PEOPLE OF PAXTON

I've long had a whole townful of folks circulating through my head---they're folks I've known, or would like to, or composites of two or three interesting or memorable characters of the past or present. Perhaps forty of them have been introduced in here, and on my PAXTON PEOPLE blog, and I hope to someday combine the whole town into a story or two. I get going describing folks---their talents, their houses, their attributes and afflictions, and their interactions with other folk, and I can do pretty well up to the point of GIVING THEM SOMETHING TO DO. A Plot. A Story that would be worth reading, interweaving lives and actions into some semblance of a book. 

 Someone will suddenly come to me, with a whole personality and whims and a life of their own, and it seems as if I've actually known them, and there's no trouble putting down whatever comes to mind, but then there they sit. And I have whole gaggles of Paxton folks circulating through my head---church folks and townfolk and folks scattered on their farms and little bits of land. They are from memories, wishes, and imagination, with no insinuation of which is which, since they feel like long-worn quilts from a fragrant old cedar-chest: scraps and pieces of whole cloth, aprons and dresses and shirts and a bolero or two. There might be a small swatch from the minuscule Barbie-skirt on Harliss’ plate, or a small snip from the MOTHER pillow sent from Japan by Carey Luke Bishop, while he was overseas. Perhaps a bit of lace from one of Mrs. Keen's dainty handkerchiefs she always had tucked into the sleeve of her silky blouse. The imaginary black-as-night silk cloak swirled in Miss Mavis’ wake makes an appearance, as well as a whole section of pattern composed of bits from prom dresses, bridesmaid’s dresses, piano recital dresses for generations of Paxton girls, all from the trusty needle of Mrs. Barbee.

 The tales behind the stitches in all those generations of Hope Chests in that small town could populate a library, and and I want so much to tell those stories.     All the pieces are separate, thus far, of different colors and patterns, velvet and gingham and denim and suede---good broadcloth and flimsy voile, taffeta and bridal satin folded with khaki, ancient woolen---blue and gray, sailcloth, stars and stripes, but just as I've never put needle to cloth with any useful or beautiful result, it's an uphill climb to get them all cut and sewn into a quilt pattern and a story and a town. 

I'm workin' on it.

STARRY NIGHT

All the moons and comets and stars have been great items of interest in the past little while, and we’ve stood out in the cold back yard, breaths wafting up into the darkness, as we took in these once-in-a-lifetime moments of astronomical significance.  All that cosmic display, going on for untellable time, just up there for the looking at---we seldom think of what grandeur just goes on without us, heedless of our little plans and designs.  

Leah just sent me a lovely video of an unimaginably-painted scene---Van Gogh’s STARRY NIGHT coming to life atop a bowl of dark water.    In a moment, the artist’s hands scatter-spatter, then splash-drip the paint in childish blobs.   Then he magically swirls and contours the masses of  quivering colour into the familiar beauty of Vincent’s nightscape with just a few dips and strokes of brush and fingers.  I cannot think how he ever thought to DO it, let alone honed such a technique into such a frangible art form, ephemeral and fleeting as smoke.  

A moment to take in the beauty of it, then a magnificent swirl of the heavens, like a cosmic interruption that shook galaxies in the creation of the Universe.   A few more drops of colour bring a magical transformation into another familiar painting---simply stunning in the making.  

This is too beautiful not to share---do make it into full screen, and use the SOUND.   Beethoven's MOONLIGHT only adds to the majesty---though they did not overlap in history, perhaps van Gogh heard these magnificent strains just one time. 

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1eS3ChsQAM

MAW'S STUFFED TOMATOES

This fabulous Tomato Season has me thinking about my first Mother-in-Law. She was really an Angel on this Earth---a kind, strong, loving, smart woman whose loving ways will make her long remembered by all of us who loved her. She was a marvelous Southern Cook, with a “way” with a Sunday pot-roast, and a true hand with a piecrust, turning out acres of Lemon Icebox and Karo Pecan and Chocolate pies for every occasion, and her Caramel Cake recipe is still sought by all of us who remember it.

But she had one recipe that I’d never tried before---when she made it, it was always called "Stuffed Tomatoes." She said it was from the "Murdock side" and had begun when Mayonnaise was a brand-new invention, and had to be made by hand, way before the family had electricity, or indeed, any appliance to ease the effort.

