Sordid Blog

So here’s one last pic of me with the children at the beach house … yep, all these little darlings in one little house … sweetness.

Last night, we went to dinner @ Golden Corral. I know what you’re saying, but kids ate for .99! So we couldn’t feed them at home for that price! I got to ride with Michelle & Shane and their nieces and two friends, so four girls between 10 and 14. And then Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” came on the XM Radio, and, well, it was an impressive performance by the 4 girls who sang along. Moderately creepy to have a 12 year old singing a few of the lyrics, but still … “us girls, we are so magical, soft skin …” you see where the creep factor can come in … Still too funny …

So Orson Scott Card, whose Ender-series of books I’ve loved as some of my absolute favorite, has gone round the bend again with his own loving brand of homophobic bullshit. I guess you can love a book and an author for giving it to you without loving the person at all; perhaps they are wonderfully separate.

Fortunately, good ol’ Pam over at the House Blend has pulled apart Card’s crazy in useful ways … I might give my students the Card essay in FYC this fall and see what they make of it. I never have enough crazy-wingnut writing to share, and this one has lots of problematic “logical” moves to pull at for a good chunk of classtime. Then maybe offer Pam’s House Blend as one way of bloggerizing an essay. Who knows?

I’m spending a few days with the Eble clan at Carolina Beach.  Now, let me set the scene: this means Michelle and Share are here, but so are Michelle’s brothers and their wives, alone with their respective four children (plus two friends of children), so we have 10 kids in the house.  Uh-huh … that’s right … and six are boys aged 7 & under … and two wear diapers.  So I clearly have a funny notion of what a “vacation” looks like.

Then again, if you have a kid like Little Will to hang out with, well, for a Big Will like me, that’s a pretty good deal.  In this picture, we’re playing with Photoboth on the MacBook.  It was a good time.

I’m here as Shane and Michelle’s child; I know this because I’m sharing a room with Little Will and his little brother Benjamin. So we little boys are enjoying a male-bonding time and watching a lot of Cartoon Network.  I can sense your envy even as I type this!

This summer, during the TRWP, I was prompted to write about a memory, and this is the story that emerged.  Not sure if it’s worth reading, but I had fun writing it, and given my recent trip home for mother’s funeral and a dinner-on-the-ground experience, it seems like a good time to share it.  It’s long, and maybe is best listened to as a podcast, which is included in the link below. Enjoy!  All that said, I should also confess that this might be Frey-esque in that some of this may not have really happened … did Mimi stand up and say what she said or just say it loudly when services were over … I’m not certain now, but I think the spirit of the event is here.

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When my grandmother was displeased, you knew it.  Everyone knew it. I think she reached that point – sometime before I was born – when she decided that she had no time to suffer fools and that what the world really needed from her, even if the world didn’t know it, was brutal honesty. When she spoke, she was merely answering a calling. As a young person, I especially liked being there when her honesty found voice or audience.

Whether the time Mimi had to educate the 16 year old cashier at the Piggly Wiggly about why we don’t accuse a 73 year old Southern woman of lying about how many items she paid for and how many she didn’t days after returning to the store with a badly tallied receipt in her hand, or the time she let the manager at the B. C. Moore’s department store know that, contrary to “store policy,” which she couldn’t give two shakes for, she would, indeed, be refunded cash for the return of her tragically disappointing Keds – as she noted convincingly, “store credit don’t mean nothing except I can spend my money on something else that ain’t worth the box it came in!” – they were all adventures.

But one that stands out has to be the experience of watching our little community go through the process of selecting, buying, and installing a new baby grand piano at the Moxley Baptist Church. You’ll need a little background.  For starters, Mimi’s father helped build the church – literally, board by board, and when the paved road came through, he helped lift the church and scoot it back from the road.  Which is to say that Mimi had a sense of investment in the place.  To this day, you’ll find an aging black-and-white picture of my great-grandfather and the other deacons in the church foyer.

Second, the woman who, as Mimi once noted, “spread her ass across the piano bench,” was not my grandmother’s favorite person.  Could have been that my mother had played the piano at church for years, until her divorce, when the current broad-assed woman angled to usurp her.  Could have been because, as Mimi said, Miss Sharon wasn’t worth the dynamite it would take to blow her up – I think Mimi recognized that the current pianist couldn’t really play the instrument all that well. And that’s the God’s honest truth: when Miss Sharon took over, she played mostly just one hand; it took her a few years to get the left hand on the keyboard, and even when I would return from college and go to church with Mimi, I’d notice that she’d never really “gotten” how to play a hymn.  You don’t strike every note, honey!Ultimately, Mimi’s reasoning was sound: why buy an expensive piano if the woman at the helm couldn’t really navigate the ship?

Regardless of what exactly bothered Mimi about the whole thing, suffice it to say that the thought of her tithing money to purchase a new piano for this train-wreck of a bench-stealing, no-talent pianist did not sit well.  Each Sunday, as the church collected money for “God’s work and a new piano,” when Mimi would drop her unfolded-for-all-the-world-to-see check in the offering plate, the memo line would read quite clearly, “For Jesus – NOT for piano” or “For Lottie Moon Christmas Fund – NOT for piano.”  As the plate made its rounds through the pews, no one was confused about Mimi’s feelings regarding the new purchase.

So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone what happened that hot summer Sunday when the new piano was “installed” for the glory of God and the elevation of His word through song and voice.

