Thanksgiving 2007

The second annual "Central Florida Thanksgiving Cookfest and Effenpalooza" has concluded at Adam and April's. We decided to follow up last year's Indian feast with a contemporary traditional menu. See Joan's account for pics and details. Here are some random impressions:

• Is the buzzard Florida's state bird? It should be.
• If there is a worse stretch of interstate highway than I-75 between Lake City and the Florida Turnpike, I'd hate to see it.
• We passed two big college football venues Saturday and I was concerned about traffic. I thought our delay south of Gainesville was Florida/FSU related until traffic cleared after a big pile of laundry in the road. Somebody got to their destination last night with just the clothes on their back. All the Iron Bowl-ers were on campus already when we blew past Auburn. It was dead as usual.
  
• Cracker Barrel has added chicken livers to their regular menu. Oh, yeah.
• It is comforting to know that broadcast radio sucks all the way to central Florida and not just in Birmingham. Thank Marconi for the scan button.
  
• Classic rock is good for passing time if the car stereo will handle the bass and someone is quick on the volume control to shield little ears from questionable lyrics. Thanks, Mick. Thanks, Bryan. Thanks, Prince. Thanks, John.
  
• Is there a sanitary convenience-store restroom in the southeast? Are paper towels and soap rationed in Georgia/Florida? Ever heard of a mop?
  
• There is something otherworldly and impressive about big bales of cotton waiting to be ginned.
• Babies that can walk and talk add so much to a home. Especially if someone else has diaper detail.
• If you eat at a fast food restaurant attached to a gas station, you deserve whatever gastrointestinal discomfort you experience.
  
• Hiking in sand is quite a workout. Doubters should give the Lake Louisa trails a try.
• T-shirt, shorts, and barefoot feels under-dressed for roasting marshmallows around a campfire.
  
• Cool Whip on homemade pumpkin pie is like wearing a wide polka-dot tie with a tuxedo.
• I've tried to be cool and like wine but it tastes too much like cough medicine. I give up.
• Why does everyone respond to "I don't like deer meat" with "You've never had it prepared the right way"? My point: how come no one can prepare it the right way so I can like it?
• If a small town bills itself as historic, and you've never heard of the town, how historic can it really be?
• Is finding gas for "only" $2.91 really a victory to be celebrated?
  
• What were the town fathers thinking when they named Ty Ty, Georgia? Is there an official pronunciation that doesn't sound, umm, less than manly?
• What does it say about your family when your objective is to get home from vacation in time to see what color Mrs. Slocombe's hair is this week?
  

Death in Memphis, Part I

We've spent part of spring break in Memphis. We've been the proper tourists: river cruises, Beale Street, Graceland, Sun Studios, Gibson guitar factory, etc. We've eaten Gus's spicy fried chicken, Corky's bbq, and Dyer's burgers, deep fried in the original grease from 1912. We even saw an NBA game for $5 a head. (NBA Trivia - Q: Can you hear the basketball bounce off the floor from the $5 seats? A: No.)

We strayed off the tourist brochure map a couple of times, though. This morning, for instance, we spent a little over an hour at Elmwood Cemetery.

If you are thinking What kind of man takes his family to a cemetery on vacation? well, that would be me. Because they love me (and because I was driving), Joan and the kids kindly agreed to indulge my diversion all the while holding my promise of brevity over my head.

A cool, sparse drizzle struggled to wash the South Dudley Street grime off the windshield as I drove across the whitewashed bridge that arched over the railroad tracks and into the cemetery. The Victorian cottage that houses the cemetery office seemed inviting and the distinguished gentleman (bearing an uncanny resemblance to the late Ed Bradley) who appeared out of the safe when I entered the office wasn't at all surprised by my presence or my request for help locating a grave.

"Who are you looking for?" he asked.

"Shelby Foote," I replied.

"Ah, I can show you right where Shelby's at," he responded, with a warm, casual familiarity for both the subject of my search and location of his resting place. He highlighted the route to the grave on a photocopied cemetery map while explaining that Mr. Foote's family had yet to put up a headstone though the burial had taken place almost two years before. "You need to look for Jeffery Forrest's grave, and Shelby will be right next to that."

