He’d just always wanted a hearse, he said.

U.L. and I like to take Sunday drives, after dinner, each week.

There’s no rush to this ritual. We enjoy a long dinner with the rest of the family; we gossip, we share news (even the made-up News, an old habit we used to do when I was younger, that’s found some way to stick, even to this day).

What you do is, you mute the TV, you guess at what’s being said by looking at the graphics, and then you tell your version. It was quite a shock, for instance, when I realized that Bush had actually been re-elected, and even greater still, when I found out that Navratilova was an honest-to-goodness lesbian who barely got the rights to animal visitation; I’d thought she was trying to sell her dogs on national television and had been arrested for it. I hadn’t realized that what I’d been watching was a court trial, of a “divorce,” per se.

This will be the death of me.

It’s not that there’s all that many places to see or drive by in my small, Haven Kimmel-sized hometown. It just gives us time to ourselves, to draw out the necessary conversations that seem to be so much a part of this post-Sunday Dinner ritual.

I always have to do the drive, in his Cadillac, while he sits in the passenger side regaling the same stories, world without end, that he does every Sunday.  Mrs. So-and-So used to live there in that house until her nephew got high on “the drugs” and broke in and bludgeoned her to death, and then dug up that gorgoues purple clematus, for no reason at all and left a big hole in the yard; or, that house is where Old This-and-That caught fire and burned to death when lightning struck his hot water heater, he was asleep, which you shouldn’t do in an electrical storm; you know, stories like that.

It’s too, too painfully southern.

I love every minute of them, though, I really do, despite the nature of this blog. I truly relish these drives.

And every now and then, he recalls a new story, a new moment shared, a story stolen, either at a funeral home, or at Piggly Wiggly, a grocery store that he affectionately refers to as The Pig, when writing his checks there. He used to concoct grocery lists in an aisle-by-aisle fashion, so familiar was he with their layout. It certainly maximized shopping time. Gave you more time to socialize. 

I’ll have to tell you later about an incident that involved a church scavenger hunt, a cucumber, and Miss Ada Lee.

Yesterday, though, as we drove past the sod-soaked fields and yards of our neighbors, the rain has truly been remarkable and of legend, here lately – I keep anticipating animals, approaching two-by-two, gathering on the carport, staring eagerly at the Cadillac, trying to figure out how to get into it. It’s a large Cadillac, and so, somewhat similar to an ark, at least, I’d think, to present-day animals, who I imagine are about as intelligent as the rest of us in the 21st century – yet, we found ourselves taking a new road, a different route, this time.  It was only new because we usually just drive past it and not down it, it’s a dead end, but we didn’t do that yesterday. No, sir.

We drove down it, to the cul-de-sac, and there at the end was a hearse.

U.L. told me that it was an old one, from Nowell’s. And that the man who lived in this house (the one we were practically in the driveway of , so I began to turn the car around before we aroused too much suspicion), had bought it. Because he wanted it. He did not, in fact, work at Nowell’s.

He’d just always wanted a hearse, he said. 

This, U.L. discovered while purchasing some Cool Whip and fresh coconut shavings at Piggly Wiggly, preparing to make his celebrated Coconut Cake, and this man, we’ll call him Frank (because that’s his name) was standing behind him, bragging about the fact that he’d gotten a good deal on that death trap of a hearse at Nowell’s. It only had 40,000 miles on it, and they took six grand for it, as is.

To which U.L. registered surprise. The town indeed must be smaller than he thought. People died all the time around here; it was a hobby. To have only amassed 40,000 miles didn’t seem right. It should have higher mileage on it than that.

I'd rather not know what's in the back.

The man, Frank, now enjoyed driving the hearse down Highway 397, fast as he could (right up to 60 mph, he said), with his two dogs, part-Beagle/part-Yankee, he’d gotten them off a cousin in Chicago, a shovel, and a plastic tarp. He’d drive up and down 397  until he happened upon some version of roadkill, and as a free service to the city, he’d stop the car, pull the shovel out from the back (it had not come with the purchase of the car, as I’d thought) and delicately carry them off to a final resting place, one less likely to be continuously mowed over by Broncos…and Cadillacs.

I trust he had very well-behaved dogs.

U.L. said a hearse was the last thing he would want to ride in. Frank told him not to worry, it would be.

Every Sunday, we do this. Dinner, small talk, a car ride, the same stories, sometimes new ones, and I love it.

And…I also hate it.

All at the same time, I amass these feelings in my bones, in my blood, my knuckles, and it’s usually with a fork of mashed potatoes, or butterbeans, or peach cobbler on its way to my mouth. It’s a saturating, obligatory, exhausting, and lovely wont.

One that I’ve often felt suffocated by, and I don’t like admitting that, but it’s true, because it seems too rote, rhetorical to matter.  I’d never been able to put into anything other than a simple series of words…maybe I wasn’t able to give it better context, or maybe I wasn’t supposed to, because it was of a higher order of thinking than I was able to get to on my own…

…until this morning.

Amanda, having been gone this past weekend to a wedding (yet another one!) in Memphis, had finally returned home, laden with Pottery Barn accessories for the den and bathroom, and this morning, she was starved for my attention, as best friends often become when separated (I starve for hers, as well, and we both ache and starve for Siciliana’s, Erin’s, and vice versa…would that we could all be thinner from such friendly famine – which is just slightly less oxymoronic than friendly fire, to the soul, anyway), she came bounding into my bedroom and woke me up.

It was noon, so I, now that I’m fully awake, have forgiven her. But, in her usual way, she had a passage she wanted to share with me.  This is something we all do, and constantly, this sharing works with each other. Usually, Amanda has more profound (and, also, published) pieces to share with me: cummings, Yeates, Hurston, et al. She is, I’d argue, far more well read than any of us, especially me.

Despite being famously non-auditory in almost anything I do, I humor her and listen. It’s a selection from Robert Penn Warren’s All The King’s Men. From page 35, she read:

The child comes home, and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be hasn’t got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. […] But this thing in itself is not love. It’s just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation.  

I heard every word of that.

I had to look at them, actually, I had to take the book and look at the words, themselves, I was that bothered by the accuracy of his prose. Once, during my first tryst with graduate school (in English), I took a Fugitive Poets class under the remarkably affable, fatherly, likable, and slightly off-key Dr. Phillips, and had read of Warren’s poetry, along with Davidson’s and the tragic Jarrell’s, which struck me less for its poignancy and more because he stepped in front of a bus and was killed, perhaps on purpose. I’d decided, as a poet, Warren’s work was soft, if terse, and what prose we read of his, I found suggestive of needing a closer editor…I felt that way about this piece as well, but somehow it didn’t matter in this context.

The original electric chair.

I was absolutely struck by the meaning, and remembered that meaning is what the reader gets to do, gets to fiddle around with…at least, ultimately.  (I’m a Fish advocate, Reader-Response, etc.). Critics, theorists can say whatever they need to (everyone needs a job, right?), but what resonates is if the reader takes up the mallet and strikes the gong.

Nothing else matters at all.

And this passage was so captively southern, so perfectly southern, so bitterly southern, that …it finally upset me. Warren had, all those years ago, in his novel about a corrupt politician, written down so clearly what I’d been trying to say myself. I guess that’s why I couldn’t: he’d already used the words. 

And had done so, so irreproachably.

I guessed then, after the reading was over, that the only way for me to climb to this higher order, is to do what he did, what they all did…

…just, take off for the open road, and find a quiet, muted place and live out the rest of my days, a fugitive.