All The World's A Stage Plank ... Part One

When I was a little girl we spent a lot of time on the road. Why doesn't matter. I don't have any way of knowing what anyone else like (or not like) me would do in the same or a similar situation, but I know what I did. In a landscape that was different every time you hazarded a glance out the window, I looked for constants. And although our strange little nomadic family occasionally sojourned in metropolitan areas west of the Rockies, by and large we made our many homes east of the mighty Mississippi ... and mostly in the "deep" South.

And an orange mustache into the bargain, to go with the little sweat beads that always populated your slightly dingy upper lip.

My mother was born in late Depression-era Brookhaven, Mississippi, but raised in wartime and post-war Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My father had been from Mississippi and Louisiana too but was out of the picture well before my third birthday. The man I called "Daddy" from my toddler until my adolescent years hailed from Hickman, Kentucky, a whistle-stop in the extreme Southwestern corner of the state, poised on the bluffs above the Mississippi River near the mouth of picturesque Bayou du Chien. So I was reared as a Southerner, and it is Southern scenes and traditions with which I identify most.

One of the things I adored and looked forward to in my travels as a child was the times when we would stop and get out of the car. "We're going to be stopping up yonder," my mother would say, and I would crane my skinny neck to see what wonders "up yonder" might hold. Sometimes it was a filling station; sometimes a coffee shop. (This was long before "stopping" meant exiting from the Interstate where you could choose between any number of ubiquitous truck stops, C-stores, and fast food establishments.) But of all the varied possibilities, by far my most hoped-for places to stop were general stores.

The few that still exist are tourist attractions now, but in the early '60s they were still fairly common in the rural South: dark, cool, cavernous mercantiles filled with every kind of delicacy a little kid could dream of. From the moment we stepped off the gray weathered boards of the front porch through the rusty screen door that closed with a gentle thwap behind us onto the worn but gleaming hardwoods of the interior, I was in heaven. The smells! The air was pungent with -- among dozens of other mysterious odors   -- furniture polish, turpentine, molasses, apples, leather, yeast, paper, grain ... and my personal favorite: pure cane sugar.

Of course my sister and I knew we would get something ... penny candy or a "sody pop" or some other such delight. Our sincere hope was that we would not be required to share whatever we got. It just took all the fun out of your first frosty Orange Crush in three weeks if your bossy big sister was incessantly grabbing it away from your eager lips, afraid you'd suck too much down before she got her turn. The sweet and the burn and the cold would hit your throat simultaneously and explode down your gullet into your stomach, making you happy all the way. And an orange mustache into the bargain, to go with the little sweat beads that always populated your slightly dingy upper lip.

But if left to my own devices, having secured permission to "pick out one thing," what I began scouting around for almost immediately (as soon as my eyes had adjusted to the dim dusty light, such a contrast from the merciless sun outside) among the staggering number of choices that crammed the shelves and display cases, was one coveted item: Stage Planks.

So that today's blog post won't be too long, I'll tell you all about Stage Planks tomorrow ... my memories of them, and the lessons they have taught me.

Comments

[Keli]

Wow! You write so vividly! I feel like I can see the places you describe. And what a memory! I look forward to discovering what stage planks are, and why you picked them...