~The Bones of the American Dream~
**[Warning: This narrative will reveal no great ideas or
profound revelations. If you're bored,
don't say you weren't warned.]**
**[Disclaimer: I am aware that this piece seems incomplete, threadbare, and clumsy. Quite aware. I am harping on a theme, and quite annoyingly at that. My mind seems to be stuck in one gear and circling uselessly around some indistinct point here. So I plan to revise it in the future, but for now I feel a need to just put it up and see where looking at it in context leads me.]**
Part I: Rural Acrostics
The long sad shades of springs gone to furrow and seed lingered about our sweat-prickled bodies in the summer of our discontent. The sun’s slow crawl over the horizon lingered at the edge of the slumbering world, a purple and red swathed arc of sky creased under the last heat of an endless day. We watched with weary calm, our minds settling down, plodding along with thoughts grown as listless as flesh on the edge of sleep, as if unable to bear the weight of ideas in the sopping air. The shadows of shrubs and fence posts and ungainly farming implements somehow seemed more distinct than the objects casting them.
Part I: Rural Acrostics
The long sad shades of springs gone to furrow and seed lingered about our sweat-prickled bodies in the summer of our discontent. The sun’s slow crawl over the horizon lingered at the edge of the slumbering world, a purple and red swathed arc of sky creased under the last heat of an endless day. We watched with weary calm, our minds settling down, plodding along with thoughts grown as listless as flesh on the edge of sleep, as if unable to bear the weight of ideas in the sopping air. The shadows of shrubs and fence posts and ungainly farming implements somehow seemed more distinct than the objects casting them.
This moribund descent into an
Alabama dusk felt like the eve of the last of days, or like what I always
assumed the eve of the last of days would feel like. A corpulent swelteringstickydarkness gathered like dust about us in the
half-evening of a quarter after 8 on a Sunday at the tail end of August.
Night fell too slowly, yet day
somehow left too quickly, slipping away in broad strokes, rolling down over the
horizon. It was the Great In-between of
life – or Life – on the outskirts of a small Southern town, nestled in the far
rural reaches of a nation that has not yet grown comfortable in its own
landscaped skin.
I’m not sure it ever will. Can a nation whose identity is intimately
wrapped in the idea of a frontier ever escape its restive tendencies?
Darkness under rising indigo,
night breathing out of tepid hours as the sunset shimmered like layered silk
draped across the horizon. We looked around at nothing in particular. We nodded off without closing our eyes,
caught in the somnolence of vast fields of faltering crops. He murmured something crude. To break the spell, I think, to wake himself
up, and me along with him. Though we had
just driven down that morning from the University of Alabama, where we were
both undergrads, it felt like we’d been there on the porch for days.
To our right, a thin paved road
that hadn’t seen maintenance in decades, if ever. It wasn’t even entirely clear to me that the
road was actually paved beneath the dirt and dust and dried clay; when I
pointed this out, my friend assured me it was.
Or had been, once.
Or had been, once seemed to be
a phrase that he was obligated to append to half the town he grew up in.
On the far side of this
questionably-maintained road, nestling undergrowth became wide fields lined by
massive trees at the very edge of our sight.
Occasionally, a flowering bush emerged from the riot of drab green and
brown next to the road, but the flowers had wilted quickly under the summer
heat.
Laid out about the house like
the saddest and least edible buffet ever:
endless fields of hay and oats and ‘baccy, all colored a dark piss-yellow
streaked with brown by time and drought and the sad-eyed neglect of farmers caught
helplessly in the relentless ennui of a region descending into poverty. The plants shriveled under the heat. They grew flaccid
and weighed down by dead leaves on desiccating stalks. Occasionally, a rare breeze caused them to sway
before falling still again, as if all their remaining energy had been purged in
that last desperate attempt to interact with hostile world around them. Because the porch wrapped broadly around the
entire house, we could see considerable portions of the surrounding land.
Some fields were dead, victims
of neglect and bankruptcy and all the usual ways farmers can falter and
fail. As far as I could tell, the
tobacco was the only crop being carefully maintained. Even from our vantage point two hundred yards
away, I could smell the dank sweetness of it, like bitter molasses. 1
Somehow, I’d never imagined
seeing so many stricken earthtones at the end of all things, nor associating
vast fields of goldenrod with a slow awkward descent into death.
