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.

Willful ignorance satures South Carolina gubernatorial candidates

Ahat ignorant clowns, MAGA clown are entering the SC race for governor.. You Lie s son Alan Wilson, the flake Nancy Mace and now the fundamentalist from North Spartanburg Josh Kimbrell are in.

     After his commencement speech at Wake Forest, CBS sixty minutes needs to camp out at Mace Seacoast Church in Mt Pleasant and see what's going on there. The speaker's children are Clemson grads and Dabo Swinney is no longer a Southern Baptist because of folks like Wilson, Kimbrell and Mace 

     I'm sure they will be trying to get some transgenders to move in the state to break some darling darlings now with a kill in a volleyball game to increase thier chance. I dont know one transgender volleball player in the state but I.m sure George Singleton will find it if there is one. Nikki Haley was desperately looking for one when as a Clemson trustee she embraced Charlie Kirk and TPUSA couple Novemebers ago at Clemson

     Here why don't yall surprise the rest of the nation and take a deep repeated liten to David Graham interview on NPR Fresh Air. Hell do something actually earthshaking and read the book. Have staff do a group read with you of Joe Crespino wonderful Strom Thurmond's America--Nikki had never heard of it nor seen The PBS Blinding of Isaac Woodard-- ; and one more if it doesnt keep you past your bedtime: Jill Lepore great recent history of America, These Truths.

       And Robert Jones easy google for Shutting Down CRT Debate. See the Atwater Memo reference . A pocket of Furman faculty gets the implication.

     Great Friend of LD Johnson, the Abe Lincoln of Baptists a generation ago, would call all you infidels "Soul molesters". That was a favorite prophetic witness of Will D. Campbell. I could go on and on but yall got a lot of sophomoric notions and embarass me.

     And Josh,find a better preacher. Ive known the jack leg you got since Furman, a state leader in the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. Have North Spartanburg and TRey Gowdy at FBC do something righteous and start reading Baptist Global News site twice a week so they can begin to distinguish their ASS from a Holel in the Ground.

       Stay tuned and follow the developing the story about the Timmon Family and the renovation of the Furman basketball arena. How long will their name be on in in the wake of the Seeking Abraham and Placing Furman reports.

Poem the Call Away and the Kingston Hwy Rock Store and Johns Store

   This last week had some exchanges with a kidney Doctor in Arkansas. Shared the Robert Bly poem The Call Away and he got several comments on his facebook. Recently he wrote a piece on his facebook about two gas stations near his home. That sparked in me thoughts on the Rock Store and the Johns Store on the Kingston Hwy about a quarter mile apart, about five miles east of Rome Ga on the east side of Dykes Creek in walking distance of my grandfather's farm he bought in the early fifties and the Baptist church where was strong influence. Retired chief army Chaplain Doug Carver credits my Grandfather's faith and witness as big reason he rose in the ranks.

  

      A passage in Cormac McCarthy's last novel the Passenger   reminded me of the meditations I had on my Grandmother's farm in my thirties, a break, a retreat from the first thirty years of my life. I could almost describe Nanny and Pap's 120 acres in similar language .

    Spot passages from pages 165 to 167 of the novel

        When he got back to the creek he followed it up into the woods and crossed on the flat stones below the old wooden spillway. The spillway boards were cuped and back with age, and the water that ran over them looked dark and heavy. Of the gristmill itself nothing was left save the stones of the foundation together with the rustd iron axle that had once carried the wheelmill and the rusted iron collars in which it once had turned. ( continuing for a page and half of rediscovering his grandparents farm we come to this)

      Bobby understood that over a few hills lay Oak Ridge which  brought his father from Princeton in the forties.  His existence was owed to Adolf Hitler. The forces of history that ushered his troubled life into the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the state of the West

     Ive been in and out of Rome Ga since my first year of life and lived there good bit of the time from the fall of 81 through December of 86.  The fall of 81 I got entangled with a former Miss Alabama contestant who made a significant impression on me for a good six months. She lived on the east side of Rome near the neighborhood of the shortlived South Carolina coach , Will Muschamp formerly at Florida. My first cousin Tim wife Shirley also in that neighborhood a niece of the former treasurer of South Carolina . Across the hwy from them was the Ledbetter Mansion, farm and estate .  She'd live in Atlanta for a couple years near the Big Chicken and would often take the Kingston HWY where Johns and the Rock Store became part of her traveling memories just a few miles out.

