PAXTON PEOPLE---ELISE TOWNER

 

Elise Towner has lived her whole life in Paxton, except for her college years and that Summer in between that she and her Mama spent touring Europe like her Mama had in Her Day.

     Elise wears lovely clothes, gets her hair done more than once a week, and forever carries the over-hanging scent of Kents and Arpege. She does not see it---for who looks into the mirror when they’re taking a big drag---but she’s one of those smokers who sucks in every puff for all she’s worth, with her mouth making a little volcano with myriad crevices down the sides. Even when she’s not smoking, she’s getting a circle of those tiny inward lines around her lips like the folds at the business end of a 12-gauge shell, from sucking on the weed for twenty-some years. And despite an armada of amazingly-expensive creams and miracle masks, some labeled for Night and others exclusively for Morning, or Day, or for the Sun, she’ll be a dry-faced old lady before she's fifty. 

 

Elise shops. She goes to Jackson and to Memphis and sometimes Birmingham for a long weekend, and she flies to Dallas to Neiman Marcus about four times a year. When she went off to Ole Miss, she carried more clothes than any six other girls, all bought during a week in Dallas, where she and her Mama bought everything that caught their eyes.

They stayed at the Stoneleigh, because you just DID, enjoying the spa and the pool to revive them from the effort of all that energy used in choosing between designers. The day they left to fly home, two men from the place, who had driven over the day before and stayed at Motel 6 out on the interstate, picked up the room key at the front desk of the Stoneleigh. They were driving a big box-truck all totted up with racks and hangers and brackets inside for hanging all the clothes, and they loaded up every single dress, suit, cocktail outfit and evening dress, all the underwear locked in the five suitcases, along with twenty-one pairs of shoes, which slid neatly into the chest of shelves in the truck, with the door closed and locked over their pricey leather contents.

The shoes would be taken out at home, a Polaroid snapped of each pair, then the picture stapled securely to the end of the box, for quick and easy finding of whichever pair Elise wanted at that moment. Her Mama had her own shoe-shelves done just like that, and had for years, except that the Polaroids were a new thing, seen in on a TV show---a fleeting pan of some movie star’s room-sized closets showed the whole library of shoes in their neatly-marked boxes. And her Mama wished SHE’D done it that way long before, with the pictures and all---seeing the contents at a glance was WAY ahead of looking at five index cards printed “Blue Heels” and having to look in to be sure.

And after all the clothes had been taken out and tried on and modeled at home several times, Birdie Mae, with strict little notations and slips of paper and a big printed-out chart to go by, had got them all back into the carry-bags and sleeves and shoeboxes, for a repeat of the truck-hauling process to Ole Miss for Rush. (Three of the sororities had cut Elise After Water, and she STILL resents it---she flat refused to let Mike contribute to two different incumbents because their wives were Chi O’s).

She filled her dorm closet with her clothes in their fancy hanging bags and arranged bras and panties and stockings in the drawers of the highboy the men wedged against the left side wall of her closet. She'd also had them stick up one of those snap-on light things on each of the four walls of the closet, and nail a little inch-high rail around the big shelf at the top, for keeping her shoeboxes in place.

She put the rest of her clothes in her trunk and made it an end-table to her bed, like young Army recruits keep their things. The trunk stuck out a bit beneath the little in-room sink, and so the girls had to do a little side-bend, standing there in their underwear, to brush their teeth and blink beneath the Maybelline wand.

But Elise didn’t bring NEAR all of her clothes---when there was a big Game coming up, or a dance or just a special date to go to the Peabody or somewhere else in Memphis, she’d have a long, detailed phone call with her Mama, and next day that Big Ole green Sedan de Ville would pull out of that long driveway outside Paxton with all the chosen garments and accessories on racks in the back seat, just bringing them right on up to her and carrying back whatever needed taking to the dry cleaners or hand-washing by Birdie Mae at home.

And Elise was forever resentful of the whole other closet wasted on her roommate’s meager nine outfits, bought at Sears and Penney’s and not worthy of all that wasted space. Elise opened her own closet door from time to time, spritzing the space full of perfumed clouds which clung to every thread and button, marking her territory and her passage through the halls to class. She still plows through life like she plowed through people, sending the import of her Self through the parting crowds like the overdone fumes of Arpege.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

 

I've always been fascinated by the terms for groups of animals or birds.  

Some of these must have been kindled by the sun-drenched ennui of idle poets on a Summer’s day.  I can just see a velvet-jacketed Shelley or Burns, elbow-propped in a pollened meadow, scribbling down lofty and more improbable nouns as the day wore on, chortling at their own wit.   Well, maybe not Shelley---he was never much of a chortler, I’d think, and most likely reached his apogee rhyming “wert”  with “heart.”

Or maybe the Hellfire Club, sitting around drunk on a havoc-less off-night, when the Dogs of War had slipped clean out the pet door to howl, leaving them bored and peevish as petulant children, shouting out odd, disjointed words. 

