A hot day of food and fun

After church let out this morning I drove home and picked up Cindy in order to travel over to Cissie's house for our afternoon adventure. We drove over to her house and waited for her to come from her church. After a few minutes she arrived, changed clothes, and we headed cross country to go to Concord for Sunday dinner at the Concord Cafe.

This was the second time we had eaten on a Sunday at the Concord Cafe. There are a dearth of places to eat in Pike County, but the Concord Cafe has a nice buffet on Sundays and we headed over and had a nice lunch with a profusion of vegetables, including fried green tomatoes, and some casseroles. I particularly enjoyed the pot roast which I had with my mashed potatoes and the zipper peas.

The Concord Cafe also has a nice selection of desserts that they make themselves, which included several slices of lemon ice box pie (certainly in my top five of desserts).

I figure we had our share of vegetables too and they were really fresh. We decided to go to the Concord Cafe after church at least once a month from here on out. It was very pleasant.

Afterward, we headed toward Woodbury, where our journey took a slight detour when Cindy and Cissie found that they had opened up a new antique store downtown. The ladies decided that it would be a good place to stop and digest our meal before we continued on to Raleigh and the peach orchard.

So we walked through the wares on display. The antiques were a mixed bag. One of my favorite items was a casual cast picture from the Beverly Hillbillies. Oddly, the best item that we identified was an old cast iron urinal from Budapest. Odd might not be the best definition of that item, but it was probably the best thing we found in our journey around the store.

Afterward, we continued on to Hudson's Farms. After a quick drive through Meriwether County we arrived at the little building where Hudson's Farms sells peaches, ice cream, and various other items. After finding out that Cindy's favorite peaches were gone, the lady at the stand mentioned that they had figs. Cindy's eyes widened and the young lady told us we would have to drive out into the orchard to where the fig trees were located.

I agreed to take a basket out into the orchard, in the heat and humidity, and soon was stepping over the water lines and the high grass to the trees. As it turned out, most of the figs were still pretty green and wasps seemed to enjoy protecting the ripe figs. About thirty minutes dodging the wasps, flicking the other bugs off the fruit and dropping the figs which were either ripe or on the verge of ripe.

When I got back to the stand, the young lady gave me a bottled water on the house and we negotiated the sale of some ice cream. The water and the mixed peach and blueberry ice cream was great, but the air conditioning was the key, and before long we were back in Griffin, dropping Cissie off at her house and heading me back for a second shower and a nap.

It was a good afternoon. A pretty good day.

Autumn's coming

We have had quite a bit of rain over the past couple of days. Not so hard as just regular and most of it has come in the nighttime when we were asleep and unaware of the falling of the drops, but you wake up and the pains of glass from room to room are covered over with a blanket of humidity which distorts the veiw from the dry inside to the wet grass and trees outside. It is still August and so Summer, with almost ten days left of the month before we come into the first week of September, but September is such a deceptive month in Central Georgia because it brings very little of Autumn and a little more as a continuation of Summer. Still, with the coming of school openings and football, it feels in your heart as if it should be Fall, even if it doesn't feel that way in the air.

It must have been fifteen years ago when Dad and I drove up to the farm, taking our shotguns and what not with us, and strode across the fields, looking for doves, or at least the sound of their cooing in the trees. After taking several and bringing them home to Grandmommie to toss out, since there were too few to share, we spent the evening watching Austin Peay attempt to start their season off optimistically.

It was hot and dry in the fields that day, but it cooled off by the beginning of the game that evening and several soldiers attempted to parachute onto the field from above through a thick fog. Fall came to us that evening despite the indifferent comings and goings of the days of heat and the absence of humidity.

Fall will soon be upon us and some respite, other than the ripe peaches and cold watermelons we have enjoyed this Summer. There will be still some time for the pleasurable tartness mixed with sweetness of a blackberry cobbler with vanilla ice cream. Still, I love the approach of Autumn, almost as much as a drive through Meriwether County in late February to see the sunny daffodils spread across the grey and tan straw of Winter. There is something sublime about the changes of seasons. But I love Autumn and Spring the best.

