Hudson Strode

I'm writing an article about Hudson Strode who taught at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa for years until he retired in 1963. He taught either Shakespeare or Creative Writing to  such Alabama literary notables as Harper Lee,  Helen Norris, and our current Poet Laureate, Sue Brannan Walker. If anybody reading this took classes under Hudson Strode, I'd like to hear from you.

Testing...

What happened to spring and summer? Where did the months go? On April 4 I had kneecap surgery. Zoom, there went the rest of spring. Zoom, zoom--now summer is waning.

And why don't things stay the same? Where are my Followers? Did the few I have give up because I've been so quiet? Where are their faces? I've bragged so many times about how easy it is to negotiate Blogger. Hah. who sez? Something has changed; I feel as though I'm trying to negotiate a blog at GoDaddy. That one's a killer for the non-techie wysiwyg kind of designer.

This is a test ti see this will even appear on the screen. And will the date change? Here goes...

Moon River...waiting round the bend, my Huckle-berry friend, la la la...

Ah, what does this phrase conjure up for you? Before this weekend for me it was Johnny Mercer's song, his star Emma Kelly, the poem I wrote for Emma that was published on SCAD's Pen and Ink page, the night I presented the framed poem to her (she had me read it aloud  but this audience was hardly ready or eager to hear a poem about St. Patrick's Day on River Street), and the day I was her driver in Savannah. That day John Berendt first came to town publicly for a PBS fundraiser with city-wide events.

But the story of that day is long and tedious. Today's story will be shorter. This weekend I chaperoned a group of kids in a confirmation class at my church (six 5th, 6th, and  one 8th graders) on a trip back home to Savannah. We stayed on Moon River at Wesley Gardens, a retreat property owned by my church there, Wesley Monumental. While our main purpose was to promote team-building among the students, we also wanted to give them the history of Methodism and something of what the founder John Wesley and his brother Charles did while they were in Savannah.

After sleeping on air mattresses or sofas at the youth room at Mulberry United Methodist, Macon,  the oldest Methodist church in Georgia, with Tommy and Flo Martin, we headed east on I-16. Our next stop was lunch with my good buddies, Rita and Mike, who live just outside Savannah, but who, in our last decade there, lived smack dab downtown on Charlton where they had a b & b. No  sign could be posted because that street--my, my, my--simply couldn't have any commercial signs about. But their home was on several tours and was, and still is, a joy to see. Mike has taken up painting as a hobby and was a great encourager to our students about teaching oneself to do a thing. (His self-taught work was impressive.) Rita served up lemonade and the homemade cookies she's famous for, and personalized her beautiful little book ON HIGHER GROUND for each of the students. Rita did both the photography and the copy for the book and it's a beautiful depiction of the historic churches in Savannah.

Our arrival at Wesley Gardens was, to quote the kids, awesome. The big house, the chapel, the gazebo, all overlook the spectaculor Moon River. Gorgeous camellias of all varieties pepper the grounds. I particularly liked the white ones surrounding the prayer garden commenorating friends gone on. I wish I knew more camellia names besides my fave, Pink Perfection. After a brief look-see and assignment of bedrooms--boys up, girls down, counselor Rev. Emily in counselor's room--we had to get going to Kroger's for the first part of one of our exercises. The six students were divided up to plan and prepare the evening meals on Saturday and Sunday nights. (Both I and Guy, the other chaperone, love to cook.) Each group had fifty dollars to feed the nine of us. Not a bad budget at all--no caviar or beef tenderloin--but we could make do.

Oh, I must use broader brush strokes if I plan to finish this entry this month. Both groups (Chef GaGa with Her Sous's and Five Guys) came in right at fifty bucks; For my group each of the three was to be in charge of the dish they'd suggested: Katie wanted Shrimp Alfredo; my wise 8th grader Daniel actually chose broccoli and a fruit salad, and Maggie, concocted a brownie/ice cream, Thin Mint dessert. Amazing really.

