January 12, 2013
-
Breathing Fire, or Needing a Hot Spell
Holy Lord; I do not know how a sweet Alabama aunt, back in the days when women did not curse — Much — could make the strong man desperate for some low T therapy then, and the sweet ladies with their Sunday gloves and flowery hats need to run home and cut their visits short, for my beloved Aunt Inez could say, “Shit Fire,” chew her gum or dip her stuff, and iron a shirt on a good day never questioning that she might be speaking a phrase which a child could get smacked out of school for saying — After the paddling, before you walked home, and the neighbors had turned the party line in to the news, “That little nasty Barbara Everett said, the — You know what, but I am going to tell you just in case you haven’t heard about it; those horrible words we don’t say around here in Tennessee, “Shit fire!” So after I got home, Mama was waiting, switch in hand, bar of soap at the wash pan, and I was in for the whipping I was not going to forget afterI had already been whipped senseless.
One thinks, as a child, that my aunt had some reason for saying the phrase on a regular basis, and I loved her dearly, for she allowed me and her wonderful daughter a little younger than me primp with her lipstick, her high heels, and she never scolded me for a thing in my life, and after we moved to Tennessee, my great joy would be to return to her house, sit by the fire, and to have my precious Uncle and her husband come in at days end. All of the love that seemed to pour out for me may not have been what life was about most times around there, for Uncle had a problem with whiskey, but you have your mean drunks and your mellow sort, and he seemed to be among the most mellow man that I ever knew throughout the few years I would get to know him, for he and my Aunt Inez, by all measure, seemed to depart this life too soon, for theirs was a joyful place which I envied, and about now, a breeze is blowing across Sand Mountain, and a voice is whispering, for it is the way of angels, “Well, “Shit Fire,” How could anyone have thought such about a woman, two children next to an old garage where my uncle fixed cars between bouts of whiskey drinking and man talk — Could have ever considered that cold house a nice among the nicest places of their memories, but the last Christmas I would spend with my beloved aunt holding me in her arms to this day finds me fixated on that hamlet of my birth, Rosalie.
They lived near a church, a garage that fried the best burgers anyone could try to mimic, but it took the gas station’s lard and ground beef, some sweaty guy using a frying pan and day old buns to get just the right flavor, and I want you to understand that ketchup might work on a french frie, but yellow and cheap mustard with enough onions to give gastric innards from miles around a good cleaning left you knowing that you had the food of kings and of queens, and the only company located around the USA which must have gotten some of their info about frying hamburgers is a joiont called Sonic, for there and only there is a near masterpiece for what we had to leave behind in Alabama. It is no surprise to any of us who were born down south that lard is one heck of a lot better for you than fake butter which was supposed to make folks skinnier as well as to be so much better for you, for it was new, and the pretty housewives at the refrigerators had on dresses and high heels where as we who knew our lard; Well, drippings did not have that ring to it that margarine had; but in my aunts lovely home, I was exposed to what I would think of as fine restaurant fare, for I was never in the gas station!
The last Christmas I ever spent at her house would be one of those weeks when I got to stay the whole week and just to be a child. I did not mention that a couple of houses near this home of Uncle Homer and Aunt Inez, along with a school, a church within walking distance, and a few stray dogs looking for a meal made this count as a real town, and the eldest daughter was a high school football queen, but she was one with high moral values, so each day she would play a piano which her folks decided to afford for her, because she was a woman of exceptional musical talents who could just sit down and play from hymnals or some old songs of long ago to please her family without much more than having heard of it before. Most of the music was played at a very rapid and up tempo though, and great Evangelicals can make any song wake the dead much less those who are just sleeping.
