Signs and Portents

     Twenty years ago a popular bumper sticker expressed a universal truth, that being “+$#% Happens.” This prompted our state legislature to pass a law banning obscene bumper stickers, presumably so the kiddies could maintain the illusion of an ordered universe a few years longer.

     I thought at the time, and still think, the censure didn’t go far enough. They could and should have outlawed them altogether. I mean if it’s a “privilege” rather than a right to drive on the roads that you’re paying for so that the states has your “implied” consent to seize your bodily fluids and gases without a warrant, surely we can stop you from putting writing on your car that I have to read when I’m stopped at a light.

     I don’t want to read it because it’s mostly moronic.

     I don’t want to read it because I don’t care what you, anonymous motorist, would rather be doing and so long as you have brake lights, I don’t care what your vehicle stops for.

     I guess the people who sport such stickers are hoping to connect with other motorists with similar interests, e.g. a car pulls up beside them at the light, the window rolls down and the driver says, “Hey baby, I see you’d rather be doing needle point too. Your place or mine?”

     Some people like to put pre-printed jokes on their cars, often about their car or their driving, presumably to suggest their great wit, but usually conveying to the reader, “I’m an idiot, and I’m proud of it.”

     Perhaps the purest example of this phenomenon is a bumper sticker I saw in Athens, GA in the early eighties which read “We want Russia between the hedges!” (“Between the hedges” is a local idiom for the UGA football field.)

     Of course, even if bumper stickers were prohibited, there’s other means of expressing your written message to an unwilling audience, graffiti in the bathroom stall for example. (Talk about a captive audience.) At GG’s Pizza and Wings there is a simple piece of graffiti at eye level above the urinal which reads, “No amnusty,” which I think succinctly pretty much sums up that whole debate.

     And there’s nothing I see keeping people from putting signs in their yards with political speech or the ten commandments, or telling us where you’d rather be, (although the latter might be grounds for divorce,) but this right, except for a flurry at election time, is rarely exercised.

     Unfortunately this isn’t so with businesses and churches. It’s natural that stores should want to advertise their wares, but when they want to couple this with lowest-common-denominator political speech as in “Doral Menthol 2 packs for $4. God Bless America!” I gag. And am I the only person who, when given a choice, shuns the business advertising “American Owned and Operated”?

     Many churches force us to read messages, but, after all, delivering a message is one of their primary functions. Some of these are clever – though I must admit none come to mind – but most aren’t and many make me want to bash my head on the steering wheel.

     There should be a standardized test people have to pass before being allowed to write church sign messages.

     There’s a church between Social Circle and Monroe, which shall go unnamed only because I can’t remember the name of it, whose sign once informed me on the top line, “Stop drop and roll,” and on the second, “Don’t work in hell.”

     I took this as a nonsensical series of commands (“stop, drop, roll” and “don’t work in hell”) until my children explained to me that “stop, drop, and roll” was a fire safety procedure and that the message writer was grammatically illiterate.

     And churches and church people sometimes use bumpers to spread the word. I don’t know about you, but I do not believe grace will visit me via bumper sticker. It’s not salvation; it’s a country music song. (Maybe it wuz drugs/And maybe it wuz liquor/But I found Jesus on a Bumper Sticker.)

     Once about ten years ago, even the Presbyterians resorted to bumper-sticker evangelism – and when I say Presbyterians, I don’t mean the wacky fundamentalist sect; I mean the common milktoast variety we all know and love. Some of them were sporting stickers saying “I’d rather be in church,” which caused me to buttonhole a Presbyterian minister in People’s Drugstore and tell him I was printing my own bumper stickers saying simply “I’m so bored” and that I’d be placing them just over the Presbyterian stickers.

     My plan worked. If there’s one thing Presbyterians can do, it’s network. Within a matter of weeks the stickers disappeared nationwide.

The Last White Mama

My wife, Cynthia Millsaps, is not, in fact, the last white mother whose children call her “Mama,” but she is one of a dwindling few in the American South, the home of mama’s last stand. I and all of my friends grew up calling our parents Mama and Daddy. Although we grew up hearing The Beaver and Wally call their parents Mom and Dad, these were people who lived in some strange Yankee place. These were people who would name their son “Theodore.” Besides, we called our parents Mama and Daddy because those were their proper titles.
Now, of course, a large majority of white southern kids, and a growing minority of African-American ancestry, call their parents Mom and Dad. I hear toddlers calling out for mama but that stops when they get to school. I even know adults of my advanced age who grew up with a mama and daddy who’ve been replaced by a mom and dad. I don’t think it’s only the influence of the media that has wrought this transformation. The Beaver and “My Three Sons” weren’t able to shake the hold of mama and daddy for my generation, so I think there’s more going on here.
But what does it matter? You may well ask. It matters because Mom and Dad ain’t got no soul, which is, I believe, a major reason they got stuck with those diminutives. That they have no soul is easily illustrated. If Bob Dylan had sung, “Oh, Mom, can this really be the end?” it would have been ineffectual, because no matter what combination of Texas medicine and railroad gin the singer has consumed, the problem can’t be that bad if he’s seeking solace from someone called Mom. Similarly, if you “turn twenty-one in prison doing life without parole,” and “no one could steer you right” but Mom tried, it’s no wonder you’re doing hard time Yo mama would have given it a serious, soulful try.




