Going Home

Answered a couple of e-mails this morning, then dashed out to go get my mom so we could go to the funeral. I had figured it might take an hour, and to give myself some extra cushion I told her I would be there around 8:45 or so. “Why don’t you just come at 9?” As if 15 minutes would make that much of a difference one way or the other. Anyway, I told her I just wanted to make sure we had some time to get there, and then, of course, I ran late and got there at about five till nine. “I called your office—I thought you might have forgotten about it.” Nah, just got busy.

Then it was time to figure out which vehicle.

“Are you riding with me?”

“Well, no, I figured I would drive.”

“But do you have an umbrella big enough for both of us?”

Huh?

“Yes, I have a big umbrella…”

“Well, get it and you can ride with me.”

::sigh:: Went and got my umbrella, came back to her car—“You want me to drive?”

“Do you want to drive?”

“I will if you want me to”

”I’ll drive.”

Okay, then. Got in and buckled up—as I’ve written before, she drives a late model Cadillac Eldorado, mainly because it has a relatively hot V-8. As she says, when she mashes the gas, she wants it to go. She put the key in and cranked it up—“Do you know how to get there?”

My mom is such a card. I told her the other day I wasn’t sure I knew how to get there and she scoffed and said, “Aww, I’ll tell you which way it is.”

“No, I thought YOU knew.”

“I don’t know where we’re going!”

“Just drive west, you’ll get there.” Smartypants.

SO, we set out. She decided to get to the interstate from downtown using the Red Mountain Expressway, and was incredibly unclear about where the hidden entrance was on 27th Street, as well as which lane to get in to go “around by the Civic Center.” Big looping connector ramp which merges into I-59/20 that never ceases to make me a bit queasy. It’s narrow and high and spindly and is cambered so your mother will try to take it like she’s driving the pace car at Talladega.

“OOOh, I think this thing is too tight of a curve!”

“Well, I reckon it is a bit much at 70—you bring it down to 40 and it’s a lot easier.”

For some reason this just tickled her to no end. She snickered and laughed and allowed that 70 might have been somewhat too fast. Or not. She got the Caddy hauled down and merged more or less in one piece—she drives like the throttle and brake are on-off switches, so the ride leaves a bit to be desired. Hard to relax when you have to throw your hand up to grab the dashboard as you slide off the slick leather seats when she slams on the binders, then to have your head slam into the headrest the next second as she stomps on the gas.

We negotiated on whether to get on 78 West by going on up to Arkadelphia Road or to get on I-65 and exit at Finley Boulevard, or go way on up to 41st Avenue. She asked; I suggested just staying on 59 until Arkadelphia, so she went toward Finley.

“Why’d you ask if you already knew which way you were going to go!?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

On to 78, and at this point I will begin to make use of Dale Short’s description that I linked to yesterday of the trip route. (In this way I will attempt to draft upon the better talents of a more able writer to give my own crap some pizzazz.)

To get to Shanghi, Alabama, you take Highway 78 West out of Birmingham. Some twenty miles later you come to the Graysville exit, which you take and then turn left onto Flat Top Road.

Okay, let’s stop there—part of that twenty miles (which is now more like twelve given the annexation fever of Birmingham and Graysville) is what made up the place where I grew up, Forestdale. When Forestdale was young, there wasn’t much more than a scattering of houses and a few gas stations, and then it began to grow into a bedroom community full of iron and steelworkers during the mid ‘60s, and by the time I graduated from high school, it was full of stores and fast food places—but not in a bad way. It was lively, but not the sort of junky mess you usually associate with strip malls and burger joints.

Now, though, it has been overtaken by junky mess. Pawn shops (both the merchandise and the car title types), bingo arcades, package stores, clinging-to-life mom-and-pop joints that went into the old chain burger joints after they sold out, big fluorescent yellow and black flashing arrow signs, fireworks trailers. The few homes that survived the earlier building boom (with their owners always hopeful that they would “go commercial”) have begun to rot down, back behind old, overgrown chain link fences.

It’s not home anymore, that’s for sure.

The one bright spot is that our old house (which DID go commercial back then—first it was a flower shop, then some kind of an office building, then it was enlarged and bricked up to become an attorney’s office) is still in good shape. Not that you can actually SEE our old house behind the addition and the renovations and the brickwork, but it’s nice to know it’s still under there.

On through the next town of Adamsville (which really was a town instead of just an unincorporated area, and which my mom blew through doing 75) and then on to that turn onto Flat Top Road. Just down under the highway overpass is another street called Arrow Drive that heads back up another hill. This is where one of the guys I graduated high school with came down a bit too fast, in the wet, and slid across the road down into the ravine on the opposite side, thus shrinking our class size by 7%. (There was only 15 of us.) That intersection always gives me the creeps.

