scribbling

What This Country Needs is a Cheap Cigar Box

No Telling

I know you remember these. Maybe your cigar box of choice wasn’t Roi-Tan, but you had one. Maybe dozens. Was it a Swisher Sweets? Hav-A-Tampa?

I alternated between White Owl and Kind Edward cigar boxes for my more important collections at home. Rocks, mainly, but sometimes buttons or leaves, sometimes pecans and pokey sweet-gum balls. I remember finding a papery chrysalis once dangling from a forsythia bush. I opened the lid several dozen times a day fully expecting each time to unlock a grateful butterfly, but it never happened.

In late August I always had a fine collection of locust shells carefully picked from tree bark, screened doors, and other scratchy, irregular places. These were particularly prone to crushing in, say, the back pocket of your jeans, so a sturdy cigar box was essential. My neighborhood friends and I would travel in rangy packs like out-of-season Easter egg hunters, some of us with empty mayonnaise jars but most of us with cigar boxes. We could kill entire afternoons looking for locust shells and sticking their hooked little empty feet to our clothes and hair. After scaring my mother with them at dinner, they were always carefully placed back in the King Edwards box and spent the night under my bed.

I don’t know what those kids with the mayonnaise jars did. Those were for lightning-bugs anyway.

The fancier boxes were fine for treasures, but Roi-Tan was was the box of choice in my school desk. Elegance. An air of serious sophistication. Everything about this maroon box said you cared about the pencils inside and that education itself was a somber, sacred event. No bug shells or glass buttons in this box, thank you, the Roi-Tan held cerebral tools.

Every single year before the first day of school, my dad would take me down to Rexall Drug to pick out the perfect cigar box. Timing was everything, because everyone got their cigar boxes at the Rexall and if your daddy was the sort who put things off, you could end up carrying fat pencils and an Elmer’s paste bottle in something ridiculous like a paper sack. That was nothing short of social suicide and certainly no way to begin first grade. These were the days when “special” kids were carted off before the end of the opening day and never seen again.

Thinking back, I’m sure the missing children had little to do with paper sacks vs. cigar boxes, but times were different back then. Falling into school-supply lockstep for a month or so was calculated survival. It was dangerous to be quirky and we knew it.

So Roi-Tan it was.

My mother wrote my name on every single side of that cigar box, not that she needed to. By the end of the first week I’d written “Monda” a hundred times on it myself, trying out every single crayon I’d brought with me. Most of the boys used scissors to gouge their names into their cigar boxes, a practice I found equally violent and fascinating until a boy named Dale nearly cut off a finger doing it. He was whisked, bleeding, out of class and down the hall. When he returned the next day, he had stitches, round-edged scissors, and a swagger. I fell in love with him by recess.

I found this Roi-Tan cigar box at a Camden, Arkansas junk store for $2. It was worth every penny just to remember the locust shells and swaggering Dale.

…and THIS little piggy went…

No Telling


Not long ago I told the harrowing story of The 90 Escaped Pigs on the Interstate. Thankfully, there’s an update and a semi-happy ending.

The following is a KATV report which has gone fairly viral.

Little Rock – An 800-pound hog that survived on its own for a week after a truck flipped while on its way to a slaughterhouse has surfaced in a swimming pool at a home near the crash site.

LeAnn Baldy, whose house is only yards from Interstate 430, said Monday she noticed her pool was suddenly overflowing and then saw the immersed pig, which was having a drink in the pool.

About 90 hogs were in the trailer when it overturned where I-430 meets I-40, and about 60 survived. Officials said they thought the last of them had been caught.


Baldy says she found a farmer to take in the pig. A spokesman for Odom’s Tennessee Pride says it can’t use the hog in its sausage products because no one knows what the hog had been eating in its week on the lam.

Reading between the lines makes the math easy. Ninety hogs in the accident, minus thirty DOA, equals 60 hogs caught by local troopers “and others” that certainly made their way to the Odom’s Tennessee Pride processing plant. I’m sure they’re in the freezer by now. Or on your breakfast plate.

