Old Trees

The best part about growing up in a small southern town is that you have just enough of the amenities of modern life without having to give up the things about the country that most folks cherish. It wasn’t like we were living out on the prairie somewhere and going to the general store was something that you only did once every five or six months. At the same time, if I wanted a quiet stroll in the woods or to play down by the train tracks then those things were readily accessible as well.

As teenagers we had our hangouts. We didn’t go to the movies every weekend because Vincent didn’t have a theater. The closest one that we had was about 20 miles away in Sylacauga. A ticket was $1.50 so there were plenty of times that our parents chose that for our entertainment. But when you start hanging out with friends you tend to stick closer to home. The fact that the gasoline is being paid for out of your pocket instead of a weekly allowance might have something to do with that.

But when I think of hanging out in the truest sense of the phrase I really think of where I preferred to spend my alone time. I’ve always been a person that was very comfortable spending time alone. There is something about the silence when no one expects you to be “on” that I’ve always enjoyed. Not that I don’t like being around people. My family is still the most important thing in my life. But ever since I was a child I’ve cherished the solitude that came in being by myself.

One of the places that a kid can seem to find a moment of peace is either in the branches or at the foot of an old tree.

Small town America has no shortage of old trees. As I said, we had a fast food place. We also had a decent video store with no shortage of classic horror (another favorite pastime of mine). But being nestled in the foothills of Appalachia, there were trees everywhere. Some of them were put there by mother nature and some of them were planted by the hands of a human. Many of them were purposely placed next to a building or had the structure designed around it to keep it intact.

We loved our trees back then.

I can think of a couple of my favorites as I sit here. I would have to say that at the top of my list was the giant oak tree that used to be right in front of the high school. It wasn’t old in the way the ancient redwoods are old. But in my teenage mind it was a relic of another time. It had been planted back in the 40s when my grandparents had been students at the same school. As a matter of fact there had been more than one occasion that my grandmother said to me “We planted that tree” when we would drive past the school. That made me think that she had actually dug the hole that the sapling had been placed in. Thinking back now I seriously doubt that was the case.

This was one of those epic trees that you find is just part of the construct that is your life. That tree was always there. When my mom would drop me off at school in the morning I would walk by it and run my hand across it’s trunk. I spent more than a few afternoons sitting beneath it with a book. It was a common target during class pranks. But while you would expect someone to deface it with a can of spray paint or something, we all had too much respect for it. The worst it ever got was a little toilet paper and some shaving cream. 

It was a majestic elder that presided over us throughout our lives. And then the corporate designers came in sometime around 1989. They had been hired by the school board to update our school. They wanted it to look less like a high school from the 1960s...which is the thing I liked most about it...and become a modern center for quality education. According to their blueprints the only way they could make that happen was if they removed the old tree.

We signed petitions. We had parents stand up in school meetings. There were battles the scale of which could not be done justice in a movie with both Morgan Freeman AND Michelle Pfeifer. In the end we won and the construction company redesigned the entire new layout to keep the tree intact.

One year later it was discovered that the tree was diseased and was a risk of falling and killing us. You’d think they would have checked that out first. The tree came down.

You win some...am I right?

Another old tree that I reminisce about sometimes is an old elm tree on my grandfather’s property. It is still there...or at least it was the last time I was there. It was right on the edge of his front yard next to a retaining wall. That meant that you could climb up easily on the yard side and then make your way over to the other side and find yourself easily twenty feet in the air. That made for a lot of fun for a kid that had a death wish and wanted to hurl himself off a branch and risk breaking an ankle when he lands. I know this because it is something that I did plenty of times.

This memory is also the reason that I would never allow my kids to play around this tree.

It’s really hard when you have kids that want to climb everything that might get them more than a foot off the ground. You find yourself grasping at straws to keep them occupied enough. One of my go-to solutions was usually storytelling.

Storytelling is a nice way of saying that I lied to them.

“You can’t climb that tree, Austin,” I said.

“Why not?” he replied.

I fumbled for a reason that wasn’t a simple because I told you not to. 

“There’s a witch in there,” I said. 

Austin was skeptical but I had Gracie’s undivided attention.

“Really?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “There’s an old witch that lives in that tree. If you climb it you could fall right into her stove.”

Okay, typing it out now I see how horrible it was. But it worked. That tree never caused an injury in my family.

I can’t say the same for the old crabapple tree that was on my other grandfather’s property. That tree caused two generations of “butt-whippings”.

