That time I almost met Harper Lee.

I take great pride in the Lee last name.

According to legend, and also my father who, among his many world travels, visited the “Lee place” in Ireland, etc. I think, from what I can gather, that it was hardly more than a couple of sticks stuck upright in a slab of mortar. 

A perfect potato.

I mean, that’s been centuries back; the only palpable evidence was that of the family crest, but don’t ask me what’s on that thing. I couldn’t tell you. What I do know is that there were only ever two Lee brothers who set out for the New World. Both made it, but on the way over, one lost everything except like a goat or two, a cow, and half a potato…oh, and of course his precious family. The other managed to hold onto all his money, though I think he lost a daughter.

I don’t know; it’s not important.

Point is, in a way, we’re all related. And, in that same way, I get to take all the credit for what everyone else in the family did, does, and has done. Even though, we don’t know each other. And probably never will. Because why should we.

However, following this by-now established logic in my made-up world of existence and family trees, that means, then that Harper Lee is related to me. And that means I’m a part of her great American novel. (Also, it means I’m related to Peggy Lee, Bruce Lee, Gypsy Rose Lee, Jason Lee, and probably Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Vivian Leigh, even though they tried to cleverly hide the fact by misspelling the Lee last name. But, I wasn’t fooled).

There are many more Lees/Leighs/even Lis (like Jet Li), in my family, but today’s focus is on Harper for the simple fact that I almost met her once.

My friend Lyle and I (several years ago, now, I guess it was) were taking a trip down to Pensacola. We have some good friends who live down there, still, and it makes me jealous to think about it since I too wish to live near the water but I still love them. Lyle had diligently (as he is wont to do) made all the travel arrangements. I try to always maintain great relationships with extremely orderly people.  I secretly wish I were, and every now and then, I can aggravate myself into becoming like them, but it’s ever so much, much easier just to find friends who already are like that, and then support them in their decision-making process. This I can do, in my sleep. (And that’s usually exactly where I do it).

Lyle had chosen a more scenic route, which if I recall correctly, actually ended up being a better route, anyway, and a portion of it wound its way through Monroeville, Alabama.  This was exciting news to me.

I knew of Monroeville; one of my favorite authors is Capote. Not so much for anything stylistically, but more because he was such a loudmouth, one-of-a-kind original. For me, that’s how I divide my favorites in literature: those who wrote well and those who lived well.  And though I personally think I’m nothing like him, I still blush at the comparison people often make between us. I think it has mostly to do with the fact that I, like him, am somewhat addicted to scarfs.

I've been to Paradise, and I've been to Me.

I also wear a Fedora, though, which puts me, perhaps, a little more in the category of Elvis Costello, someone else I’m often compared to, for some reason. I look nothing like him, and besides, I think he favors Bono. Who recently wrote a poem about Elvis Presley (not a good one, in my opinion – I’m supposing there’s musical accompaniment that I missed hearing). A few members of Presley’s family, a small tributary of it anyway still gurgling along in Mississippi, on his father’s side, are close family friends of U.L., so I don’t know, maybe it all comes full circle.

I’ve gotten off track, as usual. Sorry.

I was well familiar with Monroeville, like I said, because I often re-read and enmesh myself in one of my favorite autobiographies, Capote, written by one Gerald Clarke; it truly takes a good long look at this tiny town. It’s also well-written, I should point out.  Which is really all it could be, considering the stink Capote caused about his “invention” of creative nonfiction. I know, I know, he never really said, out loud, that he “invented” creative nonfiction, but so superior did he think his ability to cull a story from truth along the tenets of fiction that he, I’m sure, believed it his invention by proximity of mastery, if nothing else.

That’s what all geniuses do, you know.

So, I was elated when Lyle said we’d be passing through. I’d always wanted to drive through Monroeville. I mean, it couldn’t be that large. It wouldn’t take up much time.

We were stopping for gas anyway.

The trouble was – the rain. It was pouring, open-spout, straight down, as rain tends to do. And, it was a little more off the beaten path of Highway 41, than it appeared to be on the map. Still, there’s no better motivation to take on an adventure quite like the need for gas. As we tentatively took the exit towards Monroeville, it dawned on Lyle that another great, literary giant lived here: Nell Harper Lee, who in the recent cinema had been portrayed on the big screen by both Catherine Keener and Sandra Bullock. The New Yorker had recently published a letter from Harper Lee in which she openly criticized Bullock’s version of her in the lesser Capote film (put out literally on the heels of the award-winning one). “I never wore penny loafers,” Lee said. Or something like that; it had to do with shoes, I believe.

Her curmudgeon is still thick as a pie crust. But that letter I read way after the fact of this trip, as you’re about to see.

We should track down her house, then, I said to Lyle. Let’s bite the bullet, and be those people, I said, let’s ask the locals where she’s buried. 

For shame, I know. But, we couldn’t help it. She’d not been heard of in ages, she might as well be dead, in a plot right along Capote, if indeed, he were buried here, as well. I found out and soon, though, that she wasn’t dead. As a matter of fact, she was very well alive, and living in Monroeville.

