Two Faces Have I

All of the art I've wanted to make lately has had some sort of dual nature. Some sort of perfection contrasted with some kind of deformity. I'm dreaming of a perfect wing and a broken wing. I'm thinking of an angel's face with a scar running down the middle. My next sculpture is going to be a tree with a broken limb. An iron tree. That's a contradiction in itself, maybe.


I'm a creature of contradictions. I guess we all are. Something in me wants to bring evil to myself. I want to eat too much. I want to drink too much. I want to watch too much television. And that's a good day. Sometimes, I want to get in the car and just drive till I can't anymore. At the same time, something in me really wants to take two handfuls of life. I want to do art. I want to write. I want to be with friends. I want to celebrate my marriage. I want to pray. As I walk this path, I pray that Jesus will draw me to the life. I pray that he will save me from the dark. It scares me to admit that there is something inside of me that wants to kill me. But, I know it won't. It can't. Maybe that's what this "being saved" is about. Saved from hell? Sure. Maybe even better, though, is being saved from that three-stranded evil (flesh, devil, sin) that's wrapped around my soul. Saved. Delivered. Entirely. No matter how hard I try, I can't won't kill myself. But I might always want to.

I think I've really grasped life twice in my life. The first time was when I begged God to save me. The second time was when I married David. I want to live. And I want to live abundantly. I have life and death set before me. I choose life. Now, I pray I'll be able to make the little lifeward movements my everyday existence requires. As a habit and a way of being.

Amen.

Hey Little Bird, Fly Away Home. Your House is on Fire and Your Children are Burning.

The world is on fire. The smell of burning timber from South Georgia, East Alabama, and Central Florida has made a home in the Jones Valley and obscures the buildings and the television towers, Sloss Furnace and the far side of the Valley. I can't see farther than about 11th Avenue. The smoke is in my hair and eyes and it burns my nose when I have to go outside. David and I visited the Okefenokee Swamp something like four years ago this summer. I don't like the idea of the cypress and cedar and lilies and mosses burning, burning, burning all through the days and into the nights. We need some rain. Please God, we need some rain.

Lately, I've had the idea that something is very very wrong with the world. The very things that make us human, or at least remind us that we are, are missing. We don't talk like humans. We don't eat like humans. We don't love like humans. We don't fight like humans. This is a nation of automatons fighting over half-million dollar houses in manicured neighborhoods still longing for something. We bow to the idols of religion and community when what we need are friends. Perforate community and put it on a roll. What I need is one good friend. Or two. In this respect, I am a wealthy woman.

Blackberries Grow on My Grave

So, it's been a while since my last update. Several of the happenings of the last 19 days beg to be remembered, but I'll focus on one. Last weekend, we went to an iron pour at Sloss. It was the culmination of one of the summer's first open studio sessions, and there were something like ten artists actually suited-up and pouring. There were also a handful of Old People who had participated in a class offered by the Birmingham Museum of Art and were standing behind the safety line to observe iron being poured into the sand molds they made. I don't call them Old because they were advanced in years, but because they appeared to be cultured to near-death. They wore years of season tickets to the symphony, classes at the BMA, and museum-sponsored galas and banquets on their faces like they had been stamped there by a power hammer. Their presence confirmed my long-held suspicion that pretension is aging. I dare go as far as to say that Pretension Kills. I wonder at the prospect of making a mold and watching someone else pour the iron and crack the mold while you watch. In my mind, that's the art of the process. If it doesn't require a hard-hat and a welding jacket, it probably isn't much fun. And that's my opinion. Life necessarily means dirty hands. .

I think the wilderness is trying to imprison Sloss in a tangle of poke weed and blackberry bramble. Like a battalion of slow-moving infantrymen, the green encroaches on the casting shed and the old bath-houses now used as artist studios. I'm not referring to the refurbished number two furnace where you might go to see a concert or be scared out of your wits at a haunted house. I mean the old number one furnace on the other side of the blower-wheels and towers. The casting shed of the number one shelters something like four small furnaces, several mig and arc welding rigs, a forge or two and a large crane used for the metal arts programs. Here, iron is still poured at Sloss, and I think nature wants to bury the scar of it under green tangles and Virginia Creeper. There are still signs posted for the last men who worked at Sloss in 1971. Protect your hands. Your wage earners. You owe it to your family. Two soft, white hands are clasped together under the words. I wonder if anyone but me sees the irony (ha ha) in that. I made some jam from the Sloss blackberries last week and although it might be my perverted sense of taste, I swear it adds a metallic twang to my brown toast. In the end, when all of our industrialism has amounted to nothing, the world will end under a tangle of blackberry brambles, Virginia Creeper and poke weeds. Just ask Walker Percy.

On another note, here's a very cool exhibition in Auburn. My neighbor is one of the artists. You must go.

Tomato Heaven

There are something like seven baby tomatoes on my German Queen this morning. One of my neighbors calls it a "Drag Queen." She says that would be more appropriate in this neighborhood. When she tells a joke, one of her eyes does a little half wink and her mouth kind of puckers up. She plants sticks in her yard and they grow into Oak Leaf Hydrangeas. That's her spiritual gift. I think she sneaks around at night and takes cuttings of other neighbor's plants and makes them grow in her laboratory. It doubles as a kitchen. I imagine her mug-shot. She'd be posed front-side-otherside with gloves and garden shears.

I've a Better Bush plant as well. It's not an heirloom like the German Queen, but it works it's heart out making smallish red fruit out of air and soil and water. (And Miracle Grow, of course.) Last weekend, I planted a Super Fantastic and a Mr. Stripey. I'm wishing them well. They're my friends and I'll have to learn how to salvage their seeds to bring them back next year.

The hollyhocks are growing brilliantly. Last year, their flowers were pure white, but this year I've got some pinks too. They came off the same seed, so I'm not sure how that is possible. It makes me happy and reminds me of Marguritte who gave them to me two summers ago. I've got more than I can manage and I'm happy. I hope Marguritte is doing half as well as her hollyhocks.

The sunflowers look like weeds in the flowerbed. I wonder how long I can continue to grow unruly weeds in my flowerbed and strange vines in 5-gallon buckets on the front stoop before I get a letter from the city.

Maybe,Baby, The Gypsy Lied

Somewhere up north of here, there is a field full of strawberries in the middle of the sky. The best berries hide in the middle of the rows shaded by green-leaf fans and white flowers with buttercup centers that remind me of the dumplings with the buttery middles my father tried to steal from me when I was small. Pay seven dollars and walk down a sandy path past the Old Lady with Her Bum in the Air. (Don't say "follow the old lady bum!" Because that bum belongs to someone's mother.) Pick quick and try not to think of what it would be like to be a migrant picker. That just makes your back hurt. By this time tomorrow, I'll have jam. And shortcake. I left a bucket on my neighbor's porch. He spread them out and took a picture for his Big Love Thing who lives very far away and likes to eat strawberries and beef jerky for supper. He has sad eyes. She'll be here to stay soon. I'm glad about that.

Today as I drove back over the Mountain toward home, I saw the sun fall like a crimson comet into the western part of the city. Now, the moon is coming up under Vulcan and the WBRC sign, just to the left of the first tower. It's almost time to sleep, so I'll put on my white pajamas and crawl under my quilt. Lately, I've been sleeping underneath just the quilt. It makes me feel loved. Tomorrow for breakfast, I'll have strawberries and bread left on my porch by a kind stranger. I'm not used to affection of that sort. It feels like a massage: theraputic and a little painful. I hang on the cusp of anger and acceptance. This feels like grief. I send it to the Cross. Amen. Good Night.

Is that Me baby, or just a Brilliant Disguise?

I had just finished paying for two bottles of Safer spray and twenty pounds of soil when the rain started. The people in the checkout line scratched and pecked like yard chickens when the wind picked up and the clouds moved in. I think it's going to rain. Do you think it might? I hope I can get to the car in time. Where are the Venus Flytraps? Can someone bring them to me? I don't want to get out of line! The Holy Spirit and I shared a joke at their expense: do you remember that time we..? Yes. I remember. Are you going to make it rain? I might. Bring it. Bring it like you did back then. And the sky, ripped apart by His laughter in lightning, opened up and the rain fell down on the asphalt and the cars and the people who covered their heads inadequately. Sinners in the hands of a mirthful God. In the liturgy for Whitsunday, Jesus says ...and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him. It's a strange and intoxicating thing to have the only Son of God be manifest. If it's something we're able to share with others, I haven't been able to. If it happens in community, I haven't seen it. I believe there's a margin between what human fellowship can offer and what a body needs to hold itself together. No matter how we idolize our human communities and try and make them stretch across that black expanse, they always snap back into their prefabricated shapes and forms. They can't span the distance and cover a lonely human soul. And that, I believe, is evidence of a merciful God. Because it's in the gaps and the margins that Jesus chooses to manifest himself to those who love him and are loved by the Father. No church, no community, no sermon, no communion, no sacrament is as sacred to me as the jokes we tell each other when the Holy Spirit and I are alone together. It's Jesus manifesting himself because I love him. And he loves me.