The one most directly related to me happened the time that my grandmother caught myself and my little brother pulling crabapples out of the branches and hurling them at one another. Now, my grandmother has always been under the impression that crabapples were good for eating. She used to make jellies and things like that out of them. She was wrong. Crabapples, or crap-apples as I call them, are disgusting. The only thing that God ever put them on this planet for was to hurl at your little brother.

But, my grandmother and her switch had different plans. I can still feel the stripes on my legs.

Turns out, my dad had a run-in with that tree when he was a kid, too. The story goes that he got into trouble at school for something and there had been a phone call made. So, by the time he stepped off the school bus the jig was up. He got home and took off toward the barn and climbed that tree.

My grandfather, being a rather patient man, got a chair from the porch and placed it under that tree. He took his belt off and sat down. Then he and my dad had a stand-off. My dad sat in the tree for hours and my grandfather sat there at the foot of it for the same amount of time. When it had gotten good and dark and my dad’s stomach was sufficiently empty he climbed down. He bent over and accepted his licks and went on with life.

There’s a lot of memories in those old trees. Some of them are good and some of them are bad. All of them are just pages in the story of our lives. And they’re all bonafide and southern fried.

A Light Dusting

Blizzard of 1993

All anyone can talk about this morning is snow.  Well, not just snow. They’re talking about ice.

Once again the people of the south are scurrying like ants at the mere mention of a dusting of snow or a bout with freezing rain. The weathermen opened their portfolios last night and invested all they had into milk and bread before going on the air today. By the time you read this you could head over to the nearest Publix or WalMart and you’d find a wasteland devoid of all life on the aisle where the toilet paper was once stocked. The only bread that you’ll be able to find will be onion rolls. And the milk case will only be stocked with low-fat whipping cream.

Our friends to the north get a kick out of it every year. They see us clamoring to stock our shelves and to find a reliable heat source during the unavoidable month of darkness that is coming and they laugh until their cheese-shaped hats fall off. While we are worried about a quarter of an inch of ice they’ll be lighting their barbecue grills in snow up to their hips.

We get it, guys. It’s funny. I think it’s funny, too. However, I have the unfortunate ability to recall the past and I realize why we do it. Next time that you’re in Alabama, find someone that looks like they’ve lived there for a long period of time. Go up to that person. Ask them if they remember the blizzard of 1993.

The lights will dim. A soft glow will illuminate their face. Their eyes will squint so that you can’t even see them anymore. Suddenly their skin will look worn and cracked. They’ll look off into the distance and they’ll mutter, “Aye”.

If you lived through it then you remember it. The ol’ ‘93 blizzard was probably similar to a regular snow storm that parts of the northeast get every year. The problem is that this is the deep south. We rarely get below freezing for more than eight hours. So the fact that we had over a foot of snow dumped on us in one night was debilitating. 

We don’t have snow shovels. We don’t have slow blowers. No one salts the roads. And worst of all...we have lots and lots of trees. Trees tend to have limbs that break off when they get a lot of snow on them. Those limbs tend to land on power lines.

Imagine living in a place where no one really has a need for anything more than an electric furnace in their house and then half the state is without power.

We went to live with my grandparents for a few days. They had a gas heater in their den and their stove was gas so we could at least cook a few things. That is until my grandmother put the food out on the porch to keep it from going bad and the dogs treated it as their own personal buffet.

I had never seen that much snow before and it is something that I haven’t seen since. We could walk across the acres of fields on my grandparents property and as we walked back our footprints would already be filled in. And even though I was only a couple of months from my sixteenth birthday...we played like small children in that fluffy white stuff.

Anything that we could find became a sled. And when we ran out of options we just packed the snow on the hill as much as we could and slid down on our backsides. My mom wasn’t too fond of that since the dryer wasn’t working.

As much fun as we had over the several days that it took for our temperature to rise above freezing and let us get back to normal, it did kind of create a state-wide PTSD. People died during that storm. A lot of people. There were homeless people in Birmingham that froze to death as they tried to take shelter under bridges and in bus stop sheds. There were people that didn’t realize they weren’t supposed to use their generator inside the house and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. And there were the ones that fell asleep and didn’t notice that their kerosene heaters or fireplaces had sparked and they died in the resulting blaze.

For us it was a few days of frolicking in the snow with the inconvenience of not watching TV, eating a lot of PB&J, and having to share a foldout bed with my mom and my brother. But for the state as a whole it was a lesson in preparedness. We don’t let those storms sneak up on us anymore. While we haven’t had one like that since, we treat every snow event as another potential ‘93.

We sand the roads now. And we provide a free shelter for anyone to go to if they don’t have heat. And we always get to the grocery store early to get milk and bread.

We can’t go without our milk sandwiches.

