Since I’ve lived in Alabama for 24 years now, my folks have been introduced to real barbeque. I am convinced my father doesn’t come to visit me but to get his barbeque fix. He stops at the local barbeque place called The Pig Stand before ever reaching my driveway. He calls it the Piggly Wiggly, confusing it with the southern grocery store chain.

I like to cook. When they visit I plan big meals. I don’t know why, he’s never hungry.

“Oh, don’t cook for me, Terri Lynn. I had two piggly wigglys at lunch.”

Just before Father’s Day this year my dad was hospitalized with a bacterial infection. I had already shipped his Father’s Day gift, a full barbeque dinner—pulled pork, beans, slaw, white bread and red sauce—complete with eating instructions (for uninitiated Yankees). It didn’t come from the Piggly Wiggly, but from a popular chain that would air-mail on dry ice. It would arrive in two days. Unfortunately, he would remain in the hospital for over two weeks, subsisting on pablum and green jello. I called mom so she could have the neighbor get the delivery and stick it in her freezer until she could pick it up. I think my father had a porky premonition. That night he said he sure could go for a barbeque.

Three weeks later mom retrieved the meal from the freezer and warmed it up for dad’s dinner. Even warmed up pit barbeque has got to be better than the stove-top concoction. Next time I talk to dad I ask how he liked his Father’s Day gift.

“Well, it was pretty good,” he says, “but it wasn’t no piggly wiggly.”

I even knew a magician—or, rather, I saw him perform

His name was Ken Clendenin and he could change the color of a silk handkerchief by pulling it through his fist. He spread a red bandanna over some crumpled newspapers, and changed them into a dozen yellow roses. He pulled a gold coin from behind his ear.

I once saw him clap his hands and make a white dove appear.

While performing his magic he would talk to the audience in a relaxed and intimate way, making everyone laugh and catching us by surprise. We would lean forward in our seats, wondering what amazing thing he would do next.

I had no dad around, and no male role models who inspired much hope in my heart, so somehow Mr. Clendenin, whom I knew very little about personally, became my ideal.

I even tried to do magic myself.

I got a book of card tricks and learned how to get someone to pick out a card, return it to the desk after which I would correctly identify it.

I knew that a good magician never reveals his secrets, and I never did—although every once in awhile a particularly clever subject would figure out a secret anyway.

In those days I lived first in West Virginia and, later, in Tennessee, where I was the only magician I knew.

In West Virginia, barges piled high with coal went down the river. The men who worked in the factories moved zombie-like through the morning fog, carrying their lunch pails like broken muskets. Some of the kids I went to school with lived in tin-roofed shacks with cardboard in the windows.

It was not a place where people thought much about magic.

I ordered magic tricks from catalogues with money I earned on my paper route, and by the time we had moved to Tennessee I had a small suitcase full of tricks. I even had an black silk top hat and a magician’s coat with a special pocket sewed into the lining, where I hid the live rabbit I pulled out of my hat—much to the astonishment of my audiences.

During all of these years I never had a television—my mom didn’t believe children should watch them—but she took me to the library on a regular basis, so early on I learned how much magic there is in books, especially novels. In the summer I read six or seven books a week.

By the time I was a teenager, I had begun to see that the timeless beauty of a well-written story was much more beguiling than my magic tricks, which had already begun to seem a little threadbare.

I eventually put my suitcase full of magician’s tricks away.

But today, whenever I write a story, song or novel, I am still trying to name the right card in the deck, still trying to pull a white dove from the empty air.

The cool air hums with the bustling buzz of the city, vibrating through the night, echoing across the channel and resonating off the black, ineffable tranquility of the river. A full moon blushes in the cloudless sky as bleary eyes catch the glossy glow of pale lunar slivers dripped along the water’s surface.

Another warm can of beer from the ice-less cooler. A splicing spurt of bubbling fizz trickles down, soaking my hand with Dionysus’ sweet elixir. Gulping the skunked liquid, listening to the ever-incessant hum, the inescapable roar of the coastal metropolis: Myrtle Beach—the grand melting pot of the South.

Trying to ignore the roar, I glance around, absorbing the panorama, and escape into the shadows.

The flickering gleam of departing planes dances about in the heavens as the headlights of speeding cars sparkle like Christmas lights along the bridge and tiny human specks scatter about the apartments across the waterway.

Nostalgia floods my thoughts and overwhelms my mind with dreams of the backwoods where I fished and hunted deer. I grow homesick. I long for the rolling hills of the Appalachians. I miss the serenity of the country. And I think: a mere speck,

lost in thought, in this all-too-huge world. And I feel lonely. I try not to think. I drink my beer.