      Sadly an upscale Dollar General has located about two football fields east of the Rock Store screwing up the neighborhood which only 150 some odd years ago was the founding of Morrison Campground --worth a google search, and the potable spring water; just a few years after Sherman left Rome in the fall of 64. The Novel E. L. Doctorow  The March takes it up from there.

     Come back to this blog soon as I have a great story about Tom Edsall of the Wah Post and a ride I caught at Johns store in june of 86

Furman, Trump resistance and Process

  I  was present Saturday in Pendleton SC for the anti Trump rallies. I got on camera with the Anderson Observer report and you can see me in the video there. Erin Goss an English Proff at Celemson fan of Cormac McCarthy and Ron Rash was a coordinator for the ralley and she and I had nice conversation. The Oberver said the crowd was about 350 but I think it more more like 750 or more.

   I had twosigns. One said Get Timmons family name of Furman Arena and the other asked why are Nikki Haley and the Clemson trustees struck mute in the face of all of Trump's shenanigans.

     I hope Furman Paladin newspaper will take a look at some faculty acting like Trump. In January I was threatened with criminal trespass for talking at a faculty meeting Jan 15. It It is a ridiculous overreaction to my reservations about some aspects of the Placing Furman initiative. I am am convinced one powerful facllty faculty member got his panties in a wad. The Man who convenend the meeting told me after He was kind of glad I was there, I identified myself before I spoke. It was turned over to John Milby head of security. Nice guy but thick headed and caught up in a ridiculous process beneath Furman and all its advertised virtue and free speech history.

   I am enthusastic about a scholarship initiative in Alabama that could in a few short years deliver a quarter million dollars to Furman in matching funds. I already have two scholars from the small town of Collinsville Alabama. One has verbal scores through the roof I hope to introduce to Tomiko Brown Nagin and the other, Hispanic, with high math scores. I have mentioned her to Dr Harris in the Math Department. My Father and his Father were good friends.

     Not to toot my own horn but I dont see how a fellow like me is a candidate for criminal trespass. There are a good twenty classmates, faculty and staff who think this is ridiculous, and former Chaplain Jim Pitts a few years ago said if Furman had an Order of the Palmetto he would nominate me

   Mr. Milby, President Davis and some of the trustees should read my review of Karen Guth's Tainted Legacies. easy for google for recent issue of Christian Ethics Today. I quote Pitts at some length in that piece.

    A former assistant to Samford President Tom Corts wrote President Davis an appeal on my behalf which she dismissed and turned back to Milby who is not a jury of my peers.

    This is my 50th homecoming year. I hope to get this to the attention of the student newspaper cause I think they can do some investigation worthy of Marshall Frady  early in the upcoming year.

     Furman and Trump in concert. I Never imagined. 

Will Aunt Mary's Johnson Ferry defenestrate Collinsville Baptist

  Aunt Mary Willis of the Johnson Ferry Baptist church in Marietta Ga is the sister of the widow of John Morgan, recently deceased after forty five years as pastor of the Alabama church where my Mother was baptized in the town my family goes back to the 1840s. I lived there for thirty years up till late January 2020 whereupon I relocated to Upstate SC

    That congregation defenestrated me on May 26, 2006 by a vote of 32 20. Now Johnson Ferry and 60 percent of the voting messengers yesterday in Dallas Texas want to drive Collinville Baptist out of the Convention with the Law Amendment. Mary Willis pastor Clay Smith is named as one of ten pastors including the pastor of FBC Cumming Ga out becasue they are soft on women. Prime example in the Collinsville case is the Memorial service for Pastor Morgan of six weeks ago. You can watch it online

   Smith is a trustee of Southern Semonary whose president Al Mohler is a hardline fundamentalist super trumper and political operative. Watch him in the documentary Hold the Line SBC created by the New Yorker.