We looked about from our
vantage point on his front porch, ensconced in quaintly archaic rocking
chairs. Quaint, or would have been had
they not been painted the unsettling powder-orange of the University of
Tennessee. When I asked my friend if his
parents had attended UT, he shook his head.
For reasons I couldn’t discern, however, he neglected to expand on the
subject. Perhaps he was ashamed. Perhaps he was just trying to annoy me.
The creak of our chairs was
mostly masked by the louder creaks of the tired wooden porch floor beneath as
we slowly teetered and tottered. We
rocked with deliberation, kicking at the wood beneath our feet only at occasional
intervals, just enough to keep us in motion.
The sunset over the fields and trees glowed so beautiful that a better man than either of us
might have wept. It wasn’t that we
weren’t good men. Assuming one’s
expectations weren’t overly high in that regard and one was feeling a
particularly charitable at the moment, one could describe us as relatively
decent men. But we were young and
brusque and more certain of ourselves than we had any right to be.
Even behind my Aviators (it was
the mid-90s, so hush), my eyes ached from all that yellow-brown over
broad spaces that had once been occupied by men and machinery working furiously
to raise up a crop to sell.
Most of the land we could see
didn’t belong to his family. Everything
we could see, almost to the horizon where distant copses of stunted trees
lurked, belonged to either by his neighbors or a non-local agricultural concern
that seemed to have abandoned the area at some point since he actually lived
here. That was exactly what he
said: Ahgr-ih-cult’ral concern.
I’m not sure he even knew exactly what the term meant, other than big
business horning in on the relative solitude of the country home where he’d
grown up.
His home sat on a respectable,
but not staggering, two and a half acres of land. Enough for a decent house, a nice yard, and
an above-ground swimming pool, but hardly the latter-day trappings of
munificent plantations of old. His
family was late to the game anyway, he explained. His granddaddy built the house and tried to
do some farming, but, little by little, he was forced to sell off parcels of
his property until all that remained was the 2.5 acres we sat on and a small
shack filled with the plumbing supplies that accompanied his granddaddy’s
second attempt to make an honest rural living.
Just barely visible around the
corner of the house to our left: swampforests
of low-lying regions, marshlands so entrenched that human development simply
flowed around it rather than deal with trying to replace it. My friend explained them to me. The adjacent fields sat just above the
water-table, if only just. The forests, at least in this area, filled a
regional lowland, mostly bog and scrub oaks whose branches crooked awkwardly
about. In normal times, you could walk
into it and find firm footing suddenly giving way to undetected mud that sucked
loosely fitted shoes right off your foot.
You had to look for the right bushes, the proper exposure of tree roots.
But we’d walked at least two
miles through it the previous day without problem. A lingering drought had evaporated even water
hidden beneath dozens of broad branches.
The entire area was dying in flakes of dried mud, in stoppered wells and
broken down farm machinery. The place
practically reeked of frustration in the face of the inexorable march of
time. Strangely enough, my friend noted,
the drought wasn’t particularly bad or even particularly widespread. There seemed no reason for the surrounding
area to be as completely diminished as it was.
It felt like the residents of the town and surrounding farmlands had
simply given up.
It felt damaged. Cursed.
When my friend spoke of his feelings about being home again, he sounded
like a man who saw a place at once both intimately familiar and utterly
alien. He had lost something grasping
thorn and thresh of overgrown fields, in brutally segmented clay of dried-up
irrigation channels. Something had
shattered into a thousand, thousand pieces that compassed everything he’d once
known yet resembled it not at all.
Perhaps he didn’t think in
precisely that way, exactly those terms, but there was no mistaking the sense
of resignation in the way he carried himself, the way he spoke with mumbling
lassitude of the remnants of his youth. His
parents, who had him later in life, had come to represent the aging despair that
gripped the town. And though he
certainly didn’t say this, I suspected he no longer really recognized his
parents very well. I’d met them earlier,
and when he spoke to them, he spoke with an enthusiasm that seemed to fall flat
in their presence, as if he had not yet become accustomed to the changes that
had turned them older than they should have been over the last few years. After a couple minutes, his voice died down,
his enthusiasm faltered, and the look of resignation on his face practically
mirrored the perpetual looks of resignation on theirs.
