Christmases and Cars

    Many years have passed since the days of Mother and Daddy with eight kids living on a tobacco farm in North Carolina, and me waiting for Santa to come down the chimney. How fast time flies. With Christmas approaching, I glance in the rear-view mirror in wonderment. One day I am whizzing down Wendover in my '74 Camaro, with the eight-track tape player blaring Linda Ronstadt's Simple Dreams, and the next, I am signing up for Medicare.

    

    Where did the time go? Lost somewhere in the motions of living, I guess, but I do have a multitude of memories to draw from, especially when it comes to Christmas, and in at least one of those recollections, the aforementioned copper-toned Camaro played a starring role.

Guitar Glory

     After traveling down some back roads and winding through the hills of Virginia, we began climbing a mountain, leaning into one hairpin turn after another. Finally, we arrived in the town of Monterey, only to drive at an even slower pace poking through a street festival already in progress.

    We squeezed around bumper-to-bumper SUVs and festival-goers on foot fingering funnel cakes and puffs of cotton candy. Then we eased away from the noise of crowds and mufflers to find The Highland Center and a grateful plenty of free parking right in front of the building.

Dirt daubers and all

     My friend Bill (not his real name) is 80 years old and a deacon at our church. He is tall and thin but not as tall as he used to be, because a few months ago, he experienced some back problems and now stoops over when he walks. More than once, he has given me a bag of peas he not only picked from his garden but shelled as well. 

    On Sunday mornings at church, Bill hands me a program and sometimes slips me a CD or cassette tape to take home and listen to. Over the years he has broadened my listening pleasure to include oldies like Jim and Jessie, The Louvin Brothers, Jimmy Martin, Reno and Smiley, an all-instrumental by Don Reno, and other gems from long ago.

The Mary Poppins Nightmare

    This story is about my husband and to somewhat protect his identity, I am referring to him by his childhood nickname. When he was growing up, everyone called him Barry; some of his cousins still call him that. 

    Barry loves to tell stories as much as I enjoy writing and every once in a while, this story resurfaces to be told yet again. The following account is how he remembers it from years ago and how it all went down:

Wound Up

    Early one Saturday morning my husband rushed through the front door, into the kitchen and said he needed me to help him with a snake.

    Wait a minute. I set my cup on the counter.

    "You need me to do what?"

Japanese pie, anyone?

    When we lived on the farm in Gibsonville, we had Father's Day dinners out in the yard. Mother's brothers and sisters would come -- my uncles Clinton and Marvin, aunts Effie, Opal, Annie and Lucy and many of their children, too. Since there were eight of us kids, most of the cousins could find someone their age to pal around with. 

    My maternal grandfather and guest of honor, Grandpa Doss, lived in a small mobile home next to our house and Mother put the dinners together for him. The ones arriving came carrying a favorite dish or two. Bowls of potato salad and green beans, homemade biscuits and deviled eggs were spread across the tables outside. I remember white tablecloths which were probably bed sheets, for I doubt that my mother ever owned a fancy table covering of any kind.

A meditation about country life

    "In cities, no one is quiet but many are lonely. In the country, people are quiet but few as lonely." -- Geoffrey F. Fisher 

    That's because a cow's moo in the distance, or the hum of a neighbor's tractor, can often be as comforting as another's voice.

For Goodness Snakes!

 

    On an Independence Day, I sat down on the pew of a small country church. A few minutes into the service, a tall grey-haired man stepped deliberately up to the microphone. Cupping a harmonica with his aged hands, he played patriotic fare in celebration of the holiday. 

    The familiar sound filling the sanctuary carried me back to my childhood to serenades of my daddy's French harp, as he used to call it. Even though I had never met the grey-haired man named Henry, I endeared him right then and there.

A Bucket and a Nail

I heard about a simple man

    on my mother's family tree

A faded photo black and white

    proves the authenticity

He stands so tall in tattered clothes

    from his arm there hangs a pail

Inside it only emptiness

    and a solitary nail

    Every family has its weird characters and my step-great-uncle might be one of the weirdest. His first and middle names are Christopher Columbus, and with such an impressive designation, he really should have gone places in life, but unlike his presumed namesake, my ancestral Christopher Columbus came nowhere close to voyaging the ocean or discovering a new territory. This Columbus mostly hoofed it on foot.

