SkyWatch Friday: Straight To You

I found out by accident -- actually, thanks to a kind comment by a wonderful photographer named Carver -- that I am "hosting" SkyWatch Friday this week.

I sent my picture of Folly Beach, South Carolina, to the owners of SkyWatch many months ago and did not hear back from them, so of course it was a pleasant surprise to find they'd decided to use my picture.

SkyWatch Friday is a great site that is all about one thing: pictures of the sky, all over the world, at all times of day, in all its moods, photographed by people like me who love ... taking pictures of the sky!

It's been a while since I participated in SkyWatch Friday, so here you go. These photos were taken in Hartsville and Bishopville, South Carolina, on September 8, 2010.

The sky was showing off something fierce that day and y'all, it was HOT.

My pictures are accompanied by the evocative lyrics of Straight To You, the final track on Josh Groban's fantastic new CD, Illuminations.  

(I know, I know ... the lyric doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's called poetry and I love it.)

(Well, the part about running to somebody because you're captured one more time makes perfect sense to me. Sure does. And I have seen the sky throw thunderbolts and sparks, and I know how sorrow comes a-stealing. So maybe the lyric does make sense. You be the judge.)

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All the towers of ivory are crumbling
And the swallows have sharpened their beaks
This is the time of our great undoing
This is the time that I'll come running

Straight to you
For I am captured
Straight to you
For I am captured
One more time

The light in our window is fading
The candle gutters on the ledge
Well now sorrow, it comes a-stealing
And I'll cry, babe, but I'll come running

Straight to you
For I am captured
Straight to you
For I am captured
Once again

Gone are the days of rainbows
Gone are the nights of swinging from the stars
For the sea will swallow up the mountains
And the sky will throw thunderbolts and sparks

Straight at you
But I'll come running
Straight to you
But I'll come running
One more time

Heaven has denied us its kingdom
The saints are drunk howling at the moon
The chariots of angels are colliding
Well, I'll run, babe, but I'll come running

Straight to you
For I am captured
Straight to you
For I am captured
One more time

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To see more stunning photos of the sky (including mine, at the very top!), click on the SkyWatch logo below.

The day begins strangely ... then continues

The odd calls prodded my consciousness like a styrofoam hammer steadily assailing my frontal lobe.

Weeaaaaahhhhhhhh!

Ohhhhhaaaaaaaeeeeuuuuuu!

Haaaaaaaaeeeeeawwwww!

Wooooooohhhhhhaaaahhhh!

After about a dozen of those, I woke up.

It wasn't Javier baying at the barely-up sun (being in the toy group, he bays at nothing) and no, it wasn't a dream.

See, it's like this: I haven't been sleeping well. Too much on my mind, I guess.

Dreading nights of thrashing around trying to locate planet REM, I generally stay up too late.

I'm not an early riser unless I have a job and those have been thin on the ground (well, since the apparent conclusion of what shall henceforth be known as The Court Reporting Blitz Of November 2010, anyway), so I don't worry about oversleeping.

I wake up naturally by eight o'clock no matter when I finally succumb to slumber.

My nightly tendency is to turn off the television after I've watched Forensic Files on the truTV channel. I love that show.

By then it's gone midnight and generally speaking I'm fairly tired but not quite tired enough, so I may read or work a crossword puzzle for awhile.

Eventually I kill the light, beat my pillow into submission, get comfortable, close my eyes, and wait for that welcome fuzzy-muzzy sleep-is-about-to-sink-you-into-oblivion feeling.

If I'm still waiting after what feels like fifteen or twenty minutes, I flick the light back on and watch reruns of The Nanny on Nick at Nite.

Because if anything will make you long for peace and quiet and lack of consciousness, it's the voice of Fran Drescher.

Fingernails scraping the black off a blackboard sounds like a lullaby in comparison.

Last night was no different except I lost interest in Forensic Files before it was all the way over. I had already finished my crossword.

Except, knowing the pattern of the last few attempts to fall sleep before two o'clock in the morning, I went ahead and watched Nanny Fine apply her distinctly nasal wiles to several unlikely situations.

Finally I slept. Fitfullly.

As weak winter light began creeping around the edges of my closed draperies, I heard it.

Weeaaaaahhhhhhhh!

Ohhhhhaaaaaaaeeeeuuuuuu!

Haaaaaaaaeeeeeawwwww!

Wooooooohhhhhhaaaahhhh!

What sounded like Fran Drescher on mind-altering substances -- or perhaps in full-swing labor with those TV twins -- was originating from the street in front of my house.

Disturbing the peace, as it were.

Now, let me pull over and park here for a mo.

I live in a large and well-populated but very serene neighborhood. While not exactly bucolic, it is packed with mature trees which tend to mute what little intrusive noise there is.