Neighborhood Part 11

Laura's belongings are piled up on the sidewalk. A model ship, clothing in tiny sizes, laminated posters and other detritus sit abandoned under the Chinaberry tree collecting rain and becoming bedding for the feral cats who make Southside their home. Piles like hers are all over Southside. I used to think they represented irresponsible neighbors who just dumped their junk in the street as they moved, but it finally dawned on me that they're the scars of hasty evictions. The piles look like junk because all of the tenant's valuable possessions have long since been traded for drugs or found their way to one of Birmingham's pawn shops. Each pile represents a person. Laura's pile is the collected flotsam and jetsam of her life. Her clothing. Things she treasured and couldn't trade. Marks of her identity under the rain, under the wind, under feet, under cars as if her life were a mark on a chalkboard that could be removed with one swoop of the landlord's eraser. I don't know if it's wrong, but I'm glad she's gone. And I don't blame the landlord for evicting her. She didn't leave him with a choice. It's just that I feel compelled to eulogize her murdered future somehow. Here lived Laura. She is a wrecked shell of a human being, but she is still a human being. She murdered her dreams, but she still had them. Once upon a better time, here in this house, under these Chinaberry trees.

I've learned a little more about Laura's dreams over the past weeks. In an unsurprising twist of fate (unsurprising only because nothing is very surprising anymore), I discovered I have a friend who worked with Laura before she relapsed back in January. My friend actually found Laura a little intimidating. I found her intimidating, too, when I used to see her leave her apartment in a suit and heels off to her marketing job. She was a graduate student. Intelligent, reserved, serious. As I sat on the porch barefoot in my husband's shirt and ratty jeans, I felt less than her somehow. She had a purpose and a plan. I had a lawnmower and a monkey's job. Laura was my friend, my friend remembers. Never in a million years would I have believed she would come to this. One of my neighbors remembers Laura refusing an offered beer. I used to have a rough life, she said, and I don't drink anymore. She used to tell the neighbors that there were a lot of bad people in our neighborhood and we laughed, thinking "well, you're the bad people, Laura." But now I see what she meant. She was afraid she couldn't stand up under the pressure of available heroin and available clientele.

So, in the end, she didn't make it. She's alive if you can call it that, somewhere in south Florida serving a four-year sentence for prostitution and possession, but she didn't make it out of Southside back into life. Heroin addicts refer to the time when your drugs are gone and you're junk-sick as "nighttime." So, it's nighttime for Laura, and maybe hope comes in the morning. Somehow, I think I've been fascinated by her life all these weeks because it's a metaphor for what's going on all around me. But unlike Laura, I feel delivered. I feel that somehow God looked at my little family and said That's enough for Team Smith. And I know I don't deserve it. I'm not better than the people facing the wrecking ball, but that knowledge doesn't stem my gratitude for being spared. I'm tempted to think that God spared us because David deserved it, but that isn't true either. I think he spared us because he's good. He'll lead us into difficulty many more times as we walk this earth, but he won't let us be destroyed. Ever. He promised and I believed him.

I had a dream that David and I were standing on the edge of a cliff. He took my hand and said "Just don't let go," and together we leaped off our security into the Wild Blue Yonder. And God said it was good.

When The Lord Made Me, He Made A Ramblin Man

A 59-year-old man showed up at a Wal-Mart in Tuscaloosa with a suitcase and went inside. Ten minutes later, surveillance cameras caught him climbing into a yellow taxi and driving away. For almost two months, his family didn't know what had happened to him. Was he abducted? Did he have some sort of mental break? There weren't any answers to their frenzied questions. It turns out that the taxi bore him to the Tuscaloosa Greyhound Station where he boarded a bus bound for El Paso. He didn't say why. He just went. Fifty years ago, he might have just hopped a box car down at the rail yard to the sound of a harmonica's lonesome waw-waw-waw as the city rolled away. News reports didn't indicate if he had any plans to come home.

It was a bad thing to do. His family was worried about him. He's a bad man, but I understand. I feel it as I sit at a fashionable pre-fabricated restaurant with a group of people I know little and understand less. I feel it when I look at the same sink full of dishes I washed yesterday. I feel it when I see a private jet span the blue distance between the television towers above my happy cottage. I feel it when I'm cornered by the pleasant conversation of a person who isn't all that pleasant. It's a feeling of wanting to go. Not somewhere, just away, and maybe not even forever. I saw an open box car flashing down a track in our neighborhood recently and I imagined running along beside it, throwing my bundle and pulling myself up. I thought let's just jump in there and see where we go. I was almost kidding. I feel I've been seeking some kind of freedom my whole life. A few times, I've tasted it. I used to drive my car along the highway between Auburn and Tallasee just to watch the river pour over the Alabama Power damn. The dark water under the glimmer of the bug-flecked streetlights made me tired. The highway flickering by under the sporadic light of honkey tonks and auto body repair shops made me sad. Freedom, in that sense, isn't what I wanted it to be.

The mystery I'm starting to unravel is that freedom is the fortitude to stay put until the restlessness passes. So, here am I, anchored for the course. Not free to jump a train, but free to stand and be delivered from all that makes me want to.

Copper Bob

They call him "Copper Bob" because if you look at his face in just the right light, you can see on his skin the greenish cast of the copper he's been sculpting for twenty-five years. His studio is in an abandoned limestone quarry somewhere north of town. He's a stooped man, permanently fixed in an almost subservient posture. He doesn't make eye contact readily, but when he does, I can see the little boy he used to be still suspended in mischievous blue eyes hidden in a mass of curly honey hair. I can see the little boy in his art, too. A copper frog swings on a copper trapeze suspended from a copper limb. A copper gnome hides in a copper knothole. A copper sunflower dances in a passing breeze.

I'm learning the subtle differences between the iron and the copper sculptors. Iron artists work in casting teams of something like ten people. Everyone counts. Everyone matters when you're melting iron in a 2800 degree furnace that just might be named something like "Old Grumpy" to indicate it's propensity to blow up in your face. There's a feeling of glory and wonder at the human accomplishment of channeling nature and doing something you just, by all logical summation, shouldn't be doing. It's electric. It's sexy. It's overwhelming. Even the clothing cast iron sculptors wear belies the testosterone surge of man (or woman)-over-nature creation. Their leather jackets bear the mark of where they come from. One might say CHICAGO. One might be a picture of a fairy and and bear the mark ICPO WORLD FAMOUS FOUNDRY. I once saw one of them throw back his face shield and light a cigarette off a cooling sculpture. He reached for a swig of beer before he went back to tap-tap-tapping the furnace to start it's molten flow. Their casual approach to possible incineration lends them a mystery I haven't felt since I was ten years old watching a lion tamer at the circus. Immediately, I think I've gotta get in there. They say that the ghost of an old iron man killed at Alice Furnace more than a hundred years ago continued to haunt the catwalk at Sloss up until it closed so he could see the tapping of the furnace. My neighbor says he's still there on iron-pour days and that his shadow darts between the buildings trying to get a look at what they're doing. I can't imagine what it must have been like to watch the tap of Old Number 2 from the First Avenue viaduct. The old furnaces can't be used now, but I'm grateful for their 8-foot replacements like someone who has never seen the sun is happy for the moon.

Well, I meant this entry to be about Copper Bob, but I'm too smitten with the iron to write about the copper. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you: Susan in face shield pouring iron. June 22. Can't wait.

Iron Pour

The Destruction and Redemption of a Wannabe Artist Soul

On a trip to New York in the summer of 2000, I met an art student from Jamaica Queens who told me that I had no ability to evaluate art. What education do you have? she asked. What ability do you have? What experience do you have? You don't know anything. To be honest, that seven-year-old statement from a girl whose name I can't remember and whose face I wouldn't be able to recognize again lodged somewhere in my soul and crippled my abilities both to look at a piece of art and appreciate it or to walk away from it unimpressed. Actually, it was the second great undoing of Susan, artistically speaking. The first came after a bad experience with an elementary school art teacher. In the end, I became a writer. Writing is my terra familiar, my br'er patch. I critique it and praise it with absolute confidence. I like this. I say. I don't like this. I'm not obliged to qualify or explain. It's true that I've been Institutionally Certified to have an opinion about literature, but if some student of literature were to emerge from Queens and ask me to justify my basic right to have an opinion about writing I would say simply: I can read. And then I would step on her face with my supercool Frye Boot.