And speaking of “yo mama,” if you’re looking for fisticuffs and you issue the challenge, “Yo mom,” you’ll get no respect. “Yo mom? Yo mom? What’s the matter with you man? I wouldn’t embarrass myself fighting a pussyass like you.” And Yankee fans could never have gotten Pedro Martinez’s goat if their chant had been, “Who’s your dad?”
So how did Mama and Daddy lose their souls and become the cardboard cutouts Mom and Dad? I have a couple of theories about that.
I first noticed this trend in the 1980’s when I realized social workers and school teachers were referring to people whose names they knew, not as Mr. Jones and Mrs. Jones, or even “the mother” or “your father,” but as Mom and Dad, as in, “I’ve spoken with Mom and she says Heather and Justin are home every night, but Dad says she goes out to bars every night and the kids run wild.” Not only did they refer to the parents in the third person as Mom and Dad, they would actually address them in that manner as in, “Dad says you’re a bar-hopping crack whore. What do you have to say about that, Mom?”
They must have picked up this nomenclature in state university departments of education and social work. Some influential educator somewhere -- probably a disciple of the same behavioral psychology which decided that following a predetermined schedule of stratagems and goals was an effective substitute for scholarship, talent and intuition -- started referring to dealing with moms and dads and stratagems and goals for having Mom and Dad “utilize” goal-oriented “methodology,” and it spread like wildfire through departments nationwide. I’m willing to bet this unknown influential educator was not from the South; if he were his mama would skin him alive.
If you think there’s no harm in the “momming” of America, think again. Serious consequences can ensue from such cavalier pigeonholing. I’ve read that Cindy Sheehan thought President Bush was disrespectful to her in his initial meeting with her and other parents of soldiers killed in Iraq because he addressed her as “Mom.” I can just hear him. “Mom, I know how hard it must be to lose a child.” It’s obvious the man is a nitwit but how could his handlers let him utter something like that? Does he get it from his wife, a former school teacher? And doesn’t he claim to be from Texas? If his mama were from Texas, she’d skin him alive, but that was left to Ms. Sheehan.
(A kindred phenomenon of artificial intimacy is the shift of ostensibly educated people toward addressing adults whom they have never met by their first names. I first noticed this in salesmen but it has spread to professionals.)
My second theory is that Mama and Daddy lost their titles by losing their entitlement to them. They stopped being Mama and Daddy by passing their children off to day care, divorcing each other. How can you address your father’s or mother’s third spouse as Mama or Daddy? Mom or Dad is all they deserve. For that matter, are you going to call the man who divorced yo mama, Daddy? Daddy wouldn’t do that, but some guy called Dad might.
My own children are now twenty and twenty-three years old. My wife and I never suggested that they call us one thing or the other. When referring to each other to our children we used “Cynthia” and “Ellis,” “your mother” or “your father,” and we certainly never referred to ourselves in the third person, as in, “Give Mommie the butcher knife, sweetie.” They called Cynthia “Mama” because that’s who she was, and she never relinquished that position even though almost all their friends had moms and dads.
(I’m not suggesting our children came up with “Mama” and “Da” in a vacuum. [They call me “Da,” as do all their friends, but that’s another essay entirely.] They developed “mama” the way all children with English-speaking mothers do. “Ma” is as close as neophyte speakers can come to “moth-,” and although they realize there’s another syllable to deal with, forget that noise, it’s as hard as the first one. Just stick another “ma” on there. And I’m not a linguist but I suspect “Da” is as close as they can get to “Fa,” the same way they say “dis” and “dat” before they can make the “th” sound.)
So if you live in Jackson, Mississippi, and your children call you Mom or Dad, am I saying that’s a problem? Of course not; can’t you take a joke? But I am saying it might be a symptom, and the joke may be on you.
How come my children still call their mother, “Mama”? I think it’s because one or both of their parents were almost always with them or available to be with them during there pre-school years. We played with them and shared their fantasies, but didn’t talk down to them because they were children. We didn’t act one way and expect them to act another, and when they ventured into the world of moms and dads, they saw nothing they wished to substitute for the world of Mama and Da.
And by the way, their mama does dance and their daddy does rock and roll.