But in the delicate crash of a low tide rolling against the sandy shore, in the subtle churn of the water, everything suddenly changes. The nostalgia, the homesick longing, all fade into the night and drown below the serene water.

Though everything around is structured, every artificial wonder of modern man works perfectly to maintain the order and trite monotony of a superficial existence—the cars,

the interstate, the bridge, the planes; the people all following designated routes, all following common place routine, the river remains free. Vicariously through it, through the thin strand of monofilament connecting the river and me through the medium of a fiberglass fishing rod, I am overcome with the unbound sense of freedom I once felt in the country. And I no longer feel alone.

I close my eyes and lean back in the red folding chair. My grasp around the beer can slowly loosens and it slips from my hand and spills over onto the sand. The roar, I still hear it. But now it’s but a sweet symphony, like crickets in the meadow, like a whippoorwill in the hollow. And I lean back, further and further. Slowly leaning, slowly slipping until everything spirals into its necessary end and gravity hurls me violently backwards onto the ground.

And there I lay, still in the chair, and content myself with my new found position in this world. Again I drift, slowly off into dream.

Slowly…

Heavy eyelids close…

Slowly…

A bell rings.

Like the frenzy of crushed adderall sniffed into the nostrils, I am awake and livid with anticipation. Anxious, I jump to my feet. The fishing pole, bent in half and bowed to a horizontal angle, bounces around in the rod holder and jingles the bell on top with furious spasms at each twitch of the line. I lift the rod from the ground, jerk backwards and feel a tremendous weight on the line—a whale, a shark—something huge!

With great strain, I reel in the line inch by inch. Then, when the beast sees the shoreline, he hauls ass back into deeper water and my reel hisses with screeching line. On the bottom, in the depths of the river, the fish settles to regain strength. Again, I lift the rod vertically and pull backwards, then lean forward to reel in the slack. Twenty restless minutes pass before the fish is nearly to shore, splashing hopelessly in the shallows.

I grab hold of the catfish’s enormous jaw and feel the sandpaper teeth below its whiskered face shredding my flesh. A rebel unscathed by the bustle of the surrounding city is now a captive by my hands. He ceases to fight, ceases to struggle, and contents himself to his new position in this world: to his prison at the end of a stringer.

And in that moment, the epiphany saturates my drunken mind: I have become the city, the corrupter of all things free. And in that moment, we are the same, the fish and I. Our souls silently lost in the looming roar of the city night.

My mother never allowed herself many luxuries. We lived in a middle-class neighborhood, my father made good money but my mother never felt secure. Money to her was security and there would never be enough. Being the daughter of a farmer in rural Alabama, my mother grew up in a clapboard home with partially dirt floors, flour-sack clothing and cotton-picking chores after school. No matter how far my mother moved from her red-clay roots, the fear of poverty and the nipping pangs of want never left her. I didn’t know her history until I was older; as a girl, I simply saw my mother as cheap and was perpetually embarrassed by my brown-bag lunches, used dresses and our clunker cars.

Despite my mother’s frugality, she had one weekly indulgence. Every Saturday, she visited a local beauty shop where she would have her hair washed and set in a firm, lacquered updo. If there was no one to watch us, my sister and I were forced to tag along. We’d sit, glassy-eyed and bored, and watch as she and other females went through their weekly ritual of beauty.

My mother’s beauty parlor was nothing like today’s salon. Hers was bare bones, stripped down, a no-frills room filled with monstrous hair driers, fluorescent lights and streaky mirrors. It was home to surly hairdressers and a gaggle of older ladies who, like my mom, considered their weekly visits a necessity for hair maintenance, not a treat for relaxation. The shop’s plate window was covered in a dark green plastic film to keep private what went on inside its walls. As I waited, I studied the cobwebs on the plastic flowers and counted the dead flies on the sill. By our weekly excursion, my sister and I learned all too early about the price women paid to manage their bodies.

My mother’s Saturday appointment always ended in the same results. A wash, a set, an eon under a seated dryer and then a final tease out. Her hair was transformed in a stiff, tight helmet with an unnaturally high peak at the crown. I think most women in the 1970s wore this style; it simply varied in color: brown, blonde or blue-tinted. For an hour every week my mother sat and endured, surrounded by the smells of ammonia, cleaning fluids and cigarette smoke, the drone of clunky driers and old lady chatter.

My mother’s hair. Such a mystery to me and the beauty shop seemed a strange ritual, a weekly test of tolerance to create a hairdo that could endure seven days. With her hair freshly set, my mother battled daily life. She wore plastic hair caps in the rain, had brushes with violent picks and bristles, wore a mesh net and pink tape to bed. A helmet on a helmet, she knew how to protect an investment.