The next night the "Four Guys" (Guy plus Ben, Caroline, and Kate Pride) served up a seafood platter on a platter like nothing I'd seen before. It was a creamy white long oval design in pottery so it held the heat well. Whereas our group had served buffet style, this group gave us this huge platter family style as a centerpiece flanked by a green salad dressed with oil and vinegar. The platter held shrimp, sauted catfish (a team-member's choice), enough alligator to taste (yes, the chef had to do it), and new potatoes, parboiled, sliced, and sauteed in butter. YUMMY. Our dessert was a Thin Mint milkshake. (Yes, it's Girl Scout cookie season!)

Sunday was our formal learning day. We started off with a tour by Ralph Bailey of the Mother Church of Methodism in Savannah, Trinity United Methodist. There I rocked in a chair at the back (for babies or grannies) and we saw a beautiful, old baptismal font from Independent Presbyterian. We also saw a gavel made from the wood of the parsonage of John Wesley.

Next we worshipped at Wesley Monumental where I was thrilled to be back among good buddies: Karen, Dale, Tim, Kim, Alyse, Eddie, Judy, Ron, Susan, Dick, Tim, Anne, Ellene, Tom, Deanna, the Edwardses, Sue, Gretchen, Raymond, Charlie...and so many more. The church has flourished and will soon have a school/daycare on the first floor. I didn't get to go across the street to the Espy House which has also been renovated for office space.

Christ Church, Anglican, (Wesley never left the Anglican Church) and the statue of John Wesley were next. I'm grateful for Corley Nease for being our docent there. A huge white angel (I forgot to ask what it was made of) held the baptismal basin there; that and the raised glass and brass pulpit were eye poppers.

The students were history-saturated at that point, so we skipped the Cockspur Island statue of Wesley and drove straight to Tybee. In the 40's a train took teenagers to the beach pavillion where they danced under the stars to one of the big bands. Teenagers also dared each other to swim from the river downtown to Tybee, technically to Lazaretto Creek. (Luke Bowyer and his wife Johnny, my dear friend, gave me a lot of colorful history for my novel set in Savannah.)

Our pre-teens got their feet wet. The boys actually went in. I was so cold I actually left them with the two other adults and  went back to the van to sit while they soaked each other with splashing! Ah, youth.

All this, and yet it was sunrise on Moon River that defies description, except perhaps in Psalm 8. Take a look for yourself. Let me know if you've seen Moon River.

Reflections, 2010

My post-Christmas card is so fat it needs a table of contents. Besides the card, a page of superlatives, and a page of pics, I've been including a five-page poem! Absurd. I've decided to lighten the snail mail load by posting the five-page poem here instead. The poem is a revision of the occasional verse I wrote for the 50th reunion of Northside High this past spring. I've used it as the final poem in a compilation for a chapbook of poems I'm calling BEAUTY AND DISTANCE. (Know any publishers who'd like to publish it??)
~
And it was this that awed him—the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time. There was one moment of timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move. It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal moment had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute.
~
On the brink of the dark he stood, with only the dream of the cities, the million books, the spectral images of the people he had loved, who had loved him, whom he had known and lost. They will not come again. They never will come back again.
                                                                                        -Thomas Wolfe
                                                                                          Look Homeward, Angel


Going Home: 176 Days
on the occasion of the 50th reunion of the Class of 1960, May 15, 2010

Our time spent with W. C. Stamps
that first year learning to drive
could have lasted like ambergris
shut up in a book for fifty years,
fixative for perfume, fecal marine-like
scent sanitized to alcohol cleanness.
We simply craved the open road.
The Drivers’ Ed class at Northside High
was far north of the salt line and the sea;
its pervasive smell was parched peanuts
packed into Mr. Stamps’ front pockets,
inciting four girls an hour to practice
a skill the boys had learned plowing,
and the more adroit girls, by some means.
With new licenses steaming in wallets,
a smattering of rising seniors from Gorgas,
and a fistful from Montgomery jostled
on separate buses across the county
to be greeted that fall of ‘59 with red clay;
barefoot, we salvaged our socks and shoes,
rinsing our feet inside in shiny-white sinks


scrubbed by my brother, custodian
of the rainbow of gladiolas, his annual garden
border. Our class chose red as its favorite.
Educated apart in two warm white wooden
structures, fifty seniors posed together in lines
for the picture, each one stretching to find
a safe corner inside new cold brick walls.


