Oyster Crackers

When I was young, I went on a vacation with C., my best friend.  For some reason, we chose to stay in the room while my parents went out to eat.  We were tired or sunburned or something.  We had been on a semi-disasterous innertube rafting trip on a river in Tennessee, and we were likely exhausted.  I seem to remember a great deal of portage and falling off innertubes.  In any case, it seemed a good idea at the time. 

Only we got hungry.  And it went on so long.

The hotel was near nothing, so walking to a place to eat was impossible.  We looked through the room, but there was nothing and no vending machines.  All we had to eat was a bag of oyster crackers we'd bought to throw at the ducks in the nearby river.  So we'd eat them one at a time, laughing hysterically because there was nothing else to do.  We had no transport, no options.  We just waited, trusting that sooner or later, food would come because we'd been told that it would.

Many hours later, my parents returned, and they'd had quite a lot of trouble finding us (and themselves) food.  In the non-touristy place we were staying, apparently the sidewalks rolled up quite early.  We wound up with a couple of very nasty hamburgers in styrofoam takeaway containers. 

At some point in your life, I am pretty sure most of you, gentle readers, have had this hamburger.  It is the ultimate disappointment.  Dry-hard bun, pitiful cold patty, rubbery technicolor orange cheese, frightning tiny pickles, limp lettuce, and no condiments to speak of.  We ate them because we had no other options.  They weren't what we'd wanted (that restaurant had not been open), but they were what we had, so we made do.

Certain things have happened to me in the last two days that have impressed upon me the notion that I'm still sitting around waiting for things that were promised that just aren't going to come.  I'm still trying to tell myself that I can be content with something that is less than what I really wanted or expected.  I am tired of it.  It's time to do something about it.

I don't know what, and I don't know how yet, but it has been impressed upon me that I must start looking, or all I'm ever going to have are things that do not satisfy me.  Stop-gap has become my whole life.  I'm sure it was a gradual thing, something silent and stealthy slipping up like some form of comfortable quicksand, but this is enough.

I'm putting you on notice, world.  I am done with oyster crackers and piss-poor hamburgers.  I refuse to believe that's all there is.  I refuse to believe that's all I'm worth.  If that's all you can offer me, it's time for you to get to steppin'. 

Graceland

 After years of being curious, I finally got to go to Graceland last Wednesday.  My best friend and I got up, ate a hotel buffet breakfast, and braved cross-town traffic to arrive in an nearly-empty parking lot.

We paid our fee, passed through a queue and an unexpected photo stop, were handed the headphone set/audio guide that has become de rigeur at tourist attractions, and loaded onto a small shuttle bus which rolled across Elvis Presley Boulevard, through open gates, and up a small hill.
And there it was.

I am not sure what I was expecting.  This wasn't it.

Maybe I just expected the sort of excess that one sees in the homes of Hollywood elite today, flash, excess, too much of everything to be a truly livable space.  Instead, what was there was a home.  Large, spacious, elegant, but still a home.

Our little headphoned herd passed through the large front door and on either side of us were the home's public spaces.  There was a formal parlor, furnished in white, gold, and blue, on the right, and to the left, there was a formal dining room, the height of elegance for the time period in which it had been decorated.

We looked into a couple of bedrooms tucked down a small hall, and then we went around a corner to the kitchen.  It was here that the contrast of the two parts of the house really struck me.  The kitchen was described as the heart of Elvis's home, and I could tell the difference automatically.  It looked like a place real people could cook and eat and sneak down to raid the fridge in the middle of the night.   In fact, there was a stairwell that would allow just that. It looked like real people had at one time had real lives there, not just a set for photo ops or a display of conspicuous consumption.  

The downstairs rooms and even the famous Jungle Room felt the same way.  The private spaces of Graceland were comfortable and functional, full of expensive things, perhaps, but not a museum, not a slick spread in a magazine.  People used and enjoyed those rooms.

I liked it quite a lot.

The divisions he'd created, the idea of a public formal space in which he could meet those who perhaps were not close to him, is a very Southern thing.  The formal front parlor has been around for a long time.  I found it interesting that he had continued that tradition in his home.  He had enough money to have created anything he wanted, but what he created was a home.

Of course, the house itself is only a small part of the tour.  The outbuildings that have been converted or added are storehouses of memorabilia, costumes, personal items, and above all, gold and platinum records.  Trophies of all kinds were everywhere.

