“Man, if that ol’ porch rocker could talk . . . … What a tale of tails it could tell!”
Over seventy-five year’s worth of tales, that’s what. There’s Arvie’s arse and Cowboy’s keister, Hank’s heinie, Bill’s bum, Carolyn’s caboose, Cecil’s stern, Sharon’s cheeks, Freddie’s fanny, both Ruby & Roy’s rears . . . the list goes on.
Then, of course, there’s Dave’s derriere.
It might look like an old rockin’ chair. By observation, you’d think it is mainly held together by the decades-old combination of paint and rust. But if you pick up this chair to move it, you realize it is heavy. And solid — steel hardened by more than a century. If you were to try and peel back the layers of paint, you’d trace back through a lot of those years.
And you’d meet a lot of tails.
Mine is one tail that has seen every coat of paint since the original. If we could somehow reel the time together and my tail, today, could meet my 1965 tail, I don’t know what they would say to each other. But tail-speak is another story entirely. And this one is about the chair.
Back when my tail and the chair first met, it sat on the front porch of my grandparent’s home in Downtown Tibbee, Mississippi. You won’t find that on a map. Pretty much, if you don’t already know where Tibbee is, neither this story nor a search of available maps will help much. (And callin’ it “Downtown Tibbee” is an insider’s joke, of sorts. It’s where the only paved road and the railroad tracks crossed. Tibbee has neither a down or a town.) So, let’s just say Tibbee is true country. Proud country. Deep south. The kind o’ country where folks didn’t have air conditionin’, so they sat out on they front porches of a warm summer’s evenin’ and rocked chairs like this one, in timin’ with the heat-drone o’ cicadas—their tails rockin’ with the rhythm.
On such an evenin’ half a century ago, my ten-year-old tail would have been relegated to the porch stairs. The rockin’ chair would have been a place of honor for my elders. Next to our tails, there would have been half-downed glasses o’ sweet tea left over from dinner. With the sweat pourin’ down the outside of the glasses just the way it poured down our faces. And just maybe on this particular evenin’, the tail in the old chair belonged to a man known to the community as “Cowboy.” He was a carpenter by trade and a friendly face to all. He was also my grandfather.
The chair sat on the far end of the porch. In the grass just below (and within spittin’ distance of the chair) was a huge cast-iron pot. More of a rusty cauldron than a pot. As a kid, I ‘magined that we had somehow confiscated it from witches who had concocted their last brew. Just maybe, that was why a man called “Cowboy” now had it, I don’t know. My grandfather died ‘fore I was given the opportunity to glean much wisdom from him.
But on this partic’lar hot afternoon, my grandfather had taken me fishin’ down to the pond, and this big pot was now swimmin’ with bream. We would need to scale and clean ‘em once the heat of the day abated. You see, the pot sat below the joined eaves of two tin roof sections and caught rainwater. From the rockin’ chair on a rainy evenin’ the splashin’ in the pot would sound like a waterfall, above the noise of the rain on the tin roof! Of course, we had a water pump and well-house, but this old pot worked as our water source for waterin’ plants, rinsin’ hands, or holdin’ our bass, bream, or catfish ‘til we cleaned ‘em.
On evenin’s when the Cowboy sat on the porch, it was guaranteed that a passin’ neighbor or two would stop by for a visit. And a glass of tea. Over the years, I developed the skill of scootin’ my tail quickly through the open screen door to retrieve those glasses of tea. Those of us who dawdled learned that the stout spring on the door meant business when it slammed the door onto our young and skinny behinds. (Back then, our tails were skinny, I assure you.)
Fast forward to the next paint job, and Cowboy is in our memories. I learned very young that friendliness and a larger-than-life persona are no match for cancer. His likeness remained for most of my life in one painting my Aunt Sharon left on the wall in the hallway of that old house in Tibbee when she later married and moved away.
The shadows of the years and the loss of my grandfather brought the need for my still-skinny tail to become the man of the house. Not that I deserved it . . . … or even knew it for that matter. In high school and college, I was far from a man. But me, and Joe from ‘crost the railroad tracks, and my younger brother Mark, well, I guess we paved our own paths toward manhood.
Probably just to keep us out of her way, or to keep us out of trouble, or to teach us things we’d never learn in college . . . … hmm . . . … In retrospect, probably for all these reasons (my grandmother was much smarter than I knew at the time)— any-hoo, my grandmother convinced us to build a log cabin usin’ nothin’ but hand tools. We picked a spot at the furthest corner of the property, on the highest hill in Tibbee, and overlookin’ Trulove’s Lake. (The cabin, like the tail-speak stories, is a different story.)
When you’re fifteen years old and spendin’ sixteen-hour days cuttin’, skinnin’, haulin’, notchin’, and stackin’ logs, let me tell you— nobody’s cookin’ was as good at the end of a day as Grandma’s! And, whoever got to the front porch first after dinner got the steel rockin’ chair! (We still didn’t have air-conditionin’.) I can’t recall much about the conversations on the front porch on those evenin’s, ‘cept for one common theme. As we thought of ourselves as true, frontier-mountain men (buildin’ a log cabin by hand), we would always end up talkin’ about how someday we’d end up livin’ on a mountain out west. Heck, we might even buy us a mountain!
That summer gave way to a few others, and maybe another coat of paint for the old rocker, to find my tail gettin’ older, but not much wiser. I lived with my grandmother through college. I could try to make it sound noble and say that she needed a man around to help care for the place. But the real truth was that I needed my grandmother. My college education was more than most people got. It was farm life and gettin’ my tail up early, even on Saturday. It was goin’ to class with purple thumbs from shellin’ peas. (A tummy full o’ peas ‘n cornbread’ll put a special smile on your face when your tail hits that chair on the front porch with a tall iced tea in your hand!)
Some things changed. Tibbee residents eventually ended up with “street water” that we had to pay for, and at one point at our old home place, we added an air conditioner toin one of the windows. (It was just for when we had comp’ny . . . …) Other things didn’t change as much. We still talked about how we’d end up on a mountain out west.
Someday.
You’ve certainly noticed that it is no longer the 1960s, even if you only do so through the larger shadow of my tail over time. That chair on the front porch saw a lot of family Fourth of July holidays, Thanksgivin’s, and Christmases. It saw new paint and old tails. As I had children of my own, it held old tails and new tails at the same time! Heck, I can even remember my own father (bless his soul) sittin’ on the porch and talkin’ about mountains out west . . .…
Tibbee, in its simplicity, taught us all a lot of important lessons. One of those lessons was to dream. Ironically, when you leave there, one of the things you dream about is Tibbee. And grandfathers that you have lost. And grandmothers that you have lost. And fathers that you have lost. And children that you have lost . . . …
And then Tibbee, itself . . . … is gone. You won’t find my Tibbee on the map. My grandparent’s house burnt down. The porch burnt down with it.
But not the chair. It just needed a new coat of paint.
If you have been kind enough to read this far, you might be wonderin’ abouton the whereabouts of the old rocker. Well, I guess it held onto all those dreams and stories over and through the many years and coats of paint. It has found the mountain at last. Mount Ogden, Utah.
And this chair’s story won’t be complete ‘til you visit, plant your tail, and add your story to it.
We’ll have a tall glass of iced tea waitin’.
And if my glass holds instead some bourbon, you might hear another story or two . . . … About ol’ Tibbee Joe, who still lives across the tracks . . . … About skinny-dippin’ tails, ‘n hand-hewn log cabins . . . … And other tales that’ll only lead to more. But then, that’s what rockin’ chairs are all about. Tails n’ stories. Life n’ dreams.