Their old schools were the age of the Brownville
Community Building where Methodist and Baptist
alternated Sundays, except for weddings and funerals.
Daddy didn’t miss a Sunday and Mama, only a few.
So for my wedding the crowd was mixed. It’s gone, too—
abandoned, burned to the ground, the last sentinel
of a once-idyllic village of creosoted homes, rotted down.


That August day its two stories were illumined
in the wavy heat of dog days; Mama wore blue eyelet
that matched both her eyes and Daddy’s. His long
stride moved me right along down the aisle,
a farmer’s tan above his unnatural collar and tie.
He raised his more natural hand, nodding
to the crowd, to Chappy Pate, who waved back.

Daddy complained about worldly ballgames
the way we girls did our p.e. bloomers,
bloused blue cotton, as hard to swallow
as the concept of so much newness:
new alma mater, new mascot, new colors
new flower, new officers, new song?
Oh, if we could only find our song leader.


Janie might have chosen
Down in the Valley
or Barbara Allen
the tunes she’d led
in elementary school
after the daily Bible recitation
and the pledge of allegiance.


Not a one of us knew by heart
the words of The Bells of St. Mary’s
by Bing Crosby; Ma and Pa Kettle
were our only movies. Rowdy Yates
had replaced Lash LaRue. The Bells
we would come to know was about
saving a Catholic school from shut-down.


Our churches—Phillips Chapel, Friendship, El Bethel, Nazareth,
Haygood, Tabernacle, Concord, Mt. Hebron, Mt. Zion, Campground,
and Arbor, Sand, and Sulphur Springs—
had no bells, just Amazing Grace and Blessed Assurance.
The Bells smacks of an inspired faculty member’s
choice for us, a stab to cushion our transition,
a subplot for our own unique story.
Janie, Ludie, Mr. Stamps, and I white-knuckled
the graveled road past Binion Creek and the curves
leading to Mormon Road, past Friendship Baptist
where I walked two miles to summer singing school,
keeping time and mouthing shaped notes, Fa Sol La.
We shelled and munched peanuts as we cruised
past the Dobbs house, my spot to catch the bus.
At the end of the lesson, we could eat a hot lunch
in the lunchroom if we had a whole quarter to spare.
Afternoons I got off the bus under the water oaks
to walk the quarter mile back home, the James Hewitt
place. ‘Croppers, we thinned corn, chopped cotton,
pulled corn, canned corn, shelled corn, picked cotton—
our corn and cotton lives were larded
with ripe watermelons burst open
in the middles to reveal juicy hearts;
with the taste of Alberta peaches
as fresh as the smell of bleached sheets
dried on a clothesline, as tasty
as pork sausage fried in the iron skillet,
seasoned with fresh garden sage:
as we sped along, green bled by and we forgot
the blood and organs spilling from the gutted
hog hanging from the limb for butchering;
we forgot that raw stench
and the smoke burning our eyes
as we stirred the black pot of cracklin’s
to render the fat for the winter
or cooking hominy
in that same iron pot
with the ashes from the fireplace;
we could forget stepping on nails—
or in my case a horse harness buckle,
forget our mamas running to get a rag,
soaking it from the kerosene can—
ah, but we would never erase that nurture,
so we have driven back after fifty years.
We let old voices and faces exude
as the wind whispers on our faces
as we roll along in our cars
you will not remember them
they will not remember you
as it did the night Doris and I
pushed the car out of her driveway,
to drive me home—
you should not do this
you should not do this
whispers we ignored.


Home—this one down the hill, past the commissary
across the tracks near the Quarters. Then Betty Guin
knew the difference between cockleburs
and eggplants. Then the other ten seniors
were still alive; then Miss Pauline Scrievner,
ahead of her time, individualized our work;
wrote daily advice on the blackboard —
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
That one, I was sure, caused her to pause
more times than did either Eliot or Donne.


