Author: Monda

Roe sells his family history by the acre

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(Who knows what this will eventually be. I’m just scribbling.)

Roe’s house had been for sale as long as anyone could remember. He freshened his advertising once a year or so with new paint to attract attention. No one ever slowed to take down the phone number and no one ever called. Once in a while Roe would mention figures to the neighbors and family – usually around Christmas but mostly after church. He estimated and reestimated appraisals for local properties most nearly like his own, upgrading his own eventual gross sales price with each passing year.

The Hutto house was certainly something to look at, and when Roe was diligent with the yard work, it could actually be seen from the road. The house began as a three-room tar paper box built off the ground to keep it cool in the summer. Since his great-grandparents constructed it in the mid-thirties with money from cotton picking and sharecropping, there had been a few changes. This was the Hutto Starter House. Roe’s great-grandparents began their married lives in this house, as did all the freshly-marrieds in the family.

Electricity glowed illusory from three single, dangling wires – one in each room of the house. The open back porch was enclosed to accommodate a toilet, tub, and sink some years ago, and the other half was dangerously wired in devotion to a rusted washing machine that did not now nor had ever worked. The interior walls of the house were solid two-by-fours and appeared to have been painted variously at various times, showing traces in the living room of a hurried winter newspapering.

The whole house, porches and all, measured a scant 20’ x24’. If a visitor stood at the epicenter of the Hutto home, he could be reasonably comfortable in all three rooms at once.
There was a place by the north wall covered now by a rather frantic Olsten photograph of Roe’s daddy, Petrus, grimacing proudly in his Screaming Tigers football uniform back when the pads were small and helmets were metal. The football portrait represented specific skills of movement or prowess – a postured still just violent and childlike enough to make his mother’s heart sway and his father suck in his own gut in admiration. Behind this frozen gridiron legacy was a valentine card pasted directly on the two-by-four and painted around, but never over. It read, “TO MY SWEETEST ONE. I ADORE THEE” in a flag of beautiful scripting carried aloft by a mainly naked, smiling cherub. The paper was thinning and faded and bore neither the name of the adored nor the giver of the sentiment. The Hutto family considered this a sacred relic of sorts: at some time some member of their family had a feeling strong enough to warrant the purchase of such a card and was too overcome with the depth of that emotion to mar it with one single, secular, mark.

The house was built as it could be paid for and was never really completed. It existed in a permanent state of flux where the work seemed to create and redouble itself to keep the house from being complete. Each spurt of enthusiastic newlywed workmanship shone outwardly and inwardly like fine and many colored sandstone layers. The main roof was originally tarred roll roofing that had been replaced and patched, but never changed. That front porch was an afterthought and its corrugated metal roofing was added even later than that. A rusted-out section had been covered by an odd piece of green corrugated fiberglass that filtered the Arkansas sun like a Cold War atomic afterglow.

It’s hard to put a price on a house like that.

Overheard Conversation #1

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4:00 at Hobby Lobby
“I don’t usually never do this kind of sewing. Usually do the high dollar stuff. Custom sewing. I don’t never do that three-dollar stuff or alterations. Don’t have no patience at all for them kind of people. They worry you to death. Only the high dollar stuff.” Pam wore a plaid scrunchie in her hair that perfectly matched the Christmas-plaid cats on her sweatshirt. The cats had little plastic pearl-eyes.

She shifted her enormous mass from right foot to left, positioning her right fist into a hip for counter weight. She had the practiced coolness of a woman who wears a lot of gold rings but seldom looks down at them.

“ This here’s just for some Christmas presents an’ stuff. I generally only do custom sewing for rodeo and pageants. I’m very familiar with sequins. Do ‘em all by hand. Only the high dollar jobs, though.”

Pam’s nonchalance became one of the finest things she had attempted this week. She breathed deeply the moment, hoping not to alter it by saying even one syllable too much. She let here eyes become disinterested and vague.

“ I also train rodeo queens,” she exhaled while picking up and discarding packages of uncovered, coverable buttons.

The small, bent woman with the scissors looked up from the table and nodded appropriately while systematically measuring and cutting a variety of polyester fringes for Pam. She meticulously remeasured each and taped the fringe just at the cutting point to prevent fraying.

She had to. That satin fringe was almost two dollars a yard.

Write as if no one is reading

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It’s a breezy Sunday night. Almost cool, like October really ought to be and sometimes isn’t here in Arkansas. The house is quiet, the lamp is low, and all the dishes are done. I’m making time to write, which always makes me happy.

I should be golden.

I’m not. There are papers to grade, class planning to do, and a frighteningly long list of things I Did Not Get Done during the Fall Break. I’m a little ranty, a little mean about the papers I did grade. Not because they’re bad, but because they oozed into break despite my best efforts. There’s a spot on my carpet that needs attention, and there are spiders in my garage that need killing.

This is my M.O., my downfall. Intellectually and pedagogically I know for certain that writing doesn’t require a perfect moment or a room of one’s own. I’m also fully aware that creativity isn’t necessarily a special, spiritual moment of jupiter-aligned-with-mars magic. I teach this every day.

I just fall back into it every once in a while. It’s like eating cheesecake. I can go for a year being smart and strong and then, POW. There’s cheesecake on my fork. The writing habit is just as mysteriously interrupted. I don’t know how it happens.

That’s actually the reason for this blog. A self-imposed daily post gives me enough reason to make the words come out. The posting itself keeps me from whining and ranting pointlessly, which is what happens in the little journal I carry around.

At any rate, the papers still need grading, the spiders and spots need eradication, and I don’t have anything to wear to work tomorrow. Who cares? The dishes are done, I’ve written my post, and there’s no cheesecake anywhere near me.

Success.

Generation Jones

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All this time I thought I was at the tail-end of the Boomers. Not so. It seems now I’m officially a member of Generation Jones, a new subgroup born between 1954 and 1965, squeezing in between the Boomers and the Gen Xers .

If you were born in the late fifties or early sixties, you’re a Joneser too. We’re half-idealist Boomers, half-Xer cynic mutts. In other words, we expect Camelot and are genuinely surprised when the castle turns out to be a house of cards we saw put together by sleight-of-hand. We’re always in a state of constant letdown, it seems, and always Jonesin‘ for the ideal.

In the same year, we watched Vietnam war protests and man landing on the moon. We saw Dick Nixon and his five o’clock shadow step down, then ate Twinkies during The Brady Bunch. We entered segregated elementary schools and graduated from integrated high schools. We swore not to stay in loveless marriages like our parents did, then sashayed right down the aisle and eventually got divorced. And remarried. And divorced.

I have a great many women-friends who’ve gone about relationships this way, so it’s not just a matter of our National Identity as Gen Jonesers. It’s personal. And there are a lot of us.

Nothing says “hope” like a forty-something woman having her first child.

We don’t trust anything to go as planned, either personally or in Washington, but we keep voting and getting married and having kids anyway. It is important to note, however, that Washington is still chock-full of Boomers. Politically, we Gen Jonesers haven’t made it to the dance yet. Maybe it’s because we’re too busy running kids to soccer games and being overinvolved in their schooling. Then again, we do know how to drive our SUVs to the polls.

I’ve got some more reading to do on my new identity as a Gen Joneser and on our Generation Y progeny.