My mother’s rituals. My mother’s quest to create some form of beauty in her life – a life devoted to four children and a workaholic husband – is a constant source of amazement to me. I wonder what she thought about as she sat beneath the hair dryer, as she prepared herself for bed, securing her weekly investment with a hairnet, Dippity-Do and tape. I wonder, too, about my father and his thoughts of my mother’s bedtime armor. But I was a child and questions such as these were inappropriate.

Psychologists say we internalize values when we’re young. Those visits to the beauty parlor and my mother’s unmoving hair were my first introductions into the secret realm of women. The beauty parlor was a place to escape the outside world of home and husband and chores, even if only for an hour or two. Even if it was the same every week, its space was reserved only for the female, a home to ritual and gender seclusion and heavily-sprayed sets.

It’s no wonder that I don’t enjoy hair salons now. I find no comfort in their walls. Staring at myself in a mirror or spending hours with foil bits attached to my head make me itch. It feels like work. And even though the places I visit are called spas, I cannot relax. Perhaps I am my mother’s daughter after all. A little less frugal, a little more free. I wear my hair shoulder length and natural, sometimes fighting its persistent curl and sometimes going to bed with it wet and dangerously free to take whatever form it wishes as I dream. There is a certain decadence to waking up with wild locks and a damp pillow. I wish my mother could have known such anarchy.

It probably wasn’t the brightest marketing campaign ever devised, but I give the CDC an “A” for effort.

They are certainly dead on (no pun intended) that Zombies are a hot commodity.

I think it all began in the 1970′s with “Night of the Living Dead,” a movie that was advertised as “so terrifying that movie patrons are fainting in their seats.” I saw that one as a teenager, and although I didn’t faint or even find it particularly scary, I have to admit that it had a really cool ending.

“Night” spawned a number of sequels and knockoffs, but few packed the original’s bite and Zombie interest sort of died out (no pun intended).

Interest revived (no pun intended) a few years ago with a couple of pretty good Zombie comedy spoofs: “Shaun of the Dead” and “Zombieland.” While both were funny, my personal favorite was the latter, mainly because it had a set of rules to live by for the “un-dead”: 1.Cardio; 2. Double-tap; 3. Beware of bathrooms; 4. Wear seat belts; 5. Check the back seat, etc,.

Zombie-mania is now at an all-time high due to an AMC television show, “The Walking Dead.” It’s a Sunday night staple at my house. The story details the trials and travails of a group of survivors of a Zombie apocalypse. It begins in Atlanta and follows the group as they make their way toward Fort Benning, GA, where they hope the military can provide safe harbor from the hordes of Zombies that roam the Georgia country side.

“The Walking Dead” is not overrun (no pun intended) with acting ability, but it is an entertaining story. I find it plausible because I believe that Southerners are well-suited to survive a Zombie attack.

Consider the facts, if you will:

1. We have been invaded before, first in the 1860′s and then later by Yankees seeking a better place to live. We have survived both invasions and still maintain our unique identity;

2. We subsist quite comfortably on garden produce and canned meat products;

3. In any random sample of ten Southerners, at least four know how to hunt.

4. We are proficient at hand-to-hand combat, which was illustrated at most Walmart stores this past “Black Friday.”

5. A gun lives at every house.

It will take more than hordes of flesh-eating Zombies to defeat the South. We can only be defeated by one thing: snow.

I began to hear murmurings on Thanksgiving Day. “Did you hear that they are predicting snow on Monday night?”

The frantic pitch picked up throughout the weekend. By Sunday night the prediction had increased to “possibly two to four inches.”

In Montgomery yesterday, I noticed people looking up at the sky, as if they were somehow trying to determine if the clouds were laden with snow–like someone from Montgomery would actually know what a snow cloud looked like if they saw one.

As I write this, I have no doubt that every grocery store in the north half of Alabama is now completely stripped of bread, milk, and batteries. It happens every time snow is predicted. These three items are apparently all we believe we need to survive.

I don’t know if the South will ever face a “Zombie Apocalypse.”

But one thing is certain: the CDC can be confident that we will be the ones full of loaf bread and milk and our flashlights will be shining brightly.

My old man had recently been diagnosed with the C demon, and was in the midst of deciding between two treatments for the disease, chemotherapy or surgery.

We were seated out back watching the rain fall on the Plantain and Lychee Trees.  My dad is an avid horticulturalist, a hobby that has always kept him firmly planted.  His back yard looks like the tropical gardens you see in those movies that depict a Caribbean getaway. The setting has always lent itself to family conversations that are sometimes passionate, but more often nostalgic. In this particular instance it was just he and I, and the topic invariably turned towards his reminiscences of family, and the hard life he had led back in Colombia.