~***~
Later, when we grew thirsty, we drove into town, and the
few people I saw looked so remarkably like his parents that I was a bit
unnerved. Still faces, squinting eyes,
careful movements, and the occasional reflexive smile that looked like the
person was trying to re-enact a memory of a smile and hoping it would suffice.
These were not unfriendly
people. Just people who had seen better
days and had no particular hope of seeing such days again. If they ever had dreams, they’d made their
peace with the understanding that the time to realize them had passed.
There are worse fates than
making your peace, even if it’s making your peace with something unpleasant.
Even over and above the locals,
our trip through town was a lonely one.
It was a one stoplight sort of place, and the stop-light was merely
flashing yellow in all four directions, and even that felt like the lights were
on the verge of faltering.
Yield…yield…yield…the reluctant flickers of darkened bulbs measured the
full extent of life’s traffic through the center of town. Half the buildings along the main street were
bare. Not even shuttered or dressed in
the going-out-of-business posters that mark failed business everywhere. Just empty windows, cracked doors, old names
fading slowly across the glass. Some of
them weren’t even shut. The doors hung
open a crack, or a pane from the main window was missing. A former hardware store. A former store whose name had once begun with
‘LUC…”. Between them, a former café that
couldn’t have been more than two meters wide as it filled the gap between the hardware
store and the LUC... store.
An aura of desuetude clung
tightly to the town, like a particularly voracious but languid parasite. The sensation of the lifeblood being sucked
dry was inescapable.
What strikes me now, after all
these years, was that I saw virtually no white.
Some beige, if one chooses to account those as variations of white, but
few colors I would call white without
qualifiers. Lots of browns and greys and
peeling blues and splotchy vinyl siding, but very little white. Several buildings might have been white at
one time, but the endless dirt and dust of rural farms under a drought made it
difficult to tell for certain.
I didn’t notice then, mind you. I just knew something felt off, and I only
realize what it was in writing this.
What I did notice back then was the prevalence of empty lots. I couldn’t help but wonder how those came
about in the midst of a small town.
There seemed to be no reason for a space between two storefronts to be
empty, but there also seemed no indication that buildings that once resided in
them had been demolished.
That’s the interesting thing
about failure – sometimes you lack the resources to even tear down the remains.
What few people walked about
did so with shuffling gaits and slightly bowed heads. Had it not been so sad, I would have laughed
at the cliché of it all. But they contrasted
with the occasional person sitting in a chair under the shade of some shop’s
awning. These would look at us and
wave. Calling their waves cheery might
have been a stretch, but they were at least friendly.
If ever I’d been to a purgatory
on Earth, this was it.
Ch'or sì or no s'intendon le parole.2
We stopped at a convenience
store that, like everything else in town, had seen far better days. Half the coolers were dark and bare. The other half were filled almost entirely
with beer, with a single narrow cooler on wheels devoted to soft drinks and
off-brand dairy. The distinct odor of
cigar smoke mixed with the dusty breeze of a window-mounted air-conditioner was
overpowering. A layer of dust that
covered a shelf of tchotchkes – ornaments and rough figurines and blank
baseball caps – was visible from several feet away.
The less said about the hot-dog
rollers, the better. Judging from the
consistency of the hot dog skins, they had started cooking during the Carter
administration. Judging from the smell,
they were literally skin filled entirely with grease. Judging from the grease on the rollers, this
was not the sort of grease that would have been permitted under the Hague Convention
on Chemical Weapons.
I would have reported the guy
to the U.N., but looking up the phone number would have been a hassle.
(This is also why I didn’t
report a friend of mine who made the absolute worst mixed drinks in
existence. Not in the world. Not in the U.S. Not even in our town. In.
Existence. Eventually I came to
understand that some evils must be tolerated for the Greater Good. The Greater Good in this case was the fact
that he provided us poor college students with free booze. I like to think that the existentialists
would have approved of my perspective here.)