Wait. Let’s make that 59 because at least one bought himself more time by laying low, drinking a little chlorine, rummaging around eating God only knows what, and in general making himself un-processable. Way to go, pool pig. I hope someone named you.

I’m no pig-hugger, but I do enjoy small justices and reprieves. This big boy appears to have both for now.

As for Ms. Baldy, she’s probably got a few new snapshots for the family album. I’d love to see one of them. Especially the picture of how they removed the 800-pound escapee from her swimming pool.

The Breakable Man in the Mirror

No Telling

(This is the first picture in a Time photo essay called “Young Michael Jackson at Home.” Just click on the picture to view the rest of the series.)

I’m really not sure what to say. Most of us mourned the loss of Michael Jackson years ago. I’m sure the boy in the picture is, in fact, the Man in the Mirror, forever twelve, always a Lost Boy.

Whatever horrifying things he did or did not do to himself and others, he’s left behind a mind-boggling body of work. He’s also left behind three children, and whether my criticism is deserving or not, it’s possible those kids have been given a gift through the painful loss of their father. I hope they go to their grandmother and that she lives forever.

I flipped through the channels tonight and the tube is heavy with retrospectives and tributes. There’s a combination of fascination and profound sadness when I see these video clips. That’s not new, though. Something about Michael Jackson has always made me feel a little sad, even when he was a little boy. Even as a sometimes-ridiculous grown man he always seemed afraid, breakable.

In addition to the old video clips there are also legions of talking heads whipping up the frenzied fans like a never-ending opening act. Everyone has something to say whether or not they have anything to say, and they say it over and over again. See? I’m even blogging about it and I’m not anybody.

At the end of the day, toxicology reports will all come in, folks will point fingers, others will make a fortune from misfortune, and the rest of us will catch “A-B-C” on geezer radio stations as we drive to work and tap the steering wheel while we sing along. Just as we always have.

This Little Piggy Went to…

No Telling

…Interstate 40. And 430. And just about everywhere else for hours while traffic was rerouted around the pig fiasco.

Update: Interstate Reopens After Pig Truck Accident – todaysthv.com | KTHV | Little Rock, AR

The Great Bear Writing Project began this morning with several of our faithful stuck in traffic for over an hour while “troopers and others” coaxed close to ninety 800-pound swine off the roadway. Thankfully, our writers all made it in. Sadly, there was no video. There are more pictures, however, if you click on the KTHV link.

Let me say that hogs on the interstate during rush hour traffic is just one of the things I love about living here in Arkansas. It reminds me that despite our technological acumen and wanna-be status, we’re still just good people who every once in a while have to sidestep loose pigs.

My heart is full.

Scribbling up a Storm in Harmony Grove

No Telling

I’m here in Harmony Grove, AR this week with Stephanie giving a week-long series of writing workshops and having the time of my life.

Everyone set up their own blogs today, so we’re frantically blogging and commenting before the lunch break. Technology being what it is – sometimes unfriendly and occasionally misbehaving – we’ve still managed a room full of teachers freshly publishing online.

I’m taking pictures and soon there will be a whole host of scribbling and such to show you exactly what it is we’ve accomplished this week. Stay tuned, y’all.

Dirt Farming

No Telling

It’s that time of year again. I crave puttering and seedlings and faded pink canvas gloves and big straw hats. There’s nothing like the hot, green smell of tomato leaves after a storm, or the random geometry of climbing yard-long beans. I’m a Southern Grandmother and it’s my right to tend the garden.

But I don’t have one and it’s my own fault. I tried to simplify yard work by moving into a gardenless garden home where mysterious bands of young rogues sweep across the subdivision on riding mowers, slinging edgers and leaf blowers. Twice a week, the battalion tidies our postage-stamp yards. A plague of well-paid locusts. They do a good job, mind you, but a yard that can be manicured in half an hour is too small for a garden.

