Memoirs
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In A Trying Time
A hot, bleak, disappointing day, and sitting here in the quiet of a cool room, I am grateful that it is at an end. Two sizable disappointments bled the day of much of its appeal. One was a considerable setback at my job, which does not bode well for me in the coming weeks. The other was a bit of dismal financial news, arriving when I reached home this evening. And yet I do not feel crushed or despondent, and my spirits are cheery and calm. I believe the credit for my calmness in the face of disappointment goes to two mp3’s to which I listened today. This morning on…
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Red Pebbled Plastic Glass
When I was eight years old, my Aunt Carolyn dropped by for a visit. Aunt Carolyn was not like her older sister, my mother. She was unmarried, an Air Force veteran, working a cushy job for the government. She was a nation-trotter, a quick-laugher. She was the first person I ever knew who possessed and used credit cards. Her life was a bullet, shot far from us. Her red Chrysler pulled up out front on a cool Friday night and she left the car running while she trotted to our front door and shoved it open. I was listening to an Exotic Guitars lp on Mother’s radio/record player and looked…
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Twoscore And Two
It was what is referred to as a “flashbulb moment,” and I can revisit it any time I wish. Forty-two years ago today. My friends and I were driving to Burger Chef –ah, now there’s a memory, that taste, that ambience — when the news came on the local radio station. Elvis had died in Memphis. Cars came to sudden stops in the middle of the road. Adults were leaning out their windows and shouting at each other. “Did you hear? Did you hear that?” And then the long, elaborate national grieving started at summer’s end. My sister and I talked about it at length because of what had happened…
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Ninety And Nine
My mother used to sing a hymn when she did housework. This was when I was a small boy; when I was older, she never sang, though I don’t know why. The hymn I remember her singing often was “There Were Ninety and Nine,” and I can’t recall the last time I heard anyone sing or play this old chestnut. It’s a strange sort of dovetailing, me thinking of this hymn this morning, because today would have been my mother’s 99th birthday, and in the dark silence of the predawn, I heard a neighbor’s sheep baaing down in the holler. In the ancient world, such things would likely have been…
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Little Griefs
The second foggy morning in August so far, and I am tracking them. Mountain lore holds that the number of fogs in August forecasts the number of snows in the coming winter. Last year it was off a bit, but it’s still great fun to monitor. Through the fog’s gloom as I drove, I saw a tiny fawn in the road, lying exactly along the yellow stripe in the center. Such a delicate and beautiful little creature, fragile and soft and spotted. It looked to be sleeping as I slowed and passed it. And I had the same thought I always have when I see such sights. I thought of…
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Layksuh Hayull
I sat outside this morning with bible, breviary, and notebook, my coffee steaming in the cool and sugared mugginess of the day’s initial pages. Up in the woods in the direction of the new-born sun, a screech owl called, sounding as always like a tiny spectral horse whinnying. His appearance is early this year; I usually don’t hear the screech owls until mid-to-late September. And I sat and sipped and wondered if his eerie song was considered a harbinger in the mythos of any peoples. The squadron of the buzzing bullets we call hummingbirds were about their business, and watching them reminded me of something from my pilgrimage to Gethsemani…
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In The Press
As I mentioned at the end of my last brief post, I made a pilgrimage that I’ve been pondering for a while. I returned last week and took some time before attempting to set down a few thoughts here. In recent months I’ve undergone considerable emotional and spiritual stress, some of it from factors beyond my control. The cracks in my foundations have begun to show, and my wife suggested with loving firmness that it was time I made the trip I had been talking about for some time. Back during my very brief time in a college classroom, I had the good fortune to sit under the teaching of…
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Hourglass
Summer is on us in full force. Driving to work this morning, the haze in the air gave a taste of drowsiness, of lassitude. The mountains to the south of us are famously known as the Great Smoky Mountains, but the Clinch Mountains in which I live and move and have my daily being are smoky enough under their own rippling power. I passed a group of cows with their calves and noticed one little heifer with a white face, placid beneath a locust tree. She looked as if she’d forgotten to remove her cold cream when she tumbled out of bed at first light. I believe our eyes met…
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June Into July
There he is again, above me, half-watching me as I am half-watching him. As I write this, the hummingbird is on the telephone wire over my head, his tiny feet curled around the wire, his baton of a bill moving left and right, conducting the orchestra only he and his kin can hear. The summer day is hot and still, and much quieter than the summer Sundays of my youth, the sultry days down in the Delta when the reedy drone of locusts and katydids stretched across the hours and surprised you at night when it began to fade. Quieter here, yes, and perhaps not as hot, but hot still.…
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Answering For It — REVISED
Near my job is a building I pass every day. A low-slung affair in the middle of an over-large parking lot, it resembles a bank or a real estate office. The grounds are aggressively landscaped, deliberately shaded with ornamental trees, marked out by mulched quilts of annual flowers and bright shrubs. There are always cars in the parking lot, even on the weekends. The building is a nursing home. Most mornings when I pass, the front lobby isn’t fully lit, and there are few signs of activity behind its glass walls. But along the exterior walls there are many windows, and the windows are almost all fully lit, even in…