I turned to leave, and he asked me, "So, what brought you here today?"

I puzzled at the question, for I thought I had answered it earlier, but I replied, "I'm just an admirer of Mr. Foote's work and I thought it'd be interesting to visit his grave and pay my respects."

"Well, we're glad you stopped by. When you get to the grave, pull as far off the side of the road as you can. These roads weren't built for cars and they're mighty narrow. Enjoy your visit."

By then the rain had stopped and the clouds were breaking. I followed the map down the narrow passage bordered by grave markers of every shape and size and shaded by towering magnolias, dogwoods, and crape myrtles. When I reached the point on my map where the office manager's highlighter mark ended, I looked to the side of the road and located Jeffery Forrest's grave. Next to it, under a mighty forked magnolia, a tiny American flag hung limply in the stillness.

"Around the bend from Bolton's rumpled statue, a visitor comes upon what many consider the high point of the tour, Chapel Hill Circle, which contains the Forrest plot. Here Lieutenant Nathan Bedford Forrest was laid to rest in 1877, at the age of fifty-six, joining four of the five brothers who followed him at birth and preceded him in death, two of them as casualties of the war that gave him his nom-de-guerre, "Wizard of the Saddle," and earned him the reputation, widely acknowledged, of being the greatest cavalry commander of the Civil or any other war. Sixteen years later his wife was buried beside him, and both were removed in 1904 to rest beneath his equestrian statue in Forrest Park, just over an airline mile away, out Union Avenue in what had by then become the heart of the city." Elmwood: In the Shadows of the Elms by Perre Magness, from the introduction The Legacy of Historic Elmwood Continues... by Shelby Foote.

I became acquainted with Shelby Foote's writing as a freshman in college, though I didn't know it at the time. My US History to 1877 professor, Mr. Sandlin, passionately quoted Foote's accounts of Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston: how he had been branded the Savior of the Confederacy, how crowds had greeted him throughout the Confederacy on his way to Richmond to receive his orders, how he had led the Battle of Shiloh carrying a tin cup instead of a sword, the cup his share of Yankee spoils as an apology to a young lieutenant whose feelings he had hurt by chastising him for plundering an enemy tent, and most memorably the exchange between Johnston and his aide at Shiloh, Tennessee Governor Isham G. Harris, as the general's mortal wound was discovered.

IGH: General, are you hurt?
ASJ: Yes, and I fear seriously.

I searched for the source of that quotation for years, in vain. It wasn't until Ken Burns' The Civil War and my introduction to Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative that my search was rewarded and my interest in Foote and his writing blossomed.

When Foote died I was going through a rough time dealing with my grandmother's illness. On the day his death notice hit the Memphis paper I flew through Memphis on my way to Colorado and I got a copy of the paper in the airport. I knew if ever I was in Memphis, outside the airport, I'd have to make a trip to the cemetery, and this morning I made good on that promise to myself.

I had planned to read the aforementioned account of General Johnston at Foote's grave, but a river cruise tour guide's comments about the Civil War naval battle that took place just off Mud Island prompted me to read that instead. I figured the kids would relate to that better since they had been at that spot and had a frame of reference. They indulged my reading and then sped off to terrorize the dead while I wandered around, soaking up the experience.

A few minutes later the kids came running back to the flag marking Foote's grave. "Papa, you gotta come see the funny statue we found!" they cried, dragging me across the road. I could see the tarnished bust a good ways away but when I got close enough to read the name I got the shivers. We were standing at the grave of Tennessee Governor Isham G. Harris.



There is no way I could express what I felt at that moment to the kids, so I let Foote speak for me through the original passage I had intended to read at his grave.

