Month: April 2017

Cussing

Cussing was never acceptable in our home. I’ve been whipped for most of the cuss words that I’ve said. That’s not to say that we didn’t hear any cussing living in our community. Between hanging out with Bargain Town, riding the school bus,  and working with Pop, we got our Hollywood prescribed daily dose of obscenities even without a television. Bargain Town cussed at least twice every sentence, and I haven’t met many grown men that could out cuss some of the kids on my school bus, and I’ve worked on construction sites. Pop only cussed when he was angry, excepted when he accused us of not working fast enough, or “asslin'” around, which if it were a word it would probably be a cussword. His cuss words sounded like they tasted bad in his mouth.

There was a season in my life when it seems like we went camping every other weekend. Many times it was an impulse decision. On good days we’d plan ahead and have at least twenty minutes of daylight to set up the tent. But most of the time we planned a camping trip with just enough time to get to the store before it closed at 9:00pm. Once you start planning ahead to camp, you realize how miserable and tedious camping can be and you’ll talk yourself out of it.

Sometimes we, Zach and I, camped with our cousin Anthony. Anthony was about eight years older than me. He usually had a big mangy dog and an even mangier friend that would tag along on our camping expeditions. Without adult supervision, teenagers that cuss tend to use foul language a bit more freely. Anthony was a proficient cusser even around adults, so expletives abounded on the camping trips that he attended. If another cusser was present, usually in the person of the mangy friend, it was a contest to see who could out do the other. The contest would last into the wee hours of the morning.

It was on one of the nights that Anthony, the mangy dog, and the mangy friend, “Swamp Rat”, were camping with us that I had crawled into the tent to go to sleep. I laid there for a long time in the twilight of wakefulness, listening to the cussers compete. When finally the contest was waning and the older boys crawled into the tent, Anthony’s huge dog lay down on my feet and went to sleep. I woke up the next morning to Anthony asking, “Did that dog $#!+ in here?” The dog had broke wind and it smelled like someone had bombed the paper mill. In my hazy half sleep, realizing that the dog was sleeping on my legs now, I said angrily, “He better not have $#!+ on me!”

Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners. Although not a cusser myself, I had been around it all night and in a dazed moment I participated. Anthony, who still knew what he was doing was wrong, was disappointed in me. Perhaps he just let on like he was just to torment me. Either way he made me go out in the woods and repent. I wasn’t mad at him though, I was planning to do that anyway.

Baths & Showers: A lesson in Sharing

We were so good at sharing we had to learn how to enjoy something on our own.

“Y’all better learn how to share!” Mom would say, as if she was introducing a new concept. Zach and I had been sharing all of our lives. We shared a bedroom, and a bed. between snatching the covers and sticking your freezing cold feet on your brother’s back, we understood that sharing was a momentary truce in the constant struggle for the upper hand. Usually we had be admonished to share if one of us had gotten a new toy or item of interest. We were so used to sharing everything that if we ever got the chance to pick out something new, we would go out of our way to find what the other didn’t like so we didn’t have to share. I think that’s why I play guitar. We were so good at sharing we had to learn how to enjoy something on our own.

We even shared the tub and shower. Mom had one of those old claw footed cast iron tubs in which a grown man could bathe fully submerged if he wanted to wait long enough for the water fill. We shared a bath until we couldn’t fit in the tub without touching one another. Which was a sure way to start a fist fight, the last thing Momma wanted to deal with while she was trying to get us clean for bed. And man did we get filthy playing in the woods and cotton field behind our house. I remember more than once mom making me get back in the tub cause I still had “granny beads”,  or dirt in the cracks in my neck.

Once we outgrew the tub, we had to “learn how to share” a shower. I was half grown before I figured out how to regulate the hot water on our single knobbed shower, so I usually conceded the position closest to the nozzle to Zach, who by some wizardry understood this conundrum. At least I trusted that he did. When Zach was feeling particularly spiteful he would tell me that he had “put Ajax” in the shower. I’m not really certain why I was so mortified of Ajax, but I was. I would scream, holler and cry until Mom would come in and ask what was going on. “He put Ajax in here!” I would explain. Zach would feign ignorance which added to Mom’s confusion.

He didn’t always torment me in the shower though, we often played until the hot water ran out. Our house had a peculiarity in the plumbing where if you flushed the commode or ran water while the shower was running, the hot water cut out and left the miserable bather with a blast of freezing cold water. Sometimes I think Mom did this on purpose to speed us up a little bit.

One particular time I remember Zach and I taking a shower and having a rollicking good time singing. We were stomping our feet in a rhythm while Zach sang, “I’m Tom Sawyer” and I would answer “I’m Huckleberry Finn.” We did this at the top of our lungs. It was great fun. We hadn’t learned that music had critics yet. We must have kept it up until we sensed that the hot water was about to run out when all of the sudden Dad burst into the bathroom like a charging elephant, snatched the shower door open and spanked both of us soundly. We were both a bit dumbfounded because usually Dad gave us a warning shot. We learned later that he had been telling us to pipe down since the opening line of our concert.

