The photo holds more than just a half-thunk thought about Christmas gifts for Matthew, even though that’s why I took it. I sent it to Matt’s older brother, Brandon, to see if he’d go in with me for a Christmas gift. It has been a lifetime since I had enough money to buy my sons anything for Christmas, but they don’t need anything but for their mother to stay sane, which is what I’m trying to do.
So hang in there with me and let’s get this morning vision out of my head, okay?
I woke up this morning staring at a Red Cross Disaster Relief poster I found at the local Red Cross building across the street from me. It’s being cleared out and will be turned into some sort of bed&breakfast or something — can’t wait to see how they pull that off...but since my grandmother worked for the Red Cross in Columbia, Mississippi her entire life, until she retired with a 35 year mostly volunteer thank you and moved to California to live with her daughter, and ya’ll all know by now my story, right? So I don’t need to explain how much my grandmother meant to me and all that...(google any portion of my life history, I dare you — Called Delusions of Grandeur, published 2007. There’s a linky somewhere.)
Anyhoo, I’m trying to figure out what has me all stirred up again, and I think I’ll get up and see if I can find my way to Christ Cathedral to attend the church where she and her siblings attended from the day she was born (1899) to the day they moved her belongings to Mississippi after they took the land Warley farms was on for an airport during the second world war.
The things I keep with me all the time are my oscillating GE fan, my Underwood typewriter, and my great grandmother’s silver spoon. Oh, and I have an unopened cocacola from the very refrigerator that was in my grandmother’s house when she died. Or my Aunt’s house, rather. I’d probably kill someone if they took that bottle from me. Or worse, drank it. But shit happens, and I’ve lost more of the things that matter to me over the years than I care to remember right now.
But my mind went from the American Red Cross symbol to Coca-Cola, and I then had an image I couldn’t explain. It was of a closet full of shoes. Women’s shoes. And it was probably the image that explains why I married the man I did.
I have told my best friend and lover who I have known all my life that trust is an issue for me. I’ve known this man about third grade, and somehow he finally convinced my daddy that he could safely guard my father’s precious daughter (me) for a time, to go to a movie. I don’t remember which one, but it was confirmed when Joe and I took in Star Wars the other night that Fairhope theatre was the location of our first actual date.
And I trust him. I’ve always trusted him, like people trust Luke Skywalker, or maybe Han Solo. He’s too funny to be Luke. And that’s off track again, so I’ll get back to the narrative.
Last night, I felt like i’d been in another time warp and that it has been a week of Saturdays for me. It’s football season, I know you know this, and it is Alabama. And there’s no way anything else is happening.
I can’t even get my sons or Joe to answer my calls. It’s a rule, people. Men don’t talk to women during a football game. I get that. So I walked the two blocks to Moe’s and found a cool bunch of friends to hang out with. And I needed a beer.
So one of my favorite bartenders introduced me to Abita’s seasonal brew — Mardi Gras. Ok? we do that shit around here. We invented it, in fact. Look that up whenever you want to. And it was good, mellow and just the right size to hold me still long enough to meet a few cool people and have a conversation or three about so many things I can’t tell you what any of it was.
My lasting impressions though were that the kid I met last night named Vincent who is due to leave for Yale on the 13th will be a first class find in my life of collecting cool people I’ve met. He came up to me at the bar, and this is what he said: First, I like the way you dress (how could he have known my shirt and jeans were from Walmart, the shoes are ten years old, the tights have a hole in them and the turtleneck came from Goodwill. Oh, and the jacket? It’s the liner from one of Trenton’s old coats. I still miss that old man, even though I don’t miss having to slap his hands back where they belong every time I got near enough to reach.)
And the second thing he said was this: Your face tells a story.
Oh, man, did that kid know how to open up my life to be poured out as fast as I could talk. I told him about meeting Michael Jackson, about teaching writing to the first eight scholarship football players, about being a stewardess (Delta) and a cheerleader, and a blonde, and I think I told someone that I was elected biggest flirt in high school (although I think Vincent was away waiting tables for that zinger). I also told him this:
When I went off to London at age 17 I had never met a black person with an accent other than the southern ones who cradled me and cared for me and I was telling him how the years between 1967 (middle of May) and February 1969 changed everything for me, and suddenly I found myself admitting something out loud I never say down here, at all.
