Goin' Down to Mama's

Temporarily Offline

Goin Down to Mama's is temporarily offline due to recent tornado activity.  We're all fine and the house is fine.  We just have a big tree in the driveway and no power, and heaven help me if I can figure out how to use email on my phone. 

 

Springtime Honeysuckle

I've always loved honeysuckle. Back home, it seems particularly drawn to barbed wire, draping itself over pasture fences till they can hardly bear the weight of it. As kids, my cousins and I used to painstakingly extract the tiny drops of honey so we could literally get a taste of springtime. I had forgotten, until my mother reminded me, how her mother used to have it all through her house—just clippings from the yard that she would put in glasses of water and scatter from room to room so she could enjoy their sweet fragrance. It's such a simple thing. And such a special one. No planting, no weeding, no staking. Just wait for it to bloom every spring and summer, and enjoy every minute of it while it's here.

Daddy Says: "Let's Go See Us Some Art," Part II

Picture it—Seaside, Florida, with the parents. We wander into a gallery featuring an artist who does portraits with no faces. There's just a flesh-colored blur where each face should be.

Daddy: "These paintings got no faces."

Gallery Owner (Politely): "Yes, sir, that's intentional. The artist wants to give you, the viewer, the opportunity to imagine the details of each face however you wish."

Daddy (Having Pondered Briefly): "Well . . . how much would you charge us for a finished one?"

Daddy Says: "Let's Go See Us Some Art"

I used to get occasional invitations to corporate nights at the Birmingham Museum of Art, and Daddy would always be my date. My husband never met a corporate function he didn't want to dodge, and Mama covers an art museum at the same speed she uses for Walmart: "Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Well, look at that. Isn't that different? I think we've pretty much seen everything worth seeing. I'm ready when you are." Daddy, on the other hand, shares my love of museums—and free food. He enjoys taking his time, rambling through the galleries and pondering how anybody could be talented enough to capture a beautiful landscape or another person's likeness on canvas. So he was a shoo-in for the Matisse exhibit when it came to town. Once we had seen the exhibit—which included many portraits of women in various states of dress/undress—we headed back to the buffet line, where we bumped into a particularly well-traveled vice-president from the office. I introduced her to Daddy. "So, Junior, what do you think of Matisse?" she asked. Daddy thought it over and said: "I think he knew a lotta ugly women." [Matisse portrait by Carl Van Vechten, public domain, via wikimedia.org]  

 

Hushpuppies

My husband grew up in the Midwest, but he has fully embraced the Southern obsession with fried catfish and hushpuppies. Or fried shrimp and hushpuppies. Or fried . . . You get the idea. And bless his heart, every time we used to have them in restaurants, he had to endure my rant: "You think these hushpuppies are good? You just don't know. Wait till you have Mama's." Annoying, I'm sure, but absolutely true. I have had hushpuppies from Panama City, Florida, to Greenville, Mississippi. (Yes, I am a world traveler.) And nobody can beat Mama. Hers are light-as-air, crunchy-golden puffs of shut-yo-mouth deliciousness. Just ask my husband. He finally had them. (Actually, he had a whole bunch of them.)

She's Good People: Chonda Pierce

Years and years ago, a friend gave me a cassette (yes, this was when dinosaurs roamed the earth) of Chonda Pierce, and I laughed myself silly. I had forgotten all about it till I ran across some of her clips on YouTube. (She brought us "Menopause Parking" yesterday.) A registered, card-carrying PK (preacher's kid), Chonda is also an award-winning comedian and author. She even managed to find humor in her own bout with clinical depression. And she's in especially rare form when she talks about—you guessed it—her mama. Here are two fun clips: "My Mother and the Mini-Bar" and "Mushroom Top." Enjoy!

 

 

 

Ode to the Fuzzy Brain

My cousin Kathy, who precedes me by three years, warned me that at a certain point in my life—somewhere on the back side of my forties—my brain would turn to mush. This is that illustrious phase of life, ladies, that we call The Change. At first, I did not believe Kathy. I was still young. I was still sharp. But then one morning after breakfast, my husband caught me putting the bacon in the silverware drawer. "What are you doing?" he said. I looked down at the center-cut Hormel I was about to lay in the spoon tray. "I have no idea," I said. Then followed the untold hours spent looking for my car keys, the brand-new box of root touch-up that I apparently decided to store in the trash can, and a gazillion episodes of "Now what did I come in here for?"  And so to all of my friends who are currently on Aisle 3 at Publix wondering what you did with your grocery list, or struggling to remember the name of your sister's oldest child, let me just say, you are not alone. And to all my friends under 40—when that fateful day comes, and you find yourself wondering who put the remote in the refrigerator, or the phone rings and you answer your garage door opener, fear not. You aren't crazy. You're just . . . mature:)

P.S. Singer Pam Peterson has an entire song devoted to the fuzzy brain--search "Memory Spoof" on YouTube. And here's comedian Chonda Pierce's plan for menopause parking.

 

 

Celebrate Good Friends

I try to start the week off with a little Monday humor, but to tell the truth, I don't have it in me today. I lost a dear friend over the weekend. Sara Jones was a wonderful writer, dancer, friend, wife, mother. She had the biggest heart—and the most open one—of just about anyone I've ever met. She used to call me "Valerina." We helped each other write stories, laughed together, cried together.

One of my most telling memories of her came, oddly enough, on that awful morning of 9/11, after the Southern Living staff had huddled together around a conference room television and watched in horror. Sara followed me back to my office. "I have faith, and I know you do, too, so could we pray together?" I thought she meant that in the general, but she meant right then and there. And we did. We shut the door, joined hands, and said a prayer. She was never afraid to share her feelings or her faith. I will always think of her smiling—or hugging. Sara hugged a lot, most likely because she could always sense when somebody needed one. When I learned of her death, I told a friend that I was relieved to know I had church—down at Mama's—the next day because I needed it. I needed to be with my family and my church family. And the closer we draw to Sara's service, I'm feeling the need for my old Southern Living family, for the big circle of friends who knew this amazing person and loved her as I did.

So what does this have to do with you? Everything. We never, ever realize how much someone means to us until they're gone. So start this week off, not by thinking of everything that goes on your to-do list for a busy Monday, but by writing down one name—the name of a dear friend you will celebrate today—with a phone call, a card, an email, a text message—take five minutes and tell just one person how much they've blessed your life. Sara would like that:)

Fish Fry

If memory serves, the late great Eudora Welty once had a Mississippi character describe some of her neighbors as the kind of people who "fry their fish with the skins on." It was not intended as a compliment. Mama does not fry her fish with the skins on. She fries them to a perfect golden brown of crunchy goodness surrounding light, flaky white meat that melts in your mouth. Her father, she said, would eat any fish his children caught—no matter how small—and her mother would take the time to cook anything bigger than a minnow. Fishing, for them, was not just a pleasure but a necessity, a way to help sustain a big family in lean times. I did not catch the fish you see before you (though I considered asking the seafood guy at Publix to toss them to me after he wrapped them up so I could say that I did). But I can honestly report that, after just one fish-frying lesson with Cap'n Mama, I fried two pretty decent catfish. Not as sunny gold as hers . . . but pretty darn close. 

She's Good People: Jeanne Robertson

This clip is a little long, but it's hysterical. Jeanne Robertson is a humorist/speaker whose stories will ring true to anybody from the South. And I like the way she calls her husband Left Brain:) By the way, she has other clips on YouTube, including a doozy about rafting with Baptists (which made Mama and me do that LOL thing in a big way).