We met again in another nearly-new school,
with a library more technical than Mrs. Legg’s.
Mrs. Legg—next to Ann you would be my daughter
invited me to town to spend the night,
introduced me to steak, Worchestershire, and the ACT,
expanding my dusty paths to roads less taken,
to the world of the university.
But the question remains like Prufrock’s—
would it have mattered after all,
my decisions and indecisions
before the taking of toast and tea
Would it have mattered
had I never taken that route?
We are not the same; we are the same.
we weigh more, we’ve wrinkled,
we’ve shrunk or we’ve ballooned
we’ve married, we’ve divorced,
we’ve given birth, we’ve died,
we’ve gone to school, we’ve worked,
we’ve decorated homes, we’ve raised kids,
we’ve doted on grandkids, we’ve lost touch,
now we’ve come together for one weekend.


We are the not the same; we are the same
as we drive away tonight
without naming superlatives.
The tallest, the prettiest, the best speller?
The richest, the thinnest, the key quarterback?
The one who will live to be 100?
The one most likely to die tonight?
Who needs who’s who?

How clever our parents and teachers
were, how knowing. How surprising
for it to sink in no man is an island,
we are all a part of the main
that we are all related here
beyond just the blood kin.


The Class of 1960, cousins connected
by that thin, indelible wire of roll call:

Joyce Espey Beard, Doris Braselton, Buster Bolton, Jewell Brown,
Douglas Butler, Becky Cabiness, Jerry Cannon, Eric Christian,
Joe Neal Collins, Nina Essary, Bert Elliott, Doris Elliott, Alice Farley,
Eleanor Freeman, Laudis Freeman, Janie Gilliland, Betty Guin,
Jane Harkey, Billie Haynie, Sue Holloway, Shelby Hyche, Ludie Jones,
Melba Jones, Dora Kuykendall, Donald Lunceford, Tony Lunceford,
Mary Jo Maddox, Nancy Clements Micklic, Mary Mims, Mac Olive,
Sarah Frances Oswalt, Edwin Phillips, Martha Pike, Bernice Porter,
Charles Ray, Anna Loyal Rogers, Billy Doyal Rogers, Tiamons Rogers,
Mary Ellen Rowland, Garlon Smalley, Geraldine Smith, Kathleen Smith,
Jerry Simpson, James Sturdivant, Robert Earl Swiney, Norman Traweek,
Beverly Walker, John Doyal Watkins, Beryl Watson, Wyman Watson,
Leland Wheat, Jimmy Wilson, Raymon Winters


present, here, as we round the Cabiness Grocery
Store corner, driving down 43 or 171 to Northport
and from Northport over the Warrior River
into which particles of our dust will one day
mingle in the gentler wash of a celestial sea.

                                                                           -Kathleen Thompson
                                                         Class of 1960

"Planting The Divine Detail" with LAMP FRESHMAN CLASS

Yesterday I had the privilege of again presenting my "Road Scholar" poetry gig with the Alabama Humanities Foundation. The biggest compliment was that this was the second time I was invited to LAMP by Ms. Leah Stoudenmier. (I met her first when I did this poetry program for Northside High--my alma mater--in Tuscaloosa County where she was a student teacher.) The next huge compliment was that one of the students returned for a "second dose" even though he had been in my workshop last year. Thanks, Ms. Leah! Thanks, Jackson! Thanks, FRESHMAN CLASS OF LAMP!! (Don't forget to send me your poems when they're completed!)

Who says poetry can't be fun?? If you want to write poetry with me at your school, let me know at this site, and I'll contact your school. Or, just have your teacher read about the potential programs in both poetry and fiction at http://www.ahf.net/.

 See you soon, I hope,  for a little subconscious-searching for your very own divine details, the salt, pepper, and sage (or tarragon) with which to season your poetry: abracadabra!

Thanksgiving. . .

