Food For Thought

http://reset.me/video/culture-making-people-unhappy/

Upon This Rock

Upon This Rock

A short story

by Brandon Britton

Periodically I sweep the dust, leaves and sticks off the flat, smooth, though misshapen, rocks at the base of our little portable faux wrought iron fence. I sweep and I time travel. I transcend my current geographic location and am carried by the winds and my memories to a place hundreds of miles and decades away. I touch down in a place with a funny little name: Chicken Creek.

Every story has a starting place, a natural beginning, and for this story, our story, Chicken Creek is where it begins. It was here that Richard and Dale began their lives together, in much the same way places with names like Trade Branch and Gunter Ridge marked the beginning point for their parents. Although they had married years earlier, and three of their children were born when they lived at a different location, Chicken Creek was where their lives, our lives, began. After a decade, one of their sons would lead his girlfriend up a hill overlooking Chicken Creek and ask her to become his wife. Almost thirty years later that same son, and his now wife, would begin the second act of their lives on this same farm, in that same little white house. Nearly a century earlier their ancestors had lived here, not on the flat forty acres at the bottom of the hill, but high atop that hill, in a simple wooden house that their great, great, great, great, great grandson at sixteen would hang out in to party with his friends, prompting his grandfather, who was unaware his oldest grandchild was the source of the commotion, to threaten to call the police to break up the party. As the circle of life continued, upon this same hill, this grandson would go on his first date with the girl who would become his wife, a girl he just met the day before while swimming together where Chicken Creek flowed into Richland Creek. Another ten years would pass and that same grandson would eventually bring his wife and children to the cool shady spot beside the creek to live, raising his boys on the farm where both he and his father played as children.

Long, long before any of this there was Richard and Dale and Chicken Creek. This was the place he had chosen to raise his boys. It had everything they would need for a memorable childhood: a huge field for football and baseball, a basketball goal, hills and woods, a natural spring, cows and hogs, and that creek. The creek that they would fish in, swim in, skips rocks and kill snakes in. He bought the little white house that was built in the 1800’s and moved in his family. It was small, but it was all they needed, and most importantly it had a loving mother to watch over it all and to keep it all together. She was a gentle Christian woman who never went to work outside the home, but was constantly at work within it. Dale, or Memaw as her grandchildren would later call her, kept food on the table, clothes on their backs and Dr. Seuss books in their hands. She loved to read, and was a talented writer herself, which she tried to instill in her boys, and ultimately did in her grandson. This was the place that would serve as their foundation for the next fifty plus years, though sadly, he would seldom spend his time there.

“Fatty”, or better yet, Granddaddy Richard, as he would eventually be called, had what was known as a thousand yard stare. He always looked like he was seeing things the rest of us didn't see, whether they were things in the past, the future or the present and just in a different geographic location, who knows. I first witnessed this stare on Saturday mornings as he sat at the little circular kitchen table reading the paper, listening to the morning news and drinking coffee as the smoke from his cigarettes swirled in the air above his head. Meanwhile Memaw would be in the front of the house, drifting between the three rooms with the blue shag carpet and the noisy air conditioner in the summer or the four burner electric heater in the winter. I observed all of this from in front of the television in the den. There was no cable television on Chicken Creek, so my Saturday morning cartoons came via a twenty foot high antenna atop a pole in the backyard. The floor would be littered with matchbox cars, Legos and geometrically shaped wooden building blocks that became the ingredients for my Saturday mornings adventures. Memaw would cook or clean, I would play, but he would sit there silently and stare at nothing in particular. 

Perhaps this stare was just the collateral damage of fighting addiction. If you are constantly waging war in your mind with the siren song of the bottle, it makes it nearly impossible to concern yourself too much with the cooling of the coffee or the burning down of the cigarette in your hands. Maybe it was just the side effects of being a traveling salesman. Those who live on the road are never really anywhere. A life in transit means you are always coming from or going to somewhere so you never truly, fully, get to be "there." I came to understand that stare, and my appreciation for and admiration of him only increased when I made my own lonely journey down the road he traveled, first addiction, then as a traveling salesman. Our addictions weren't identical, mine was whiskey, his was vodka, and we didn't sell the same things, for him it was farm equipment parts, for me missions, but it was the same isolated path that we followed, just in different eras. We were never close in the traditional sense, though I never once questioned how much he loved us. He demonstrated his love through his constant generosity and his keen business sense which he freely shared with others. Strangely, I was never closer to him than when I was alone, 1,500 miles from home, sitting alone at a diner, striking up conversations with strangers because I was dreading having to walk into my hotel room and spend the next eight hours alone. Sometimes when I was driving down the highway, bored with the radio, but still with hundreds of miles to go, I would prop my left wrist at the twelve o’clock position and lean over onto the armrest on the right the way he always did. This simple maneuver somehow made me feel like I wasn’t alone. It made me feel like he was there with me.

