Vienna

I grew up just outside of Atlanta, but my parents were from adjacent small towns in southern Georgia about three hours south of Atlanta. Mama was from Vienna, and Daddy was from Cordele. After a stint in the Navy, Daddy got a job with IBM in 1959 and moved to Atlanta. For a short time, Daddy lived with relatives. In 1960, Daddy bought a small two-bedroom house in the West End area of Atlanta, and he and Mama got married in the fall of 1960. I was born in 1963. In 1966, Mama and Daddy bought a bigger house, a new three-bedroom brick ranch, in the southwest suburbs where I grew up. Although I was born and raised in and around Atlanta, my heart considered Vienna "home" for many years.

In addition to Thanksgiving and Christmas, my parents made weekend pilgrimages to south Georgia at least every other month. We would leave out on a Friday afternoon as soon as Daddy got home from work and make the three-hour drive to south Georgia. Sometimes we would take I-75 which was usually more direct and quicker. However, during holidays we would take the "old way" to avoid traffic. The "old way" was the route between Vienna and Atlanta before the construction of I-75. When we took the old way, we meandered on state highways through little towns of Griffin, Barnesville, Roberta, Fort Valley, Marshallville, and Montezuma. In between the towns was field upon field of cotton, corn, soybeans and peanuts with an occasional pecan orchard thrown in here and there. Around Fort Valley and Roberta, those aforementioned crops and pecan orchards gave way to peach orchards. Not infrequently, we would encounter crop dusters spraying the fields with noxious-smelling pesticides, herbicides, or defoliates. When are you little, a three-hour car ride is a short forever. However, when I started to smell those chemicals, I knew we were getting close. To this very day, whenever I travel to that area to visit relatives and pass by a freshly sprayed field and that noxious, carcinogenic smell assaults my nose, I still get a happy, warm feeling of being "home".

My maternal grandparents, Luke and Christine Little, lived on West Pine Street in Vienna with my Uncle Ronnie. (When we were small we called them Granddaddy and Granny but over time it somehow became Luke and Christine.) Ronnie was only eight years older than I was as he was a late-in-life surprise for Luke and Christine. Their house was about three-quarters of a mile from the center of town. Although my paternal grandparents, Grandma and Grandpa Wright, lived in nearby Cordele, we did not spend much time there and never slept at their house. We would visit them at some point during the weekend and have a meal but we would spend a majority of our time in Vienna. (Our relationship with Grandma and Grandpa Wright is a whole different story for another time.)

From the time I was five or six years old, I would spend several weeks each summer with Luke and Christine. The first couple of summers I went by myself because my brother, Brian, was too young. However, by the time he was four or five, he was joining me for those two or three idyllic weeks in Vienna as well. When school let out for the summer, we anxiously waited for the day Mama would pack our clothes, load us up in our cavernous avocado-green 1972 Chevrolet station wagon, and launch the summer vacation.

I hated the weeks of the summer I had to stay at my home in Atlanta. I did not have any friends walking distance with whom to play or just hang out. My best friend, Connie, did live within walking distance but she spent the entire summer with her grandmother so she was never around. So, I was bored out of my mind. I spent my time reading. I read dozens of books each summer.

Vienna (pronounced "vy-anna") is a very small town. When I was a child, it had a population around 2300. In the center of town was a small park with the obligatory Confederate memorial. Back then the old codgers would congregate on park benches to recount their oft-told, tattered tales embellished to the point they were pretty much lies. Just southwest of the square stood the red brick Dooly County Courthouse built in 1890. By the early 1970's, Vienna was declining like many other small towns. However, there were still a handful of businesses operating. There was Forbes Drug Store which still had a soda fountain in those days. Sometimes I would get a "welfare" which was a cherry Coke. Cherry Cokes were favored by the staff at the nearby Social Services office, thus the name. The Red & White supermarket was next door to Forbes. My grandmother would shop there only for what was "on special" as she preferred to "do her trading", as she would say, at Stephens' Super Foods.