Ten Things I Don't Mind You Knowing About Me

Vincent, AL

My mind is full of stories of things that I’ve done, seen, and experienced over the years. I’ve bragged that my brain is like a steel trap because I can gather memories from an age that most people don’t even remember. I have distinct images of things that happened to me when I was less than two years old.

When I sit down to actually write one of the stories my mind goes completely blank. It’s as if my brain comes out of my head, looks at me, and says “We ain’t never been nowhere.”

“Of course we have,” I say. “We’ve done lots of things.”

“I don’t think so,” says Brain. “Right now all I can come up with is that Twilight Zone episode where the plastic surgeons are really ugly and maybe the first verse of the Punky Brewster theme song.”

“Well, what about that time I accidentally killed a bird and had to raise the babies?” I reply.

Brain shakes what I can only assume is what it’s head should be. “That’s an episode of Andy.”

Oh yeah. I think you’ll come to find that a lot of my childhood memories have been contaminated by the copious amounts of television that I was allowed to watch growing up.

Well, today seems like a good day for a random list. How about 10 things that I don’t mind telling you about myself?

1) I grew up in a small town in Alabama called Vincent. It had a population of about 1,500 people, 2,000 dogs, 762 cows, 2 emus, and at least one black bear. The chief exports of Vincent are cotton and prayer and the only thing that gets imported is the opposing football team on Friday night.

2) My dad has been in the army and the air force. He was a firefighter and a police officer. He never got me out of a speeding ticket but he did pull me over once and threaten to give me one.

3) My mother was an EMT when I was young and she went to college to become a nurse while I was in high school. She was the go-to medical professional on the hill where our mobile home was. If anyone had an injury or an ailment they always went to her first before they shelled out a co-pay to go see a doctor. Unfortunately for her, her patients were not always human. I remember at least twice that she was called out at night to a neighbor’s house to assist with a dog or a cat that had gone into labor.

4) I’ve met a few celebrities in my life, though only a couple of them have “stories” to go along with them. I once saw a teenager get arrested because he insulted Dan Quayle in front of a huge crowd of people. Henry Winkler gave my kids a private magic show. I saw Joan Collins sign a playboy magazine that contained her own naked pictures. And one of my favorite authors sends me a “Happy Birthday” message every year.

5) I was once attacked by a rooster that had been possessed by the devil himself.

6) One of the most spectacular motor vehicle crashes that ever took place in the Vincent city limits happened while I was behind the wheel. I expertly maneuvered a car between a large tree and a small populated house with zero visibility. No one got hurt...except for my car. It died that day.

7) I once had a cat named Leaper that used to come in the house when we opened the door and immediately perched himself on the back of our couch. One day Leaper went missing. He was gone for three years. Then one day my mom opened the front door and he jumped up on the back of the couch as if he had never left. He was missing an ear and at least two toes but he was there. He stayed with us for a few more years before he passed away.

8) I trespassed into a government building when I was doing door-to-door sales. I wandered into the lobby and immediately gave my pitch to an old white-haired man in a suit. He had me follow him to a conference room where ten other white-haired men proceeded to buy all of the merchandise that I had on me. Then security escorted me from the building.

9) Raising my two kids is the thing that I’m most proud of even though I’m convinced that any good thing they’ve done was not a result of anything I taught them. 

10) My life is a broken record of the ecstatic and the tragic set on a loop to repeat for eternity. I have been dragged from loneliness by a wonderful woman. I’ve stared down the barrel of life-changing tragedies and pulled out a win. I’ve had people that I love yanked out of my arms by death. I’ve watched people I love walk away from me for no reason. And yet despite those things...because of those things...I continue to wake up every morning. 

As this blog continues I’ll tell you more about each and every one of those things. I’ll tell you the story of the time I got cursed out by an old man over what flavor pizza he liked. I’ll tell you why I can't really stomach apple juice. And I’ll tell you about the time I was left alone in a motionless elevator with a recently vacated corpse.

Tragedy and comedy...rinse and repeat. Bonafide and Southern Fried.

Blogging Again For The First Time

I’m not a writer.

When I was in middle school I used to take part in a writing exercise every year. Kids all over the school would submit stories, poems, and art to be bound into a publication that was titled “Read My Mind”. It was a great way to peak interest in the arts while also being a decent money-maker for the school.

What parent wasn’t going to buy a publication with their kid’s work in it?

