The table of Christian Things.

November 11, 2009 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Deep South, education, Everyday, faith, humor, life, theatre 
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On some mornings, as I’m entering the Town That Was, aka Scooba, I have a small (though at one time it was) visual delight, usually, to my right, just as I bump over the railroad tracks, situated all alone in front of what may very well be a defunct fire station. And this is what my small (though at one time it was) visual delight consists of:  a faded tent, no doubt purchased “as is,” from some desperate funeral home, I imagine. Beneath the tattered green fabric sits a cheap a la Fred’s-Giving-Away-the-Store-again! plastic table precariously atop four brittle fold-out legs. Adorning this table is a...

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I would have prayed, but I had to merge.

September 4, 2009 by · Leave a Comment
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This morning, as I made my way down the Trail of Tears to the town of Scooba, I passed a man in a reddish-shall-we-say-bleeding-into-burgundy Chevy Aveo...reading a book. While he drove. We were heading into that infamously, always congested section of highway right outside a town, or village, or tribe, known simply by the wooden staked sign, signaling both the start and the end of what appears to be a mostly dirt road, bearing the mysterious name of Wahalak. For some reason, and I feel that voodoo has a large part to do with it, they simply cannot get this portion of the road...

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I buried probably, like, a million birds as a child.

June 18, 2009 by · Leave a Comment
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I don't know of a southern household that doesn't own a pair of binoculars or have a jar of Blue Plate mayonnaise in the refrigerator. So, this is going to be a disappointing blog, in part, because my house has neither. Ok, well maybe a thimbleful is left of the mayonnaise. Ms. Frankie, the sweetest neighbor I had while growing up, God love her, thought it was because people really liked to look at the birds, that's why they all had binoculars...and that anything other than Blue Plate was sacrilege. She had a pair, herself, but they sat on the mantle after her husband died and...

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He'd just always wanted a hearse, he said.

May 25, 2009 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Everyday 
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U.L. and I like to take Sunday drives, after dinner, each week. There's no rush to this ritual. We enjoy a long dinner with the rest of the family; we gossip, we share news (even the made-up News, an old habit we used to do when I was younger, that's found some way to stick, even to this day). What you do is, you mute the TV, you guess at what's being said by looking at the graphics, and then you tell your version. It was quite a shock, for instance, when I realized that Bush had actually been re-elected, and even greater still,...

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The monk on a yellow motorcycle.

May 21, 2009 by · Leave a Comment
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Again, with the dreams. I'm having such dreams, lately.  A flood. Minus the ark. I think they're so vehement and vivid because I'm knuckles-down and knee-deep in rehearsals for The Complete Works of William Shakespeare [abridged]. We open next week, and I'm stressed, to be sure. But so long as I can get that stress out in my dreams, and not on the stage, perhaps, perchance, it will be all right. After all, the Bard said, There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Heaven help me indeed, if this is part of my philosophy. Earth, I...

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