...Johnston saw that the officers were having trouble getting the troops in line to go forward again. "Men! they are stubborn; we must use the bayonet," he told them. To emphasize his meaning he rode among them and touched the points of their bayonets with the tin cup. "These must do the work," he said. When the line had formed, the soldiers were still hesitant to reenter the smoky uproar. So Johnston did what he had been doing all morning, all along the line of battle. Riding front and center, he stood in the stirrups, removed his hat, and called back over his shoulder: "I will lead you!" As he touched his spurs to the flanks of his horse, the men surged forward, charging with him into the sheet of flame which blazed to meet them there among the blossoms letting fall their bright pink rain.
This time the charge was not repulsed; Hurlburt's troops gave way, abandoning the orchard to the cheering men in gray. Johnston came riding back, a smile on his lips, his teeth flashing white beneath his mustache. There were rips and tears in his uniform and one bootsole had been cut nearly in half by a minie bullet. He shook his foot so the dangling leather flapped. "They didn't trip me up that time," he said, laughing. His battle blood was up; his eyes were shining. Presently, however, as the general sat watching his soldiers celebrate their capture of the orchard and its guns, Governor Isham Harris of Tennessee, who had volunteered to serve as his aide during the battle, saw him reel in the saddle.
"General -- are you hurt?" he cried.
"Yes, and I fear seriously," Johnston said.
None of the rest of his staff was there, the general having sent them off on various missions. Riding with one arm across Johnston's shoulders to prevent his falling, Harris guided the bay into a nearby ravine, where he eased the pale commander to the ground and began unfastening his clothes in an attempt to find the wound. He had no luck until he noticed the right boot full of blood, and then he found it: a neat hole drilled just above the hollow of the knee, marking where the femoral artery had been severed. This called for a knowledge of tourniquets, but the governor knew nothing of such things. The man who knew most about them, Johnston's staff physician, had been ordered by the general to attend to a group of Federal wounded he encountered on his way to the far right. When the doctor protested, Johnston cut him off: "These men were our enemies a moment ago. They are our prisoners now. Take care of them." So Harris alone was left to do what he could to staunch the bright red flow of blood.
He could do little. Brandy might help, he thought, but when he poured some into the hurt man's mouth it ran back out again. Presently a colonel, Johnston's chief of staff, came hurrying into the ravine. But he could do nothing either. He knelt down facing the general. "Johnston, do you know me? Johnston, do you know me?" he kept asking, over and over, nudging the general's shoulder as he spoke.
But Johnston did not know him. Johnston was dead."
The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume I, Chapter 4, by Shelby Foote

I explained to the kids that minutes before we had been at the grave of the man who wrote those words about the man at whose grave we now stood. The connection was deeper than that for me, of course, but how to explain? My father had taken me to Shiloh as a child; I'd seen the tree that marked the spot where Johnston died. Later, as an adult, I'd heard a park ranger from Shiloh tell a Civil War roundtable audience of Governor Harris's reticent return to Shiloh to help find the spot for historians. Add to that the aforementioned passion of a beloved teacher and a coincidental discovery by a couple of rambunctious kids running off energy while waiting for their old man to get his head out of the philosophical clouds and it all comes full circle. Where else but a cemetery can a twentieth-century writer truly convene with literary subjects of a prior century that died before he was born? How better can he affiliate with a family he so admired than to be buried beside them? How more tangibly can a reader connect a writer's words with his subject's actions and bring those actions to life again? How, pray tell, can noble deeds of past centuries live on, but through words?

I took a few steps toward the car before I realized that the bust on Governor Harris's grave was staring towards that small American flag on Chapel Hill Circle. I will remember this day until I die, or until words fail me.

Tandoori Thanksgiving

Our friends Adam and April moved to Florida in August. Because of Adam's work schedule, among other things, they knew they wouldn't be coming "home" for Thanksgiving so they invited us to visit them.

It really was a no-brainer, accepting the invitation, once I heard that there would be cooking involved. I trudged up the attic stairs in search of old Bon Appetit November back issues, drooling over possible herbs to encrust the bird with and pondering exotic sides with which to surround its golden-baked carcass.

Joan and April burned precious cell minutes planning the menu before Joan announced one day that we were having Indian food for Thanksgiving.