Ms. Morris was the school guidance counselor. But since we were a small school the guidance counselor didn’t have enough to do so she was also required to teach a couple of classes. She taught 6th grade literature. She was also in charge of collecting all of this work and compiling it. This is not a job that I envy at all. I have read a fair amount of stories and poetry written by 11 and 12 -year-olds in my day. I can tell you that the phenoms are few and far between. But Ms. Morris had a way of making every kid feel like Hemmingway.

When I look back at the things that happened in my life that made me want to write, there are a few teachers that come to mind. Obviously, it isn’t something that has earned me a lot of money, but there were some seeds planted along the way. Seeds that grew enough to make me still want to do it during my fifth decade on this rock.

Ms. Morris was one of the planters of those seeds.

She had a rule when it came to the “Read My Mind” book. To call it a rule is pretty loose since she published just about anything that a kid gave her. She wanted to cultivate creativity and telling some middle-schooler that their drawing sucked wasn’t going to do it...no matter how much southern sweet tea you poured over it. That’s not the kind of thing that makes a person write a blog about you thirty years later.

The only rule was that if you wanted to go to the Young Author’s Conference then you had to have at least 5 submissions in the book.

The Young Author’s Conference was an elite event that was held every year at the University of Montevallo. Only the cream of the crop received the highly sought after invitations and I got one every year.

I found out several years later that it wasn’t as exclusive as I thought. Anybody with $15 and a few hours on a Saturday morning could go. But don’t tell that to 12-year-old me. To me, the YAC was a tour of the chocolate factory and I had the golden ticket.

One spring afternoon as I was shoving things into my locker and getting ready to head to bus I spied Ms. Morris hurrying down the hallway toward me.

“I’m sending the book to the printer tomorrow morning,” she said with an urgency in her voice. I thought that urgency was a little out of place for the news that she was giving me. The next sentence let me know why it was there. “You’ve only submitted 4 stories.”

My heart dropped. The Young Author’s Conference was the highlight of my year. It was the one day out of the year that I didn’t feel out of place. I could go and be around a bunch of other kids that liked writing as much as I did. I got to meet authors and artists that had actually published their work and gotten paid for it. I could buy books and have the person that wrote it sign it for me. It was MY day and I had just found out that I wasn’t going.

Again, Ms. Morris had no intention of not taking me. I don’t mean to brag but I was kind of her favorite.

There are several dozen people in their forties that just read that last sentence that until now were under the distinct impression that they were Ms. Morris’s favorite. I don’t mean to ruin your life...but you weren’t. I was.

“Can I write another story?” I asked.

“You can but I have to have it in my hand by 7:30 in the morning so I can type it,” she replied.

I ran to the bus and headed home. I immediately discarded any notion that I was going to be doing homework and got my binder out. I sat at the dining room table in my family’s double-wide mobile home. It would be another two hours before my mom got home from work. My brother was exploring the woods behind our home as he normally did until dark. I was alone.

Alone with my thoughts.

And I have no idea what I wrote. 

I’d like to tell you that I wrote some expertly crafted story and that Ms. Morris was blown away. But that’s not what happened. I churned out some middle school level crap and earned a spot on the bus to the conference. All of my copies of the “Read My Mind” books were lost in a fire a few years ago. I think the public library in my home town has some but it’s been decades since I looked at them.

The point of this story is not WHAT I wrote. The point is THAT I wrote.

Am I a writer? I don’t really consider myself to be. I’ve been told that I am because it's something that I like to do. I’ve been published a couple of times and actually been paid to do it once or twice. I guess you can say that I am, but I still say that it is something that I want to be.

I’m thankful for people that I’ve met along the way that have encouraged it. Ms. Morris, Mr. Latham, and others that I’ll introduce you to over time.

Because now that I’ve reached 43 I’ve decided that I want to take my writing a little more seriously. I want to do more of it. I may never write a great American novel. That screenplay that I’ve dreamed about for 25 years may never make its way out of my brain. But I think that I have some stories to tell. I have some essays that I think I can write. I may even have a poem or two bouncing around in this brain that I’ve marinated in saturated fat for a lifetime.

I’m starting a new blog. It isn’t my first one. I’ve done a few over the years on various subjects. I haven’t stuck to them in the long run. I’ve written movie reviews. I’ve tried to talk about weight loss and health. But none of them were interesting enough to make me want to keep doing them. And if I didn’t find them interesting then I know you wouldn’t either.

This time it’s going to be a much broader range of material. I’m going to tell you stories about growing up in the rural south. I’m going to tell you stories about being a husband and father. I’m going to talk about bullying and make commentaries on the events of the day.

Mostly I’m just going to write. I’m going to keep it as simple as I can. Try to get better at it. And see what happens.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Welcome to “Bonafide and Southern Fried”.