Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for January, 2012

A firm foundation

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on January 25, 2012 | 6 Comments »

We are all familiar with the parable of the wise man who built his house upon the rock from the Gospel of Matthew. The rock in the story is, of course, the teachings of Jesus.

But ladies, I’m here to tell you that this principal applies to many things, chief among them fashion.

Just as the foolish man cannot build his house upon the sand, a fashionable woman cannot build her house of style on a squishy, bulging, dimply underpinning.

That’s why the Lord gave us a firm foundation – foundation garments, that is!

Yes, I’m talking about girdles, longline brassieres, slips and the like.

Did you ever wonder why Marilyn wasn’t beset by panty lines or why Ms. Taylor didn’t have a muffin top?

Foundation garments!

Were they comfortable? I doubt it. But they looked flawless.

Now, I will maintain until the day they press the toes of my pointy red high-heeled shoes down under the coffin lid that so-called “natural beauty” is as rare as hen’s teeth. It takes work to look naturally beautiful because most normal folks, when presented in all their glory, just are not. Sorry, y’all.

And I…well, I know I’m not a dewy teenager anymore. But I also know that I can make the most of the foundation the Good Lord gave me, which is what drove me to the lingerie section of the store this past weekend for just that – a foundation…garment.

You see, I have a sweater dress in my closet that has been taunting me. Taunting me, I say,  because I am what you might call broad in the beam. Always have been. Always will be. No amount of squats, lunges, or other equally distasteful activity will ever change that. I’m good, country stock.

So, thought I, “if you can’t beat it,  just mash it into compliance.” And I set out to find the firmest foundation I could upon which to build my sweater dress house.

I came home with an Assets’ Convertible Slip Dress. It had it all. Smoothing. Shaping. Slimming. I was in business.

Come Monday, I got up and commenced getting ready for the day. I worked my way into my convertible slip dress (and I’m here to tell you, there was work involved) but I eased into my sweater dress. I too was flawless. Not a line. Not a bulge. Not a dimple.

Well, my sisters, the convertible slip dress is all fine and dandy when you spend the day sitting at your desk. I did notice on a few trips to the coffee pot and the copier that the convertible slip dress was wont to creeping up a tee-ninecy little bit, but not so much that a discreet tug wouldn’t right it. And a little minor adjustment here and there is a small price to pay for looking sleek in a sweater dress.

It was not until I went to have lunch with my girlfriend that I noticed a slight issue with my convertible slip dress. While walking the block and a half from my parking place to the restaurant, I noticed more than just a tee-ninecy bit of creepage. My convertible slip dress was slowly but surely making its way north from my knees. The opportunity for a discreet tug did not present itself during the course of our lunch, and before I knew it, I was back out on the sidewalk making the trek back to my car.

With every step, my convertible slip dress was making a trek of its own…quickly. I was very hastily trying to make it to my car while taking teeny tiny steps so as not to encourage the seemingly unstoppable creepage. I made it all the way to the middle of 20th Street, to the very center of the busiest lunchtime intersection in all of Birmingham, when…FWOOP!

My convertible slip dress had made its way to the apex of my thunderous thighs and in a sudden and swift ascent rolled all the way up to my waist like a window shade gone wild leaving me in the middle of the street with an enormous bulge of spandex where my previously hourglass waist had been.

One mad dash to the car later, the hem found and restored to knee length, I was once again flawless in my sweater dress and a little bit wiser. You see, it does you no good to have a firm foundation if it is not anchored securely to the ground!

Read Full Post »

The mark of the Rooster

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on January 23, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

January 23, 2012, marks the beginning of the Chinese New Year – the year of the Dragon. The Dragon is probably the most auspicious sign in the Chinese zodiac and this coming year is supposed to be one of progress, prosperity, and success. One can only hope.

All I knew of chinoiserie growing up was learned at the House of Chin on Airport Boulevard in Mobile. We would meet up there with the whole McDonald clan for big family dinners.

The House of Chin served exotic sounding dishes like chicken chow mein on silver pedestaled dishes with domed covers. Lord knows it must be exotic if it can only be eaten after it is ceremoniously revealed out from under a silver dome.

I was particularly fond of the big pieces of celery that came in the moo goo gai pan. I wondered why Chinese celery tasted so differently from the celery that we got at the Piggly Wiggly. I was grown when I found out that it wasn’t celery at all, but bok choy.

One time Mama bought me a tiny, red silk lantern. It had a tassel and smelled of lacquer. It hung from a little silk cord. Fancy.