When I was a young mother with a strapping husband and big yard, I planted thick raised-bed gardens every summer. He fought the grass and bamboo, I nurtured seedlings, weeded, and staked. Later as a single mother, I turned to flowers and herbs. It was all I could manage in those busy years. Weekends when Em went to her father’s, I’d hit the plant stores. Putting rose bushes in the ground somehow helped the shock of childless weekends. It filled the empty places.

It occurs to me now I’ve unconsciously given myself less fertile ground to tend and maybe it’s a sign. The need to parent vegetables and blooms is still strong. But gardening is maternity and I suspect my own waning fertility has made choices without consulting me.

I don’t like the sound of that. I’m not ready.

So look out, Home Depot and Lowes. It’s Sunday and I plan to worship a little dirt. Grammy needs to plant even if it’s only a few tubs on a concrete patio.

Remembering the Women

No Telling

We have so many fallen to remember. Too many wars. We are all touched in some way by loss, and some of us are overwhelmed by the numbers. I know I am. But it is important that we remember.

Today is about finding a way to honor those memories. I didn’t and don’t personally know any of these women, but I’ll carry them with me all day and for more days than I know. I’ve read their stories now and I’ll return to them again and again because they are the little stones I’ve sewn in my pockets to keep me grounded.

Go Hug a Single Mama

No Telling


It’s true. You know, single mothers deserve a whole month of free spa days with paid vacation and an on-call nanny. It won’t happen, of course, but there should be a little something more than a card or an almost forgotten card and the celebration should last at least a week.

Single mothers work hard being everything to everyone all the time. It’s a tough job description that takes a special kind of woman to make it work. Most of my generation has taken a stab at single parenting at least once – some, several times. We never list that on our resumes, though. We should, because nothing says I Can Get Things Done like a single woman with a couple of kids, a job, a house to run, and at least one ex-somebody calling regularly to complain. Despite and because of it all, we manage to make the whole shebang run smoothly.

It’s no surprise. We’ve had generations of training. My grandmother was a war widow at 21 – five kids and no high school diploma. Make no mistake – just because there’s a box marked “widowed” on the form, that doesn’t mean the parenting is different. My mother has been married to my dad forever, but her marital status didn’t alter the fact that Dad was on the road most of the time and she was In Charge. Talk to any woman married in the late 50s and early 60s and they’ll tell you about single-parenting with or without the vows. Things were what they were in those days.

I’ve single-parented and now my daughter is, too. It’s not easy and sometimes it’s not fun, but it is what it is. Just tonight she managed to bathe afternoon play dirt and Ranch Dressing out of her son’s hair before the bedtime snuggle. Then she fixed the stopped up sink and repaired the disposal via googled instructions. If we find a wayward spider on the floor tonight, I imagine we’ll kill it ourselves.

Tomorrow’s our day – all of us out there loading the dishwasher and starting a pile of laundry and dragging out the trash now that the kids are in bed. We’re the queens of multitasking and the goddesses of Getting It Done. So bring on the macaroni necklaces and dandelions stolen from the neighbor’s yard – we’re ready to bask in the 24-hour glamor of Mother’s Day and we deserve all 1,440 minutes of it.

Eye on the Prize: Grading Momentum, Self-Denial, and a Request for Good Reading

No Telling

I’m two weeks from No More Papers to Grade. Anyone who teaches knows the final jag of the semester is about responding and grading and paperwork and wrapping things up. They also know it’s a self-inflicted time of pleasure-reading famine. There’s simply no time for the foolishness of lounging with a delicious book.

We who teach know all about self-denial. We’re masters of the craft. We don’t visit anyone, take the night off, dream up exciting recipes for veal, or blog. We eat Lean Cuisines from the microwave and wash it down with cold coffee because both are fast. It’s important, though, to dangle a carrot or two to keep us going. Here’s where you come in.
Give me a list of books to look forward to. Dangle the dream of rewarding hours prone on a divan with piles of novels and poetry and anything that doesn’t resemble a freshman argumentative essay. I live to teach, but the grading stack is high just now and the work is daunting. I need a tasty book list to help me make it through final papers and final exams.
Think of it as a public service.