There was no quick way to get to Grandmother's house. No interstates zoomed from Nash to Hertford counties in eastern North Carolina. You poked along, one tobacco or soybean field at a time, more often as not stuck behind a Combine harvester moving slow as Christmas. If the cotton was high we'd pretend it was Christmas. Look, snow!
But what point was there in hurrying? After dinner (not lunch, dinner) we might sit on the porch and snap beans, or walk the grounds to pluck a fig or muscadine for dessert, or gather pecans for pies. On hot summer days, Grandaddy would climb a wooden ladder and come back down with the main ingredients for hand-cranked peach ice cream.
Before we headed back to Rocky Mount, Grandmother would play the piano for us while we picked out hymns. We could sing — I was partial to "Jesus Paid it All" — but not clap. Baptists do not clap, Grandmother always said.
“Kathryn, you can play all night and I won’t clap once,” Granddaddy once assured her. (I believe I inherited some of his dry wit, even though I broke from the family faith and became Methodist.)
I wish there was a road I could take, at any speed, that would deliver me back to their supper table in Winton, N.C. Although my grandparents are gone, I find that country roads really can take you home.
I won’t lie: I did choke up at Elvis’ grave when I visited Graceland. I was 4 when The King died but I remember it being the first time I saw adults cry. I didn’t need tissues when I watched the Peabody ducks on their daily promenade through the lobby and into the fountain of the historic Memphis hotel, but was charmed to see the little guys continue a custom dating to the 1930s.
The brothers at the Sigma Nu fraternity house at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va. were utterly nonplussed when my husband and I traipsed in a few years ago so I could see where Charlie honed his gifts of fellowship and hospitality. When he sat down in a rocking chair on the front porch I caught a glimpse of an 18-year-old from Savannah, following in his father’s footsteps yet beginning his own path toward becoming a man.
My favorite trips in recent years have been to Starkville, Miss., where Charles Gay I and II are buried. (III is buried in Savannah’s Bonaventure Cemetery, IV is still above ground in Savannah and V lives with me in Marietta). During one visit, Cousin Betsy Stark was excited to test-drive Starkville’s new Ruby Tuesday. Instead we dined in as she told us about living during the Depression, when all the family’s food came from the ground or the barn and things clicked along pretty well even though no one had money for years.
“We didn’t know we were poor,” she said.
Commuting around Atlanta, I am always in a hurry and usually running late, thanks to traffic. When heading out of town, I think it’s nice to take the four-lane instead of the highway if you can. The Chick-fil-A on Macon’s Arkwright Road/Riverside Drive exit is without question one of the most convenient places to stop before facing that desolate strip of nothing known as I-16 on the way to St. Simons, but I prefer the Nu-Way on Cotton Avenue downtown, where it’s been serving hot dogs since 1916.
If you have one more minute before the highway calls, Golden Bough Book Store, also on Cotton Avenue, has a fine collection of vintage titles. I picked up a volume of Sidney Lanier’s poems and prose there, published the very same year that James Mallis opened that first Nu-Way and originally belonging to one Dorothy Beall, who wrote her name in pencil on the first page.
“For a perfect journey, God gave us a perfect day,” begins Lanier’s piece on Florida’s Ocklawaha River.
When traveling in the South, perfect journeys can be trips back in time.
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