I sit here and over analyze, as I often do with most things, thinking that the reason dad related the details of grandfather’s death was to give me a better idea about who he was and how he got to where he is now; contemplations of impending mortality.  He and I had never gotten along at all.  He was a conservative, strict disciplinarian, a fact that left enough of an indelible mark on me to hide my eye roll as he began.

I recall how my father’s face became distant, as he stared out into the raindrops and began to tell the story, with the matter-of-fact tone he always uses when trying to council me.  His dad had passed away at home.  The family had barely enough money to feed themselves much less give the man medical care.  Grandfather had never been home much.  He was a black-marketer, spending most of his time on the water between the mainland and San Andres Island, where the contraband products he dealt in arrived from the U.S., cigarettes and whiskey mostly.  He did know where to lay his bones at the end though.  My dad recounted the frantic cries of his mother, and seeing his old man staring blankly.  He told about how he had to wrap his father in the sheets soiled and damp from days of pain, explaining stoically how he had to build the coffin himself – due to grandmother’s insistence on some basic level of dignity for the old fellow – from discarded wood he was able to collect from the surrounding village, quickly so as to prevent further decay in the hot, humid climate.  He gave the small amount of money he had left in his pockets to a neighbor who let him use a donkey and cart, and he rode his father to the nearby pauper’s cemetery and buried him, without a funeral, without any fan-fare.  My father was nineteen at the time.

After the story we stared out blankly, watching the rivulets of water scurry down the Plantain leaves.

As I grow older, the opportunities to have my eyes opened so as to receive true epiphanies are becoming rare.  Real epiphanies are few enough, but one would think that with age they’d be more common what with the wealth of experience we accumulate and the corresponding wisdom.  I suppose then, that in becoming wiser, we learn to recognize the difference between true moments of enlightenment and lesser moments of naïve realization.

I have taken a rather long pause in order to think about how to describe the way I felt after hearing dad’s tale.  The best I can come up with is this.  When I was in College, I remember spending a particular weekend day on Miami Beach.  I had a pair of sunglasses on that I eventually forgot about.  As late afternoon approached, I sat where the beach waves just pull back, taking little bits of sand with them, and stared out at the horizon.  My nose was itching and I raised my hand to scratch, when I felt the sunglasses.  I pulled them off and the view before me exploded with new detail and brightness.  I recall saying to myself, My God, that is amazing.

Dad’s story was a moment of enlightenment for me, that cliché of walking in another’s shoes.  With a true epiphany comes a new way of looking at life.  For so many years I had labored under the impression that many of my woes could be comfortably filed in a corner of my mind, categorized under the “blame it on my father” archive.

Do not judge others for the way they are, and if you do, do it carefully.  Your troubles are mostly your own doing, as are your moments of bliss.  Forgive others, and most of all forgive yourself.  If you don’t consider this an epiphany, consider it a naïve realization.  But please, consider it.

Sometimes she whispers in my ear, reminds me that we have that in common; that we are both performers of the highest order.  I know we look like it, too, there in my Grandmother’s world.  We are rainbow girls stuck in a stormy washed out painting where everybody knows both can’t exist at once.  She’s the red and I’m the yellow, and for the life of me, I can’t understand why God ever lets the clouds crowd in front of the sun.  Doesn’t seem fair to me, to a yellow rainbow girl, but I wouldn’t dare question it out loud.  God does not make mistakes here.

My Momma smells like night flowers and vanilla in that afternoon sun and I rub my wrists against hers to steal some of her sapphire sophistication.  She laughs and rests the tip of her nose on mine and baptizes me, saving my sorry soul with sparkling aqua irises. Then her black lashes fall like a whisper and she breathes in hard before stamping my cheek with a scarlet kiss.  She kicks off her shoes as if she’s about to climb the fence, but when she grabs the top line, she shudders back, eyes frozen, mouth wide open, jerking and seizing until her tortoise shell headband flies right off.

She falls to the ground peeping at me with one eye, nose scrunched up, her aria of giggles filling the treetops, rising to the mountaintops before falling back down on me like shooting stars.  I collapse onto her belly, into her long thin arms. Shalimar rapture. She rocks me side to side, too tightly, lightly singing: I heard it in the wind last night.  It sounded like applause … Chilly now. End of summer … The moon swept down black water like an empty spotlight. She sits up and crosses herself in the name of The Father, The Son, and Joni Mitchell.  I do it, too, and she laughs deep from her heart, her watch hand over her mouth.  I crawl under and scurry up the fence-wire to the third line and take a bow to her wild unladylike applause.

