Author: Kitty

#38: Antioch Express

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Salt of the Earth

Nashville MTA Route 38
Image: Nashville MTA

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot” (5:13). Salt, as Jesus proclaims, is flavor. In the south, we agree. Pots of Sunday beans and greens are often seasoned with salty pork. Whether ham hock or fatback, pintos and turnip leaves soak up the essence of their cooking company. In the south and beyond, salt shakers are a functional piece of dining room décor. Packets are included with to-go plasticware. Grocery stores sell kosher for the ideal seasoning of meat, sea for a less-processed option, pickling for cucumbers, rock for ice cream, and table varieties for my dad, who salts everything before tasting. Some companies offer bacon-flavored and Himalayan Pink options. Epsom salt, when used in a bath, is said to detoxify the body. Dissolved in warm water and gargled, salt is believed to ease a sore throat. In all of its forms, salt is part of a process. From sprinkling to cooking to eating to soaking, salt is story.

I noticed some of my own flavored memories one Wednesday morning as I cleaned tears from the lenses of my red frames. The night before, in my binge-watching Ally McBeal phase, I wept over the death of a character named Marty. He was a nursing home resident and the joy of its being. He organized dances and sported bow ties as he twirled his fancy feet partners to the tunes of Ella and Frank. To Marty, every woman was a darling, every man gentle. All were friends. And when Marty experienced (unrecognized and undiagnosed) disillusionment in the form of dragons and cyclopes and other fantastic creatures, he offered them as adventures to his lady and fellow companions. Every night at 7:30p.m., Marty and his crew would turn out the lights, gather in twos and threes, and search the home for these imaginative invaders. His friends were delighted to have a quest in a place where much of their time was spent waiting for it to pass. Marty brought life and laughter to men and women who had been missing its taste.

When Marty died, his friends and I gave our salty tears to tissues and the earth. Continue reading “#38: Antioch Express” →

#34: Opry Mills

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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

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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” →