With rare exceptions, you can hear a leaf rustle or a squirrel scamper up the trunk of the big oak.

Sometimes in the early mornings, if I'm awake, I'll hear voices and laughter as a gaggle of kids clots a corner, waiting for the school bus.

But this was not that. This was caterwauling and it was being done by a single person.

And it had managed to cross the considerable space between the asphalt and my domicile, filter through my closed windows and my drawn draperies, and pierce my sleeping brain until I was fully awake.

I looked at the clock. No longer seven-fifteen but not yet seven-thirty.

I found my slippers. I turned off the security system. I opened my front door.

It was nineteen degrees outside but I had to know why a banshee had lodged itself in the street and determined to deprive me of what paltry amount of sleep I had managed to make my own.

And I have no problem admitting that I was feeling distinctly curmudgeonly, which is actually the topnote of my personality even at the best of times.

When I've been rudely awakened from elusive slumber?

You maybe don't want to know.

Shivering, I peered out into the street. My house sits up high so the culprit was many feet away from and below me.

She looked up. She appeared to be a girl of about fifteen. And she was alone.

I used my front-porch-to-the-street voice. "Do you realize while you're out here screaming your head off, there may be people who are still trying to rest?"

Maybe I sounded mad. Ask me if I care.

Our neighborhood self-appointed matutinal wailer smiled a smile so sweet, even I could see it despite the distance and the fact that I was using barely-open eyes. 

She said, "Sorry!" Said it like she meant it.

I closed the door and went back to bed, but alas the sleep train had pulled out of the station and left me waiting alone beside the cold, deserted tracks.

Barely a memory.

Later, out and about doing a little shopping, I ran into a friend I hadn't seen in a few months. She was behind me in line at Big Lots as I unloaded my cart.

She saw me first but then we both started smiling. Hi! HI! How are you? Fine! How are YOU? Fine, fine! 

I told her I had just bought my first Christmas present of the season yesterday. Which is true. She laughed and held up something for me to see. 

It was a HUGE furry black toy tarantula. I think it had a remote control.

My friend has no grandchildren so I asked if it was for her husband.

She said yes.

I had planned to go to Wal-Mart but I decided that today, I'd better not risk it.

A fragment of underdone potato

Here's my favorite scene from the best production of A Christmas Carol EVAH, y'all.

Delicious in its depiction of quiet desperation and dreary suspense! Spectacular in its delirious denouement.

(Hat tip to Steve Caldwell who, in a distinctly un-Scroogelike gesture, many years ago gave me my treasured and much-viewed VHS copy of this film.)

TG and I tried to watch this last night. We piled up on pillows in our bed (first mistake) and turned it on at about eleven o'clock (second mistake).

Yeah, right. We got through The Ghost of Christmas Past and then it was lights out. 

But at least I saw this scene, my very favorite.

We'll play the rest later. And then before Christmas is over, I'll watch the whole thing again.

When it comes to playing Ebenezer Scrooge, it doesn't get any better than the late George C. Scott.

British actor Frank Finlay, who played the ghost of Jacob Marley, was no slouch either.

I know the clip is ten minutes in length but watch it anyway. You deserve a break from all that shopping and cooking and decorating.

~ Merry Christmas ~

This makes no census

My dadLast Saturday, like a complete noodle (because who has time for this during Christmas?) I bit on the fourteen-day free trial at Ancestry dot com.

I think the only thing I moved for the next eight hours was my index finger, to click the mouse and follow my lineage back, back, back into the dark murky waters of seventeenth-century Ireland.

(Your free trial doesn't take you across the pond, should your search point in that general direction. And if you become a paying customer it costs way more to investigate your provenance outside of the USA.)

At times I laughed out loud as I clicked and read, causing TG to holler, "Are you having a good time?" from his vantage point in the next room where he lay prone on the sofa watching football, moving nothing but his thumb to click the remote.

We're totally digital at our house.

So, what did I find out? I know you're dying to know because, it being Christmas and all, you've got nothing else to do but read about my dead relatives.

Well.

I got as far back as Brian McManus, born in 1675 in Carrickfergus, Antrim, Ireland. He stayed on the Emerald Isle but his son, John McManus, emigrated to America in the early 1700s.

He settled in Maryland, where he died in 1738. That's the last mention of a McManus in my family tree living north of the Sweet Tea Line. Thereafter they hailed from South Carolina and Louisiana.

Many years later in Louisiana, a little girl was born with the name ... wait for it ... Louisiana! Amongst her siblings she had a sister named Missouri and one named Alabama. Also a brother named Washington.

Her parents were clearly enamored of these United States.

And guess what! Their last name was Bird! Louisiana Bird! She was my great great grandmother.

I like it that my great great grandmother was named Louisiana Bird. I'll bet you a creamy-white magnolia petal she was ditzy like me.

