Essays

You can write anywhere. Just make sure you show up ready to do the job.

I watched my husband Bo paint the purple letters on the yellow header above the plexiglass door of my new free library. Visions of spines with names like Maya Angelou, Aldo Leopold, Salman Rushdie, and J.D. Salinger danced in my head. The neighbors up and down Devil Fork Road were going to love it — and I could create my own literary community.

Miss Betty’s column was never supposed to be funny. Still, every Christmas, after making the pilgrimage from Georgia to Water Valley, Mississippi, my sisters and I would read “Betty’s Week” aloud for guaranteed laughter. Scoring a copy of the North Mississippi Herald was a family tradition, right up there with perusing the staff picks at Square Books and snorfeling down pepper-flecked bacon at Big Bad Breakfast. 

I recalled, mistily, an incident at a carnival when I was 4 or 5. I’d wandered away from my parents, in pursuit of an enormous teddy bear. I followed the bear behind the Ferris wheel, through a canvas flap. As I looked on fondly, the bear ripped its head off — and lit a cigarette.

For my first 28 years — and for the eight years my mother and father were married before I was born — Billy and his addiction to alcohol ruled my family’s home life.

I had heard from my Memphis connection that Chilton was playing guitar in The Panther Burns, a rockabilly band led by singer Tav Falco. It seemed to me that the man who had written and sung Big Star’s “Kanga Roo,” “The Ballad of El Goodo,” “September Gurls,” “Daisy Glaze,” and “Thirteen” — famous songs now but virtually unknown in 1980 — surely couldn’t be moving among us in any known or normal form.