Maw always hollowed out the prettiest, well-matched tomatoes for her presentation; she'd stuff them just so and round the tops carefully, to make them into perfect orbs balanced amongst the parsley on a pretty plate. They were among the several recipes she referred to as "Preacher Food," and certainly the intent was elegant, if not the title.

And I can remember that Janie and Ralph would take several apiece, eat all the contents with a spoon, and leave the forlorn little pink shells for the chickens. And hollowing out all those tomatoes was not really fun work, so I began peeling them, mushing the whole bunch and chopping them with a handy little hand-chopper in a bowl, and going from there---despite my leanings toward gussying up certain dishes, this one just caused too much work and too much waste. Besides, it's really pretty, all pink and creamy in a pretty clear bowl.

STUFFED TOMATOES, just as she and I would have discussed the preparation:

Fry a half a’ pound of bacon pretty done, and save the drippings.

Six or eight REAL RIPE good-sized tomatoes---shape doesn't matter in this case

A sleeve of Premiums, crushed in the paper, with lots of small bits, not powder

A good big spoon-clop of mayonnaise (Blue Plate or Duke's make it authentic, but NEVER Miracle Whip!!)

S&P to taste, but AFTER the bacon is added

Peel tomatoes and chop fine as possible, or smush them with your immaculately-sterile fingers, into an almost-puree, with some small bits left for color. Stir in mayo, then start adding crackers; stir well, and watch for consistency---it should be thick, but not dry. You may not need to add all the crackers, depending on size of tomatoes. Crumble bacon and stir it in, along with however much of the drippings you care to---all is good, if you like a good bacon flavor, but it's to your taste.

Dip a spoontip into it, and do that little TP-TP-TP with your lips to check for flavor, and then salt and pepper to taste. Store in fridge for several hours, then stir well just before serving, or stuffing into a quarter-cut tomato for a salad plate, or put an ice cream scoop onto lettuce or sliced tomatoes.

This recipe has been in the family for more than a hundred years, from Grandmother White’s family out in the Hills, and tastes like a creamy BLT. Tomato season’s ON! Y’all go pick/get/order some really ripe ones, and have a taste of Maw Haley’s Table. She set a fine one, and what would we give to sit down at that table ONE MORE TIME.

TWENTY-ONE YEARS AGO---THE MAGIC'S STILL THERE

 

Photos from Internet

On this gentle Cusp of Summer, with the day and night in unison, each chiming in right on cue like a well-rehearsed choir, I’m thinking back to a Solstice twenty-one years in the past, when we “celebrated’ the date at Stonehenge.   I say celebrated, but we were mere spectators, much like bystanders marooned on rocks around which the great tide of participants flowed, like a great colourful sea.  I imagine the great tide of people is there, right now, awaiting the sunrise in their garb and grime, their costumes and coolers, their ceremony or curiosity.  

From my Travel Journal, June of 2003:

This is “FIRST DAY OF SUMMER” and I don’t think it’s celebrated very widely in the South. We don't do much to actively COURT the heat, so to speak, nor do we honor the inferno days. We don't even speak well of it, except to say that the sun is good for the crops. 

  We'd been sadly informed by our tour guide that we would not be able to take the promised trip to Stonehenge, because the roads had been shut down. (He DID mention that if you were a practicing Druid, you would be given admittance, but he could assure neither our safety, our virtue, nor a return of the bus to pick us up on the morrow).

We took a LONG and winding way around the site, and as he and the driver (who lived just there, and took one night off to go home to his family) mapped out a little-known route, and we took it. It led us deeper and deeper (in the literal sense---the roadsides grew higher and higher, as we rode through a narrow by-way which had been carved into a miles-of-trench by countless centuries of carts and wagons, with no forethought to modern vehicles, and looking out the windows put you face-to-face with dirt. One turn was hair-pin and hair-raising, as I looked down from my far-back-seat perch, with the archaelogy-dig strata going past the windows on both sides of my three-directions view, and then the similarly-horrified faces of the fellow passengers in the other vehicle near enough to kiss as they skillfully negotiated the passage.

