Jeanne Reese Allison

My mother was a remarkable woman, like all the women in the family.

Daughter of the redoubtable “General” Thelma Reese, Mother managed to carry on to her own little family the love and capabilities she inherited from her mother.

Over a life that at 75 lasted not long enough for her children, Jeanne raised us, energetically volunteered in the community, and eventually went to work. She had a variety of jobs related to music and the arts, managing concert bookings, artist accommodations and a multitude of other tasks.

She also loved us. And loved the grandchildren as they came, for whatever her interests were outside the home, and they were many, family came first.

Retooling “Writings” page

I have sort of completed a new version of my “writings” page listed in the navigation menu found in the header image above. I converted my old hand-coded HTML page into a new install of the same WordPress template I am using here.

If you have any comments on the content over there, please let me know in this post comments section.

Avoirdupois, as Caddy Powell liked to say.

The Dog leaves us

It is warm. I lie next to the top of the little road in a bed of leaves and pine straw, watching the bipeds in their yards. The sun is shining and the cool air of morning is now warm. Cocking my head and pricking up my ears, I keep track of everything I can hear. I hear lots the bipeds never notice. I smell things they cannot, also. I lie there and let the sounds and smells and sights fit over me like a bright, warm blanket. I feel a vibration in the hard stuff under the leaves. I hear one of the big loud moving boxes the bipeds go up and down the big road in. It is all right. I know the sound of this big loud box, it carries the hairy-faced biped who often comes here. I like him. He takes me for walks. He feeds me sometimes when the female biped is not here. He pats me and makes happy sounds to me. Sometimes he shouts at me, but bipeds are like that. Mostly he is good to me. He brings me the small gods that make me happy. I jump up and wag my tail, because now I have another reason to be happy. The hairy-faced biped turns into the little road to stop beside the front walk. I run down the little road behind his box, until it stops. He makes happy sounds to me as he gets out of the box, using the sounds I know he and the female use to talk to me. He goes into the house. I return to my place, to watch the road. There were good food smells earlier in the cave. I know one of the bipeds will soon call me to come in. Some days I don’t listen, but I know today I will because they always share the good-smelling food with me. I will keep watch while they get ready. I will guard my place against bad bipeds and those big boxes that come up and down my road so fast that I can’t catch them.

Those Who Went Before

At some point you begin to wonder about the distant people who fathered and mothered your grandparents and great-grandparents, and even further back. You wonder even if those folks were poor, obscure and from all indications lacking in any outstanding traits other than contributing to your DNA.

Twenty-something years ago, during the genealogical frenzy resulting from the popularity of Arthur Hailey’s book Roots I felt such an interest. My great-grandfather had published a partial genealogy of his family, so I had a starting point.

The House Behind Rowan Oak

We were in Oxford, MS this past weekend, gathered with others, family and friends, to see my sister’s youngest daughter marry, completing the set of in-laws for her parents; her two older sisters and younger brother had shown her the way.

Lots of people, family I see usually only at events of this sort, familiar strangers and tons of food washed down by rivers of refreshing beverages. A great party, beautiful bride and bridesmaids, all as it should be.

Not being of the immediate wedding party, we had Saturday before four in the afternoon free. Once again, in a morning of drizzle and mist this time, we wandered out Old Taylor Road to the outward and visible sign of a willful, somewhat arrogant and gifted man’s assertion of his and his family’s place in the world-Rowan Oak. William Faulkner, who earned little money in his life before a collection of his fiction, long and short, revived the critical attention he had never quite lost.  Faulkner  began his journey towards re-inventing his own family when revenue from an early book, Sanctuary, (to be the last profitable published work before the above mentioned revival) in 1930, allowed the purchas of a decaying house over which he sweated and scrimped and slowly wrested from oblivion over twenty years. He named the house “Rowan Oak” for the rowan tree, legendarily effective against evil.

From previous trips we were familiar with the various buildings on the grounds, and since our visit was earlier than the opening hours for the house proper, we wandered around, stopping in front of a decaying little house directly behind Rowan Oak, in sight of the kitchen door. This house made me think of Caroline Barr, “Mammy Callie” to the Faulkners, especially memorialized by William in The Sound and the Fury.

