Walk the Line

I'm not a big moviegoer, but I've been to two movies in the last two weeks. Last Saturday I took Dora to see Chicken Little while Lovett saw the new Harry Potter movie. Today, Zelda, Lovett, and I saw Walk the Line while Dora was painting a ceramic unicorn at a birthday party.

It was a pretty good movie. I'm not a big Reese Witherspoon fan, but she is cuter than June Carter was, so that helped. I have never seen Joaquin Phoenix in anything, but sometimes he was dead-on J.R. Cash. Shelby Lynne was good as J.R.'s mama. With her beehive 60's hairdo and eyeglasses she could have passed for Lurleen Wallace.

A couple of observations struck me during the movie, though:

• Is there a requirement that musician's biopics include a scene of the subject making a phone call from backstage during a show?
• And that they pass out on stage?
• And that they receive a dressing-room visit from the voluptuous young woman in the front row from the previous scene?
• And that the memory of a dead relative haunts them?

Flashbacks from my past include:

• Hearing the song Jackson. That song is one of the first musical memories I have. The phrase hotter than a pepper sprout doesn't escape your psyche easily.
  
• J.R. quotes Foghorn Leghorn in two scenes - Fortunately, I keep my feathers numbered for just such an emergency. It used to crack me up when I heard F.L. say that.
• The movie ended before J.R. and June got married, which preceded Cash's television show, one of my first TV memories. The Statler Brothers got their big break on Cash's show. Mr. and Mrs. DePaul were big Statler Brothers fans. They wrote a song about their experience entitled We Got Paid by Cash. On a trip home from Indianapolis in the summer of '75, several Statler Brothers albums that she hadn't seen in Alabama rode home in my mother's lap.
• Mama Bennett's father fell in a pile of burning leaves once, when he was in his seventies. He crawled back to the house and smeared a jar of Bama mayonnaise on his legs to soothe the burns. I never hear Ring of Fire without thinking of that. This incident may rear its head again in a future Ficcion piece. I'm just saying...
  

A lot of suggested adultery, drinking, and drug use (well, duh) was in the movie, but suprisingly (and thankfully), with the exception of one f-bomb and one passing reference to Elvis's preoccupation with female ..., er, ...parts, the language didn't burn my ears. But the music rocked.

This movie wins the Eggplant seal of approval, for what it's worth.

Requiem for a Rat Snake

Remember the rat snake I mentioned when I wrote about Dora's birthday?

Well, it died. Rather, she died. I saw the article in Saturday's paper, including a picture of a young man I immediately recognized as the emcee of the hands-on portion of the party. I was torn between showing the picture to Dora and having to explain why it was in the paper or just tossing it aside without mentioning it to her. I decided to show her, and though she was sad, she took it very well.

The article stated that a funeral service for the snake would be held at Ruffner Mountain Nature Center on Monday. Monday was cold and rainy but Zelda decided to take the kids anyway. There was a small crowd there, mostly RMNC staff, but the local media was well represented. My kids became the media darlings of the funeral. A newspaper article in today's paper quoted Lovett and pictured Dora, while Lovett was featured in a TV report this evening. Dora took a ceramic angel that she dropped in the grave. Lovett shared how he had enjoyed seeing the snake at his seventh birthday party and how she had helped him avoid a fear of snakes (something he obviously didn't get from his father).

Dora and Lovett, celebrities. And they owe their fame to a fifteen-year-old dead rat snake.

RIP, Lady Gray.

A poem, read at the funeral:

The Snake
Richard Edwards

I hate the snake
I hate the snake
I hate the way it trails and writhes
And slithers on its belly in the dirty dirt and creeps
I hate the snake
I hate its beady eye that never sleeps.

I love the snake
I love the snake
I love the way it pours and glides
And esses through the desert and loops necklaces on trees
I love the snake
Its zigs and zags, its ins and outs, its ease.

I hate the snake
I hate the snake
I hate its flickering liquorice tongue
Its hide and sneak, its hissiness, its picnic-wrecking spite
I hate its yawn
Its needle fangs, their glitter and their bite.

I love the snake
I love the snake
I love its coiled elastic names
just listen to them: hamadryad, bandy-bandy,
ladder,
Sidewinder, asp
And moccasin and fer de lance and adder
And cascabel
And copperhead

Green mamba, coachwhip, indigo -
So keep your fluffy kittens and your puppy-dogs,
I'll take
The boomslang and
The anaconda. Oh, I love the snake.

Restroom Etiquette

An actual line in an e-mail received today from the property owner of my office building:

We ask that Tenants please not use the office building's restrooms to discard food items. As you can imagine, the odors are quite unpleasant for many people.

I'm not making this up.

"It's not your birthday!"

In planning for Zelda's birthday dinner Saturday afternoon, she codependently considered the children as she weighed her choices.

Lovett, as I've chronicled before, is a notoriously picky eater. Painfully picky. "Why don't you wait in the car while we go in and eat?" picky. Dora is not so picky, she's just opinionated. She knows what she likes and where to get it.

