|
19573. iiibbb - 6/2/2006 3:09:47 PM Well... the first time I met her mom was at P's black belt test. We had to travel where P was living before (about 4 hours away). Her parents came down from New York to watch too.
We didn't get to talk that night, so we arranged to have brunch the next morning.
So... her mom knows that I was born in the South, that I'm a forester, that I like guns, and that I race cars. If you ignore the PhD, or my parents, or my other interests, on paper I may seem a total redneck.
Her mother is a person of some status and from New York City. Very well off. Very worldly. Very smart.
So she tries to make conversation by getting into the car racing stuff. So I tell her about the level I am in is the lowest form of sanctioned racing in the US (Solo 2, aka autocross). I tell her about why it's fun and interesting to me.
She keeps asking questions... and askes something like, "Where can you do this? It seems like such a rural (read 'redneck') thing."
So I respond that "No, it's everywhere in the US. If you're willing to drive 2 hrs in any direction you can pretty much do it every weekend."
So she asks if it's in her city... which I assure her it is...
Finally, she asks still in disbelief... "Well, how come I don't know anyone who does this".
And I responded very deadpan... "Well, maybe you need to meet more people." Which is a very ironic statement given who she is.
Anyway P's mom has liked me ever since; I think in part because I showed a little backbone, did it with humor, and I think she realized the 'rural' crack was a little out of line.
But I like her too. She is very witty. 19574. arkymalarky - 6/2/2006 3:14:29 PM Oh yes, do 3i3b. Something fun to read when I get home. We're looking at wedding locations today in Hot Springs and doing some shopping.
I love your post, Anomie. Lots of familiar stuff that's still part of rural life today, but also the cotton farm images, since my Texas bunch on Dad's side had a lot of cotton farmers, and I have memories unique to that, but none as good as getting to sit on a load of cotton going to the gin. I think rural life is like you describe. Some of it's boring when you're living it if you come from a city (like we did, too) but the memories really stand out, partly because it's just not part of any other living. I was on duty at work one day and heard one kid tell another that "when I leave here I'm going to live in a town with a stoplight."
Those places are long gone.
We're four miles from the closest place--"THE truck stop," but there was a little old lady who owned one of those stores out here about two miles away, until around the mid-1980s. She was something else. Bob's family didn't like her (mainly because she hated most of them), but he charged cigarettes and dogfood there for years. You had to look at the dates on anything you dared to buy there, and buying anything dairy was unwise. She kept money tucked in every crevice of the store, and it's amazing she never got robbed. She was bent over and the store was always dark and hot, and it had an old gas tank that had probably been up since the 50s at the latest. If she got mad at you she was like the Soup Nazi. Once she was mad she didn't care if you didn't come to her store. She fell outside one time and Bob's granddad stopped to help her up, and she told him "get your hands off me you mule." He just continued to help her up, like the gentleman he was. And the reason she was most likely to get mad is because you lived near enough (within a 15 mile radius or so) and didn't come to her store often enough to suit her.
The oddest thing about her was that occasionally she had "burping fits" and if she started one while you were in the store you might as well come back another time, because she couldn't talk until it was over and you'd just have to sit there holding your purchases until she quit.
We still have stores that are like way-back machines, and in some ways the whole town that I work in is a little time-warp in the road. 19575. arkymalarky - 6/2/2006 3:16:57 PM Faulkner used stream of consciousness too, and The Sound and the Fury is a fantastic book. You shouldn't confuse a writing technique with an author, Ulgine. You shut yourself out of a lot of good literature that way. In fact, you shouldn't confuse a personal life with an artistic one or you do the same thing. Though I'm not familiar with William Burroughs so don't know whether his work's any good or not. 19576. arkymalarky - 6/2/2006 3:20:51 PM Anyway P's mom has liked me ever since; I think in part because I showed a little backbone, did it with humor, and I think she realized the 'rural' crack was a little out of line.
But I like her too. She is very witty.
That is too cool. I'm sure you're right, too. I'm sure she's glad to have someone she can spar with in that way who catches her wit.
19577. Magoseph - 6/2/2006 3:32:54 PM Thanks for the story, iiibbb. A mother-in-law who likes you, that's great!
Today’s the haircut day—since Flexi broke his wrist in January, I didn’t get a trim, so my hair is shaggy and even Flex, never a critic of my looks, you understand, said that I should do something about it. I’m meeting my daughter-in-law and we’re going first to lunch. I’m on a diet right now, so I’ll order a goodie that I can take home to the critic.
See you! 19578. judithathome - 6/2/2006 3:51:27 PM Hey cool it, around here "Stream of consciousness" means Joyce, not Burroughs.
