​

FUN​

It’s time for us to have some fun. Perchance to laugh. Goof off, even. Dare I suggest? Be silly.

Three of my favorite co-workers/office girlfriends just happened to all walk into my office about the same time this morning. Individually, we were frustrated beyond words with staffing issues, lack-of-common-sense employee situations, stupid decisions, ridiculous requests and an overall sense of exhaustion. Collectively, our despair and fatigue were palpable.

We sought solace from each other, taking turns discussing the most pressing problems -- but as I listened with a growing sense of doom and gloom as we all expressed how incredulous we were at the latest snafu and what boom needed to be lowered next, I started to grin. Then, I began to laugh. The eyes-watering, shoulder-shaking kind of laughter. There may even have been a snort. Or, two.

My friends thought I’d cracked under the pressure.

But, I had only looked around the room. We were – all four of us – almost identically dressed from top to bottom in black. Solid black. Solid, somber, serious black. Our furrowed brows and frowns outnumbered smiles four to zip.

We were each -- and all -- dressed, most appropriately, for a funeral. A wake.

Chic, perhaps. Slimming, most definitely. But fun?

Hardly.

As I attempted to explain my inexplicable outburst of snickering, we all began looking down at ourselves and then at each other. Then my sisters joined in my mirth.

“Okay. It’s time to do something fun,” my fellow dirge-worthy ginger concluded. “This is a sign.”

Understand this: Our fashion choices as well as our overall outlook on life were truly justified. It’s been a rough few days (weeks, months, etc. – Take your pick). One of the morbid four of us was mugged two weeks ago. Her face and psyche still bearing the scars and stitches of the pistol whipping. Our work woes are avalanching. And there are no ready solutions at hand. We can’t even drive from here to there in our community because the infrastructure is collapsing around us. Politics stink. Both locally and nationally. We can’t watch the evening news without blood pressures rising. And spirits sinking. Once an innocent diversion, even Facebook has transitioned from being an enjoyable link to our friends’ virtual vacations and dinners out to a sordid festering of hate, mean girl putdowns, divisiveness and race baiting.

And we’re tired of it. All of it.

But this morning, once forced to look at ourselves in the mirror of our dressed-alike sisterhood, we all started to laugh. Nay, to giggle.

And it felt good. Really good. So we laughed some more.

We also decided to be silly. For a change. Damn professionalism. We would tell everyone in the office to dress in pink next Friday. For the girls. Next, we logged into Amazon Prime and ordered matching tutus. Pink, of course. For the Ta-Ta’s and Breast Cancer Awareness. Our friend who’d been assaulted decided she needed sequins on hers. We concurred.

Then we agreed to have a Pink Potluck Party that day as well. A 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Cancel all meetings. Postpone the projects. Instead, put out the pink punch. Pink cotton candy. Pink cupcakes. Cookies. Strawberry ice cream…

And the men in the office WOULD HAVE TO participate as well. In pink. And, they would have to enjoy it.

We also unanimously decided that because we all, indisputably, look so dang good in black, we would simply add to today’s ensembles and dress as witches on October 31. Head to toe. Repleat with pointed hats and other accoutrements.

All in black.

But, this time, we’d have fun doing it.

 

                                                                                                # # #

 

​ANGRY

I feel like a Momma Bear whose cubs are being threatened.

And my claws are out.

Over the past few days, my friends have been under attack. I watched impotently last week as an old and dear friend was pilloried, drawn and quartered – by both once-trusted compatriots and total strangers alike -- over a late night Facebook post gone terribly, terribly wrong. A lifetime of philanthropic generosity, journalistic excellence and a stellar reputation as an all-around great guy was irreparably trashed by a self-righteous lynch mob because he mistakenly cast shade in an extremely politically incorrect way. He apologized but even his contrition was lambasted. Then, over the weekend I learned a fellow writer, tribe member and book lover was, quite literally, run over by a car and every inch of her body is now black, blue, bandaged and broken. An armful of others in my circle are reeling right now from cancer, suicide, infidelity, false accusations, death, debt and dashed dreams. Their worlds are turning upside down.

For them, my heart is breaking. Because I care so much – love them so deeply – the unfairness of it all makes me livid.

Last night, to top it all off with a bright red cherry bomb, a beautiful beach-loving, mermaid-identifying girlfriend who works just an arm’s length away from me was held up at gunpoint. From dawn to dusk she tries to protect abused and neglected children, but after putting in a long, 12-hour day doing just that, she was mugged, pistol-whipped, robbed and left lying in a pool of blood only a half block from our office.

Stop it.

Just stop it.

I’m sick and tired of all the bad news, inexcusable misbehavior, poisonous hatred and utter disregard for all that is good and lovely and precious in my world. I’m oh-so-over the pushing and shoving to steal what’s not yours and the hollow protestations and vacuous demands for a misshapen entitlement and perverted sense of justice. I’m disgusted with politics and politicians. I’m furious that the people I care about are suffering and mistreated and abused. I am frustrated over the good guys finishing behind those who are not.

I am weary.

On Sunday, I sat in the pew and listened to the preacher tell me that our God is not angry. Rather, he said, God is love. And, he said, if I view God as angry it would make me cynical, sarcastic and bitter.

I’m stilling mulling over the preacher’s anger vs love hypothesis and I am questioning his either/or theological assertion (not to mention wondering how he can cast aside a whole testament full of evidence to the contrary not to mention a quite descriptive depiction of a very angry Jesus wreaking havoc on a bunch of ill-behaved money changers in the Temple.) But this I do know: I, for one, am angry. And, while I am confessing to my God who I personally believe is both angry and loving as well as both forgiving and judging, I am also increasingly cynical, sarcastic and bitter.

More and more frequently, I find myself commenting that I have lived too long for this world. That the things I have consistently believed to be sacred and precious are now considered by so many to be irrelevant and worthless. The values I have clung to and the compass that has pointed to my true north are now spinning off into an orderless universe.

My truths, while still core to my being, have been cast aside by today’s society as archaic and inappropriate. I am, simultaneously, too much and too little. Both inflexible and amorphous. What little is correct these days depends solely on who is making the observation and what it is they are judging.

I feel like a stranger in a very unlikeable world.

I cannot relate. Nor, at most times, do I even want to try anymore.

The preacher ended his sermon Sunday morning by challenging those in his congregation to take a few minutes every day this week to think about all the good things God has done for us. I have no problem doing that. My list is long and overflowing. I have admittedly received far more grace and goodness that I will ever deserve. I have been given much that is beautiful and best. And for every undeserved gift of love, I am forever grateful.

But does that necessarily mean I cannot and should not also be angry at the injustice of this world? Does viewing God as love demand that I dismiss my ire when wrong is poured out and when violence claims another victim? Can I not brandish my sword and slug through the mire to fight for what I hold to be right?

Is it impossible – or merely impermissible -- to be both loving and angry?

                                                                                               # # #

​​​Catfish​

August 4, 1964
The bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were discovered today buried in an earthen dam off a remote county road in Neshoba County near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The gruesome discovery concluded a 44-day search for the three Freedom Summer workers who had disappeared June 21 after working at Mt. Zion Church to register black voters. On their way back home to Meridian, the young civil rights activists were stopped by local authorities, arrested and taken to jail. Shortly after they were released, the three went missing. Their burned-out station wagon was later found in a swampy area not far from the church.
                                                                                              --  New York Times

           Fish. A wriggling, helpless string of iridescent silver and yellow-throated bream and two slimy gray catfish flopping frantically in shallow muddy water near the lake’s edge.

          That’s the disparate picture my mind repeatedly paints every time that dark day resurrects.

          Ninety or so miles west and just a little south of the incomprehensible crime scene that has forever since painted Mississippi as a bastion of bigotry and racial violence, the sun over my head that day was blistering hot. Humidity was unbearable. Mosquitos, incessant.

          Yet, the fish. Their furtive splashes were enthusiastic but did little to dissuade a giant snapping turtle slowly chewing his way through their spindly tails, one nip at a time. Their inevitable fate was strung up with a red and white twisted plastic rope gouged through their gills and anchored into the mud by a sharp aluminum rod.
   