Looking at these rocks I see him and he’s here with me. These rocks are tableaus and looking down upon them I see the scenes of our family history recreated, both triumphant and devastating. Sometimes they are mirrors, other times they are portals to a time long gone or to glimpse the future. These rocks are tombstones, stumbling blocks and foundations. They are me. They are we. They are those of us who have yet to arrive. Many times the storms of life have frightened and injured me, yet these rocks have sustained me, all because a wise woman, my Memaw, a few generations ago determined to build her house, not on the sand, but on the Rock, and upon these rocks, to this day, I flee for safety and stability in times of threat or indecision.

These rocks made the migration to Florida, via Georgia, by way of a twenty-seven foot Penske moving truck. After agonizing over the decision to dig up my roots and leave Chicken Creek behind, I had a moment, an epiphany perhaps. I will never leave this place behind, no matter where I go, not because I choose to stay, but because I choose for it to stay with me. Moments before pulling away from Chicken Creek with everything we owned loaded in that truck, I realized something was missing. Jumping from the cab of the truck I waded into the middle of the creek, the part where the water breaks across the shoals, and felt around for eight rocks. Sliding them under the bench seat I climbed behind the wheel and began the drive south. For awhile I kept them a secret from everyone in my family, until Memorial Day 2011, just before my parents and mother in law got in their cars to return back to Chicken Creek. Gathering all of us in the flower garden of our back yard I produced the stones. Eight flat, smooth creek rocks, molded and shaped, smoothed and washed in the creek that carved its way through our family farm. There was one each representing my sons, one representing my wife and I, one for my parents, one for my wife’s mother and three to symbolize our faith (the Father, Son and Holy Spirit). In the same fashion that Joshua erected a monument in the Jordan River to remind the Israelites where they came from, where they were going, and Who brought them there, we established our own portable shrine to our history and our legacy, crafted from the foundation of Chicken Creek itself. It is a  constant visible reminder of who we are, where we are going and where we came from. Three years later when our location drifted even farther south to Florida, the stones journeyed with us, and are now, by the same hand that pulled them from the waters and planted them in the sand, being swept of the natural debris that accumulates on top of them from day to day. 

Standing up I snap back to the present, no longer in the cool, lush stream bed of Chicken Creek, but now under the Spanish moss covered Live Oaks and palm trees in the tropical heat of a Florida Spring. I take my seat between the bougainvillea and hibiscus flowers, refreshed, comforted, and put pen to paper. We too are flat, smooth and misshapen, yet planted and arranged together. We too are covered in dirt, leaves and sticks, soiled and scarred by time and circumstance, but we are still here together. For generations these rocks have been smoothed, shaped and cleansed by the cool waters of Chicken Creek flowing over them, and so have we, not by flowing over us but because it flows through our veins. When separated from it we crave it the way a beached fish does the ocean. We are who we are because of Chicken Creek and it serves as an umbilical connection to our origins, binding us together no matter where the winds take us. Even though the Tennessee dirt under my feet has been replaced with Florida sand, I will always stand upon this rock.

Sop

Sop

(A Short Story)

by

Brandon Britton

"This here's the best part," his raspy, but comforting, voice proclaimed to no one in particular, though the only other people in the room were me, a seven year old kid, and Big Mama, his wife of over fifty years that he had married when she was just thirteen. Normally the only voice breaking the silence of the morning was that of George Martin’s drifting from the small, visibly old radio atop the dull green refrigerator, as he gave his “1420 Martin Street” report at 6:00 am. Occasionally the news report would be interrupted by Nate Street, the other DJ who provided the “Street” in “1420 Martin Street”, reading an advertisement for the weekly sales at Johnson’s Foodtown or Davis & Eslick. At least three times per morning the high pitched, harmonized voices of the three tiny blonde Bryant sisters imploring the native citizens to shop at Gibson & Cardin, their father’s pharmacy, would cut through the airwaves. Mostly though, it was just George Martin’s rhythmic voice reading the morning news, accompanied by a symphony of kitchen noises like clanging pans, closing cabinet doors, rattling silverware, sliding drawers, running water and screeching oven doors.