Paper Covers Rock: A Talking, Traveling Testimonial

I’m 53 years old, a feat I’ve achieved by not having died yet, which if you’d followed my lifestyle closely you’d know to be no small achievement. I’ve been a busboy, a waiter, a chef, a criminal defense attorney, a newspaper columnist, a writer of fiction, a husband, a parent, and now I’m embarking on the career for which all this has prepared me: the manager of a rock and roll band.
The band, The Cool S.W.A.P., are, like me, residents of Newton County. Two are friends of my kids who for years now have hung around my house playing my records, playing guitars, consuming my consumables, singing. Twenty year-old John T, it turns out, was born to sing rock and roll. T.J., also 20, has a driven work ethic that extends only to making music. The other two guys are a little older and have been professional musicians for a while. Scottie B, 28, is a drummer who doesn’t miss a lick, and Marshall McCart is a 30 year old UGA grad who works two day jobs. He’s also one of the best guitarists you’re ever likely to see up close.
I missed their first live show, caught their second in June on the patio of a Covington restaurant and was unprepared for how good they are. A carload of beautiful bohemian dancing girls materialized from somewhere, made me dance with them until I couldn’t stand it no more, and just as abruptly went on their way. Since then I’ve been the manager of The Cool S.W.A.P., an avocation that so far has cost me several hundred dollars in cash, gasoline, alcohol and sleep deprivation.
The rock venues of Covington are not the biggest or most prolific, which led us to quickly decide we want to make it in Athens because, as the Drive By Truckers have Carl Perkins say of Nashville, it’s “where you go to see if what is said is so.” So on a Monday in early August, T.J., John T and I, armed with a home-printed promo package and a demo of seven songs recorded in Marshall’s basement, set out for Athens via Madison, where we hope to book some shows.
Things are not exactly hopping on a Monday afternoon with school not in session in the Classic City, but we manage to locate Eyal Reisen and book two shows at DT’s Down Under and leave a couple of demos at places where we might even get paid. I’ve made calls to these places the week before, and I’m surprised that people remember my name and apologize for not having returned my calls, but I suspect this is partly due to my membership in W.A.M.G.A.T., one of the most privileged minority groups in the world: White Anglo-Saxon Males Graying at the Temples. Fast food restaurant managers spot me in the back of the line and say, “May I take your order sir?”
We head back on a curricular route by Lake Oconee because a waitress in Madison has told us we should leave a demo at a place named Zac’s which books live bands. My mouth tastes bad from smoking a lot of cigarettes, which seems to be a prerequisite for playing rock and roll.
“T.J.,” I inquire, “You got any chewing gum, mints, candy or something?”
“Look in the glove compartment.”
“Nothing’s in here but traffic tickets and whatever’s in this box.”
“Condoms.”
“Are they flavored?”

Wednesday, August 10, 2005
I call Murphy Wolford at Tasty World and he’s not only listened to our demo, he likes it and wants to put us on stage, Tuesday August 30th at 10:30, the first of three bands. Better news, we’ll get paid, one third of the door after the house takes $110.00 operating expenses. Can we play a 40 minute set of original material? Murphy wants to know. “Yes,” I assure him, because we are Brer Rabbit and our music is the brier patch.
That evening, T.J., John T., my son Jack -- an Emory student and sometime contributor to the band -- and I take two acoustic guitars and head off to open mic night at The Celtic Tavern in Conyers, where T.J. says we can win money. We get to do three songs. The first is a creation of Jack’s called “Natural Light,” which celebrates the pleasures of relieving oneself off the front porch. The second is a composition of mine, a sing-along called “When Queers Can Get Married,” a Randy Newmanesque satire about a homophobic young man who is uncomfortable with the idea of homosexual unions.
Conyers is about as red state as you can get. We open to a packed house who have come to hear the amateur efforts of their friends and relatives, and midway through the first verse of “Queers” we have cleared the room. People shout angrily on their way out. The place looks like Pompeii after Versavius erupts. Drinks are left unfinished and cigarettes burning in ashtrays. The old and infirm are abandoned in a mad scramble to protect the young.
Incredibly, we still win enough money to cover our bar tab, which under the circumstances we felt obliged to run up as high as we could.