           Good as dead. Already half buried in the muck.

           I threw a baseball bat-sized stick at the persistent hardshell, prompting his wrinkled head to duck underwater. When I skidded another limb in his direction, he bobbed again and took off – kicking up a cloud of silt on his way to forage elsewhere. Admittedly, my gallant gesture was more to protect my own dinner than to save the fish’s slimy tails, but I felt a slight satisfaction at preserving some degree of sanctity for the creatures which would soon be beheaded, gutted, breaded and fried up for my supper.
 

          “Stoppit. You’ll spook da fish,” my father barked, casting his line back into the water. He lit another Winston and held it in his teeth as he began winding his reel ever so slowly to entice the swimmers with some wretchedly stinky cheese bait.

          “Yessir. Sorry, sir.”

          I loved fried catfish, hushpuppies and tartar sauce but I deplored fishing. The bugs, the mud, having to sit on prickly grass and hot, sandy dirt. I really hated sweating. But, more than anything, I detested snakes. And there were lots of them. Sunning themselves on the dirt banks surrounding the pond my father insisted on calling a lake. He had just had a crew dig it out of a cow pasture on the back side of our family’s weekend farm in Ellisville. Snakes made my skin crawl, made me shudder and fear for my 7-year-old life. My nightmares were made of what I would have to do to survive if their pointed fangs ever found my foot. Or leg. Or whatever. Rattlers and cottonmouths aside, I really didn’t like much of anything else about the farm either – especially in the spring and summer. Too hot. Too sticky. Too many creepy, crawly things for my taste. But for some strange reason, the rest of my family was obsessed with it. The farm was located just outside of Ellisville, a south Mississippi redneck hamlet best  known for the state-run school for the mentally handicapped that was located on its southern edge. 

          As I got older, I always assumed the cow pastures, barn and lake were my father’s homage to the Green Acres television show (On the sit-com, the bumbling but good-hearted farm-hand Eb was played by Tom Lester, a family friend and local Laurel celebrity of sorts, so we always watched it.) It seemed like the only time my father came close to looking like he was happy was when he was on the farm riding atop his bright red Massey Ferguson tractor, looking for all the world like Oliver Wendell Douglas, the dapper New York City lawyer come-earth tiller and cow herder. In reality, my father was only 15 years or so removed from growing up hand-to-mouth poor on a barren dustbowl of another dirt farm about a half-hour’s drive away in Stringer, a godforsaken bend in the road just north of Laurel where our real six-days-out-of-the-week house was. Only a law degree from Ole Miss and the good fortune of landing in a plum law firm separated him from his retched upbringing in hard scrabble rural Mississippi. 

          Pennymaker Farm, truth be told, was my father’s not so disguised attempt to emulate his senior law partner Carroll Gartin, who also happened to be Mississippi’s lieutenant governor and one of the most handsome men I had ever seen. Mr. Gartin was tall and broad-shouldered and had the widest, white-toothed smile of anyone I knew. To an awestruck child, it seemed his eyes twinkled whenever he saw me. Once, he took me on a day trip to Jackson – just the two of us – where we had a fancy lunch at the Governor’s Mansion on Capitol Street. But what I enjoyed most was spending time with him riding on beautiful horses across his pastures. He’s the one who first got me into the saddle and introduced me to the ecstasies of galloping and cantering and jumping.

          I loved Mr. Gartin and his elegant wife Janie. Adored them. The beautiful couple had a much more attractive piece of farm land than ours, wrapped around a beautiful natural lake situated just across the blacktop road from our weekend “place,” as my mother liked to call it. Very much unlike ours, the sloping banks leading down to the Gartins’ lake were neatly mowed and covered with lush St. Augustine grass. Their sprawling dark green, board-and-batten weekend farmhouse was, to me, a wonderland filled with books and photographs and antique rugs. On the coffee table near Mr. Gartin’s overstuffed dark red leather recliner, an ever-present wormwood dough bowl was filled with every kind of nut known to mankind and a sterling silver nutcracker I could use whenever I wanted. Without having to ask permission first. They even had a matching silver pointy thing you were supposed to use to scrape away the bitter lining between the pecan meats after you shelled them. 

          At their farm, you didn’t have to sit in the dirt to fish. Mrs. Gartin always had brightly colored canvas chairs for all of us – even for me and her son Bill who I was absolutely convinced I’d marry when we both grew up – with really cool corkscrew metal things to hold your fishing rod for you. Whenever we were outside by the lake, she would serve us iced lemonade served in tall metal glasses so cold they would make your fingers go numb. And ginger snaps so thin you could almost see the sun through them.

          Unlike everybody else I knew, and especially not like me, Mrs. Gartin didn’t sweat. Instead, she always wore a strand of pearls with short cotton pique shift dresses and sandals or flowing cotton caftans and deliciously floppy straw hats that were tied onto her perfectly coiffed head with flower-splashed silk scarves. Once, she gave me one of her sunhats to wear. 

          “It keeps the freckles away,” she whispered, placing the bonnet atop my sweaty little head. 

          When we were piling into our car to go home at the end of the lazy summer’s day, she told me to keep it. For real. I just knew that whenever I wore it I was as elegant as Jackie Kennedy sitting on the shores of their family compound at Hyannis Port. Whenever we visited the Gartin farmhouse in Ellisville or their beautiful two-story home just down the road from our ranch-style house in Laurel, Mrs. Gartin would have a “happy” for me wrapped up in colored tissue paper.

          “Just because,” she’d always say with a wink. My favorite gift from her – other than the floppy hat and a folding pink paper fan from China with painted dragons on it -- was a wooden cup on a stick with a little egg yolk-sized ball tied to the handle with a piece of red and white twisted string. It came all the way from Mexico according to the etching on the handle. I could spend all afternoon trying to flip that ball into the cup, sitting elegantly in my bright turquoise chair, sipping my lemonade and wearing my sophisticated sun hat.

          But not that day. 

          That day, I was stuck barefooted in the dirt on the banks of our muddy pond. Throwing sticks at turtles and imagining snakes were sneaking up behind me to inject their poisonous venom into my mosquito-bite-riddled appendages.

          Just when I thought I could not take the boredom or the August heat or the threat of snakes one minute longer, a big cloud of dust blew through the metal gate at the far end of the lake where the newly built dam was still covered with burlap feed sacks to keep the mud and weeds from washing away when it rained. A flashing blue light on top of the Jones County Sheriff’s Department cruiser was the first thing to emerge from the haze. Next was the sheriff himself, hitching up his too-tight brown polyester pants and straightening the revolver snapped into its black leather holster as he walked to meet my father, already heading in his direction.

          “They found ‘em boys,” the sheriff yelled, motioning for my father to come to him.

          My father tossed his smoldering cigarette butt into the lake as he turned back to look at me and my mother, but kept walking toward the patrol car. He looked angry -- but I didn’t know why. I hadn’t done anything to make him mad. Except for throwing those two sticks and scaring away his beloved fish.

          “In a dam. All three of ‘em. Shot in da head,” the sheriff continued to shout. He squirted a long spittle of nasty brown tobacco juice onto the ground. 

          “Dammit.”

          That didn’t sound good. I felt a little sick to my stomach.

          My father covered the uneven ground much faster than the rotund sheriff did, heading him off before he even got close to climbing up our brand new lake’s red clay dam. The two men walked back together to the patrol car, talking, and climbed inside. The siren bleated when he turned off the blue light.

          Still bored and ready to go home to air conditioning and the refuge of my bedroom, I turned back to my fish watching. The bream appeared lifeless now, gently rocking and floating on top of the ripples as the dirty water bumped against the lake’s edge. Only the bigger catfish occasionally put forth any effort to escape captivity.

          Flies were buzzing around their scaly corpses now. And a dragonfly.

          It wasn’t long, though, before the car backed up and left in almost as much of a rush as it arrived. My father walked back to where I was perched and started telling my mother what the sheriff had come to say. Said we’d better get back to Laurel where we’d be alright. Couldn’t tell what was going to happen next.

          “All hell’s gonna break loose,” my father said. “I gotta call Carroll. May go over with him.”

