southern essays

Camping

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There are people who choose to do this. More than once.

I, too, was enticed by the rustic vision of communing with nature when a friend of ours suggested we all go camping out on family farm land to celebrate his birthday. It’ll be fun for the kids I thought. I looked to see what sort of camping gear we could get from Amazon before my husband stopped me and thankfully, suggested we ask his outdoorsman brother if we could borrow something they had. Little did we know that he had quite the professional cache of camping gear, and Joey came home with a nice sized four-person tent, 35 degree sleeping bags, cute little camping mattresses to go underneath those sleeping bags, and little camping tables to set in between our tailgating chairs. We were all set for our little family adventure.

The evening began peacefully, gathered around a roaring campfire that the menfolk kept feeding and messing with. I think all men are pyromaniacs at heart—tell me of one male who can leave a fire alone without poking at it and rearranging the sticks because its not quite right? Our friends swapped playlists and we listened to everything from The Band and George Strait to Nelly. The kids ran all over the farm and played hard until our friends that had some sense went back home.

I sat up by the fire until my son called out to me to come snuggle with him. This was just a ruse to get my phone so he could watch Power Rangers, but whatever. I crouched down and tiptoed into the tent, handed him the phone, and zipped myself up in one of the sleeping bags. This isn’t so bad I thought, we’ll be just fine. At 2:30 a.m., I woke up shivering, because apparently these sleeping bags are rated on survivability, not comfort. My kind husband unzipped my bag, put a pair of his socks on me, tucked my frigid feet back in, and zipped me back up in the bag like the helpless creature I am.

At 5:34 a.m., I woke up with a strong urgency to get to the bathroom… quick. I laid there for a good 30 seconds, not sure where I was or why my arms were seemingly strapped to the sides of my body like a mummy. I finally remembered that I had actually chosen to do this and wasn’t being held hostage in the woods by a sick psychopath, and I started fiddling with the zipper. I had almost given up hope of getting out of there without peeing on myself when the zipper cooperated and let me out of the nightmarish cocoon. Then there was the tent door zipper to contend with. Once I was out of the hell hole, I searched unsuccessfully for my shoes in the dark. I was already doing the cross-legged potty dance at this point, so I tip toed over rocks, wet earth, and sharp broken limbs in my socks until I came at last to the oasis that was the latrine.

As I relieved myself, I vowed never to do this silly thing again. I mean really. People spend money on all this gear so that they can sleep on the ground. Why would you risk being eaten by coyotes when you could just as easily take yourself to a Marriott? You want to commune with nature? Wonderful! Rent a chalet in the mountains.

My brother owns a nice sized camper, and my Daddy has—for as long as I can remember—wanted to buy an RV. They want to go places and be outside. I want to go places too, but I think I will reserve a hotel room at those places.

As soon as I got back to the tent and found my shoes, I asked my husband nicely for my keys and said Adios. I’ve never been so happy to see the shining lights of Sandersville, Georgia… and my bed therein.

Cat Lady

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I am not a “dog person”. In the South, that’s sort of like admitting you’re an alcoholic, an admission that something is inherently wrong with you. I just read another southern writer I love—Rick Bragg—who was writing about his dogs, actually has a whole book coming out about his current dog. With numerous southern dog stories like Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows, I feel like I’m lacking something essential to being southern. I also don’t like tomato sandwiches, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

I’m fine being around dogs; it’s not that I’m afraid of them or anything. But dogs smell bad a lot of the time, and a lot of them like to lick you, which I’m just not down with. The whole “puppy breath” thing is not endearing to me. Now, I love my niece bulldog, BeeGee, just like I loved my niece pug Penny and my sister basset hound Nugget. Dogs have been in my family for years, some inside dogs and some outside dogs. It’s just that I prefer them to be owned by somebody else. Someone else’s baby you can love on and cuddle until it starts crying, and then you give it back to its Mama. It’s kind of like that.

I guess that makes me the crazy aunt in our family dynamic. The cat lady. I’m cool with that. My husband and I have had two cats, one planned and one unplanned. BeBop, a bobtail girl kitty who looks like a furry bowling ball, was adopted at my behest from a local couple who couldn’t keep their orange tabby from attacking her in his quest for dominance. She is sitting on the arm of my chair now, wishing I would stop what I’m doing and give her a good scratch between the ears. Our take-up cat Noelle was a scraggly, wormy, fearful looking creature who sought shelter at our doorstep during Christmastime. She was such a unique looking cat, and I decided after doing some research that she must have been at least part Maine Coon. Her tail was bushy like a squirrel’s and the fur around her face made her look lion-esque. My husband found her dead under a chair in our dining room a couple years ago; she showed no signs of suffering prior to that, so we’re not sure what happened.