Fortunately for the crippled artist in me, God is Haggo'el, the Redeemer. I remember walking into the Birmingham Museum of Art for the first time in more than fifteen years and being surprised at my ability to have an opinion. I see Mary Cassatt's sketches and I appreciate them. I see Albert Bierstadt's Looking Down Yosemite Valley and am raptured. I get this. I think to myself. I get this and it's my right. So what qualification do I have to appreciate this painting? I say simply: I can see. Over the subsequent months, I see more redemption. I realize that my house sits amid the houses of an art professor, the metal artists, a photographer, a chef, and an artist in clay. Art invades me. Everything is beauty. I get a street education in high art courtesy of Haggo'el and learn I'm not half as stupid as I allowed myself to believe. This weekend, I got to take a field trip. (It was the second I've had recently, but the first deserves a post of its own.) So assaulted were my senses that I experienced complete overload and neared a visual meltdown. I saw many artists. I want to write about three.

Ol' 55 (Or, have you noticed that I keep naming these posts after Tom Waits songs?)

One of my neighbors is a college professor. I don't know what he teaches, but I tell everyone that it's Rockabilly Ethos. For his final, you have to go to a Brian Setzer concert and learn how to roll a pack of Camels in the sleeve of your plain white t-shirt. For extra credit, you can tattoo a teardrop at the corner of your eye. On Saturdays, he throws a deep cuff in his blue jeans and whacks away at his yard with a scythe. Sometimes, he wears a shirt. I always take that as a sign of a good weekend. I just saw him drive past his own house to look at the collection of motley plants growing accidentally and very much on purpose in his front yard. Intentionally careless, he sweeps his pompadour back into place before he kisses his wife hello. She, incidentally, looks like a cast member from Thirtysomething. The best thing about this neighbor is his English Bulldog. His daughter named it Pickles. He would have named it Daddy-O, I bet.

My father says it was great to be a teenager in the 50's. To me, it sounds like a lot of fighting down by the San Antonio River, finishing concrete, cursing in Spanish and peeing off bridges. He says he went to a bar with a Mexican man he worked with called Blacky Salazar when he was about thirteen. The bartender gave him a Lone Star and he drank it. I guess they both figured that after a man's day at work, he deserved a man's beer. He says that about halfway through that beer, the doors opened and a couple of Texas Rangers strutted in. (Now, I assume they strutted, because that's what Texas Men do. They strut. Think George W. Bush with a few extra pounds and a heap more sense.) Up went that beer, he recalls, and in it's place down went a Big Red. After a few minutes they decided the bandito they were looking for had crept down towards Laredo and back over the border and they left. Up went the Big Red and back down went the beer. I like that story. I asked my dad if people actually called each other "Daddy-O" back then. "Only if they wanted their asses kicked," he said. Three cheers for Dad and three cheers for the asses he kicked down by the San Antonio River back in '55.

For I am a Rain Dog, Too (Or, Not So Fast Shorty: Neighborhood Part 10)

The rain is a wild thing running off the roof and on the broad and curling tomato leaves and the concrete and the air conditioner and the broken glass lying in the side yard. The dry mint leaves strain from their pot to breathe the mist. They will end their lives floating with ice in sugared bourbon, and I think they can't have higher ambitions. The bus strains up the hill. Black in the back, white in the front. This phenomena bothers my husband tremendously. He averts his eyes when the bus breaks down and the transit authority brings out its vintage replacement. It's too much. he says. I can't bear the sight of it. Rights so hard earned are forgotten upon realization. The rain runs off the hood of my sleek new car and makes me glad I won't have to wash it. I can't see the top of the second television tower through the fog, but I know it's there and it makes me glad. When I was small driving on the 20-59 through the city, I looked at those towers and thought being able to see them from your house to be the epitome of urban chic. I cling to that belief as I crane my neck to make them out, one to the left and one to the right, over the trees. The wind growls across the top of Red Mountain, along the coal-road past the iron ore. A train rumbles past Sloss. My wind chime struggles to escape the fatal embrace of a Confederate Jasmine. God is in His Heaven. All is right with the world. Somewhere. But not here. Not just now.

Last night, I dreamed of being eaten by a giant fallopian tube with a snarling ovary face. I dreamed of stepping on a dirty needle as I padded barefoot through the grass. I dreamed of rifles and pistols waltzing Matilda through the back yard. I startled awake and flew up the well of sleep to see a million white lights flitting about my room haphazardly like schizophrenic Tinkerbells. Well, this is just great. I thought to myself as I reached for my glasses and saw the whirling lights of an ambulance brought into focus. I wrapped myself again in my quilt and brought the hem over my eyes to block out the lights and siren. That's when the rain began.

Yesterday, Jackson interrupted my conversation with Tom Collins as I sat on the porch with a friend. His appearance didn't bring the usual cold shiver of dread. It should have. He looks older to me now. My fuzzy head only permitted a few of his words to sink in. Extradition to Florida blocked. Time elapsed. Released. Somewhere in Birmingham. Tonight.

Will Ferrell's Landlord

Will Ferrell's Landlord

The End. (Neighborhood, Part 9)

Jackson wanted to talk, so I walked across the street to his car. "Well," he says,"she's gone." Paul, her boyfriend, is in the Hoover jail. No one came to bail him out. Laura's mother picked her up underneath the spreading Chinaberry branches. There's a sheet of plywood nailed over the doorway. Gone, gone. She's long gone. Gone from Alabama, she ain't never coming home.

Two purple finches dart out from under the heavy branches of the Tulip Poplar tree. The doves who made their home on the mine-trailing pillars holding up my front porch teach their babies how to fly. The sky spreads golden over the interstate and fringes itself with pink. A migrating Broad Winged hawk makes a last swoop through the clouds between the television towers on Red Mountain and I see WBRC light up. I'm suddenly tired. Soul and bone tired like I used to be at the end of a day of horse breaking. It starts in my back and envelopes me like a hug. I'm going to sleep well tonight under the spreading Chinaberry branches.

Jackson tells me what they found in her apartment. A half-starved cat, a few rigs, a plugged toilet. Somewhere, evening starts for Laura . If she can, she'll tie up and nod off. If she can't, she'll be cold and junk-sick. Night will fall. Jackson says she had a wedding picture in her apartment and she looked more beautiful than Brigette Nielson. (In the Rocky days, he clarifies, before Flava-Flav.) David comes home and I hug him for a long time. Our metal artist, drives up and his pretty speckled dog jumps around in the front yard. Corduroy makes friends.

I see another junkie walk up the street and hide in a shrub when he spots a patrol car waiting for him. I see another. And another. If this were a screenplay, I'd make the camera draw back and take a panoramic shot of all the junkies all over town working for a fix before darkness overtakes the city. Life and Death stake their identity on the existence of each other.

Good night track marks. Good night hot rigs. Good night all-night brawls. Good night tac. rifles in my back yard. Good night, Laura. Good night, Me. Good night Birmingham, I couldn't love you more.

The Best Friend You've Got is a Railroad Track (Neighborhood Part 8)

STONEYO was picked up on some outstanding warrants last week. Jackson said he admitted being a loyal customer of Laura. I couldn't resist a toldyouso, so I didn't. I imagine he struck out on his tiny motorcycle for parts unknown and less hot with the wind in his hair and a needle between his toes. Laura doesn't have many clients anymore. I think she must be on the last legs of a desperate downward spiral courtesy of her friend, China White or more probably at this point, plain old black tar. She's not a day-tripper now. She's a gutter junkie with some experience. Laura's boyfriend was last night's collar. He, too, had some outstanding warrants. When the cops finally got inside her apartment, they found Laura's boyfriend and his girlfriend. Laura, they said, was hidden under some dirty clothes in the closet. The word is that she's officially been evicted, but apparently, it takes three months to evict someone Hallelujah, Amen. One of the artist neighbors beat it back to Michigan last week. I've just had enough of this, he said. So have I, but I'm invested. On the heels of a quick pleasedtomeetyou, his girlfriend said I'm spending the night in Memphis with or without you. I can't dig this anymore. I was sorry to see him go.

Jackson patted the boyfriend down and put one hand over his head before shoving him in the back of the car. It was a learned gesture. I know in my heart that Jackson doesn't really care if he bashes his head on the roof of the car or not. He just doesn't want to get stuck with a hot rig. The girlfriend lit a cigarette in the darkness and tried to make her battered car start. When it wouldn't go, Jackson fired up his bullhorn and said Ma'am, you're gonna have to release that emergency brake. She was so flustered that he had to help her find it with the bright beam of his Maglite. She beat it down the street, ashes glowing. I imagine I won't be seeing her again. When she arrived that afternoon, she had smiled at me as she slid over to the passenger side of her car to let Laura's boyfriend drive. She seemed to think she was some kind of teenager on a date, and I guess she might have been. Tough luck is a hard lesson. I never smiled back. After the arrest, Laura tottered down the street on four-inch high heels, her face hidden in her sleeves. I watched this scene from my front porch while eating a hamburger with spinach and tomato. Cops inside, Cops outside but with better reception.