          My mother started to cry a little bit but he told her to stop it. “That won’t do anybody good,” he said. He barked at me to get the string of fish and get myself back to the car. 

          “Stay off the dam,” he snapped. “C’mon, now. Hurry it up.” 

         The fish’s cold wet slimy stinky scaly flesh flapped against my legs as I hurried to catch up with my parents, both loaded down with fishing poles and minnow buckets, dragging my almost two-year-old brother in tow. 

          I sat in the back seat of my mother’s baby blue Plymouth Valiant, not making a sound. But I listened to every word. And I heard of most of them.

          “Put ‘em in the dam…all three of ‘em boys… beat the hell out of ‘em…shot in the head…FBI…dug ‘em out with a bulldozer…Burrage’s place…last night…damn feds…hell’s gonna break loose.” 

          I didn’t really understand what my father was talking about. But I knew something definitely wasn’t right.

          What he said didn’t exactly make much sense. I knew you couldn’t hide somebody in a dam.

          All summer long, I’d been threatened within an inch of my life if I played on our new dam. Or, even walked on it. They kept reminding me to stay off it. Warned me it might collapse or spring a leak if we messed with it or put too much weight on it. No walking or running up and down on the back side. It hadn’t “set up” yet.

          So, even I knew you couldn’t bury somebody in a dam. 

          You just couldn’t.

                        
June 21, 2004

          “Would you like some tartar sauce?” I offered, extending a small white Styrofoam bowl filled with the slimy white condiment to the elderly woman sitting across from me at the long folding table covered with a plastic red-and-white checked cloth.

          “Or would you like catsup, Mrs. Goodman?”

          She chose the Heinz to top off the three golden friend catfish fillets piled onto her plate. I think she preferred the hush puppies to the bottom feeders by the way she played with her food, but she bravely nibbled at the fish between tiny bites of coleslaw.

          “Do you always fry this kind of fish?” she asked, making small talk in a valiant attempt to postpone talking about why we – and another 1,500 or so others – were gathered off a red clay road in rural Neshoba County 40 years to the day after her son was beaten, shot and buried in an earthen dam eight miles due south of where she was sitting today.

          I shared with her my favorite recipe – coating the fillets with a spicy dry seasoning before searing it in butter in an extremely hot black cast-iron skillet. I don’t think she was listening but our banter postponed the inevitable.

          Before long, however, our conversation tiptoed to Andy’s baseball card collection. We’d just taken a picture of it for the newspaper. She had brought the collection with her from home, she said, in hopes of turning her son into a human being in the public’s eye – instead of just a blurred black and white photograph on a four decades-old Missing poster. Slowly, we started talking about the serious stuff. About why she finally decided to come to Mississippi. To where her world had been shattered those many years ago.

          She had accepted the Coalition for Justice’s invitation, she said, because it was “long past time” for Mississippi to do something about the murder of her son and his two Freedom Summer friends. And, “possibly,” she said, it looked like things may finally be changing – even if only shifting slightly – to the point that there might be a sliver of hope that such justice “long deferred” might actually happen.

          A lot of qualifiers for just a little bit of hope. But, in her words that day, at least there was a glimmer.

          I scribbled in my notebook as she talked. I nodded and tried not to interrupt so she would say more.

          In the end, what I saw during that almost surreal interview with a petite, frail, soft-spoken mother juxtaposed against the backdrop of a noisy and crowded Mississippi fish fry was more newsworthy than what I actually heard in her words. Her eyes spoke volumes. Her determined presence so much more.

          At the other end of our table, Rita Schwerner-Bender, the widow of Mickey, watched expressionless as the throng of strangers milled about the un-air conditioned Neshoba County Multipurpose Arena. I ached to ask what she was thinking. What she was feeling. But it seemed wrong, at that moment, to interrupt. It had to be a much different picture of Philadelphia from the one she had known 40 years ago. Still, I wondered if she had any idea that the crowd she was watching today was – these many decades after she left Mississippi vowing never to return – still an anomaly. This diverse gathering of mostly local residents, all who lived within a stone’s throw of each other – albeit of distinctly different sides of the tracks – still rarely crossed economic or social paths in their small town much less shared a common table. 

          Or, purpose.

          But on that day, they were together. A brave handful of Philadelphia leaders -- including my boss Jim Prince, editor of the Neshoba County Democrat newspaper, and Leroy Clemons, president of the Neshoba County NAACP -- had accomplished what most in Mississippi either thought impossible or totally uncalled for. This multi-racial group had brought everyone together under one roof at one time – Choctaw Indians, African Americans and whites. All there for the same reason. To apologize, collectively, to the families. To call for justice and to ask the local district attorney and Mississippi’s Attorney General Jim Hood to re-open the case, indict the alleged ring leader behind the three murders and try him for his role in the crimes.

          After the almost one ton of Mississippi hatched, raised and caught catfish had been battered, fried up and consumed that day, I helped clear our table on the back side of the second-floor landing. I tossed the paper plate containing Mrs. Goodman’s half-eaten lunch into the trash barrel as I helped her cautiously descend the concrete stairwell and step up to the temporary stage set up on the ground floor of the arena.

          It was on that dias – and later at the Mt. Zion church memorial service -- that speeches, along with not just a little history, were to be made that day.

          Mississippi’s former Secretary of State Dick Molpus, who grew up in Philadelphia just miles from the crime, spoke for every single soul gathered in the arena that day. For those, like him, who knew personally of the sacrifice and the loss. For the many there who had lived it themselves and carried their own scars. For those too young to know first-hand hand what had happened but had, nonetheless, grown up in the painful shadows and been poisoned by the hate. 

          “We deeply regret what happened here...  We wish we could undo it.  We are profoundly sorry that they are gone.  We wish we could bring them back,” he apologized directly to the Schwerners, the Chaneys and the Goodmans sitting behind him on the stage, echoing a ground-quaking apology he made to the families 15 years earlier on behalf of himself and the state of Mississippi. His apology essentially killed Molpus' political career but began the first loosening of the wheels of justice. 

          “Listen to the words that will be said today.  But most of all, see what is around you.  Draw strength and solace from it.  Know that it is real.  Black, white, and Choctaw Indian together have forged a new and strong bond and helped transform a community.  Fear has waned—fear of the unknown, fear of each other—and hope abides.

          A community choir sang. Preachers shouted to the heavens. 

          And politicians promised.

          Ben Chaney swallowed tears as he stood – proudly -- to about his lost brother J.C. and how excited he was about what his role was going to be that summer.  Their mother was afraid for him, but James wasn’t. Rita did not speak but she previously and privately had shared her memories about the Freedom House she and Mickey had set up in Meridian to help prepare their brave new friends to register to vote. About their pressing on despite the threats and the violence and the fear.

          Then, Carolyn Goodman walked to the podium and called out for justice. Finally, for justice. 

          For her Andy. 

                                                                                                 # # #

June 21, 2005

Edgar Ray Killen, a small-town Baptist preacher, was convicted today of three counts of manslaughter, and sentenced to 60 years in Mississippi’s Parchman prison. The ring leader behind the deaths of James Chaney, Michael “Mickey” Schwerner and Andrew Goodman was found guilty by a Mississippi jury exactly 41 years to the day that the three young men were kidnapped and killed.

                                                                                        --  New York Times

Serendipity
Good luck in making unexpected and fortunate discoveries. The phenomenon
of finding valuable or positive things not sought for.

One call after another after another. After another. I couldn’t answer one line without three other buttons on the desk phone flashing for me to answer them.

“Good morning! Would you please hold for just a moment?”

“Good morning! Please hold.”

“Good morning! Yes, just one moment.”

If I had not been so awestruck by the names and titles I was scribbling on my phone message notepad, I would have run screaming from the room. But I was. Awestruck.

For a wanna-be journalist, I was in nirvana. Considering that this was only supposed to be a part-time summer job between my sophomore and junior years at Ole Miss, being a receptionist for my father’s former law partner was turning out to be much more than I had hoped. 

