Memorials

I walked the road the other morning alone, leaving Jinx and Bluebelle to romp in the backyard while I strolled the mountain lane, and I noticed how the gravel at the edges of the road had been ground down by the tires and tires and tires until it resembled nothing so much as gray aquarium rock. If I had one of those glass boxes full of water and marine life and topped with a humming light — I’ve never in my life owned an aquarium, and usually only think of them when I read Loren Eisley, who spent a childhood making and stocking his own — I would scoop up a few gallons of the small gunmetal pebbles on the sides of my road and take them home and rinse them off and build a flooring that any guppy or molly would be proud to drowse above, a carpet of hard minerals that would hold a bobbing plastic pirate’s chest, a bed of bb-sized boulders that could anchor some fake emerald flora through which my fish could switch their tails and tish-tosh their top-lit days away. Stones in the road, fit for stones in a bubbling clear cube that would serve as night light and television substitute and reverie fodder.

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The Maid, by Kat Valentine

Memorial Day is here, and the voting grillers and the ball cap-wearing tshirters and the Lee Greenwooders are shaking their heads, mock-weary with the fauxvitas they strap onto their faces on such days, and PBS is airing their concerts with their hymns to Colin Powell and their carefully deliberate ignoring of the freckled cannon fodder their beloved government wastes so profligately but hates and resents with such devotion. Patriotic holidays in this empire are meaningless, they are charades, they are amateurish performances for the sleepy obedient passive ones who suckle at sports teats with the same reverence with which they drop their tithe checks into the felt-bottomed plate.

Memorial Day this year happens to fall on the day of the Feast of Saint Joan of Arc. This is Alanis-level irony, and it is a damn shame. I am revolted to think of my patron saint’s feast day being smudged up with a day on which political and religious whores of all flavors will make speeches and promises and asses of themselves. I will will myself to ignore these bleatings and to meditate instead on the little French teenage peasant girl who, 591 years ago, died a terrible death rather than deny the power and mystery of the God Who spoke to her through voices and visions. She is considered a saint by a Church. Joan of Arc IS a saint. And not because of any pronouncement from a foundering, dying Church that has disgraced herself with her corruptions and compromises, with her winsome weakness and craven simultaneous rakings for power and public approval.

I will spend my waking hours pointedly ignoring Memorial Day and instead tending the green love that grows in the garden of my heart, my love for the Maid, the astonishing and illiterate girl who mounted the wooden steps to the pillar with its iron chains, the faggots piled beneath her tiny white feet,  dry branches probably culled from the trees off in the distance, trees she could see beyond and above the heads of those proper churchgoing faces who stared at her while she stared, for a short time, at a cross and faced her death all alone, all alone, all alone.

I will love the Maid, la Pucelle, all the days of my life, and when I finally close my eyes on this breathing world, I will hold in my heart the hope that I will see her on the other side and talk with her about the many things I have whispered to her while walking the roads and fields and hills of my home here.

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And yet it is a feast day, and Mrs. Orr and I have plans to feast, taking ourselves beyond the handful of beans and rice on which Saint Joan of Arc subsisted during her military campaigns. We are great admirers and consumers of that sublime Texas dish, the chicken fried steak. And on this year’s Feast of Saint Joan of Arc, we plan to attempt preparing some chicken fried steaks in a way that we have never experienced, but about which we have heard and are fascinated. Mary’s Cafe, a little joint in Texas, is famous for a nontraditional and salivation-inducing twist on the method of cooking. Instead of heavily battering and then deep-frying the meat, Mary simply flours the steak and cooks it on a hot griddle, ladling it with melted butter halfway through the process. We are determined to make a go of it, using my wife’s cast iron griddle she bought in Pigeon Forge last winter. We will let you know how it turns out.

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Regarding the situation we’re all in and the steps needed to improve it, let me just observe that there is an important distinction between men who are warlike and men who are merely animalistic. Think on this.

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I have a question for my readers, and please let me say again how grateful I am for each and every one of you. Those of you who have a strong knowledge of bluegrass and/or Americana music, pay close attention. I heard a song on the radio a few weeks ago, heard it twice in two days, but never the complete song. I was not in a position for writing materials and so couldn’t jot down any notes. The song I heard was sung by a young female with a voice like a cross between Taylor Swift and Emi Sunshine. There was a line in the song about either the promise of a blue day or the promise of a new day. There was fiddle, banjo, and guitar in the arrangement, and the tune was light and pleasant. I have worn out the search engines putting these elements into them and trying to ascertain what the song is and who sings it. If any of you have any ideas of how I can find the answer to this question, I will be so very indebted to you.

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When I was a shirt-tail boy, Memorial Day was known as Decoration Day in my shabby circles. It was a day when everyone traveled to the family cemetery plot(s) and spruced things up and placed (usually plastic) flowers on the graves.

One of my favorite Robert Mitchum movies, Home From the Hill, contains a scene where the bastard son of the town’s most prominent citizen is wielding a hoe against the weeds and brambles growing on his mother’s grave in the sinner’s corner of the town cemetery. While there, he meets and talks with the wife of the man who sired him while they watch the more upstanding citizens prettying up the resting places of their respectable loved ones.. It’s a quick scene, but memorable for me. George Peppard played the illegitimate son of the town’s lion, who was played by Mitchum.

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The poor and unlovely are rarely appreciated. I want you to watch this video of a man who is both poor and unlovely, and yet who possesses a rough beauty and dignity in short supply in this age.

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We attended a simple country wedding at a little local church recently. The bride was beautiful in the most modest gown I’ve seen in many years, and the groom was his usual smiling self in his overalls. It was one of the few weddings I’ve ever attended where I could read the gathered crowd’s mood to be a unanimous “We are truly happy for y’all.” God’s blessings and happiness to G & S. May you have many years together.

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A family friend gave me two bars of Texas Beer Soap and a sack of onion sets. The soap is very nice and I’ve been enjoying my showers with it. The onions are growing and thriving alongside the tomatoes. And this is the extent of my farmingness at this point. But my heart is happy and peaceful, and that is enough.

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Our Japanese magnolia, seen at top right in the photo below, had to go. It had some sort of strange pull for black snakes, and today I finally got tired enough of pulling them down from the branches while the dogs raised holy hell, and I cut ‘er down. It threw a nice little patch of shade onto the back porch, but I’d rather have hot sun than black, shiny-scaly ropes of hissing hostility. Have I mentioned lately that the blasted things bite?

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In the still night upon the Feast of Saint Joan of Arc, let pure music come forth, and let talk of guns & glory — issuing from the lips of those who will neither use the former nor recognize the later — be stilled.

A blessed and peaceful feast of Saint Joan of Arc to you all, my dear friends.

~ S.K. Orr