The day before, I met Laura's uncle as I hugged the artist and his girlfriend goodbye. He's an attorney and he told us how worried he was about her. Her son hasn't heard from her in weeks. He's apparently so upset that he's dropped out of school and moved in with his grandmother. They don't know where she is. They don't know how she got there. They don't know how to get her back. He tried to give us his phone number but we didn't want it. I don't know what he expected from us. I'm sorry, he said. I'm sorry for all of this. After he had gone, the remaining artist observed the contrast. I'm the neighbor who can't sleep. He's the family who can't sleep. I hope they get her soon. For all of our sakes.

A Fragment of My Childhood: The Story of the Days When Carole King Sang Children's Songs Instead of Four Poofy Australians in a Big Red Car

Hit the Dirt! (Neighborhood Part 7)

I think I should put Jackson on our Christmas card list. He's become a regular feature in the small circle of my life. Yesterday afternoon he pulled to a stop at the curb, and when I started to speak to him, he shook his head and went back to scrutinizing his notebook. After a few minutes, he flipped it closed and drove further up the street where he parked. My New Friend the Cast Iron Sculptor looked quizzically at me when I took him some lemon chess pie a few minutes later. I dunno. I said before he asked. I guess it's just that time of day. Seeing the police, talking to the police, questioning the police, and being questioned ourselves is something that happens almost every day now. Laura hasn't been seen in a week or more, but when I saw him at the Southern Conference on Cast Iron Art on Saturday, my neighbor told me he heard her moving around in the dark and waterless apartment at night. I imagine she's become some sort of Kafka-esque beetle creature thriving on heroin and waking up at night. I wouldn't be surprised to see she'd grown a few hairy and segmented legs if I met her on the street. I don't know how you can live up there without water, he said, but he cut the hose she was running from his faucet to her window anyway. I don't blame him. I hate her, he says, and I agree, much to my own chagrin. I told my neighbor about my conflicting emotions. A body can only take so much before compassion wears thin, he said. This is true. For all of us who aren't Christ.

I came inside to make supper and I walked into our bedroom to get my white apron from the end of our bed. For some reason, I had left the curtain open. I almost never do that, but so hungry for the sun and the green Chinaberry leaves was I that I broke with tradition and let the sunshine in. As I went to close it, I found myself eye to eye with one of three cops standing in my back and side yard with drawn rifles. Get away from the window. Get away from the window now, one of them said. I flattened myself on the floor and pressed my face into the heartwood boards in my bedroom. I crawled into the kitchen on my belly to avoid being caught in the crossfire that might have ricocheted through the window and all around the bedroom where I sleep. From this vantage point, I found my missing slipper hidden under the bed and realized how far I have traveled from where I first began.

I didn't want to move here. I wanted to stay in Vestavia Hills in a safe little ranch house near the supermarket. But moved here we did with the encouragement of friends who no longer speak to us to be close to a church that no longer wants us. It was a foolish move. And I suppose I'm a fool, but as I watch my tomatoes grow on the front stoop and laugh at my brother-in-law's story of having been reprimanded by his neighborhood association for having let too many sticks fall in his yard, as I see the sparks fly from my neighbor's furnace at Sloss, as I laugh too loudly over too much Southern Comfort on my front porch, as I smell barbecue cooking at the neighborhood rib joint at six in the morning, as I see plants first introduced to my flowerbeds fifty years ago start to sprout again, I realize that I'm home. I'm home. I'm home sandwiched between a wannabe rock band and and a motley crew of iron artists who always have dirty hands. I'm home in a yard with a garden unplanned and a freedom to sit on my front porch and swig straight from the bottle. I'm free to laugh too loudly. I'm free to not be nice. I'm free. Sometimes, I'm on my face on the floor, but then again, sometimes I'm not. I was mislead into this Egypt, but what Evil meant for evil, God meant for good. No church or person will ever help this city, but by the grace of God, maybe this city will help us.

Lodged--Robert Frost

The rain to the wind said,
"You push and I'll pelt."
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged -- though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt

Why People Do The Things They Do

She did things differently from the rest of the Melanies and Scarletts. She didn't wait for the husband to have the baby. She had angels tattooed on her arms and shoulders. She was always different from the rest of us, but nobody every told her that so she didn't know.

I joked with her in Sunday School. One time, I hurt her feelings and she cried. In high school, she gave me a book about seals. She was reaching out. I didn't hear. Years later, I saw her with her beautiful baby and I didn't bother to write her number down. I should have. I should have. She was my friend. She was reaching out. But I didn't hear.

I don't know what goes through your head to make you do something like that. I would have tried to help. But I didn't hear. I heard the news this afternoon in a casual way. I won't be seeing her again. I should have done what I could have done to share the burden then. I will always be sorry for that.

Dood Looks Like a Lady (Neighborhood Part 6)

I believe spring finally bested the tenacious tentacles of winter this weekend, but not before the cold rolled over the city like a lion bent on picking off the fresh shoots and tender buds of our roses, hollyhocks, tomatoes, and trees. Of all my plants, the Don Juan roses on either side of my front steps faired the worst. Their red blossoms bent dejectedly underneath the rain and cold almost touching the grass. Gardeners have a rule of thumb about how things should grow after they are first planted. It's first year no, second year slow, third year go. Unfortunately, my roses were going. I hope they recover. I tied them up and said a prayer before I went to get the hose to water the tomatoes. As I rounded the house, I heard Laura and her boyfriend fighting through the upstairs window next door. This isn't about you! he said. Of course it's about me! she answered. I imagine they were fighting about his mother. She was the one to set the police swarming around the house on Sunday night with guns and flashlights and curses. Apparently, she doesn't fancy the idea of her 24-year-old son shacking-up with a 44-year-old I.V. drug user. There isn't anything she can do, though, but watch his life uncoil before her eyes. The police told her not to come back. I started talking to Corduroy as loudly as I possibly could. I think she's tired of them. She just looked up and went back to worrying her lamb shank bone. A very tall man on a tiny red motorcycle pulled up the street and meeped "shave and a haircut" on his feeble horn before shooting around the corner and disappearing. A few minutes later, he was back in a familiar white Chevrolet. His license plate says "STONEYO." He's come to deliver the wake-up shot just like he does every evening at the same time. He pulled over just before Jackson pulled up.

Officer Jackson calls his beat "the party L," because it's roughly comprised of the area between 20th Street and the 5-points bars, to the part of Magnolia Avenue abutting Brother Bryan Park. On any given night, Jackson is called upon by the city to confine the homeless, keep the drunk fraternity boys from fighting, and keep the rich people dining at Frank Stitt's Highlands Bar and Grill from being so afraid of the homeless and the drunk frat boys that they drive back over Red Mountain before they let go of any more of their money. He laughs about it. I imagine he laughs because he knows that as soon as he gets some experience on Birmingham's mean streets, he'll accept a position with Mountain Brook, Vestavia or Hoover for twice as much money and 75-percent fewer crack houses. In my opinion, he's a government cat-hearder with a gun. He isn't really allowed to fight crime, but he does his best to harrass it away. In so doing, he often takes some time away from the L to drive up 20th Street and make good on his threat to make it a miserable month for Laura
. She's never happy to see him coming. As much as I like him, I'm not always happy to see him, either. It always means drama; the kind of drama that takes five hours and means no sleep.

I tell him what I've been seeing. He tells me what he's been seeing. STONEYO overhears and bails out on Laura and her wake-up shot. She's going to be sick and cross within an hour. He never comes back. I tell Jackson that one of the artists found a pile of used rigs next to the trash can the week before. So, she's shooting, I say, thinking she was a meth-head. She must be far-gone. Jackson says she's always been shooting and that her drug of choice is heroin. He sees other known junkies in and out of her apartment all night long and into the morning. This must be why the artists have taken to sleeping in their studio at Sloss Furnace. I can't imagine what would be bad enough to make them sleep at Sloss with the ghouls and ghosts of unfortunately-smelted iron workers, but apparently, it's Laura. I live next door to Sid and Nancy and it isn't as cool as I would have thought when I was embroiled in my Sex Pistols obsession. A tall blond woman comes down the steps and climbs into a red Chevy Blazer. See that woman? Jackson asks. She used to be a dude.