When she died, Faulkner had her funeral at Rowan Oak, and eulogized the old black woman whose life had been one of servitude, first as a slave, then as an engrafted part of the Faulkner family. In an epigraph of dedication to Go Down, Moses, published in that year, Faulkner summarized her eulogy thusly:

To Mammy

CAROLINE BARR

Mississippi [1840-1940]

Who was born in slavery and who

gave to my family a fidelity without

stint or calculation of recompense

and to my childhood an immeasur-

able devotion and love.

We stood in front of the little house, its porch damaged by damp and age, and looked back and forth between the two houses. I remembered the passage in Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, in which Dilsey, the great character who so resembles Caroline Barr, wracked by age, arises to painfully cross the bare yard to the Compson house, there to prepare breakfast for the family. I excerpted that passage today for quotation in my Home Page

Like a flower growing in a barren dirt yard, love and compassion and selflessness managed to grow in the dark soil of Southern history’s greatest evil. Slavery did not destroy Caroline Barr. And Faulkner memorialized that greatness of spirit in Dilsey.

They endured.

When Things Go Well…

…it is usually because hard-working people plan and execute well. I spent most of the morning watching probably the best-run event ever on the riverfront here in Chattanooga. For the second year, rowers from around the country gathered for the Head of the Hooch regatta, with hundreds of boats and a thousand or more rowers. This event for many years was held in Atlanta, but with the completion of our river front parks and other projects, the Atlanta Rowing Club partnered with the Chattanooga Rowing Club to put on this event. Apparently all comments amongst the participants have been so positive we may expect this event to be here for a long time.

I was staggered at the scale, the variety of boats, people and activities. Seeing all the young (and not so young, rowing is a lifetime activity for some) people, spent with a three-mile race, hauling their boats up the ramp from the river following the race was awe-inspiring for me.

I took many pictures, a very few of which you can find here .

Another October

October is my favorite month of the year. Actually, any month in which I am ambulatory, conscious and in reasonable expectation of remaining so is fine with me. October, however, is special. Insert here a paean to the God, gods, Goddess, Allah, Yahweh and attendant forest familiars and lesser spirits involved in bringing me October every year. I can now remember about 58 Octobers, the first few being taken up with nursery matters and a few excursions into the front yard for parental picture-taking as my toddler self picked up fallen leaves and tried to eat them. I don’t remember this, but my parents did. I have destroyed the photographic evidence.

The October when I was four, however, provided the foundation for my Octobermania. We had moved that year to a suburb of Chattanooga known as Lookout Mountain, a shard of the Cumberland Plateau cut off from the main body by rivers and creeks. Nestled amongst woods, rocky outcroppings and winding roads, houses were scattered about, and my parents bought one to which they brought me and my infant sister. There were lots of trees in our yard, and yet unbuilt lots with more to wander through.

I remember standing in the driveway one clear, cold day in what must have been October, darting about trying to catch leaves as they fell. I no longer wanted to eat them, but appreciated the multiple hues of red, yellow and orange. I remember the tingling feel of cold air drawn into my nose, smelling of something clean and clear. The air, most likely, had flowed from Canada across the Plains, pushing cold temperatures free of sooty industrial haze onto Lookout Mountain, all for my delight.

October for 2006 is two days gone, but this morning I snatched a little of its memory on the River Walk along the Tennessee River. I had turned off the morning news shows on television, sick of the political coverage and sicker of the political attack ads. I needed to clear my head of such things. I walked for several hours among the colors of unfallen leaves beneath an impossibly blue sky. Every where I looked was wonder and joy, almost I was four again. I needed that fix.

I don’t know how many more Octobers will find me still here, drinking in the air, surrounded by the teeming colors and still able to walk by scenes that no camera can adequately capture. I would like to take my grandchildren through the woods and fields a few times before I can no longer catch the falling leaves and feel October’s wonder. I want to thank somebody. Perhaps I have.