Emmett Stephens started out with a very small grocery store about a block north of the square. It was in old clapboard building of weathered, unpainted pine with a rusty screen door that had "Colonial is Good Bread" stenciled in fading yellow and orange paint. I have only the vaguest of memories of going into the old original Stephens grocery store. I remember it being dark and a little scary. At some point, Emmett's son Charles built a modern supermarket across the street from the old place. In recent years, Stephens' became a Piggly Wiggly franchise but it was still owned by the Stephens family.

Now back to the square. Next to the Red & White was a cafe. I never recalled anyone in our family eating there; then again, my grandparents never ate out anyway. There was The Roberts Shop which was a small clothing store for women and girls. The Roberts Shop was owned by "Ol' Lady Roberts" as Christine called her. Aside from underwear and sleepwear for the grandchildren, Christine did not buy much there because she thought Ol' Lady Roberts set her prices too high. Christine's distant cousin by marriage, Frances Peavy, worked at the Roberts Shop for years. If there was something Christine wanted to buy, she would wait until Ol' Lady Roberts went home for lunch. Christine would then stop by the shop because Frances would give her a substantial discount on the sly. Other businesses on on the square was Newby's Men shop, the Vienna Hardware Store, the Bank of Dooly, Akins Insurance, and, of course, the pool room. The pool room was a lair devoid of estrogen for the young, unmarried men and the married men who were not manageable.

At Luke and Christine's house, the world was our oyster - how a grandparents' house is supposed to be. First of all, we had playmates 24/7, our cousins Melinda and Sheila. Their mother, Aunt Foye, was Mama's younger sister. Although Aunt Foye and her husband, Uncle Bo, moved every few years, they were never further than 20 miles from Vienna. Melinda and I were born the same year three months apart; I in January and Melinda in April. Sheila was two years younger than we were. Brian was two years younger than Sheila. Whenever we visited Luke and Christine's, Luke would collect Melinda and Sheila. Typically, they would stay at Luke and Christine's with us for the duration of our visit

We had countless things to do for entertainment at Luke and Christine's. We went swimming at the town's swimming pool almost everyday. There were children our age on Pine Street with entertainment resources that we could exploit. Down the street, Theresa had a trampoline. Across the street, Myron and Tracy had an above-ground pool which came in handy on Monday's because the town swimming pool was closed on Mondays for cleaning or on days that Christine did not have time to take us to the pool in town. There were always had a few old bicycles for our use to ride up and down the sidewalks. Luke and Christine let us go down the road to Ryal's, a little convenience store, by ourselves to buy Icees and penny candy often financed by scavenging the change from the crevices of the Christine's sofa. My Uncle Ronnie frequently he fell asleep watching TV stretched out on the sofa. By the time he stumbled off to bed, he had lost most of the change in his pockets. At night, after the hot sun set and it cooled off, we ran about the yard like "striped-ass apes", as Uncle Ronnie dryly described, playing hide and seek, kick the can, and other various made-up games outside in the dark until the mosquitos ate us alive.

We spent a lot of time playing "restaurant" in the backyard on a weathered picnic table. We gathered discarded vegetables from the garden which were generally those that had gotten too mature and tough for Christine's liking or had been damaged by pests. We cut them up with cast-off table knives and concocted various dishes in aluminum pie pans for our imaginary customers. Sometimes we would make soup in the abandoned cast iron wash pot that we found in the backyard. Amongst our cooking equipment was an old plastic egg tray that we used for making "cookies". We discovered that if we mixed the soil with water to make a "dough", pressed it into the twelve half-sphere indentations, and let it dry in the hot sun, perfect "cookies" could be popped out the tray intact and pretty hard. I think the lime content of the sandy soil created something akin to cement.

