Ode to Billy Joe

I am determined to rewrite Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billy Joe as a novel. Ever since my 11th grade English teacher, Mrs. Haynes, had the entire class write essays on what we thought she and Billy Joe were throwing off that bridge, I’ve been bothered by that story. And now, almost half a century later, I have figured it out. You see, if you listen closely to the song, and visualize all of the things her mother says, you (or at least I) get a very different picture. It makes me start wondering about the relationship between mom and Brother Taylor, for instance. And do Mom’s questions not sound a bit like an inquisition? Listen closely to her, and then add things like a piercing look, and an unstated accusation, like “What do you know about that, girl?”, and then “What’s happened to your appetite?” , as though she is probing for an admission of some sort. Maybe it wasn’t a virus that Papa caught that did him in. Could it have been clearing the way for Brother Taylor? Okay, I’ve got to write it. Northern Mississippi, 1964, here I come. Oh, and Carmen Haynes, if you’re reading this (and I hope you are), I am convinced it wasn’t something existential, like their combined hopes, dreams, and future plans they were throwing off that bridge. They had their escape plans made and laid, and were just waiting. All they were really doing was pitching rocks at turtles. The only thing of note that was pitched off that bridge was Billy Joe, and I’m betting that Brother Taylor was the one who did it. Can you change my grade to an "A"?

Boy, Am I Bored

“Can we go somewhere?” He’s 14, but it could just as easily be 12 or 16, maybe even 10. Or it could be her at any of those ages. “Where do you want to go?” “Anywhere, let’s just go somewhere. There’s nothing to do around here. I’m bored.” I can feel it coming, but there’s nothing I can do but join in and play this game. “Why don’t you read a book? “I’ve read all the ones I like.” “Watch TV? There are only a hundred or so channels. Surely there’s something on that’s good.” “No, I looked at the guide. They’re all boring.” “Watch a movie?” “Seen them all a hundred times.” “Get on the internet.” Not always a good suggestion, but I can already see where this is going. “There’s nothing there I want to see. You have all the good sites blocked.” “Play a video game?” There are at least three platforms, and dozens of games for each. “Played them all. Beat them all. Bored with them all.” “How about your DS?” “Those games are all sissy games, and anyway I’ve beat them.” “I guess your iPod Touch is out of the question.” “I’m out of money on iTunes, and I’ve played all the games I can download. Nobody is around to text, there are all out doing stuff.” “What kind of stuff?” “I don’t know, just stuff. Fun stuff.” “Why not shoot some baskets?” “No.” “Ride your bike?” “Flat tire.” “Go for a walk?” “Been everywhere, seen everything, done it all.” “I guess you could help me with the chores.” No verbal response, just eye-roll and incredulous look. “Or maybe you could wash the car.” Another of the same, this time over the shoulder as he walks away. “Does this mean no?” The same response again, over a slumping, boneless shoulder, the surest sign of abject boredom and disgust at having to stay home all day and all night. At this point I have only two choices (really three, but throwing rocks at a child is frowned upon in some cultures, ours being one of them). I can sacrifice my day to search for meaningful “fun”, a search doomed to failure from the start. I mean, if none of the twelve offerings above are worth a try, what would make me think anything I could drive him to, or procure for him would be any better? Or I could make the situation worse, which I almost invariably choose. This time is no different. “I don’t believe in boredom. I think it’s just a lack of imagination.” That’s sure to get a glare, and thereby justifiable. “You have everything in the world to do right here. What is it you really want?” “I don’t know. I’m just bored.” So here we have it. The speech has to come out. If I don’t recite it on purpose I’ll no doubt go into a dissociative trance and pump it out of my subconscious. “When I was your age I never got bored. There wasn’t satellite TV or computers, and I was in my 20s with a family when the first video game was invented. You had to go to a movie on Saturday to see one, and then there wasn’t a choice. We didn’t have a telephone in the house, and the nearest neighbor my age was 4 miles away. I did ride over there on my bike a lot, though. There was all kinds of stuff to see and do, and if I did find myself with nothing that excited me, I could always read the encyclopedia. One summer I got all the way to the “D’s”. Of course I had to shout the last half, because I had lost my audience. He had slumped off somewhere to wallow in boredom, blaming me for being the fun-sucker I am. Ever happen to you? Don’t lie. It’s happened to all of us with progeny. Ever think about why? There has to be a reason, even if it turns out to be some form of contagion spread by puberty. Who’s really to blame? I’ll throw together a list of possibilities. It won’t be all-inclusive, just those things I can think of. Add some more and text me. Or email me. Or tweet. Or put them on face-book. My-space? Skype? Even (if you are hopelessly out of touch) call me. I should probably set the record straight. I got bored, too. I remember days that seemed to stretch out to infinity, and I could come up with nothing that sounded exciting to do. My choices were fewer then than his now, but my vista was narrower then, too. I could read, run, walk, play ball, solitaire, fish, bicycle, or just fool around. That doesn’t sound like a lot of choices by today’s standards, but it made for a full life for those times, and I wouldn’t trade then for now. The point is that no matter what is available, sometimes nothing satisfies. I don’t remember it lasting for hours or days or longer, but I remember occasionally thinking that I had a lot of time on my hands and not one thing to fill it with. What’s a body to do? This is where imagination comes in. It’s downright ugly of me to disparage a teen’s (or anyone’s) imagination. That’s just one of my failures. For the life of me, I can’t recall curing mind-numbing periods of boredom with bursts of genius, inspiration, or imagination. But something must have happened or I would still be shuffling around, grumping and grumbling and asking to be entertained. And the same will happen to him – and her. The wrong thing for me (or you) to do is to jump up and start trying to please. I get the image of “how do you like this? How about this? Maybe in a different color? Size?” in a futile effort to find a match between what he wants and what I can offer. That’s a non-starter. It calls to mind a friend’s boss who was fond of saying, “I don’t know what I want but I’ll know it when I see it - and that’s not it.”

