Sixty years with Bridges BBQ as Sacred Space

     

 First come back to this blog as it likely to get better with more anecdotes as my memory evolves.

    I first set foot in Bridges BBQ circa April of 1962 as a third grader in Miss Mattie Mae's class in Gaffney. My Daddy a Baptist preacher had become pastor of Bethany Baptist Church on the Wilkinsville Rd just off the Union HWY , a Mission of FBC Gaffney.  Floyd Worthy, a mechanic in town was on the pulpit committee and a deacon. His wife brought the five of us to Bridges on that inaugural visit and it registered with my palate. Was later to find out there was an elevator in  big shop  where he worked in Gaffney roughly where the Board of Public Works came to headquarter. He and my Dad had some dramatic scrabble contests over the years.

    I think we sat in one of the big ovals just inside the door. The family looked for that booth the rest of the decade when we could come up with church members and later all on our own. Herschel Harris family came with us often, his brother in law a Strom Thurmond Freedom of Choice school board trustee resisting integration I remember.

   By senior year I was coming on my own or double dating but mostly still with family. The hush puppies called and I think we had to be there at least four times  every year minimum through 78 when we moved to Knoxville without my brother who married in 1980.

    My brother  kept the family tradition going riding up from Greenville with his Harley buddies many of whom he would meet in Gaffney and drive. And of course any time we visited from Knoxville or Rome Ga, Collinsville, Alabama of Pike County Ga west of Macon Bridges was on the intinerary.

     My senior year  GHS 71 we played Salley Schweppe and Shelby HS in tennis. Salley beat me in Gaffney and I think she beat Harry Poole in Shelby. In Shelby Mikie Michaels and Robbie McCraw came up from Clemson to watch us play. We got the tennis out of the way and whole team was in Bridges by about 4:30. We sat in the back with Mikie grabbing left over hush puppies all the way down the walls. I think it was our star player from India first time to have the Cue. His father taught Biology at Limestone.

     Robbie and I brought dates the fall of 70 for the meal and putt putt golf. I made a terrible mistake and talked in the back seat all the way home to south of Goucher almost in Union. My delicious tenth grade opportunity was gone in ten days. I was in despair through February of the coming year.

    In the nineties my friend later to writer early script for Denzel Washington, had an office in Shelby. Had lunch with him there and once saw the editor of the Baptist Courier in the place, as well known to Gardner Webb folks including Ron Rash. Saw a Furman class mate, the writer Whitt Bromm in the booth solo about seven years ago. My brother wondered how I know some random fellow in the front booth.

   In the nineties some younger friends from Alabama stopped on way from UVA back home. They were impressed. For them better than SAWS in Bham and the place near the WMU headquarters that had the great chocolate pie, Johnny Rays.

    It was a rare time on the stools that I heard Gaffney Classmate Jimmy Baker had died around 2001 . His Uncle had driven up after church and Gaffney came up and he told me our outstanding running back who played at App State had fallen over on a Saturday morning at the family auto shop near the Gaffney Ledger off downtown Gaffney.

     Steve Shoemaker was a successor to Carlyle Marney at the prestigious as Baptist go, Myers Park BC in Charlotte. Marney was a Baptist public intellectual of mid 20th century, friend of LBJ and Sam Ervin. Shoemaker wrote a recent book on Baptism as a moment, a thin veil between our earthy existence and heaven on this earth. Similar thinking on the characters of the great Cormac McCarthy see each of our Lives as a Sacrament. So for me not much of a reach to say that first bite of hush puppy, slaw, and the divine pork in God's chosen perfected vinegar baste salutation is an event of Communion and sacrament. As Mary Oliver the poet has said, Who knows what the soul is, it comes and goes. For me last Friday it was appearing near Patterson Springs as I could taste that first bite about 12 minutes before I got to my existential sanctuary of BBQ

     George Singleton is a Furman grad who downgraded to teach at Wofford. In his latest collection of short stories, The Curious Case of Non Profit Martyrs he has a story titled Standard that has this to say about a place I think is just outside Union as all his stories are somewhere between Spartanburg and Ninety Six. Comparisons to Bridges are obvious though all units have their distinctions. For instance I couldnt imagine an 8 by ten of Billy Graham and Jesse Helms ever having adorned any restaurant in Union.

    I had time to  turn and see this place brought together , almost, the great melting pot of our country. Tables able to seat ten diners , stood like hurdles throughout the the space. There were lawyer looking people at one place, after workd white women at another. One table held nothing but Duke Power employees wearing their plastic hardhats. A group of Black men, all wearing bow ties sat at another table. Grandmothers, meth addicts, little kids just out of Headstart programs. There were bibb coverall wearing men sporting crooked trucker caps emblazoned with stiteched Confederate flags, or ones that bolstered that Dont Tread on Me Flag. They wore hats promoting the NRA, and Make America Great Again, and 3......I got my plate and walked past the attorneys, the racists and the families who wouldnt know how to deal with a stranger in their midst, their children bent down looking at Cell Phones. I didn't want to sit down with them as I had the propensity to say things like "This world isnt going to end with a bang or a whimper, but from you kids banginging into each other and getting concussions and fallling in a hole, or prancing into traffic. I'm already seeing it, I drive an ambulance.!"

    End quote. So for now there you have it. I have to believe Miss Chadwick, my Advanced English teacher Gaffney High School Class of 71 is proud of me; and Momma too