One day we decided to garnish our creations with some bright red and green hot peppers that we found on the ground beneath the plants as the result of a heavy storm. My grandparents lived below the "gnat line". The "gnat line" is an unofficial geographical boundary that runs through Columbus, Macon, and Augusta. If you lived below the "gnat line", it means throughout the summer months you were harassed by gnats buzzing into and around your eyes constantly. You instinctually learn how to "blow gnats" since swatting them away with your hands is not only inconvenient but is it not as effective. This is done by fixing your lips in a position so that when you forcefully expel a breath, it targets a stream of air up toward one eye with enough force to temporarily dispatch the gnats. Then, you reconfigure your lips to target the other eye. This becomes a reflex over time, and you learn to integrate this action seamlessly while speaking. However, as little kids, our gnat-blowing skills were not fully developed, and we often resorted to rubbing our eyes with our hands to deal with the gnats. That is exactly what my cousins and I did after picking those hot peppers.

The capsicum started to burn our eyes. Not realizing the root cause, we just rubbed our eyes even more. Blinded, we somehow made our way into the house squalling all the way. It took my Aunt Foye several minutes to figure out the source of our distress. She checked for the typical things: She snatched up our t-shirts looking for evidence of wasp stings in the event we had disturbed one of paper nests that often materialized on the underside of the picnic table; she examined our bare feet for fire ant bites; she looked for snake bites too although a snake striking all three of would have been highly unusual. Somehow she figured out through our blubbering we had gotten something in our eyes. She grabbed an aqua blue bath cloth, wet it, and started wiping our eyes while holding us in a head lock since we were squirming so much mostly because she her vigorous decontamination tactics were almost gouging out our eyes. It took a long while for the burning to subside as we sat on my grandmother's cream-colored, vinyl sofa in the chilled air provided by the window unit while watching afternoon game shows on TV. Each of us was nursing our red eyes with a cold, wet bath cloth after bickering over who got the pretty aqua one. We never messed those peppers again and settled instead for more austere presentations of our culinary creations.

Our house in Atlanta was always quiet growing up. My high school friends compared it to a funeral home. My father did not tolerate children squabbling amongst themselves or really any noisy activity, so my brother and were always pretty quiet. If we did need to argue, we did so in whispers. Otherwise, we both got a swat on the bottom and were sent to our rooms for the remainder of the day. Consequently, I was not accustomed to the chaos that routinely broke out with my cousins. They had not been raised in the same restrictive manner, so they thought nothing of screeching at each other or even passing a few licks.

When this sort of thing got on my nerves and I needed some quiet time, I would get off by myself to look for arrowheads and fossils. There was a field behind my grandparents' house that was owned by someone else. Some years it was planted with corn and some years with soy beans. Each time the field was plowed, arrowheads and limestone rocks riddled with fossils were unearthed. The other kids had no interest in arrowheads or fossils nor had the patience it took scanning the ground to find them, so I could be guaranteed to be left alone a bit. I would walk that field for hours afraid to quit and miss a great find. This was the beginning of my life-long love of rockhounding.

We could do whatever we wanted as long as we did not hurt ourselves or each other. When the inevitable squabble erupted and someone ended up crying, Christine would console the injured party whispering, "Hush now. Hush now." while half-heartedly fussing at the perpetrators, "There ain't no sense in this. Y'all play pretty now." Other than that, we could knock ourselves out. If we wanted to stay up all night giggling and "playing grab-ass", as my uncle termed it, that's was fine. If we did not get up until 9a-10a, Christine did not care. Typically, in the summer, she was up at daybreak and working in the garden while it was still cool. By time she was done, we would be up. So, it sort of worked out for everyone.

