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.

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 a shiny fifty-cent piece.

     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 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, my Aunt Bernice offered me a job in her drapery shop. She had been a dressmaker for years 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 landed in my lap.

    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 was 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.

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.