   Ferry and Cumming are both in Marjorie Taylor Green's congressional district which makes perfect sense in a way. And known historically for the lynching of Leo Frank and the ethnic cleansing and lynchings in Forsyth County in 1915 .    Methodist minster's son Patrick Phillips wrote up seven years ago in Blood at the Root. One chapter was titled Thirty karat son of a bitch with spare parts.

     I'm not calling Clay Smith the Ferry pastor that, but there are some similarities to his mentality and how he  operates. Smith's father was minister of music at FBC Mauldin SC in the nineties whose pastor Strickland wife is the niece of  Etheredge, George Wallace highway man in the 80s. Red retired to Collinsville of some means and was quite the character at Basketball games etc. He is now a trustee of Jacksonville State with the famous lead of the group Alabama, Randy Owen.

     Randy and I had lunch at the Ft Payne Cracker Barrel about a decade ago but I digress

    So google up the New yorker doc Hold the Line, SBC and see the Religion News Service report of today June 12 on the SBC Law Amendment, and sterling unflinching reports at Baptist News Global. Countdown is on for Aunt Mary and Collinsville Baptist.

    Stay in touch as more to come 

Kayla Beene and Mason McKinney new hope for Collinsville Baptist church

Ffriends been a while since I’ve posted in this blogcould be a little sketchy as it’s gonna be kind of a random catch all blog of the last couple of months and I’m doing it. Technically a new way I’m hoping a friend or put it in an email and send it back to me that I can copy and just post as a blog so it won’t be bold or print, but maybe it’ll get the job done. Kayla Beene and Mason McKinney early twenties . They are in their early 20s and a new hope for Collinsville Baptist are taking positions of responsibility with the youth and even on the bylaws committee, the two have a bright families and if they will reach out with the challenge of a Becky Kennedy in her robe and stole for the Morgan memorial Service Becakyon staff at Baylore ordained about ten years ago talked about the wider network of everybody that was around during the time of John Morgan that sits a wide reach With Kayla b she has an a great uncle whose daughter it goes to Duke of Divinity school and there’s a lot of things to think about there. I hope the church in this new generation will will open their minds for good people, especially in the matter of Baptist identity and the authentic Baptist witness in America Will go a little wider and then have been discussed the last 30 or 40 years and understand the implication of the fundamentaist takeover

      the Baptist convention not to dwell on it, but to know that it happened and that the SBC is no longer what it was and it’s not the congregation that in Collinsville Baptist has a part of that water picture is not the congregation now with their recent flirtations with Calvinism that was envisioned in the 20s 30s and fories.  and 40s and my mother‘s era and the era of the Gilbreth and Mary Catherine Reed, who had a wide following because she was here at the home economics department at university of Alabama So those days  those days they had pastors like John Jeffers, who went on to be a longtime Pastor first Baptist Church, Auburn and then even in the 70s they had Fred Grissom, who Jackie Myers embraced and Became a professor at Southeastern seminary under the time  of my dad‘s great friend Randall lolly is the president and that’s completely different from from what’s going on with the SBC now.

 Kayla and Mason Bright people they can watch the documentary. up at baptist news global or a google for SBC Hold The Line .  It’s easy to find hold the line SBC about Women in Baptist life and in their role in the church and it’s obvious Becky Kennedy flew in the face of all that and I’m glad she did in her robe but she’s an ordained minister one of the better products of the Morgan era. They embraced Becky and so that whole service was Flew in the face of what the SBC is and at the SBC followed through from the national level down to the state local level they vote Collinsville Baptist out of the association and Southern Baptist life so I mean that’s just the fact there’s no way to look around it so I hope Mason  side his let me see where his mother’s his mother‘s sister is the aunt By marriage of the school superintendent for the state of Alabama. Eric Mackie and he understands what’s going on in this Baptist mess. He learned a lot when he was at Jacksonville State, Wayne Flynt spoke last year tohistorical societyk association First Baptist Auburn and his is a disciple Mark Wilson. He’s been head of the Auburn democracy project for 14 years which has had a presence in Collinsville through Jennifer Wilkins  he was on the pool pit committee for first Baptist Church Auburn. He knows this is a mess and he knows there’s a better vision For Collinsville Baptist Church than the one that they’re looking at now so there’s ways to do these things and I hope Kayla and a mason look into it and I’m just a phone call away and I got friends who know people that can help if Collinsville Baptist not too stubborn to et a grip in the mist ethnicaoy dierse town in the state. 70 percent of Collinsville school is now minortiy and Jason Barnett and Brad;ey crawford need to talk to their friend Jrdan dufexis and Tommy Tubberville, even rick burgess and get sme carity.   Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong aint what they used to be  (lot more on that in a couple mnths)  used to be so I’m a throw my two cents in later in the year, but I wanted to get this in to get to Kayla and Mason‘s attention and they can do their own thinking they got people they can talk to. They can even talk to Sherlyn Crowe that’s Baptist joint committee in Washington DC who’s a product of the first Baptist Church of Fort Payne got a masters at Vanderbilt so they’re smart there are people that understand this and they’re not very far away and want to put this out there and maybe with the sequel but that’s good for now.

