a flag attached.
I need to install a new box, but I kind of like the character our dented mailbox has. It seems to scream to the world, “Hey, look at me! I’m lopsided! When it rains the mail gets wet!”
My mail lady hates our mailbox. She tells me it is one of
the top four things that causes her high blood pressure. The top item on her list is her mother-in-law in Tampa.
I receive a lot of mail. Which is a new thing for me. Used to, nobody wrote me but Ed McMahon and the IRS. But now I get mail from all over, sometimes from exotic countries like Canada.
Today, I got a letter from Jacksonville, from a woman I met a few weeks ago. It was a very touching letter. I cried when I read it.
I also got a letter from a man named Myron, who is from Tacoma, Washington, whose father just died.
This week alone, I received letters from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin; Fayetteville, North Carolina; Chanute, Kansas; Oswego, New York; and Atlanta, Georgia.
Most of my letters, however, come from Alabama. I am fortunate to call Alabama my adopted home away from home.…
Even so, there’s something about this tune that moves me. I can close my gray eyes and go back in time.
Willie Nelson is on my radio. He is singing one of my favorite songs.
“In the twilight glow I see her,
“Blue eyes crying in the rain,
“When we kissed goodbye and parted,
“I knew we’d never meet again…”
I turn it up because I am a sucker for this tune. Though, I’m not sure why. When I was a boy, the lyrics never made sense to me.
After all, nobody with blue eyes ever cried in the rain for me. And I certainly didn’t have blue eyes. My eyes are gray. My mother used to say my eyes were the color of our pump shed.
Even so, there’s something about this tune that moves me. I can close my gray eyes and go back in time.
And I see my father’s work bench in the garage. A radio sits beside a chest of mini-drawers that is filled with bolts, nuts, screws, washers, and rubber grommets.
Crystal Gayle is singing “Don’t it Make
my Brown Eyes Blue?”
Then Willie begins playing over the speaker. My father turns it up.
“Love is but a dying ember,
“Only memories remain,
“Through the ages, I’ll remember,
“Blue eyes crying in the rain…”
And I am holding a GI Joe doll, watching a tall, skinny man work on something beneath a shop lamp, holding a screwdriver.
He does all his own repairs, this man. Because he believes it is wasteful to hire people to do work you could do yourself. Just like it’s disgraceful, and even unforgivable, to throw away refrigerator leftovers.
The people I come from are proud and self-sufficient, and they are not above eating ten-week old meatloaf that has turned Sea Foam Green. They cut their own hair. And their own lawns.
When I started travelling a lot for work, I hired a yardman to…
The older you get, the more important the little pieces of your past become. You find yourself wanting to remember the itty-bitty details. Things you didn’t even know you cared about. Because they are not just memories, they’re you.
ATLANTA—I don’t do big cities, but I don’t mind Atlanta.
If you were to force me to pick my favorite American city, I wouldn’t pick one because I don’t like being forced to do anything.
My mother used to force me to eat tapioca pudding as a kid, the texture reminded me of old-person snot and I refused to eat it because I couldn’t understand how the same advanced civilization that invented bacon, airplanes, and the Thigh Master, came up with tapioca.
But like I was saying, if you asked me nicely to pick a favorite major American city, maybe I would pick Atlanta. Because I have history here.
Right now I am driving I-285, through Atlanta’s congested traffic. The long line of vehicles moves five feet per hour. It’s miserable.
I have plenty of time to remember all kinds of things in this gridlock. Things like, for instance, tapioca.
And I can recall an era before smartphones, when newspapers were works of journalism, before they
got swallowed by internet agencies who produce articles entitled: “TWENTY-ONE REASONS WHY BOTTLED WATER WILL KILL YOU.”
And I remember when the Atlanta Journal Constitution was the highlight of my day.
We lived in Atlanta for a hot minute when I was a boy, and each morning I would be the first to retrieve the newspaper. My uncle thought this was hysterical.
“You’re fetching the paper?” he said. “That’s a pretty good trick, Fido. How about next I teach you to shake, roll over, and tee-tee on command?”
But I already knew how to do those things.
So I would open the paper to read my favorite columnist. Then, I would cut out the column with scissors because it was the brightest spot of my day.
Later, when my uncle would shake open his newspaper, he would find a gaping hole where…
The backroads between Florida and Alabama are perfect. The scenery is all dirt roads and sleepy homesteads. If you drive these two-lane highways with your radio playing old-time music, you will appreciate the music.
If you are so inclined, play a little Hank. If you are feeling adventurous, Willie Nelson. Romantic, try Patsy Cline.
I don’t know what it is about this drive that moves me. Perhaps it’s because this is my home county. Or maybe because I have been burning these local roads since my youth. Maybe it’s because once, I had this ridiculous idea that I wanted to leave.
I don’t know why.
Here, not much has changed since the pavement cooled. The one-story houses on the sides of the highway are frozen in time. The homemade vegetable stands, vacant until summer use. The broke down tractors, the cotton fields.
If you’re into rural beauty, there is nothing but beauty from here to Huntsville.
I pass Hart’s Fillin’ Station, in DeFuniak Springs. If you
have never been to Hart’s to eat fried chicken, you aren’t living right.
On this road you see homes with hordes of cars parked in the driveway. Those cars probably belong to adult children who have returned home. It could be that everyone is in town for a wedding. Maybe a funeral. A baby shower. A birthday. Karaoke night.
Either way, there is going to be good eating, I guarantee it.
The narrow highway lopes across a flat Panhandle. I feel sorry I ever wanted to abandon it. Soon, I am leaving my county. Welcome to Florala, Alabama. We have officially left Florida and crossed into the Yellowhammer State.
The two locales look more or less the same. There are wide fields with gracious trees that bow over the roads. Pathways adorned with live oaks, flat green pastures peppered with round bales.
I pass…