That year I Christmas I would hear, “Joy To The World,” played and sang with such vigor that I would wonder how anyone could make a keyboard get up and walk and everyone in the room dance, because it does not sound like the music to which I was accustomed, so may I just say that there is no way that Elvis could have been a part of a sing-a-long, for my cousin, Ronwyn took a back seat to no one. We called her Ronnie, and she was a family beauty which would resign her to being called from the mountain early on by one, Dr. Dunn, as he was known, and he came to preach, but he would leave with my cousin as his wife, and they were headed for California where they grew prunes or olives or whatever it was they grew near an area called Yolo, and for the life of me I could not figure out why my cousin had to farm with a physician husband, but I did not know that some people go through appropriate channels and become, “Doctors of Religion,” and these same folks cannot make a living without some other means of support, but my cousin was so beautiful that I am certain more men than one desired to know her, but I did not know about all of those goings on back then, and I still see that beautiful young girl doing, “Joy To The World,” with such vigor that I thought it was a new rag time version.
I saw some big faux candy canes on a brilliant and clever Xanga woman’s header when I began to think how Christmas, and last year, and all of time right now appears to be moving on at a speed which is hard for me to bear. When I became very ill in 2012, I felt that life was getting away from me, for all of that Christmas was a blur, and then, again this December I missed out on all of my decorating, the great joys of going through stores and picking out gifts which is among my favorite things to do, to celebrate what once for me, a burger from a gas station as a treat, so six more days of hospital care was not how I planned for my year to end. It was among the first times when I really used the internet for shopping, and the seriously flawed me would come out when I seemed to want two of everything, and then there’s; “Well that is such a bargain, then I should buy six, for I never know these days when I might have another Holiday season wiped out, and the only good news is now that most of my parts are gone, my children raised, and we are down to one beloved pet, then unless I have a major coronary or brain damage, then most of what causes people to go for operations, then I do not have those parts anymore.
Certainly, Go ahead and snear, you pervert, for you too may be facing needing bionic parts, and for what is gone; Then the pituitary gland does its best to keep us from becoming totally hindered by the lack of a few good hormones, but to the kinder of you, then I too am still not a castrated goat! But I love Christmas, for it is a season when people pretend to be nicer, and people wish you; “Happy Holidays,” just as one walks down a crowded street, and my heart wants to scream back, “Merry Christmas, and go, “Shit Fire,” if you do not like the statment, for I would never be so zealous as to defile their days of celebration by scratching out, for instance — Any referral to the lunar New Year, or putting a big nix on a Bat Mitzvah, because it does not suit my sensibilites of the Easter season. I believe that we should repeal any effort to take away Christian when it comes to the cards we send, and if any store refuses to acknowledge wishing people a Merry Christmas those of us who are admittedly shopping for such; Then it is time we gave the the great big heave ho and shop some place else, for what started out as political correctness has now become censorship of what our little winter Carnival is all about.
The day Christian was seen by corporations as a down side to winter sales was a day when freedom of speech was taken away from a lot of us. I love winter carnivals, and I love Hannukah, the great Lunar New Year fully celebrated here in the Bay area, and we enjoyed all of the Bat and Bar Mitsvahs ever attended. I am tired of all of having a country established on the principals taken from scripture and made even more stern by Puritans being re-evaluated for wishing those who may not be one of the flock having to re-examine how we celebrate for fear of associating ourselves with bigotry by using a word which implies a religious belief, because it has gone much too far, and we have kept our mouths shut as the very word, Christmas, has the effect of ruining other children’s lives if the word is said. In the 1980s in this country, there was growth in Christian worship, and I can safely say that around that period of time was when it began to be important to get that, “Happy Holiday,” card which used to say, “Merry Christmas,” and does any one presume that we had many people who were concerned about new churches cropping up, and if we had problems with it, then we are Nazis, Fascists, Forgetting the plight of The American Indian, and I will end the list there, but you know exactly what I am talking about.
