Actually, today is Black Friday. Wal-Mart workers are on strike, two of the three kids (they are all home) are still asleep, and Betterhalf is about to slip out to her favorite store for a little shopping. I have not written a blog entry in months, but I have some things on my mind. Let's unpack for a while, shall we?
First of all, this holiday has not been as expected. I have pneumonia this year, brought on, at least in part, by my pushing too much to get a lot of work done this semester, teaching an extra class, presenting three conference papers, attempting to complete a book (still working on securing rights to quote lyrics, by the way), and carrying on the usual teaching and administrative responsibilities. It has been a long ride, but the semester is almost over, and I am looking forward to the spring.
I have had some modest success in publication this year, as well.
But, more important than work, always more important than work, is seeing how well my family is doing. My parents are in good health, my kids are flourishing, and my wife just loves the job she started last January. It is a pleasure to see them so happy and engaged in day-to-day life--they all have something to look forward to, and I can think of little more important than that.
I wish we could have travelled this weekend, but this little Thanksgiving has meant a great deal to me, too. I am about to start grading essays, I will get to teach again on Monday (I have been out for two weeks), and, surely, I will eventually begin enjoying the creative effects of codeine that Coleridge supposedly enjoyed--all right, that last part is a lie. I will recover from this bout of pneumonia just as I always have, and I will establish a new normal to adapt.
I hope you all have enjoyed a restful, satisfying holiday.
Friday, November 23, 2012
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Long Summer (So Far) of Writing
It's been a while since the last post, but life has been pushing, and I have been pushing back. The summer began with my department's having to evacuate our building, so I have been working in a space that looks like the set for Sanford & Son, and it's been difficult to focus on composing while thinking of the moving job to come. At the same time, though, I have been writing chapters of a book to be published this fall--I am co-editing a volume of essays about the interaction of country music lyricists and American culture. My co-editor, Roxanne Harde, and I have been bearing down on this project for the last year. I am down to tweaking a chapter on Cindy Walker and Lyle Lovett (I have already written chapters on Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, as well as co-writing the introduction with a discussion of The Dixie Chicks) and securing the publishing rights to reproducing some lyrics. I will make a big announcement when it appears.
There have been other writing projects, as well. I have been writing some poetry, and I have managed to place some, as well. I also received a few days ago Louisiana Literature's spring 2012 issue, which contains my two poems "Jones Valley" and "Copperhead." My blog's title comes from a line in "Jones Valley." I have poems accepted at a handful of journals, including Cape Rock Journal, The Connecticut Review, and Stoneboat, among others, and I will have two poems in the "Tennessee" volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology, due next year. I am also revising a couple of academic articles that will appear in scholarly journals in the next year, and I am scheduled to present two papers this coming fall semester.
Did I mention that I'm taking mandolin lessons, too?
I just want to assure you that absence from the blog does not mean I am slowing down. I'm pushing harder.
There have been other writing projects, as well. I have been writing some poetry, and I have managed to place some, as well. I also received a few days ago Louisiana Literature's spring 2012 issue, which contains my two poems "Jones Valley" and "Copperhead." My blog's title comes from a line in "Jones Valley." I have poems accepted at a handful of journals, including Cape Rock Journal, The Connecticut Review, and Stoneboat, among others, and I will have two poems in the "Tennessee" volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology, due next year. I am also revising a couple of academic articles that will appear in scholarly journals in the next year, and I am scheduled to present two papers this coming fall semester.
Did I mention that I'm taking mandolin lessons, too?
I just want to assure you that absence from the blog does not mean I am slowing down. I'm pushing harder.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
End of a Difficult School Year
A friend commented a few days ago that I had not posted a new blog entry for a while, and, frankly, I confess that I have not felt as if I had much blogworthy to describe. The past nine months have been whiplash ups and downs, and I am seeing so many changes in progress that bearings get more and more difficult to determine.
Today, though, I am going to dwell on the positive events. I am going to leave out the usual good stuff for which I am grateful, the good health of my family and friends, the network of kind feeling, and the other award-acceptance kind of stuff that one has to acknowledge. Consider those things acknowledged. Here are the positives:
That's about all to blog about now. I am seeing some light.
