theology&geometry

I’m at my parents’ house. A couple of escaped convicts are running around the area. Mom’s been catching me up on their tale. Apparently they got out of a Louisiana prison work arrangement thingy, and made their way up the Delta. They’ve been offing people and taking their cars. My sister sent me a text this morning saying that she heard on the scanner that they were last spotted in Lexington in a yellow truck with an orange light bar on top, a bed topper, and government tags.

So… Yep.

Here’s the news story.

The youngest nephew is into fishing. The same way I am into ruining television and movies and roadtrips by identifying any typeface that passes in front of my eyes. I went out to the pond with him Monday afternoon and watched as he cast his line over and over into the brown water, only pulling back leaves and plugs of algae. Even his traditionally lucky spot behind the discarded tire yielded nothing, where the day before he’d caught the same fish twice.

Maybe his luck was busted by the nosy little pony that kept trying to eat whatever was in the tackle box.

[Project 365]

This Promise Ring cover was my first introduction to the Pixies in 1999. It was on Where Is My Mind: A Tribute to the Pixies, which featured a ton of bands I was really into at the time (Get Up Kids, Promise Ring, Weezer, Reel Big Fish, Superdrag). I remember taking Phil’s CD and making a cassette-tape copy of several of the songs and just playing that damn tape over and over at the video store on Main Street in Saltillo on lonely nights when we’d have three customers and I’d be the only living, breathing animal inhabiting downtown after sundown.

That memory came crackling back into my skull last night as I was watching a later episode of the fourth season of Lost. Jack’s all bearded and drunk and rolls up to a funeral home with the original “Gouge Away” blaring in the car. There are only a few scattered Pixies songs in my music library, and that’s not one of them. So I scrunched my face in faint recognition and instantly thought of the Promise Ring version first, even though I haven’t heard it in ten years. Weird.

Anyway, here it is. I still like it:

[Project 365]

I knew I was going to have to write this post eventually, and for many months now, I knew the time was creeping closer and closer. I just didn’t know how close. And then Sunday things just sort of fell apart and difficult decisions had to be made and here we are.

Felix battled his insulinoma like a trooper, but you can only fight your body so long. And Sunday, after so many seizures and him yelping the most pitiful yelp of an animal shocked and in pain you’ve ever heard, we decided — after the vet confirmed our hunch that there was really no guarantee that any treatment option we pursued would help him — it was time to put him to sleep. It happened so fast. He was in the other room, yelping, and then he got quiet and they brought him in, zonked on Valium. We had to make the call. I couldn’t look the doctor in the eye, even though he was being so nice to us. We had some time alone with Felix, but he was already gone. Wasn’t even blinking, just shivering. And then suddenly I was standing there with Phil, watching the doctor inject blue and then clear liquid into his little leg catheter. He stopped breathing and that was that. They put him in a box for us so we could take him and bury him in Saltillo beside Gonzo.

Two hours on the road.

At 1 a.m., Phil dug a grave and I held the flashlight. He said a prayer and went about the business of covering up the grave. There was crying. I was crying for the end of an era in my life as much as I was crying for Felix himself. So much has changed, and I’m not sure it’s all been for the better.

I will miss him so much. He was my first pet — a pet I picked out and raised and cared for. He was tiny, tiny when we first got him, and we were so clueless about ferrets that when we let him have too many dried apples to eat and he was horking them up, we honestly thought we had killed him. There was one time in Havenwood in Murfreesboro when we couldn’t find him, and realized with that gut-walloping horror that he had escaped through the dryer hose and was outside. He’d gotten downstairs and was happily on his way to adventures in wilds of the ‘Boro, but we spotted him and snagged him and utterly foiled his plan. He tried to get away again in Memphis when we lived in Lynnfield Place. One of our neighbors found a little sable ferret in the monkeygrass and notified the office. The apartment was so big and the ferrets had so many places to hide that we didn’t even know he was missing.

He was so smart and so good and such a little boy scout. I’m glad he’s not suffering anymore.

[Project 365]

Yesterday was my dad’s 54th birthday. Everyone gathered at the new Mexican restaurant in Saltillo to eat, drink, and yell as loudly as we possibly could about the impossibility of pronouncing basic Mexican words for food.

It was a pretty good time, I have to say. Watching the brothers who run the place deal with the avalanche of crazy that comes with my family was fascinating. They were absolute professionals — no orders were botched, and we had chips and cheese dip and sweet tea and water refills coming like clockwork without ever demanding them. And they were super nice about all of it.

