Survivor’s Guilt
May 7, 2010 Fortunate. Lucky. How many times have I said these words in the last week? How many times have I felt them as I clicked through photos of the devastation, feeling like a rubbernecker on the highway?
Essays
After Eudora
A friend of mine spent his childhood “playing church” and arguing over whose turn it was to preach and whose to be saved. And a relative recently attended a wedding reception where the centerpiece was a whole hog, smoking away in a homemade smoker on a trailerbed still hitched to the pick-up truck. When the owner got mad about something or other, he got in and drove away, pulling the smoking hog on the trailer behind him. (More potato salad, anyone?) These stories are true, and funny, and Southern. But they are also potential fodder for some bad Southern fiction.
The (Im)Perfect Word
Writers are always looking for the perfect word, the perfect sentence. Put a bunch of writers together for a little while and you’ll most likely hear one of them declare, “I love that word,” in response to something someone has uttered. Words have power. Words mean something. Words live and breathe. But what happens when the perfect word is one that you do not want to use?
Waking the Peace Dragon
Linda Ragsdale, Nashville children’s book author and illustrator, was severely wounded in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, which left more than 170 people dead and injured hundreds more. Choosing to make a mission of love from the darkness she experienced, Ragsdale has created a website, www.thepeacedragon.com, that puts this mission into action.
That Close
In the first week of June 1966, Stokely Carmichael was in Memphis. Chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and a veteran of the civil-rights trenches, he had been arrested repeatedly since 1961’s Freedom Rides. At 24, he was becoming frustrated with the pace of change, doubtful it could be achieved without violence. In the first week of June 1966, Stokely Carmichael was days away from breaking with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., days away from raising his fist as he emerged yet again from prison in Greenwood, Mississippi, and making his famous speech advocating “Black Power.”
In the first week of June 1966, in Memphis, I was a high-school cheerleader.
Roadside Zoo
On a trip to Maine, my wife and I saw more dead animals than live ones. I became morbidly fascinated by them. That smudge on the road was amphibian, I would think, his cold humor drawn to the stone warmth of highway on a passionate night. Overturned, an ottoman would aim its wooden legs like this dead possum. The immigrant coyote? A wild rug flung on the carpeted ditch. And all those raccoons, their comic bandit role forgotten in these deathbed scenes.