Today, though, I am going to dwell on the positive events. I am going to leave out the usual good stuff for which I am grateful, the good health of my family and friends, the network of kind feeling, and the other award-acceptance kind of stuff that one has to acknowledge. Consider those things acknowledged. Here are the positives:
- My wife and kids have gotten opportunities that have made them happier. Betterhalf got a better job where she feels challenged and appreciated. Firstkid is doing well off at that out-of-town university. Middlekid feels confident in what he is doing, taking to books and band. The Dotter's talents are starting to blossom--she placed in a poetry contest, she draws all the time, and she's excited that she'll be playing flute in band next year. Things seem to be paying off for all of them.
- This past spring, I had the single best teaching semester I have had in more years than I can remember. I taught a senior-level novels class filled with bright, articulate students, many of them talented writers, as well. I also taught a graduate-level novels class that taught me a great deal in return. After a difficult fall semester, this past spring semester offered a great deal of relief.
- I actually began feeling more like a writer this past year. I had some modest success in getting poems accepted to some respectable journals, I am co-editing a book of essays about country music lyricists (due out at the end of this year--wait for the announcement), and I have placed other pieces. My goal for next year is to feel more like an accomplished writer.
- I am getting closer to a sense of where I fit in my work as a teacher and as a semi-administrator. I think I am finding the balance.
That's about all to blog about now. I am seeing some light.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Springsteen's Back, and He's Pissed
Hello, all. I have been performing feats of administrative calibration and entropy for the past few weeks, and I have not, aside from some embarrassing personal stuff and revelatory wakefulness, had that much appropriate to write about for great public consumption. I have also been waiting for weeks for Bruce Springsteen to release his promised new album, Wrecking Ball, and I have listened to it more than a couple of dozen times over the past few days. I think it is time to share some opinions with you, and, Boss, if you read these comments, know that they are from the heart. I will not make these comments pretty. I bought Working on a Dream, and, while I enjoyed some of the tracks and appreciated your paying tributes to all kinds of pop music (especially your tribute to The Byrds, "Life Itself," and the Orbison tribute of "Queen of the Supermarket"), and I thought that a couple of tracks really belonged on Magic (the title track and "Queen"), I just could not find myself loving the album as a whole. I was particularly let down by having the heavenly, loving "The Last Carnival" followed by the bathetic "The Wrestler." I realize you earned an Academy Award nomination for that song, but the repeated images of "one" as disability, culminating in the one-legged dog image, became pitiful to an absurd extent.
Because, I have to say, I think Magic is the single best album you've released in the latter part of your career, even better than The Rising, another album I deeply admire. While The Rising offers us encouragement in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon, it also expands our concepts of hope. I believe when I hear that album that you have distilled the urgent need so many of us felt for assurance in our capacity to endure and revive. I think Magic surpasses The Rising, however, in that you voice the disgust many of us feel in having been flimflammed through our attempts to survive those losses. Your songs do not always overtly attack the empowered administration at the time ("Magic" itself offers a subtle yet sharp attack), but the entire album harnesses that frustrated energy of Born in the U. S. A. and demonstrates, often with kindred musical stylings but always with the same intensity, that even a generation later we wind up resisting those same strangling, impersonal "leaders" who screw us at seemingly every turn. I have got to say that as an album, Magic stands up, track to track to track. I can and have listened to it for hours.
Oh, I'm writing as if Springsteen is reading this note. Let me back up a bit. Wrecking Ball takes all the intensity of an E Street Springsteen and broadens the sound by augmenting it with Seeger Sessions instrumentation. As a result, many of these songs are more amplified folk than rock. It works, making Wrecking Ball an Americana album pulling from all kinds of American song traditions and making a rompin', stompin' breakdown/hoedown of an album. The great majority of the album offers political commentary as the Boss takes stock of America in its second decade of the new century. By the Boss's reckoning, we are in rough shape. The majority of the songs have a setting of financial woes--even the moving love song, "This Depression," repeats "I need your heart," as if the only sustaining factor in our times is love. "Easy Money" at first sounds like carefree encouragement to make a quick buck until the lyrics reveal criminal intent. The desperation of "Jack of All Trades," which begins with a list of skills held by the singer and the jobs he can do, ends with his assertion that he would also be able to kill those responsible for causing the hardships. More often, though, the songs offer encouragement, a call to faith, persistence, and courage as well as a confidence in heart and persistence. From the comic image of the dead's waiting to reclaim their own in "We Are Alive" to the open defiance of "Wrecking Ball," "Death to My Hometown," and "We Take Care of Our Own," to the promise of "American Land" (the final track sounding like the best Pogues imitation ever), Springsteen calls on us to persist and withstand the hard times. Sometimes a rock chant makes me believe that will work. In this album, it does.