The Ballad of A Junkie, Neighborhood Part 5

Lately, when I return to the city, or even back from the Old Library where I go to hear the friendly murals whisper to me under the pendulous lights that always seem eager to illuminate my way, I inevitably come back to the whirling blue lights that mean things aren't well next door. I hear the cops shouting in the darkness, their voices traveling up the beams of their half-mile lights to her bedroom window. This is a hot house, Laura. And if you don't come outside right now, things are going to be a hell of a lot hotter. This is going to be the most miserable month of your whole miserable life. I hear her stumble in the darkness and curse. Sunday night, she dropped like a cat off her back porch and landed on the neighbor's porch below. These neighbors represent a treasured faction of the Old Guard. They're artists in cast iron and steel, a remainder of the vibrant artistic community Southside used to be before we were here and before those who were here before us were here. I imagine Southside in the seventies. It's the Southside that existed for Jim Reed before he had to pack his Fond Memories and Old Books and move them down to a space on 3rd Avenue. I imagine that back then, the whole world between 20th and 14th Streets was Jim's Museum of the Weird South, home to writers and painters and bangers-on-pipes. I recently learned that Dennis Covington once lived here in a rundown Tudor on Green Springs Avenue. I drive by that house on my way to buy Fresh Mozzarella at the fancy Publix and I think oh house, if only you could tell a tale of the artists who lived here and what they did to pass their time. I imagine that the stories it could tell about Dennis Covington would be acceptably pornographic, if such a thing is possible. Acceptably pornographic and redemptive like the story of when his wife fell down before the Lord after having aborted a miracle baby because it's parentage was disputed. I knew at that moment, she writes, that I was forgiven. And to her, forgiven means no consequences. I wish that's what forgiven meant to me.

I know that Laura found no forgiveness from the Birmingham Cops who wasted their flashlight batteries looking for her feather-thin frame between the Chinaberry trees on Sunday night.

Little Known Facts About Me

For a brief time, I worked at Village Photographers in Auburn taking Zaps. The second or third time David and I visited RMC, I saw a guy that looked familiar. Finally, it dawned on me that I had seen him, not at church, but at a frat party in Auburn saying, Hey Zap Girl, take a picture of my butt! I guess he started to take his pants off, but I didn't stay around there long enough to make sure. There are two, no three, things you can count on when you are in this line of work:

1. Many of your co-workers will know something about Dungeons and Dragons.
2. There will always be a picture of someone naked or partially naked somwhere in the rolls you shoot on any given night.

3. There will always be a shot of white chicks making gang signs.

The Ballad of Junkie( Neighborhood Drama Part 4)

Officer G. is as round and dark as a plum. On his belt he carries a tazer equipped with a small camera used to record the spastic gyrations of everyone he subdues. I suppose the camera was added after Mayor Kincaid got bent out of shape when a few people died after having been tazed. The police called that Collateral Damage, the City Council called it Unacceptable. (If Representative John Rogers called it something, it would probably have been "Mushhumphaloa Acrakcadoah," or something like that. None of his constituents would have any idea what he had said, but he would have said it with such conviction they would have rubbed their chins and said "That's right. He sure is right about that." and gone on with their business.) The new camera protects the citizens and gives the officers at the South Precinct some pretty funny home movies to watch between their shifts. I can only imagine the knee-slapping good time they have watching some cracked-out kid involuntarily invoking the aid of Saint Vitus as he "flops like a fish" on the pavement. G.--officers refer to each other and themselves only by their last names--explains the tazer to the small group of neighbors between the pansies and tomatoes on my front stoop. "It goes pop pop pop pop!" he says. "And that's when you know to get the hell out of the way." Without having to be asked, he Pop! Pop! Pops! the tazer at a nearby cat. The cat escapes startled, but un-tazed. I think Officer G. would like to have the footage of a tazed cat, poofed out like a cotton ball, to show back at the South Precinct at the end of his shift.

G. was just starting his second shift, 11-to-7, after having finished the 3-to-11 shift thirty minutes before. "I need some MO-NAY!" he says. I wish I had some to share. He shows us the other crime-fighting tools he has on his belt, and explains that most of them were purchased with his own money. Flashlights, night-sticks, handcuffs, guns. His police cruiser is ten years old and showing its age. As he talks, I realize that when his car was new, G. was still a sixteen-year-old offensive lineman at Jackson-Olin High School. When he finished his 30-minute interview with my neighbor's much younger boyfriend, he comes to ask us "What did he do now? I can't figure it out." I have the strange suspicion that Officer G. talks just a little too much.

Some three hours earlier, David and I followed 18th Street over the hump that is Red Mountain back into the belly of the city. One of my favorite views is a panoramic vista of the Jones Valley along that route just below the statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge. Birmingham creeps through the valley and up both sides as if it sprouted from a seed dropped by the need for iron just after the Civil War. I used to have a pastor with a small son who greeted the buildings and the rusted-out furnaces by saying "Hello City! I'm back." I understand. Although it is the world of my youth and experience, I always feel the world outside the city is the place I go to thoroughly embarrass myself. The way I dress, the way I talk, the way I think, the way I walk are just a little different. I've always subscribed to the theory that architecture and environment contribute to human identity. Now I know that if theories can somehow be substantiated by empirical evidence, that one has been. Two years in, I'm different.

The change started as imperceptibly as a morning glory vine creeping up the window. As odd as it sounds, I think it happened over time as I was forced to deal with the homeless. As I was forced to deal with the poor. As I was forced to deal with the drug-addled, the HIV positive, the neglected, the mentally ill. In and of themselves, it isn't so very hard to address issues such as poverty, disease, and destitution. But I'm always flummoxed when I start to wonder how Christ marries these issues. How is Christ manifest in the homeless? How is Christ manifest in the life of a beat-cop who doesn't make enough money to pay the rent after he's purchased his own equipment? When you live in the World Beyond the City, you drive away after a night's boozing and stop thinking about Roosevelt who lives under a bench at Brother Bryan Park. You stop thinking about Fred up the street who sells cocaine out of his apartment. You stop thinking. Here, though, they are always with you. You cannot escape. And as much as you want to change them, as much as you want to help them, they turn around and change you. They hand you a dubious gift wrapped in a dirty newspaper and all that is left is a humble acceptance of something you can't give back. Finally you learn, maybe years later, how much you owe them for that. Thank you city. Thank you neighborhood. Thank you Christ, Healer of the World, who causes the morning glory to grow across my broken window. Hello City! I'm back. I'm back to be embraced by those who don't know how much of a stranger I really am.

(Of course, to be continued....)

One More Silly Post

Am I a terrible person for thinking this is hella funny?

My Drawing Shows I'm Losing My Mind

This is my drawing. What does it say about me? Well, I'm pretty sure it doesn't say anything good. This is my last silly post. Tomorrow, I'll update you on what happened to us over the weekend. (Hint: think MORE police cars and MORE neighborhood espionage.)

When Good Frogs Go Bad

The Art of the Swindle
Letters to the Editor

And by Frogs, I mean my favorite jejune Frenchies Foucault and Lacan. (Amid others.)

Neighborhood Drama/Neighborhood Bonding Part 3

Elvis at Three, Howard Finster, 1982

Neighbors I've either not met or haven't spoken to more than a few times in the two years I've lived here came over just to say "hey" and watch the free entertainment unfold. In retrospect, that my Southern upbringing would carry over past the belle days of my bridal teas to the day all of my neighbors would gather on my front porch to see one of our junk-sick neighbors get arrested is bizarre on the level of Flannery O'Connor's leg-stealing Bible salesman. I realize with mingled dismay and delight that my life just might be worthy of a Tennessee Williams play. I've arrived.

Like old soldiers at the VFW, we share our stories. We have seen the men come and go. We have heard the late-night fighting. We've seen other police cars on other nights take other men away in handcuffs. We wonder if the police see what we see. We doubt our conclusions, but the evidence seems irrefutable. We can't be sure. We can be sure, and we are. My neighbors and I are a wall of eyes in the Darkness. We're watching. We're seeing. And our collectivity makes us formidable. Our unabashed curiosity is the product of privilege. We're not afraid because we're the ones with the real weapons: money, education and political pull. It doesn't take long for one of the cops to be ensnared in our unified gravity. He tells us that the undercover cop had been watching a house on another street for weeks. He'd just had the opportunity to make a significant bust when his collar took off down the street, our street, running. He tries not to address us in police easyspeak, but I think he finds it easier to address us in his own vernacular. Two black males. One white female. One used rig left behind the bushes. Two years ago, I would have thought that a rig was something you put in the middle of the Gulf to drill oil. We moved here from Mountain Brook. I couldn't be paid enough to move back.

The police made one arrest. One black male. He had injured his arm. Thus the ambulance. Whether his injuries were from poking himself repeatedly in the arm with a dirty needle or from having a 240-pound cop ride his body down the sidewalk like a surfboard, we'll never know. I guess it's just comforting to know that they'll treat your injuries before they'll throw the book at you. They weren't even looking for our neighbor. They weren't watching, as we had hoped, for the return of her yellow cab. Like the Older Brother, we watched for her return with mounting enthusiasm. Oh, God, please don't let them leave before she comes back. I prayed. I justify this by telling myself she'd get some treatment in prison, but in Alabama, she's more likely to get scabies. This I know. We knew she'd be coming back up the street soon. We'd be there to witness the ultimate Walk of Shame.