The man behind the counter
barely looked at us as we purchased a case of Coors and the last four-pack of
wine coolers in the store for my friend’s mother. I wanted to ask my friend if he knew the man,
if some happy parts of his childhood still lingered. Since the man barely acknowledged us, though,
I suspected that would lead no place worth going.
By the time we arrived back at
the house, the sun had disappeared, though its luminal remnants lingered over
the tops of the trees in the distance. The
creep of night seemed interminable as we sat out on his porch drinking
increasingly-lukewarm beer. Nothing
happened. Nothing would happen. Nothing had happened. The sense of unbeing, unknowing, unloving,
and always undreaming weighed us down.
It was an odd sensation, undreaming within a dreaming, like drowsing
whilst fighting against drowning. The
more we woke, the more we slept. Bugs
bit us. We felt them and did not believe. We dreamed anxiously of the dark long before
the last ragged fragments of the day faded, and when it finally did, we sat in
the glow of the light from the window behind us and told what jokes we could
remember, dirty and clean, offensive and mild, anything to keep the ennui away.
I say ennui, and the name fits perfectly, a sighing insubstantial murmur
that can fill days with its afternotes and linger in the ozone that coats our
tastebuds. It was the Ennui, that haggard crow flapping
aimlessly this way and that through a landscape fit for little else, its dull
black eyes surveying the undreaming landscape.
In its wake, the vulture Entropy
scattered the intrinsic bones across the dust.
(If I try real hard, I can
almost pretend that I wasn’t the sort of pretentious twit that would idly
create an elaborate avian motif to describe being somewhat bored. Almost.
But I was young and filled with the vigorous intellectual nattiness of
an undergrad in college. So, while I
cringe nowadays just thinking about that tendency, I can forgive myself on the
grounds that no college student majoring in one of the liberal arts can be
considered truly collegiate until he or she has embrace pomposity. I know I did, after all, and self-awareness
is the first step on the path toward forgiveness. Just so long as I can laugh at myself – and I
certainly can, to a slightly unsettling degree – I can be redeemed.)
Though I wanted to draw him
into doing so, I refrained from asking my friend what the town had been like,
growing up.
That night, we slept in hot
rooms. That was the nature of Alabama
summers, so we were used to it. But one
never learns to be comfortable in the
drenching restless prickly-sweat of trying to sleep in steamy environments. I managed perhaps three to four hours of
sleep. No two of those hours were
consecutive. When I took a shower the
next morning, the water was tepid, and smelled like well-water. Which it was, so that was unsurprising. And I was used to tepid well-water. I’d drunk it plenty of times in my life. Tepid well-water, however, doesn’t leave on
feeling truly clean no matter how long one showers under it..
~***~
The next morning, we went walking. If you had asked us why we chose to do this,
I suspect my answer would have been, Might
as well, right? and my friend’s answer would have been a mumbling
incoherency of purpose. Walking was his
suggestion, and when I shrugged, he grabbed his cigarettes and headed out the
door before I could ask the all-important Why? I don’t think he knew why we were circling
around to the few identifiable residential properties nearby, smoking and
talking about pointless stuff.
(Mostly parties, bars, and all
the lovely women we knew, as I recall. I’m
not sure we ever talked at length about many other topics in all the time we
knew each other. At its heart, our
friendship was based on two constants – beer and heterosexuality – and we were
damned if we weren’t going to get as much mileage out of those topics as we
could while we were still young, shallow, and occasionally sober.)
The houses were uniformly old,
uniformly wooden, and uniformly marked with indelible dirt stains on peeling
paint. Only one of them could be seen
from my friend’s house, rising in the distance above a tobacco field adjacent
the back yard. Though it had stood empty
since before my friend left for college, he took me there first. The owners had died, and their heirs had come
by to visit only once before abandoning it for good.
I didn’t ask why my friend took
me there, but I suspected that some sort of symbolism was involved.
Maybe. My friend wasn’t really the most
metaphorically-inclined person I knew, to be honest.
But he was familiar with all of
the remaining neighbors, an aging group of countryfolk that would not – or,
more likely, could not – move away from this place of aching joints and
muttered conversations. They remained in
the only place they could imagine living out the remainder of their slowdreaming
drifting days in a world gone grey.