Elizabeth Cassidy Sandifer - Mamaw (1918-1981)

At any rate, she married a man named Allen Guice O'Neal. He was an ordained Baptist minister who ended up committing suicide.

According to a newspaper article, he had been despondent about an ongoing illness.

It was Nora O'Neal, the daughter of Louisiana and Allen, who married one J.T. McManus. Eventually there was born to them a little boy they named Onie.

Onie grew up and married a pretty girl named Doris Freeman, and together they had one child: a son, Blanchard Guy McManus, born October 16, 1930 in Shreveport, Caddo Parish, Louisiana.

Blanchard was my father.

Several years later, on June 25, 1937, my mother would be born in Brookhaven, Lincoln County, Mississippi.

Her parents were Dorsey Rollins Sandifer and Elizabeth Cassidy Sandifer. My beloved Papaw and Mamaw.

My own TG was especially doted upon by Papaw. The first time they met was in Atlanta in June of 1979, a few days before our wedding.

When TG arrived, Papaw was cooking up a big pot of jambalaya for everybody. Papaw was a cajun chef with few equals. He could've taught Paul Prudhomme a thing or twelve.

I still dream of his repasts of fried brim (that he'd caught on his own bayou trotlines), hot crispy okra, melt-in-your-mouth butterbeans, and scrumptious cakelike cornbread.

My grandmother Doris Freeman McManus (R)(Let's not even talk about his homemade fudge. My sister and I -- as adults -- have been known to fight over a tin of that stuff. Since his passing I've never tasted fudge remotely like it. People don't know what fudge is anymore. Hint: it does not involve chocolate chips, marshmallow creme, or condensed milk.)

An' yeah ma cher, for that jambalaya recipe he'd brought the Andouille sausage with him all the way from Baton Rouge.

Well, when Papaw put it on the table accompanied by a pan of cornbread still in the black iron skillet and said "tuck in" -- or words to that effect -- TG took it very personally. He ate three platesful and before the evening was over, Papaw was calling that Ohio boy "son."

December 4 -- last Saturday, the day I sat for hours researching my ancestry -- would have been Papaw's ninety-fifth birthday.

One of the times I laughed out loud was when I was looking at crystal-clear pictures of the handwritten census records from 1920 and 1930 in Wesson, Copiah County, Mississippi.

Although my grandfather had celebrated his fourth birthday just three weeks prior to January 7, 1920, the census enumerator for "Wesson City," one Albert B. Weeks, put down little Dorsey's age as four and a half. He is correctly identified as to race and gender across the line of little checkboxes thusly: Dorsey ... Son... M ... W ... 4 1/2 ... S.

His mother, my great-grandmother Eugenia, whose husband had died the previous November, was expecting her last child, baby Myron. She is described as a 41-year old white woman, widow, head of the house.

Living in the home with her were sons Anderson, Jessie, and Dorsey, as well as daughters Buella, Mildred, Elberta, Bessie, Mollie, and Katie.

Ten years later, on April 7, 1930, the census enumerator for "Wesson Town" in Copiah County, Mississippi, was a lady named Mattie Matthews.

Eugenia, by then age 50, still lived in the little house described as being situated "East of the Railroad Tracks" (the wrong side, no doubt), but she'd added two boarders: Hooper Stone, white, age 25, and Hilda Carruthers, white, age 22.

Some of her brood had flown the nest. Remaining at home were sons Jessie, age 22, and Myron, age 9. They were joined by daughters Mollie, 17, Katie, 15 ... and Dorcie, 14.

Dorsey Rollins Sandifer - Papaw (1915-1994)

Yes. Somewhere between 1920 and 1930 my grandfather became a girl and changed his name from Dorsey to Dorcie.

That information provided according to what had to have been an extremely myopic -- or, at the very least, distracted -- census taker.

Isn't that special?

Papaw would've loved it that the census enumerator wrote him down as a daughter when he was fourteen. In my mind's eye I can see his face alight with laughter and with my heart I can hear that laughter. 

Maybe after wiping away tears of mirth, to entertain us he would have snatched his harmonica out of his pocket and played the piece that sounded just like the slowly-building noise of a locomotive progressing purposefully along the rails, crescendoing in its high-pitched whistle as it blew by us where we stood "East of the Railroad Tracks."

Because anywhere my Papaw was, was always the side of the tracks I wanted to be on.

Even if he was really a girl.

The customer is always white? Give me a break.

One of my favorite places to go in Columbia is Frank's Car Wash (hereinafter "FCW").

Unfortunately I don't go very often because although I do love me a clean auto, car washes can be expensive and I'm not always in the mood to spend the dollars.

My car spends the preponderance of its time in the garage anyway, me being such a homebody.