It wasn’t even 10 o’clock and I had already fielded calls from James Naughton with the New York Times, the Associated Press Bureau in D.C., the Today Show, CBS New York, talked to both Evans AND Novak and I had just put Bill Monroe, the new host for Meet the Press, on hold. As quickly as I could scribble out the name of the caller, record a return phone number and relay that information to my boss, I would stash the pink pre-printed While You Were Out sheets into a keepsake folder that one day soon I would use to fill up my Rolodex with important sources and contacts. Pure gold.

I kept watching the clock. At 10 a.m. almost every day since I had started working there, I would get a call from Tom Brokaw. The new hotshot reporter for NBC news. He was adorable. And extremely polite. Not pushy about getting through to talk with Mr. Pickering. Instead, he would spend time shooting the breeze with me.  He gave me his direct line in New York. And, his home phone number -- just in case I ever needed anything. Told me he had an old friend who would be teaching feature writing at Ole Miss in the fall and he’d tell him to be on the lookout for me. I was signed up for the course.

Tom also said for me to stay in touch and to let him know when I graduated.

(Lesson #1 Learned: Always be respectful to secretaries and receptionists. They are the most powerful gatekeepers anywhere. Alienate them and you will never get to speak with your source. Make them your ally and you’re in the door.)

My watch read 10:01.

Rrrrrrrrring.

“Good morning! Charles Pickering’s office. May I help you?”

It was him. Tom.

We talked for a minute about how hot it was this summer in Mississippi and started chatting about journalism and why I wanted to be a reporter when the light blinked off on Mr. Pickering’s line, so I interrupted and put the call through.

“Talk to you tomorrow,” I said, punching the #2 button to transfer the call. “Good luck.”

Charles was incoming chairman of Mississippi’s fledgling Republican Party and co-chair of the Mississippi delegation to the 1976 Republican National Convention. Last week, the split-down-the-middle delegation had decided to refrain from endorsing either presidential candidate until the convention opened next month in Kansas City, Missouri.

The way things were shaping up nationally, it was looking like Mississippi might be the key state to decide the nomination so everybody  -- and I mean EVERYBODY -- in the news business wanted to know how Pickering was leaning. But he was playing things close to his vest.

In a few minutes, Charles stuck his head out of his mahogany paneled office. The one that used to be occupied by my father before he was elected judge and left the firm.

“Having fun yet?” he joked, leaning against the door frame sipping on what was probably his fourth cup of coffee that morning. “Been crazy today but I’ve got to do something on my speech. Hold my calls for 15 minutes. All of them. I don’t care who it is, I’ve got to think and get something down on paper.”

He closed the door. Sounded like he locked and bolted it. Fort Knox.

The phone started ringing again. And I started taking down names and numbers. Again. At one point, I just let it ring. I couldn’t get to all of the calls anyway.

“Good morning! Charles Pickering’s office. May I help you?” I finally answered, feeling guilty just watching the red “answer me!” lights flash on and off.

I told the caller that Mr. Pickering was in a conference for the moment and couldn’t be interrupted but I would be happy to ask him to return the call as soon as he was free. Could I have his name and number, please?

“I’m Jerry, but that’s okay. I’ll just hold if that’s alright with you,” the voice on the other end said.

“Any idea how long he’ll be?”

I told him that it would be at least 15 minutes and repeated that I would be happy to take a message.

“No, problem. I’ll just hold.”

When the other lines started to ring again, I put Jerry on hold. Line #3.

Every break I got, I’d check back on #3 just to make sure he was okay and still wanted to keep holding.

“I’m fine,” he said. 

On about the third or fourth check-in, Jerry borrowed a page from Brokaw’s playbook and started chit-chatting, asking my name and how long I’d worked for Charles. When I told him that I was studying journalism at Ole Miss and would be going back to Oxford in a couple of weeks, he finally found something we had in common. Something we could talk about.

“Ole Miss? Then you’ve gotta like football. The Rebels, right?”

Yes, I liked football. In particular, a defensive end from North Riverside, Illinois.

“Tall, dark and handsome?” he asked.

“Tall. But blond,” I said.

“I used to be a tall blond football player myself,” Jerry preened. “Center. #48. Wasn’t too bad if I do say so...”

Two other lines started ringing, so I put him back on hold. “Sorry!”

A few minutes later, after taking a message from Haley Barbour who was working as the delegation’s chief of staff that summer and then another from a rude, no-name research assistant for Reuters, I pushed the button for Line #3.

“Still there?” I asked. He was. And he started talking about football again. Obviously a one-trick pony, I thought. I was wishing Brokaw would call back.

“We won the national championship two years in a row…”

The clock finally – mercifully -- clicked down toward the 15-minute mark.

“I think they’re finishing up now,” I interrupted Jerry’s story about some big game back in the dark ages and about his deciding not to go pro and play for the Green Bay Packers. “Let me put you through.”

“Mr. Pickering, I have a call for you on three. He’s been waiting the whole time.”

I punched the transfer button and started stacking up the messages to hand off to him as soon as the call was over.  In a few minutes, I saw the light go off on his line.

Charles stormed out of the office, banging the door back against the wall.

“When I said to hold my calls, I didn’t mean the President. Of the United States!” he barked. “That was Gerald Ford. For 15 minutes!”

I needed to throw up. 

But, the phone started ringing.

“Good morning, Charles Pick...”

Before I could get out another word, he interrupted.

“You in trouble?”

“Yessir.”

“Is he mad?”

“Yessir”

“Let me talk to him.”

                                                                                                   # # #

The 1976 Republican National Convention was the last major convention where the party’s nominee was not decided during the primary process. On the first roll call vote, Mississippi cast the deciding votes to put Gerald Ford over the 1,130-delegate number required to win the nomination over challenger Ronald Reagan.

Tom Brokaw’s first big career break came that night on the floor of the Kemper Arena when he slipped into a last-minute secret caucus of the Mississippi delegation which had cloistered underneath the bleacher steps. Brokaw broke the national news that Mississippi had decided to cast its 30 votes, not for Reagan as anticipated, but for Ford. He got the scoop.

                                                                                                # # #

Almost two years after winning the party’s nomination but losing the White House to Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford came to Ole Miss on a speaking tour. I was assigned to interview the former president for the Daily Mississippian campus newspaper.

I showed up, reporter’s notebook in hand, and awaited my allotted time slot. Fifteen minutes with the president. A one-on-one interview. Nervous did not begin to describe my state of mind. Checking in with Secret Service, I handed over my purse for inspection. It was post-Squeaky Fromme and the security detail was on high alert. Obviously.

“How are y’all doing?” I tried to make polite conversation in my finest sorority girl Southern drawl.

But they weren’t having it.  Instead, one officer took my purse. Opened it and started rooting around. He looked up at me, stone-faced. Another nodded, took my arm and led me down the hall. He opened a door and ushered me in. Into a storage closet. The door was shut behind me.

Locked.

They kept my purse. There was a metal nail file inside, I later found out.

After what seemed like eternity, and a more than mild panic attack over the likelihood that I was going to be arrested and would never get my big interview, there was a knock on the door.

It was him.

“I’ll vouch for her. I owe her one.”

                                                                                            # # #

ALMOST

"The disease of not-enough is cured

when you give thanks for more than enough grace."

Ann Voskamp

​I’m going to be cremated when I die.
If you or even anyone I barely know would ask me at any given moment why I am choosing to opt out of the pomp and circumstance of a five-alarm Great Southern Funeral, it’s more likely than not I will click off multiple well-reasoned arguments for why I have decided it is preferable to me personally for my be-sooted remains to be scattered hither, thither and yon beginning with a slight dusting on the black-and-white tiled floor of the Acme Oyster Bar in New Orleans and winding up with a grand hurrah dumping (of whatever is left of me after a quick and unceremonial stopovers and ashy deposits in the tulip beds in the Loop at Ole Miss, the Little Pigeon River by the Apple Barn in Pigeon Forge and the back balcony of the Grove Park Inn in Ashville) into the Inside Passage’s Glacier Bay to float with all eternity with the whales, polar bears and other nearly extinct casualties of global warming. They would all be valid.

