Seasons

October is opening well, with cool evenings and mornings, sunny, warm afternoons. Tonight I have been sitting on my small porch, two stories above the ground, listening to night sounds, cadences of crickets and cicadas, slowed in the cooling evening. I overlook a wooded slope that goes down to a busy street, where the susurration of traffic noise ebbs and swells in slow syncopation. A dog barks fitfully on the hill opposite.

I remember another night listening to dog sounds, many years ago.  Late summer one year, after a double date to see Doctor Zhivago, a friend and I took our dates up Lookout Mountain and picked our way down the moonlit path to Sunset Rock, on the western cliffs of the mountain, overlooking the mostly rural Lookout Valley. We sat on lichen-crusted rocks, the girls gathered close to us in the cool of the evening, listening to the booming of freight cars shunted back and forth in the yards at the foot of the mountain. Across the valley, in the wooded hills below Sand Mountain, we heard hounds giving tongue. My friend said they were likely foxhounds, chasing the sharp forms of their quarry through the night as the hunters sat around wood fires listening to their dogs, sipping from cups of whiskey.

Emboldened by the huddling of the girls against us for warmth, we kissed and hugged them for an hour or so. Nothing more. It was 1966, but we were not drinking, nor were we of the drug generation, our dates were nice girls, and presently we arose, led them back up the path, and took them home.

Granny Phyllis and the “Little Monkey”

My Granny Phyllis was an outspoken product of her generation in the south, who never hesitated to call a spade a goddamn shovel. She shared the racial prejudices of her time, but not the polite language which talked around the subject. Even in the last decade of her life, after all the struggles of the 1960s had settled the de jure question of entrenched prejudice and established the official tolerance she never quite observed.

Following the Civil Rights acts of the middle 60s and the work of many Chattanooga civic leaders of both races, public places of all sorts, including restaurants, were integrated. One day Granny Phyllis was dining alone in the Home Plate Cafeteria when a well-dressed black man asked if he could share her large table. This request raised all her hackles, but she chose strategy over her usual directness. She smiled at the man, and as he seated himself, began to talk non-stop to him, never allowing him a chance to speak, although she peppered him with questions so that he put his fork down and began many times to reply. When she was ready, she gathered her things and left the man with a cooling and untouched meal in front of him. Granny Phyllis loved to tell the story, which she saw as her triumph over a Negro (not the word she habitually used) who didn’t know his place.

I became involved later in her life in a situation that might have blown up rather badly. Granny Phyllis, who refused to give up her driver’s license, had rear-ended a car. The officer investigating ticketed her for following too closely, pointing out the court date. Granny Phyllis was furious. As she told me a number of times over the weeks before the court date, that “little monkey” had not treated her with respect. The officer was black, you see, and regardless of her fault, she took exception to his attitude.

I accompanied my grandmother to city traffic court on the day, fearing the worst if the officer and the accused shared the same space. The proceedings dragged on in the usual way, and I had to make a quick run to feed my meter. When I got back, Granny Phyllis was ready to go. The other motorists had not appeared, since her insurance company had settled with them, and as customary the judge dismissed the ticket. Nothing passed between the “little monkey” and my grandmother. I was relieved.

My grandmother was unfailingly kind to those less fortunate than she…as long as they remembered their place.

Chasing Phantasms

The black women, in layers of worn dresses, shirts, jackets and scarves, move between the pecan trees in the early morning October light. The old man, in faded khaki work clothes from Dickies points here and there to different rows of trees, with gruff, unintelligible instructions that the women seem to understand, changing direction among the rows in response to the old man’s mutterings.

I have met him here, at the “big house” of my Great-grandfather and grandfather’s stewardship, so that he can guide me on a tour of acreage owned by my family over two counties and across one elevation of the shard of the Cumberland Plateau known as Lookout Mountain. Failing at college, ill content with the family business, yearning for a simpler and more organic existence, I want to see the rural past that underlies my family history. I have in the past week subscribed to “Mother Earth News,” and begun to read up on organic farming, with emphasis on raising pigs. I read lengthy essays by English 19th century eccentrics on the sanctity of raising your own bacon and brewing your own beer.

I do not speak of these things to the old man, who has spent his life first driving my great-grandfather’s car, then managing the farm and surrounding acreage for my grandfather and his sister, following my great-grandfather’s death. The old man still remembers most of my unknown family history, and briefly and elliptically touches on many things I would like to know. But in his declining years patience with children, which at 22 I surely am to him, grows thin. He looks blankly at a TVA topo map I have marked with the property I want to see, says vaguely, “don’t use maps much,” and rides shotgun with me in my car to tour the land he knows firsthand.

Over the mountain, in a back valley threaded with a dirt road, he directs me into a weedy track leading up to an old house on the side of a ridge. An old couple are tenants there, among the soybean fields planted by help hired by a doctor who rents the land. The old man gets out of my car, steps behind the small horse barn, and urinates into the mud and straw of the pen, shielded from the house by the barn. Continues to talk about the land and crops as he pisses. Suburban fastidiousness I brutally suppress. This is real, unadorned rural society.

At the end of the day, I return the old man to his truck at the big house, the pecan harvesters long gone. He genially wishes me a good evening, and follows me out the drive, stopping to lock the gate. I drive home to my apartment, feeling oddly unfulfilled. Is that all there is? Several years later, I find, that for me, it was. Farming is not an amusement park for suburban gentry, un-conversant in the arts and understanding that comes with years of dependency on making things work.

I was twenty-two. Eight years later, with two children and a wife, I tried again. With more consequential results. Experience is the only school in which I have learned anything, and I learn it again, and again.

God’s mercy on all his children.

Smirnoff and Semi-Bad Girls, cont’d.

Cruising up the drive into the Drive-In, under the marquee listing Rebel Without a Cause and Thunder Road as the features, I turned down a row of cars midway of the lot, in what I judged to be a blind angle from the projection/concession building. I pulled the Corvair into the end slot, close to the fence, where an overhanging tree cast deeper shade in the gathering dark. There was a grassy space about twenty feet wide between the end slot and the fence. It was cramped in the car, with five teenagers. I had formed a plan.

Smirnoff and Semi-Bad Girls

Growing up in the late 50s and early 60s was a tame existence for my generation. I lived on Lookout Mountain, a narrow plateau southwest of Chattanooga capped by the incorporated Town of Lookout Mountain. Property values and patriotism were king, Communists and immorality were the enemies. We aspired to the latter, though opportunities for cautious adventures were few. No Pill yet, so every boy with hopes carried a single condom in his wallet, over time wearing a distinctive ring in the leather. We smirked when we pulled out our wallet to pay for a movie or a drive-in hamburger, glancing slantwise to see if our dates with their circle pins on their blouse collars noticed. We mostly dated nice girls, so they never let on if they did see, or know. Probably they had a good laugh afterwards, amongst themselves.