In short order you'll pass Flat Top, Bessie Mines, Jonestown, Snowtown, and West Jefferson.

When I was little, this road was two lanes, and full of gigantic potholes and coal trucks full to the brim and running at either top speed downhill or near dead stop up. All the land around looked about like the moon. It’s better now—the road is mostly four lane, and has been straightened considerably, and all the mounds of tailings now have a thin, fine covering of grass. Still not much in the way of trees though. Little glimpses of Old Flat Top Road and other old intersecting roads to nowhere could be seen back in behind mounds of dirt—one in particular looked little bigger than a snake and was just as curvy, and looked like it was going up a hill that was only a degree or two shy of vertical—“That’s the one that goes off to Porter. That’s the one where your daddy and that Sumner boy came down on that motorcycle doing A HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR! Wonder he didn’t get killed.” Yep—my dad was a bit of a lunatic, although he did have a right good time. He had a big 80 cubic inch Harley-Davidson (one of the ones with the shifter on the side of the tank) that he blasted around the hills and hollers, and I have an old photo of him sitting on it, looking every bit like a punk kid. But a likeable one. And no, I don’t know which Sumner boy, it was just “that” one, like “that Hicks bunch” or “that store”.

With the curves having been taken out of the road, and with the construction of the new Corridor X interstate to Memphis, some of the familiar landmarks my mom was looking for had been obliterated. She kept looking for Snowtown... Snowtown!...SNOWTOWN!!, and the only evidence left was the Snowtown Church of God of Prophecy. There’s a new intersection now just past it now, and from it you could see the cooling tower for the Miller Steam Plant, which is just beyond West Jefferson High School, which was the direction we needed to go.

So she turned in the opposite direction.

I was finally able to convince her that if she was trying to get to West Jefferson, she needed to do a 180, which to her credit she managed to accomplish without doing a full power bootlegger turn, but by just turning around in someone’s gravel drive. She was still rather put out that Snowtown was not more recognizable.

Thus back on the right path, we passed by “that Youngblood girl’s house” which was the home of one of my parent’s teachers at West Jefferson. She was only just a little older than her students at the time she taught them, and she would be in her 80s now. Still a girl, though, you know. I remember long ago when my dad and I were going down that way to go to the river that he stopped in to call on her. She really was a beautiful woman, and talked to us forever. I wish I had remembered more of the conversation now.

Then past the old service station that used to belong to one of my uncles—it’s now an abandoned little mess of concrete block and vines. He and his boys used to run coal and work on coal trucks, and there was still an old Peterbilt and coal trailer parked behind, but nothing else. On up the hill to old West Jefferson, which has been surplused by the board of education. Once a pretty little rural school, it’s starting to fall down, too. This was were my dad played football. Their coach was paralyzed and used a wheelchair, but this was just at the start of World War II and all the able-bodied men were volunteering or being drafted, so they took what they could get. I think this man was probably one of the greatest influences on my dad—he would talk about him respectfully, and in awe that even though he couldn’t run around with the boys, he could show them how to play ball and win. Tough bunch of boys, they were, and they went on in a couple of years to march into Berlin and Tokyo.

On down a bit more and we passed over the Flat Creek Bridge over the Warrior River. There’s an old iron bridge that still stands there, and a newer concrete bridge beside it built during the late ‘60s. A bit further off to the left before you cross the bridge is an old wooden railroad trestle beside the river. My dad would stop down at the foot of it and let me “fish” in the little slough that ran under it into the main branch of the river. Never caught a thing.

A little beyond West Jefferson High School, when you see the reservoir for the power plant on your left, you take a very hard right--almost a U-turn--and find yourself in Twilleytown, a place which was signified at one time by a big railroad trestle which Bobby Adams once hit with his motorcycle. The trestle has since been torn down. Now you can see only the stumps of it and some scattered redrock. At that point you're almost home.

Yep, that’s it. We passed by, and my mom remarked, “That’s where the railroad trestle used to be.” I’ve mentioned it before, but you can tell how long a person’s lived in a certain place by how many times they mention landmarks that used to be someplace. Passed by the intersection for Reed’s Ferry Road, which is where the first house my mom and dad lived in stands. It’s also where my sister lived her first few years before they moved out to Forestdale. I think the old house was still back there, but there was a huge pile of brushy mess in front of where the road is, and we couldn’t see that far back.

It's a straight shot of about half a mile to Shanghi Baptist Church and Hardin's Grocery, which mark what is roughly the southern boundary of Shanghi.