Deeper truth be told, though, I’m a little more than uncertain that John might do as he has oft jokingly threatened and chisel a bone-chilling, one-word epitaph on my tombstone. Almost.

As in, “I almost got the kitchen clean,” or “I almost met that deadline,” or “I almost put Thanksgiving dinner on the table on time this year.” Or, if you really want to start meddling into my lifetime portfolio of not-quites and just-abouts, it would more painfully and truthfully be such gut-punching confessions as “I was almost good enough,” or “I almost made him happy,” or “I almost lived up to my potential.”

Or, the Really Big One that wakes me up in a cold sweat at 3:30 a.m. most fitful nights: “I almost finished my book.”

But, not quite. Just almost. Closer than ever before. But not done yet. Almost.

Between us girls: I’ve been greatly amiss for the past 61 years or so in not doing everything I should have been doing or accomplishing what I really ought to have produced with my life. I’ve rarely, if ever, been the best. First place. Top dog. Numero uno. At least in the big stuff. In the things that matter. Admittedly, I’ve won my share of battles – just never the big war.

I am a perennial also-ran. The right hand. The deputy whatever. The assistant. Just never the lead mutt. 

The sad part of it is, I’m pretty comfortable being in that #2 or #3 or run-up spot. In the blinding light of day and when I put it down in black and white 11 point Calibre typeface, however, that truly hurts to admit. It is not that I have been a total and utter failure – I’ve usually been right up there in the running for whatever I’ve taken on as a challenge or as my life’s work and joy. There is a decently fleshed out resume somewhere on my computer’s hard drive; I have met and been blessed by more wonderful souls than I deserve and experienced countless opportunities a lot of others would only dared to dream of having; I have loved my husband and our sweet family long and hard and well, and I’ve fought tooth and nail to defend a true friend and crusade for a lost cause -- but there are definitely more than a few important items of unfinished or half-finished projects dangling for dear life on the tail end of my life’s to-do list. Things I have not yet done to the best of my abilities. Talents I have thus far wasted. Skills I have not honed to perfection or excellently applied.

Confession: I am not in the least pleased or at peace with myself because of it. That New Testament parable of the lazy servant and the wasted talents is the stuff of nightmares for this born and bred Southern Baptist girlfriend. I am perennially convicted of being satisfied with the good instead of pushing further for the best. And I know not what joys and thrills I have missed out on because of these compromises.

With the most loving of “you can do better than this” intentions from those who have pointed wagging fingers in my direction, I’ve been both privately and publicly shamed on more than one occasion for disappointingly paving my own personal road to hell with the great plans and high hopes I’ve self-proclaimed for myself. And, as many good-hearted and well-intentioned souls who have likewise fallen short before me, I’ve started down that ambitious highway with boatloads of vim, vigor and vision – only to fall prey a short (or long) time later to exhaustion, distraction or some other condition that plausibly prevented me from making it across the finish line.

Never fear. I can orate excuses with the best of them: “But I had to take care of (fill-in-the-blank) and I thought that was more important” or “I had to do (fill-in-the-blank again) at work and didn’t have time” and the ever-popular “I was just too (choose one of the following: tired, sick, exhausted, busy, overwhelmed…)”

You get the idea.

Almost doesn’t count. It is only finishing well that matters. Right?

Right?

I once heard a comedian say that the worst thing that could ever happen to an Olympic athlete would be to stand on the podium to the right of center and have a silver medal placed around his or her neck. Second place? Really? After all the struggle and training and trying and sacrifice – and a split-hair of a second – an eyelash -- made all the difference between winning and ALMOST winning? Between glory and anonymity? Success and failure?

“If only he’d had a pimple on his nose, he’d have crossed the line first! How do you live with yourself?” the comic joked. The audience roared in response.

I wanted to cry.

Whenever I almost reached a big goal but just fell short, it was a sucker punch to my soul because I really did try. I just did not, or could not, quite do whatever it would have taken to succeed so I branded myself a loser and labeled myself a failure.  When someone else won the grand and glorious prize I’d dreamed and reached for but it just barely exceeded my grasp and I was left holding onto that green honorable mention ribbon instead of clutching the elusive, shiny gold trophy, it hurt. I shrunk a little more inside and my light dimmed just another bit.
I honestly do not envy their success. I just long for my own.

Late one night, not that very long ago, I found myself once again staring up at the ceiling fan in our bedroom. Couldn’t sleep. Face washed with tears. Tossing and turning over the words I should be putting onto the page but was so bone tired and brain weary to the point I could not make myself crawl out of bed and sit at my computer to do so. I was questioning everything good and lovely and holy about my existence when a peace unexpectedly rained down on me.

I was suddenly soaked in grace.

Looking over at my sleeping husband, I realized he still loves me in my failures and despite my shortcomings and even with my disappointing almosts.  Then I closed my eyes and realized my God loves me infinitely more  -- even with all my many missteps and imperfections.

Because of Grace. Unmerited favor. Love I didn’t earn. Acceptance I didn’t win. In spite of, not because of.

I didn’t have to be first. I didn’t have to win. I didn’t have to do better or be more. I just have to do and to be.

(But I do have to finish that book.)

​Ebenezer

Stone of help.

A stone set up by Samuel as a token of gratitude for deliverance.

1 Samuel 7:10-12

​Nana possessed the greenest thumb of all six of the Hegwood soul sisters. She could spit on the ground and something beautiful would grow. Buttercups, lilies, azaleas and hostas exploded across the lush St. Augustine carpet surrounding her white clapboard house on Raleigh’s main street, built just next door to the family’s newspaper office. String beans, lady peas, sweet corn, okra and squash would crawl all over each other to see which would be the first produce to overflow her gathering basket. And everyone in Smith County knew Miz Lena’s Better Boy tomatoes had no equal.

Unfortunately, hers was a fertile gift of sweet Southern womanhood that I did not inherit. I cannot grow weeds.

Nana bestowed me with other treasures, however. Not the least of which are beautiful memories of youthful summers of bliss spent in the refuge of the kindest, wisest and -- honest-to-God -- best woman I have ever known. Our daily routines were the stuff of storybook tales.

To this very day, if I squeeze my eyes tight enough, I can see Nana in her beloved garden. Shielded from the sun by a well-frayed straw sunhat, long-sleeved man’s white shirt tucked underneath a bright floral cotton apron and a pair of filthy, once-bright-green elbow-length gardening gloves. She would walk up and down each hand-tilled row to check on the progress of her babies, stopping every now and then to stoop over to examine her bunched butter beans or to kneel down to scratch out a bucketful of tiny new potatoes for our midday meal.

Nana would rise with the sun to keep her daily gardening appointment. Careful to slip quietly out of her bedroom so she wouldn’t awaken me, she’d dress in the kitchen before heading down the steep hill  behind her house to her very own Eden. Carved out of rich black dirt between her yard and the yawning chasm of a kudzu-draped gully beyond her property line, Nana’s fertile, verdant half-acre was her leafy heaven. Her “He walks with me and He talks with me” weekday sanctuary. Her bushel-basket, freezer-filling, pride-and-joy garden.

On those oh-so-early summer mornings, she thought I was sleeping. But I wasn’t. I pretended to be, though, so I wouldn’t have to join her in the daybreak ritual she so thoroughly enjoyed but I so absolutely did not. Once she was reveling in her morning glory, however, I would slip out of her king-sized bed and peak through the crack in her bedroom window curtains to watch the early morning harvesting take place. The woman fascinated me and I loved to watch her happiness.

My maternal grandmother was my everything. My best friend. My confidant. My godsend. My encourager and role model. My ever-present sanctuary in the middle of what I now realize was a more than stormy childhood.

Tall, straight-shouldered with a headful of perfectly coiffed jet black hair, Nana was a force with which to be reckoned. She could talk politics with the county courthouse gang, sling hot lead into the Linotype typesetting machine and boldly march all in white for her right as a woman to vote. There was nothing a man could do that she couldn’t accomplish just as well – or better -- simultaneously with baking biscuits from scratch and serving them up with homemade sausage gravy and scrambled eggs she had gathered from her own hens. A lover of Sanka and anything sugary sweet, Nana staunchly believed in the youth-perpetuating, wrinkle-banishing power of Luzier face cream almost as much as she did in the sin-purging, soul whitening power of the blood of the Lamb. She had the joyful heart of a child and a fierce backbone of steel.