Is Wrecking Ball as good as Magic? I still prefer the older album. First, "You've Got It" is a straight love song, and that fact makes it different from every other song on the album--even "This Depression" emphasizes the financial characteristics of that song's setting. I also wish there had been one good close harmony like on "Gypsy Biker" from Magic. That last is a matter of taste, I admit, but the sadness on Magic has a grim defiance to it that the elegaic songs on Wrecking Ball could sometimes use.
But if Springsteen and/or his people find this blog, I also find myself asking if there is an intended but unacknowledged ambiguity in the opening track, "We Take Care of Our Own." In the lines "Wherever this flag's flown, / We take care of our own," and the lines, "There ain't no help, the cavalry stayed home," especially in the contexts of mentioning New Orleans and "shotgun shacks," it seems to me that a couple of things are happening. First of all, the song appears to assert that the government has not helped the poor enough (if "the cavalry," so often a symbol of help in desperate times, doesn't help, then we must rely on each other in our own communities). I also noticed that all the places mentioned in the song are American places. The fact of the matter is that with our many international obligations and engagements, our flag flies all over the world. Springsteen's song appears to be making the comment that we Americans are always looking out for American best interests, no matter what our overseas engagement happens to be and what the consequences might be to the indigenous people. I suspect that Springsteen intends for these comments to remain subtly in his work, and I am surprised to hear that the Obama re-election campaign may be considering it as one of its rallying songs. "We Take Care of Our Own" sounds to me like something the singer of "Born in the U. S. A." would be singing a generation later.
I am awfully fond of Wrecking Ball as an album, and I will likely listen to it as a complete work again and again. When Bruce delivers a state of the union album, it is spot-on and worth listening to. It's time to listen again.
Because, I have to say, I think Magic is the single best album you've released in the latter part of your career, even better than The Rising, another album I deeply admire. While The Rising offers us encouragement in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon, it also expands our concepts of hope. I believe when I hear that album that you have distilled the urgent need so many of us felt for assurance in our capacity to endure and revive. I think Magic surpasses The Rising, however, in that you voice the disgust many of us feel in having been flimflammed through our attempts to survive those losses. Your songs do not always overtly attack the empowered administration at the time ("Magic" itself offers a subtle yet sharp attack), but the entire album harnesses that frustrated energy of Born in the U. S. A. and demonstrates, often with kindred musical stylings but always with the same intensity, that even a generation later we wind up resisting those same strangling, impersonal "leaders" who screw us at seemingly every turn. I have got to say that as an album, Magic stands up, track to track to track. I can and have listened to it for hours.
Oh, I'm writing as if Springsteen is reading this note. Let me back up a bit. Wrecking Ball takes all the intensity of an E Street Springsteen and broadens the sound by augmenting it with Seeger Sessions instrumentation. As a result, many of these songs are more amplified folk than rock. It works, making Wrecking Ball an Americana album pulling from all kinds of American song traditions and making a rompin', stompin' breakdown/hoedown of an album. The great majority of the album offers political commentary as the Boss takes stock of America in its second decade of the new century. By the Boss's reckoning, we are in rough shape. The majority of the songs have a setting of financial woes--even the moving love song, "This Depression," repeats "I need your heart," as if the only sustaining factor in our times is love. "Easy Money" at first sounds like carefree encouragement to make a quick buck until the lyrics reveal criminal intent. The desperation of "Jack of All Trades," which begins with a list of skills held by the singer and the jobs he can do, ends with his assertion that he would also be able to kill those responsible for causing the hardships. More often, though, the songs offer encouragement, a call to faith, persistence, and courage as well as a confidence in heart and persistence. From the comic image of the dead's waiting to reclaim their own in "We Are Alive" to the open defiance of "Wrecking Ball," "Death to My Hometown," and "We Take Care of Our Own," to the promise of "American Land" (the final track sounding like the best Pogues imitation ever), Springsteen calls on us to persist and withstand the hard times. Sometimes a rock chant makes me believe that will work. In this album, it does.
Is Wrecking Ball as good as Magic? I still prefer the older album. First, "You've Got It" is a straight love song, and that fact makes it different from every other song on the album--even "This Depression" emphasizes the financial characteristics of that song's setting. I also wish there had been one good close harmony like on "Gypsy Biker" from Magic. That last is a matter of taste, I admit, but the sadness on Magic has a grim defiance to it that the elegaic songs on Wrecking Ball could sometimes use.