We finished up in the memory garden where the graves are.  People were snapping image after image of the graves, and to me, it felt a little odd.  To me, the graves were a private place, and the neverending parade of tourists, myself included, seemed a little inappropriate.  I admit that I've toured cathedrals of Europe, and I certainly took pictures of Dante's monument in Santa Croce and Shakespeare's in Holy Trinity, but this hit me differently.  I felt like I'd crawled over a fence and invaded someone's privacy.

We loaded back up, were carted across the road, and got off in the miniature theme park where we'd started.  We dutifully toured the automobile collection, browsed in shops, had our photo made with Elvis through the magic of Photoshop, got pressed pennies, bought the obligatory t-shirts.

We took a break and ate a hamburger and a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich with some of the best fries I've ever had in one of the two restaurants on the Graceland property, and the 50s diner decor included the obligatory beautiful Wurlitzer filled with Elvis's music.  We listened, ate, and took a minute to refuel. The whole time, though I couldn't stop thinking about what Elvis himself might have thought about this whole thing.  He had tried to make a home, a refuge for himself and those he loved.  He hadn't built a palace to excess, although he certainly had the financial means to do so.  This means that he treasured that space and what it represented.

So would he have been okay with what it has become?  Would he have seen it as just another part of the business, or would it have bothered him that we were traipsing through his kitchen, snapping photos of his formal parlor?

The question continued to resonate with me all the way back out to the now-filled parking lot and all the way down I-55 to my own refuge.  It lingers still.

Retro-Eco

The really fabulous thing about living out here in the country in a house various members of my family have lived in for more than 50 years is that many of the tools of the past are still around ready for use.  Sometimes, they break down due to natural age, and I have to make the decision as to whether or not it is worth it to replace them.

One item I have never had a moment's qualm about keeping in repair is the old-fashioned clothes line my grandmother had situated in the back yard.  She had hers originally strung through huge old fence posts and cedar trunks more than head high.  Even cedar gives up eventually, and the second year I lived here, I had to figure out what to do about it.

The vocational center at school has a welding program, and my dad had them build me a new set of posts, huge steel Ts, to hold updated line.  We set them in quick-setting concrete, strung them with the plastic-sheathed steel cable, and it was ready to go.

Until Katrina dropped a tree on it.

Some time later, we dug up the pole, took it back to school, got the top bar rewelded on, and reset it in the ground.  Since that time, it's been standing sentry like Granny's version did for so many years.

I don't use it all the time, but when I wash all my bedding, quilts, comforter, sheets, all, I use it to sun dry all of that whenever possible.  Today, I got up, stripped down the bed, took the feather mattress out and draped it over a porch stair rail, and began the process of laundering all the fabrics.  Then I carried each load out to the line and hung it up.

Even though it's an old-fashioned thing, I like it for several reasons.  First of all, it keeps me from having to run my dryer and heat up my house unnecessarily.  Even though the laundry area is out of the way, there's no reason to make things harder on my poor old air unit than they have to be.  Second, it's nice to feel like I'm somehow saving electricity.  It never ceases to amuse me that so many of the things that people now embrace as "eco-friendly," my grandmother did on a daily basis because that was all there was.  I suppose there really is nothing new under the sun. Finally, I love how it feels to sink down in the bed at the end of a day of cleaning and smell that freshness that only comes from something dried outdoors.

The only real drawback comes in the form of a never-ending worry that it's going to rain.  It's always a sort of lottery.  Today, for example, I went to Wal-Mart earlier, and I carefully checked the weather forecast before I left.  Nothing but clear skies.  While I was wheeling up and down the aisles, my phone chirped at me, and when I looked, a severe thunderstorm warning had showed up.  At that point, there was nothing to do about it.  I just sighed and moved on to the pet food, hoping I could get my shopping done and get home before the bottom fell out of it.

Well, the skies are still sunny although now and then a threatening cloud passes by.  In a couple of hours, I'll go out and gather everything in, make up the bed, finish up the chore.  When I do, I will feel connected to my Granny.  I remember going out to the clothes line with her to gather in the towels or Grandaddy's overalls.  I remember the little bag she'd made that fit on the clothesline that held wooden clothespins.  It's a small thing, but they are the ones that matter.

Uh-oh.  Even as I typed that, I heard thunder.  Time to get the clothes off the line, I think.....