The bigotry has now gone on to other shoes, those who fancy themselves as the utmost intellects who want America to put away its bible culture, for it is not to the liking of certain groups who swollen bigots, their heads so full of their self-rightious opinions. My friends, life was more pleasant when we lived our lives and did not worry to whom we were going to answer, and I do not want, speaking of hell, fire, and damnation for any priest who was a part of the greatest sex scandal in history as we know it, to have one thought that they deserve similar respect. They were another group which made it possible to keep murdering churches, and only hell’s fires can be quenched by their actions toward children. Being taken in to Seminary at a time when everything in them was about to bloom or blunder once was a way for a poor young man to bring honor to a family, but still it does not dampen the sins against the most fragile of human beings — Little children. We should have a memorial for all of the children of abuse everywhere, and press the children’s name on it with the date they were first injured. A zealous bigot though can only be satisfied until the churches everywhere are murdered.
Yes, Christmas is a religious holiday which falls around the winter solstice when pagans had rights and rituals long before Judaica had records, way before Christ, and other prophets where people would choose the faith of nations, and I thought a lot about these things over Christmas — Everything from, “Should parents have a child’s chemistry checked if a child is showing no sign of being the male or female they appeared to be at birth?” I asked myself what could be the down side, for once, at least in the country, very mild and feminine males chose to go to the woods and hang themselves, and all knew why, but no one would say the words that the fear of abuse and the torment of class mates called them to the horror of their death, so if those parents had of known how to seek to help their child lose confusion and social abandonment; Again, what are the down sides. It is tyranny to suggest that, “Gay At Birth,” has exceptions to the rule, so who would be barberic enough to suggest that young men and women should have the privilege of having such test done. I seriously doubted that a female relative wanted to grow a beard in her 40s, but I found out I was incorrect, but we are all subject to the executioner now that hormonal testing is feasible. We would be subject to even asking boys or girls such feelings in school nurse settings.
I thought about how lonely I felt for my family and the trips back to the old home place. We had nothing, but as the years went along, we, their children, had the privilege of indulging our parents in every way possible at the Christmas celebrations they never knew. I thought of my Aunt Inez, because she loved me so and how much fun it was to have a Christmas where my beautiful cousin could make that old piano sound like a one woman honky tonk place to come and to worship. I put away all of my scars which I carried for the Christmas hours, and I held two little grandchildren, my baby dolls as near me as I could with an amazingly large surgical scar I had to protect, and somehow in it all I was able to know that I had another litanny of Christmas memories stamped on my heart; I just wanted to tell you that Mama needed to be glad Aunt Inez did not catch her beating on me for saying, “Shit Fire,” for it was like the younger people use the F word now — That punctuation mark which keeps any one from falling asleep.
As far as Dr. Dunn and his wife, beautiful Ronwyn; I understand they have gone to be near their children, and Ronnie was the eldest girl cousin, but she raised fine children, helped spread the word she was taught to live, and even though I pictured her as a princess on the landscape of a film, then in many ways, she lived out her dream in California, and we all missed her, for she never came to Tennessee after she left the mountain, so all I have is the memory of my cousin as, “The Highschool Football Queen,” and one Christmas when burgers were cooked the right way in a pan which only a fool would wash, for those windshield wiping towels back then sucked up the grease between a few days of getting the lard just right; And if I do make it to heaven, I want to know how that man made those wonderful burgers and to tell him that Sonic stole his recipe.
We wait for the real Carnivals to begin all over the known Christian world, the sweetness of St. Valentines is apt to come first, but no longer am I going to wish anyone a, “Happy Holiday,” for they are too easily befriended and looking over that bigotry goes both ways. Blessings to all who read this entry, and if you see a great big storm cloud just sitting over your house, then hit the door, for my Aunt Inez might be messing around with the clouds again, and if she gives it just the right touch; then you might get something less pure than rain if you get where I am going with this…
Barbara Everett Heintz, Author of, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” available through Amazon, Kindle, and Create Space, and this, Pinkhoneysuckle, on Xanga
Thanks to some very special folks who shared today that their book club would be using my book to read and discuss. “Greater love hath no man or woman!
