The Scarf

   The Coplin Weaver family and cousins totalling about thirty shared the weekend of July 20 sharing family oral history. A grand project for any family at one time wealthiest family in Guntersville Alabama. In  in the sixties The Mother and four daughters their own pew at the FUMC in town had plenty to tell. The Father, insurance man and realtor was a Baptist.  Reports are the often told story of their caretaker of color  Mary Phinell got the most traffic. 

    But I have a story to tell of twenty years ago here going public for the first time.  I wanted to tell this a story at the reception for the wedding party on April 1 2006, the Friday evening before . Yes, it was April Fools’ Day 2006 and the night before they were married, but I was asked not to say anything because the father of the bride now deceased may be encouraged to share and my friend Susan Weaver loved her father, but she was scared that if me and him said something who knows where it would go, so I had to stay quiet while Mark Morgan of Duke, brother of the fiance,  Morgan charm the group and got all the accolades and I just had to sit on it But here’s my story. I was president and founder of the sugar booger adoration society, sugar booger, married the Prince so that was Susan Weaver and John Morgan my assistant vice president  was Andy Myers of UPS ; and  in charge of recruitment was Russ Beeene,  a screeenwriter, who had  an obvious case of undiagnosed Asperger‘s so we didn’t want it to grow and it didn’t . So  on that night. I wanted to tell the story Susan beginning when she was about 20 years old shared a lot of family information with me and with the two friends Andy and Russ we felt like we did a good bit over that six years that she was enchanted with the prince or always more like six and more like 14 years total, but he came around and it was good for everybody and it was a great wedding , one aunt Katie called it storybook they got Jackie Weaver‘s 1956 Cadillac convertible and road from the church down Main Street to the library that was under construction and it was really humid and everybody was sweating, but we had a reception there they had they had their wedding meal there but the reception the night before when people were talking And so Mrs. Weaver was a quiet woman. She made perfect on math on the ACT in 1965 and taught math at the high school and I ate lunch at school a lot and I would see her at school but I said I saw her one day in the hall outside the luxury. I said Ms Weaver I have a story about Susan. I gotta tell you, but you can’t tell her I told you,  and Ms Weaver Looked me straight eyes   said I don’t see why not she tells you everything I’ve ever said and I said you know what can I say? I mean she nailed it. That’s pretty much the truth and so but so Susan this has been about 1993. She calls the house about 11:30 at night and my father who had married Edna after mother died my mama he was disturbed about the whole situation. I said not worry about it. It was a special situation so she was on the phone she was in a dither. She wanted to get the Prince  something for Christmas, but didn’t want to show her hand. She wanted to do something  do something appropriate and ask my advice and I said well I haven’t had a lot of experience in romance, but there was a girl at Furman I dated for a year and a half and second Christmas rolls around and I said ask my mama said mama You know what should I get this girl for Christmas? Momma said  she thought a real nice scarf would be appropriate so I got her a scarf and  at Christmas I gave her  a ride from Furman up to her aunts in Gastonia North Carolina. We stopped at the roller rink in Spartanburg  and they were playing the crocodile rock but I couldn’t skate.  it was hilarious and just a sweet night and so I thought I was in love for sure but by February of 73 of the next year a fellow classmate moved in on me and it was over for me and they got married went to   USouth Carolina  law school and had some beautiful children and grandchildren >  Susan says OK OK I won’t get him a scarf

Robert Grainier, Train Dreams the Movie will release in September

   Keep an eye for it on Netflix and then limited theatrical release. Based on novella nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, got great praise from James Wood in the Guardian. Find and read that review. I met Wood at Sewanee writers summer camp about 15 years ago. He said he was aware of Marshall Frady but dealt almost solely with fiction.

      Here from a good wiki page on the novel you should read, quoting

         Grainier's life is a mystery from start to finish, a sort of blank space that he fills in and that we fill in with him. At the core of such fiction is the conviction that our lives will remain essentially mysterious to us—that as human beings we don't know what we are and cannot grasp our own experience. In the character of Robert Granier, though, Johnson seems to be suggesting that we need not understand our own lives in order to live them, enjoy them, fully inhabit them–and also that we might take some comfort in that, if in anything at all."^[21]

Guest post, the Crabapple tree by Todd Heifner tirbute to his brother

   My friend Todd Heifner Youngest rother Brad died in late April .  Was very impressive memorial service you can google at New Millenium church in Arkansas. Eric Motley grand friend of Brad since Samford in the mid nineties flew down from his post as associate director of the National Art Museum in DC to deliver a eulogy as did Mart Gray magnificent effort.

     Last week Todd posted this memory on facebook

                  What Now For The Damned Crabapple Tree?

You’d have to know what a nightmare the yard was at our home just a few days after we moved in. It’s a hard thing to realize that the biggest investment of your lifetime now is the embodiment of your favorite movie—maybe ever—“a river runs through it.”

