He'd just always wanted a hearse, he said.
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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,...
Persistence has no pesticide.
It all started with the handmade oatmeal soap my sister-in-law gave me, in the guise of a present. I must say, wrapped as it was in that beautiful red gift paper, it was quite a thoughtful-looking Christmas present. That’s the allure of wrapping paper, though, isn’t it? I learned this early on: people will take anything on this earth if you just wrap it pretty enough. It can be a thoughtless happy, a re-gift (as American as the NRA), a genuine present, anything. Many is the household item, kitchen utensil, family portrait, that I, as a child, took and re-wrapped and gave to Nana...
All they could do was "talk the fire out."
Part of my nightly ritual is calling U.L., checking in with him before I go to bed. He's a very nervous and worried man, and has a slight addiction to mayonnaise, like the rest of us in Mississippi, despite believing that it causes him great anxiety. It's gotten a little better now that he's on his "nerve pill." Which took every preacher south of God to convince him to take. This side of my family is very old, very superstitious, maybe a little Christian Scientist but registered as Southern Baptist... And it never fails that each night our phone conversation goes a little...
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