Fragments From Floyd

This morning I get a second chance to take the most direct indirect route between home and Rocky Mount. Last night's google route took me the two long legs of the triangle and I was hoping for the hypotenuse. Knowing how famously confusing roads in this ultra-rural part of the Piedmont can be, I left an hour and a half before the event expecting a 45 minute drive. Turned out more like a 75 minute drive, but I still arrived a bit early, and as these things usually do, this coffeehouse reading event started only approximately on time. I was slated to read first. Gulp.

I relied once more on the Muses of Road Hum, those meditative ladies who put things into my head while I'm driving someplace where I have to have my act together by the end of the journey. Those gossamer divas stitch the concepts, paragraphs and themes together for me while my corpus is involved in following the pitch and turn of the road, and voila! By the time I reach my biology class or physical therapy patient or book reading, I have a plan, an outline, a bolt of golden cloth. But last night, with all the wrong turns and angst of being both lost and late, those cowardly muses dared not intrude on my funk. I arrived in Rocky Mount without an opening tactic. All I gleaned from my drive over was a single silly metaphor: my book was like my dinner last night.

Thirty-two bean soup. Nutritious, my body somehow knows without being able to divine exactly which nutrients are working in which cells, tissues or organs. It satisfies a basic need. Flavorful. And it is not the taste of lentil, red, white or October beans I taste, not any one single bean that defines what this soup is like. It is the medley of all the beans and ingredients taken together that create the rich sensation of flavor that comes from each bite. Texture. The fact that some beans feel large in the mouth, some are slightly crunchy, and others have a resilience that is almost meaty--these characteristics, too, contribute to the experience. (Yes, I am going somewhere with this I think. Just let me keep driving here.)

Slow Road Home is like a 32-bean soup, the muses told me, and then vanished somewhere along Ferrum Mountain road and I chewed on this small morsel until I found my way. There are 108 beans in SRH. Small wonder it is hard for me to tell someone who asks what the book is like, what it is about, what flavor they should expect from reading it. And herein, the risk of a browser picking up the book from a shelf, sampling a few bites, and getting the beans they like least. With such a variety of ingredients, it takes more than a small, random sampling to know what the book tastes like. And when I have to decide which THREE pieces to read in any given setting, I know when I start that my selections will not represent the whole any more than picking out three of the 32 beans last night would have given me the taste of the soup. If a reader wants the full experience of flavor, texture and nutrition from Slow Road, well, they'll just have to take it home and consume it. And by the time I had milked this metaphor dry, I had fumbled my way to the Hungry Vibe Coffee House. Coffee houses, I remembered too late, are dangerous place to read one's work if you hope to have each word heard. Dangerous.

Out of the corner of my eye, in the middle of delivering one sampled bean, in walks blogger buddy Sean Pecor from nearby Boones Mill. I am reading the piece called Insect Epistemology about Monarch butterflies and just getting to the meat of the piece, nuancing every word with great expression, building to the crux of the piece when suddenly, I can't hear my own voice. I know the audience is faring no better. Mr. Pecor has ordered a Cappuccino. WHRRRR FRZZZZZ WHRRRRR . . .born with Heaven in their wiring and in their wings. Thank you very much.

And so it goes. Franklin County bookfest in Rocky Mount today. Y'all come.