Our backyard caught all the water from the neighborhood it seemed and we wondered would we ever establish a yard?

Well, given the beauty and serenity that is now ours out back, I’m not sure I’d trade it. That’s thanks to lots and lots of intention, sweat, and moving the same plant from place…..to place…..to place. But to be sure, it is now a place of respite and grace given the vision Amanda had for the yard, and that she and our friend Genaro and I have cultivated these past five years at her direction.

I didn’t ask for much when the landscaping was picked. Just a few specific irises and the planting of two crabapple trees—ones I remember specifically from the days of my childhood.

But the crabapple trees weren’t for me. They were planted on our 3/4 acre wetland for the purpose of producing great harvests of crabapples for my brother Brad.

Brad was many things to many folks. For me, at least, a part of who he was generated from a healthy mix of nostalgia, love, and generosity which he heaped in massive amounts on those he loved.

And Brad loved everybody.

When my brothers and I were growing up, one of the rituals of our summers—just days after school was out—was a one-way bus trip from the Nashville, Tennessee Continental Trailways bus station on Sixth and Commerce Streets downtown to the Texarkana, Arkansas Trailways Depot on Stateline Road. You could step out the front door of that Texarkana station, walk to the corner of the block, cross the street and be in Texas.

We did it every summer even though the last admonition in Nashville was “Not for any reason are you to leave any of the bus stations where the bus stops along the route. Not in Jackson, nor Memphis, nor Little Rock, nor Hot Springs, nor Texarkana. Do you understand??”

With a head nod of ascent to the parents, we would board the bus and just wait for the 11 hour bus trip to pass when we knew—just like Sam Bowie, or Davie Crockett, or Sam Houston—we would dismount our ride and saunter into Texas without any constraint of oversight, just us cowboys and our earthly goods.

My brothers and I were blessed to have all four of our grandparents into adulthood, but those summers when we were teenagers and older grade school kids making our annual journey to Plain Dealing, Louisiana on the bus, to spend five or six weeks with our grandparents…….well that was just heaven.

One of the many great memories of those summers was climbing my paternal grandparents HUGE crabapple tree in the middle of the gravel turnaround in their driveway. We would scamper up the tree and collect crabapples for the world’s greatest crabapple wars, fought in the backyard between the sheets and other wash my grandmother had hung out to dry. It was a fit battleground for us young warriors.

But even more what I recall was gathering bushel baskets full of those crabapples, and my grandmother—the one who couldn’t cook!—making the finest homemade crabapple jelly anywhere in those parts.

And we would feast on it for breakfast on toast, or over in the afternoon with peanut butter on slices of goosedown soft Holsum white bread. It was heaven.

Well younger brother Brad not only partook of the fun, the food, and the firepower of a stinging hot crabapple, he also watched and listened, learning how to make that crabapple jelly and refining his own recipe over many, many years.

About the time Amanda and I relocated to Pelham some six years ago, Brad told me in a late night phone marathon how hard it had become to make his annual batch of crabapple jelly. Due, he said, for want of suitable crabapples with which to cook this homemade treat. They were increasingly hard to find, he said.

So I indicated to Amanda my desire to plant such a tree in our yard in order to supply Brad a key ingredient for years to come.

We planted two of these trees initially, but lost one to water and root damage.

The second tree, however, has struggled and survived through these past half dozen years. This spring it was covered in blossoms indicating a fine crop of crabapples was on the way.

I got great joy in thinking of delivering such a copius yield of this hardened fruit to Brad at harvest time this year for him to recreate the recipe of our youth.

But that was not to be, due to Brad’s passing some seven weeks ago on May 2.

And so I was left wondering upon returning home from his memorial service—

“What now for the damned crabapple tree?”

Having convinced myself to remove it from the back yard due to the rankish smell it makes when unpicked crabapples fall to the ground in late fall, I looked out the family room window Friday afternoon before last, considering how best to fell the tree. I was berating myself for having planted the thing in the first place—“a stupid idea,” I thought, “and more nostalgia than sensible.”

And that’s when I saw it.

The tree was moving, teeming with life almost as if a mini-earthquake was disturbing this tree alone.

And then the darts that started to fly from within the tree—hummingbirds, dozens of them, like a swarm of bees around a hive.

There were so many of them the tree literally looked as if it were shaking—burning, if you will, with a voice from the Great Beyond.

And so for now, it seems, this has become the tree where the hummingbirds rest. A tree that was dead in my eyes, particularly given the grief at having lost my brother this spring, and all the memories and promise the tree held. Yet it is now more alive than ever! Teeming with copius amounts of nostalgia, love, and generosity.

And teeming with life……in the shadow of death.

Who knows, maybe I’ll try my hand at making crabapple jelly this fall. Or maybe not.

But I do know this……..

I’m thankful for the hummingbirds.

And for this crabapple tree.

And for my brother Brad.