The men and women we met were
thin and gnarled, or fat and gnarled, or sometimes just fleshy and blotched,
and they seemed lost in their own thoughts even when they were giving you their
full attention. They looked you in the
eyes as they spoke, yet somehow managed to be looking anywhere but directly at
you.
At least when speaking with
me. I was a stranger, someone to treat
with the utmost civility, yet their voices sounded hollow, perfunctory. They spoke in intransigent monosyllables,
asking how I was and whether I was enjoying myself, almost as if puzzled at the
idea that I had come here willingly, that I was accompanying my friend to meet
the neighbors of my own volition.
They had no particular use for
outsiders come to gawp at the end of their days. I couldn’t blame them one bit. If they had to fade away, they should at
least have been allowed the dignity of solitude.
They favored my friend with
half-smiles and sincere Welcome backs,
but when he introduced me, they slumped back into their endless ennui. Politely, of course, ever so politely, but it
seemed as though they’d expended all their energy just welcoming my friend.
They moved slow, talked even
slower, and whatever purpose their actions and words once had, it had become
rote. I knew what they were going to say
before they said it – polite words of greeting, mumbled observations about the
weather, the heat, the crops and football.
One couple was obsessed with the times.
The times had left them behind. The times
weren’t bringin’ the right sort of rain.
The times had messed up the
way things oughta be, and maybe people in Washington, D.C. should stop screwing
around with the times.
Their confusion was
inarticulate but very palpable. And even
though none of the other neighbors spoke about the times as such, they all shared the same vague sense of dread and
consternation.
The houses all had open
windows. Their ages suggested they
probably didn’t have central air, though I did notice a window AC in a
kitchen. But I wondered if they’d run
the AC even if they had it. Power,
especially the electricity needed to cool an entire two-story house, cost
money, and money seemed to have deserted these places a while back. Inside, the furniture looked uniformly aged,
well-used, with cracks in the leather recliners, permanent creases in couch
cushions, and scuff marks on the wooden furniture. Perhaps some would call my term unkind. Well-used? Why not well-loved? And I’d agree. But the overall sense of desiccation left me
feeling that the unkind description seemed more apt. I felt like these items remained as mementos
to a time when they would have seemed new and luxurious, reminders of a days
when the parlors and living rooms would be filled with happy people, flush with
the incomes of steady work and optimistic about all the plans they could make
for the future.
I felt like I was standing over
their bones.
I felt like I was being given a
guided tour to the death of the American Dream.
The neighbor I remember best
was the last one we visited, a stooped black woman with thin hair and fat
breasts that hung over a well-rounded stomach.
Despite her appearance, her skin was far smoother than I thought possible
for someone her age. As we walked up to
the door, she was already there, opening it to meet us on a porch enclosed with
heavy canvas and layers of mosquito netting.
That is, the porch of anyone in the wetter parts of the South, at least
anyone with experience and common sense.
She moved about with the help
of a four-footed aluminum cane that had buckled slightly about a third of the
way down its length. She welcomed us
quite sincerely – and treated me far more kindly than the others we’d met – and
invited us to sit for a spell. Her word,
because you can’t grow up in the South without learning that a ‘spell’ is the
exact right measure of time for any decent interaction.
We chatted. She was a marvelous old lady, sort of a rural
Grand Dame of the best Southern tradition.
She nodded a lot, tapped the tip of her cane down when she was making a
joke, and liked to use the phrase Dontcha believe it?3 as a
punctuation to all manner of sentences.
When we left after 20 minutes
and a glass of ice tea (actually a bit too sweet for my tastes, but perfectly
brewed with the perfect amount of lemon) and were actually sad to do so. As we walked down the dirt driveway, toward
the road that may or may not have also been dirt, she stayed on the front porch
until we were out of sight, an elegant leftover of old-style Southern etiquette
that demanded she wait until her guests were well and truly gone before
abandoning her job as hostess.
On the walk back, I called her Grandmother when speaking of our time
there, as a reflexive mark of respect4. As in (as best as I can recall) Grandmother *Washington was very sweet,
wasn’t she?