I had an abortion when I was 19 in California. At that time there were only two places one could have one, and my aunt happened to live in one of those places, so in addition to my father and who knows who all else putting up the money for me to go to London, putting up the money for me to go to MSCW, putting up the money for me to realize my dreams of being another Norman Rockwell, I had to bankrupt my father by having no clue about sex and not the first idea about birth control until I learned all of it the hard way.
So get that out of the way. I flew Delta, I had flown Pan Am/Delta to London. I came back to Alabama because my father, in his desperation to get me somewhere that might be safe enough (little did he know) enrolled me in Auburn. I managed to get a taste of what 35 feet of snow in the Sierras looked like, and I wanted desperately to stay out there and go to the California College of Arts & Crafts. My aunt had even taken me to the campus. But she also took me to Haight Ashbury, and kids, if you don’t know what was going down there, I’ve got a few books you should probably read.
She just wanted me to see the ugly side, because I was all about Peter Max, and Cable Cars, and in fact, the posters on my dorm wall at MSCW were Clark Gable and the one at my apartment at Auburn was a Delta Poster of San Francisco.
And that’s how I became affiliated with my mother’s and father’s Alma Mater. I can’t say much about my behavior there, nor will I restate the conditions of my subsequent three quarters of failure to stay in school. I didn’t manage to even pass shorthand, when in the summer of 69 I was working at Gibson’s Discount Store and trying to figure out what I should be doing instead of ringing up peanuts at the hot nuts cubicle or whatever it was called.
So I hopped a Greyhound to Atlanta and got a job with Delta. And that’s when the trouble really started. I was footloose and fancy free. For a while, that was cool. But then I got all mixed up. Men I thought were honest were not even close to being what they made me think they were, and I was so naieve that I bought their stories, or maybe I didn’t even ask them what the story was. I just bought what they were selling.
So I’m sitting beside Vincent at the bar last night trying to tell him how I ended up marrying a man who really didn’t even like me a whole lot. We were not just opposites, we were mixed up, sad, lonely, messed up products of a screwed up state at a time when there wasn’t much that was making sense anywhere you looked.
Churches were having hootenannys and dancing down the aisles trying to get some of the feeling to stick to the traditional walls. There were so many changes it was headspinning. We dealt with it in various ways, and yet I knew this relationship was not working. I have the journal where I had vowed to break up with him, and then came back for my last flight of the month sporting a diamond ring. Out of the blue, he decided to accept the first job of many with International Harvester, (now Navstar? I don’t know anymore) and it was a time of chaos in business as well. Companies were downsizing, changing, absorbing each other and that idea of working for a good company (I was always so proud to have chosen an airline that made it to this day — my other choices were National and Eastern — remember them? No, you don’t.)
But there’s that image of a closet full of shoes. And I know how I felt the morning I woke up in the bed of a man I’d only met the night before. He worked for Coca Cola — so he said. Actually, it turns out he just put up the signs in the 7-11 for them, but how was I to know that. So I was kind of enamored, shall we say, that this guy, who probably wasn’t even a real blonde, liked me enough to actually sleep with me, which was the badge of honor for a Farah Fawcett wannabe...and by then who gave a shit how many people I slept with — I wasn’t counting.
But that closet full of shoes was quite a shock. I’d not only slept with a married man, I’d slept in HER bed. That was not very long before I said I do. And I did stay true to my part of the bargain once I said I do. I never slept in any other bed than the one I slept in mostly alone the whole time I was married. And obviously, I did actually have sex with the man a few times. cause I have two bruisers that have clearly got his genes. They even hold a beer the same damn way.
Isn’t it funny, when you look back on life and try to figure out why you did some of the things you did? Well, blame it on the logos. Oh, and about that football? I now say Roll Tide, War Eagle and Go Jags with convincing enthusiasm — most people don’t think you can be born in this state and do that, but I’m sure I get the last word on this. Cause you see, I got pregnant on the campus of the University of Alabama, I got married to the guy I met at Auburn, and I got two degrees from the University of South Alabama, so Go, Jags! And may the best man win.