Noelle was a gentle creature who knew she could whoop BeBop’s butt but chose—mostly—not to. She was a ladylike feline who graciously entertained BeBop’s notions of dominance. You see, BeBop is completely and utterly helpless, but you can’t convince her of that. She has always believed herself to be the alpha kitty and was highly offended when we allowed another cat to cross our doorstep. She has no hip sockets, and to be honest with you, I have no idea how she walks at all. Our vet said he had only seen one other case of a cat being born with such a deformed pelvis, and in that case the cat had to have surgery to fix the eventual grinding of bone on bone that occurred.

Our vet makes fun of me. He’s a good country doctor who takes care of animals large and small and writes songs that’ll have you in tears after a few chords. He and his wife, who works in the clinic, are salt-of-the-earth people, the kind of people you’re better for knowing. I’m sure they’re dog people. My Mama called them a few years back asking if Dr. Cullens could see their old orange tabby, Coot, who has since crossed the rainbow bridge. Mama was worried about Coot for some reason, maybe he had gotten into a real bad fight with another country cat or some such as that. She was telling Mrs. Cullens that Coot was basically an old barn cat and trying to explain to her the difference between Coot and our pampered indoor girl, BeBop. “I understand. BeBop is definitely not a barn cat,” Mrs. Cullens said.

My great-grandmother Nan Nan probably had over twenty take-up cats that she would feed on her back porch. I guess I’m a little bit like her, although she always had a dog too. Don’t tell my husband, but I can see myself feeding all the neighborhood cats in my old age. They’re brilliant creatures whose fickle affection you have to earn. They’re not like most dogs, who will blindly adore their owners. Actually, cats don’t really have owners at all. If anything, they own their humans. They certainly own their territory and will ruthlessly defend it.

One of the most difficult things about being a pet owner is that an animal’s life span is so much shorter than a human’s. When BeBop dies, I’ll feel a little lost. She has been here for most of our marriage and all of our son’s four years; she’s basically part of the furniture at this point. Some Christians say that animals don’t have souls and won’t make it to heaven. That it all goes dark for them when this earthly life is over. But I like to believe in the “country side of heaven” that Dr. Cullens, the vet, sings about. “There’s a side of heaven where country people go,” he sings. A side of heaven with red dirt and little winding roads, where you can hear the screen door slap and eat your Granny’s biscuits. A lot of good country people will have their old dog Jake sitting on the front porch. I’ll have a dozen or so cats that I feed outside, and I believe BeBop will be there inside, probably still pooping on the rug because she’s mad at me for acknowledging the other cats.

Little Fat Men

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A rather large ceramic reclining Buddha sits in the corner of my son’s bathroom. I think of this as an appropriate place, because sometimes I am naked in that room and Buddha makes me feel better as I look into the plate glass mirror at my own fat belly. Buddha sits there with a wide grin on his face, naked except for a strategically draped robe.

Another Buddha sits on a shelf with me at school. This guy has his arms up, raising the ancient roof, with an ecstatic smile on his face. He is literally dancing in all his glory, and he makes me laugh just to look at him. He’s a brilliant reminder on those days when grumpy, hormonal teenagers make me forget the joy of the art I’m teaching them. There is an inscription in pencil and three white lines on the bottom of this Buddha, bearing the only evidence from where my genius art teacher friend glued him back together and hid the damage.

Some visitors to these spaces might worry about me when they see the statuettes. I can hear it now. What’s a good Christian girl doing with a Zen Buddhist idol on the bathroom floor? No child of mine is going to be taught by some hussy with a blasphemous relic sitting on her classroom shelf.

These little dudes don’t represent my religious beliefs, but they do remind me to be content and joyful wherever I am, whatever I’m doing. There are times when I desperately need relief from

the bonds of anxiety and depression, and seeing a little fat man rolling with laughter sometimes does the trick. I often wonder what my great-grandmother Meme was thinking when she acquired these Buddhas. Her parents, John and Zada Schleucher, were once vaudeville performers until they saw the light and Jesus saved them from their sacrilegious ways. They founded the Miami Rescue Mission and are famous in our family for guiding a wayward woman to salvation while sitting in the bushes of the whorehouse next door.

Meme wasn’t allowed to take dance classes. She probably wasn’t allowed to do many other seemingly harmless things she wanted to do growing up, rebelling in her later years by acquiring several hobbies disapproved by the Bible-thumping Schleuchers. I was told she took yoga classes while Gramps, retired from the Southern Bell Company, spent time studying photography and collecting rocks and minerals. On one of Gramps’s rock trades, some fellow in Japan sent him a carved Buddha. Meme thought it was the cutest little fat man she’d ever seen and started collecting them. The ones I have are hers, a reminder of the need to travel one’s own journey to spiritual enlightenment.