When we got to be old enough to be of any use, Christine would enlist us to help shell the peas or butter beans she had picked early each morning. When we woke up, a couple of mountains of peas about three feet wide by two feet high piled on an old bed sheet - white with faded, blue morning glories - would be waiting for us underneath the big Chinese elm shade trade in the front yard. Along side the bed sheet, would be nested stacks of old dish pans of various sizes - some white enamel with chips and some aluminum with dents. The largest dishpan was designated to the be final repository for the emancipated peas. Four aluminum lawn chairs - the folding aluminum kind with green and white nylon webbing - would be arranged around the bedsheet in a circle. A Piggly Wiggly grocery bag was placed next to each folding chair into which we would toss the empty pods. We would each grab a pan and fill it with whatever was on deck for us to shell and get to work. Because Christine liked tender young beans and peas, shelling them a royal pain. More mature pods are easy to pop open to extract the peas inside. One had to cultivate the skill to pop open the less mature pods. The edge of one's right thumbnail took a beating since the edge of the nail was used to sort of pry open the pod. After days of doing this, one's nail would start separating from the nail bed. Also, when we shelled purple-hulled peas, our fingers and thumbnails would be stained purple. Once our dish pan was full of pretty shelled peas or butter beans, we would sift through them culling those that were "stung" which was the term used for insect damage, and then empty the rest into the largest dishpan.

Christine's deal was that we could not go swimming until those mountains were gone. So, if we "fiddle-farted around", we would just be cutting into our swimming time. On the days we had shelled the purple-hulled peas, going swimming was especially beneficial since the over-chlorinated pool bleached our fingers and thumbnails clean. It took us about 2-3 hours to finish on average. Usually, Christine, Melinda and I shelled the lion's share. Sheila never felt a real sense of responsibility to help. Sometimes when she figured we were not looking, Sheila would toss a couple of handfuls of shelled peas from the large dishpan into her little dish pan to cover the fact that she was "fiddle-farting". When Melinda caught her, there would be a war. Melinda would holler and tattle, and Sheila would smirk at being able to push her sister's buttons so easily knowing that Christine would hardly say a word to her. Of course, Brian, being a boy, would always be exempt since he was so young and, besides, shelling peas was women's work.

Brian spent a lot of time with Luke. Luke was not really energetic. In the spring, he would "put in" the garden. During the growing season, he would spray for insects every so often, keep the garden watered when there was not much rainfall, and pull a weed or two. As for harvesting, he would do the less tedious jobs - cut okra, pull corn, and pick a tomato or cucumber or two. Christine ended up with everything else. The picking of peas was tedious and hard on the back as you were constantly bent over while scouring plant after plant on row after row for pods that were ready to pick only to repeat the process in 2-3 days when more pods had matured.

Instead, Luke spent most of his time sitting in his chair in the den holding court and chain-smoking. Sometimes he might migrate to the front steps to watch us play while he chain smoked. From that vinyl-covered throne, he managed to keep Brian entertained sitting in his lap for hours. They had an imaginary game called "Bill and Tom" whereby they pretended to be cowboys. Luke was "Bill" and Brian was "Tom". Sometimes Christine made a cameo appearance as Bill's wife, "Big-Ass Carrie", although she did was not allowed a speaking part. Brian was only about four or five years old, but he caught on to the improvisational nature of it pretty quick. The "Adventures of Bill and Tom" were intermittently woven in their activities throughout the day. It went something like this:

Bill : Morning, Tom. How did you sleep?

Tom: Pretty good.

Bill: How could you sleep? Didn't you hear all the ruckus when I caught those SOBs trying to steal our horses in the middle of the night.

Tom: Well...did they steal them?

Bill: Hell no! I ran them off.

Tom: That's good. Wake me up next time.

Bill: Well...get in there and tell "Big Ass Carrie" (Christine) to get you some breakfast. After breakfast, we need hitch up the horses (Luke's Chevrolet) and to go into town.

Also from that chair, Luke schooled Brian in off-color nursery rhymes. Whenever Luke visited his relatives that lived near Hawkinsville, he would take Brian with him. Of course, he proudly would goad Brian in performing his newly learned repertoire much to their delight.

Examples:

Red breast robin, sitting on a flagpole

When the wind blows, you can see his a**hole.