Late night in search of a reason

Thursday rolled through like a wheel rolled down a hill and by the middle of the afternoon I had handled all the court in which I was representing clients, and the rest of the day went by until Cindy and I were at the Reahards with our group eating together and discussing our future Bible studies. It was fun.

Friday came and went and I was up in Dunwoody with the family, including Frank and Maggie and we enjoyed a meal at the Ted's in Decatur.

Now it is Saturday night, or rather early Sunday morning and I am really tired and should be in bed, but I am sitting here writing this stuff and need a topic which might interest me, so I have at least a chance of interesting someone reading this. Well, chances are pretty slim at this point.

Earlier today I was listening to "What do you know" on NPR. The show was broadcast from Houston, Texas. In the show they usually have someone from the town in which they broadcast the show to answer some questions. For today's show they had Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill from ZZ Top. As I listened to the exchange I couldn't help but think about the episode of the cartoon, "King of the Hill" in which the members of ZZ Top appeared as cartoons of themselves and pretended to be old friends of Hank Hill, particularly Dusty Hill, who was supposed to be the Hank's cousin.

I guess it is the measure of radio that since you cannot see a visual depiction of the people who are speaking, that it is quite easy to be distracted by a memory of a cartoon depiction. The end result was a radio audio broadcast, augmented by my memory of a cartoon visual of the people being interviewed. Wierd.

I should go to bed. It is time. Maybe I wlll be a bit more creative in the morning.

The end of the week

The last and most burdensome day of this busy week is tomorrow. I will take Cindy to work and then drive to Jackson to see how much the judge wants to protect the other side. At this point, my client just wants to be divorced, but the judge seems to want to expand the field.

Afterward, I get to drive down to Monroe County to see if I can preserve my client on the outside of the Monroe County jail. It may be difficult to do since it doesn't take much to revoke probation. It is odd how much effort is made to put some people back in jail when the people who fund the jail would just as soon keep as many people out as they can.

There is quite a tension these days between the county commissioners who have to fund the county jail and the keepers of the jail who would like as many occupants as they can get. I learned about that in a conversation with one of the judges. You would think that the judges would work to come up with some alternatives to simply putting people away.

After the end of the day, Cindy and I get to go with our group to the Reahards for supper. I am really looking forward to that. It seems as if it has been a very long time since we all got together. The powers that be don't necessarily want these groups to continue on forever, but we enjoy each other so much I don't really think we would want to quit.

Friday will be closing day. Hopefully, some money will come in by the end of the week. I am getting really tired of this economy. It seems that everything is a struggle.

Pretty campuses

I was pretty lucky in college. The setting around W&L was the Blue Ridge mountains. Lexington was a quaint little village which sometimes seemed to be caught in the Nineteenth Century. The buildings at W&L were all red brick and white columns. The whole place breathed history as if time had stopped for a second.

When I got to Athens to attend law school I fell in love with downtown and the old campus. Walking around among the old buildings and the trees on the old campus was so peaceful. I loved strolling around among the old commercial buildings. Even driving around Athens brought your eye to restored old antebellum mansions and such.

Momma told me that I had been very fortunate in the colleges I chose. They were both beautiful. Most campuses have their places which draw the eye and charm the spirit. But I have also seen some college campuses which don't live up to the example of others.

I remember walking around the campus at one college and wondering why all the buildings looked like late Soviet realism architecture. Another college was surrounded by shopping districts and strangling civil engineering which did nothing but confuse you as you tried to navigate the traffic snarl. A trip to UVA really disheartened me because the beatiful architectural plan created by Thomas Jefferson was somewhat overwhelmed by the downtown's urban blight. It just didn't match up.

I suppose it would be hard to keep any campus pristine as it develops and even harder to keep the town around it matched to the spirit of the college. Lexington and W&L and Athens and UGA have been pretty good in trying to keep the town and gown in sinc. It doesn't happen like that all the time.