The servers were bringing out all the food and amid the fajitas and enchiladas and taco salads and beans and rice, they set down a hamburger and fries in front of my youngest nephew, Patrick. Everyone was all, “What is that?! You come to a Mexican restaurant and get a hamburger?” But our server, Adolfo, had Patrick’s back. “It’s a Mexican Big Mac!” he said before disappearing into the kitchen again.

My sister and I had schemed to surprise my mom with a cake and gifts too, since her birthday is the 12th. So after dinner, while we scurried out to the car to get the cake and stuff, we completely missed the restaurant staff coming out and singing to my sombrero-wearing father, which was kind of the one thing I was hoping to see yesterday. It’s okay, though, because my mother accidentally caught some of it on video.

Kahuna Grande from Lindsey Turner on Vimeo.

What she did not catch on video, however, was my brother mooning her as a way of saying “happy birthday.”

We coaxed Adolfo and Roger, a family friend, into taking a family picture for us. With five different cameras. Which took fifteen minutes. And was completely hilarious and chaotic. When it was time to pay up, I tipped heavily and thanked Adolfo and Jesus (both the Messiah and the dude at the restaurant) for putting up with all of us. They seemed happy to have the business but also a little relieved to see us suiting up and heading out. I mean, we unironically refer to ourselves as The Clampetts for a reason.

Full Flickr set here.

Eventually, when Vimeo deigns to process it, I’ll post a bonus video of everyone freaking out when some sizzling fajitas come out of the kitchen. And now, check out everyone in my family freaking out when the sizzling plate of fajita meat comes out!

IS THAT YERS?!?! from Lindsey Turner on Vimeo.

[Project 365]

They’ve gone and put a Mexican restaurant in the old Grandma’s Kitchen building in downtown Saltillo. My little old Saltillo, pop. 300, with no bank, no school, one gas station, and but one red light (which currently does not work) has a Mexican restaurant now. If the economy keeps tanking and I lose my job and have to move back in with my parents, I will at least be able to drown my sorrows in chips and white cheese dip.

The brothers who run El Potrillo are super nice, and sat down and talked with us while we stuffed our faces. My mom and grandmother asked them about their time in Mexico, how they got here, how and when they learned English, what the Mexican drug cartels are like, how the dating scene is in Saltillo (very bad), and so many more things that made me laugh loudly and uncomfortably.

I hope they get their liquor license by summer, because “drink margaritas on Main Street in Saltillo” has been on my bucket list way too long.

[Project 365]

Never in my life did I imagine that the Google Street View crew would roll through Saltillo. But they did. And it looks a little like they half-assed it just like they did with Memphis. I guess they’re just hitting major rural highways for now. Too bad, because that means you can’t take a virtual stroll down to the river, or see the rockin’ mural on what used to be JB’s Grocery (which was, before that, Turner’s Grocery, and before that, Smith’s Grocery), or gawk at the crumbling Chic Jeans factory. Or creep past St. Paul Loop, the place where one of the creepiest stories I know took place. You can, however, have a little looksee around scenic downtown Saltillo.

View Larger Map

Just to the left in this frame is the Head Shop, which isn’t at all what you debauched heathens think it is. It’s a barber shop; its original location across the street, where my brother had his first haircut, burned, I think. Just past that is what used to be Saltillo Video (not sure what’s there now; it’s been a doctor’s office off an on as long as I can remember), where I spent many, many hours working during high school. Then there’s the Main Street Grill, which I heard was closing (if it hasn’t already) and Angie’s General Store, a newish establishment that stocks an unholy array of random stuff.

Directly across the street and beyond the purview of Street View is the new billiard/gameroom run by a guy I went to high school with. Beyond that is Parker’s Dig, where I used to buy T-shirts for a quarter (and where I got plenty of stuff for free when I was dating Phil, since he’s part of the Parker clan). Further beyond that is the aforementioned former JB/Turner/Smith’s Grocery, then the bank my mom worked at when I was a kid, and Saltillo United Methodist Church, where my family still worships. Keep going and you’ll eventually run into the river, where, up until just a few years ago, there was still a two-car ferry in operation (for just a dollar or two, you could take a trip to Cerro Gordo), one of the last of its kind.