Now that I have kids of my own I find myself echoing my parents as I try to teach my kids how to play nicely together and share for goodness sake. Although I’m pretty sure they’re having so much fun that they don’t hear me most of the time.

 

The Tinker Suit

We stopped at Smith’s and got some of that orange peanut candy that tastes like rubber.

I was two years old when Brant Douglas Reynolds, my Mom’s dad, died of a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day in 1989. My memories of him are few and a little vague. I remember riding in the back of his 1968 Ford Ranger that rotted to the ground from neglect after his death. I remember him bringing me Oreo cookies. I remember going to the cow sale with him. We stopped at Smith’s and got some of that orange peanut candy that tastes like rubber. I remember going into his work shed and seeing all of his power tools.  I remember his blue tractor. And I remember being at his viewing after he died. “Dan Dan is asleep.” I said to Mom as she held me on her hip so that I could peer into his casket.

Years later as a teenager, I changed the strings on his 1972 Martin D-18. Gram had bought it new for him from Fretted Instruments with the income tax return that year. You’d have thought that you bought him a brand new pickup truck. I could tell that he cared for the guitar because he had looped the strings through the hole in the tuning peg twice before winding it, a step that I always skip because it takes longer and isn’t really necessary, but it looks nice. That extra step said something about the thoroughness of his personality, as I took those old strings off it was almost like he was talking to me. I think he’d be happy to know that I play guitar, but he’d be happier to know that I preach the same Gospel that he and the Apostle Peter preached.

I heard that he had a 1959 Les Paul in the 1960’s. The Holy Grail of guitars. He had to trade it for a car. I’d like to at least see a picture of that guitar. Perhaps it wasn’t a 1959, and it’s better to just remember it that way. I use this story to convince my wife to let me have multiple guitars, I hope it pays off one day.

I don’t know how well he played guitar, or sang. I  don’t remember. I vaguely remember him at church preaching and playing guitar. But you do a lot of sleeping at church when you’re two years old, so these memories are sort of dreamy. He was taken away early in my life and looking back I can see how his absence impacted me. I’m sure things would have been different if he were still alive today, I can’t say that they would be better. Or worse. But they’d be different. 

Rev. Roger Lewis, a close friend to “Tinker” as my grandfather was known, was traveling for Thanksgiving when he heard news of my Tinker’s death. He didn’t have a suit with him and felt terrible about going to the viewing in casual clothes. Til this day, he keeps a suit of dress clothes in his vehicle whenever he is going out of town overnight, just in case of an emergency. He calls it his Tinker Suit. I hope that it doesn’t get much use.

Funerals & Wakes

I come from a long line of religious Birmingham News subscribers. Growing up, I read the comics everyday. My parents worked the crossword puzzle everyday. My grandmother, Nonna, Nola Wells, read the obituaries every day. If she remotely knew someone who had passed, she would call up her sister, Shelby Jean and they would go to the viewing. “Don’t you remember him? He married Mark’s second wife after they split up. He came to the Barbecue one year.” I’m pretty sure on more than one occasion they didn’t know the person at all. I’m also fairly sure no one noticed, and the family wouldn’t have been upset anyway. I went with her a couple of times, but I knew the people that had died.

Funerals and wakes were time honored rituals in the deep south. People used to take the body home for the viewing, that’s what a wake is. But it was more than a viewing, it had all the trappings of a normal family get together, like food, laughter, games, story swapping. And of course the body. You had to have the body. How rude would it be to have a get together celebrating someone’s life and not invite that person? People took it so seriously that they would set up with the dead all night long. How disrespectful would it be to leave Granny in the funeral home all by herself? Most of the time, the wake would just last til way into the morning, that way no one had to stay up by themselves.

One night in about 1968, Nonna and her mother, Granny, Ila Clementine Brasher, had been to a late night wake for Uncle Doss, in Sylacauga, a good fort five minutes from where they lived. Granny was wearing one of those big fur hats that you see ladies wearing in old movies. Wakes were formal affairs. Oddly enough they weren’t even related to Uncle Doss, but that didn’t matter, they knew him. It was late, about three in the morning when they finally got on the road. A police officer pulled them over because it wasn’t often that you saw a couple of  nicely dressed ladies driving through a rough neighborhood at three o’clock in the morning. “Ma’am, is everything ok?” Said the concerned officer. Nonna begin to explain that they were on their way home from a wake when Granny, in her big fur hat, leaned over from the passenger seat to make eye contact with the policeman and said with authority, “Young man, we have been setting up with the dead.” This was all the explanation the police officer needed.