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.
Last year, we were entertaining a visiting Nashville couple at a gorgeous, candlelit jazz bar in downtown Bangkok, where we have lived for eight years, when the man — a powerful, intelligent, and well-respected friend of ours — leaned across the table, clicked his gin and tonic against my husband’s glass and said, “Curt, you’ve given your family such a wonderful life.” This man is progressive, thoughtful, funny, someone I admire deeply. But his words landed like a gut punch.
She would mute the television, and together we would say the prayers and responses of the Rite before I served her communion. I remember us always looking directly into each other’s eyes at that moment, bonded not only as mother and son-in-law, but in our faith.