Thursday August 11, 2005
One of the reasons the S.W.A.P. is so good is that they practice hard three nights a week. I try to make at least one, offering production advice and feedback.
They usually follow my advice because rock and roll has been the soundtrack to my life, which roughly coincides with the history of the genre.
Sometimes my feedback is simply awestruck praise. At the end of a particularly tight rendition of our “Sight Out of Mind,” I tell them the The Strokes only wish they had a song that good, but I pull no punches when the sound doesn’t suit me. “Too much guitar solo there. Save it for when we’re playing all day in a baseball stadium.” Marshall’s verse on “The Weight” sounds like he’s trying to do it the way Richard Manuel would. Now that he’s dead. The new song they’re working on sounds like a Pure Prairie League B-side.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Tonight we’re playing our first Athens gig, taking the stage at midnight at DT’s Down Under. Somewhere along the way I pick up a Flagpole and read the first part of Ben Gerrard’s informative article on “Cracking The Scene” as a new band in Athens. The Cool S.W.A.P.’s excellent management, it seems, is already doing everything right.
It’s a good time to be playing, because it’s the night before the first day of fall semester. Walking down Clayton Street in one of my Colonel Parker costumes -- seersucker or linen, always the Panama hat -- it’s immediately apparent to me that I’m the only person on the street who is not a kid. They are spilling out of barroom doors, trash talking, showing lots of skin, vomiting in sewer grates.
They look at me guardedly, as if I might be The Man. I smile and nod, feeling like a character in a Velvet Underground song.
Them: “Hey white boy. What are you doing downtown? You chasing our woman around?”
Me: “Oh no suh, not me. That’s the last thing on my mind. I’m just waiting for my man.”
Although their bitches do look fine.
DT’s is like the basement of a frat house, a frat house that has severely gone to seed: a bar on one end, a band on the other, and not much in he middle but a little patch of concrete floor infused with decades of spilled beer. We’re right at home here; it’s a lot like Marshall’s basement.
Most of the best and brightest of our Covington friends, including my eighteen year-old daughter, are students here. They’re out in force and they bring people with them, fifty or so, half of them ridiculously good looking females.
“Yo! Da! Wassup?” they yell as I enter. They call me “Da.” Perhaps we can discuss why that is some other time.
The set opens, at my suggestion, with “Seven Nation Army,” a song they always nail. When you hear those opening bass notes, I say, it’s like “Satisfaction.” You say to yourself, “Oh, this place. I’ve been here before. I love this place.”
And that’s the way it is. The band hits the ground running and never looks back, cranking out one full-tilt rocker after another, luring the crowd into a screaming, jumping frenzy. Scottie B is happy as he can be. Marshall mostly shies away behind a post, kicking guitar ass like Clapton unbound.
The young guys though, have never had this much stage presence. They’re doing synchronized jumps; John T gets down on the floor. It’s all these sunny young tits, I know, that has wrought this transformation. Aside from the aforementioned “Miracle of the Dancing Bohemians,” we don’t get this in Covington.
I sit at the bar thinking that the staff at DT’s is amazed at how good my band is. People start wandering in from the street. An attractive young woman of graduate school age walks up to me and says, “What are you doing here?”
I explain that I’m a friend of the band. She tells me I look like someone she’d really like to talk to.
It’s too loud for talk, but she yells that she just walked in because this band sounds so good. “Who are they?”
“The Cool S.W.A.P.,” I shout, just as the Rastafarian with whom she came pulls her out, and before I have the wits to give her a business card and tell her, if she says she’s calling about the band, my secretary will let her talk to me for free.


Back on stage, a couple of our more zealous Covington fans have removed their shirts and are helping John T play the congas. At this show, at this stage of our career, this is kind of cute. Later we will employ Hell’s Angels who will break their fingers should they attempt such a stunt.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
DT’s has been calling my office today wanting us to play the next night and just about any other time we want. As a matter of fact, we can pretty much be the house band as long as we’re willing to play for free.
I meet with the band at practice to discuss this and a couple of other things. One of the other things is that I’ve had the kind of brainstorm they’d be paying me for if we were getting paid. I’ve called Flagpole and talked to Mr. Gerrand’s editor, Chris Hassiotis, and told him I’d read Mr. Gerrand’s article with interest because I’m managing a band which is right now doing what the article suggested. What if Mr. Gerrand were to cover our upcoming shows and report on the progress of a “baby band” actively trying to “crack the scene?”
Mr. Hassiotis seems interested, or maybe he’s just being nice, but he’s actually heard of us and will pass this information along to Mr. Gerrard, who is currently out of town, and have him get in touch with me. Later it occurs to me that I failed to ascertain how long Mr. Gerrand would be out of town.
The other thing I want to do is demo a song T.J. and I wrote the night before, which I sing with T.J. on guitar. It fails to get Marshall’s endorsement, a prerequisite to anything this band does and with good reason. If, like Tom Hanks in That Thing You Do, you were saying who was what in The Cool S.W.A.P., (the funny one, the brains) Marshall would be “the talent.”
We call DT’s and tell them we’ll do the two free shows to which we agreed and if they need a fill-in tomorrow we’ll do it if as a favor, but they’ll have to give us a little cash to cover gas and cigarettes. We end up rescheduling our Thursday show for Friday, September 2, the night before the Boise State game.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Yesterday I struck a jury in a drug case and the judge told me my trial will begin Wednesday at 9:00am. There’s no way around this. If it were any other show I’d stay home and go to bed, but the Tasty World show is the biggest we’ve ever played.
So I’m here, regretting that I’ll only get five hours sleep, regretting more that I won’t get to hear the bands after us.
Thanks to the cover change probably, our crowd is a little smaller than Thursday, but we’re still more than covering the house’s overhead with our fans alone. Also, they’re more subdued. This isn’t a place, I think, where people take off their shirts.
The set opens with “A.M. Hindsight,” a song with more hooks than Wilt Chamberlain, and I know everything will be alright. They have a sound man here who knows what he’s doing, and I can hear things I haven’t heard before, a few of which I want to change.
The highlight of the night is “Talking, Traveling Blues,” a pedestrian name for one of the crunkest songs you’ll ever hear. By the end of the show a group of girls sitting behind me who’ve come to hear the next band are yelling, “Oh, yeah! Cool S.W.A.P!”
In the morning my five hours of sleep has kept me sharp. I’m thinking about my closing where I wrap myself in the flag and make fun of the State’s witnesses, when an unexpected piece of evidence causes my client to bail and plead guilty.
By 1pm. I’m home having a couple of drinks and a cigar. At 3:00 I take a nap, get up at five and burn a pizza, then repeat the process and sleep eleven hours.
In the morning I learn that while I was out the price of gasoline has gone up fifty cents a gallon and the City of New Orleans now looks like an apocalyptic scene in a science fiction movie. I should be concerned about these things, I know, but what I’m really concerned abut is what Murphy thought about our show.
Friday, September 2, 2005
Walking in from the courthouse parking deck, the east side of Athens for some reason smells bad tonight.
The smell subsides as I make my way down Clayton, and I notice that while there are as many kids in town as the night before school started, they are considerably less raucous, and I soon see why: a healthy percentage of the coeds on the sidewalks are window shopping with their mothers, some even with they mama’s mamas, no doubt here for tomorrow’s game.
Ten o’clock at DT’s, not much is happening. There are about a dozen spectators, and the house sound system is providing a major glitch in that no sound is coming out the lead singer’s mike. The band asks me to work on this problem which is something like getting Mr. Magoo to handle reading the road map, then I engage the guy working the door who makes no more headway than did Magoo.
After ten minutes or so of shoulder shrugging, Damion -- a good Samaritan I’d earlier met outside, and a keyboard player with an accomplished band of his own, Greg and the Gruntones, who’ll be on at midnight -- addresses the problem and fixes it in no time. People have been drifting in and by 10:30 when T.J. hits the jangly intro to “American Girl,” our usual cadre of fans is here along with others I haven’t seen before.
Early on I make the remarkable discovery that one can purchase a healthy pour of Kettle One Dutch vodka for the nominal price of four dollars and fifty cents at this fine establishment, a phenomenon that later in the evening will lead to some minor property damage, but I’m not driving, and for now I feel like Jesus’ son as the band rips off a blistering Zeppelin medley that has jaws dropping.
In addition to the Kettle One, I’m feeling good because Murphy wants us back a Tasty World on September 26, we’re recording and E.P. of new material at an actual recording studio on August 18th, and although Flagpole hasn’t called me back, I’ve decided to write the article myself because, after all, it’s the sort of thing I do.
Like every show that we’ve played, this one is better than the last. I meet my daughter’s roommate, a clever girl who has brought her own contingent to swell the progress and already knows “Talking Traveling Blues” is her favorite song. When our show ends I mill around waiting for the Gruntones, but I only get to hear one song when T.J. says we have to leave because the guy on whose couches we are to sleep is about to get in a fight on the sidewalk.
And so we rock on, boats against the current -- O.K., you’ve heard that one. How about, “I’d like to thank you on behalf of the group and myself, and I hope …”