After ordering and prior to egg rolls, it was always big fun for everyone to find their birth year on the menu and read their horoscope aloud. We did it every time. The words never changed. We did it anyway.

Brother is a Dragon, naturally. Mama is a Horse. Daddy is a Rooster.

Picture courtesy of Wikipedia.

I happen to have been born in the year of the Rooster, as well. But unlike Daddy, I bear the mark of the Rooster on my left arm – a round, white reminder of a childhood run-in with a mad Rhode Island Red. I came out of the fracas sporting a nice scar on my bicep and a little wary of barnyard fowl. He wound up as Sarah’s Sunday dinner.

I am “a pioneer in spirit…devoted to work and the quest after knowledge. [I am] selfish and eccentric.”

Pioneering. Questing. Devotion. Those are some mighty powerful words for a little chick to read. Would that really be me? It’s funny to want to live up to a prophecy found on a soggy paper placemat, but I did, and still do.

I don’t know about selfish. I probably am to a certain degree, but who isn’t? I am definitely eccentric. No doubt about that. And getting more so every day.

I have come to learn a great deal about Chinese culture as an adult, more than I ever really wanted to. And while I understand that there is infinitely more to the Chinese zodiac than what is written under my egg drop soup, I still read those words every time.

And I am still proud to be a Rooster.

Read Full Post »

A Brownie no more

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on January 16, 2012 | 4 Comments »

It’s that time of year again. The time when smart little girls dressed in sashes heavy with the badges of their accomplishment implore you to fund their pursuit of “courage, confidence and character” through the purchase of sweet treats – Girl Scout cookies.

The Brownie Handbook (Photo from bibliocycle: http://www.etsy.com/shop/bibliocycle).

And it is at this time every year I am reminded of one of my greatest failures. My failure to become a Brownie.

When I was about 7 or 8 years old, someone in Citronelle decided to start a Brownie troop. We were to meet once a week at the Citronelle Baptist Assembly (now Camp Whispering Pines) to learn how to be resourceful, clever, and creative young women. We also got to have cookies and Kool-aid, de rigueur for any social gathering of the time.

I went to the first few meetings, received a handbook, and raised my two little fingers heavenward and fervently recited the Brownie Creed:

On my honor, I will try:
To serve God and my country,
To help people at all times,
And to live by the Girl Scout Law.

I was sincere. I was earnest in my study of the manual. I wanted desperately to become the responsible young girl in the illustrations – kind to animals and the elderly, able to create a tourniquet under duress, adept at identifying indigenous trees by their bark.

I remember well the day of my downfall. The day I knew my hopes of sewing and fire-building badges would never come to fruition.  The day I knew that I would never proudly wear the smart brown jumper and striped blouse with the Peter Pan collar. The day I knew I could never become a Brownie.

A page from the Brownie Handbook (Photo from bibliocycle: http://www.etsy.com/shop/bibliocycle).

The end came with these words, “You girls will be excited to know that we are planning a camp-out on the banks of beautiful Lake Chautauqua.”

A camp-out? Outside!? I was immediately filled with dread and horror.

Now many of you may think that because I come from the country, the far-flung recesses of Mobile County, that I just love to sleep out of doors,  on the ground, staring blissfully up into the heavens while the crickets chirp and the little froggies sing their songs.

You would be wrong. It is precisely because I am from the country, the far-flung recesses of Mobile County, that I do not, and will not, sleep out of doors, especially by a brackish, murky body of water.

As our apparently fearless, and obviously deranged, leader went on to explain how we would start fires and roast marshmallows and tell stories, all I could think of was the time when Baw* and I were fishing at my cousin Sister’s pond. We were sitting out on her little pier drowning some worms and having a ball when Sister’s husband Jesse came down to visit. As the men stood on the bank and chatted, I continued to fish, dangling my little toes off the edge of the dock.

The next thing I knew, Baw yanked me up by my overall straps and flung me up onto the grass while Jesse began to frantically beat at the water’s edge with an oar. It was moccasins, you see. A nest of moccasins. Mere feet from where my little piggies had been.

Then there was the time when Baw and I were swimming at Puppy Creek. Tired of playing in the water, I was digging clay out of the bank with which to fashion little cups and saucers so that we could have a tea party. Baw was sitting in his harvest gold folding chair about thirty feet away watching me.

Now Baw always carried his pistol with him when we went to the Creek. After all, you just never knew what sort of person might wander up. River people. I never really thought much about him carrying a gun until this day when I heard him say calmly and quietly but in a tone I had never heard before, “Stand up slowly. Don’t look behind you. And come to me. Now.”