As we speculated and watched the cops tie up the loose ends of their search, we made a few jokes about how this would never end up on the news. Within moments, we spotted the satellite truck of one of the local stations lumbering down the street. Seemingly contented to spectate, they never braved the world outside their truck. Sissies. The next morning, they covered a minor pot bust in Vestavia Hills further proving my theory that the Weird South has gone out of fashion. The rest of Birmingham lives in Outer Suburbia. They prefer stainless steel and whitewash to the broken asphalt redrock of the city. They go to bed at night and thank God that they don't have to live on our side of Red Mountain. We go to bed at night and thank God that we've found a bubble of freedom in a city of century-old pretension. Our neighborhood collects those people with means enough to live elsewhere if only they could brave the neighborhood bylaws. Give me trash on the street and broken sidewalks, but please don't tell me what kind of bushes I've got to plant in my own front yard. We're the last remnant of the Weird South in this Southern City. Welcome home, Howard Finster.

As we laughed, a yellow cab rolled truculently (if you're of the sort who believes inanimate objects can, indeed, be truculent) up the street. The driver looked nervous. A dark head emerged from the rear window for a split-second before it was laid flat against the back seat. It looked like no one was in the cab at all as it rolled past her house toward 5-points. Like a shot, my neighbor ran to the window of the nearest police car. There's someone in that cab. There's someone lying flat in the back seat of that cab. Before she finished, the police car reversed cutting off all escape. She loosened her muscles to let them better absorb the impact of being pulled by her arms and forced on her feet. She tottered, but regained her balance before they started patting her legs for weapons and drugs. They got the cab driver, too, but he didn't look as used to it. It's a wonder to me what skills human beings unconsciously learn from the life they lead. Whatever she had, was already smoked or thrown out of the window. She wasn't going to jail that night. They let the cab driver go and he sped down the street. I figure he was saved by feigned ignorance once, but I doubt he'll be tempting the Fates a second time. Since then, I've seen her travel by taxi several times but never again with the same cab company.

Our narrator, Officer Sims, returned to fill us in. He told us that she's a known meth user and prostitute. They're working her case. They're closing in. Every day, I see less of her. She stays in her apartment until about 5:30 then goes off in a cab for less than 20 minutes. She often has clients just before then. She often has clients late at night. I write down a description of their faces and their cars. Sometimes, I get their plate numbers. I call the South Precinct. I'm known there by now and I worry that they think I'm crazy. I think they must know that I'm a Gentrifier who moved here from Mountain Brook. I pour tea. I polish silver. But I don't know proper etiquette for having my neighbor arrested for tricking. In my mind, I'm SuSu Crimefighter. I'm Huggie Bear. I'm a force to be reckoned with. Maybe, I'm a fool. (But I surely do have mad skillz, y'all.) She must feel the heat.

The men look right at my eyes and I look right back and spit on the ground. They look away because I Am More Fierce Than They Would Expect. I'm a little suburban white woman, but I have anger on my side. And I'm angry. I wonder if they have wives or girlfriends at home. I wonder if they have mothers in big hats at church on Sunday. I wonder if they have children. I want to slap and pinch and kick them in tender spots like the backs of their arms or the underside of their legs. I want to intimidate them like they try to intimidate me. I hate them irrationally. I think there must be something instinctive initiating me into the Universal Sorority of Women that makes me hate who they are and what they are doing. I think the initiation is powerlessness. I've noticed that really big men, really strong men, really smart men aren't usually sexist. It's the small men, the weak men, the men who are stupid who hurt women. In that way, they're like spiders. It's the little ones that bite. Sometimes, women just get bitten, and unless God has something mighty awful planned, we're just going to have to move on. In the faces of those men, I see all the times I was powerless. I see all the times no one stood up for me. I see the Liar who let me take the fall for something he did because he knew I had no recourse. Because he knew I had no recourse. So bound is she by addiction and madness and parole violation that she has no recourse. She's a rabbit in a cage. My heart cries out for Mercy.

I have a tiny inclination brewing in my heart. It's a tiny desire to lose my mind just a little bit and float into the Great By and By. It's a tiny desire to stand on my porch and say REPENT, THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS AT HAND! If I hadn't already, living here makes me realize that only grace stands between me and destruction. Only mercy guards the door to Perdition. Only Jesus can solve problems like these. And in my heart, I know He's coming. And he's going to make it Right.

Neighborhood Drama/Neighborhood Bonding Part Two

She moved into the top apartment of a 1920's duplex several months ago with her teenage son. At first, I only took notice of the son walking around, cat cradled in arms, calling to his mother like a neglected toddler. Mom. Mom. Mom. Mama. Mother. Mom. He never got a response during the day, but late at night, I often heard the shrill and raised voice that proved there was some interaction between them long after the rest of us were sleeping. After a little while, I didn't see the cat anymore. After a little while longer, I didn't see the boy anymore either. After that, I started to see more of Them.

They come at regular intervals throughout the day, all day long and into the night. They come in beat-up old Jeeps and Suburbans with spinners. They come in cars with college licence plates and in cars with no license plates at all. The only thing they have in common is that they're all coming to sell or to buy the same thing. When they're coming to buy, they stay for less than a minute. In and out faster than the drive-through line at the bank. Service with a smile and quick like lightning. When they're coming to sell, it takes a little longer. My neighbor has limited currency, you see, and she only knows how to pay with one line of credit.

The neighbors whisper about her. We're all surprised and validated that we've each come to the same conclusion about her business. She either doesn't notice our whispers, or she doesn't care. Four years ago, her line of work was more common here, but the value of our houses has increased by about fifty percent since then and we're moving past the Transitional Phase of neighborhood development and have started to make way into the "Gentrified" category. Most people who owned investment properties available to rent have sold out, and where we once were pushers, pimps, prostitutes and poor, we're now professors, traders, doctors, architects and insurance salesmen. The Old Regime didn't disappear, it just moved a little to the West and to the North as neighbors demanded to have their investments protected and we started getting better police protection. My neighbor came just a little too late to be able to practice the Oldest Profession without being noticed. And so, Sunday night the neighborhood came together for the same reason neighbors have for centuries: to fight a common foe.

David and I were sitting on the porch eating supper with Jason when we saw her leaving in a cab. Gone to score, no doubt. Despite my safe and respectable suburban upbringing, I've learned a little about the culture around me. I've learned a little, both from my own empirical research and from the careful study of those around me, about the power of addiction. I know what it means to watch from the bottom of a self-dug pit while happiness blooms around you. I know this and I'm sad for this small and much used woman who inhabits a shell of a body and a rusted-out life. Everyone on this street is ready to do their part to make sure she isn't on this street for one moment longer than necessary. We're all her adversaries. Social services are good. Rehabilitation is good. Inhaling the chemical consequences of her crystal meth addiction, having her clients come to our doors by mistake, knowing that someone somewhere might just be tweaked enough to show up at her doorstep with a weapon and a score to settle makes us nervous. I don't know if there is a "Christian" way to handle this problem. I am sympathetic, even empathetic, but not so much that I can handle living next door to a full-blown, fo-sho, crack ho. This is reality laid on the line. What would Jesus do? Maybe the better question is what is Jesus doing?.

Sunday night, we noticed a battered Pontiac cruising down our street. He's looking for her, I said when he looked up at the three of us with a little more interest than ordinary. When he came speeding back up the street followed by at first four, then five, then seven police cars, a firetruck and an ambulance, we thought we had been more right than we knew. The Pontiac pulled over and an undercover police officer leaped out. For about 30 minutes, we watched our street swarm with cops and flashlights up and down the sidewalk and in the bushes behind our house and our neighbor's. No one took notice of the three of us. Other neighbors heard the noises of seven police cars, one firetruck and an ambulance and started to come out on their porches to watch. For some reason known only to God, I yelled Y'all come over, I have brownies. And they did.

Stay tuned. I'm hoping to finish this up in one more installment. Good night, Moon.

Neighborhood Drama/Neighborhood Bonding, Part One

David caught me staring at the palm of my hand when we were having supper the other night. What's wrong with your hand? Nothing. I'm just looking. There's nothing wrong with that. Thank you.

I could have put an hour's worth of of exposition into that expression of gratitude, but the real meaning behind Thank You when I say it to my husband means more than one word, or one treatise, is able to convey. If live with him till I'm a hundred and three and thank him for one specific thing every day, I won't finish. I'm most humbled when I can't express the depth of my gratitude to and for him. The irony in all this is that he doesn't really like to be thanked. So I skip my exegesis and trust that in his heart, he knows he really is my hero.

The point of all this is that since I quit working for the church, I've been able to look and be and think. After two weeks, I stopped cringing when the phone rang. After three weeks, I stopped dreading Sunday evenings. After nearly four, I stopped seeing an emergency in every small situation. I don't dread the regular reminders of how utterly insignificant I am. I haven't blogged, or really spoken, about this Un-named Thing because it hurts and I haven't thought it wise. But, a writer has a right to write about what informs her story. So I will. (But just a little bit.)

