CirclesOfWagons

  Every kid needs a wonderful grandparent, and mine was named John. My Mama called him Daddy, lots of people called him Mr. Craft, and when his friends were trying to raise him on a C.B. radio, they called him High Pockets. For me, he was Papaw. He was a tall man, probably 6’3” with no shoes on, which explains the C.B. handle. On the way back from World War II, he stopped in St. Louis, met a beautiful big city girl in a U.S.O. club, and a few weeks later got on a train home with her, headed for a rural little spot in South Mississippi. He married her when they got there, and eventually he settled his wife and their four young children in a lush river bottom, a couple hundred yards from the shady banks of the Bouie River and about 60 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico. My Mama, his first born, was in her early twenties and working at the Sea Bee base in Biloxi when she met my Daddy. When they found out their first baby (me) would arrive in the spring of 1971, they bought a house across t

  At the end of a long July weekend in the woods, surrounded by friends and mostly disconnected from the outside world, late afternoon was approaching, and it was time to start winding up our stay. I wanted to be home and unloaded by dark, so I started gathering my things and packing up to head back to town. I love to escape into spaces where it’s not immediately obvious which decade we’re in, and since I liked phones a lot better when they were attached to the wall, I usually stash my cell phone under the driver’s seat whenever I’m away from home, or with people I care about, or just being purposeful in giving my full attention to something without a screen. Over the course of a long weekend like the one that was ending, I might’ve checked the phone once or twice a day, and maybe I would’ve kept it out for a while to look something up or play some music, but I wouldn’t have kept it handy, and the last time I touched it that weekend I must’ve flaked on putting it back in the truck, bec

       Outside of church, my earliest memories of music are sounds from a cheap transistor radio, playing in Mama’s kitchen from some place up higher than I could reach. And in the Deep South of the 1970’s and 80’s, radio mostly meant country music, where old hymns freely crossed over from Gospel music as bluegrass hits. And all these years later, when I hear the opening notes of an old classic like “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” being plucked out on a banjo, when the good Dr. Ralph Stanley’s distinctive voice starts to weave lonesome lyrics about a mother’s funeral over and through a sweet symphony of pickin’ and strummin’ and fiddle playin’, I know just how the cool kitchen tiles of my childhood home felt in bare feet. I couldn’t help stomp clappin’ and whirly twirly fake cloggin’ all over my Mama’s kitchen floor then, and probably no matter how old I get, I’ll still have to carve myself out a minute or two of joyful stomp twirlin’ and heehaw-in’ around whenever that old favorite come

Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington In 1970’s Mississippi, when the average home had no more than one television and none of us had ever seen a TV show in color, there was only one channel—two on a cloudy day, but only if you were lucky enough to have a rooftop antenna and committed enough to keep fiddling with the control knob ‘til you managed to set the angle just right. TV viewing was very much a one-dimensional activity in those days. We didn’t have cable or satellite service or even a remote control, so we’d just walk up to the big cabinet with a screen and a few knobs on it in the living room, press the power button and then sit on the floor to wait for it to warm up. Slowly the scenes playing on that one channel came to life, and it didn’t occur to us to question what would be on. We were delighted to watch, whatever it was. Often that was a John Wayne movie, a frontier story, some classic American tale of westward expansion. John Wayne’s territorial lifestyle was such