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I ran across this statement by Fidel Castro somewhere; I have trouble believing it’s a real statement, perhaps because it’s in French and not in Spanish, but who knows … maybe it was translated for some reason … but it seems to be exactly the same sentiment that Bush has been throwing around RE his role in the Iraq War:

Condamnez moi si vous voulez, mais  l’Histoire m’acquittera.
“Condemn me if you will, but History will aquit me” (Will’s translation)

Just saying … oh, and I also don’t trust it that much cause 3 of the words were spelled incorrectly in the source …

Dear Ms. Titty-Titty,

If you ever come back to my back porch and then sprawl all out and roll around like you own the place, I will be forced to consider that a breach of our contract and will be forced to eat you.

I’m just letting you know.

Sincerely,

Gwennie JC

PS: Yes, Max is a wussy … if Mr. had let me out there, I wouldn’t have just stared at you and then run away when you hissed.  Max ain’t got no backbone cause he not from the street.

In case you’re wondering, green beans are “high as a cat’s back” right now, as is food for feeding catfish.  Really, just about everything is high as a cat’s back right now.  I’d forgotten this expression, though I know I heard it a million times from my grandmother.  Over the last few days with my aunt, I heard it a dozen times, along with a host of other clever things.  People have been “tighter than Dick’s hatband” (referring to their penny-pinching quality), and I may have heard about a number of folks who “couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with directions on the heal”.  That’s a special kinda dumb, folks.

I do miss the clever Southernism that I grew up with some days.

After dinner out on Saturday night at Lewis Lake (yeah, there’s no apostrophe s on that for some reason) — and this is a place that is literally out in the middle of nowhere, down the Riddleville road just outside of Bartow, and then right at the sign and then right again at the sign that reads “Paved Road Ends Here”, and you find a bunch of old buildings that back up to a lake which used to have a grist mill — I ended up back at my aunt’s with some of her family and watched the video of their 50th anniversary part at the Johnson-Josey-Jordan House in Bartow.  Well, it’s now called Magnolia Mornings B&B, but to me, it’s just the Josey-Jordan house; I have no idea who Johnson is and when he/she/it came along to add a name.  The house is like a law firm for names. The best part of the video was the end, when they turned the camera on my aunt and uncle’s faces as they watched a picture slideshow of 50 years of pictures.  Too much … my aunt squeals and hollars and says “Oh my fathers” about 20 times.  It’s too cute.

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Suffice it to say, Saturday morning brought a claustral heat.  At least 95 degrees, and the shade of the blue tent from Smith Funeral Home did little to ease that heat.

The family met at Smith Funeral Home in Wadley around 10:15 a.m., and had the chance to catch up with each other. Some of the pallbearers could not make it to the viewing the night before, so the morning provided us with a short bit of time to catch up and see how each cousin has been doing.  My first- cousins, my aunt’s children, all three boys, were obvious choices for pallbearers, and after them, my mother’s other sister’s son, another first-cousin, made a fourth; we rounded to six by getting two second cousins, whom I never saw growing up except once each year at the family reunion.  But mother adored them both, as they were her first-cousins and she had spent much of her childhood with them.

At quarter of 11:00, we took to our cars, and as my car was directly behind the hearse, I took my aunt’s three boys with me; I think that’s the first time I’ve been with all three of them in one place in years, probably since I was a small child.  My aunt’s oldest son is so much older than me that by the time I can really remember, he was already at the University of Georgia and not long after was getting married to a girl from Nahunta.

On the seven mile trip to the Moxley Baptist Church cemetery, cars that we met would pull of the road and stop for the procession.  I’ve lived in big cities so long that I’d assumed folks didn’t still do that, that they rode on as though nothing were going on.  But not in Jefferson County, where everyone knows that you just stop what you’re doing as the dead move past.

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I’m sitting at my aunt’s dining room table, coffee in hand, and wondering at how strange it is to have wireless access at her house.  My brother and I spent the night here last night, while my sister and her family stayed “across the creek” at my cousin’s house.  My brother asked my 68 year old aunt why she had wireless: “So I can work my laptop!”  And what does she do with this wireless? “Well, I need get on that Food Network and look at recipes sometimes.”  Her grandchildren do not have “the Internet” at their houses and they don’t really get to use it here, as they should be outside playing and not sitting around being idle.  Interesting.

Would have given anything for a digital voice recorder last night … I’d forgotten the sort of conversations that one can have in the South; I’m too disconnected from those cadences and moves.  There are not nearly enough studies of how Southerners talk — it was like some sort of artful language dance all night long … amazing.

Had fascinating conversations last night about the state of education in the United States, conversations that surprised me really.  My aunt has always seemed smart and interesting (and frightening) and she did not disappoint last night.  I think she knows more about good pedagogy than most of the teachers I meet on a daily basis.  Wild …

Kayte got stung by two wasps yesterday while playing outside; she screamed bloody murder and I thought we might have to put her down … the cows in the closest pasture seemed unamused and her screams.  That niece of mine is a drama queen; where does she get it?  Pipper and I played baseball for a couple hours: me slow-underhand pitching and him swinging through the air; when he’d make contact and knock one over my head, he’d declare “sports star” and that was code for something.  Then he played with his cousins for an hour or so and was soakin’ wet in the evening humidity and heat.

Today will be a whole new set of adventures as more family comes in and folks stop by. Not really sure what the day will hold, actually, but tonight will be fascinating. The viewing will be tonight from 6:00 - 8:00 @ Smith Funeral Home in Wadley, GA; the funeral will be tomorrow morning @ 11:00 @ the Moxley Baptist Church, followed by a lunch for the family at the Moxley Methodist Church Social Hall around noon. It all seems to move very quickly, but then not quite quickly enough …