Zelda narrowed it down to three choices:

1. [local Italian bistro with the patio view of the traffic headache that is Highway 280]
2. [local seafood restaurant with the kicking catfish tenders]
3. [internationally-famous local rib joint]

Early polls indicated a preference for [seafood], as Zelda had a craving for coconut shrimp. Lovett was excited by this prospect, since he likes the chicken fingers there, though I tell him they fry them in fish grease.

[Aside: Are chicken fingers a product of poultry genetic engineering or something? When I was a child, chickens didn't have fingers. Or lips, either.]

Dora protested because seafood is on her short-list of won't-eats.

Then Zelda leaned toward [ribs], which got Dora's and my attention. Yeah, a thick slab of juicy ribs with vinegary red sauce, tea sweet enough to give a zombie the shakes, and a pint of banana pudding to top it off (eat your heart out, Doug). Dora's chant of "Ribs, ribs, ribs!" was overshadowed only by barfing sounds from Lovett, who, it pains me deeply to report, "doesn't like bbq." The last time we ate at [ribs], he dodged flying sauce from my fingers while picking the onions out of a pint of potato salad with a spork, no less. Zelda responded to his protests with a hearty "it's not your birthday!" but the gagging didn't stop.

Then Zelda mentioned [Italian], home of the piping garlic rolls and gnarly eggplant (!) parmesan, and the more she thought of Dora protesting seafood and Lovett eating melba toast and Sweet'nLow at [ribs], she decided that [Italian] was the way to go.

Which broke Dora's heart. She lay face down on the ottoman and wailed, "I want to go to [ribs]!" She was inconsolable. "It's not your birthday!" Zelda reasoned, but the wailing only got louder. I felt like crying, too, because I realized that [ribs] was now out of the question. Going to [ribs] after an outburst like that would concede all sorts of parental power to a pugnacious five-year-old, and bad as I could taste that sauce hours later in my goatee, I knew it was not to be.

So we ended up at [Italian]. Zelda had a tasty loaded calzone, I had (what else) eggplant parmesan, Dora had spaghetti and meatballs, and Lovett had a cheese calzone (the Italian counterpart to the cheese quesidillas he orders when we go to [local Mexican dive with the hottest salsa on the planet and tea sweet enough to rival that at [ribs]]).

"I have an idea," said Lovett. "After we're done here, can we go ..."

"It's not your birthday!" said Zelda and I, at the same time, as Dora dropped a fully-loaded 7-Up onto the patio floor.

Zelda's Fortieth

Zelda turned forty today.

It makes me old to think that I have a forty-year-old wife. And that I was around when she turned twenty. And that we've been together over half our lives. Wow.

I think for her first birthday I got her an add-a-bead necklace. Anyone remember those? Yeah, I don't think she was impressed either.

This year has been tough on both of us, as a couple and individually, so I thought it best to test the waters before acquiesing to the pull-something-over-on-someone crap that is mandatory on birthdays that end in zero. Her response? "Under no circumstances am I to be made the center of attention, anywhere, at any time." Rather vague, no? I abided her wishes through firestorms of protest from some of her well-meaning friends, even though they thought me either a cold-hearted bastard or a walking manifestion of male cluelessness, of which I am neither, I must say. Some people just have to learn things for themselves.

Zelda had a prior obligation for tonight, so we did her celebratory dinner Saturday night at [local Italian bistro with the patio view of the traffic headache that is Highway 280]. Yesterday we gifted her with birthday bounty. Zelda is a writer, too, so I gave her a copy of A Writer's Paris: A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul as inspiration for her in-progress manuscript, and a copy of Paul McCartney's new CD, just because I heard an interview about it on Morning Edition a few weeks ago. Dora picked out a necklace and earrings from her and Lovett. I think we did well. The sentiment was there, anyway.

Today, Zelda thwarted an attempt at pushiness from an aforementioned friend whom I'd tried to discourage for two weeks. Said friend couldn't fathom that Zelda wanted nothing more than a picnic lunch with her children on her birthday, so that's what they did, with friend and son in tow. I'm expecting an apology from friend. I'm already practicing my I-tried-to-tell-you.

Zelda didn't receive a birthday card from Mrs. DePaul, unless it was lost in the mail. I kinda doubt it.

Anyway, happy fortieth, Zelda. From Chris, with love.

New Fiction in Ficcion de la Berenjena

Companion Blogs

Some of you have visited and commented on my installment fiction blog, Maddie's Dress. Thank you. Maddie is a composite of several influential people in my life, and I've been contemplating her circumstances for some time. The first four chapters were written over the past several years, while chapter five is new material. I know generally where I'm going with her, and I hope I'm timely enough with the material that you don't lose interest.

Last night I created a short fiction blog, Ficcion de la Berenjena. If the free online translation programs didn't let me down, that means roughly "Fiction from the Eggplant." I'll occasionally throw a short fiction item out there that I've tinkered with. My only outlet before blogging was to hand these things to Zelda, but she is hardly an impartial audience. My stuff either makes her laugh or cry, but I have that effect on her in normal, everyday life, so that is a poor gauge of literary merit. Let my anonymity free you for candid appraisals. If you think something I post is crap, tell me. Just tell me why. Too sappy? Improbable? Predictable? Preachy? I can take it, I think.

Your time is precious, and that you spend some of it reading my babblings is a priceless reward. Bless you all.