Nana introduced me, through well-worn books and well-told tales, to a wide world where I could do anything I wanted and become anything I imagined. She also taught me life lessons I will never forget. Most of what I learned came from observing how she loved living and how she lived out love. Other wisdom flowed into me through her stories.

Typically, our inter-generational conversations were underscored by a chirping concert of katydids, grasshoppers and tree frogs while she and I – sometimes joined by various assorted relatives who would drop by for a spell – would rock or swing the late afternoons and early evenings away on her front porch. We would sip from glasses of icy lemonade or Tang while waving at everyone who walked past us down the sidewalk on their way home for dinner.  We’d talk about the paper. About who was sick or who was getting married or having a baby. Other times, we’d just sit and rock. We’d earned that respite, she said, after shelling butter beans, canning chow-chow or putting up whatever bounty she’d gathered earlier that day from her vegetable garden.

Hard work’s good for you, she’d say. But so was putting your feet up when you were tired.  She practiced both with equal dedication.

When everybody else had gone home and the street lights started to blink on when the sun sank behind the church steeple, it would just be the two of us left on her porch. Sometimes she’d tell me stories. More often, she’d just ask me questions and let me talk. About whatever I wanted. For as long as I wanted.

And she would listen. To me. It was our time.

We shared other secrets, too, just between the two of us. One of them was Nana’s other garden. It fascinated me considerably more than the one with rows of pole beans, flowering squash and itchy okra. My mother called it a rock garden and said she thought it was ugly, country and a waste of time.  

But Nana only told me the magic of what made it so special.

“It’s my Ebenezer Garden,” she whispered. “It’s holy ground.”

For the longest time, I never knew what she meant by that. But I understood if that circle of assorted rocks was special to her then it was, for dadgum sure, special to me too. And if it was important enough to Nana for her sit on the ground and keep all the weeds from hiding the rocks she’d collected from her annual trips to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and to the Great Smokey Mountains, then I would help her take care of it too.

“That one’s for Mr. Ross,” she’d say, plucking away the stray clover and sprigs of grass shooting up near the giant cauliflower-sized cluster of pinkish white quartz crystals. “I wish you had been able to get to know him. He would have been so proud of you…”

Then she would go on for a while talking about the gentle man she had loved and toiled alongside for so many years. The state senator. The newspaper publisher and editor. The man several decades her senior who had first noticed her as the town’s new school mistress when she would walk past the newspaper on her way to and from the boarding house. The town leader she always referred to as Mr. Ross, all through their formal courtship and even throughout their marriage. My grandfather. The one I only know from tiny, yellowing, black-and-white photographs and hand-tinted portraits. The dapper, cane-tapping, straw boater-doffing gentleman, who after putting his beloved Smith County Reformer to bed late one Wednesday evening -- just a few months shy of my arrival into this world – kissed his bride and headed out the printshop door. Nana says she still remembers listening to him whistling as he walked the half block up the sidewalk from The Reformer office to check the day’s mail and to make sure the postmaster got the hot-off-the-press papers distributed to everyone’s box for early morning delivery. But, when Mr. Ross didn’t come back after what seemed to be an inordinately long time, Nana said she went looking for him.

She found her love lying on the floor of the tiny post office lobby. An aneurism.

“You never knew him but he already loved you anyway,” she’d say. “You’re so much like him. You’re going to grow up to be like him, I can tell.”

Nana told me Mr. Ross had given her the quartz cluster on their last trip to Hot Springs. In 1956. The summer before I was born in late October. After he died, she added the sparkling gem to her little circle of rocks just past the fig tree near the back steps of the house they’d made into a home. It joined three other stones already in their own special places. A smooth river rock, about the size of a man’s hand, was for Little Jim. It was rescued from the Little Pigeon River that ran through the Smokey Mountains near Gatlinburg. Little Jim, her precious baby boy, had died from scarlet fever when he was just a toddler. The other two were for her momma and her daddy. They died too early, she said.

“Here I raise my ebenezer,” she’d sing-song quietly to herself as she preened her treasures. “Here by Thy great help I’ve come…”

It was pure worship. Total praise. Unabashed, unapologetic and unequalled by anything I’ve ever experienced in any grand and glorious sanctuary or cathedral.

                                                                                                     ---

I was married and had a family of my own when Nana died. John, Jay and I lived in Jackson where it was now my turn, as a wet-behind-the-ears reporter, to help put out the state’s daily newspaper – just like my grandfather had done before me and just like Nana predicted would happen when I grew up. Visits to her house in Raleigh remained special weekend treats for me and mine. It was still my happy place. My escape from the world. Nana loved on my own baby Jay so hard and so well I think she was trying to make up for lost time she never had with her Little Jim. I always felt special when I walked through her front door and forever knew I was well-loved whenever the screen door would slam behind me on my way back to my real life. She would stand at the end of the driveway waving goodbye to us long after our car’s taillights had disappeared from view.

It was almost 30 years ago when Nana slipped out of my life -- after she was well into her 90s, after dementia had begun to steal her wit and recollections and, most precipitously, after being blindsided by a car as she jaywalked across the two-lane street from her house to the Raleigh Baptist Church for Sunday night services. Her unexpected departure produced the first real and, to this day, the worst heartbreak I have known.

On the day we had to say our last goodbyes, I almost made it through her funeral without falling apart. I kept reminding myself of all the good times. Of all the secrets. And stories. And fun.

I held it together, at least, until the organist started playing her two favorite hymns.

“I come to the garden alone
While the dew is still on the roses
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses
And He walks with me
And He talks with me
And He tells me I am His own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.”

My face washed with tears and I held with all my might to the hands of my sweet Jay and John.

“Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount, I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of Thy redeeming love.

Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home."

When Nana had truly – and safely -- arrived at home to celebrate her reunion with Jesus, Mr. Ross and Little Jim, we buried her sweet body in the family plot, nestled between her loved ones in the shade of a sprawling hot pink crepe myrtle tree she had planted there 40 years earlier. In the surreal days after Nana’s departure, my mother and her sister Jimmie started the ritual of going through the house packing up things they wanted, bickering about who was getting what and who wasn’t. They boxed up other belongings, the stuff they really didn’t care about or have room for in their own homes, for Nana’s surviving sisters and other relatives. My cousin Pam got the baby grand piano. Aunt Audrey took the spinning wheel she’d always coveted. Mom claimed the Americana punch bowl and matching cups purchased way back in 1954 for her wedding reception. The only things I asked for were a little wood-handled frying pan Nana would always use to prepare her famous scrambled eggs and a leather-bound set of fairy tale books she would read to me when I was little. And, a pair of my grandfather’s wire-rimmed glasses.

While everyone else clamored around unloading the closets, cupboards and hope chests packed with the valuables Nana had collected throughout her nine decades-long storied lifetime, I went outside to escape the chaos. By myself. Behind the house, just past the fig tree by the back steps.

To the Ebenezer Garden.

Humming Southern Baptist hymn standards as I dug into Nana’s now neglected altar, I pried away the dirt from the giant quartz cluster and wrapped the blessed relic in a floursack dishtowel I’d lifted from the kitchen. I retrieved the river rock and tucked it into my tote bag as well. I sat there for the longest time, letting her stories seep back into my soul just as the damp dirt melded into my jeans. I smoothed out the soil I had disrupted in my excavations. Then, I cleaned away the rotting leaves and sticks that had accumulated during Nana’s extended stay in the hospital and nursing home following the car accident.

It was mindless work. But eternally worthwhile.

In the midst of my cleanup, I fortuitously found one final gift Nana had left behind for me. I spied, almost hidden by one of the last clumps of pine straw to be brushed aside, a shiny white and emerald green chunk of glass that had been planted right next to Mr. Ross. I didn’t remember seeing it before. Curious, I dropped back to my knees and started scraping away the debris. When I dug it up, I discovered resting underneath in the dirt a folded silver envelope made from a crumpled piece of tin foil. I unfolded the makeshift package.

