With the end of September comes the annual event of the falling of the leaves and the concomitant chore of raking them up and getting rid of them one way or another. Back home we used to heap them up into piles and then set them afire. The burning leaves produced an aroma, not a smell, that was a delight to the senses but pleasured us only once a year and is not forgotten decades later. Since then I’ve often wondered whether a forest fire amongst deciduous trees produces so sweet a smell. Anyhow I still have a Pavlovian reaction to burning leaves of memories from the distant past in Alabama.
Friday I decided to start the series of rakings necessary to rid the yard of leaves. Can’t burn them now without being inundated with police and vile thoughts of the neighbors. Steven, who lives next door, operates a compost heap and is delighted with garbage cans of leaves.
For some reason or another, I felt Puritanical and tackled the trash collected along the fence. Pulling the leaves and other trash into a pile, I marched at a slow step down the fence. Then it dawned that the pile had the shape of a recently dug grave. By a quirk of mental contortions, I realized that it was also the 150th anniversary of my grandfather’s birthday. This meant that Saturday, October 1st, would be the 77th anniversary of my brother’s.
I decided to sit down and have a cigarette. All sorts of thoughts from a country churchyard spun through my head. Moreover I now frequently ponder matters mortal. These two men were and still are important to me. Papa was born in 1860 remarkably two days after the census was taken. His entire life was spent in Meadeville, Mississippi, thirty miles east of Natchez. The population has always been less than 500 depending upon what had happened during the previous decade. He vituprertivly denounced Lincoln and all his works. Years later, I could understand his thinking. Being born when he was, Papa could not remember what life was before the War. No doubt his elders looked back at those times as a golden era. We know this wasn’t so because by 1860 the nation was just recovering from the Panic of 1857.
No matter, he was old enough to remember when the Yankees came. He had learned that the blue bellies were booger men who liked to steal bad little boys. Then suddenly one day the whole front yard was filled with blue bellies. Like any small boy, he went screaming to his mother. The commanding officer picked him up and tried to calm him. The result was that they discovered that Papa’s Christian name DeMont was the same as the officer’s sir name. Papa was convinced that the Yankees did not burn the house because of this happy accident. Maybe. Even the Yankees did not have the time to burn every house they ran across.
Papa inadvertently taught me about aging. Dying at ninety-seven, he was the oldest citizen of Franklin County. The men who were mere elders gave him a birthday party organized primarily by Mr. John Rounds every year. He told me that those men hadn’t been his friends. His comment was, “Why, I danced at the wedding of John Rounds’ folks.” A body’s friends go, then his contemporaries, and finally only memories remain.
My brother was born in 1933 and was named for our grandfather, but nobody called him Wentworth except Mother. Those W’s and R were too much for me to cope with, so I called him Wimpy. Then our sister, Duane, came along nine years later and called him Bibi, which became a name limited to the family. To everybody else, he was Wimpy.
The three of us looked nothing alike. My hair was dark brown back in those days, Bibi was early on tow headed which later became a dark blonde, Duane was a red head.
Bibi was six feet at fourteen and ended up at 6'2". His two sons grew to 6'6" and 6'7". Duane’s boy is somewhere over six feet. I just got none of the height genes in the family.
Bibi deserves to be remembered by the world at large for one statement he made, We were discussing intellectuals, what they were, their qualities, their purpose in society, et alia, At the end of the conversation, he summarized by saying, “Intellectuals are just like Christians; many are called but few are chosen.”
Later in his life during one week-end, one of his boys was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and the other was admitted to med school. This would be a feather in any parent’s cap–actually two feathers. Bibi was more modest; he asked the question “What did I do right?” He realized that he was in as much a quandary as those parents who ask, “What did I do wrong?” To me these questions show how iffy parenthood is.
Another more egocentric reason for my remembering him so fondly took place in Venice. He was sitting at a table in an outdoor café in the Piazza watching the people, taking in the sights, and generally enjoying his place in the sun, While studying the facade of St. Mark’s, he noticed and remembered the four horses. They were part of the loot the Venetians brought home from Constantinople after the Fourth Crusade. I believe they were had been removed from Rome by one of the early emperors. Anyhow Bibi said he remembered my telling him the history of the horses when he was a little boy. . From all the verbiage that I have spewed during my years on this earth, he is the only person to say that he had remembered some of my words years later. I did say that my reasons were egocentric.
Papa is buried in Meadeville cemetery amongst his friends and family. Bibi’s ashes are scattered somewhere in the Smoky Mountains.
Life goes on at least of some sort or another. I picked up the rake and continued my chores.
About the Author
Although I was born in Macon, Georgia in 1928, I was raised in Birmingham during the Great Depression. No doubt I still carry invisible scars caused by that era. No matter we survived. I am talking about my sister, brother, and I. There are two things that set me apart from people. From about the third grade I was a voracious reader of books on almost any subject. Had I concentrated, I would have been an authority by now; but I didn’t with no regrets.
After the University of Alabama and the Air Force, I came to Denver. Here I met Carl, who picked me up in Mary’s Bar. Through our early life we traveled extensively in the mountain West. Carl is from Helena, Montana, and is a Blackfoot Indian. Our being from nearly opposite ends of the country made “going to see the folks” a broadening experience. We went so many times that we finally had “must see” places on each route like the Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky and the polo games in Sheridan, Wyoming. Now those happy travels are only memories.
I was amongst the first members of the memoir writing class. While it doesn’t offer criticism, it does offer feedback. Also just trying to improve your writing helps no end.
Carl is now in a nursing home, I don’t drive any more. We totter on.
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