I've turned my rediscovered powers of observation mostly to the garden. Because I live in an urban environment, "my garden" summarily includes my entire city: my neighbors, my postman, the garbage men, the neighborhood policemen. I've learned a lot. I've noticed the way my postman smokes his Camel cigarettes like a jazz musician. He walks like he's driven by the smoky twang of an internal upright bass. He's a postman by day, but at night, I bet he's cool. Cool in the Miles Davis sense of the word. I like to watch him go up and down the street in his Postal-Service issue minivan. He sees it all. He knows it all. I imagine he turns our stories into a series. of. machine. gun. scats. at. Ona's. on. Saturday. night. Ahh. Half John Coltrane mathematical trainwreck and half J-I-L-L-S-C-O-T-T easy and honest. That's my neighborhood. A Love Supreme.

My across-the-street neighbor bathes his dog on the sidewalk once a week. Of that pair, I don't know if dog or human is most fortunate. They have each other. And from what I can tell, that's just fine. My closer neighbors are a commune of upper-class hippies who call themselves a band. Three men and one wife live together. I've noticed that the wife does all the work. When they practice, if that's what you can call the first few few bars of Crazy Train played over and over and over again, the Postman shakes his head. He knows and he sees, but more importantly he hears, what passes for music these days. I have other neighbors: neighbors who don't cut their grass, neighbors who call the police on other neighbors who don't cut their grass, neighbors who don't speak to those of us who are Southside newbies and most responsible for the gentrification they see all around them, neighbors who have their food delivered by Schwanns, neighbors who might not eat at all. But the neighbor I've noticed the most, is the neighbor who probably notices me the least.

And now, my blogging time is way past gone. I'll post the rest of the story tomorrow.

Apocalypse....Now?

There's a scene in Apocalypse Now depicting a battle over the fictional Dulong Bridge. I think Coppola intends it to show the madness of war, and if that's the case, it serves its purpose. P.B.R. Streetgang pulls up to a carnival of war; rockets launch like fireworks over the bridge only otherwise illuminated by a rakish string of paper lanterns. Soldiers alternately scurry away from the fallout and play cards. It becomes apparent to the men on board (at least one of them in the midst of an acid trip) that the situation has deteriorated beyond their ability to comprehend. At one point, Martin Sheen's character approaches a young GI (who has, incidentally, just launched a grenade at a V.C. caught in some wire) and asks him who is in charge. Looking back with the thousand-yard stare of a man who has spent more than his share of time "in country", the soldier answers, "Aren't you?"

It's my favorite scene in any movie ever and it reminds me a lot of what's been happening in my small world lately. Those captains we thought were standing in the gap are stumbling around looking at each other and saying "Who is in charge here?" And and answering back, "Aren't you?"

I think there's a reason why so much of the Christian life is compared to warfare. Sometimes, I look around me and think that we resemble a platoon of soldiers loaded in a Huey and plonked smack down in the middle of the jungle. (Or the desert.) If the disciples and early apostles were the Marines, we must be the follow-up forces sent in to hunker down in inhospitable territory for an indefinite period of time. We've got Medivac units and communications units and commissary units. Etcetera. Ad Nauseum. We're not home and we're not happy about it. (Like our grandfathers before us, we stumble off the field only to be offered coffee by the Red Cross. For 5 cents a cup. When the church starts asking us to donate blood, we'll know we've really got a problem. And that's a post for another day.)

It's hard to choose the right path through the battle. None of us knows the truth and nothing but the truth. We know bits and we know pieces. We know enough to make it through, but we're all faced with the moment in time when we've got to rely on God's love for us and our own good intentions. I think God did this on purpose. He told us what we had to know. For the rest, we're going to have to walk according to the Spirit and very much by faith. Everyone has their own way to cope with this "unknown."

Some people say we'll never really make it through and that our best bet is to look for the beauty in the ugly, the righteousness in the reprobate and the comfort in earthly community. I like this idea. It seems hopeful yet safe. The problem comes with the crushing realization that we're all alone in the world. We're created for community, but community will always disappoint. We're destined to be misunderstood. Not to say that we won't have meaningful relationships and receive encouragement from others, only that it won't be consistent and it won't be entirely trustworthy. Each of us is a rabid monster underneath a thin veneer of restraint. We rip each other to bits inevitably. Inevitably. If we are so blessed as to find one person, just one, who can see us truly and understand, we should presume upon the goodness of God no more. All the evil that exists in the world exists in the soul of Everyman.

Some people try to tie knots in the strings of truth we do have in order to unify them. To make them whole and cogent. To make them reach the areas of our experience they weren't designed to reach. I've learned that if I fail to mask my own uncertainty, there is always someone ready to flog me with an easy answer. Sometimes, I feel like an antelope surrounded by all-knowing hyenas who smell the blood of my uncertainty. I don't understand. All of my struggle for insight into this leads me only to a greater ability to describe the problem.

I've made it my habit here to be positive. Honestly, I am a happy person with a charmed life. Never never never would I have believed you had you been able to come to me when I was younger and tell me what a beautiful thing my life would be. Unfortunately (or very fortunately, depending how you look at it), the only only thing I have to offer here is a certainty that One Bright Morning, that Huey will come back. And take us home. Where we'll be able to be what we were meant to be and live how we were meant to live. Until then, we cling to the cross and try not to kill each other.

In the meantime, who is in charge here?

The Best Thing in My Kitchen

The best thing in my kitchen at the moment is a chicken roasting pan that looks something like this. I think my mother bought it for me about 6 years ago for about 8 bucks at Wal-Mart (shudder that, I know). I left it alone and unused in my oven-drawer for years until I decided it might be a good idea to use it, and once I did, I actually had to grieve all of the chickens I could have roasted if only I had realized what an incredible device this little pan actually is. It's a simple thing. In my opinion, the best things that come out of the kitchen are simple things that give us a little wholesome comfort at the end of the day. I always feel grateful for old-fashioned culinary pleasures like a beautifully roasted chicken, a simple spinach salad, grainy pears, butternut squash soup, baked sweet potatoes with brown sugar, and whole-wheat bread with butter and honey. In this world of fast and out-of-the-bag food, homemade food reminds us that we're human. We're not machines that can survive on pre-packaged food and synthetic sugar. We're a rather fragile sort of creature that needs sunshine, clean sheets, warm suppers, fresh vegetables and good coffee to thrive. God didn't intend for us to be so strong and self-sufficient. That's why we aren't.

When I roast a chicken, I don't spend a lot of time trussing it, or covering the breasts with buttered aluminum foil like some culinarians recommend. I usually just peel and wash a carrot and a few ribs of celery and put them in the cavity with some garlic I've whacked with the flat edge of my favorite knife (another wonderful thing in my kitchen) and some fresh rosemary from the pot on my front porch. (Another aside, here in balmy Alabama, fresh rosemary will thrive outside in a pot all winter. It gets a little woody, but it's still flavorful.) I always sprinkle a little coarse sea salt on the outside of the bird and drizzle it with olive oil. I roast it at about 350 degrees until it starts to smell like heaven and Corduroy Dog starts to drool on the floor (for about an hour). (Real chefs say to roast it at a higher temperature for a shorter period of time, but I don't think that gives the veggies and herbs you've put inside the chicken time to release their flavor.) Do what you will with the pan-juices. They're lovely.

While I'm at it with all of this sharing what I like to eat and all, I might as well tell you how to make the perfect (again, in my opinion) Mint Julep. First, you've got to have grown your own traditional spearmint. It's the mintiest mint and down here, it's marketed as being "especially good for mint julep." Cut a handful. Take a handful or two of ice and smash it with your husband's hammer in a clean cotton towel. (When he says "I'm not sure that's good for the kitchen counter," just smile sweetly and hammer on.) Put about a half-inch of sugar (I know.) in the bottom of a 10-ounce glass and mash the mint right into it with the back of a spoon. (Oh, it smells like heaven.) Fill the glass with ice and pour in the bourbon to the top. (Even though my husband is from the patch of Tennessee just to the left of Jack Daniel's Country and Just to the Right of George Dickel's promised land, I'm still on speaking terms with Jim Beam. You can even use Southern Comfort if you're not a purist. Nothing isn't made better with a few jiggers of So. Co., that's the truth.) Drink it on the porch barefoot like a redneck. It's okay. Yum.

Now, it's your turn. Whoever you are, if you know me or not, respond to this post with the thing you most like to eat.

Subversive Su, Melanies and Scarletts, The Things That Happen When I Sleep

I think that every writer needs to write for himself at first. Well, maybe at second. If you learn to tell someone else's story, it inspires you to write your own. (Well, maybe after years of hiding behind other people's stories. I admit, I'm suspended in the editing process. I edit and reframe my story, omitting or reworking the parts that cause me hurt so deep that I can't touch them up.) It's a tough process. I proceed in fits and starts making headway in bits and pieces as particles of my story emerge from the snow of years to be discovered anew.