Most definitely and I also agree with Arky...there are many stream of consciousness writers but that doesn't make them perverts at all. Henry Miller, a man more in the mold of Burroughs, wrote that way and both of them made an impact on literature. The fact that they were shits in their personal lives is just a facet of the whole, not the entirety.
I loved The Sound and the Fury and never understood the title fully until I'd read it twice...the second time, I read every other chapter in sequence...the book is completely understandable that way. ;-)
19579. webfeet - 6/2/2006 5:59:39 PM Alistair
Although coy, charming and sometimes deceitful, my three-year old has years to go before she masters the l'art de conversation that comes naturally to mags, who probably has it in her regal blood.
But mags isn't deceitful. Perhaps Madame de Stahl would be a better example, since this is, after all, her salon.
Did you visit the Island of San Giorgio? Very sinister. I believe there is a church there where they play summer concerts and an eerie park which is in the middle of a thicket that is home to like one hundred starving cats. It's like Pet Cemetary only in Venice. With chamber music.
19580. webfeet - 6/2/2006 6:04:43 PM
You can also mention to your mother-in-law,iiibbb, that there is a Vanderbilt Raceway just east of NYC on Long Island. There are 'rednecks' out here, too. 19581. alistairconnor - 6/2/2006 10:05:47 PM "coy, charming and sometimes deceitful"
yeah... Mme de Merteuil, because she stole her daddy's heart from you. They all do that, as soon as they're old enough to flutter their eyelashes. 19582. anomie - 6/3/2006 11:23:45 AM What a vivid character your shopkeeper is Arky. For some reason it got me thinking of the older folks back then and their snuff cans next to the couch. My grandmother used to have "spells". Lots of near-fainting, the preacher called, laying on hands and a lot of murmered praying. A good way of being the center of attention.
As to riding on the cotton, man that stuff was piled high. Seemed like we were two stories up. Us kids held on to wooden rails placed in the truck to increase capacity. At the gin we lined up at the big vacumm tube behind other trucks and waited our turn...much talk about whether we had enough for a bale. After the vacumm emptied the truck, we waited for another eternity for the pay off. As I remember, the gin cut a check there and then. Meanwhile we picked up a few blocks of cheese. I guess that was a distro point. Do I remember some preacher doing a fire and brimstone sermon to the waiting sharecroppers? I think so. That may have been somewhere else. I remember thinking it seemed out of place. 19583. arkymalarky - 6/3/2006 4:36:59 PM A good way of being the center of attention.
Hahaha. Better than a lot of the current methods.
This lady's been dead for a while. Her son finally put her in a nursing home and sold her store. Someone made a house of sorts out of it. I'd have gutted it before considering using the brick shell for human habitation. Which maybe they did. I don't know.
As I remember, the gin cut a check there and then. Meanwhile we picked up a few blocks of cheese. I guess that was a distro point. Do I remember some preacher doing a fire and brimstone sermon to the waiting sharecroppers? I think so. That may have been somewhere else. I remember thinking it seemed out of place.
That's why Southern American literature is so great. I've posted on it before, but I love what Flannery O'Connor had to say about an enthusiastic professor who'd written her in frustration that his students didn't seem to be getting the significance of the Grandmother in her great story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," and how his Southern students in particular couldn't accept the notion the Grandmother was a symbol of evil in the story. She informed him that it was because they all had grandmothers and great-aunts at home just like her.
19584. Magoseph - 6/5/2006 12:27:48 AM Hello, perfect day, no clouds, 70 degrees, we had fun!
Great read in Mote fiction from our NuPlanetOne, waiting with trepidation for what follows! 19585. PelleNilsson - 6/5/2006 5:37:37 PM Belated congratulations, iiibbb! I've been away, forest-managing. 19586. Macnas - 6/6/2006 2:36:16 PM You wood be, woodn't you. 19587. PelleNilsson - 6/6/2006 4:02:55 PM Groan 19588. robertjayb - 6/6/2006 4:59:09 PM Lest we forget: This is D-Day. 19589. PelleNilsson - 6/6/2006 5:19:32 PM A small part of the American war cemetery in Normandie:
 19590. Ulgine Barrows - 6/7/2006 7:13:32 AM mmm.
totally digging the perspective of the shot, and that awesome trained evergreen cone on the left. 19591. SnowOwl - 6/8/2006 10:58:55 AM Congratulations, iiibbb. Your wedding sounds like fun, which weddings should be.
19592. SnowOwl - 6/8/2006 10:59:41 AM Pelle, do you have my email address? I'm getting things ready for our trip and I realise that I no longer have your contact details.
|