My friend nodded, but corrected
me. “Oh, she’s actually just a couple
years older than my parents.” He raised
his hand to stop me before I even considered speaking. “Yeah, I know what you mean. She’s had a tough life, though, from what
she’s told me and my parents. Husband
died in an accident not long after I born.
Lost two kids before they were 5, and I think she had multiple miscarriages. That’s the impression I got, though, of
course, she never actually came out and said it. Only family I ever knew of was a nephew who
lives in Atlanta and stops by, or used to when I was living here, once or twice
a year.”
“Tough living out here,” I
said.
He nodded, and shrugged. I waited for him to say something, but the
walk continued in silence. So I just
finished my original comment. “Dying
small towns and farm communities can really grind a person down.”
My friend nodded again, this
time with a slight grimace.
~***~
And these are the thoughts I had as we worked our way
back to his house: All the slow
calcification of lifetimes spent out where survival depended on the sun and
soil, the rain and the endless slogs of churning mud, everything out here
trudged on and on until muted voices finally called each person, each aged
repository of sadness, home again at last.
The tragedy of the death of rural Americana in the burgeoning shadow of
the computer age, the failure of manual transmission amidst the endless digital
networks.
But I kept thinking about
Grandmother *Washington, who was younger than she looked and older than she should have
been. The specifics of her life were
unique to her, of course. The general tragedy
of scrabbling out the last few decades of their lives in a world dying of a
mouldering malaise, however, could be seen on the faces of everyone I met
there. She just gave them a memorable
face.
And, perhaps, a meaningful narrative. Though probably not. We want to find meaning in damned near
everything. Sometimes, things just don’t
have meaning. They simply happen because
that’s how life goes. It takes most
people a lifetime to understand that, if they ever manage to understand it at
all.
But I still remember Grandmother
*Washington walking out onto the porch, her eyes sharp but her movement
slow. Stooped before her time,
Grandmother hobbled onwards with no particular destination in mind. Just the blank horizon in this life, and
whatever rewards she might find in the next.
If that didn’t provide a perfect metaphor for the region, I can’t
imagine what would.
Metaphors aren’t meaning,
though. Just descriptions. Clarifications or obfuscations, ways of
giving substance to the bare bones of ideas.
And the town itself, with all
its deserted buildings, flaking signs and broken windows, remained a reminder
of the life that was. It was more
depressing than any ghost town in the same way that watching someone suffering
as they die is worse than the memorial service after. (And on this point, I can speak with vivid
authority. When you lose the two people
you love most in the world to cancer, when you sit by their bedsides day after
day until you are a razor’s edge away from breaking, you learn such things. It's been...a rough few years,) This was a place that once had schools. I saw a single sign boasting of some sort of
state-wide educational award at the elementary school, though I never saw the
school building itself. And, with
schools, children and dances and ice cream parlors. It had parents and homey restaurants and the
steady chatter of friends meeting for a bit between the chores and occupations
of their lives. It had two churches that
I saw, one Baptist, one Methodist, though I never asked my friend whether
either still held services.
The Baptist church, clearly the
older of the two, had a large cemetery filled with the mothers and fathers and
sisters and brothers of the town’s remaining inhabitants. It encapsulated the history of the town far
better than any spoken narrative could possible manage.
I think, perhaps, that I understood
what a lifetime out there meant, even if I couldn’t quite articulate it then. It wasn’t life lived, or the vasty deep of
time, or even the memories of years long gone.
It was the accumulation of sensations, of celebration and mourning, of
square dances at the abandoned Masonic Lodge and delectable foods that one
loved as a child and would never taste again.
This wasn’t a grand tragedy, some Euripidesian narrative of divine
curses and petty betrayal. This was loss
on the scale of bits and pieces, of cherished memories reduced to useless
sentiment. The sadness of these people
was unmistakable. It wasn’t ineluctable,
however, or even necessary. It was simply
a condition, the layers of sediment accreting on the dying corpse of a small
town. Whatever grandiloquent
philosophies might have once been offered, the aftermath was merely the silent
trudge down a diminishing country lane.