The reason I like FCW so much is simple: they have a sign posted in the waiting areas that I love to read.

It goes thusly:

Rule Number One: The Customer Is Always Right.

Rule Number Two: When In Doubt, Refer To Rule Number One.

I mean, how sweet is that?

If you get home and look at your car and you don't like the way it looks and you go back over there and drive up and tell them, they ask no questions. They scribble something on your windshield with a grease pencil and you get a repeat service at no charge.

Also, they have a 24-hour rain or bird rule there.

Meaning, if within 24 hours of your original visit it rains on your clean wheels, or a bird mistakes said vehicle for a rest area on its travels through the sky, you can get your sedan sudsed again for free.

My only complaint about FCW involves the yummy new-car smell they spray under the seats at the conclusion of your automotive ablutions. They charge for it now, whereas it used to be complimentary.

Oh well. I'd better be careful here because I bet if I drove up as the customer and said, "I don't think I should have to pay a dollar extra for three spritzes of new-car smell," they might agree with me but I'd still pay.

So much for always being right.

Anyway, I have not been to FCW in a while but yesterday I was a guest of The World's Largest Retailer (hereinafter "TWLR").

Where the customer is barely tolerated. Forget being right.

If there is a sign posted regarding customers, I believe it is displayed in employees-only areas and it reads thusly:

Rule Number One: Separate These Jokers From Their Money With As Little Effort As Possible.

Rule Number Two: Keep Courtesy To A Bare Minimum Because We Don't Want To Run The Risk Of Them Getting Used To It. 

In other words, ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the smiley faces are on the rollback signs.

And trust me, I would love to get in and out with as little effort as possible but the place is so big you're practically assured an hour-long walking tour as you navigate hundreds of aisles attempting to locate your merchandise.

Then, to make up for it, you get a nice long rest while you wait in one of the three (out of forty possible) lines that are actually open and manned by a human being whose function it is to process orders.

I found a line that was sparsely populated yesterday but as it turned out, that barely mattered. 

The customers being checked out when I joined the queue were trying to buy some (live) fish floating in a clear plastic bag of water. Apparently this threw the cashier because I heard her say she'd never had that experience before.

?????

Next thing I knew, said cashier had disappeared. As in, she was no longer at her register. And it was several minutes before she returned, walking as slowly as someone approaching the business end of a guillotine.

It was another ten minutes before the fish were paid for and the customer in front of me was being rung up. She was buying only six or seven things but for some mysterious reason had opted out of using one of the "20 items or less" lines.

FINALLY it was my turn. I was wearing my Merry Christmas sweatshirt again and although my cashier greeted me courteously enough, she didn't mention it. I smiled and said hello, how are you today? As one does.

This energetic employee of TWLR had rung up three or four of my purchases when a tall lady materialized BEHIND her, brandishing a clipboard. Ignoring me and without preamble, she engaged "my" cashier in a discussion about said employee being due to take a break.

"You were supposed to take your break at three ten," the tall lady informed everyone within fifteen feet. (It was about three twenty-five at the time.)

The TWLR stuff-scanner stopped what she was doing, turned around to face the tall lady, and gestured with my can of hairspray. "What do you mean?" She scrinched up her face. "I just came off lunch at three oh six and you wanted me to take a break at three ten?"

A discussion ensued. My hairspray was still being used to punctuate the comments of the employee who had been expected to "work" four whole minutes between breaks, and had transgressed by "working" nineteen whole minutes before being hunted down by a supervisor and advised publicly of her error.

And that's about the time I had enough.

"Look, maybe y'all could discuss this after my order is rung up, because I have other places I need to be," I said. 

I didn't say it mean but I didn't blink either.

My cashier's head swiveled back around faster than money evaporates out of your wallet at TWLR. She fixed eyes steely as two freshly-sharpened augers on my two unblinking eyes and when she spoke, her tone was not exactly warm.

"Oh I do apologize sinCEREly but I didn't realize I had stopped," she said, throwing my can of hairspray into the sagging white mouth of a bag that had been waiting just like me.

Thunk.

"Well, how 'bout we watch it on instant replay," I suggested.

The rest of our transaction was carried out with, shall we say, a certain estrangement between us. I think if she could've gone on her break and left me standing there with the balance of my groceries and sundries chilling unscanned on the conveyor belt, she would have.

I'm not a racist and I double-dog dare you to call me one to my face but I bet you a box of Moon Pies that if this dedicated employee of TWLR entered a polling place on November 4, 2008, she voted for Obama.

But there I go profiling. Making just all sorts of assumptions.

I'll go you one better. I'll bet you a carton of RC Cola that to her, the white customer who calls her out on any subject is always treated as though they are dead wrong.

I wished her a Merry Christmas anyway. Reparations! But I was obliged to say it to her back because she was leaving for a break.