Farmer Brown went to town with a stack of hay

Farmer Martin came a fartin' and blew it all away

Christine fixed our lunch whenever we were hungry and pretty much fixed whatever we wanted. However, we always opted for either pineapple or banana sandwiches.

A pineapple sandwich, as I later learned, is a decidedly Southern thing. It is two canned pineapple rings, preferably Dole, arranged on Sunbeam white bread dressed with mayonnaise or salad dressing. I preferred mayonnaise; whereas, my cousins would only consider salad dressing because it was sweeter. I had developed my own technique for constructing a pineapple sandwich. I would cut both of the pineapple rings and interlock the two resulting "C"s to provide as much uninterrupted pineapple coverage as possible with no overlapping. Banana sandwiches were pretty much the same thing but instead of pineapple rings, the bread was shingled with thin slices of banana.

Christine cooked a big supper every night. Shortly before supper time, Luke would troll the garden for ripe tomatoes, cucumbers, and spring onions to slice up to have with whatever Christine cooked. There was always at least four vegetables ranging from summer squash - fried or braised with onions, field peas, butter beans, black-eyed peas, early peas, fried eggplant, fried green tomatoes, fried okra, snap beans, turnip or collard greens simmered with smoked pork, and the list goes on. To go along with the vegetables would be always be some sort of meat - fried chicken, country fried steak with gravy, fried fish, fried pork chops, or pot roast - I think this was the only thing not fried. Sometimes she would make chicken and dumplings which were sublime. I am a pretty good cook, and I have tried in vain to duplicate her chicken and dumplings and, sadly, have never come close. Also, there was always a cast iron skillet of cornbread AND (not OR) a couple of pans of homemade biscuits. However, if one of the "young'uns", as we were labeled, decided to forego the vegetables and meat and eat only biscuits sopped in cane syrup, as my cousin Sheila often did, that was OK too.

The supper table at Christine's was chaotic but fun. When the whole family was there - Luke, Christine, Ronnie, my parents, Melinda and Sheila's parents and the four grandchildren, it was a tight fit around the oval dining table intended for six people. All the adults except for Christine sat at the normal designated seats with the kids tucked at the "corners" of the table. Those that were too small to reach the table sat perched on precariously stacked Sears and Roebuck catalogs that were saved year after year and stored in the living room closet for just this purpose. Christine never sat down to eat claiming she was not hungry after tasting everything while cooking. She was happy to stand in kitchen propped against the counter, enjoying the conversations and being on standby to refill glasses of sweet tea and resupply platters and serving bowls when the contents started to dwindle.

Christine would eventually fix herself a plate once the men and children drifted away from the table. My mom and my aunt would remain at the table to talk and catch up on gossip with Christine while she ate her supper. By the time I was nine or ten years old, my mom would "volunteer" me to clean the kitchen and wash the dishes while they talked. The house on West Pine Street did not have a dishwasher. I did not mind cleaning the kitchen but I did resent having to tackle it by myself. Such a huge meal dirtied a lot of dishes, pots, and pans. Christine would make a fuss and insist that I go play with the other kids, and she would clean the kitchen. However, that is the last thing I wanted.

After supper, we would scrape the plates and consolidate the scraps in a large aluminum bowl for the dogs. Luke liked dogs, and they generally kept two or three yard dogs around. Christine would add crumbled stale cornbread or biscuits from the prior day's meals and would ladle some pea broth or gravy over over the scraps in the bowl. One of us would volunteer to feed the dogs. The dogs' "feed bowls" were actually old hubcaps. Dry food was stored in a galvanized trash can in the carport. We would dump a scoop of dry dog food into each hubcap topped with a portion of the scraps and pea broth. On occasion, the dogs would just get dry dog food if there were no leftovers. After filing the hubcaps with just the dry dog food, they would sniff the dog food, look at you expectantly, sniff the dog food again, look at you again, and then amble away huffing that was a mixture of disgust and disappointment. Eventually, when they would eat when no one was looking.