But if Springsteen and/or his people find this blog, I also find myself asking if there is an intended but unacknowledged ambiguity in the opening track, "We Take Care of Our Own." In the lines "Wherever this flag's flown, / We take care of our own," and the lines, "There ain't no help, the cavalry stayed home," especially in the contexts of mentioning New Orleans and "shotgun shacks," it seems to me that a couple of things are happening. First of all, the song appears to assert that the government has not helped the poor enough (if "the cavalry," so often a symbol of help in desperate times, doesn't help, then we must rely on each other in our own communities). I also noticed that all the places mentioned in the song are American places. The fact of the matter is that with our many international obligations and engagements, our flag flies all over the world. Springsteen's song appears to be making the comment that we Americans are always looking out for American best interests, no matter what our overseas engagement happens to be and what the consequences might be to the indigenous people. I suspect that Springsteen intends for these comments to remain subtly in his work, and I am surprised to hear that the Obama re-election campaign may be considering it as one of its rallying songs. "We Take Care of Our Own" sounds to me like something the singer of "Born in the U. S. A." would be singing a generation later.
I am awfully fond of Wrecking Ball as an album, and I will likely listen to it as a complete work again and again. When Bruce delivers a state of the union album, it is spot-on and worth listening to. It's time to listen again.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
My Sense of Time Is Slipping
As March begins here in east Tennessee, we have already seen spring-like temperatures, there are budding plants in my front yard, and the grass could use a mowing. I am grading essays and realize that the semester has already reached its midpoint. I have been writing regularly, submitting regularly, and attending more meetings than I can remember. I am not certain how so much gets accomplished, and I can always think of more to do. I find myself in this situation every semester, and work offers only a version of what I see at home.
There are times when all I can do is look at my kids and try to see where they went. Firstkid is off at college, and he stands assured and happy in that part of his life. Middlekid is taller than his mom, and those baby cheeks from only last year are gone. Thirdkid has started losing that awkwardness of being too tall too fast, and I am pleased to see how comfortable she has become with herself, hoping she can keep that confidence as the added pressure of middle school starts.
I'm just checking in now. I got an idea for some writing that I need to pursue, and I have some personal editing to do--not only in my writing but in the way I will face the end of the semester. My window is open today.
There are times when all I can do is look at my kids and try to see where they went. Firstkid is off at college, and he stands assured and happy in that part of his life. Middlekid is taller than his mom, and those baby cheeks from only last year are gone. Thirdkid has started losing that awkwardness of being too tall too fast, and I am pleased to see how comfortable she has become with herself, hoping she can keep that confidence as the added pressure of middle school starts.
I'm just checking in now. I got an idea for some writing that I need to pursue, and I have some personal editing to do--not only in my writing but in the way I will face the end of the semester. My window is open today.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Where I've Been
The break between semesters had me working hard, and I am just now returning to creative writing (I wrote a so-so draft of a poem today, but at least I wrote something). In the past five weeks, I graded a lot of final exams, polished part of an intro for a collection of essays due out late this year, finished one of the essays and wrote another one from scratch, wrote two conference papers, and made it through the first Christmas holiday with the experience of having Firstkid home from college along with the new teen and the restless tween. It was a busy time all those weeks, but here I am on the other side, wife happy in her new job, kids happy to be back at school (yes, all three of them), I happy to be back in the routine, as of five minutes ago the proud owner of a brand new rejection slip (not even a letter) from a journal whose initials spell a negative conjunction.
This afternoon, I get to re-read passages of Moby-Dick and Sister Carrie to prepare for the classes I teach tomorrow.
My department is hosting a poetry open mic event tonight, and I am looking forward to participating. I could use some creative recharging.
This afternoon, I get to re-read passages of Moby-Dick and Sister Carrie to prepare for the classes I teach tomorrow.
My department is hosting a poetry open mic event tonight, and I am looking forward to participating. I could use some creative recharging.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Old Christmas in Holly Pond
When I was a boy in the 1960s, the majority of my extended family lived no further than twenty miles from my home in north central Alabama, so I pretty much took it for granted that I would see just about everyone fairly regularly, but not always in big groups. We kept many scheduled family reunions then, the summer ones usually corresponding to decoration Sundays at family churches, a couple of more modest meetings at Thanksgiving and New Year's Day, and the big Christmas one, with my lone surviving maternal great grandmother being its focus. Usually, on Christmas mornings (the lone exception's being the year my younger brother had the mumps), we two kids and our parents would open presents, eat breakfast, and then head out to Holly Pond for the noon meal, the house full of relatives and the weather usually accommodating the many cousins' spilling outside to play all over the farm. The old house couldn't contain everything that was in it.