Rain

I’m sitting at my computer table and watching it rain. Nothing’s wrong, in fact things are going pretty well right now. I just like rain. For the several years that Wendy and I actively farmed, and helped feed over 50 families, we very often didn’t get nearly enough rain. In fact, a couple of years it was so stingy that we watched things turn brown and die, while we resorted to buying from other farms to make our weekly deliveries. I was constantly reminded that we as human beings can be pretty arrogant for the most part, considering that we owe our continued existence to 6 inches of topsoil, and the fact that it rains. Given that that is true, we teetered on the brink of extinction three summers in a row. But when rain finally comes, you can smell it long before it gets to you. It’s hard to define the smell, but it’s unmistakable. Then you hear it as it comes over the hill, just a steady, faint roar that gets louder slowly. I grab my stuff and start for the house, and when I get part way I can see it advancing down the hillside, obscuring the top, then halfway down, then rolling across the pasture. The roar is louder now, and once I would make a run for it. Not any more. I slow down and watch and listen, and smile so wide my cheeks hurt. The first drops are so big and hit so hard that for a minute I think there may be some hail mixed in, and I get a burst of adrenalin and panic, but that quickly fades as exhilaration takes over. There’s nothing there but big, fat raindrops. I can see dimples in the dust where drops hit, but only for a few seconds. Then everything is wet, the ground, me, and everything tha's green. I swear I can hear them singing. Why in thunder (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun) would anyone want to go inside where it’s still dry? So I walk and watch and smile, and get soaked to the skin, muddy from the knees down, and it’s all good. It reminds me of when I was small, and the house we lived in didn’t have running water. Summer rains were free showers, and my mom didn’t have to heat water on the stove and fill up the washtub. She’d give me a bar of soap and send me outside into the rain to get clean. You know, it feels as good now as it did then. Maybe I should carry a bar of soap around in my pocket.