Which is where Mr. Short’s tale starts, and mine…well, ends isn’t quite right, but I suppose it’s a stopping place for the moment.

The church yard was full of cars, not that it took that many to fill it up, but there were probably 40 or so. My aunt (nor any of the rest of us) are Baptist, and they went to church in Quintown (not Quinton, by the way), but this is where folks around here are buried. It looked to have just gotten through raining, and there was a small crowd milling around under a picnic shed. One elderly lady was standing there with an aluminum cane—“Well, Marie made it!”

Marie is one of my mom’s best friends from their early adulthood together. She and her husband used to get together with my mom and dad and go to the river and on vacations together and play canasta together. I always knew them as Fullernmaree—they were always together as a unit in my mind. It was also odd when I was old enough to figure out that “Fuller” was Fuller’s last name—it seemed so strange that anyone would not go by a perfectly good name like James.

Her husband died a few years after my dad. They had lived all over the place—Hueytown and Leeds then Hueytown again, then had moved back down to McCartytown (which is not even on the map) not long before he died. She has not been in the best of shape lately—she’s had two knees replaced, and she fell in her yard not long ago and broke her hip, then she later did something to her shoulder.

She quietly hugged my mom, then me and squeaked out a hello. And then suddenly, it was as if it was 30 years earlier—she straightened a bit, and her eyes sparkled like they did, and her voice returned strong. While not young, she had at least gotten back to something like the Marie I knew. She and my mom reminisced, caught up on who had done what, then she introduced my mom to another lady, tiny and pale, that she went to church with, and then there was another round of figuring out relations and kin.

Piles of names—Lantrips and Tuggles and Brasfields and Parkers and Gilberts and Rubies and Pearls and Lowreens, all somehow connected, none familiar, few still around, all talked about as if they were all still alive and kicking. Shook hands with my cousins (and figured out that chubby and prematurely grayheaded appears to not just be an isolated thing). Worked around the crowd a bit and shook hands with my one remaining uncle. He was looking pretty spry—I suppose he’s getting close to 80, still has a grip like a vise.

A few more folks arrived, and we walked on through the gate to the grave site, with my mom and Marie still figuring out the various genealogies. Simple service—prayer, short sermon, prayer. Just the way Aunt Juanita wanted it. She had been sick for a while after my uncle Orville (my mom’s oldest brother) died, and had been miserable without him to pester her. They lived a simple, plainspoken, hardworking life, but one full of love and kindness and great good humor and righteousness. Not a lot of tears were shed—I suppose most folks think we’re a rather peculiar bunch, but I come from a long line of folks who saw life as just a stop on the way to a better place. Death was not, and is not, the end. It simply marks the time when you can finally put down your pick and shovel, or the big dishpan full of beans to snap, and escape the pains and vagaries you’ve seen for so long. She was lonesome for her man, and she wanted very much to go see him. While everyone was sad to wish her goodbye, everyone was confident we’d see her again. I imagine this group would shed more tears to have to put their son or daughter on a plane and watch them fly off to live in California. Then again, California’s a lot further away.

After the last Amen, we stood around a bit and talked some more with some of her grandkids—good looking bunch of young folks, married now and starting families themselves. The last time I remember seeing most of them they were just about the age my kids are now. One of the girls brought her husband and baby—one of my aunt’s greatgrandsons. Tiny little fellow asleep on dad’s shoulder, oblivious to the still, humid air, or to the old scraggly mutt that came up during the sermon and decided to stay around and beg for pats on the head, or to anything else except for his thumb and whatever it was he was dreaming about.

We walked back down to the parking lot with them, and my mom got corralled by the little lady Marie had introduced her to earlier. Marie had to leave early because her legs were hurting, but this little lady was still trying to find out some more information about folks, so we stood around and tried to help her figure out the bloodlines. About then, the rain started to fall again, so we broke away and got back in the car and started back to Birmingham.

It rained buckets on the way back, and my mom out of necessity had to let up on the go-pedal a bit, which was just as well because the local constabulary was out in force all the way back. I teased her that they were looking for her from her earlier romp. “Aww, I don’t think they’re after me. Anyway, I could outrun ‘em.” Which made both of us laugh. Back to her office, where she dropped me at my van.

Quick hug and a kiss, and, of course, I told her I loved her. She’s a pretty fine mom, you know.

As for the weekend, I don’t know what’s planned, but for some reason I believe it will be very busy. Yeah, I know…go figure! So, I’ll be out of here in a bit, all of you have a good weekend, and I’ll see you Monday bright and early.
posted by Terry at 4:01:00 PM