Back in the kitchen, she pours us a glass of sweet tea and offers to help make the chicken for lunch.  I sit under the table and finish circling all the words I know in the Baptist bulletin and then turn them all into flowers, a garden of yellow pencil happiness filled with squiggly wiggly purple Bible worms.  Maybe my Momma forgot that nobody helps in this kitchen unless it’s to clear or wash the dishes, but I doubt it and I already know that today there will be help … good-girl, seven-millimeter-pearl-help, all southern-charming and polite and happy-faced.  Good Lord, help us all.

I can’t actually see their faces, only their feet, but I hear their hornet-stung voices swelling up in their mouths until the conversation turns from cone flowers and red onions to nothing but grunts and mumbles.  Their feet move around the table, both of them taking the long way, dancing like the animals on Wild Kingdom about to eat each other even though everybody watching pretends they won’t.  I think about making a run for the back door, but I suddenly hear the buttermilk scream my name in the hot oil and I think I ought to stick around in case my Momma messed up and put a leg in the first batch again.  One thing I know for sure – God didn’t make a mistake on a chicken’s leg, but no matter how much you want it, you have to cook the big pieces first.  That’s The Way.

More mumbling and grunting and the back door slams.  The skinny black capri pants and red toenails are gone.  The beige shoes with the pinky-side knife slits picks up the pace, placing plates and forks and butter biscuits above my head.  I just sit there under the ancient oak, sipping my tea and waiting for her to pull that leg out of the grease. It smells about done. I can see my Mama through the screen door, out there by the fence, smoke swirling around her jet black hair, and I think for a minute that she’s going to try some climbing, but she doesn’t.  She just sits down and lies back on her elbows letting the sun shine full on her dewy face.

I probably ought to go out there and tell her that peacocking on an old pasture fence is tricky business; it requires a girl to be brave and steady so she won’t cut herself, or worse, rip her good dress.  Hands positioned on the top line. Feet carefully set on the bottom. Ruffles stuffed under the elbow; stand straight up tall like a stiff red Mississippi maple.  Climbing a barbed wire fence is just like living – you can’t bend a bit or everything will go slack and the only grace that can break your fall will also cut you to the bone.  But I reckon she already knows all of that.

Euretha Mae Hughes could also garden.  Once married, she had produce year-round, either fresh, frozen, or ‘canned,’ put up in glass jars.  Each fall, even now, the driveway curving to the farmhouse built by her wiry Swedish husband is a virtual lava flow of red spider lilies.

Closer to that farmhouse in spring you see her real treasures, from cloud white to bright blue to velvet black, “tall and bearded like good-looking men.”  When grandchildren and great-grandchildren would get careless in their own play and brush up against one of her beauties, she would yell out “Stay off of my Mary Randalls!” or “Keep away from those Nina Levetts!” confusing the hell out of the thicker kids and causing the sharper ones to imagine those irises with the ladies’ names as sentient beings, their slowly bobbing heads ready for fortune telling.  The one goggle-eyed granddaughter would ask if she’d ever be popular.  The irises refused to nod, and that poor ugly child died a little inside.  The only nodding those Mary Randalls, all pinkish like the bottom of an infant’s feet, would ever give that girl was when she asked if she possessed special powers.  Nod. Nod. Nod!  And so for a number of years, enhanced through her readings of Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and the Bible, her buy-in to the possibility of child-magic would be rock solid.

Years before that goggle-eyed grandchild was even a thought, Rita, the eldest of Euretha’s four children, was given a job to do.  She had to walk a neighbor’s mule back to its rightful owners after it had wandered too near Euretha’s gardens.  Not long after Rita took the mule back to its home turf did it come right on back, stomping in the flowerbeds, and again she was told to catch the mule and walk the half mile to the neighbor’s farm.  This time young Rita had a message, one she was embarrassed to give, “My mother doesn’t want to see this mule again.”  Assured by the neighbors that they’d keep their fences mended, the thin, serious girl trudged home along a busy road, tall grass catching in her socks and scratching up her shins.

But we all know adults often write checks their asses can’t cash, and two weeks later Rita got off the school bus, walked up the driveway and was met by her mother.  “Go tell the neighbors to come here and get their damn mule.”  Rita dropped her schoolbags on the grass, made an about face, and trudged down the hot two-lane road yet again.  She was looking forward to the upcoming entertainment – Euretha was surely going to give these people a tongue-lashing about their mule, perhaps with her little 410 rifle to lean on, just to drive the point home. Rita lacked the ability to rip someone apart with words –  smart mouthedness tends to skip generations.