Words I prefer not to hear

Comes now the essay I promised when I stopped writing a regular column: words and expressions I prefer not to hear in 2006. First we’ll have a prologue, then a top-ten list.
Prologue
Many of these annoyances come form the food service industry. As I’ve previously ranted in these pages, I don’t wish to be commanded to “enjoy” after my server has placed food before me. When I’m repeatedly asked, “Is everything alright?” at least one thing is not alright-- my server is not very good at the job-- but I also suspect I’m in an establishment I’m not likely to “enjoy.” The same is true when I enter a restaurant to lunch alone (possibly so I can work on something like this column undisturbed) and am invariably asked, “Just one?” as if I’m not only a social pariah but a burden to business. I want to reply, “No, supremely and abundantly one, one with the universe, one of God’s children, one who will tip bigger than the party of three requesting separate checks even though I’m assaulted by kitsch.” I’ve tried beating them to the punch by walking up and saying, “one,” but I’m getting old and can’t smack them with my notebook before they can reply, “Just one?”
At least food service jargon is confined to the trade, but when the corporate media, the entertainment industry or political commentators latch onto the trendy expression of the month, it spreads like a pandemic throughout the industry and into the population at large. I no longer care to think outside the box, and I’m not going to push an envelope unless it shoves me first. “Senior moment” is only funny if you’re so senior you can’t recall having heard it before, and I’m already getting tired of hearing a confluence of events described as “a perfect storm.”
Sports broadcasters are not only the worst offenders at repeating the popularly trite, they spawn a cornucopia of banality of their own. Once one of them spoke of “leaving it all on the floor” (court, field) they all had to say it in their sleep. The “walk-off” homerun didn’t exist two years ago, but now a summer broadcast of “Sportscenter” can’t go by without one. And no, Georgia Tech is not within three points of the lead, they’re exactly three points behind. Sportscasters are the worst abusers, if not indeed the originators, of the fallacy of referring to a particular individual as one of several of the same even if that individual is supremely singular, i.e., “your Barry Bonds, your Michael Jordans, your Jesus Christs.” Bobby Knight, famous for not suffering fools lightly, when asked how Indiana would fare when it faced “the Ohio States and the Purdues,” replied, “There’s more than one Purdue? When did this happen?”
I’d prefer not to hear pointless redundancies this year, each and every one of them, irregardless of how much you want to say them at this point in time, (Did you think we might think you were referring to some continuum other than time?) and I don’t want to hear anyone with any claim to being from the American South say that anything has “class,” (Everything has class, from the Brahamn to the untouchable) much less call anything “classy.”
The Top Ten List
10. “My ex” That X person is a human being whom you in your infinite wisdom selected from among billions as your soul mate. He or she is not diminished by your diminutive, you are.
9. “Quote-unquote” What does this mean? Its users are seldom quoting anyone, and what’s with the “unquote?”
8. “Has issues” I have issues with this expression because I’m sick of hearing it, the same as with
7. “Challenged” It was funny about once. Its current users are language-challenged.
6. “Proactive” Suddenly everything and everybody worth their salt is. I’m going to plan ahead so I won’t have to be.
5. “is priceless” I can mute the fiftieth nauseating version of the MasterCard commercial, but when you print your version on T-shirts and coffee cups to promote your organization and to show me how clever you are, unfortunately you do.
4. “Mom” Call your own mother “Mom” if you choose, but I say, “ Yo mama’s such a half-wit she don’t even get a whole name.” A level of purgatory is reserved for newspaper people who refer to mothers generally as “moms.” (“Mom says kids learn good in home school.”) A much lower level is set aside for those in social services and related fields who actually address people to whom they are not related as “Mom” and “Dad.” (Dad says the children are unsupervised because you’re a bar-hopping crack whore. What do you say to that, Mom?”
3. “24-7” A woman once interviewed for employment with me and the first time she said she was on the job 24-7 I knew we wouldn’t be a good fit, the third time she said it I foresaw that her employment by me would end in homicide and me in need of a lawyer.
2. “Veggie” No explanation required, I trust. If you use this term, you’re not reading this column because it has more words than pictures.
1. “Utilize” Out of the thousands of times you’ll hear or read this word next year, you’ll encounter maybe one instance of correct usage. Many were assigned The Elements of Style, but few read. In the fifty or so years since Strunk and White first lamented this situation, the cancer has spread throughout society. “Utilize” is now used as a synonym for “use” by a legion of people who want to sound techno-scientifically important.