Well, duh. There were Indians at the first Thanksgiving. And they brought food. Corn, potatoes, berries, pemmican, etc. Indian food.

Only Joan wasn't talking Indian as in Squanto and Massasoit. More like Shashi and Mujibar.

It was an intriguing idea. I love Indian food. One of our favorite restaurants is Taj India here in Birmingham. I've had some great meals there. I just don't know how to pronounce most of the stuff and I especially don't know what goes into it.

Also, I'm not so stuck on traditional Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is my all-time favorite holiday, but Joan and I once caught the stomach virus from hell on a Thanksgiving weekend so for several years we did anything but traditional. We did burgers one year, barbecue the next. Anything but turkey and cranberry sauce. That's all I have to say about that.

So following an uneventful 9-hour drive to central Florida, we were barely in the door when Joan began parsing out recipe printouts and little plastic bowls of spices. Without further adieu, here is the complete menu and the responsible chef:

• Papaya Chutney (April)


• Walnut Chutney (Brian)


• Sheer Kurma (Joan)


• Chana Masala (Brian)


• Navratna Korma (April)


• Palak Paneer (Brian)


• Curry Chicken (April, recipe from a neighbor)


• Rice Roti (Joan)

Sparing you the details of what goes on in a frantic Indian kitchen, this feast ROCKED! Absolutely rocked. Not a dud dish in the bunch. I can't speak for the others, but some notes on the dishes I was responsible for:

• The masala in Chana Masala is a base of tomatoes, peppers, garlic, and onions that would have made a pretty good salsa were we doing a Mexican Thanksgiving. However, it is fried in oil until it becomes a paste, and then it is brought to boil just before the chana (chickpeas) are added. This base would be excellent with some lamb in it.


• The paneer in Palak Paneer is milk curds. I used this recipe, and quite honestly, this was the most frustrating part of the whole process. I wasn't sure what I was after and couldn't tell whether I was doing the right thing, though I did an awful lot of stirring. I believe paneer is Sanskrit for "much patience required."

This was truly one of the best Thanksgiving experiences of my life. The food, the fellowship, the challenge, and the end result were a recipe for success.

Shashi and Mujibar would be proud.

Tombstone, Alabama

Aunt Becky was blessed with some unseasonably warm weather for her weekend visit. As well as some rain. She enjoyed listening to the rainfall Sunday night. Apparently it doesn't rain much out west where she lives.

She had told me a couple of weeks ago that she wanted to drive up to our hometown and see how things had changed. I don't get up there much anymore so it sounded like a good idea to me. I asked her what she wanted to see, mentally mapping out the most efficient tour route of schools we'd attended, businesses we'd patronized, and houses we'd lived in or visited the kinfolks in. She predictably named a few of them before mentioning one specifically.

Will you take me to see Mammy?

Mammy. Wow. I hadn't been to see her in several years. Mammy was Aunt Becky's grandmother; my great-grandmother. She was a sweet thing, and I feel robbed that I didn't know her in her prime. She was stricken with Parkinson's disease shortly after I was born; my memories consist of her shuffling along behind an aluminum walker and her sitting cross-legged in a big naugahyde chair wearing a cotton house dress with her thumbs and forefingers clacking together uncontrollably like an ambidextrous telegraph operator. She died over twenty years ago, during my first semester of college. On the day of her funeral I left the college bookstore after spending the astronomical sum of $180 buying textbooks to find a parking ticket on my windshield for having my back bumper hanging over a yellow curb in one of those welcome-to-the-real-world-you-ain't-in-high-school-no-more cosmic coincidences.

Yes, I'll take you to see Mammy, I replied. But that wasn't all. She wanted to see where Mammy's sisters were buried, so I agreed to take her there. And then she wanted to see where her father's (my grandfather's) folks are buried, and I agreed to take her there. And to the schools. And to the businesses. And to the houses.

It was quite a list but I thought it through and had a pretty good route picked out. There were a couple of shortcomings with my plan, however. First, it would take a good bit of time and miles to fit it all in. Second, Joan, Evan, and Lora wanted to go as well.