Let me back up first, a little.

So, we’d found ourselves, finally, under a tall awning at a Chevron. And not a moment too soon, I should add. I get nervous easily on road trips (having fun, of course) and was in need of a restroom break. It doesn’t take much, as anyone who knows me will gladly tell you. While in the Chevron, I did bite the bullet – I did the one thing I dislike others for doing, because truth be known, I don’t get starry-eyed. At least, not easily. I remember my Ya Ya saying once that no one was that important; we all have to shit, she said. (Forgive the imagery and language, but that’s fairly provocative, and it’s kept me in good stead for many years).

But, regardless, I did it: I became a tourist of wanderlust and asked the guy behind the cash register where her grave was. And also, Capote’s house, and her house, also. The guy behind me answered. She’s not dead, he said. And he should know; he was her mailman, and was on his way to deliver her mail, right then.

And for the record, Capote’s house was torn down years ago, and the mailman wasn’t sure if there was even a marker there, but maybe? Anyway, we could find Harper Lee on the second floor of the bank, in the middle of town. She kept her office there, and we could just get out and go upstairs, and on the right, knock at her door.

The real deal. No deal.

I hurried back to the car, told Lyle, and we immediately agreed that we should do this. We should just go further into the town and get lost and find her and well…let’s just get that part done, first, we said.

The town wasn’t, isn’t, large, but it doesn’t take a space much bigger than a living room to get lost in when you don’t know where you’re going. The rain was relentless. We took several wrong turns, and I believe, at the last minute, we were about to give up when a KFC roared into view and there behind it was a clunky, solid-brown brick building with an unobtrusive sign stating that this was indeed the First Bank of Monroeville.

We pulled into a parking space and stared at it. Here it was; here, she was, somewhere tucked away inside like the thousands and thousands of dollar bills. I imagined her wound as tightly into her own persona as a roll of quarters. Just as heavy, too, I thought, with her mystique and her bitten thumb attitude at the literary world. Who could blame her? Some critics don’t really believe she wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, anyway; others don’t give the fact that she had anything to do with In Cold Blood a leg to stand on, (I mean, Capote didn’t), so where do you go with that?

Poor thing.

However…she was still a giant, and more power to her if she’s fooled them all. (But I don’t believe that for a moment).

We took a deep breath, Lyle and I, and scared ourselves. What would we say to her? Hey, Harper, good job on that book and all?  Or, Atticus, cool name, where’d that come from? Or, are you Scout?

The rain kept on and on and on.

And, then…so did we.

We pulled out of the parking space, too intimidated to meet her. At least, this is what we said to ourselves, heading further south towards old friends who hadn’t written any works of “staggering genius” (yet), and a mile of sand that wouldn’t care what questions we asked. We told ourselves, Look at us – what we have on, we’re wearing traveling clothes (for me that was pair of exercise pants and a Golden Girls overshirt).

You couldn’t go meeting the First Lady of Fiction looking like we did.

Plus, the rain! We would have come across as obsessed fans, a couple of soaking rats. We’d probably have been arrested. Of course, I’d spit the fact of that mailman out as fast as I could, if that were the case. Aiding and abetting is a crime, too.

I know I missed a real opportunity that day. But, only in the flesh, in the literal, only in the very real chance of having met her, shaked her hand, thanked her, whatever would have happened. Everything else about that moment, though…pure gold, I must say. A great memory.

Just do it what it says.

We took our last exit in Alabama, just miles from the Florida state line, through a town so small I’m still not sure it was even there. Except for this sign. Spray-painted across an empty storefront.

I don’t know, but for me, this made the trip.

This sign was worth all the money in the First Bank of Monroeville.

Part Two: Aunt Lola

When and if I remember a dream it’s because it has some potent element to it; I’d like to think I made that point, clearly enough, in yesterday’s blog. And certainly, I would think so with the Billie Holiday dream; and those precious and upsetting few that have come true…all of which I’ve shared with you.

God is in there somewhere.

But the potency, when it’s there, is one that is, that must be, for me, necessarily Fascinating and Disturbing in its minutiae, as it invades my mind, my lobes, with its obsessive and small details; isn’t that where God is, according to van der Rohe? I make no bones about how my dreams are often too vivid and verbal, to the point of Hamletian madness; I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if I lose what little sense I have left by Christmas.  (But, I would imagine, we all have dreams like that…and that we’ll all be mad by Christmas.  That seems to be the universal deadline).

So, true to fashion, here’s the Aunt Lola dream, one that has bothered me and moved me in myserious ways, since I dreamed it a couple of years ago. It has a residue that I can’t shake from off my soul.

I dreamed that I was running late for class, for Kay’s class, (this was toward the end of my graduate degree). I got to campus and there taped on the door was a scripted note telling me that she’d changed locations at the last minute, to an abandoned nursing home, one that I’d driven by many times, and wondered why it still stood. It was such an eyesore.