 

When we came back out of that deep road, the fields stretched for miles, and they were absolutely teeming with people, and I had the thought that an entire alien race could have landed in Salisbury Plain right then, and would have easily blended right in. It was like the crowds converging on the Superbowl---long lines in the lanes and paths, costumes and characters from Yoda to Spock to Frodo and friends, with many a quite persuasive priest and abbot amongst the throngs. Everyone seemed to be carrying a cooler or a bedroll or a musical instrument, and a whole flock of bongo players, drums shouldered and keeping up a steady rhythm, passed us as we crept along like an aquarium-on-wheels amongst the walking crowd.

 The investment in black fabric alone must have swelled the coffers of quite a few merchants, and the makeup and the music---it was like a specially-arranged performance, and we not only had ringside seats, we moved along, and caught forty more rings of that many-ring circus. We passed through a small village, and apparently none of our group was looking out as we crossed one of a duo of bridges. When the guide spoke over the microphone: “A pair of Naiads bathing to your right,” the stampede back down the aisle rocked the bus and landed two gentlemen almost in my lap. And indeed, there had been two ladies, beautiful young ones, both absolutely naked, pouring water from the little stream over each other.

I think the guide and I were the only ones who caught a glimpse---everyone else was either running to get a look or dodging elbows and flying feet.

And then, from far, far away---the golden shapes in the sunlight emerged, swimming into view almost through a haze; we took pictures through the windows, as the lime-vested gentlemen waved us to keep going and the foot-dust like the Flight from Egypt filled the air.
Photo from Internet

I think I’ll remember that most because we didn’t get to stop and get out and look closely; the far remove keeps that mystical, magical place ever as a mirage, a picture in a Baedeker, a cover silhouette on the journal I carried to record the days of my trip. And the mystique has probably grown in the remembering, to even greater size and import than it would have had we stood and looked at it a while, like tourists gazing on a church.

We caught glimpses, we saw outlines, we saw the glow of sun on the spires, and we saw the great procession of those faithful to something older than memory, older than time. That’s an unforgettable impression, and seeing it only through glass left the thought that perhaps it was a mirage or our imaginations, or visible only for a moment, like Brigadoon.

FOURTEEN YEARS AGO TODAY

UNDER THE TITLE "JOY"

https://lawntea.blogspot.com/2010/06/days-one-and-two.html

https://lawntea.blogspot.com/2010/06/friday.html

https://lawntea.blogspot.com/2010/06/and-rain.html

https://lawntea.blogspot.com/2010/06/tiny-bubbles.html

https://lawntea.blogspot.com/2010/06/princesseses.html

One of the loveliest weeks of my entire eighty-something years, and I wouldn't swap it for a trip to Europe. Names were changed in my blog to protect You Know Who You Are.

Our Fairy Girl today, still sharing the magic that is KATIE.

THE WORK

In all art each one sees from experience, from shapes and lines, from squint and head-bend, from wishful thinking. My vision of the WORK is a single-bulb on a light cord from the ceiling, in a small yellow kitchen amongst the pushed-aside plate and ashtray on the table. Shoulders hunched over an old Underwood the size of an anvil, page halfway filled, and a story born and birthing in that light cast on the snow.

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WORKING LATE

 

WORKING LATE  RAY HENDERSHOT

In all art each one sees from experience, from shapes and lines, from squint and head-bend, from wishful thinking.   My vision of WORKING LATE is a single-bulb on a light cord from the ceiling, in a small yellow kitchen smelling of fried fish and old Tareyton smoke.   A pushed-aside plate and ashtray on the table, and shoulders hunched over an old Underwood the size of an anvil, page halfway filled, and a story born and birthing in the light cast on the snow.

WHO COUNTS SHEEP ANY MORE?

 

Tiny pink or purple dragons, warmly burping cookie-breath

When they’re sad, the burps are lickrish, when they’re wishful, berry pie.  Then the many shades of happy, and angry and forlorn and merry, swooping

through the green, trailing cinnamon and peppermint and lime. 

 

Cheery flits leave wakes of lemon, with vanilla overtones, and the swoops and swags of exuberance and joy spread strawberry fumes like clouds.

 

Chocolate means contentment, and black cherry is for drowse, with a little whiff of nutmeg for a nice Winter nap, snuggled into the covers.

 

Warm shortbread for an afternoon’s smooth course, peach muffins for a morning’s rise, tea and cappuccino’s brown notes for the first light in the sky.

 

Time for night-night for this nestling, with his trusty Passy-Fire.

 

 

 

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:.