I wasn't worried about Joan. She has proven time and again that she will follow me anywhere. Lora was a natural concern simply because her age, attention span, and bladder capacity are all in the single digits. Evan was a concern because, well, because he's Evan.

Evan and I often clash during those teachable moments between a father and a son. If I explicitly try to impart some knowledge to him about something, he sometimes rebels with exasperated huffs and eye-rolls. He told me the last time we were at Vulcan Park as I pointed out the cooling towers of Miller Steam Plant on the horizon, Please, dad, no more geography! Being cooped up in a van with him for a couple of hours of intermittent cemetery stops didn't sound like the best possible Saturday, but for Aunt Becky's sake I determined that if I could handle it, he could too.

We quickly checked the first two cemeteries off our list. Cemetery #1 is where Mammy's sisters, their husbands, and some of their kids are buried. We tried to recall whose funerals we had attended and whose we hadn't and why. Our people buried in cemetery #2 died way before we were gleams in anyone's eyes, but I had discovered the graves during genealogical research some years back and thought Aunt Becky would be interested. Back on the road, we did the school, business, house portion of the tour before stopping for a bite to eat to fortify ourselves for cemetery #3.

I drove right to Mammy's grave as if I visit it every day. It was just as I remembered. Mammy and Papa, her husband (my great-grandfather), are buried between a dogwood tree and a white pine on a downslope near the edge of the cemetery. Mammy's mother, Mama R, is buried beside her. Mama R died when I was in first grade; her funeral is the first one I remember.

Evan soon wandered off as we stood in reflective silence over the graves. After a while he called me to come check out a soldier's grave marker he had found. Then, he found the grave of someone born in the 1800's, and then someone who lived into their nineties, and then someone with a familiar name. He began to connect husband's graves with those of their wives and then their children. I showed him the grave of a congressman's wife and then a grouping of Jewish merchant's graves, clustered together on a hillside in much the same order as their stores were arranged on Main Street. I showed him the grave of one of my neighbors growing up whose daughter he knows. Suddenly and inexplicably, in between simple stones and ostentatious monuments, the past connected with the present for Evan, and it was almost all I could do to get him back into the car so we could make the remainder of our stops before dark.

We drove past Mammy and Papa's old house and Mama R's last residence on our way to cemetery #4. I found my great-great-grandfather's grave, and I remembered a story my grandfather told me about how they loaded his grandfather into a wagon after he died to take him to the highway because the ambulance wouldn't come to the farm to get him. It was so cold they had to build a fire to thaw the ground enough to dig his grave, so cold was the winter of '32 in Alabama. As I passed the story to Evan, it began to rain.

It was an emotional day, for me and Aunt Becky more than the others; for Aunt Becky most of all. After all, she was 1,800 miles away from home and didn't know when she might pass this way again. I was glad I could share it with her, and I was glad that Evan felt a spark of interest for something that I didn't prompt. I hope he never forgets the day we toured the cemeteries with his great-Aunt Becky. I know I won't.

And yes, Mammy, we still miss you.

Not my bag

We made a roadtrip to Atlanta today to pick up my Aunt Becky who is visiting from out west.

Aunt Becky doesn't get back this way very often anymore, but she has a professional association meeting in Atlanta next week and she flew in early to spend a long weekend with her favorite nephew and his fam. We were all too happy to meet her at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

It isn't every day that I jump at the chance to go to Atlanta. Atlanta is high on my "been there, done that" list. I mean, one traffic jam on I-285 looks like another, and once you've driven down one street with Peachtree embedded in the name you've driven down them all. To me, the only saving grace to the whole city is their mass transit system, known as MARTA.

As soon as I heard about Aunt Becky's trip I immediately began to contemplate the stress-free journey from the Hamilton E. Holmes station (W5) to the Airport station (S7) with no traffic, parking, or other concerns inherent to our culture's obsession with all things automotive. We left our modest suburban driveway a little before 7:00 a.m., and two hours later we were standing in the drafty Holmes terminal, trying to get the token machine to work.