It seems as if she’d made this decision because of some research-oriented assignment – I vaguely could recall, I thought, her mentioning this, the research assignment, in a class the week before but in that announcement we were going to meet at the zoo in Jackson; no one, though, was upset either by the fact that we hadn’t gone to the zoo, as promised, nor by the fact that we were sitting on the floor in the large dining hall of this abandoned nursing home. Of course, being an Educator, we’re always striving to enhance the informational exchange rate, so to speak, so nothing really surprises us: zoos, nursing homes, a cow with a glass window in her one of her stomachs (this can be actually and physically viewed and touched at the Wise Center, the famous Vet School at Mississippi State University – look it up).  

Anyway, I’m late, and there’s the obligatory long hall that I’m desperately running down, (is that Archetypal? It seems so collectively Jungian) and there’s Kay, sitting crosslegged in the doorway of the dining hall. She’s motioning for me to hurry. We’re in the process of giving presentations today, and I’m next, she mouths. Did I forget?

I did, but I’m almost to the room when I realize that I’ve got to go the bathroom, immediately, and I mouth this back, in response, to Kay, who grins (in real life, I often have to go to the bathroom; I say it’s because I have a tipped kidney), but she’s also silently adamant that I not miss my turn to go. She appreciates order and routine.

I won’t miss my turn, I assure her. I just need a minute or two.

I come out of the bathroom and am on my way to the “class”room, to give my presentation, when a voice to my right calls my name. I turn and it’s my Aunt Lola, who passed away several years ago, at the age of 98. She’s the same age, now, standing there looking at me, but without any complications, and most notably, without that crook in her back that bent her toward the grave before the rest of her was ready. I’d heard her say that many times before.

She looks radiant, youthful, active, if you will. She’s wearing a blue nightgown and matching robe, and again, I can’t quite describe it, but she’s beautiful, a light. There’s a corona, edging beyond her, that I am afraid to enter, to approach, and yet, I’m delighted that this fear has put me at a crossroads, a carrefour, especially in the presence of a woman I loved so deeply, as a child. This must be what happens to the dead; they become a tendril to their corporeal life. I’m sure they do that just as an effort to put us at ease, but slightly. I’m not saying I believe in apparitions anymore than I’m saying I don’t.

I cry, “How can you be here? How can you be alive?”

I’m ecstatic that she is, and I want everyone to know that God must be real, how else could she have returned; its’s so natural a thing to believe, blinded as I am by her softness. I mean, there’s no other way she could be talking to me if not for the fact that all my life the faith I’ve held in Christ and God is actual. She’s proof, right?

So, I rush down the hall to the class because I want them to know the truth, this truth.

You've been here before, right?

I’ve rarely been this fervent in real life, about anything, but all of a sudden, in my dream, this is what I must tell everyone. I must bring them into the hall and show them Aunt Lola. She will prove all things. I know this, you understand, in the dream. But Aunt Lola refuses.

Kay looks at me, upset, that I’d interrupt her class at so crucial a time.

“We’re doing presentations, for chrissake, Kris,” she says.

Aunt Lola pulls me back into the hall of this abandoned nursing home, and looks up into my face. I’m now racked with guilt. I admit to her how sorry I was that I didn’t ‘do right by her dying.’ I was indifferent; I was immature; I was afraid to see her stilled, against that plush casket. I tried looking at her in the casket, at Nowell’s, but I couldn’t. I was too overwhelmed; I’d never before been flooded with such simple reasons to not want someone to die: her homemade meatloaf, those beds and beds of calla lillies, helping her pick up pecans from the front yard.

It didn’t make sense. How amazingly, these simple things made her great in my eyes. I should have looked at her in the casket, I know, I should have. She overlooks this weakness, “Forget that. I have to tell you something.”

I can hardly look at her, she’s so bright, and she says, “You almost died the other night.”

This is the residue part. It is a chilling thing to have someone tell you that you almost died.

“I’ve come to tell you that it’s ok; it’s not time yet. Soon, but not yet. You need to live, first.”

“I am living,” I argue. I’m upset now, not just that I almost died, but also because she’d waste such time on so old a cliche. I’m hysterical at this point. She remains gentle; the dead, in my dreams, are always so gentle. She won’t tell me what I almost died from, what almost was responsible for taking my life; instead, she implies that I am not appreciating the normal, the mundane, and the ordinary.

So, now, of course, I intend to be suspicious of everything plain.

This shoe closet is messy. Sadly, it's also mine.

She tells me that’s ridiculous, guessing at my suspicion. She implies that God has put in these plain things a necessary, if to me, rudimentary, exuberance that surpasses human understanding. She is telling me to slow down, to take notice, and to take a breath.

And so that morning, when I woke up, I let my initial disappointment ebb, and found that I was quite happy, content. I crawled out of bed, and that’s when I rediscovered, and rather accidentally, a lost pair of favorite shoes.

Would that work as something simple? I felt that it would.

And that meant the whole world to me.