It contained a handwritten note from Nana. On three-hole notebook paper. She said she had found “this pretty” on her last trip to Hot Springs -- the one my mother and I had taken her and her sisters Mellie, Beulah and Bea on a few summers earlier just after I’d earned my bachelor’s degree in journalism. Nana had added this special rock to her garden, just for me.  Because it matched my “pretty, green eyes,” she said. Because they “sparkle just like Mr. Ross’s,” she said.

“And because I will always love you,” she said. “But I won’t always be around to tell you how much.”

                                                                                 ###

​Fat

​    “But I’ll tell you this now, mama’s words to me was the first stitch on a garment that I would wear for the rest of my born days. And once

that stitch got to running, it kept going more and more off seam. I let

her words take up housekeeping inside of me.

     “They inside of me now. But I don’t want them to be.”
                                                                         

                                                       Sarah Creamer from One Good Mama Bone by Bren McClain

I bent down to give my mother a hug. She and my father were crossways over something again which meant she had shut down. Again. Still in her bed, back turned to the world with no indication of rising, even though it was well past time for me to leave for school. No breakfast for me, again, but thankfully our maid Ruby had shown up for work just in time to take care of my little brother so I could leave.

I had a six-weeks test in geography that day. A book report and chapter spelling test too. It was a big day and I couldn’t miss or be late.

“Love you. Have a good day,” I said as Mom rolled over slightly, halfheartedly reaching up to return my embrace. I kissed her on the cheek and she partways smiled. But when her hands made contact with my hug, she recoiled.

“Eeww. You’re so soft and squishy. No wonder nobody wants to touch you,” she snarled, pulling back from me like I was something nasty. Repulsive. The right side of her upper lip curled before she rolled back away from me, shuddering more than a little from our brief contact. 

“There’s nobody that’ll ever want to hug you. You’ll never get a boyfriend. Do you know how fat you really are? Cover up those arms. Nobody will ever love that. Nobody’s ever going to want you if you’re so fat.”

No words. Not one.

My cheeks flamed hot at the same time it felt like ice water was pouring off the top of my head, running down over my gross, squishy, fat arms all the way to my stupid ugly feet and fat ankles.

Trying to catch my breath and shake off the paralyzing chill, I went soundless to my room, pulled a white sweater on over my favorite sleeveless red plaid cotton dress, grabbed my stack of third-grade books and hurried out the carport door. Mom was yelling for me to come back. She was sorry, she said. 

“I didn’t mean to say that,” she yelled.

I felt like I was going to throw up. My stomach was empty but it felt like lava was boiling inside. I needed to go to the bathroom but there wasn’t time. I’d be late. And, I couldn’t be late. It was a big day. More than anything, though, I wanted to disappear. Forever.

“What’s your problem this morning? One more minute and you’d been walking,” my father barked, jerking his shiny black Cadillac into reverse and blowing gravel as he spun out of the driveway. Not waiting for my answer, he turned up the radio and I stared out the side window. “Wouldn’t have killed you come to think of it. It’s not like the rest of us don’t have anything to do but sit around and wait on little Miss Chubbette.”

That afternoon, mom was still cloistered back in her bedroom when I got home from school. I stuck my head into her room to see if she was sleeping.  She was crying.

“I didn’t mean to say that,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

I told her everything was okay and not to worry about me. I was fine. I had homework to do. She rolled back over and pretended to sleep. I didn’t tell her I had made an A on both tests – and my book report too.

That night for supper, sweet Ruby had fried up a platter of chicken and fixed mashed potatoes and fruit cocktail Jello salad. There was a big bowl of baby green butter beans. She also made a pile of golden brown biscuits from scratch too. Ruby knew that was my favorite meal and even though she didn’t say anything to me about it, I knew deep down she’d fixed it because of what had happened that morning. I loved Ruby. She gave me a great big hug when I went over to the stove to thank her. She didn’t shudder or anything. Just held me real tight and told me she loved her baby girl.

After everyone sat down at the dining table, but before the blessing, my mother handed me a little saucer plate containing a baked, skinless chicken thigh. And a slice of tomato. There was one small teaspoon of butter beans.

“This one’s for you. You can’t eat what we’re having,” she said, not even looking at me as she put a mound of buttered potatoes onto my baby brother’s plate and picked out a juicy chicken breast for herself. “Remember what we talked about.”

Dad sliced into the two crusty, golden biscuits on his plate and wedged a heaping tablespoon of strawberry preserves into each one. He smirked, looking sideways at my plate.

I never went sleeveless again. Ever.

                                                                                   # # #

Papaw

​Everyone had gone home. Gathered up all their purses, tote bags, pillows and coats along with a clear plastic sack we had overstuffed with the plaid flannel sleep pants, socks and long-sleeved thermal knit shirt Papaw was wearing when they brought him here to hospice two days earlier in the ambulance. Joy and Gary hugged on each other, the first to walk away. Anna let a quiet, guttural moan escape when she kissed her sweetheart on the cheek, then patted his arm and sobbed silently as she followed Suzy and Ronnie out the door. My John was the last to leave. The eldest of Mitchell’s three boys and one girl. John bent over the hospital bed to rest his hand on his dad’s chest, clearly not wanting to say goodbye. Until he finally did, clearing his throat and blinking back emotions as he went.

I closed the door behind them.

It was just me. And him. In the almost dark room at the end of the hall. I told everybody I’d stay until the funeral home could come to collect his body. His tired, wasted-away, precious body. Papaw always hated to be alone. Even for a few minutes. So I just couldn’t leave him all by himself in that dark room at the end of the hall.

I was also selfish in wanting to stay behind. In that shadowed room, in that absolutely quiet void, it was just us. I held his hand and washed my cheeks with cold salty tears pouring down both sides of my face. I wasn’t sobbing with grief or even feeling any kind of shattering pain. Instead, I was simply thankful. So blessedly loved. I sat there – amazed at how someone who had been such a big part of us all for so long, suddenly was not.

He was right beside me. Yet, he wasn’t.

I fixed on the hands of the man who had become the only real father I’d ever known. Paper thin skin. Bruised, scratched, wrinkled. Still. Cold. Tired. His long fingers fit perfectly around my hand when I slipped it underneath his palm. Covering me. Protecting me. In the silence, I told him how much I loved him and thanked him for loving me even more. I smiled remembering how utterly happy he had been to hold his first great-grandchild just a few weeks before. Our little Robin, who had stretched away from my son’s embrace to wrap her tiny arms around Papaw’s neck.  I could see him napping in his recliner and the twinkle in his eyes that always showed up whenever he’d interrupt dinner conversation to tell us – again and again and again – about the day he packed his suitcase and waited on the side of Highway 61 for the bus to take him to Memphis to join the Marines to go whip Hitler or when he would re-live the details from a long-ago trip with Anna, Uncle John and Maxine to see the Rebels play LSU in the middle of a pouring rainstorm. I remembered his huge bear hugs and how – on the third day every time we’d visit the family in Clarksdale -- he would get up early, go fill up our car with gas and turn it facing homeward out his driveway. I could hear the made-up songs he would sing – off-key – to every one of the grandchildren when they were little and the sweet prayers he lifted up so faithfully and so humbly for his family, calling each one of us by name, as he talked to his friend Jesus to ask Him to take care of us and protect us.

This man -- the one who worked hard all his life and had reared well my husband and the three siblings who had become my real family. This man -- who was good and godly and kind -- was the only father who had ever given to me the love I’d watched my friends receive from their dads. This sweet man made my lost little girl dreams come true. The warm hugs and easy smiles. The fatherly advice whenever requested. The steadfast encouragement. The unconditional acceptance. The palpable love. Mitchell was the one who gave all those good gifts to me long after I stopped being a little girl and way past when I thought, mistakenly, I needed those elusive things from a father.

But now, he was gone. And yet he wasn’t.

