Author: Kitty

#34: Opry Mills

Published on by KittyLeave a comment

The Flood

The Flood
Image: The Tennessean

My high school art teacher, let’s call  her “Patsy,” was…artsy. She wore shoulder-length white hair that matched the flow of her long skirts, especially on windy days. Her skin was red, or so I remember. It wasn’t the red of too much sun over her years or the red of some medical something; it was the red of imagination. And she was…imaginative.

During my freshwoman year, which was enough of a departure from the safety and security of my rural community elementary school where everybody knew everybody and everybody was poor, high school brought popularity contests and different buildings for different subjects. Home Economics and Keyboarding were taught in the round building. The G.O.B. (Good Ol’ Boys) spent much of their time in the Agriculture Building where they learned to dip Skoal, skip class, and fix everything. General Education classes were taught in the main building and Patsy and her art were housed, along with the band’s classroom, across the parking lot in a small building somewhat removed from the rest of the school. I suppose the band needed the distance for practice. I suppose Patsy needed it for her imagination.

Taking Patsy’s introductory art class as a scared 9th grader was originally promising. One-fourth of my daily class time would be spent in creation. I would learn to draw, to use colors and brush strokes and most importantly, I would be in class with two of my friends from elementary school. Sweet relief.

Patsy made class…artsy. She was always flustered and looking for something that she had just placed… Where was it?… She just used it and… Oh, let’s just do something else. She was lenient with the day’s instruction, not-so-lenient with two young women who seemed to struggle with making it to class by 2:00p.m. They were late most every day and one of those every days, Patsy had enough. It was raining that afternoon, common in the North Carolina Mountains, and seeing that the two young women were once again absent as class began, Patsy made her way to the classroom door, locked it, turned around to face us with her pleased red skin, and continued instruction. When the knocks came, once, twice, three times, Patsy laughed.

“This must be what Noah felt like on the ark,” she said. “Ha! Ha!”

But was it?
Continue reading “#34: Opry Mills” →

Red Line: Alewife

Published on by KittyLeave a comment

Calling All Angels

Alewife
Image: MBTAgifts

When Robin Williams died, it was the second time I openly grieved a celebrity. The first was a lesser-known, but still lovable actor from the soap opera of my youth and one of the two our antennae could clearly display. It was on that same NBC channel that I had once served as a Junior Weather Forecaster. At the ripe age of 12 and standing alongside Paul Barys of WRCB Chattanooga, I delivered a few lines about the rest of the week’s temperatures and took a tour backstage where I learned that journalists who sit behind full desks often wear jeans and sneakers with their blazer.

Two years after my television debut, however, there was that first celebrity death.

It was more the character, less the celebrity. Tom was the patriarch of the Horton family on NBC’s longest running soap opera, Days of Our Lives. He was a physician, a husband, a father and grandfather and great-grandfather, and the voice that still greets devoted fans…

“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”

I adored Tom Horton. I wanted him to be my grandpa or great-grandpa. I wanted his wife, Alice, to share her homemade doughnuts with me. I wanted to sit among the many who listened to him read the Christmas Story at University Hospital then joined in the tradition of hanging my own ornament on the Horton family Christmas tree.

I didn’t know Macdonald Carey, the man who played that beloved character from 1965-1994, but when his actual death meant Tom’s death, too, I wept. The Hortons had been part of my childhood, part of my summer afternoons and holiday afternoons and, assuming we had power, snow day afternoons. It was a 1:00p.m. ritual, and it still is for my mom. Continue reading “Red Line: Alewife” →

#28: Meridian

Published on by KittyLeave a comment

St. Valentine

The first time my former husband was introduced to my mom was Valentine’s Day, 2002. Ricky and I had been dating long-distance for four months and he had made the 14-hour drive from Connecticut to North Carolina for our first calendar-and-cards-and-chocolates-certified day of romance. We were still new, especially having spent so little time in one another’s company. During those first four months and for the following eleven, most of our budding love happened on the phone. We would spend hours and hours and hours talking. He was smart, charming, and witty. I was creative, Southern, and giggly. What I remember most about those late-night conversations, aside from a phone that couldn’t last as long as we could talk, was the laughter.

It was poetic, given our monthly bills and calling card expenses, that Ricky would meet Mom in a similar fashion. Back then, just over 15 years ago, most of us university residence hall occupants did our telephone talking on a cordless landline. (For those unfamiliar with the term, imagine a telephone that does not Instaface your life and one that has to be returned to an actual base to recharge.) Those ancient boxes for conversation often came with a once revolutionary fixture called an answering machine. Even more unbelievable, people used to listen to their messages.

And so it was that while reviewing Valentine’s Day voices on a machine and in the company of my first “real” Valentine, we heard Mom begin to sing…

I just called to say I love you
I just called to say how much I care
I just called to say I love you
And I mean it from the bottom of my heart. 

Ricky was in love. With Mom. Continue reading “#28: Meridian” →