IT HAPPENED AGAIN

About 6:00 p.m. this evening, I met this narrow fellow* not "in the grass" but descending the stairs. I believe he is the same Southern Water Snake (Mangrove race, the Nerodia fasciata of the Colubrid Snake Family) I met as I climbed the stairs about 10 days ago, shortly after Mrs. Carolina Wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus, Wren Family) laid three lovely eggs in the nest she and Mr. C. Wren had built in the planter full of spider plants opposite the front door. This poor couple has had a time of it: first, they built a nest downstairs and I, not knowing it was in the wooden cube I picked up, managed to dump the entire nest onto the ground. They probably thought they'd be safer upstairs, so days later they were weaving back and forth with bits of pine needles and pieces of string. I meant to give them a wide berth, but the first time I dared look into the nest, poor Mrs. Wren flew straight up into my face, frightening me and probably herself. I have not seen the birds since.

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,--did you not,
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,--
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

*See more about Emily Dickinson and her poetry at http://www.online-literature.com/dickinson/

Besides this narrow fellow on the stairs, another party for the book happened last Friday night, in Madison, FL, that lovely southern town with handsome courthouse, 19th century mansions, three rivers nearby and many first magnitude springs, The "Four Freedoms Monument" commissioned by FDR to commemorate the death of Madison's Capt. Colin P. Kelly, the first hero of World War I, and the building right off the square that houses Janet Moses & Co. where 70 people turned up for a reading so congenial, so warm, I felt we were dancing. (See more of Madison at http://www.madisoncountyfl.com/county-information.aspx) We were serenaded with Florida folk songs from the Willinghams of Jasper, FL, the food was ambrosial, and our conversations lasted hours after I'd finished presenting SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place. Lastly, here is my B&B hostess, Rae Pike, showing off her replica Confederate dress jacket.

UPDATE on SOUTHERN COMFORTS: Rooted in a Florida Place

Sold out at Goerings Bookstore in Gainesville on 13 January with a standing-room-only crowd; so many old friends, I thought for a moment I’d stepped into a “This Is Your Life” episode. Also, on 19 January at Brooker Creek Preserve in Tarpon Springs, a lively discussion of Florida’s environmental problems and how we can honor one another’s opinions by “agreeing to disagree.” On Sunday, the 20th: calls from my Cauthen cousins saying they love the book; it means something to them.

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"YOU WILL NOT WALK THIS WAY AGAIN"

On New Year’s Day, 1 January 2008: I drove the back way to Live Oak, listening to “Robert Cole” (see note below), a song about a young boy, waiting for his ninth birthday.

“Hey, little man,” the song begins, “ . . . . tomorrow’s your big day.” It’s his birthday, but the singer speaks of “a swell of shame and sadness.” The song’s refrain tells us,

“I am your mother./ I told your oldest sister, your baby brother,/ your dog, Champ, and your best friend/ that your name is Robert Cole/ and tomorrow you are nine years old. /But you, you will not walk this road again.”

Driving past the last of the bronzed foliage along our winter road, I wiped my eyes, shut off the CD, stopped for coffee.

The man facing me from the next booth in Waffle House could have been Harry Crews’s younger brother, or maybe Harry himself, 30 years ago.

“Well, at least you got a roof over your head,” the man said to the woman whose face I couldn’t see, a woman whose red hair was caught up in back with a gleaming aqua clip.

“I might get married again,” she answered.

In “Robert Cole,” the parents fight. His father has left his mother on her knees, cursed, and said, “My life is mine,” then speaks to his young son about family, sacrifice, and children. Over and over in the song, Robert’s warned by father and mother not to walk the blacktop road that burns his feet. Robert Cole will be walking a different road. No longer a child and without a father at age nine, he won’t be hop scotching along a hot tar road, but remembering tire tracks “that’ll lead you down and round to where a car’s off in the ditch,” evidently his father’s car because now Robert Cole is “the one to take my daddy’s place,” and “ . . .. I will not walk this road again.” Cole’s father has died violently and made age 9 forever the demarcation between childhood play and the “heavy load” of an adult understanding, the knowledge of loss and how pain twists within a family.


After the woman said “I might get married again," the Waffle House man nodded, pushed the one coffee cup across the table, toward her. The late afternoon sun lit his face. A young girl with dark eyes who must have been seven or eight years old crowded in beside the woman, twisted around so her back was to the man, stared into my eyes.

When they got up to go, the man lifted a sleeping girl to his shoulder, a girl I hadn’t seen; so there were two children. Carrying a paper cup with a straw in one hand, the woman followed along behind the man. The staring girl followed too, but with her head twisted back, looking backward through her large brown eyes.


This little girl, wherever she was going, she wasn’t coming back here again. Her eyes never left my face. Out in the parking lot, the girl and her folks climbed into the cab of a moving truck. “BUDGET: Moving Up” ran in red letters across its length and fastened behind were a red pickup with no license tag, two German Shepherds inside that were wildly ricocheting off the windshield, a red Craftsman tool box in the truck’s back bed, and a child’s bicycle. Anybody could see this was a big move: the first week of the New Year; school wouldn’t start for another week.

“Please tell your mother/your older sister and baby brother/your dog Champ and your best friend/that your name is Robert Cole and tomorrow you are nine years old/But you, you will not walk this road again.”

That long moving truck with the man, woman, two girls, pickup, dogs, tools, and bicycle pulled out onto the highway, crossed the lane heading back to the Interstate, and pulled into a Shell station. I followed them and watched from the parking lot nearest the station.

They finally pulled out and headed toward the Interstate. I watched both ramps, one going east to Jacksonville, the other leading west to Tallahassee. A house trailer and a LOOMIS security truck followed them.

A long time passed before the trailer and LOOMIS truck appeared on the I-10 overpass, “Robert Cole” was playing again on my car stereo, a piano tinkling delicately. After the fireman calls “This one’s torn to hell” we realize the unrecognizable accident victim’s face is that of Robert Cole’s father. The boy sings on, telling how innocence was hammered out of him, how, on the morning before his ninth birthday, he lost one life and was catapulted into another. Over and over, we hear the words

“ . . . . sister/brother/father/mother/dog/best friend”; the familiar, now lost borders of a child’s world.

***

NOTE: Brent Best, on JUST ONE MORE: A Musical Tribute to Larry Brown, a Great American Author.
See http://www.bloodshotrecords.com/album/bloodshotrecordscompilations/293

The reenactment of the Civil War's Battle of Olustee (which was won by the Rebs) is a few days away and here's a gentleman setting up for customers.