Acadians and Rednecks

I like the way my mind travels. I am catching up on the month of September. Last night we sat and rolled pennies. I took my penny rolls (to that point) and my loose quarters and went to the United Bank branch in Ingles. By the time she (the teller. Why are they called tellers? Do they tell you how much money you have? They don't tell you how much money they will lend you, that is the job of the loan officer. That makes sense. Where does the term "teller" come from?).... Anyway, the teller counted out my rolls and my loose quarters and I had $22.00 at the end of the accounting. She gave me the dollar bills and I bought groceries for the evening.

We ate frozen pizza from Wisconsin (good cheese!) and had a salad with the tomatoes we bought up in North Georgia. When we got through, we went back to rolling pennies. I still had some money to go to Rite-Aid (formerly Eckards) to buy Cindy and me some dental floss and junior mints for Cindy. I found it somewhat ironic that I was buying Cindy dental floss and candy. What would the American Dental Association say? What would Cindy's Uncle Chuck say? What would that old dentist in Huntsville who grew up with my Dad say? Does she care? No.

Anyway, we ended up with around twenty dollars in penny rolls that I have to take to the bank to redeem for paper money. Maybe we can go to a movie tonight and eat lunch. Its an idea.

I feel a little like Kate in Prague, saving her glass bottles from the week's beer to buy fish and chips on Friday afternoon. Did she skirt along the edge of the Roman church when she was in Prague? Doesn't she remember Jan Huss and throwing the Catholic priests off the balcony into the cow manure below? Life, sometimes, is all in how you perceive it. A miracle or ironic good riddance.

I do wish I had bought two of those thin crust pizzas last night. I was still hungry, although you couldn't tell it by the way I fell asleep in the green chair during Burn Notice. As Cindy remarked, it was good we were recording it. I assume that means that she fell asleep too. At least I rousted myself up out of the chair, took Tex out and then went to bed. How ambitious!

Did you know that I was voted Most Ambitious as a 7th grade graduate of Dunwoody Elementary School? Do you know why? It was because I had an affinity for New Orleans and Louisiana and wanted to be the Governer of Louisiana. How's that for irony? I even married a NOLA girl.

Unfortunately, I have only got the trappings of Louisiana and none of the power of office. Judging by the complexities and dark meanderings (read "All the Kings Men") I don't really think I wanted to be the Governor of Louisiana. Trying to get elected President of the Student Body at Dunwoody was difficult enough. At least I could see what was happening when I lost. In retrospect, winning by such a great margin the election for Student Body Vice President was probably just a consolation prize for the other two years. And we really didn't do much when I won.

I liked the Writer's Almanac for yesterday. Sherwood Anderson just leaving his place of business and moving to Chicago to be a writer. Cindy would approve. I found out this morning that the writer of Moneyball and The Blind Side grew up in New Orleans. That's neat. Sherwood Anderson advised William Faulkner to work on his writing when he met him in New Orleans. Apparently John Grisham had something to do with Sean Touhy at Ole Miss.

I still want to go to Oxford, Mississippi. I have seen Oxford, England and Oxford, Georgia. All three have colleges in them. Ole Miss is the place you go if you can't get into the state university in your home state. Pretty sad. At least you could wander under the oaks and visualize Faulkner and the other writers from Mississippi. You could even close your eyes and dream of the antebellum south and the post war south and Elvis and all the other aspects of life in the delta.

I must say I wasn't very impressed with Southwest Mississippi this past June. Of course, we really didn't get much chance to look around. We were really close to Nachez and we saw Jackson and got to drive along the Gulf in Gulfport and Biloxi. The coast was so sad on one side and so pretty on the other. If we had been wearing our "baby suits" under our clothes, we could have parked the car and gone swimming in the Gulf. It was so pretty. But you would have had to come out of the water to see the remnants of the beach communities and remember how pretty they were before the hurricanes of 2005. It was interesting that the live oaks seemed to have weathered the storms fairly well. I enjoyed the sea food, so the natives are still there. Life is chock full of fun and sadness, and their mix is so close to the surface that it is amazing that we tend to see things in black and white. It is all a gumbo of life. We want the seafood first and foremost, but we also eat the okra and the tomatoes and the rice and even the file, which is just bark of the trees, right? Its all there, and it always seems to be there.

I remember watching Doug Kershaw in concert at the Great Southeast Music Hall in Broadview Plaza on Piedmont Road in Atlanta. Man, he would saw on that fiddle and burn out the horsehair on that bow. He would be fiddling so hot on that fiddle that he would have to trade bows two or three times during the performance just to get through the concert. He would get the room rocking and we were all tranformed into a group of pseudo-Acadians. But it was fun and it makes me want to go to Thibadeaux or St. Francisville or thereabouts and eat gumbo and crawfish ettoufee and listen to the natives play their tunes of love and joy and loss and hope for the future. Aieee!!!!!