Landmarks you can actually see include Shady Grove Cemetery (which was mentioned in Lamar Alexander’s book The Tennesseans, and is where many of Saltillo’s original settlers, uh, settled), Saltillo School (where I went to kindergarten and first grade, and where several of my family members graduated high school; Saltillo Video was housed here before moving downtown, and I used to have to sit alone in this giant creaky building at night*), The Parker House (built by a prominent Saltillo physician and great-great grandfather of my ex-boyfriend, who claims he saw a fetus in a jar in the basement of the house when he was a kid), and the Meady White House (a beautiful 1847 estate built using slave labor, owned originally by one of Saltillo’s prominent civic leaders; one of my biggest hometown regrets is that I have never been inside this place).

And, of course, you can spot the Turner compound.

It’s amazing to me to see Web 2.0-and-beyond technology sweep right through my sleepy little hometown. Sure, Saltillo teenagers have MySpace pages just like the rest of creation, but this? This is altogether different. And despite my own misgivings about the hegemony of Google-dom, I can’t help but feel that this development is pretty cool as, at the very least, a learning tool. It makes me want to see more of the America usually too small to pay attention to. It makes me want to crawl through the streets of my friends’ hometowns and have them point out their own lives’ landmarks to me.

*If you look at the map view, you’ll see a nice new green roof on the school. When I worked at the video store, which was housed in the leftmost side (the fourth and fifth-grade classrooms, I think), that roof did not exist yet. In fact, underneath that roof lies the original roof, which features a big window in the attic. I used to leave there at night, terrified to look up at the window for fear of seeing a gaunt face looking back at me. Let’s just say that place did not give off the best vibes.

It rained on my grandmother’s parade.

“Story of my life,” she said as we huddled under the church awning Saturday afternoon, watching the rain thin the already light crowd.

River Day isn’t like it used to be. I have these (probably embellished) memories of huge crowds of people in sweatshirts and jackets (they used to have it in October when it was cooler) set against a backdrop of autumn leaves and damp blacktopped streets, milling around, buying stuff, catching up with neighbors, listening to music, really putting to use the concept of fellowship. It was a Big Deal.

This year we got downtown at around noon, found a really good parking space (back in the day you had to park several blocks away from Main Street and hoof it), and sloshed through the mud and grass toward the crowd. There were a lot of bikers there (the Piston Pushers? never heard of ‘em) and maybe a hundred other people, huddled under the big tents, eating pulled pork sandwiches and ice cream from the van creeping around nearby. We made the rounds and I saw faces I hadn’t seen in years and years. Faces made gaunt by time and sorrow. Faces I no longer could attach names to. Faces that looked at me with that same sort of vague recognition. Faces that lit up when they saw my grandmother. Faces with big toothy grins. Faces that smelled like whiskey and beer.

I could tell with each minute that passed that Grandmaw was getting more and more antsy about the parade and whether they’d actually still have it. It was supposed to be her day. How many people get to be grand marshals of parades? Parades during festivals that they helped create decades ago? The sky cracked open and the downpour chased everyone out of the open and into tents and under overhangs.

Grandmaw put her hood up and trudged through the slick grass to find out what was going to happen to the parade. We could tell by the look on her face when she returned to the church awning that the news wasn’t good. She struck out again to get a barbecue sandwich while we just sat, killing time, waiting for the rain to pass. Fifteen minutes before the parade was scheduled to step off, the sun was shining. I was a little incredulous. “Why can’t they still have it? It’s not raining now!”

Someone made the call to let the grand marshal and the horses ride in front of the crowd, which had begun to spread out a little after the rain let up. Grandmaw got in her car (I honestly thought it was going to be a fancy new convertible from one of the Savannah car lots, but it was a 1917 Ford) and rode past the emcee stage and the crowd. My family (sans my parents, who were in Chattanooga for the weekend) hooted and hollered and took pictures like a bunch of paparazzi. My cousin ran up to the car to give Grandmaw flowers. She started crying. I think she was embarrassed at suddenly being the center of attention.

I was disappointed for her. How often in our lives do we spend time focusing on how great this one thing — our moment — is going to be and how flawlessly the events will unfold, making a pearl of a memory, and it actually ends up being awkward and weird and kind of a letdown? I just wanted to clear the sky, bring out the sun, bring people out of their houses, line up a proper parade complete with the marching band’s cadence in the distance and the approaching wail of sirens and clatter of hard candy hitting the sidewalk, and do it up right. Grandmaw deserved a moment in the spotlight that wasn’t contrived or carved out of pity or obligation (“Let’s just let her ride in front of the stage and be done with it”).

Important moments don’t always work out that way, I know. I’m just tired of learning that lesson over and over.

We love you, Maggie.