Mental Kudzu

Let me count the ways…

Yes, our 11th anniversary just passed but the words of adoration go to my new Mac Air. Wait, I stand corrected, since my husband gave me the new Mac, by proxy the adoration goes to him. Social Security should pay for laptops for the disabled. We are ineffective when forced to sit at a desk, our limbs don’t work that way.

Ah, to blog or not to blog, that is no longer the question. Enough dribble ducacky. Today will be spent putting this Air through its paces, attempting to transfer files from the much-loved iMac and installing various peripherals. And you will all be pleased to know – Spencer and Miss Margaret are returning in a few weeks. After a year of rebuilding their particulate universe, they have rotated their corpuscular motion toward Brown St. and will join us here in celebration of the 234th tri-union of our planets.

Cook is preparing their journey.

I choose my label. “Writer” It’s rectangular. And temporary. The large blue HELLO, I AM fades with the continuous cycles of permanent press which are wrought forth with eco-friendly laundry powder my friend brings me from Costco.

Twenty years ago, my father stuck another label above my left breast. This one, “Caregiver”, won’t come off in the washing machine. It doesn’t shrink or fade. If anything, the ink brightens. It’s as colorfast as time.

I hear the clump, drag, clump of my mother’s three-pronged cane as she stutters her way across the kitchen toward the front of the house. Her destination is the front porch. She hesitates at each threshold. Dining room. Living room. Front door. Each room is unfamiliar and she must place herself, physically and mentally, in her location before moving on to the next one.

Lately we’ve been making soup. She lurches myopically through the Soup Bible, seeking recipes and searching for ingredient lists. The idea of a pantry is completely foreign to her. The pots are too heavy to lift. The new gas stove is too complex to operate. We listen for the click-click-click of the pilot light. Click-click-click-click-click-click.

What are the ingredients on hand? Should there be a trip to the store? How do we choose our recipe on this day?

The idea of soup gives our day a continuity, a purpose. We began with vichyssoise.
Potatoes from this bin, waxed cartons of broth from this shelf, carrots from the refrigerator bottom right drawer.

Each day begins a new search.

Last night I bought beets. “Mom. Look what I have.” I hold up the grocery store bag, the green and dark red leaves of the beets hang out over the top. “Beets.”

She looks up. She’s holding a cell phone in her hand. It’s turned off. “I can’t turn this on. What is that? What?”

“Beets, Mom. Remember? We’re going to make borscht.”

“Borssshhhh? Borssshhhh? Why won’t this phone work?”

I smile and say, “Just a sec. Let’s plug it in, recharge it.” Then I hand her the cookbook. “Borscht. Beet soup. Russian Borscht. Let’s make some.”

Leaving her with the book open on the illustrated guide to creating borscht, I walk into the study and wait for her to read the recipe.

But she picks up the cell phone. I hear the beep-beep-beep as she presses numbers. “Hellooooo. This is Ruthie. It’s Ruthie. Jane? Roy? Roy, why won’t you let me talk to Jane?” I wait a few minutes, walk back to her room. She has the cookbook in her lap, the phone on the table.

“I’m going to take Ollie to the movies this afternoon. When I get back, we’ll make borscht. Okay? I’ll only be gone for a little while.”

“Who?”

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Zirdland’s new $1,000 NOVEL COMPETITION opened on the same day as the Olympics: August 8th. If you have a completed unpublished novel, you can enter it at: http://www.zirdland.com/contest.php There’s NO entry fee. Deadline is October 10th.

31

I spoke of this publication earlier. Now ya’ll can order copies of it… cool, huh?

A fictional account of an actual event.
Just a few people sit in the brocade chairs surrounding the white linen covered tables at the Brentwood Country Club ballroom. They are the elderly and with canes leaning against the empty seats, they talk in low voices, occasionally cupping their ears to hear each other. A tight group of almost middle-aged men stand near the bar in the far corner. Facing the room, backs to the bar, they survey the room. On the stage a small band plays low volume show tunes.

Children, dressed in their finest, most uncomfortable, Sunday School clothes, race around the room. They are on the verge of rioting. Confined to a large space containing no diversion other than themselves, they push each other aside as they race around tables and head toward the dessert buffet. Linen-suited demon boys flicking boogers at their sisters.