A sincere lack of desire

Kate has been having problems with her partner lately in class. She has tried to get him involved with their mutual projects, but he never seems to be available. Kate has been forced to do the work herself. Kate has been very frustrated.

Until today I have commiserated with Kate as she has struggled with this problem. Apparently, today she got up to do her presentation, with which she was supposed to have worked with her partner. When her partner rose to join her, she turned and asked him what he was doing. He told her he was presenting his work on something which was supposed to have been done weeks ago. She called him on it and he sat back down.

I obviously have sympathy for Kate and her frustrations with her partner. But suddenly I could see the partner standing up and then dropping back in his seat when he realized that everyone knew how little he had done. Despite myself and my sincere regard for Kate, I saw him there in his chair, sheepishly watching Kate make her presentation on which he was supposed to have worked.

I am glad that Kate's work is appreciated by her teachers and recognized by them as her own. But for a moment, I suddenly had compassion for this guy who seems to be floundering like he doesn't care. There has got to be some reason for that lack of desire.

In my adulthood, I have seen the effects of depression and a mind's developing confusion. Grown men will act like nothing in their lives is worthwhile and important. They will make bad decisions based on a whim. Or what seems to be a whim. I don't know if that is his problem, but every behavior has a beginning. It takes a lot of effort and work to rise above it. Boy, do I know that.

God is like that sometimes

I was reading the last few chapters of the book by Rick Bragg in which he writes about his father and his father's family, trying to exemplify the man who was a destructive force in his life. His father had been in and out of his life when he was young and had ultimately abandoned his family. In the book he details how his father fell in love with his mother and then went in and out of her life, causing as much damage when he was there as when he was away.

The book ends as his father dies of tuberculosis and his older brother is sent to prison in Atmore, Alabama. As Bragg's life sweetens with his marriage to his wife and his growing relationship with his stepson, he and his mother try to get his older brother out of the penitentiary. Meanwhile, he buys his mother a house out in the country with the money from his first book. Later, his brother is released and comes to live with his mother. Between the two of them, the two create a massive garden and plant flowers and vegetables and fruit. In Bragg's eyes, the plants are amazing.

His description is skillful and oozes with the love and pride he has in his mother and brother. I couldn't help it; my thoughts went back to the farm and the huge garden my grandfather always planted. There were tons of vegetables and rows of gardenias and other flowers. Against the fence between the drive and the garden were concord grape vines, which were sour when we picked them and ate them.

Out in the low spots in the field was a bog where the blackberries grew. In the late summer, grandmommie would lead us out there to pick the berries amongst the stickers, these being wild blackberries. Later, my grandmother would make the most amazing blackberry cobbler, with a buttery crust and the sugar mixed with the tart blackberries. Served with vanilla ice cream, it might be the only sweet treat of Summer which overcame watermelon. I wish I could have some of that again.

When we used to visit Grandmommie in the Summer, we got to enjoy all the great things of the country in Summertime. The heat and humidity, cut in half by the coolness under the oaks which spread out around the front yard. Sitting out under those trees in the darkening evening, listening to the Bob Whites calling us from above. Sitting there, talking softly, until the day's light was gone and we headed back inside to take baths and get ready for another morning which started in the darkness, with my Grandfather smoking a cigarette in the yellow chair, drinking coffee and listening to the radio as the sun sneaked up on us from the behind the smoke house and the coal house.

The greatest mystery of my growing up was the wonder of Grandmommie's biscuits. They never came out the way she wanted. They were flat and buttery and hot and didn't need a thing, but she always apologized. Always.

The mystery of this is what she didn't do which made them come out wrong, but perfect. Life is a struggle most of the time. We make a lot of mistakes. A client once told me that we all make mistakes. The key is learning from them. Perhaps in the case of Grandmommie's biscuits, the lesson is sometimes God allows our mistakes to bear sublime consequences which are much better than our intentions.

God is like that sometimes.