My maternal great-grandmother lived in a house trailer next to the house of my mother's younger aunt, Jean, and her husband, whose given name was Charles but who was usually called "Chuck" or "Chunk." Uncle Chunk Yeager was a tall, happy man, with tanned skin and a salt-and-pepper mustache, sometimes, and I have always associated his leathery, comfortable look with cowboys. He was consistently one of the most cheerful men I have ever known, easy going and hospitable. He made every child who visited his home feel welcome, and I have always wished that he had lived long enough to meet my younger children. Jean was just as loving, and it meant a great deal to be around her. After we lost Uncle Chunk, she seemed diminished in a way she could not overcome, and our subsequent gatherings always missed someone. Their children, Richard and Melanie, were lucky to have them both.
My maternal great-grandmother, Eula Snuggs, surprised me all the time. An awfully energetic and matter-of-fact woman, she made an early impression on me when I once saw her injecting insulin in her abdomen, standing right in front of the open refrigerator door with syringe in hand. One Christmas, someone thought it would be funny to give her a pair of Tobasco-red panties, and she held them up to herself and showed them off to everyone in the house, deflecting the joke from her. Her trailer was her own choice for her own independence, and I hope that when my own mother reaches that age, she will preserve those best aspects of her grandmother's character.
My favorite times in Holly Pond were at the old farmhouse. Jean and Chunk later sold that land and built a new house about a mile from it up the dirt road and closer to the main road, but I associate big Christmas with the old house. First of all, no matter what the weather happened to be, there would be the same feeling walking in. We would enter through what was essentially a utility room, through the back door. In this narrow room of the house, basically a hallway, was a closet, the chest freezer, the washer, and the dryer. On these appliances, the guests would place the various desserts they had brought. The kids would usually eat Christmas dinner there, standing with our plates on the appliances and eying the desserts. This room passed for the "big kid" table, the transition between being tended to as an infant and later tending to infants of one's own; eating there marked a stage of maturity.
Every Christmas (and, for many years, the first Sundays of May), I had to brace myself before going into the kitchen from the utility room, because suddenly there would be so much heat (ham and turkey and dressing and rolls had been in the oven for hours; every eye on the stove had a bubbling pot on it; the percolator had been running full bore since daybreak) and so many cheerful voices and good smells that I still cannot distinguish the emotions from the sensations. This was not the good cheer so often promoted in the mass media, the elegant cocktail party, the ski lodge fireplace, the sleigh ride through snow-covered landscapes. We rarely saw more than a few flakes of snow, and it was usually jacket weather, and my cousins were rarely in gowns except for proms and weddings, where the tuxes were rented, and if there were a little wine on the premises, its consumption was furtive. It was a comfortable, family, come-as-you-are, covered-dish Christmas of affection and fellow feeling, the shared delight of one's accomplishments and the unbounded sympathy for one's problems.
Later, when I got engaged, my wife-to-be was accepted and fit in immediately; years later, our oldest child was brought in just as quickly, just as I have seen so many new family members welcomed (I still remember his giggles that first Christmas there, when he got a plush ball with a sleigh bell inside it). Jean and Chunk always remembered every child who was to attend, and each received a modest gift until he or she graduated high school and became, sort of officially, an adult.
I miss those voices, the nasal twang of Jean's welcome, Granmaw Snuggs' saying "here" as if there were a Y in it ("come hyeah"), my grandmother Portis' mispronouncing her own married name (Henderson) as "Henneson." I miss the heartiness of the Yeager men's voices, even as Richard came to sound more like his father. I can still hear the crackle of the gravel on the long dirt road as I would doze off in the backseat after a long, full, happy day.
Today, in Johnson City, our family visits' having already taken place in the past few weeks, my kids are in the main room, playing video games; my house smells of the food I am preparing for supper tonight; my wife takes some personal time to read a fantasy novel before, more than likely, falling asleep in a needed nap. I have spoken to my parents, and they are well; I have texted my brother and his family, because it is Sunday and they have church activities; I plan part of the new year and hope the best of what I cannot foresee or affect. We are making a different Christmas now, preparing for the future when our children will come to visit us and associate Christmas with this one of many homes we love. Still, every time we go to visit family in Alabama, we drive through Holly Pond, and I yearn to turn from the two-lane state highway onto the familiar country road each time we pass it. Just now, in my heart, I have made that turn again.