I looked over at him, and the gun was leveled in my direction. As I did as he had told me, “POW!” Baw had fired and shot the head off a cotton-mouth that had crept up right behind me.

As if this weren’t enough, I knew all about the rattlers, alligators, wild boars, bobcats, and black bears that shared our woods with us. Not to mention the less menacing but still disturbing armadillos, skunks, fire ants, and mosquitoes, all of which were guaranteed to be spending a warm summer night on the banks of bucolic Lake Chautauqua with a horde of little girls and their crumbs and noise and Kool-aid. A positive siren song for disaster.

Not me. Not then. Not now.

For you see, it was at that moment that I realized I was really only in it for the beanie, and beanies can be bought. Common sense cannot.

 

*”Baw” is what I called my maternal grandfather.

Read Full Post »

Talking to the dead

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on January 11, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

I recently found myself alone in a car traveling a bleak and rainy back road with the ashes of a man whom I have never met. Alone for two hours.

“What did you do?” said my friend, as I relayed to her my somewhat odd circumstance.

“I talked to him,” I answered, honestly.

I mean, what else are you going to do? It seemed impolite to do otherwise.

So we (or, rather, I, since it seemed to be a decidedly one-sided conversation) discussed the inclement weather, his new home, and some general current events. I wondered if he already knew what was happening, but since he didn’t interrupt me, I carried on. We (or I) sang along to the radio some as well. After all, two hours is a long time to keep up an amiable social discourse.

You would think my friend might be vaguely surprised that I had spent the better part of two hours chatting away with an urn, maybe even shocked. But she was actually only vaguely amused. She had, after all, implored her husband to dig up her beloved cat’s carcass and move it across two states to their new home in Alabama. He obliged because he, like we all do, understands that Southerners seem to have a unique relationship and fascination with their dead. It’s almost as if they are not. Not really.

For instance, I called Mama shortly before Christmas to coordinate our holiday festivities. High on her list of things to do was getting fresh flowers to the cemetery to decorate the graves of her parents and Daddy’s. And when I say high, I mean high, as in after shopping but before menu and wardrobe planning. After all, everyone needs some Christmas cheer even if they are looking down on it from Heaven. Or up, as the case may be, but we always hope down.

When I was a little girl, Mama, Granny and I spent endless hours in old country cemeteries searching for the final resting places of distant relatives. They would recount generational relationships with such detail and accuracy that it made I Chronicles seem dubious in its recounting. We would also examine the graves of strangers and try to figure out who they must have been in relationship to their neighbors and what their lives must have been like. Lost children. War dead. Widows. All with real lives to be imagined and stories to be told.

Later on, after visits home from college, before I drove back, I would always stop by Pinecrest Cemetery to talk to Baw for a little while. Then I would drive over to Mt. Nebo and say hey to Sarah, my childhood caregiver. I would brush away the debris and the occasional errant fire-ant from their headstones, pull a weed or two, and be on my way assured that they were watching over me as a traveled. Who needs therapy when you can air out all your problems to a marble slab and invariably come around to a solution?

Southerners remember and recognize the birth dates and anniversaries of the dearly departed. We celebrate them, even if for a fleeting moment, as if they were still with us. In the case of those taken too soon, we imagine what they would be doing had they lived. For the elderly, we are thankful for the end of suffering, pain, and dementia and imagine their great reward found in a land of cloudless day.

We plan ahead for Decoration Day so that we can make our rounds to visit everyone. We surround ourselves with their belongings. Granny’s wedding ring. Pawpaw’s shotgun. A crocheted doily. A family Bible with notes scrawled in the margins. We remember our loved ones in the prime of their lives. Happy. Healthy. Carefree.

In the South, with its history of war and poverty, disaster and disease, death is just as sure as the fact that grits is always plural. We’ve learned to cope with and even embrace the inevitable with resignation, respect, and, often, humor. Is there really any other choice?

I had seen pictures of my traveling companion as a young man. Blonde and tanned. Wearing his military uniform. Holding his baby daughter. It was this person with whom I talked during that long car trip from Georgia, not the inanimate jar of dusty remains strapped into the passenger seat. Had he lived, he would have been my father-in-law, and I wanted to make a good impression.

I know it may seem odd, but you know you do it too. It’s really perfectly natural. At least in the South.

Until they start talking back, that is.

Read Full Post »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 228 other followers