Now, I had already figured out our fare requirements for the day. Lora, being four, could ride for free, which meant that we need three tokens to get to the airport (me, Joan, and Evan) and four to get back (us + Aunt Becky). At $1.75 per, I needed $12.25 to by the seven tokens. I had a twenty, a ten, and a couple of ones in my wallet, and of course, no machine in the building would take my ten. Which meant I had to use my twenty, which meant I purchased four tokens more than I needed. And that griped me. What am I going to do with four extra MARTA tokens? I mentally screamed at the machine(s). Thanks for nothing!

But my private rant notwithstanding, Joan, Evan, Lora, and I boarded the train and were soon locomoting through the Atlanta cityscape. Five stops to the Five Points station, a transfer to the southbound train, and seven stops and an escalator ride later we were waving across Delta's baggage claim concourse to Aunt Becky, who had just arrived and retrieved her bags from carousel 5.

Joan grabbed Aunt Becky's backpack, Evan grabbed her small carry-on, I grabbed her large rolling suitcase, and Lora grabbed her hand and we all traipsed back to the MARTA station. We were in the airport terminal maybe ten minutes, max. Northbound train to Five Points, transfer to the westbound train, and five stops later we were wheeling luggage toward the exit in anticipation of pointing the chariot back to the Magic City.

I was about to hoist the big bag chest-high so I could maneuver through the exit turnstile when Aunt Becky uttered some pretty ominous words. You know, I don't think that's my bag. I screeched to a halt before the turnstile and did a did-you-say-what-I-think-you-said 180 degree turn. I sat the bag upright on its wheels and I noticed for the very first time a small white tag containing the name and address of the bag's owner, which unfortunately did not match the name of my Aunt Becky. We had someone else's bag.

I can tell you that all kinds of questions go through your mind when you are standing at an exit turnstile holding someone else's bag, such as:
1. Is there something illegal in this bag that's gonna land my careless, didn't-verify-the-claim-check butt in the Fulton County Jail?
2. Has [unfortunate owner of bag] already left on his/her flight to Brazil for a month-long Amazon expedition without their life-saving supply of insulin?
3. You mean I'm gonna have to ride the train all the way to the airport and back before I can get to Cracker Barrel for lunch?
4. Is that why neither token machine would take my ten and I had to buy four extra tokens?

The answers to those questions are:
1. I don't know
2. I don't know
3. Yes
4. Yes

So off we went. Again. Five stops to the Five Points station, a transfer to the southbound train, and seven stops and an escalator ride. I began to feel like a MARTA regular. I actually thought at one point, man, we're at Oakland City already? We dropped off [unfortunate owner]'s bag at the baggage service counter and backtracked to carousel 5 to find Aunt Becky's bag still traveling around in circles.

I kinda know how the bag felt.

Welcome back to Birmingham, Aunt Becky.

No wonder Ralph Kramden was a grouch

Is there any lonelier job than driving a bus in Birmingham?

I saw a Greyhound bus on 280 today heading into town. There was one passenger on board. One. She was a middle-aged African-American woman wearing a red hat. She sat three rows behind the driver on his side of the bus, staring straight ahead as he did.

I wonder where she came from. How does it feel to be the only passenger on a bus leaving town? Are you thinking Those fools can stay there if they want but I'm getting out while the gettin's good or are you thinking How come nobody else is leaving?

I wonder where she was going. How does it feel to be the only passenger on a bus arriving in town? Are you excited to be ahead of the crowd, with the opportunities to yourself at your first-come, first-served feet? Or are you questioning your judgment, wondering if you missed the Welcome to Nowheresville sign at the city limits?

How does it feel to be the driver of a one-passenger bus? Gotta be some weird economic indicator karma going on there. This chick's fare won't buy the diesel fuel for this trip, much less pay my salary. What kinda two-bit outfit have I hooked up with? It just ain't cool tooling in a big ole bus like this with only one passenger.

He probably doesn't know it, being an out-of-town Greyhound driver, but it could be worse. He could be driving a MAX bus down 280. They never have any passengers.