And so Rita escorted the mule-owning neighbor to the Anderson farm, her fear and excitement making her uncharacteristically chatty about how hard it is to keep fences mended and how dry the weather had been of late. The farmer used the talk as an opportunity to practice what he’d say to this skinny child’s mother.  Once on the farmhouse porch Rita’s cheeks were noticeably flushed – she was already embarrassed for this farmer because she knew too well what it was like to be at receiving end of her mother’s wrath.  She quickly leaned in and knocked on the screen door in her role as emissary.  Euretha answered, and while wiping her hands on her apron said, “Your mule again got in my flower beds.  He’s in the backyard.  Get him out of here.” Then she told Rita to come inside to help get dinner ready.  The neighbor quickly apologized, reminding her that farm life is so very hard. Euretha looked at him and then past him, pursed her lips, slowly saying “MMMMM-HMMMMM” a bit too loud, a hint of edge. She then turned aside, and shut both the screen door and the front door in his face.

The mule was in indeed in the backyard as Euretha had said, but he was not in any shape to walk back to anybody’s farm.  Euretha had shot him at what looked to be fairly close range with a 12-gauge shotgun, smack in the forehead.    Rita, watching from an upstairs window, saw the neighbor take off his hat, run his hands over his face, then set off for home to get a truck to haul away his foolishness.

“In which hospital was your daughter born, Mrs. Coggin?” By this time, the registrar at the rather posh private school my mother was bound and determined that I should attend had bored me silly. But, my job was to sit up straight, say “yes m’am” or “no ma’am” and to be, as my mother put it “sweet.”

She had carefully parked the ’59 battleship caddie in the visitor’s spot in front of the school, an ante bellum birthday cake with massive Greek columns, sitting under a canopy of oak trees

“Now, Debby, be a pretty girl for mama.” She had said as we walked across the parking lot to the registrar’s office. ‘Pretty,’ you see was the opposite of ‘ugly’ – as in “Don’t be ugly to your mama.” Boys were usually ugly and girls were sometime pretty.

My heart wasn’t in it. But, at least I looked the part in a pink lace trimmed dress, white gloves and patent leather shoes that squeaked as I walked. I even had a large pink bow installed in my perfect blonde ringlets. To this day, I can’t face pink.

“Well,” I could see my mother’s face turning red. A small blotch seemed to spread itself all over her face. “It was the Allen Memorial Home.”

The receptionist looked up showing mild amusement and interest. The Allen Memorial Home was a home for unwed mothers.

“But,” mother’s face was scarlet and she gripped the top of her leather handbag for dear life, “that, of course was prior to it becoming a home for . . .”

“Unwed mothers,” I piped in. I always enjoyed this bit and added, “With illegal babies.”

“Illegitimate,” mother corrected, regaining her composure. I don’t really remember what went on after that, but I am sorry to say I actually did get accepted to the school and for a number of years suffered “Southern Genteel Female Indoctrination” that included French, etiquette lessons, how to dance at cotillions and how to walk down stairs with books on our heads. But, that is a whole other and different story.

I was all of five and three quarters at the time and already had a sense that these people who called themselves my family and humiliated me with pink everything were imposters, interlopers, maybe even kidnappers. At this stage, before my blonde hair and blue eyed state had dawned on me, I imagined, fantasized, that my true mother had been an Egyptian princess who had visited Mobile long enough to leave me in a basket on the Coggin doorstep. Maybe I had watched “The Mummy” once too often. But, when you are a child, unburdened by reality or experience, all things seem equally possible. Later when this version of events appeared to be genetically unlikely and my best friend Kathy pointed out that Egypt didn’t have princesses anymore, I switched to English royalty. After all, my chin was kind of weak. Kathy had also been the one to tell me that bacon came from dead pigs. I never ate bacon again. I think she became a lawyer.

My mother used to say, I believe very sincerely, that I should never go north of the Mason Dixon Line or west of Texas. People in the North were rude and people in the West were crazy. Texans were borderline crazy, but generally had good manners. My mother went to New York City once and held hands with her lady companions, lest they be swept away by who knows what force of evil. And, the list of what she wouldn’t or couldn’t do was a lot longer than the list of what she would or could do. She accepted that. I simply did not.

Ever the dutiful daughter, I spent half my life in England and D.C. England was not unlike the South, with an inherent suspicion of outsiders. As far as D.C. was concerned, I would often drive between Alabama and Washington. And, once you got beyond Georgia, you were in a demi-monde, not really the South, more a homage to the East Coast’s English colonial heritage. Virginia, I think, is still a colony at heart.

And here I am back again, doing what I said I would never do – living in the Deep South. And enjoying it. I used to say that I was from the South, but not of it. And now, I am beginning to wonder. I still think I was adopted.

I would sit there in the porch swing beside him a lot of nights after supper, coolin, while my Momma and sisters cleaned up the kitchen. Thisuz before air conditionin or television, least-wise before we or any of our neighbours or kin had em and even before I knew there was some rich folks that did. We’d sit there and listen to the night sounds and Daddy explainin what made each sound.