If I had to assign a name to
how I felt in that place, though, it wouldn’t be ‘sadness.’ It would be ‘loneliness.’ There was something terribly isolated about
this place, this bent and spindled memory of a community. The people were just biding their time,
I honestly don’t mean to wax
philosophic, and I say this with the full knowledge that I’m writing this down
and can go back and delete or modify or even simply redirect what has come
before. But there needs to be some
honesty. My friend’s real name is not
important. Nor is the town’s real
name. My own real name is absolutely
worthless. With the exception of
Grandmother *Washington, I’m not even certain I’m remembering most of the faces rightly any
more. Their natures, though? The faltering vigilance, the realization that
routines had long since lost any meaning?
Those I remember. The grim
lethargy, the expressionless brows, the abortive but sincere attempts to smile.
Was the home I stayed in a shade of light green or lavender? Shingle-board or vinyl siding? It was the only one-story house in that
particular area, so at least I remember that much. I’m pretty sure the driveway was gravel, but
it might have been sand, or old asphalt, or a dirt lane split into two tire
ruts along its entire length. I’m
absolutely certain that it doesn’t matter, and hadn’t mattered for many years
before I ever set foot in that place.
But sometimes things get
broken, you see. Life comes apart at the
seams and all good intentions and hard work come to nothing, shattered and
splintered into a million cracks that can no longer hold together. Abuse and carelessness and the dust-storms of
change chipped unrelentingly away. Later
that day, we drove into town to meet someone my friend wanted me to meet, and
we stopped at the A&P for a smoke since my friend stopped smoking in his
car while visiting to avoid his parents smelling it, either in the car or on
his clothes after smoking in a confined space.
Oddly, the A&P was perhaps one of the few buildings I’d seen in this
place that looked like it was open for business – clean, well-maintained,
windows filled with ads for sales and the painted lines in the parking lot
still looked relatively unworn by the elements.
It
was closed, of course. My friend told me
it shut down the previous year, having outlasted most of the local non-chain
businesses. When it first opened, it
supplanted a local grocery store that managed to survive only a year
after. As much as people wanted to
support the local store, it couldn’t match the prices or variety of the
A&P. (An old, old story, of
course. Nowadays it’s mostly told about
Walmart.) Even as they shopped at the
A&P, however, the locals vocally despised it. They would talk in harsh whispers over coffee
and breakfast at a local diner, and go to considerable effort to pretend
friends and family who worked there worked somewhere else.
And when it failed, people who
once hated the outsiders coming in, and would have cheered its demise 15 years
ago, now saw its failure as one last twist of the knife in their guts, a sign
that even the outside world no longer cared about or supported them.
And that, too, seemed
significant to me.
~***~
Footnotes:
1) Having lived a considerable amount of time in North
Carolina (indeed, I am currently living in Greensboro, just to the right of primo tobacco country) I’ve become quite familiar with the sight and scent of growing
tobacco fields. There’s nothing quite
like it, and I could tell at a glance, and sniff, that this field was doing
just fine.
2) Dante’s Purgatorio final sentence of Canto 9. Approximate translation, as best I can manage: “Now the words are clear, and now [they?] are lost.”
3) This was not actually the phrase she used, though it’s reasonably similar and similarly inapplicable to most sentences. She used it anyway. And, just for the record, while I doubt she’s still alive, I should make clear that I’ve changed a few other aspects to the story to avoid pinpointing her. Essentially, her appearance and race are the closest details to reality. Her slightly-crumpled cane actually existed, but she wasn’t the one who used that particular item. She used a cane, just not that one.
4) It’s a Southern thing, but not necessarily a universal Southern thing. It’s not even a consistent one – there are plenty of people very much like Grandmother *Washington that I never once spoke of with such an affectionate term – so there’s really no obligation to take up that habit.
~To Be Continued in Part II -- in which we learn the real reason my friend asked me along, to come, who we were going to meet, and why I’m thinking
about broken things -- to be posted when I damn well feel like writing it. Having spent approximately 5 hours on this one, I can't say when that might be except that it won't be tonight and probably not January 17, 2094. There's no story behind that particular date, but there is ominous music in the background. Feel free to play the ominous music of your choice.~
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