I declare, some of these are downright unfathomable, and others, the absolute personification of the raucous, the avaricious, the greedy, the charming, and the stunningly beautiful:

A Shrewdness of Apes

A Sleuth of Bears

An Obstinacy of Buffalo

A Bellowing of Bullfinches

A Wake of Buzzards

A Pounce of Cats

A Bask of Crocodiles

A Murder of Crows

A Cast of Falcons

A Charm of Finches

A Flamboyance of Flamingoes

A Skulk of Foxes

A Skein of Geese in flight sounds ever-so-much more graceful than a Gaggle on the ground, don’t you think?

A Tower of Giraffes

An Implausibility of Gnus

A Glint of Goldfish

A Leash of Greyhounds

A Muddle of Guinea Pigs

A Kettle of Hawks

An Array of Hedgehogs 

A Bloat of Hippopotamuses

A Charm of Hummingbirds

A Cackle of Hyenas

A Scold of Jays

A Cling of Koalas

An Exaltation of Larks

A Leap of Leopards

A Loveliness of Ladybugs

A Lounge of Lizards

A Tidings of Magpies

A Bamboo of Pandas

A Pandemonium of Parrots

An Ostentation or Pride of Peacocks

A Pomp of Pekinese

A Gulp of Pelicans

A Creche of Penguins

A Bouquet of Pheasants

A Puddle of Platypus

A Prickle of Porcupines

A Gaze of Raccoons

An Unkindness of Ravens, (or a Storytelling, but I hear their vocabularies are quite limited).

A Stubbornness of Rhinoceroses

A Parliament of Rooks

A Harem of Seals

An Exultation of Skylarks

A Murmuration of Starlings

An Ambush of Tigers

A Pitying of Turtledoves

A Blessing of Unicorns

And my absolute favorite, charming and true in its imagery:

A KALEIDOSCOPE of Butterflies:.

TOWANDA, WHERE WERE YOU?

 A quite lengthy post this morning on Debbi's Front Porch led me to a lot of thinking, about a thing I remember from my childhood.   There was a quite-influential woman in Memphis named Georgia Tann, whose leadership of the Child Welfare department was so iron-handed and illegal and downright cruel, though permitted blithely by  whatever Powers-That-Were in that era, they made the news all over the world---especially the part about selling the pretty children to the likes of Joan Crawford and Lana Turner.   

My answer from Debbi's comments page:

But I DID live the years of that unspeakable harridan---Georgia Tann, whose regular escapades were blatted on the Commercial Appeoal front page almost every morning at breakfast, and whose dreaded name uttered to us North Delta children could shudder you with cold and make you straighten up and fly right for quite a spell.   Other kids had the Boogey Man and the Wampus Cat and even a semi-local Bell Witch to keep them on track; THEY were mere amateurs.   That Memphis Witch was allowed to cruise the streets of poor neighborhoods, tempting the “pretty” children into her luxurious car, and they were gone---sold or bartered to families far away, and nobody would listen to the parents.  She switched her expensive Goldsmith’s and Lowenstein’s skirts through any place she chose, and wrought havoc worse than the Four Horsemen. 

 

She was unbelievable---what cogs in the Memphis Machine turned HER out and set her upon hapless parents of that era?   Several of the au courant court-and-prison cases right now reflect the glossing-over of Powers-That-Be on the side of some stunningly cruel and incomprehensibly powerful folks who seem to have the ear and Permission of whatever board or authority governs in some places. 

 

And I unwillingly confess kinship to one of those tiny-bit-of-authority-gone-berserk people:   My Mother’s cousin, whose position in the Child Welfare office in her Mississippi county was the ruin of many families, for her word was seemingly law in all the cases.    On Sunday visits home to her Mama, she’d regale the dinner-table with how she just COULDN’T decide, and maybe they could just all flip a coin "RIGHT NOW, and Y'all can witness it!" to see if the latest ‘case”  kept or lost their children to The System.  And woe to the ones who tried to report her to any authority---she also relished retelling those woebegone souls’ pleadings and threats, as she’d cut herself “just another little smitch ‘a that pie.”

 

Once, I heard her talk about it in person---my twelve-year-old self rebelled against the words so carelessly and triumphantly flipped into the after-dinner smoke:  “ONE OF ‘EM---HE THOUGHT HE’D SASS ME, and EYE took his kids,”  with a satisfied chin-lift and smile.   However poor the family, or how dire the circumstance, that kind of smug enjoyment is shatteringly repulsive. 

 

And in some crazy amalgam of Life and Literature, I’ve never forgotten a moment in that movie, “Stolen Babies,” when Georgia says to her new young social worker who is stunned by learning just how inhuman their System is, and has protested to her over lunch after a court date:  “We’re gonna have some CAW-fee, and a little bite ‘a sumpn’ sweet, and then I’m gonna drive you HOAM.   And you can THINK about things til Monday.” 

 

  That one sentence so reverberated with me, it has hung in the air for me to look back at for decades.

 

Boy, did this get me thinking today!   I’m not one to flash unpleasant moments or events or people onto the screen---never have been, but some things just need some rock-kickin’ and some light of day---for folks to take notice and speak up. 

 

 TOWANDA!