Conversation went somethin like this here:

“What’s that, Daddy?”

“Crickets, boy.”

“What’s that, Daddy?”

“That’d be tree frog, boy.”

“Do they really climb trees, Daddy?”

“Well, I reckon they don’t fly up in there.”

“What’s that, Daddy?”

“Barn owl, boy.”

“What’s that, Daddy?”

“Whipperwill.”

“What’s a Whipperwill, Daddy?”

“It’s a bird, boy. They sit on the ground to do their hollerin.”

“Why do they call him that?”

“Listen close to what he says, boy, whip-poor-will.”

“What’s that, Daddy?”

That’s a Screech owl, boy.”

Lordy, what a spooky, mournful sound to a pair of five year old ears. Old folks used to say an old screech owl hollerin around a place was a sign that somthin or someone was afixin to die there. If you ever have heard one of em, then you got an idea why folks used to believe that too. Even unto this day it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck whenever I hear one. I weren’t never “afeered,” as Daddy called it, though. Not as long as he was around, anyway.

Hope my younguns and grand younguns feel that same way about me.

Daddy would like that.

Stopped by the old cemetery on top of the mountain near about dark when I was on the way home from his grave the day we buried him. I didn’t even really know what I went there for, alone. It was a good ways out of my way and gas is expensive. His Cherokee Great Grandmother is buried there. Talitha Cumi was her name. She made her way, somehow, from Jackson Parrish, Louisiana, to Muscadine, Alabama, near bout on the Georgia line goin towards Atlanta, goin home to her Daddy, walkin most of the way, her three little boys in tow, after the yankees killed her husband at Mansfield. Must be 400 miles or more. They come close to starving to death along the way. Guess her and them three boys had their own little “Trail of Tears” but goin in the opposite direction from the one that’s in the history books. The oldest of them boys was eight and he became Daddy’s, granddaddy.

While I was standin there, by myself, by Talitha’s grave in the dark and wonderin why I went there, there came from somewhere across them fields and woods that old lonesome wailin of a screech owl, mournful and spooky as it ever was even when I was five years old.

I weren’t afeered though.

And I weren’t alone.

The soft plugs made satisfying missiles, and I soon found myself in heated combat with my nemesis, Ricky Lewis, at the other end of the table. We fired, ducked, and reloaded as fast as we could. Our friends, clearly outmatched, dropped out of the competition to become spectators, cheering and clapping for their favorite cheese combatant. Most of the crowd cheered for Ricky, but I had a few staunch supporters. Emboldened by their claps and shouts, we stood at opposite table ends, flinging the cheese plugs at each other as hard as we could. I kept aiming for Ricky’s impishly grinning face; nothing else mattered until I felt a sudden pinch at the base of my neck and heard a high-pitched command of “Stop!” in my ear.

The faculty, we assumed, had become too lethargic to care about our long-running cafeteria misbehavior. Miss Anne Anders, though, was an exception to most established rules. She seemed older than time but somehow ageless. She had been the girls basketball coach for centuries and the gym, already twenty years old by that time, was named for her. With a painful grip on the tenderest part of my trapezius muscle, the tiny woman dragged me away from the table and proceeded to Ricky’s end, where he was subdued in the same way with her other hand. She marched us, reaching up to maintain her grip on our shoulders, to the first place where she could find some privacy.

These were the days before people worried so much about law suits, and public school paddlings were common. The teachers and coaches didn’t bother with procuring witnesses, gaining parental consent, or otherwise doing it properly; they just beat the shit out of us. Before she pushed open the door to the boy’s restroom, Miss Anders shouted, “You better zip it up, ’cause I’m coming in!” I don’t know where the paddle came from; she must have produced it from thin air. Before I knew it, my backside was on fire. She hit me six times before ordering me to take out my billfold. Then she turned to Ricky and hit him six or eight times. When he reflexively squirmed away from the blows, she jerked him back around by a belt loop. She kept going back and forth, whacking my butt then his until we were both nearly in tears. Finally exhausted, she released us, saying only, “Now, go and behave yourselves.” Humiliated, we shuffled back toward the cafeteria. The bell rang to return to class before we got there. The ensuing commotion provided the opportunity for us to regain our composure and tough guy smirks. Soon we were both laughing and replaying the incident to the accolades of our classmates. Ricky and I became the best of friends, engaging in all sorts of reckless behavior over the years, but I don’t think we ever had another cheese straw battle.

The summer haircut brings back memories. I hated haircuts as a child.

