A great Story published in the January 2013 SOUTHERN LIVIING written by Rick Bragg.

Rick Bragg a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and author of several                        best·sellingbooks, includingA/I Over But the Shoutin' andAva 's Man.

 

Born Too Late
Captivated by a time before my time, I increasingly find  myself most at home in the presence of the past  By Rick Bragg  THE HOUSE ISA CENTURY OLD. It towers into the treetops from its corner lot in Thscaloosa, two massive stories of yellow brick with a porch so wide and deepIhave watched little boys play football across it.The house is built around a massive staircase, the kind you see only in the movies .You expect to see an elegant woman descend it in her evening gown-I imagine Lauren Bacall. A ghost walks its upper rooms , people say. Iwas a guest here for months and never saw her. Still,something dwells in that house, something from another age. The couple who welcomed me inside, Ken and Jessie Fowler,are true friends. They are almost a generation older than me, a generation of grace and civility. Their house has more rooms than a Marriott, but mostly we lived in the kitchen, talking about the places they had seen and the times they had lived, of Manhattan in an age
of miniskirts, and Miami Beach when Gleasonand Sinatra played, and
glorious football teams that traveled by train.Itwas there, beside a refrigerator filled with limitless pie, I realized I was a man lost in time. I had always been most comfortable in the past. But I had never really wrapped my mind around it till then, staring at a forkful of lemon icebox, talking about how, in a bad wreck, you really can't beat a Lincoln.I do not want to turn back time. Too many people wantto do that already. Too much good, too much justice has come to be, out of the darkness of our past. But I felt a comfort in that room , and in that company, I have seldom known . Maybe that is because by taking me into their past, they took me back to my own.
The past we spoke of had music that did not make you want to murder the radio. It poured sweetly, static and all, from big console sets and Art Deco Bakelites, flew as if on a magic carpet from the orchestras in the Blue Room in NewOrleans. Hank Williams played the VFW then, and rode a big Cadillac a thousand miles to anAmerican Legion to do it again.  would have liked to have seen that.Now, country music sounds like pop music in a bad cowboy hat from Stuckey's. The radio seems mostly to consist of men holleringabout how people do notbelong. When was a boy, we listened to Swap Shop, hoping someone was unloading a hubcap for a '66 Corvair, and heard Merle Haggard sing "That's the Way Love Goes."
I used to love television. We had two channels- three if 'fhe antenna was turned  towardAnniston- but there was always something on. Now I flip through banality till my thumb is sore.Use to be, the worst thingon TVwas wr tling. Now they tell me I can watch every foot- ball game being played on this planet on my phone.I do not want to watch a football game on my phone. How silly would I look, hollering at my own palm? I used to love cars. I loved tail fins, loved the sculpture of Detroit steel. My first Mustang cost $542. Last summer, my car's catalytic converter went out and it cost me $2,500.
Sometimes it seems I do not like anything anymore.I do not like outsourcing, or multitasking, or fusion restaurants .But I remember a night when I stayed in that house. I came in very late, and eased quietly through the big rooms, every ancient board creaking underfoot. As I started up the stairs, I heard the faint sound of music. Big band, maybe? Glenn Miller? And as I eased up the stairs I heard, I believe , the sound of two people dancing. I liked that.

132  I SO U THE R LIVING  I JAN U ARY  201 3 illu strat ion by jack  Unruh

 




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