A Visit To Dixieland Thighwackers How the Ponder Boys Took Madison County Tobacco Town      A Selection of Stories and novellas:      A Little Taste of Southern Gothic awaiting discovery The Man Who Brought the Country Down In Praise of Violets Bomb Scare The House on New Poplar Street First Love Church in the Wildwood Tobacco Town The Surrogate The Long Road Home Fateful Twilight Though now the sun is down, all hope of dawn Has not yet fled.  The antique shadow world In which I sit, amid the trees, alone, Brings hope anew, I say, for some, though peril As sure for those of us still in the throes Of youth.  How can this be? What looms within The darkened woodlands, cliffs and thorny coves To bring so soon great age, disgrace and sin? Now in my house of doom that is the doom Of youth I sense the flow of years, of life Too quickly fled amid the roseate gloom Of dusk. How now so old and bent with strife And menaced surely by a dubious fate That lacks the tact to wait its proper date?  HJ “From the days of the first grandfather,” wrote poet James Russell Lowell more than one hundred fifty years ago, “everybody has remembered a golden age behind him.”   A thought not of great profundity, the mere manifestation of an “archaic mentality,” Historian Arnold Toynbee once said—yet nonetheless worthy of reflection.  The echoes of our own golden age, even if we can’t say when it was exactly, seem unusually poignant and distinct these days, especially now that evil—and whatever deity is behind it—appears to be growing ever more powerful in every corner of the globe. Almost every day brings new proof that we are caught in a singularly mean and vicious period of our history, as exemplified by our recent presidential election—a time so sordid that one feels compelled to go back and search out whatever it was that used to inspire us with pride in our national heritage. A dark perspective and we might hope the deity or deities that have ruled our planet since the beginning of history will finally lose their hold on matter and give way to a realm of spiritual dominance.  At least let them fight it out on an even playing field.   Well, maybe it isn’t all that complicated after all.   Perhaps we are spending so much time dwelling on our past only because these leisurely first spring mornings and balmy, windless afternoons seem made to order for reminiscing. One can’t be so naïve, of course, as to believe that the kind of America we are talking about ever really existed.  We know that when we talk this way, about those earlier and simpler values, we are putting out of sight much that was ugly and vicious and terrifying as anything to be found in today’s headlines. Sometimes, as though to mock our own memories, we tell ourselves that that other America—that procession of golden days and quiet autumn twilights—was merely something dreamt up by Norman Rockwell and J.C. Leyendecker and made to grace the cover of a Saturday Evening Post.                                    -*- When one wanders about the older residential streets of this town—and we do not means those that have been rebuilt by vast infusions of urban renewal money—he can still find a hint of that other America, and sometimes his skepticism begins to fade. The houses don’t look quite so tidy now, the lawns are not quite so well kept up and the faces on the porches seem much older than they once did.  Yet when we walk down those quiet tree-shaded streets we feel deep down that there is much of that earlier time we would gladly have back if it were possible. If anything is missing from the streets it is the voices of the children, for who would let them run free when pedophiles and homosexuals and pederasts and other perverts are lurking on every corner and most of all perhaps in the vestibules of our churches.  Anyway, today’s parents are mostly a suburban generation, and so they have been for many years.  For those old enough to remember the great transition in our way of life the term “suburb,” at least until recent years, had a somewhat alien ring.  In the thirties and forties the suburbs as we now think of them had hardly begun to take shape—and the distinction between town and country is far less blurred than it is now. Now it is true that the farm was only minutes from town; and there, on a sun-filled, bee- loud Sunday afternoon, you could have your way with those great stacks of harvest corn piled high for an October shucking.  Or you could ramble through old barns pungent with the smell of freshly combined hay, or walk down a wagon road past an orchard heavy with the scent of ripening fruit.  If you kept going you could cross a plank bridge and stroll on out across a wide meadow to the timber, where there would be another road leading past the tobacco fields or down toward the creekbottom where, in late June and early July, you had picked blackberries. In those days one did not need a special occasion for visiting the farm.  Most of the immediate family—men and women who had grown up on the old place and had left to exchange their hardscrabble life for jobs in town—gathered there each week after Sunday go-to-meeting for one of grandmama’s big family dinners: chicken and dumplings, every sort of meat and vegetable, big falling down coconut cakes, and every other sort of pastry one could imagine  Perhaps what has been the most lasting memory for many of us is that of the big annual family reunion. Those were Depression days; but somehow one does not always remember the bad times.  For it was on those occasions, those August Sundays, that traditionally bought together less closely related members of the clan—faces you seldom saw at any other time during the years.  At you grew into your teenage years those faces suddenly seemed so much older and less familiar.  There were so many fresh in-laws and new children at each gathering that the reunion seemed less like a reunion of family members than a get-acquainted party in a foreign country.  So maybe it was the dying out of the old and the coming of the new—maybe it is that, as much as war- time gas rationing, which helps explain why this agreeable custom is going the way of the two-week summer revival and dinner-on-the-ground. Yet, ironically, the older and busier we become the more our past seems to hover about us.  Somehow the voices and echoes keep coming up the old side streets of memory.  There, once again, are the fathers and mothers, the grandparents, all sitting on the front porch talking as a radio blares from the open window, the curtains windless in a twilight already clamorous with the sound of jarflies and night-birds. The late James Agee, the great movie critic and occasional novelist, has left us a memorable description of a summer twilight in Knoxville, Tennessee, as he remembered it from his youth: “. . . There was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish, like the lining of a shell; and the carbon lamps lifted at the corners were on in the light, and the locusts were started and the fireflies were out, and a few frogs were flopping in the dewy grass by the time the fathers and children came out . . .” Then there is the sound of the streetcar, “stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan . . .”   The sound “rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter; fainting, lifting, lifts, faints forgone; forgotten.  Now is the night now blue dew . . . ”                          -*- Many a man spends half a lifetime rummaging through the musty hay-bin of his past.   A kind of wish fulfillment in reverse.   As he grows older he likes to get out of the city as often as possible.  He likes to winder down country lanes or across broomsedge fields alive with aster and goldenrod.  If he has made only a halfway success of his life he may spend much of the time wondering why he did not achieve more, remembering all the bad turns, his lack of foresight, the just plain bad luck, the mistakes that, in hindsight at least, could have been so easily avoided.  Or maybe he wonders why he did not aim higher, why he shied away from risks other men were willing to take.   Was it only that he lacked the qualities that make some men peculiarly suited for success? Now and then, between business appointments or at the end of a hectic afternoon (though boring enough it may have been) he may pause overlong to observe an old- time vegetable peddler hawking his wares along a residential street.  He spends more time thumbing through old photography albums or mulling over those yellowing newspapers discovered not long ago while he was cleaning out the attic or garage.   Quite often now he wakens on those first cool mornings in September and October to find the past hanging over him like a haze over autumn fields. Those who have reached middle years or who perhaps are well beyond those summer days when life was still full of hope must feel sometimes that they have lived through the last of the world’s golden ages.   In the same way it must seem impossible that tomorrow’s generations will find much to celebrate in the America of today.  What will our grandchildren be able to make of these days full of terror, this riot of crime, the drive-by shootings, the hilltop snipers, the schoolyard slayings, the mass killing of the unborn, the ugliness and decay, the pedophilic stalking of the young, the senseless unprovoked maiming, the inexplicable half-wars, the freeway shootings— and where indeed will we find an end to it all? When we have the answer we may also be able to understand why a man savors what is past not because it was different, more satisfying and indeed more golden than the tumults of our own era, but simply because it is past.   -*-