• for a God who listens whether I whine or sing
• for stunning sunsets
• for life
• for working limbs
• for family
• for grandchildren especially
• for fresh coconut cake with lemon/orange filling, cranberry conserve, pear mincemeat pie, pecan pumpkin pie--the whole of the meal

Twin Sisters

Annie Bell Poole and I are twins.
Twins of a sort. She was born on March 25, 1925, to Tempie Savannah Taylor Smith and Jewell Smith who were married on April 2, 1924. Every two years or so thereafter,Tempie gave birth until she had a hysterectomy in the early fifties. I was born in 1942 when Mama was forty, the tenth of twelve children.
Although there was no shortage of family names since Grandpa Taylor alone had fathered twenty-seven children by two consecutive wives, few of our twelve were named for family. Annie Bell’s middle name was the name of Jewell’s sister, and my first name was the first name of his mother, Mary Josephine. Ironically, she and I are more like Daddy than any of the rest, including the boys.
We both got his looks, his build, his thin chin, his short hands and fingers (along with their arthritic joints), his sometimes-sharp tongue, and, mercifully, his love of a good laugh and a ready wit. We both are verbal learners, so a radio works just as well or better for us than a television. Toward the end of Daddy’s life, he had three radios: one for the weather, one for the “funerals,” and one for the Christian “stories,” which had taken the place of “The Lone Ranger” and “Sky King.” Those I used to adore listening to as we sat in straight-backed chairs which Mama had caned with White Oak strips.
From Mama Annie Bell and I both possess a love and sensitivity for young children—any young child—so strong that we will not stand by for anything we consider hurtful to one. And for our grandchildren—well, we’d take a bullet for any one of them without question. From Mama we also learned the art of making do in—in the kitchen and elsewhere. If you don’t have this, then you can use that. I’ve heard this over and over again about ingredients for recipes, about scraps for quilting, about fertilizers for a garden. We learned the art of preservation, something Annie Bell has generously fine-tuned for me because the abundance of summer and fall harvest season must not be allowed to go to waste.
Annie Bell and I do have our differences. When I told a friend in the eighties that I, too, had grown up as poor as a church mouse and that we were sharecroppers, she said, “You’d never know it. You’ve managed to squeeze out any signs of the country you had in you.”
What a pity, this standardization and burden brought on by education and college degrees. Annie Bell still has a lot of the country in her. She has a colorful vocabulary and pronunciation of words I’ve nearly forgotten from our family. A snake quoils up (pronounced like a long i); one grabbles taters; grass is as thick as hops; thinning corn with a hoe; turnip greens juicy with their pot likker; brars, not briars; tars, not tires; tote, not carry; lids are leds; one sleeps in a shimmy-tail and wears step-ins, not panties; one weighed a sack of picked cotton with the big or little peas (I finally learned peise).
I picked very little cotton: another dear sister, Lennie Bell, babysat me and Marie in a shady spot at the end of the field. Later I would beg my siblings to give me a ride on their cotton sack.
Annie Bell has mastered an art which I struggle sometimes to emulate with my writing: making something from nothing. After her husband died and her daughter built a new house with a basement apartment for her up in the country near Phillips Chapel and the intersection of Northside Road with Mormon Road, she decided she wanted some water oak trees like the one she had in her front yard in Northport. She planted acorns from that tree in Northport and now she has at least three water oak babies which are about knee-high started at her new home.
At her home in Northport when we walked around her house, she would point out to me what the flowers were and who had given them to her to root. She had taken several limbs from shrubs at my home in Prattville to root and they looked wonderful. She had also rooted hostas from that yard. She had a camellia from Len, a hibiscus and a trumpet from Ree, and day lilies from lots of sources. She never seemed to buy anything, including fertilizers. Horse manure worked best.
When she moved up into the country with more room to plant things, she wanted a few fruit trees planted. So after just a handful of growing seasons, this past summer she picked blueberries and the first Golden Delicious apples. I got some of the blueberries for pies and she dried and froze the apples for future fried apple pies. Her little orchard stands in a straight row at the edge of their property—the blueberry bushes and the apple tree plus two fig bushes (very tricky—must have a male and female in addition to a fig bee to pollinate the bush); a red apple tree, and a pear tree.
