Things I Learned in Sunday School
Somebody came to the blog a while back having googled my name. This is not all that uncommon, but since I hadn't done a 'vanity search' on FFF or on my name (FF) in a long time, I wondered what I might find in the shadowy nooks of the web. And sure enough, looky here: a short story (true personal tale) I sent in over a year ago to an online e-zine: The DeadMule School of Southern Literature. Prestigious name, eh? I never got word it was online. Wouldn't have known, except for this serendipitous vanity search.
So, as fate has dumped this little autobiographical bit (called Child Evangelism) in my lap in this fortuitous way, I thought I'd pass it along. If you chose to read this 'creative non-fiction', you hear the author's voice in your head sounding in its southern-ness not entirely unlike that of the young Forest Gump--though I owned that voice long before Mr. Hanks impersonated it.
Also, with a submission to Dead Mule, a declaration of the author's "southern-ness" was required. You can read that, too, if'n your'a mind ta. I pasted it below. Read more>>
My first memories are southern smells: of wisteria and zoysia grass and summer ozone lifting from warm sidewalks after a storm. On those sultry days the drone of cicadas rose and fell. The screened-in porch glider squeaked back and forth and I drifted off to sleep, my head in momma’s lap and feet in grammaw's. We went barefoot from March to November and pretty well lived in our bathing suits in Birmingham, the Magic City. We caught lightning bugs in mayonnaise jars months before they show up here in the "south" of Virginia. Every summer night, we played outside until supper was ready–-the evening meal: something fried with ketchup as one of the vegetables–-then went back out 'til way past dark, hiding and seeking, peeing our pants with the excitement of summer nights. My internal rhythms will always be southern, and for that, I am thankful, even though some of the external markers of my heritage have faded.
I lost my drawl when I went to college (Auburn) and mixed with a more cosmopolitan crowd. I moved from the deepest south because–-I have to confess–-I couldn't stand the heat, so I got out of the kitchen. After grad school we moved to the mountains of southwest Virginia where we have real winters and cool summers and not so many biggie-sized mosquitoes. Now, I think of myself primarily as "mountain southern" because my preference is for higher and cooler places, and for maybe not quite so many rank and file pine trees that grow in rows acre after acre–-the 'new industrial forest-as-commodity disturbs me. But I miss the sweetgum and winter-blooming wildflowers. Sometimes I even long to smell the Kudzu, and this is a sure sign I've not lost my southern upbringing.
The house we live in now (in rural southwest Virginia) had two outhouses (his and hers, I suppose) the first time we saw it. We have a porch dog and a porch cat. In the corner of the county where we live (there's a single traffic light in the entire county) there are six people per square mile and the pace of life is slow–-a very familiar cadence for a boy who still carries Alabama in his bones. When you pass a stranger on the country roads in their 4WD truck or Subaru (the only choices with our winters), both you and they lift one or two fingers off the steering wheel in a neighborly wave. It's the way things are done in the south.
Comments
Ahhhh, a good read for first thing in the morning!
Posted by: kenju | October 24, 2005 9:02 AM
Southern stories related...
Memories from Grandma:
We used to spend the summers with my grandmother, and she would send me down into the pastures to herd the cows back to the barn to be milked. They were always down around the creek, and the creek was a child's favorite place to play. So, I'd get into the creek for a while. The cows were fat and lazy and they would slowly amble back to the barn - they knew where they were going. And I was fat and lazy and I'd amble right along behind them. Momma used to whip me when she knew I'd been in the creek. I don't know how she knew cause I'd hike my skirts up to my neck, but somehow she knew. Of course, next day I'd go down and do the same thing again. That's when I fell in love with Floyd county.
Memories from Grandpa:
Every morning I would go and collect the eggs from the chicken coup. There was a narrow worn path through high weeds leading there. And every morning I would have to meet a mean old rooster that would flog me on my way. Well, one morning I was mad and determined that if I saw that rooster I was going to kill him. Sure enough, here he came after me as I went down the path. Well, I wound up and kicked that rooster as we met and he was dead before he hit the ground.
Memory from grandma on grandpa:
Grandpa lived up the road from grandma's. He had come to see me since we were children. First he had a pony, then he got a horse, and then he got a car. And that was good.
Posted by: Jim | October 24, 2005 10:24 AM
Back in the 60's, when I was growing up in the county next to yours, THAT was the South too. Sometime after I left, while I wasn't looking, it became the Mid-Atlantic.
Huh! Can't prove that by me!
Posted by: M. Lawless | October 24, 2005 4:28 PM
A trip back to childhood will lift spirits, and set a wistful smile on my face. What a good read before settling in for the night, Fred. Thanks for stirring the memories. Smells were some of my 1st memories, too. Wisteria; roses big as saucers right under my window, smelled like spice; fresh cut grass, cut with a push mower, no noisy engine; rain after a hot summer day, smelling like clouds should; fresh butterbeans and sweet corn, bought from the man with a wagon pulled by a mule, simmering on the stove, along with fried okra...no better in this world; Daddy's white shirts, still warm from the ironing, smelled of starch; a gaggle of neighborhood kids, hot and sweaty, with those little beads of dirt around our necks, playing all day long from one yard to another..going home only for lunch and supper..surrendering to baths and bedtime when my daddy blew my grandaddy's old police whistle..the sweet smell of the air with the attic fan whirring and drawing in the night coolness...what a trip back to southern Mississippi...
Posted by: Anne | October 25, 2005 12:54 AM