Dick Vitale is probably the worst offender, but then Mr. Vitale, unless he has no former spouse, had used all ten expressions on this list in the last hour. There’s nothing Dick Vitale can’t utilize: talent, quickness, athleticism, even caution.
“Utilize” means to find a use for something formerly thought to be useless, such as the rectangle of matted lint one removes from the filter of a clothes dryer. One does not “utilize” caution unless maybe one discovers a lost stockpile previously believed to have been thrown to the wind.

Chapter 13, In which Wallace meets his maker

My father died before he was sixty-five, in the early 1970’s from natural causes that remain a mystery to me. At the time I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have, partly because I was awash in the sea of uncertainty which might and did engulf a young man from my peculiar background thrust into the wider world of social and spiritual upheaval which was America at that time, but also because for a long time I could not grasp that Preacher Millsaps was dying. The father whom I left when I moved to Atlanta at seventeen had been a robust man of sixty who could outwalk and outwork men half his age.
I remember the instant I realized he was dying. I was riding with him in the big Plymouth, and for the first time ever he was driving slowly and carefully on open road. This from a man who once passed an Ellijay policeman on a double yellow line because the cop was poking along with traffic lined up behind him.
(My father had little respect for wealth and power in themselves, only the means by which they were attained if he deemed them praiseworthy. He paid the ticket eventually, but not until we had visited half the merchants in Ellijay, all of whom he seemed to know, to protest what he saw as an abuse of power.)
There on the road between Madola and Epworth, I realized that my father, since the last time I had ridden with him, maybe the year before, had grown suddenly and dramatically old.
He, of course, saw what was happening well before that day in the Plymouth and, I see now, completed some things he thought he needed to do. In those last few years while I was away, in and out of school, he, sometimes with my help, but more often alone or with my brother-in-law Jack, went into the mountains and disassembled two snake-infested log cabins, one built in the 1880’s and one in the 1840’s by an ancestor named Stepp, transported and reassembled them into a single house on farmland he owned in Epworth.
He sat in the back yard and with a hatchet split cedar shingles from trees he had felled, then recreated the type of roof that would have originally topped the cabins. The chimney was made from rock which he hauled from the creek, evaluating each piece for fit. The floors and ceiling were the same wide boards from the original houses. The leftover chestnut boards were used to panel a kitchen he built onto a house he had built in the 1930’s, and in which my mother would live for twenty years after his death. (She covered the chestnut with yellow wallpaper, over her children’s protest, because it brightened up the room. It was, after all, her house and her kitchen.) Later, after the house was assembled and he was unable to do heavy lifting, he returned to the chair in the backyard and with a hatchet and knife separated from hickory logs long, thin strips of wood which he wove into bottoms for straight-backed chairs for his cabin’s kitchen.
A couple of years after my father’s death, I lived for a year in the cabin Preacher Millsaps willed to his son. Five years later, the money I got from selling it to my sister enabled me to afford law school.
People sat outside Lebanon Church in folding chairs at my father’s funeral, listening to the service over loud speakers. I remember that by force of will I did not weep, because my father hadn’t at his mother’s funeral because, he said, she was gone to a better place. I remember my Aunt Myrtle saying of the seminary-schooled preacher who delivered the eulogy, “Grover Jones said Wallus was a jane-yus, said there’s no telling what that man could’a done if he’d had an edjacation.”
Although I experienced tremendous grief at my father’s death, I have sometimes felt relief that we were spared the conflict that surely would have arisen from my lifestyle choices, that the only time I know he felt ashamed of me was that day on the Little League field, but that is self-serving speculation on my part.
There was a year or so in my early twenties that I was so depressed I can now remember little about the period other than where I lived and worked. During that time my father appeared to me in a dream. In the dream, I am sitting on a park bench with my head in my hands, distraught. My father, who in the dream I know to be dead, comes and sits beside me and I tell him that I don’t know what to do. He puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “I know it’s hard son, but I can see you’re doing the best you can.” I don’t know where dreams come from, but I know I held onto that one like a talisman, a lifebuoy.
Now that we’ve killed off our hero; it’s time for this story to end, and exercising my perverse sense of symmetry, since we started back in Chapter I with John Lennon’s spoken intro to the Beatles’ last L.P., (“in which Doris gets her oats”) I opt to end with a paraphrase of his closing.
I’d like to thank you on behalf of Preacher Millsaps and meself, and I hope we passed the audition.
T.T.F.N.