FINITE

I believe most of us, when we were considerably younger than we are today, blithely assumed the future to be unlimited. Endless. There was always going to be time. For whatever. Or whomever. Countless years and months and weeks and days to do what we wanted or to accomplish whatever was set aside for us to do. It mattered little if we wasted time or procrastinated or failed to take advantage of opportunities when they knocked on our door. There would always be another ship or two or three to come in. Another career opportunity. Another weekend to venture to wherever we wanted. Another summer vacation to explore the farthest corners of our imagination. Another chance to get it right, to reinvent ourselves, to try something new.

Always another. Infinitely more. Perpetual opportunity. For our younger selves, the greater portion lay ahead rather than behind us.

Now. Not so much.                               

I am sixty-one. While that supposedly wizened age doesn’t dictate I plant one foot in my grave, it does insist I acknowledge I am no longer a one-legged spring chicken.

At this point in my life, I am growing comfortably aware of the fallacy of perpetuity. It is not that the good times are all gone for me or that I am now sliding down a slippery slope to oblivion. Rather, today I am embracing a newfound reality in which there are, for me, a limited number of future Christmases, spring vacations, Easter brunches and off-season trips to the beach with my girlfriends. There are just so many Thanksgiving turkeys to roast and snaggle-toothed Jack-o-lantern pumpkins to create. I acknowledge Ole Miss has a shrinking allotment of tailgating seasons in which to get its act together and pull off that championship coup. There are only a certain number of birthday celebrations to enjoy with family and friends. Only a set amount of time to accomplish the things I have dreamed of doing, going to places I have wanted to see and immersing myself into experiences about which my childhood dreams were invented.

Instead of devolving into a depressing pronouncement, however, this self-realization for me is empowering.

I have always been deadline-driven. I work better under pressure. I need timetables and scorecards and measuring sticks. I have difficulty without boundaries or foul lines. Fences make me secure.

I am liking this newfound urgency.

Once I internalized the reality that my tomorrows are finite, it has become much easier to prioritize what – and who – is most important and deserving of my time, my attention and my investment. I can quickly sort through what retains value to me and what has already served its purpose. With perspective, I received more clarity into what I want to do, who I want to love and where I want to be.

I can answer the question, “If not now, when?”

At this juncture, I am choosing not to wait until circumstances improve, obstacles dissolve and situations evolve. I am not delaying until I am thinner, wealthier or more rested. Tomorrow or next month or next year are no longer preferable to today. The journey, not the destination, is bliss. I am learning to banish from my vocabulary the incomplete prepositional phrases of fixing to __ , planning to __ , hoping to  __ and going to __. Instead, I now write my truth in present tense.

If I want to do something, I’m doing it. If I don’t, I am pretty likely to not. I say no to what I do not desire and yes to what I do. I am willing to risk failure in exchange for the sheer possibility of success or at least the experience of running toward that goal. I rest when I am tired, play when work is done, eat when I am hungry, cry when I am sad and smile when I am not.

When I wake up in the morning, I have another window to open. I realize the day is not long enough to do it all, but it is sufficient to do some thing and to love some one.

And such, I now know, is infinitely enough.

​​Be Good

​"Be good."

I hate those words. Hate them. They’ve rattled around as a warning in my head for as long as I can remember. As a child, every time I would start to leave my house or step out of the car to go somewhere, they were always the parting admonition from my mother. “Be good.” I don’t think I thought about it so much then, but later realized my truth. Those two words were really more of a threat than a casual bid adieu.

"Be good or you’ll be in in trouble."

Be good. Don’t be too loud or rambunctious or have too much fun or do anything that might cause a problem or give anybody a reason to think bad about the family. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Behave yourself. Be good. Don’t be like those other kids and misbehave or act up. Be good. Be what I want you to be. 

Be good so I will love you.

So I was always good. I didn’t get in trouble. I obeyed all the rules and did what I was supposed to do. And didn’t do what I wasn’t supposed to. I stayed inside the box and never colored outside the lines. I didn’t talk in class. Or church. I didn’t act up. Or out. I made all A’s. Did my homework. Did better than everybody else. I wouldn’t do anything to cause anybody to say anything bad about me or my family. I tried to be whatever they wanted me to be.   

I was good so I would be loved, or so I hoped. So I would not be in trouble -- whatever I imagined that fate worse than death would be.

I was the good girl.

I didn’t take any chances. I didn’t do anything to make anyone mad. I got the gold stars and the blue ribbons and the honor roll pins. I was the teacher’s pet. I blew the curve. My picture was the best one in the art contest. My book reports and posters were the ones the teachers praised. I got more Girl Scout badges than anyone else in my troop and I was the only one to earn the rank of Queen Regent in Service at the G.A. coronation pageant at church.

I didn’t get in trouble. I kept the peace.

I never told anybody that anything was wrong. I didn’t talk about what happened at home. I didn’t tell my mother about my father. He said I’d be in trouble if I did. I didn’t breathe a word to anybody about what he did. And I didn’t let him know what my mother said when she talked to me about all the terrible things she’d found out about him. She told me to be good and not let anybody know. Ever. I’d be in trouble if I did. So I kept her secrets. And his.

I was good.

WORDS

I fell in love with the sights and sounds and smells of words as a pudgy, freckle-faced schoolgirl who had no desire to spend her summer vacation playing outside. Safely cloistered in the musky, mahogany-paneled basement of the stately and storied Lauren Rogers Library and Museum, I discovered my best friends. My world.

Whenever I could persuade my mother to drive me downtown and leave me for the day, I’d make my nest in a window seat cushioned by a well-worn, crackled red leather box pillow. My enclave was hidden in the back corner of the seldom used children’s books section, tucked underneath a giant wooden staircase leading up to the main museum rooms. From my perch, I could hear the muffled voices of the gossipy museum matrons and the snooty old librarian as they walked back and forth across the squeaky floors upstairs. They rarely came down to bother me and I liked that just fine. I was happily invisible in my space. Huge azalea bushes blocked most of my window’s view so that I’d have to lie almost on my back to see the sky peeking through the old oak trees outside and feel the warmth of dappled sunrays fall on my cheeks. On rainy afternoons, trickles of raindrops would dribble down the wavy glass panes and chart mysterious and mindful courses of their own, sometimes one joining with another to speed up their descent. Those glistening drops were about the only thing that ever managed to distract me from the life-altering treasures waiting inside the yellow paged books I’d pile up all around me like a fortress.

In that dark room, filled with a perfect perfume combination of mildew, wood wax and old leather, I discovered worlds far different from places anyone I knew could dare imagine. Those sky-high stacks of shelves were filled with beautiful and amazing things. And people. And they were all mine. My secrets. For hours and hours and hours.

The Oz books, two whole rows of them, flew me to marvelously unfamiliar lands like Rash and Kimbaloo filled with cackling witches, the woggle-bug, Kabump the elegant elephant, a talking chicken, Prince Pompadore of Pumperdink, evil gnome kings and beautiful princesses. I made steadfast friends with Sir Hokus of Pokes, Dorothy and Ozma, Zeb and Tik-Tok, Ev, Toto and Eureka. There was so much more than the tin man and the scarecrow and the lion. So much.

In another towering wooden bookcase, I discovered stories and more adventures where I glimpsed who I really was deep down inside and daydreamed of what I wanted to become when I grew up. The crusading heart of Joan of Arc left me vowing to one day be selflessly burned at the stake for all the people and things I held dear to my thumping eight-year-old heart. I became a curly blonde-haired Heidi who gathered bright blue and yellow wildflowers to put on the dinner tray for my sweet uncle when I served him crusty brown bread and the soft, white cheese I made from my pet goat’s milk. I adored the snow-capped Alps with their lush green valleys and trickling streams filled with melting ice -- and promised myself I’d someday live contentedly in a gingerbread chalet there. As Pocahontas, I fearlessly padded in my soft deerskin moccasins through the dark forests around Jamestown, my dark hair now long and straight and shiny. I was brave and scared of nothing.

But then, words broke my heart.

The Yearling contained mean sentences that made me cry. It hurt so bad when Jody shot Flag I thought I’d never be able to breathe the same way again. My world crashed. And I learned life, regardless of how much I wished and prayed and wanted it to be, was not always going to be fair. 

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Sticks and Stones