I am a Christian and believe in Jesus as my Savior and friend. I will preach the goodness of Christ, my resurrected Savior, until the day I die. I will also cherish the little Laughing Buddhas, which, to me, represent contentment, joy, and an open invitation to forge thine own path. The way I see it, Protestant Christians can take a hint from other religious traditions. Take the practice of repentance ashes on Ash Wednesday for one. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

I had a sweet friend once who made me what she called “prayer beads”. I accepted them with gratitude, saying, “Oh! These are beautiful! It’s like a rosary!” She protested that no, absolutely not, this was NOT a rosary, it was completely different, nothing Catholic about it. But my friend was shortsighted—it was like a rosary, where the holder of the beads fingers each piece as a part of prayer practice. Who cares if the idea came from Catholic tradition? It’s a beautiful practice, and if it helps with one’s prayer life, why not?

I don’t know much about Zen Buddhism, which is where my little fat men come from. The type of Buddhism originating from India is different. My knowledge is limited to a brief overview of world religions in college, but from what I remember of Buddhism, it is sort of the anti-religion, the goal of which is nirvana, a state of being where the mind is empty and the spirit is free. An old boyfriend suggested that I read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse back in the day, which I did. This book, written in 1922, follows a man and his path to enlightenment during the time of the Gautama Buddha. He learns important lessons from the people he meets along the way. If we allow ourselves to, don’t we all?

So if you see my little fat men and feel a smile start to creep across your face, allow it to happen. Lightning hasn’t struck me down yet.

On Dancing, Dying, and the Human Condition

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Dancing is a special kind of freedom, a kind of madness. I used to meet up at the empty dance studio with a few dance friends and improvise in the dark room. No lights on. Just moving. When you care about how it looks, it’s performing. When you don’t, it’s therapy.

When I teach, I sometimes try to get back to that dark room. I try to find the warm bodies that feel it the way that I used to. (I say “used to” because I seldom give myself the space anymore.) There have been a few, and they aren’t the “best” dancers. They aren’t the most competitive, and likely they are the most fragile creatures. But they feel it, like a pulse. Like a heartbeat.

I am not a great teacher. I don’t know that a lot of students will have fond memories of me. But I want to give them the space to feel, hard as that is in a public school setting. The space to find that spirit moving within them. The space to awaken something that has been lying dormant in their soul. This is the source of artistry. It is artistry that propels the technique, I think. It is this impulse that drives effort, like an addict is drawn back to a drug, time and time again. I think that’s why so many artists fall into bad habits—because we try to fill the empty space when we aren’t dancing. Because when we aren’t dancing we don’t feel fully alive. So we might turn to drink or food or sex to fill the empty places. Or we might just fall into a chasm of anxiety and depression and forget everything that ever gave us joy to begin with.

When I was in middle school, my dance studio began contracting with a choreographer from Texas. He would come in once a year and set an original piece on us kids. Later, they brought in other guest choreographers, but he is the most memorable to me. Looking back, you could tell that he had his problems. Rumor has it that he struggled with alcoholism. Such is the flaw in many great artists:  Hemingway, Van Gogh, and too many musicians to mention.

His skin was a dark, rich brown, and he had a big, bright smile and a passion that radiated from his pores. I can still smell the musky hot sweat evaporating from our skin—glorious. He made us feel something –this was the most important thing to him. Each master class he gave included us sitting in a split while we improvised arms and facial expressions. This was always performed to “The Promise” by Tracy Chapman.

Certain songs, even after all these years, make me think of him:  “The Promise”, “My Skin” by Natalie Merchant, “Hanging by a Thread” by Jann Arden, and “Din Daa Daa” by George Kranz. (Will my students remember me from different songs?) His jazz choreography was shaped partly by Frank Hatchett, who he assisted for many years, but his lyrical style was uniquely his own.

All the salt inside my body ruins

Everyone I come close to

My hands are barely holding up my head

This teacher made me feel like something special, and I tried so hard to impress him, like I did all my teachers. He would point to me as an example of emotional expression, even as a young girl. It’s amazing to me how motivating a little pat on the back can be. Even a chubby kid like me thought I could change the world with my dancing. Because of him, I grew up believing the art of dance was important—something to aspire to. “Dance is my life!” I would decree to my mother. “Dance is not your life; dance is part of your life, Leia,” I remember her saying.

He passed away at his home in July of 2007. He was 47. That’s all I know. I haven’t found a cause of death, and I don’t guess it matters. You’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead. Or so I am told.