Chapter 12, In which I disappoint

Looking back, I think for the most part I was a source of pride to my father before I left home for college. I excelled in school and could and did memorize long passages of scripture and all the books of the Bible when some competition required it, and I could take down any kid I ever met in a “sword drill.”
I guess it’s time for another aside since I suspect that there are those among the unbaptized -- and when I say baptized, I mean the real thing, dunking like a donut, not some sprinkling with holy water mumbo jumbo -- who don’t know what a sword drill is or was. The sword drill was the ingenious fusion of Southern Baptists’ desire to indoctrinate their young with Biblical minutiae, with children of the fifties and sixties fascination with westerns and particularly the cowboy gunfight. (Other sects may have adopted this rite, but I see that as somewhat like comparing spaghetti westerns with John Wayne and Wyatt Earp.)
Children were placed in a line before an adult with their Bibles hung like six-shooters at there sides. The adult would then say, “Present swords” and the kids would bring the Bibles up flat on there right palms, their left hands placed gently on the top, left thumbs rubbing the gilded edges of the leaves like itchy trigger fingers. The adult would then cite a Bible verse, say Malachi 3:12, and then, I believe, “Charge,” (although I like to think it was “Draw”) pages would rifle and the first child to locate the passage, me if I were in that line, would step forward and read the verse, smoke rising in a gentle plume over the pages.
If you were the best kid in your class or your church, the quick draw sheriff who kept the peace, I was the punk kid whose daddy you had gunned down, my entire childhood spent splattering Bible verses like whisky bottles tossed in the air, coming to gun you down. It would be a fair fight, but I would blow you away, and when the smoke cleared you would be found writhing on your back between the pulpit and the front pew, your life’s blood oozing into the carpet since medical science was not then as advanced as now, and a fusillade to the gut of “begats” and “wherefores” was usually fatal.
(Of course, the only thing that could have made this drill more authentic would have been to have eliminated the “Present swords” bit of business and just let us shoot from the hip, but I assume that the game’s inventors envisioned a scenario where greenhorns would lose their grip and send Bibles sailing across the sanctuary, possibly endangering candelabras and the picture of Jesus, if not the drill instructor herself.)
Meanwhile back at Daddy and me, I was saying my father was mostly pleased with me. In addition to being a book whiz, I enjoyed doing things he had as a child -- hunt, fish, hike, camp -- but I also was proficient at that only competition of (real) boys that then existed in Cherokee County, the Little League baseball field.
I have previously told you that it was on the baseball field that I was for the first and only time ashamed of my father. It was later on that same field, a perfectly manicured tract in a bend of the Etowah River, that I would later cause my father for the only time I can recall to say that he was ashamed of me.
Which is not to say I didn’t disappoint him at times, but these incidents were nearly always things involving property damage, rather than the wound to another human involved in the incident on the Etowah. I’m not even counting involuntary property damage, windows and windshields I shattered while honing my baseball skills, but rather things like the time when I was eight or nine when he came out of some church member’s house to discover me amusing neighborhood children by tossing a pointed carpenters file, Jim Bowie style, into the trunk of the only tree in their little front yard. He was disappointed in this error of judgment, but he didn’t say ashamed. He made me apologize to the host, who of course said it was nothing, and then spent a while explaining how old and valuable the tree was, how it was an ornament in these people’s yard, how long it would live and how I had left it forever scared. Up until then I’d thought nothing about nailing stuff to trees. Cowboys did it all the time.
(Although I did have this continuing thing with knives and wood. My nephew David [the worm gatherer] and I were returned to the scene of the crime and lectured after we’d used the pocket knifes we’d recently been mistakenly deemed old enough to own to surreptitiously bore holes in our church pew to ease our boredom during Sunday Night Service. Later when I was a sophomore in high school my father would have to make amends after Buster Byrd -- son of former Lt. Governor Garland T. Byrd, from somewhere in south Georgia -- and I spent our spare time during a summer debate workshop tossing Byrd’s bowie knife [again, Bowie style] into the solid wood door to our dorm room. In my defense I can only offer that to this day I can sing you the theme song to the early 60’s T.V. series, “Jim Bowie.”)
When I was eleven I played on a Little League team which lost every game. I had never pitched, but our pitching was so bad that one day late in the season I got the chance to record a couple of outs. For the next week I make my father squat with a catcher’s mitt on the carport with the utility room as the backstop while I battered his shins with errant pitches. The next game, when we were again down ten runs and the usual pitchers were used up, the coach came out to make the change and I was already a few steps toward the mound from my second base position when he motioned to the outfield for a ten-year-old who was his next door neighbor’s kid to come to the mound.
Things are generally very quiet when a kid’s baseball team is changing pitchers and they’re ten runs down. When I saw Waters trotting to the mound I said, to no one in particular, but, I was later to learn, loud enough for people down river to hear, “Waters? He cain’t pitch!”

