America is a beautiful thing…
In Leeds, not too far from Birmingham, Vicky owns a cafe called Laney’s. Her daughters, Sharon and Laney, do the managing and cooking, Sharon’s daughter, Lillian, makes the biscuits. Hot and buttery and crispy brown on the outside, served with pepper gravy, those biscuits are so worth the sore butt of getting there.
They were sitting at a table near the coffee pot and when I filled my cup and they asked about my trip; I told them I was wandering the south talking politics with people I might disagree with.
Laney told a story about a cop escorting her out of a local dirt track car racing event for being overly affectionate with her girlfriend. She told it like it was a family story she’d told many times. Her mother and sister laughed with her as she told it.
I parked the Revival and walked the streets of Marion. In the drugstore, the girl behind the cash register said hello. I said my wife worked in a drugstore when she was in high school and we got to talking. She’d graduated in May and is going into the Air Force in the fall. I told her that I’d joined the army after high school.
There’s a fine line between curious and creep. Two old ladies approached the register. Rather than skulk around while they paid, I told her to take care and we bumped fists, enlistee and vet, and I got back on the bike.
Two or three miles down the road from Marion, I stopped to talk to TJ sitting on his horse, Red. TJ lives on a farm down the red clay road from where I pulled over. He lives with his folks raising cows and sheep and growing melons. He’s ridden bulls in the rodeo, just a couple of times, and sometimes races Red. Red’s a fast horse. TJ graduated in May, he’s thinking about welding school in the fall, but sounded tentative. I told him about the girl at the drug store. She was a classmate.
I pulled off the road and down a little track under a bridge to pee. There was pickup parked there. Twelve years ago, Cleveland retired from his job in Cleveland, he’d been a mold maker in a foundry. He grew up near Greensboro and now he’s home, fishing for catfish. His daughters and grandchildren are coming from Ohio to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday on Tuesday. He already had two nice fish in the bucket. I didn’t ask him how he came to be called Cleveland.
Chris woke me up this morning at 6:00 when he started his truck just outside my window. It’s a diesel flatbed and damn it’s loud. Chris’ company is CH Mechanical out of south Georgia. They’re moving a veneer drier from Camden to Greenville, they’ll load the last semi this morning. Chris has horses and a wife in Georgia. He talked a lot about the horses. And about a broken neck he got in ‘95 that partially disabled his right arm. After the holiday, he and his crew will spend another six weeks living in motel while they put the drier back together. When I talked to him last night, Chris was slurring his words, lean-on-the door jamb drunk.