Small clusters of women form cliques throughout the room. Standing amid despised cousins and whining grown siblings, they are quickly bored with the conversations. They hurry to bridge the gap between themselves and their buffet-bound offspring. Gently clapping their hands, they whisper admonishments and beg for proper behavior. Don’t make me get your father… Remember what he told you in the car? Be still for a minute. You need to be unseen and unheard. What will your Papaw think?

The children, wise to their mother’s precarious positions, negotiate for sleep-overs and ice cream in exchange for acceptable behavior. Promise to quiet down as they crawl under tables while sliding from their mother’s grip.

The men continue to hover near the bar, never allowing more than a few feet between them and the bartender. They drink hundred year old scotch and review yesterday’s market decline. They remain oblivious to everyone in the room except Great Uncle Harold and Papaw. They glance toward the two old men who are seated at the table in the center of the room, and occasionally nod their heads toward them in deference.

The group knows Edgar has his eye on the two thousand acre farm Great Uncle Harold has let lie fallow for ten years. He wants to move his race horses from Kentucky to Arkansas. Just last week his mistress agreed to move and the whole plan will be complete if he can provide her with a legitimate reason to be there in town, close to him. She’s been his horse trainer for four years. Edgar implores them for their support. Henry knows Edgar’s plan and is using it for leverage. In exchange for his approval, he wants half ownership in Edgar’s Ford dealership in Camden.

Gary creates a stir when he announces he secretly wed Julie six weeks ago at a small ceremony in Little Rock. The men already know about the marriage but don’t let on. They approve and think she’s really hot. They all saw her on above the month of August, on Wayne O’s calendar where she was photographed holding a fly rod while wearing only a fishing vest and a pair of waders. Gary met her at Bubbles, a lounge off Interstate 40 near North Little Rock. He admonishes the men, keep it to yourselves until I’ve had a chance to smooth things over with Papaw. They all laugh when he tells them he had to buy her a diamond bracelet to get her to stay home today.

What the men don’t know is that Gary has their grandmother Sophia’s wedding ring in his suit pocket. He fingers it while making his marital announcement. Grandmother Sophia, confined to a bed in MeadowView, gave him the ring when he remarked on the thievery in such places. Said he could take care of it for her. He also takes care of her silver tea service and her coin collection.

Over at the center table, Harold turns to his brother, “It’s a room chock full of crap. You know it as well as I do. Not a damn one of them worth a piss. Edgar’s after my farm. God damn fool. I can’t wait to see his face when I tell him I signed it over to The Wildlife Consortium last week. It’s a protected wetland, the idiot doesn’t have enough sense to know he can’t do anything with it. Not even a horse farm.”

The old man shifts in his seat, grabs Harold by the arm and pulls him closer. “Harold, I’ve got something that will really gall you. That fart Gary took Sophia’s wedding ring. Right off her finger. I imagine he’s going to marry that piece of strip joint fluff, if he hasn’t done it already. The one that was half-naked, bare-assed, on the cover of some porn rag. What is it about tits and ass? I’ll take Sophia’s brain any day. Even if there’s not much left of it. Give me a woman who can think for herself. That’s sexy. I miss those debates as much as I miss her face, I tell you. God that woman could make a point. Take any side of an argument.”

Harold straightens up, pats his brother’s hand. “I’m sorry. He’s an idiot. Give me some more of that Dewars.”

Harold surveys the room, quickly takes a silver flask out of his suit pocket and refreshes their drinks.
Whispers shhhhhhh…. Look out. Here’s comes Hazel… Act deaf.

She’s just stepping out ‘cause Wade’s upstate in Pittsburgh,
And Carl’s doing the usual Saturday night routine,
As a guitarman wails loud and slow
About good times gone bad and men laid low.

Edna smells like yesterday’s sex,
But Carl’s been working in the foundry for 37 years
And most vapors escape his notice.

Edna’s not one of them thick-legged bitches.
She’s worn out, used up, and collects Aunt Jemima dolls.