Fifty Cents

    My mother's younger brother, Clinton, visited us often when we lived on the farm in Gibsonville, and that is why he claims more than a page in my scrapbook of childhood memories. Another reason is that sometimes before he left to go home, he gave me 50 cents.

     A framed picture of him used to hang on our living room wall, right next to one of Jesus, and if that is not a place of honor, I don't know what is. A friend of our family once stood gazing at Uncle Clinton's 8x10 and said he looked like a movie star. 

French Stew

    In childhood and much of my adult life, I lived in the shadows of shyness. Whether an innate personality trait or an offshoot of my retreat into a dark closet when Mother died, I cannot say, but the affliction nearly suffocated me in social and classroom settings. 

    The inner awkwardness was compounded by the outer visible response of my face turning beet red, a symptom known as blushing and I hated it. I lived in dread of the next time my face would let me down. Later in life I would overcome some of my shyness and eventually outgrow the turning-red syndrome, but only after some uncomfortable occurrences.

Momentarily Detained

     My sister Phyllis and I used to pack our suitcases and head to the beach for the weekend. Those were the days before husbands and babies, and even boyfriends. At the beach we lingered over hamburgers or pancakes at Mammy's Kitchen, baked in the sun with no thought of our skin one day being sixty years old, and walked for hours to the pier and back, sidestepping tides and picking up shells.

    Most of those memories are buried underneath a tall stack of years, but one trip peaks over the top, not because of something that happened at the beach, but because of the nerve-racking start.

On Pins and Needles

     One summer during my high school years, Aunt Bernice offered me a job in her drapery shop. She had been a dressmaker until her work evolved into more lucrative window treatments. Then she bought the house next door to hers and converted it into a workshop/office. She and several employees covered fancy cornice boards and sewed custom drapes for those who could afford such luxuries.

    I accepted my kindhearted aunt's offer. Considering that years later the art of sewing would, in a sense, claim my soul, I could not have been more suited to the job that had fallen out of the blue.

    Aunt Bernice paid me a dollar an hour, a shocking wage compared to today's standards, but this was the late 1960s, and to a ragamuffin like me, forty dollars in cash at the end of a forty-hour week looked like a gold mine.

Mad About Hats

    In my late teens/early twenties, I lived for a couple of years with my older sister Phyllis in an apartment in Greensboro. Both of us worked at jobs and when we had a few extra dollars in our purses, we did what sisters do -- we went shopping.

    The particulars of those trips are lost in the sunsets of our lives, but one of our escapades managed to withstand the rigors of passing years. The reason it stands out is that my quiet unassuming proper sister and I sort of caused a scene in a department store. 

Tissue Issue

        When my husband's mother passed away several years ago, he and his sister were still working at jobs and their time limited. I had already retired, so I took on the duty of emptying his mom's kitchen cabinets, dresser drawers, closets and anything else that needed to be emptied.

        I spent several days alone in my mother-in-law's house, mostly in her bedroom, sifting through everything from nightgowns to slips to pantyhose to make-up and jewelry. From the closet I pulled out familiar sweaters, jackets, trousers, and like-new dresses. As I continued performing this tearful task, a pattern began to emerge.

Hung up

     When we lived in Oak Ridge many years ago, a tree in our yard fell down but not all the way. It wedged into another tree and needed coaxing to the ground. My husband sought some assistance in making that happen, so he called my brother to come to the rescue. After all, who else would you call on to orchestrate a delicate procedure other than levelheaded never-take-chances C. Long? 

    He arrived on the scene in ghostbuster eagerness to tackle whatever tree, or monster, needed tackling. And so they began. Initially he and Barry did what great minds always do when strategizing the fate of a tree -- they huddled in the yard, looked up, down, and around, studied the slope of the land, made predictions and then came up with a Houdini-style plan that involved a rope.

Matchsticks

     When my oldest brother Charles, the firstborn of our family, was a little boy, he went with our parents to visit Daddy's first cousin, Thurman, the brother of James. I only mention James because he used to come see us and I remember him, but I have no recollection of Thurman.

    They were sons of Uncle Martin, the brother of my paternal Grandmother; more relatives of my past whom I do not remember, which has nothing to do with this story except for explaining the familial trail and letting the reader know that most of these people, although in my ancestry, are figments of my imagination.