The guards were local, middle-aged or older, and looked like they’d never seen a plate of cornbread they hadn’t sampled. The place was deserted and when I walked in, their faces lit with a light of sincere welcome. We all called, “Hey” across the big room, and when I asked directions to the tax office, they gave me vociferous directions, then watched my hind quarters go up the stairs with great enjoyment. I took not a whit of offense. I turn fifty tomorrow and will take a compliment when I can get it.

The second floor was even better. There was no line. A talkative blonde clerk took my stuff, checked my eyes, made me a license and apologized for how much it cost. When she handed it over, hot off the press, she advised, “Baby, look it over before you leave cause I might a pressed a wrong button - said you’se a man or something. You’ll find it when you git home, then you’ll be mad.”

I checked it over and assured her it was perfect.

In fact, the whole visit was perfect. When I left, the guards paused in their conversation and waved merrily. I waved back and yelled, “Bye! Thank yawl!” and they returned my thanks – and I swear I’m not imagining this: looked positively grateful to be the public servant of such a winning public. 

            On the way home I stopped at the Archer Branch Library and stocked up on free magazines and a book. It was Cracker kismet and I’m telling you what: I’m on the verge of making a vow to never step foot in a town with a population over a thousand again.

Viva la Bronson.  They have renewed my faith in mankind.

I had an appointment and was making my way through the seven stages of enlightenment – or whatever you can call the different rooms and hallways they make you wait in – and had even passed the eye exam when something must have popped up on the computer that indicated I was not to be trusted. The clerk actually made a noise of dismay, then looked at me, then back at the computer, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. He told me he was unable to put anything further into the computer till I went to the security office in person and changed my name. I pointed out that the IRS had been happy to take my money all these years and that it was the Highway Patrol who’d apparently made the initial error, but he was unmoved by argument and I was forced to descend to the next stage of torment known as a visit to social security.

Out here in the hinterlands, we have been greatly limited in where we can go for anything connected to government. We used to be able to hop over to Trenton and deal with white haired country women who called you Shug and stamped your forms without too much of a hassle. Now we have to shuffle into Gainesville and fight the traffic to a central office which is guarded at the door by a young man who told me to turn off my cell phone, then asked me if I was carrying a concealed weapon. I had on a dress and was carrying nothing but a hand-me-down Coach purse from Mama. I wanted to tell him if I’d come there to harm someone I’d do it in a more pleasurable way, with a knife, but doggone if I’m not afraid to be handcuffed and deported anymore. I just obeyed with a minimum of complaint, then went to a little computer, which spit me out a number which resembled a gas station receipt. It said:  wait time sixty minutes. I sat down at a table next to a black guy who looked to be about as close to the end of his rope as I was. He looked at my number and asked, “How long is your wait time?”

I told him sixty minutes, and he grimaced. “I been here twenty minutes and my wait times says seventy minutes. How can that be?”

I just shrugged, but made him feel better by telling him the unhappy story of my afternoon at the highway patrol, and social security misprint. “They been taking my money thirty years – suddenly it’s a big deal.”

He showed me his printed out number and repeated, “Seventy minutes. Look at it. Seventy. Minutes.”

I’m not too much of a political creature but must say that as I sat there, I did entertain myself with the notion of starting a new grassroots political party, open to all races, religions and creeds, dedicated to the proposition of abolishing waiting in line.

I think that dog will hunt.

The Johnsons were tenant farmers and moved around a lot, even at mid-point in the school year, so a lot of these sorts of pictures were taken, always with the boys sitting in overalls, easily identified by their “jet black” Johnson hair. Daddy can usually pick out a few friends and all his brothers, but for the life of him, can’t quite get a grip on this one; can’t figure out which of the overall-clad boys are him. He has narrowed it down to the front row, and is positive he is either the boy at the far left corner (obscured by a crease) or the boy three to the left of him, or the boy next to him. He claims they are all Johnsons and if they’re not him, they’re one of his brothers; of that, he is sure. They are either: Wilbur and Howard, or Wilbur and Wayne, or Wayne and Howard. Mama complicated the confusion by suggesting the corner boy is Uncle Grover, Daddy in the middle and Uncle Wilbur beside him, which has sent him into even more spasms of uncertainty.

My father has a great, ill-conceived faith in my ability to solve modern mysteries, and has called me three times to ask which boy might be him. I have pointed out that I was born in 1960 and never darkened the door of an Alabama public school, but that answer doesn’t seem to suffice.

