Small Town Pleasures

Some weeks ago I took my daughter and one of her city friends to an old cemetery tucked into a cleared space on a wooded hilltop some five miles fromthe village. Halloween was approaching, and I had sold them on the idea of exploring a "spooky old graveyard." The sky glowed almost artificially blue, like theblue of a slide photograph, light flooding overhead and all around, sharpening the outlines of grave-markers in the shapes of tablets, towers, houses, obelisks, andpyramids. Some of the oldest stones dated back to pre-Civil War days. What impressed the girls were the little humanizing sculptural details, the yoked stonehands of husbands and wives, the single stony hand with index finger (weather-worn) still pointing to heaven, the little stone lambs reminding us that these were members of a very Christian flock. Most touching of all was the man with his name alone, no date of birth or death, with a little stone dog atop his marker, suggesting in a painful way the faithfulness and persistence of deep feelings.

Things seem to hang on here, especially memories, as well as the small-scale contacts that make real civilization possible. I like knowing my neighbors, something I could never do in the University Section of New Orleans, the Upper East Side of Manhattan, or Hyde Park in Chicago.

We are all in this life together says the graveyard, and it speaks as eloquently (if silently) as the voices from the most famous graveyard of the region, the Hill, which belongs to Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. I feel the essence of small town voices most in late summer and early fall when the various harvest festivals occur (celebrating broom, corn pumpkins, apple trees, and life itself). At the Cowden Pioneer Days ( in rural Shelby County) I had one of those experiences when, for a few moments anyhow, one experiences the immense pleasure of understanding life, or a shimmering sliver of it.

A gentle rain was falling on the drought-parched earth. We had trooped through the fair grounds, picking up items at the flea market (an old clock, an old edition of Huckleberry Finn). A demolition of a '69 Plymouth station wagon was underway; a teenage boy paid out good dollars to smash the headlights and windshield . There was a baby-judging contest, with proud mamas lined up in a tent, each holding her precious bundle. The sack races went on, rain or no rain. A garish booth sold computer-generated portraits printed on T-shirts. Meanwhile, a tomahawk-and-knife-throwing contest was going on at the edge of the deep woods that enclosed us, towering trees of maple and oak and hickory, a few leaves here and there already streaked with yellow. "The leaves are turning early this year," I overheard someone say to no one in particular. We went through an old covered bridge and emerged at the sprawling food tent, sitting down to fried chicken, smoked pork, Cole slaw, and homemade pie. We shared that forced intimacy of strangers at the table with a farmer and his wife.

For weeks I had been reading books about Africa and the Third World, and I thought how revealing this place would be to a third-world resident, how American everything was. That was when I saw an old dude in his VFW uniform, olive drab campaign cap, khaki shirt and trousers of different vintage and washed-out tones. He stood ramrod straight, waiting his turn for apple pie and fried chicken. I turned and beheld the carnival rides, now deserted because of the rain. I was drawn particularly to the huge red hearts, fabricated of bent tubing and heavy wire, and above them in glowing neon, the two words Heart Flip. Each heart held a seat, and the whole group turned over again and again. I sensed a sudden, eerie turning of the year, the coming to an end of the agricultural season, the first nip of winter, my own ever-advancing age, my daughter already ten years old beside me, and the powerful imagery of those red shapes, swinging back and forth in the cold rain. The warm fumes of coffee lifted me I stared at the man in his uniform (war of my childhood, war of my father), pulled my daughter closer to me on the hard, wooden bench and felt my own heart flip, powered by its own crazy carnival ride.