This weekend, I went to the wedding of one of my recently re-discovered little-girlhood friends. I saw many of my little girl-hood friends at the Big Church where we were all little girls together. What a world of Scarletts and Melanies I inhabited. (I see why Gone with the Wind rang true. I read it last week and it is as good as they say.) We are in the Reconstruction of our lives now. Many things have happened that we didn't expect. (One of us wrote a book called Many Things Have Happened Since He Died. It's true for all of us.) We grew in the tended soil of privilege. Each of us knows, even in adulthood and even if we won't admit that we know, what distinguishes a person of quality. We came up in a genteel society. I hadn't believed it until I saw the proof in the pudding of my old friends. Despite everything, they are lovely puddings. They will never unwork the stitches they made in the fabric of my being. I wouldn't wish it if they could. We are all grown-up now and even if we try not to, we will raise our children to be people of quality. Some things can't be explained and some things cannot be escaped.

Appropriate Segue Should Go Here.

This weekend, I realized that I might just have a chance to reclaim something I thought I had lost forever...and thus convinced myself that I didn't want. I'm not sure yet, but I have a feeling. There is no God besides my God who would love me enough to breathe life into something I killed myself. (There is no husband besides mine who could, or would, so support my dreams.)

Again With the Segue.

Because of something said today, I vacillate between feeling like an accidental Mata Hari and a hurricane. I have become that Something That Must Be Dealt With, inasmuch as the sick the dog heaves up on the floor is the same. I feel like my personhood is something I'm expected to surrender to to the commissary for the sake of Our Noble Cause. If you can't find me, I'll be hiding in the well with the O'Hara silver service.

And that, gentle readers, exhausts the number of Civil War/GWTW allusions I'm allowed for one day.

Quality Children's Program

I love the Kate Pierson Muppet. And to think how many people waste time on shows like 24.

Beat (Not Beaten)

I have a friend who is a potter. (And by "potter," I mean she is an artist in clay.) She says that sometimes she puts the clay on the wheel and it tries to escape. It doesn't want to be formed or shaped, it just wants to do its own thing. She says "What are you doing? You're a lump of dirt!" Most days, that's me. Idonwannadothat! I say.

Today, however, I'm a little lump with no more fight. I give up. If He doesn't finish the work, I'll just sit here on the wheel. Having time and time again found Him faithful when no one was, I have stopped expecting anything else. I have fought and lost. I have resisted and been conquered. I have struggled and been subdued.

I yield. For now. Bested by the goodness that like a fetter binds my wandering heart to Thee.

A Vestigial Savage

"...my religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me. That is the way all men should live, and then all would be equally brave." Thomas Jonathan (Stonewall) Jackson

I have always hoped for a Glorious End. It might have something to do with my Cold War childhood or my fascination with Fox's Book of Martyrs. I tend to think it has something to do with the vestigial savage in my bloodline. I imagine my family tree has at least one Claymore-wielding Celt, one Comanche brave, one concentration camp liberator, several drunken Irishmen, and an assortment of lesser pagans and hoodlums fueled more by a genetic compulsion to endure under fire than by a superficial machismo. I am the product of a wild and colorful lineage. I am a child of glory. I can't help that I was born a girl.

One of the reasons I want to have children so very much is that I want to meet these people who will be the fusion of my wild Black Irish and David's cool (and nearly undiluted) German restraint. I can't imagine what kind of oddball will result from this genetic pairing. I can't wait to meet this person. I like him already.

As I pray for this person's arrival (where are you already?) I pray that he will be a savage. A warrior. Fearless in the face of peril. Because I think this world will see some peril and I don't see many Brave Men to face it. I see smart men. I see rich men. I see men who like to talk and be recognized for it, but I don't see many men who like to shut up and do. Or women either, for that matter. I want to be brave. I want to be fearless. I want to be strong. I don't want to betray my personal Great Cloud of Witnesses. I can't help that I was born a girl.

How Shan. Got Her Groove Back

My sister has a new blog.

Lessons from Hank Williams and the Big Church, or The Well is Very Deep Indeed

"Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next." Lewis Carroll--Alice in Wonderland

Hank Williams

In Salvation on Sand Mountain, Dennis Covington explores the idea that human beings instinctively know where they come from, even if they don't. I believe in this. Somewhere in the deep, I know who I am. I know it when I hear bagpipes. I know it when I am afraid of the snakes in the garden. (And when they make me blind with fear-rage and I whack their heads off with the hoe.) I know it like I know what's True, even when I can't explain how I know or why. Last week, I bought Bill Monroe's version of the Hank Williams song, I Saw the Light, and I knew who I am when I listened to it. (Myrtle must have known who she was in her living-life, too, because she showed up on the front porch halfway through.) Hank Williams is as soft and familiar as wheat bread, clean sheets and bare feet in the summertime. He's somewhere in my vernacular. I think I've assimilated* Hank Williams. Yes, that must be it.

The Well

Lately, all the things I've assimilated are a comfort to me. I feel like Alice, tumbling down the well feet-first and in slow motion. Instead of bemoaning his tardiness, my rabbit says How could you DO this to me? How COULD you do this to me? How could you to this to ME? I want to say, "Hey Rabbit, you're the one who threw me in this hole." And as I go, fanny over teakettle as the case may be, I grab my assimilations off the shelves and hold them near.

The Big Church

Sitting in the Big Church on Sunday, I noticed a Very Old Man in the pew in front of me. His hair was very white and his skin was very brown. His wife had a slight bob in her head. At first, I thought she was just very much in agreement with the pastor, but I think she might have had a little tremor. I looked around in the congregation and counted the Old People. The Old GrayHairs. There were a lot. And I remembered how much I miss Old People. It isn't that there is anything wrong with Young People, even God says so, but I've missed those Old People in the same way I'd miss Hank Williams, wheat bread and bare feet in the summertime should I ever be denied. Old People, after all, are not as permanent as they seem. Or as we would wish them to be.

*Merriam-Webster defines "assimilate" as a transitive verb: to take in and utilize as nourishment.

My Life With An Angry Bearded Man

This is a letter David wrote to Books & Culture yesterday. I don't know why I find it so very amusing, but I do.

I signed up on-line for a free issue. Now, I am receiving threatening mail from a Christian publication. This is unacceptable on any level. I expect these scare tactics (empty threats to scare people into paying for a subscription they don't want and never requested) from secular publications, but I expected more from you. Hang your heads in shame and change your policies post haste. Living in the South, I have a lot of Christians as friends, neighbors, and co-workers. I will tell them all, including my church, of your horrific and shameful policies. Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is upon us.

Yours,
David

What I've Been Reading

This week, I've indulged in the remarkable luxury of dragging one of my dining room chairs out on the back porch and sitting in a little square of sunshine to read. My back porch is level with the tops of my trees: a redbud, a hickory and a chinaberry. The chinaberry is the largest and my favorite, even though it tried to crawl through the roof and had to have one of its limbs unceremoniously sawed off earlier this year. (I studied dendrology at Auburn when I was in the School of Forestry. I should have stayed there. Journalism is a stupid major. ) Of course, there aren't any leaves on my trees right now, so I can look out into the blue sky and see the top of the AT&T tower and the BellSouth building. I can almost make out the red sign atop the City Federal building. When I sit there, I feel suspended between the tomato and corn cob Birmingham I love and the whoosh and bang Birmingham of the future that we all fear is going to look a lot more like Atlanta then even Atlanta wants to look. (I hate Atlanta. If you were going to put deodorant on the United States, you'd roll it on right around the 285.) I'm Southern and I'm starting to accept what that means. I can't escape and I no longer want to try. I wrap my Birmingham, past and present, around me like a blanket and it protects me from the Voices in My Head with a strong and certain sense of place.

I've read two books this week. Both about religion. Both non-fiction. Both familiar. The first was Deborah Layton's account of her life at Jonestown, the cult-compound in Guyana where Jim Jones ordered 914 of his followers to commit suicide by drinking Flavor Aid laced with cyanide. I had to ask myself how a rational person could allow themselves to be beaten and raped by their pastor in California and reason that it was a good idea to travel with him to Guyana's remote equatorial rain forest and surrender your passport. It scared me to realize how easily I have allowed religion to turn me away from the knowledge of truth I already have in my heart. The old cliche is fitting here: There but for the Grace of God go I. My one sentence review? This book scared me and showed me what a fragile little mind I have.

The second book was Dennis Covington's most revered work, Salvation on Sand Mountain. I've just finished it and I cannot comment on it now other than to say if I ever see Dennis Covington again I will shake his hand and just say "Thank you. Thank you for that." He writes about religion, the Holy Spirit and women and he really gets all three. When we argue about women's roles in the church, he asserts, we're really arguing about the nature of God. He gave me the words to voice what I've been trying to all these years.