Perhaps it was the rarity of him speaking that drew my full attention to him. Sitting there I studied his hair, which was mostly gone and what little bit remained was gray and slicked back. Despite being solid gray the cream he used in it made it look shiny and black. It’s funny as I picture it now I realize nobody wears their hair like that anymore. Like him, it belonged to another era, and even then, so long ago and at such a young age, I realized that. Maybe it was because I was a small child and I didn’t know many people, but I didn’t know anyone else like him. I knew that he had teeth, though he kept them in his nightstand, and I rarely remember him putting them in, even to eat. The biscuits, always made from scratch, and eggs that he ate most mornings didn't really require much chewing anyway. His face was a road map of deep creases that traveled back in time and told the story of thousands of days spent in the daytime heat of cotton fields or behind a mule working a plow. The hands holding his fork and coffee cup were scarred and bent, calloused and permanently dirty from enduring demanding hours working at a service station, trying to feed and clothe a wife and ten children. Modest black glasses with humble, unremarkable frames, the kind hipsters wear today to be ironic, rested on his nose. His clothes were made of materials foreign to me, like tweed and wool and polyester and he always wore “dress shirts” even though he never went anywhere. They were always stained with tobacco juice and had yellowed collars stained from sweat, the kind that gross out my wife when she sees mine, but secretly comfort me and remind me of him. My own private, unspoken homage to this unusual little man that three decades haven’t been able to erase from my mind. To my developing and erratic seven year old mind he was a fascinating enigma, as if he was a time traveler from some strange era that I didn't understand. His language was filled with peculiar words and phrases like, "toodlie doodlie”, which he would jovially spout whenever you got ready to leave, right before he playfully bopped you on the head with his rolled up pack of chewing tobacco. 

Once I overheard my parents talking about planning a trip for him and Big Mama. They were going to take them to Atlanta to stay at a big hotel, attend an Atlanta Braves baseball game and visit the zoo. What stood out to me in this conversation was the mention that he almost never left his house and had rarely even left his hometown. One hundred miles from home was perhaps the farthest he had ever traveled and to their knowledge he had never stayed in a hotel. I was only seven years old and I had already been to Florida and stayed in a motel on the beach. I had visited Rock City in Chattanooga and a dozen other places much farther than one hundred miles away. From that time on I became fascinated at the idea of being with this little old man the first time he visited the big city and went to a pro baseball game. I don’t remember if the Braves won, but I remember the hat he got at the stadium that he treasured and wore whenever he watched the Braves on television.

It wasn’t just his home, He seldom left this kitchen table, and when he did it was only to go to his easy chair in the living room to chew tobacco and watch the Atlanta Braves baseball games on TBS. The living room was actually a garage that had been converted into a living room. One end served as the living room and the other housed the washer and dryer, deep freezer and Big Mama’s quilting rack that her sons installed to hang down from the ceiling. The remainder of the room was devoted to seating. Every wall was lined with couches and chairs, which was a priority when you have ten children and over forty grandchildren, all of whom, along with their spouses, boyfriends and girlfriends, would fill that fifteen hundred square foot home every Thanksgiving and Christmas, not to mention Mother’s Day, Easter and most Sunday afternoons. Their home was decorated with two things: photographs of the seventy plus people who were their children and grandchildren, and trinkets that had been collected or given to them by their children. Blue shag carpet covered the floor and dozens of pictures covered the walls. To this day I’ve only ever seen one other house with a similar wall of photographs.

The highlight of my day would be getting off the school bus and rushing to sit beside him in that easy chair in that converted garage to watch the Braves. We seldom spoke, but sitting there in silence, Big Mama on the couch sewing or quilting by hand constantly, I learned more than I ever did in school. My education didn’t consist of presidents or state capitals, but Atlanta Braves and their positions. Bruce Benedict, Claudel Washington, Phil Neikro, Bob Horner, and my hero, Dale Murphy. Big Mama would sow, I’d watch the Braves and periodically he’d ring the spittoon. For a seven year old boy, hands down, that was the coolest thing in the world. To me that spittoon might as well have been a genies lamp because it was magical. Not only did he get to chew this sweet smelling tobacco, but he got to spit, something little boys were constantly being told not to do, and he got to do it in the house no less, in a golden bowl that made a "ptting" sound when the tobacco juice hit it.