“Well they all kind of look like you,” I speculated after a long look at the photo. “I think that’s Uncle Grover in the corner.”

“No!” he cried, “It ain’t Grover! He was nine years older than me. We never went to the same school!”

“Then maybe it’s you and Uncle Wilbur and Uncle Howard,” I said, which was apparently another impossibility.

“Then where’s Wayne?”

Of such uncertainty does Cracker insanity spring. If anyone happens to recognize daddy in the photo above, please do send in evidence. It will set my mind at ease and let my daddy rest easy.  

The other sign is below - don’t know location (though lady who sent it is from Taylor County.) The message speaks for itself:

There is a line in an old hymn: “In the rustling grass I hear Him pass; He speaks to me everywhere.” 

He does.  

That’s the nature of my conversations with Pat: a stream of consciousness rattle that is like a squirrel running through the woods, leaping tree to tree. We talk books, gossip, Bernie, children, editors, how my mama’s doing; how his book is going; why NY publishing has hit the skids, whether it will rebound. He is truly anti-name dropping but every once in a while some Big Name will arise and I will ask, “You know them?” He usually owns up to it if he does, and his comments are occasionally - or actually, frequently, unprintable, as he is well versed in the southern profanity paradox. He would cut off his arm before he’d so much as drop a damn around Mrs. Randel, but just talking among friends, reverts to the casual Marine air base blue streak of his youth, which is arguably the most profane conversational English on earth. Wendel does the same thing and between them, they’re turning me into a Sunday School teacher with the mouth of a deck hand. I actually used a curse word in front of Mama and Daddy at the dinner table a few months ago, making them pause, fork in air, and stare at me for ten full seconds, with these What-Hath-God-Wrought faces.   

But aside from the corruption of my vocabulary, I very much enjoy talking with the Poet Warrior, who has a poet’s eye for strange, telling detail, making even the most casual observation resonate. We also have moments of cell phone misery. My new Blackberry drops, on average, four times a conversation, and if neither of us remembers where we left off, we are back to square one. He claims he has told me the great secrets of his life and confided the esoteric mysteries of fiction but the call had dropped and he was talking into thin air. We also have the occasional middle-age blank-out. Last night, he was talking about a man who’d inspired the character of Chad Rutledge in South of Broad. He would remember the real man but for the life of him, couldn’t remember the name in fiction. He kept circling, throwing out what he could remember, trying to jog our memories.

“He was Something Rutledge the Tenth.”

          “Chad,” I supplied, but he wasn’t convinced.

          “No – that’s not – he was married to Molly.”

          I spent the rest of the conversation thinking I’d lost my mind. As soon as I got off the phone, I looked in the book and emailed him: “It was CHAD. Don’t make me think I’m crazier than I already am.”

           I’ve had a few jealous souls make unkind remarks about my unfettered access to one of the great lights of Southern culture, but hell, I earned it. I faced Harry Crews when I was a country girl of twenty-one, and lived to tell about it. I paid my dues, baby, and in the face of their green-eyed envy, just shrug and say: “It’s a hard job, but somebody has to do it.”

           And for the doubters of the world, yes, I have pictorial evidence - see photo below, taken in Thomasville of Pat and some young women he was traveling with, whom he introduced as his neices (actually, can-can dancers from the FSU dance program.) That is a real Toulouse-Lautrec behind them.

See what I mean? Famous-er and famous-er.

I was complaining about how much I’d eaten, and she said, “Oh, baby, I think everybody worries too much about weight these days. It’s a waste of time. Your Grannie stayed on a diet her whole life, and it never made a bit of difference. When she died, she filled that coffin up.”

Such blunt honesty is common, as Mama has an iron-clad aesthetic, and cannot speak of anyone without some kind of comment on their size and general beauty quotient. She has truly curious ideas of beauty (“got that square face,” or “got them black eyes,” and cares not at all for the angular and the striking, but has been known to comment of many a model-like beauty: “Ain’t one bit pretty.” She doesn’t say it in dire insult, but just a matter of fact summation, in a tone of mild regret.

She prefers thin when possible, but doesn’t let a case of runaway obesity cloud her critique; often says of truly gigantic personalities, “Well, they’re pretty in the face.” She says it kindly but I’ve always thought it passive-aggressive (pretty in the face, but ugly in the thighs.) And yes, there are a few truly ugly amongst us – usually sorry men who do women wrong, who Mama labels ugly purely in spite. She once dismissed the philandering husband of a friend as “thet old Andy-Gump-looking something.”