Chapter Eleven, In which Wallace disappoints

I only remember one occasion that I felt ashamed of my father. I was nine years old and it involved baseball, my consuming passion at the time.
Wallace had tried to discourage me from “trying out” for Little League. He was afraid I wouldn’t “make the team,” but I was insistent. He mentioned something about one of my sisters crying after not making some team -- school basketball, I guess. I shouldn’t come crying to him when it happened, he said, but I was insistent and he relented.
Some of my classmates had already played a year before I could start, because I was the youngest person in my grade, so I knew it wasn’t possible to not “make the team” of which there were twelve. I also knew something else my father didn’t, which was that I could play some ball.
I knew I could play some ball from competition at recess and after school, where I could stay as long as I wanted because I walked to and from it on a trail through Mr. Barrett’s woods. There were other “walkers” to play ball with at Holly Springs Elementary, and some of the best players had no choice but to stay after school because they rode the “Sixes” bus which couldn’t board until a bus had completed its forty-five minute “Toonigh” run and returned for them.
I had also virtually memorized the “Baseball” entry in my World Book Encyclopedia, and read every book remotely involving baseball in the little school’s library. I dazzled my elders in the Temple of Baseball Lore. They could name a good player from their childhood and I could tell them definitively whether that player was in the Hall of Fame. The “Black Sox Scandal” and “The House that Ruth Built” were things I relived with shame and pride even though they’d occurred a generation or two before my birth. I sifted through the box scores of every game in the paper. Then there was “The Game of the Week” from which I gathered tidbits from Pee-Wee and Old Diz. I could tell you how many stitches are on a baseball (“a hunerd and eight, podner”) and sing the Falstaff Beer jingle.
My father, I was to learn, knew next to nothing about baseball.
At one of the first practices with the Bears, my first team, I was playing second base when somebody fouled a ball into the stands behind third where my father sat watching. He retrieved the ball and threw it back in -- there’s no other way to say this that could capture my horror at the time -- like a girl.
I don’t know how long I stood there stunned before my face flushed. I’m fairly certain that if the next pitch had been hit my way, it could have smacked me in the side of the head before I moved.
If you don’t know what throwing like a girl means, it’s a fairly sure bet that you yourself throw like a girl, and more likely than not are, or were, a girl, or maybe an Eskimo. This is far less true now that stereotypes and sports opportunities for females have changed, but in 1960 there was only one girl in my school who didn’t throw like a girl, and she was a born athlete.
My father threw like a girl, I realized after I had digested this information, because he’d never played baseball. It’s entirely possible he was an adult before he ever saw anyone -- child or adult -- play the game of baseball.
I can assure you there were no baseball fields on Jack’s River. The game of baseball before Babe Ruth in the 1910’s, when my father was the age I was when I learned the game, was far from the national obsession it was to become, and then, before radio, Jack’s River was largely sequestered from what went on in flatland America.
More importantly, baseball is not a game well suited to mountainous forest land. A very small percentage of major league players traditionally have come from Appalachia; they came disproportionately from flat farm and pasture lands where summers and days were long.
Prior to that day when he threw the foul ball back, I had thought that my father, Preacher Millsaps, in spite of being fifteen or twenty years older than my friend’s parents, could do anything as well or better than any of them. None of my teammates mentioned it, surprising considering how cruel boys are to each other at that age, maybe for the same reason Wallace and I never discussed it -- it was just too embarrassing. It would have been like making fun of someone for having only one leg. Throwing a baseball well was that central to our notion of respectable male identity.
There would of course come a time when I looked back and was ashamed of my nine-year-old self for being ashamed of my father for not being able to do what he’d never needed to learn, but long before that, from the day it happened onward, there was a chink in his armor, and for all I knew there could be others.