My maternal great-grandmother lived in a house trailer next to the house of my mother's younger aunt, Jean, and her husband, whose given name was Charles but who was usually called "Chuck" or "Chunk." Uncle Chunk Yeager was a tall, happy man, with tanned skin and a salt-and-pepper mustache, sometimes, and I have always associated his leathery, comfortable look with cowboys. He was consistently one of the most cheerful men I have ever known, easy going and hospitable. He made every child who visited his home feel welcome, and I have always wished that he had lived long enough to meet my younger children. Jean was just as loving, and it meant a great deal to be around her. After we lost Uncle Chunk, she seemed diminished in a way she could not overcome, and our subsequent gatherings always missed someone. Their children, Richard and Melanie, were lucky to have them both.
My maternal great-grandmother, Eula Snuggs, surprised me all the time. An awfully energetic and matter-of-fact woman, she made an early impression on me when I once saw her injecting insulin in her abdomen, standing right in front of the open refrigerator door with syringe in hand. One Christmas, someone thought it would be funny to give her a pair of Tobasco-red panties, and she held them up to herself and showed them off to everyone in the house, deflecting the joke from her. Her trailer was her own choice for her own independence, and I hope that when my own mother reaches that age, she will preserve those best aspects of her grandmother's character.
My favorite times in Holly Pond were at the old farmhouse. Jean and Chunk later sold that land and built a new house about a mile from it up the dirt road and closer to the main road, but I associate big Christmas with the old house. First of all, no matter what the weather happened to be, there would be the same feeling walking in. We would enter through what was essentially a utility room, through the back door. In this narrow room of the house, basically a hallway, was a closet, the chest freezer, the washer, and the dryer. On these appliances, the guests would place the various desserts they had brought. The kids would usually eat Christmas dinner there, standing with our plates on the appliances and eying the desserts. This room passed for the "big kid" table, the transition between being tended to as an infant and later tending to infants of one's own; eating there marked a stage of maturity.
Every Christmas (and, for many years, the first Sundays of May), I had to brace myself before going into the kitchen from the utility room, because suddenly there would be so much heat (ham and turkey and dressing and rolls had been in the oven for hours; every eye on the stove had a bubbling pot on it; the percolator had been running full bore since daybreak) and so many cheerful voices and good smells that I still cannot distinguish the emotions from the sensations. This was not the good cheer so often promoted in the mass media, the elegant cocktail party, the ski lodge fireplace, the sleigh ride through snow-covered landscapes. We rarely saw more than a few flakes of snow, and it was usually jacket weather, and my cousins were rarely in gowns except for proms and weddings, where the tuxes were rented, and if there were a little wine on the premises, its consumption was furtive. It was a comfortable, family, come-as-you-are, covered-dish Christmas of affection and fellow feeling, the shared delight of one's accomplishments and the unbounded sympathy for one's problems.
Later, when I got engaged, my wife-to-be was accepted and fit in immediately; years later, our oldest child was brought in just as quickly, just as I have seen so many new family members welcomed (I still remember his giggles that first Christmas there, when he got a plush ball with a sleigh bell inside it). Jean and Chunk always remembered every child who was to attend, and each received a modest gift until he or she graduated high school and became, sort of officially, an adult.
I miss those voices, the nasal twang of Jean's welcome, Granmaw Snuggs' saying "here" as if there were a Y in it ("come hyeah"), my grandmother Portis' mispronouncing her own married name (Henderson) as "Henneson." I miss the heartiness of the Yeager men's voices, even as Richard came to sound more like his father. I can still hear the crackle of the gravel on the long dirt road as I would doze off in the backseat after a long, full, happy day.
Today, in Johnson City, our family visits' having already taken place in the past few weeks, my kids are in the main room, playing video games; my house smells of the food I am preparing for supper tonight; my wife takes some personal time to read a fantasy novel before, more than likely, falling asleep in a needed nap. I have spoken to my parents, and they are well; I have texted my brother and his family, because it is Sunday and they have church activities; I plan part of the new year and hope the best of what I cannot foresee or affect. We are making a different Christmas now, preparing for the future when our children will come to visit us and associate Christmas with this one of many homes we love. Still, every time we go to visit family in Alabama, we drive through Holly Pond, and I yearn to turn from the two-lane state highway onto the familiar country road each time we pass it. Just now, in my heart, I have made that turn again.
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