Andy Gump was before my time, but I get the feeling he wasn’t a head turner. I hate to disparage my beloved Grannie by putting her picture in this particular post, but I just found the one below, and I love it. Not only is she pretty in the face, but she is demonstrating her ability to “get the clothes on the line.” Literally. Viva the Big Boned.

Pretty in the Face.

Just when you think there are no more metaphors of Southern life…

He also showed me a picture he’d snagged of me cooking in Texas, which he has scanned and enlarged to poster-size. Mama told me she is in the market for a suitable frame, and wants to hang it in the living room, marking a significant upward movement in my sibling favor. Usually only pictures of Jay make the living room; the rest of us end up on the back wall of the den above the TV. But old Jan is on the march.Another book or two and I might get a spot on the piano, where only sheet music and Hummels yet reside. I can only aspire.

I understand industry (my husband works for a corporation) and human error. What I don’t understand is why the rest of the world had safety measures that weren’t quite functional or required in the waters of the fragile Gulf. I also don’t understand why the feds didn’t say: “Hey! Idiots! Finish your backup before you drill that well!” Such lapses really do make me narrow my eyes, and wonder about all the backroom deals and three-martini lunches and political glad-handing that goes on in Big Oil, that leaves our sea turtles and shrimp and whole coastal culture floating belly-up, possibly so toxic that Lily and my future grandchildren won’t be able to swim in the waters of Panama City Beach, or catch a fish off the pier in Cedar Key, or eat a real, home-grown Louisiana poor boy, because the shrimp have to be flown in from China. 

See what I mean about the profanity?

I am especially irritated and annoyed and generally enraged by British Petroleum’s new PR campaign, wherein the matchless Churchill is quoted in a cunning attempt to curry favor and sound heroic. Well, two can play at that game, and let me say here, in public, that the Cracker Nation vows:

To fight British Petroleum on the beaches,

On the landing grounds,

In the fields and in the streets,

in the hills;

And shall not surrender

Till the money-sucking oilmen and their glad-handing political suck-ups clean our sea and go back to Dover and drill their own white cliffs.

And they can take Exxon with them.

They are also big on hospitality, and the same guy who picked me up at the airport took me back three days later. He was a native and clearly savored his job as guide, and both ways, coming and going, gave a travelogue of downtown Nashville that I doubt will ever be equaled in the annals of airport-shuttle history. I was staying at the little boutique Hilton across from the library, which had a side entrance and a maze like lobby. Though my shuttle guy gave me many directions, I managed to get lost from sidewalk to front desk. I wandered around a while, pulling my luggage, fearing I might be joining the homeless folk out in the park, when I turned a corner and caught sight of a front desk. I let out a cry of country relief, and asked the clerk, a young black man: “Is this the front desk?”

He smiled and said, “Yes,” then, without missing a beat, “but we’re closed,” then roared with laughter at my expression, proving once and for all that though they call themselves hillbillies, they really are Crackers, up there on the banks of the old Cumberland River.

I saw the Cumberland from a distance in October, and if you haven’t already heard, it unexpectedly hit a 500 year flood stage this week, breeching its banks and laying waste to much of the downtown. I understand all of it, even Opryland, is under water - which is a bizarre notion to any Cracker; like hearing the Statue of Liberty fell over. I hated to hear it; I really did, and hate to think what has become of the Hilton lobby and the wisecracking clerk and everyone else I met up there. I am confident that they will rise to the occasion, and take on this flood with the same courage and humor they take on everything else. Some cities sink under the weight of catastrophe, but I expect this particular breed of Tennessean to emerge from their baptism like a hound after a good bath. The Yanks couldn’t keep ‘em down and neither did Prohibition, and they have even evolved enough to embrace ice hockey.

I call that a resilient breed of Cracker and I bless them, and wish them well. We haven’t (yet) been swallowed up by our oil slick here in North Florida, and if we have anything you need, my friends, just give us a call, or call Mama. You know it’s yours for the asking. And whoever that man was on the news, who was saving his horses: sir, if I ever meet you in person, I would be honored to shake your hand. I don’t know who you are, but I know what you are, and that is a Good Man.    

All I can say is: move over, NASCAR.