My dad took me to a barbershop in our little town back in the late 1960′s, which I believe was located on one of the side streets between Broadway and Norton. This shop was a real man’s haven: three big leather-clad barber chairs, black and white checkered tile floors, and mirrors on the back wall. Other walls adorned with mounted deer heads and large-mouth bass, along with a scandalous auto parts store calendar featuring a pin-up girl in the latest one-piece bathing suit. In one corner, a glass-front cabinet filled with creams and tonics every man needed to keep his coiffure under control. Metal chairs with vinyl cushions lined the waiting area. Real men talking–football, problems at the mill, or the intricacies of rebuilding a small-block 350 engine. Plenty to read while you waited: Field and Stream, Popular Mechanics, or the local newspaper. There was an AM radio on the counter, playing country or gospel music. Depending on the time of day, you might even hear L.R. Ross tell you what merchandise was available for sale or trade on the “Shop and Swap” segment on W.F.E.B.:

“Neighbors, we have a man who’d like to trade a goat for a single-shot 12 gauge shotgun. If you have a gun you’d like to trade, please call…”

I can still smell the witch hazel and talcum powder.

Although there were three chairs, only one was used. The barber was Mr. Mallory. As a little boy, it seemed quite possible to me that he had given Moses his first hair cut. He wore glasses with lenses as thick as the bottom of an old green-glass coke bottle, and the end of his nose was an inch from your head while he worked his magic.

Mr. Mallory always asked “How you want it?”, but the answer never mattered. You might want it like Elvis, but you got it in a style called “flat top.” It was the cut he liked best, the one for small-town southern gentlemen at that time. I was just relieved to leave the chair with ears still attached. If I didn’t squirm too much, I’d get a piece of Bazooka bubble gum as a reward.

Times have changed.

The place I go these days for a haircut is a “style shop.” The customers are both men and women, and the barbers are now called “stylist” and are exclusively female. The walls are pastel and there are flower arrangements. The sound system plays something soothing and “New Age.” The shop smells of bleaching chemicals and potpourri. There is no Field and Stream, though if you look hard you might find a copy of Time or Newsweek. The last time I went, the receptionist asked me if I wanted a warm cookie.

My stylist is blond and attractive. She tries to engage me with conversation about American Idol or Dancing with the Stars, but it is to no avail. I have never watched either. Confident that my ears will survive intact, I fight the urge not to doze off while she works. She asks if I would like mousse or styling gel before I leave. I always decline. As Eastwood said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

She and her coworkers are psychologists. They tell me my graying hair makes me looked “distinguished.” I am aware that I am being worked for return visits, like a waitress works a middle-aged man for tips at Hooters.

I’ll admit she does a good job with the little bit of hair she has to work with. But for her skills, she charges a fee that would have made Mr. Mallory decide to close up early and take the rest of the day off.

Manhood still barely intact, I leave knowing I’ll have to return in a month or so. I feel a strong urge to go rebuild a small-block 350 engine or shoot an animal.

Maybe times haven’t changed all that much. I still hate haircuts.

Grandma’s attic smelled of old newspapers and moth balls. It was musty and dusty and hot–a perfect hideout. The stairs were steep and I knocked my head on the slanted ceiling’s rafters. Plunked down on the twin bed inhabiting one corner I’d fritter away the afternoon thumbing through copies of my uncle’s old MAD magazines. But, one afternoon, when Alfred E. Newman’s charm wore off, I rummaged through a chest at the foot of the bed. Underneath some hand-embroidered doilies, I uncovered a small, book with a broken strap and lock. On the inside cover was written, “Ida Mae Jacob,” in loopy cursive. It was my grandmother’s diary!

“Kenny and I had a spat,” she wrote on August 11, 1934. Seems she had caught him “making eyes” at another girl. But, Kenny, the cad, was also a chivalrous balladeer. On August 12, 1934 he came to my grandma’s front porch, serenading her with “I Love You Truly,” on his trombone. They lived in a small town in Michigan. A town where the surnames on the mailboxes and the surnames on the headstones had been the same for generations. I’m sure the resonant sounds coming from that trombone drifted down the road and into many a neighbor’s open window. Grandma was mortified. “Oh, boy, the kids are sure gonna razz me tomorrow,” she wrote. She must have taken the razzing well, because Grandma “Ikey” and Grandpa Kenny had been married 53 years when grandma passed away.

I closed the diary. Guiltily, I hid it back under the yellowed doilies, closed the chest, and descended the stairs. The kitchen smelled of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Grandma was elbow-deep in dishwater singing in her soprano trill,

A love tis something, to feel your hand,
Ah, yes, tis something, by your side to stand,
Gone is the sorrow, gone doubt and fear,
For you love me truly,
Truly dear!