PIANO MAN

 

Just scrolling back in my phone just now, I came across a little poem that I'd scribbled down while in the waiting room at Chris' last surgery.   Between the prayers and Cryptic Crosswords of that long, nervous day, dated at the bottom "8-30-19," I spent my birthday in a Surgery-Vigil in one of those small rooms reserved for family, with my book and pen and phone and occasional passers-by the only company.  

I'd just had one of those "can't-be-but-is-it?" moments on seeing a slim passing gentleman disappearing down the hall in what I could have sworn was a Leisure Suit, and so I stood to peek out and gawk til he disappeared through the doors.  The silhouette and the gait were so similar to those of a long-ago acquaintance of great musical acumen, but whose talents were spent in various small bars in and around several counties, stirring the smoke and hum of the rooms with old tunes and quite magical classical numbers over the years.   

I just sat down and fumbled words into my even-then-geriatric phone---a silly poem---accidentally turning out to be a banal mono-rhyme all the way down, and outlining what I perceived to have been the life of such a quiet, perhaps unfulfilled soul.  I gave him a youth from mere imagination, then other happenstance to bring him to what I knew for sure:   He lived by his music, by a brandy-snifter paycheck earned in the dim recesses and dull hum of voices and his tunes.    I DID know, as well, that his accomplishment at the keyboard earned him Sunday-morning-organist title at the Presbyterian church, and that the whole county gathered for the fabulous majesty of his Christmas and Easter programs.  

I wanted to put that great experience into the poem, that thing that none of us could do, that burst of Glory in the music of those special Sundays, but I just left it alone, for I cannot find words to do it justice.    I just know that I could live such a small life as his seemed, just for the great joy of the Knowing that I could call forth such Magic with my fingertips.  I hope his heart was that full---just for the carrying around of all that Grace and that Cosmic Secret of spilling out the music.

                                 PIANO MAN

Once he played, oh, he played, from the time he was ten, 

For his Mama's Card Friends smoking Kents in the den,

They'd ask for "That Rainbow Thing," then, "Play it AGAIN!"

As the maid brought the Bridge Mix and sandwiches in. 

He made hardly a ripple in the pond he was in,

Til a DUI got him five months in the Pen.

It took years to get back on the circuit again;

He'd have sold his own soul for a Holiday Inn.

There's been many an evening when no one came in,

And he played through his repertoire, Solo, again;

Til a lady on her fourth martini leaned in,

Leaving "Love That Red" lipstick all over his chin,

And his second-best pants saturated with gin.

Now he sits in the lounge with hair growing thin,

Still taking requests from the folks who walk in,

With his cigarette propped in an old Altoids tin,

He's as famous as he'll ever get, or Has Been.

    

TEN YEARS AGO

 

FROM OTHER, HAPPIER, MORE INTERESTING TIMES---TEN YEARS AGO, TODAY.💕

An entire pink room greeted me as I emerged from our room this morning.  Chris had turned on a whole carnival of lights, draped up and above the dining table, over onto the bookcases, spanning the doors of the china cabinet, and swagged over the curtain like a New Year’s skyline.

 

The heart has been glowing on the table for weeks, now---it’s like one of those projects we used to make long ago, with starch-dipped string wrapped around a balloon, the whole thing given a thorough coat of Faultless spray to absolute stiffness, and then the balloon deflated.  

The table itself had quite a few holiday decorations and representations left over, with the Christmas dishes and holly goblets and a few red paper napkins and two square vases in red and silver.

One little votive-cup, with a never-ending supply of tea-lights, for no particular occasion at all, or any we’d like.

There's a sweeping little light-up angel-in-a-cube, some pink candy canes and a pearly-pinky-tan Santa standing in Sweetpea’s Christmas tumbler.

My favorite cup, with some hot-pink paper napkins, chosen over turkeys and harvest-fruit for the Thanksgiving table, because “these will go.”  And they kinda DID, because we used the Burgundy Plates.  In the chair, there’s even a glimpse of the gaudy sandwich “platter” from our Un-Super Bowl party.

On the right, a frosted-glass lampshade, one of five bought with good intentions, but which did not fit the little chandelier.  We use those outdoors mostly, on the patio in Summer.

And way down right front, my Mother’s wavy fruit-bowl, used for special occasions all the time I was growing up.  It was used many a time for crudite' at parties, way back when they were still just a “vegetable tray,” and mostly consisted of sticks---carrot, celery and cucumber, because that’s what we HAD, when snow peas and jicama were still as unheard of as Sri Lanka.

The stack of pages is print-outs of my Paxton People, just to hold them in my hands before all the books were printed. 

 Once, on a decorating show, I saw a beautiful young woman show pictures of the "before" of her home, before she was married, with roses and pinks and lacy pretties, and then the stark leather and steel and glass of the "after," because her husband (an NFL player, if I remember correctly), felt like such frou-frou was just "girl stuff."  I remember her wistful voice, "I had to give up my roses."

 

   I asked Chris if he were comfortable with all our pastels and pillows and pretties, and he said, in his sweet, rambling way:  "I don't care if you string Kewpie dolls around the walls, just so YOU'RE here."  And that's how our life was.  

I hope YOUR Valentines Day is ROSY as well!

💕