Blues

Spent Saturday night in Clarksdale, Mississippi at Clark House, a recently opened, beautifully renovated historic home near downtown, after lunch at City Grocery in Oxford and a little tool around Square Books. We were in Clarksdale for the launch of Delta Blues, a collection of mystery stories edited by Carolyn Haines, at the Ground Zero blues club, with proceeds going to the Rock River Foundation. I’m not a blues aficionado, and I’m pretty sure I got no right to sing the blues, but it was fun hearing a bunch of writers take the stage and sing and play their writerly hearts out for a good cause.
Whenever I arrive somewhere new, I like to get my bearings by taking a stroll, whether it’s just through the hotel lobby or around a neighborhood. It helps me feel located in that particular place, my temporary home. After we got settled into our room (I picked the one named Bottletree, of course), I headed out into the neighborhood, which borders Clarksdale’s downtown. As I walked down the sidewalk, big squares of concrete cracked and buckled by the roots of old oak trees, the wind came up, tossing the yellow jonquil blooms lining people’s yards. It occurred to me that I did in fact feel at home, and I realized that these streets I’ve walked out on from inns and hotels and bed and breakfasts in Clarksdale, in Montgomery and Monroeville and Montevallo and Hartselle, Alabama, in Inman Park in Atlanta, are like the streets where my grandmothers lived in Arkadelphia and Hot Springs, Arkansas, or the ones I rode my homemade skateboard down in Little Rock, Arkansas, where we lived on 2020 N. Arthur, an address my childhood mind free-associated with both clear vision and the knights of the round table. Forsythia was blooming, the flowering quince beginning to show its pink blossoms. I overheard the murmurings of a conversation taking place on a back porch. Someone drove up with a kid coming home from basketball practice. All around me, the houses, from grand nineteenth century to more recent twenties bungalows, seemed settled into their yards. A rainbow wind sock waved from the porch of a Victorian two-story, reminding me of an old lady with a bright scarf.

Bottle Tree arrives!

Yesterday was a red-letter day--a big box bearing my copies of Bottle Tree arrived at the door. I was tempted to hug the UPS guy but restrained myself. (Is this common among authors receiving their books?) By the way, here's where the phrase "red-letter," meaning "memorably happy," comes from: "the practice of marking in red the holy days in church calendars" (American Heritage Dictionary). Well, here's to a memorably happy day!

Unitarian Universalists

I never expected to find myself in the pulpit, but yesterday I did, sort of, speaking to the Unitarian Universalist congregation of Tuscaloosa about the book I co-edited with Wendy Reed, All Out of Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality, and our second collection of essays which we've nearly finished but don't quite have a title for yet--our working title is All Out of Faith, Again. One of our contributors has suggested Altared States, an appropriate pun for this region of the U.S.

I had a warm welcome from the congregation, which I'd been meaning to visit for a long time, and met some kindred spirits.

Here's what I said about the new book, which we hope to have out in about a year:

"In looking at these new essays to see how to organize them and what to write about them in our introduction, we found, peculiarly, that fully half of our new contributors had written either primarily or marginally about clothing, mixing the sartorial with the spiritual.

I’ve been pondering this. I remember wondering, as a child, why I had to dress up to go to church and being told that it had to do with showing respect to God. I remember that it was really important to wear a slip with your dress. Was God some kind of fashion police? Did he only listen to those who were properly attired? To the degree that I conceptualized God independently of what I’d been taught in church, I think I would have said that this being we referred to as God was more present to me in the exaltation I felt in the high limbs of a tree I climbed or in the feeling of running barefoot across a soft lawn, than in the itchy tights and hard patent-leather shoes I wore to church.

Of course, we do say something with what we wear: I want to be comfortable, I love the color red, I’d rather blend in than stand out. It’s all very well to consider the lilies in the field, but a lily never experienced closet trauma or wondered whether the field made her butt look big.

So maybe clothing is an apt metaphor for the “fit” of religious or spiritual practice. The wrong one can make you feel as though you are spiritually holding your stomach in, as with a pair of too-tight pants. When you are wearing something that fits well and suits you, you feel good, unselfconscious, at ease."