Baptist populists, the MAGA Base and soul molesting complicity

   Andrew Gardner uploaded a piece April 7 on Baptist populism and the MAGA Base. It ratifies what I have been saying for 35 years now about the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. in 1993 Harold Bloom of Yale wrote in his book The American Religion the tragedy in the SBC is the result of pure political machinations masquerading as religious conviction.

      Five years before that Paul Pressler in the network of Jesse Helms and the Council for National Policy walked off the interview with Bill Moyers when pressed about his Exxon family history with the right wing. Part of it had to do with windfall profit taxes Jimmy Carter ushered in as suggested by Tom Edsall in The New Politics of Inequality. Pressler's network went back to the McCarthy era in culture war politics distraction disquising oil profits.

   Homer Lindsay has a key anecdote in Gardner's telling. Bullying a compromise discussion with the ultra fundies on the seminaries, he called them chickens for backing off hardline notions. One of his key parishioners at FBC Jacksonville Florida was Tim Tebow's Mother, the Eagle Forum Woman of the Year for 2018

   See Jill Lepore These Truths to put the Eagle Forum in context over the SBC takeover years and check the index for Frank Norris and Baptist populism of Billy Sunday's Day.

        Bill Friday UNC chanclellor told Cecil Sherman the most significant development of the 1980s in North Carolina was the Helms Baptists of the CNP ouster of Randall Lolley as president of Southeastern Baptist Seminary in the town of Wake Forest cause Helms Pressler network knew if they could get in the heads of Baptist preachers in culture war politics they could sway that region of the country to the Right for a generation.   

     Google Robert Jones shutting down CRT debate religion news. It is a sordid tale how race baiting politics evolved into the MAGA politics of Abortion, guns and now immigration. It is chocked full of mendacity SBC and now National MAGA politics.

      Read Gardner and do you your best to distinguish between your ASS and a Hole in the Ground when it comes to Jesus and MAGA SBC Politics

      

        

Dabo Swinney Upstate mega church Newspring goes liberal on Women

About twenty years after President Carter figured it out Dabo Swinney mega church in Clemson and Anderson SC, two campuses, broke with the Southern Baptist Convention and their third world view on women. Somebody outted Meredith Knox on their staff as a "teaching minister" and that was all she wrote. Who knows if the congregation will start consulting Baptist News Global on a weekly basie or religion dispatches, but once you start thinking a little there aint no going back.

      Better for them Than the hard core Super Trumper Church of the Highlands in Bama with congregations from Tuscaloosa to Gadsden. Those Bastards ( check the Old Testament cause it defines them) and their 25 ccampuses are hard core fundamentalists hard wired to Turning Point USA and Charlie Kirk. They are proud of it.

     First Baptist Church Spartanburg with Trey Gowdy is almost as bad and Dabo wwill have to talk to his trustee Nikki Haley cause like Highlands, she has embraced Kirk and TPUSA.

    Nick Saban gave a million dollars to his St Francis Catholic student ministry in Tuscaloosa. So now Saban and Dabo are part of congregations Trump defines as the enemy from within.

     So lets have the conversation that matters now the train has left the station and Dabo Swinney is on it.....I think Trevor Lawrence is ready to take it up as well. at least in the off season.