I’m so tired of looking at my feet

All the secrets that I keep

My heart is barely hanging by a thread

There was another flawed but memorable dance person in my life. He was a professor of rhythm tap and artist-in-residence at the university I attended until he was fired for reasons unknown to me. I remember seeing him in the parking lot of the Warwick West apartment complex where I lived a year or so after he was dismissed from the university, so he must’ve lived there too. The time that I saw him there, outside of the dance studio setting, he looked terrible—so depressed and miserable, so different from the man who dressed in brightly colored suits that matched his tap shoes.

I loved him so much that I traveled to take classes he taught outside the university, at a little studio in the heart of the city. That studio was run by another passionate lover of dance who has now since passed away, but she is another story entirely. This tap professor even gave me a few private lessons when I could scrape up the money to pay him. I felt a connection with him because he, too, had that something special in his soul. I’d like to think he recognized that something in me.

Because he mattered to me, his opinion could heal or hurt me. I remember once, in his class at the university, he didn’t even look at me perform—he just looked down the whole time. I mustered up the courage to confront him after class, and he told me that “I didn’t look at you because I was listening to you.” This could’ve been just a lousy excuse for not paying attention to a student, but I accepted it. “Bring your feet up under you. Dance like a lady,” he would tell me.

Later, another teacher told me it was alright to “bring that funk” to my tap dancing style. I waver back and forth between the two now.

The professor died of heart failure in the summer of 2015. He was 58.

Oh, look at me, at all I’ve done

I’ve lost so many things I so dearly loved

I miss you all

I wish I was with you now

I wish I was

Do all dancers, like dogs, go to heaven? My faith says that grace is freely given to those who believe, and I pray that’s true. I hope we have believed hard enough. We will need that grace to get to our heaven. And I hope our heaven has a dark and empty dance studio. With space to be free. Mad. Alive.

A Cup of Kindness

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For auld lang syne, my jo

For auld lang syne

We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet

For days of auld lang syne

I’ve just spent the past hour trying to find the same kind of coffee cup my Papa used, which I have now learned is a 70s Corelle Old Town Blue pattern with a D handle. I found a set of two and sent a screenshot of them to my Mama before I bought them. I told her I was pretty sure they were the same but something seemed different. I wanted to make sure I was getting the right kind, because I am convinced my coffee will taste better in them. Every morning will taste like a Saturday at Granny and Papa’s house when I am ten years old. She said they were the same—the only difference was that the ones from Ebay didn’t have coffee stains. I’ll take care of that.

Coffee is a near religious experience for me. I guess it’s not much different than the Navajo and their peyote. It awakens me for prayer and meditation. And as soon as I get my Corelle cups, in a way, it will connect me with my ancestors. For auld lang syne—for the sake of old times.

I wonder what my grandchildren and old students will associate with me. Books maybe? Tap shoes? This reading lamp? A song I choreographed to or something I said? I have two of my Papa’s hats. He was a hat wearing gentleman. I loved that about him. Those hats were a part of his character. He had one that he would wear outside in the garden, that had a solar operated fan built into it. He looked ridiculous with that contraption on his head, but I don’t guess he cared.

Papa grew up poor as dirt, one of nine children who had to pick up and move every so often when the money ran out. He enlisted in the Army and ended up serving as a mess sergeant during World War II. When he came home on leave one time, he wanted to go see his Daddy, and he ended up leading the authorities straight to their moonshine operation. He was arrested along with his Daddy and brother and ended up having to go on another tour with the Army as a part of his agreement with the law.

But my Papa was a gentleman. He held down a steady job, retiring from the Thiele Kaolin company in Sandersville, Georgia. Good credit was important to him too:  “No one can take your good credit from you,” he used to say. Holding down a steady job and having good credit doesn’t make someone a gentleman, but I’m not sure how to explain it to you aside from this. It was in the way he treated people.

I hope I’ve taken on some of these better traits. I like to think I treat people with kindness no matter their station in life. But I am not my Papa inasmuch as I am not all anyone else. I share traits and appreciations with other kin, but I am not them. I am me. Still, they are a part of me, just as I will be a part of my descendants.

There is a song by Nichole Nordeman that is seldom played on the radio anymore called Legacy—”I want to leave a legacy/how will they remember me/did I choose to love?/did I point to You enough?” A few years later, Casting Crowns released a song called Only Jesus that throws shade on Nordeman’s song, claiming “I don’t want to leave a legacy/I don’t care if they remember me/Only Jesus”. I cringe when I hear the latter song on the radio. I think they’re being incredibly rude in their rebuttal, and when you compare lyrics, the message is actually very similar. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to leave a legacy of kindness, compassion, and pointing to Jesus. So there. Put it on the record.

Drink from a warm cup of kindness and then share it with the world. May we bestow such a legacy on this cold and bitter earth.