That spittoon was just one of dozens of artifacts that filled their home. Through the years I came to view it as I did all of the other interesting trinkets and memorabilia that decorated their home. They were like museum items that you weren't allowed to touch except in very rare situations, and always under supervision. Rather than books, ancient, strangely shaped soft drink, liquor, wine, medicine and perfume bottles adorned the bookshelf outside their bedroom. A purple glass cluster of grapes that once, long ago, was a light, hung from the ceiling in the kitchen. A ceramic cuckoo clock, with a waterwheel that no longer worked, sat atop a shelf, surrounded by decorative plates, Leo Peppermint tins and what would have appeared like junk to most people. To them these were priceless treasures housing innumerable memories. For me, the greatest artifact of all was the banjo that hung on the wall in his bedroom. On rare occasions, if you were lucky, and caught him in the right mood, he would get his banjo down and head out to the front porch. The songs he played were never ones I'd heard on the radio or anywhere else for that matter. I can only imagine they were songs from his youth, the music of his childhood that he learned, likely on front porches with his grandfather, father or uncles. This peculiar instrument with the unique sound was a perfect fit for this peculiar little man that seemed so different from me and anyone else I knew.

On this morning we weren’t in the living room or on the front porch, but at the kitchen table. It was so early in the morning that it was still dark and the only light in the entire house was in that kitchen. Periodically she would say something to him. “Sam do you want any sausage? Sam do you need any more coffee?” There was something about her calling him by his given name, Sam, that I loved to hear. To me he was just granddaddy, but to her he was this person named Sam. In my mind it was almost as if he had this other mysterious side that I didn't know. I only knew the old man who sat in his easy chair everyday, watching the Atlanta braves on tv, chewing his Levi Garrett tobacco and using a spittoon. Had I known his full name at that time, Samuel Washington Hood, I would have really been intrigued. Even today his name sounds so majestic and stately. 

While I sat at the kitchen table I would run my fingers across the vinyl table cloth, first along the smooth vinyl and then underneath on the furry, cotton like backing. It was partly because I liked the contrasting way they felt, smooth and furry, but mostly just because I was bored. In silence I ate my chocolate gravy, which Big Mama made me every morning, and he ate his eggs and biscuits and drank his coffee. He had a very unusual way of drinking his coffee. She would put his coffee cup in the center of a little bowl made of white glass with green scrolling around the top, and she would fill the coffee cup until it began to overflow into the bowl. Every so often he would lift the bowl to his mouth and drink the coffee straight from the bowl, not the cup. To this day I have no idea why he drank his coffee in such a bizarre fashion and to this day whenever I hear the 23rd Psalm, “My cup runneth over”, I think of those mornings.

Unexpectedly he shattered the silence with his declaration. “This here’s the best part.” I looked up from my chocolate gravy in time to see him take that last bite of his biscuit and use it to sop up the last little bit of the yolk from his fried eggs or the little bit of chocolate gravy that couldn’t be reached with the spoon. As he sopped it up he told me not to waste any because that was the best part. When he finished there really wasn't much need to wash the plate because it had been wiped clean. He used the biscuit to sop it all up and enjoy every last bite before getting up from the kitchen table. No doubt it was the best part because the belly was warm and full already, but there was still just a little bit more left to enjoy.

Now I get it. I realize why this was the best part for him. Every morning he ate a breakfast lovingly prepared especially for him by the girl he’d loved since they were children. He spent his days in the home that he provided for his family through back breaking labor. Each day he chewed the Levi Garrett tobacco he liked and watched his favorite team play baseball. When the mood struck him he sat on his front porch and plucked the songs of his childhood on his old banjo and throughout the day his children and grandchildren came in and out to visit and eat with them. Looking back I realize he wasn't really talking about biscuits and breakfast. He was teaching me about the real value of living, the stuff that most people consider the leftovers or the scraps. The stuff he and Big Mama had pieced together and made a life from, like so many of the patchwork quilts she had made for her grandchildren. He was talking about the goodness that’s left after the kids are grown and gone, after the job is done and the bills are paid. The final years and the quiet nights on the front porch with a banjo or the early mornings in the swing with Big Mama as she talked about how her flowers were doing. “You’ve got to sop it up, this here’s the best part.”