Can I get more with less?

I am an avid reader, and of course want to be a writer that people read avidly. But I've hit a bump in the road. Not with writing, I'm not even sure I'm on a road with that, much less the right road. No, the bump I've hit is with the books I'm finding to read. It seems that every time I pick up a good whodunit these days, somewhere in the first 25 pages I'm forced to read the description of murder not just "so foul", but so gruesome. Successful writers appear to be in a contest to see who can describe rape, torture, murder and mutilation in the most macabre manner. Now, in the couple of things I've actually written, I admittedly have bumped off some folks - after all, murder sells. So it's not the act itself that I am finding repugnant, it's the lengths to which it's being taken and being described. I mean, are there really that many deviants out there who not only serially slay, but then slice, dice, pose, and write notes in the blood of their victims? And if there are, do they really only take young, beautiful girls/women? Come on, guys, I still enjoy reading you; after all, it's the writing, not the crime, that makes you successful. But here's one voice out in the wilderness that's saying, look, it's okay with me if you just kill them and taunt the police. You don't have to disembowel, or cut off the eyelids, or keep toe trophies, or perform your own version of autopsy. Killing is enough for me. So if you don't mind, go on out there and let your bad guys kill a whole bunch of people for me to read about and for your protagonist to catch. I can read faster than you can write, so there'll always be a market. But for one of your fans at least, killing is enough. Spare me the gore. Can't wait for the next one to come out!

Thoughts on flowers and immigration

This may be one of those times that I’m reaching a little bit too far. Please bear with me. I go out every morning to feed our various critters, and in June I always make a special trip up the driveway to see which new daylilies are blooming. Almost every day there is a new one, and it’s always my new favorite, at least until I get to my real favorite, a large, deep, solid yellow. All the two and three color ones, and even the doubles pale in comparison to that one. But that’s not where I’m going with this. We have daylilies from a variety of sources, all of them important to us for one reason or another. Some came with the place, and are old, traditional colors and blooms. I have been told that 60-70 years ago the driveway was lined with flowers, most of them irises, with lilies mixed in, and we’re trying to recreate that look, little by little. Some of them I brought with me. Of those, some were transplanted from my grandmother’s house in Mississippi to the house I grew up in, and then here. Others came as a gift from my mom. She bought huge clumps of them from a lady who was selling out. I had to bed them in the garden compost heap for a while, then move them to the flower beds in front of the house I lived in then, and finally to the spot they occupy now. Much traveled, but definitely worth all of the effort. A lot of them came from Dog Days, the local Monday morning flea market in Ardmore, TN. For a couple of years I would pick up my mom and we’d go there before I drove in to work. We shopped for everything, but I usually ended up with irises, then a few weeks later, daylilies. We very carefully wrote down each one’s name, and exclaimed over them all. So now they line the driveway, and there are bright splashes of color all along. But I’m horrible at organization, and worse at color matching, so they are randomly aligned, and I never know which one will be what color. And worse yet, I can’t tell you which came from what source. They all have a story, but the story lines are blurred, just like their names. And they all have found their rightful place, and they all are a part of the landscape. None of them failed to make it, and we sure didn’t send any of them home. It occurs to me that the situation I’ve created with them is in a tiny way the same thing this great country of ours has done with all of us on a much grander scale. We all came from different places at different times, each with a distinct identity. We proudly hold on to our heritage (Scotch-Irish, English, and some Cherokee in my case). But you know what? Line us up in a row, let us show our natural growth habit and colors, and we make the same kind of soul-pleasing splash of different/sameness that the flowers in our driveway make. No matter what our origin, religion, color, or size it seems as though we all find our place, get along with our neighbors, and make our contribution. It’s a great place to be. Too bad most of the members of the US House of Representatives can’t visit our driveway in the spring and early summer. It might give them some perspective they are missing.