Carl wears a polyester Johnny Reb cap.
He bought it on his one and only trip South in 1985,
Down at Boone Hall Plantation, near Charleston,
Where admission is charged to view

The forsaken land and paths through the past…
And lunch is served in the overseer’s cabin
Transformed by plastic and painted-over wood.
Where they serve quiches, BLT’s and progress
Charging inflated prices for half-assed goods.

Selling, by the thousands, those Tawainese Aunt Jemimas
With red-checkered bandannas, laughing faces, and slightly slanted eyes.

And the South succeeds at last
In clutching the Yankee dollar,
Amid forgotten fields of sea island cotton
And long-grain rice swept up by the price of manual labor.

Can you write a story in 31 words?

#1.
I don’t rightly know when they’re coming. They slam in on me at most inconvenient times. Voices, lots of them, inside my head. Today? Silence. Everyone is safe. I’m not cold.

#2.
Laymon wants us to get married. The baby’s due in June, he wants to give it a name like Cletus Wayne. I want to graduate cosmetology school, open my own salon.

#3.
We lost my little brother Jimmy for three days last fall when he checked into the Farm Rest Motel instead of sitting there on Daddy Bill’s deer stand in the rain.

#4.
He’s got two boys from his first marriage. One’s serving five years for armed robbery, the other married Linda Speck and they have four kids under the age of five.

#5.
That’s here, there. Her son Ronnie joined ROTC in high school, freshman year, then followed LBJ to Vietnam. His picture’s on the coffee table, his name’s on a wall in DC.

People are so stuck on themselves, they make my teeth hurt.

Serious now. Some folks think ignorant is the woman at the KMart dressed in lime green polyester stretch pants twelve sizes too small, an orange tube top encasing her barn size bosoms like they was polish sausage, and flip flops what are smacking against her splayed out heels when she walks, sticking about every fifth step and then popping loose with a loud thwack who’s shoveling Coca Cola and Mars bars into the mouths of three squalling toddlers who are standing in the shopping cart on top of two fifty pound bags of dog food and a case of shotgun shells.

That’s not ignorant, that’s Mama, doing the shopping on Saturday morning.

Ignorant is folks what stand in the mall parking lot, next to their really small cars with really small tires, the kind of cars that don’t need no cardboard Christmas trees hanging from the rear view mirror smelling like Ocean Fresh Breezes, and they’re all the time saying stuff like, “Goodness, John Davidson, go and tell your sister Mary Patton to meet us at the Lexus when she’s through perusing the department store.” The bless their children with middle names like that, middle names what are last names in the wrong place. Like their mother did more for the world than their daddy and so they’ve got to make sure folks remember her name on account of it is so special because their daddy works for her family and they’ve owned the mill since after the Civil War and most of the town owes the fact that they’ve got bread on their table to that family. Ignorant is what they do for themselves and the way they treat other folks who don’t own mills or have college educations.

Ignorant is those same families who go back to their homes with more than one bathroom, homes with rumpus rooms and master bedrooms, the kind with mud rooms instead of laundry rooms, and garages instead of barns, who write long essays for NPR or Slate about how us rural yokels have grits flying out of our mouths while we grunt and point, trying to explain to those ignorants to get the hell out of the roadway on account of Larry Darnell is about to blast out of the house and tear down the road in his F-150 on account of Mama fed the deer dogs last night and they weren’t supposed to have full stomachs the morning of the hunt and he’s so mad he’s going over to Earlene’s Corner Mart for an hour long bitching session with his second-cousin twice removed who goes by the name of Snake but his Christian name is John Wayne and knowing they both slam down about a dozen country ham biscuits and a quart of coffee, all the while smoking unfiltered Camels and tapping their feet to Bosephus or Merle, and ignorant is parking on the side of the road while that’s about to happen and not listening to folks what tells you to move back away from where the gravel will be spitting up like bullets when that F-150 with over-sized tires takes the corner on its way to biscuit salvation. [That's surely the longest sentence I ever did wrote]

Maybe they ain’t as ignorant as they are confused. Confused about how they got the money to buy those cars. Confused because they don’t know history and where linen came from and how it used to be a working man’s fabric. Forgetful maybe. Forgetting all the while about folks in row houses, how those folks are the ones what put the bread on the tables of the last name in the middle children.

[taken from my "ideas" folder of April 2003]