Judy, Annie Bell’s only daughter with whom she lives, dropped her off here two days ago so that she and her husband could drive to Destin to check on her brother-in-law who had a medical emergency. It didn’t take Ann long to spot Daddy’s old shoe last sitting on a high shelf in my small laundry room. I have kept a few of the old country things that survived Mama’s early demise. As the baby, I somehow ended up with the family’s cotton scale and the peise, both big and little. They sit there, too, with the shoe last which Daddy repaired shoe soles on, a small rub board Tommy used in college to wash socks on, a dasher from a churn—the churn broke long ago, some quart-sized blue canning jars with glass lids and metal fasteners, and some early Coca-Cola trays.
How quickly she recognized everything that was there, and we reminisced about some other things Mama used and didn’t know where they had “got off to.” Mama’s circular sifter with wooden sides that she used each morning to make several large pans of biscuits for her hungry family; the battling board that she used to beat clothes with or stir them in the black washpot when she was boiling them to get ground-in dirt from the knees of denim overalls; the big rub board; the old trunk that had sat in the sideroom all of my life holding the few remnants of our Taylor and Smith grandparents; the kitchen table with the bench made by Grandpa Taylor—how do concrete things simply dissipate we wondered?
Most of the time now she calls me Sister, and I call her Ann. She remembers more about the old days than she does about what I told her five minutes ago about making chicken salad. We tackled that project to keep ourselves happily busy in the kitchen while she was here. I had planned to make a batch and take some to my daughter, Teresa, because she loves it. We would bake some blueberry muffins and have a fine little lunch to take. When I called Teresa the night before, she had a surprise announcement: she had to make a vat of chicken salad the next day to take to Nicholas’s school. How fortuitous that Ann and I were poised and ready to take on that project.
We shopped for some chicken breasts at Publix. Bone-in, of course and skin on. That way we could drop in an onion, a stalk of celery, and a carrot and have a delicious stock left after we boiled the breasts. We would freeze the stock for soups, standard operating procedure for both of us.
I asked Teresa to choose a recipe. She had planned, without thinking it through, that she would used the recipe we always use with mandarin oranges, grapes, and nuts. We all three laughed when we thought of smearing two slices of bread with oranges. Not possible. The recipe Teresa came up with was from the Barefoot Contessa—a tarragon chicken salad. Tarragon happens to be one of our favorite herbs—I make my own vinegar with fresh tarragon and use it with salad oil for a simple, but delicious dressing. We also like the tarragon chicken at Continental Bakery. Since we liked it, I guessed Ann would as well, and she did.
The recipe called for baked chicken, but we ignored that suggestion and did our usual boiling. The addition of tarragon, celery, a little mayo, salt and pepper was all the cooked chicken needed.
But I can always gild the lily when it comes to kitchen projects. And Ann was right there with me all the way: we made two loaves of light brown bread for Teresa to use for the sandwiches. She assembled them right before taking them to the school early the next day.

Ann remembers the day I was born. She and the other children were sent away from our house at Bryce Logan’s place to Monkey Sanford’s birthday party. He was an old cousin of ours on Mama’s side. Doc Guin would bring his son, J.C., that day and ask Daddy’s permission to deliver me for practice. I was his first baby. Ann remembers coming home from the party and hearing me cry before they reached the house.
Ann has been diagnosed with hardening of the arteries, dementia, or Alzheimer’s this summer. She has a history of a stroke, and more recently a hemorrhagic stroke. She may lose a lot of her memory, but I’m counting on hearing the old stories over and over again.
One of my favorites is a story she told about her oldest brother, William Eura, who was just under her. She and William were walking with Mama to the spring to get some water down under a hill and William got tired of walking.
“Mama, tote me,” William cried.
“I can’t. I’ve got a bone in my leg,” answered Mama.
“Give me a pin, Mama, and I’ll pick it out,” William said.
We both had a good laugh imagining that scene again, remembering those we love now gone. We finished washing and drying the bread pans, cleaned the counters, took dish cloths to the laundry room, and made the kitchen tidy. Twins to the end, we would never leave a single dirty dish in the sink.