Little Lost Boy

I tried several times in several ways to disappear permanently in the first decade of my life. This is just one of the most memorable: It was 1956, and I was 5 years old. I got to spend every weekday with my grandparents, since both my parents worked in town. My uncle Tommy still lived at home then, and one day in late summer he and some of his friends decided to cut firewood. There would be just enough time for it to dry out and cure before cold weather set in, and wood was the only source of heat then. Big shot that I was, I tagged along. Either they forgot to bring water, I made a nuisance of myself, or they wanted to do something that they didn’t want a big-mouthed witness around to see, because it wasn’t too long before Tommy asked me if I’d go back to the house for some water. He pointed out the roof of my grandpa’s barn, which we could see through the trees. All I had to do was go down the path, through a little hollow, and back up the hill to the barn, which was only about 100 feet from the house. No problem. I set out. I’m not real sure when I figured out that I should have turned left at Philadelphia (apologies to W.C.Fields), but when I got to a small creek I knew that something was wrong. We hadn’t crossed any creeks on our way to the woods. I turned around to go back the way I had come, but after a while nothing looked familiar to me, so I went back to the creek. I figured that if I followed it far enough, I’d come to a road or something. It meandered around back and forth, and a couple of times I crossed it on logs that had fallen, but it sure seemed like I had walked a long time. I did try calling out for help a few times, but my voice didn’t carry very well in the middle of a swamp, with brush and trees all around. In fact, it sounded small and weak. I knew no one was going to hear me, and by then I was pretty scared, so I just kept walking. It started to get late in the afternoon. Every time I caught a glimpse of the sun, it had gone lower and lower. I got the idea that if I followed the sun I could come out on the road that my grandparents lived on, sooner or later. Nothing else had worked, and I had been walking a long time, so I took off towards the sun. Finally, I saw a tin roof, and this time I kept my eyes on it until I came out of the woods and into an open area. It was a barn all right, but not the one I had set out for. It was a little scary, but I was tired, hungry and thirsty, and ready to be home, so I headed for the barn. Surely there would be a house nearby. As I got closer, though, I spotted a big red rooster, who had already spotted me, and was walking my way. I already had scars on both legs that summer from my grandmother’s rooster. He was a mean one, and flogged me soundly every time he caught me too far from her back door. I did the only thing that felt right – I turned around and ran right back into the woods, and kept running until the barn and the rooster were far behind and out of sight. I had run out of plans, and didn’t really know what to do. It was late, the shadows were long, and it would soon be dusk, then dark. I didn’t want to be in the swamp at night, with no light and without a grownup. I had heard too many stories about the things that lived in Terrible swamp. Suddenly I heard Tommy call my name, and I answered him. He has always maintained that he asked me where I was going, and that I told him I didn’t have time to talk, because I had to get home before dark. He took me, put me on his shoulders and headed for home. I wasn’t real sure why he was crying, but he did all the way back to my grandparents’ house. He almost ran with me, and it took a long time for us to get there. There were a whole lot of people gathered around, and they all carried on when they saw us. My grandfather cried even harder than Tommy had, and everyone else was laughing and talking. There were no cell phones, so no one had known until we walked into the yard that I had been found. In fact, not many people in our county even had phones. Someone had driven into town when they realized that I was lost, and almost the entire town had closed down and come out to search for me. Tommy and his friends had spent the day diving into all the deep holes in the creek (it’s called Terrible Swamp, and the creek is named Terrible Creek), certain that I’d fallen in and drowned. Somehow they had managed to keep all of this from my mom. My dad had forbidden anyone to tell her I was lost. When the two of them drove into the yard after work, and found a crowd of people milling around, half laughing, half crying, he didn’t know I’d been found, and she had no idea what was going on. Small towns being what they are, I have never gone back to Collins, even as an adult without someone sticking their head out of a store or a car on Main Street, and yelling, “Why, it’s the little lost boy, back for a visit.” It happened so often that I had to ‘fess up to my own children how dumb I had been when I was their age. My few hours of fame have lasted over half a century.