talking big
judith teele

She, the philanthropist, has given big bucks for a community art project and has blown into town for the opening. We have supper and swap stories. We mention the birthday party the next day for a friend who has turned 70. We laugh remembering in 1956 when this birthday girl was the most sophisticated, magical creature that we had ever laid eyes on.

That summer we swam at her family’s country place where she resplendent would appear. She was twenty-two and we were just barely an awkward twelve. She dazzled our adolescent world. We were smitten by her fairy tale life. She was our idol. We were agog. Downright slack jawed. Thrown into this heady mix was her 13-year-old brother, who had his very own soda fountain. We giggled, flirted with the brother, and drank all the soda-jerked cherry coke we could work down without becoming sick, hoping to remain forever in this magic kingdom.

Could she really be seventy? This idol of ours. And how did we get to be almost sixty ourselves? Sixty! Sweet Jesus. Sixty!

“This is our deadline decade.” I tell Susu, quoting from Gail Sheehey. “ No,” says Susu “that was from 40 to 50.”

Well, no matter. We reassure ourselves that we won’t go quietly into old age, like obedient children. We are going to skid into it sideways, banging and bumping along the whole way. Kicking up dust like a batter sliding into first base. “We’ll go to Nepal and Tibet,” I offer. Thinking that ought to do it, keep us moving along.

“Ever written your book, Susu?” I ask. Chagrined and not to be outdone she fixes me with a look, then says, “Where are your poems?”

We were classmates together at a small women’s college. There, as English majors we were caught in a thrilling academic cocoon with a young liberal teaching staff strong on the creative writing side. Intense thinkers, we wanted to be writers more than anything we could image. In the dives around Spartanburg, Colt-45 and diet pills fueled our heavy-duty late night conversations. We were positively moving to New York after graduation where we would write or at least read manuscripts for a living.

Life intervened. A dream deferred. Somehow I went to graduate school in Atlanta, and Susu on to be an activist, and politico. We both continued to write. Well, after a fashion. We wrote marketing, volunteer, public relations pieces. But no book and no poetry volumes.

Now, it wasn’t that I didn’t try. That was the problem. I tried too hard. My words were sphincter tight, pinched, and stiff.

Once, visiting at a mental institution, I asked an agitated patient what he was going to do when he arrived home. “Get me a cigar, and a woman and talk big” was the reply. I didn’t know about the cigar or the woman. But talking big, now that was right up my alley, just what I was after. Maybe if I found the right words then I could talk big. Get it said just right.

Poet Tony Abbott’s doctor friend once told him how patients miss medical terms. Fibroids of the uterus were transformed into fireballs of the Eucharist and spinal meningitis into smiling mighty Jesus. Now there are some talking big words for you! That’s it; I wanted to fireball somebody with my words, smiling mighty Jesus them with my brilliance.

But what I wrote had no real solidarity about it. Writers seek to find their voice; it was clear that I hadn’t found mine. Mine was everybody else’s. I wanted a not-from-around here, big-city sophisticated voice. I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin. I cranked out stilted lukewarm stuff. My very own children, flesh of my flesh…bone of my bone, accused me of using high blown, haughty language. “Your full-of-it voice,” they said, not to put too fine a point on it.
But I kept on with the big talk. So much so that I couldn’t see what was under my feet, all around me and written in my bones. That is, not until the Mission Station articles.

When The Mission Station, a non-profit group, asked if I would handle their fund raising PR (for free of course) I said no. They insisted. Finally I agreed thinking only to write a few press releases and be done with it. Out of the blue, the editor of the local paper offered to publish a feature story about the project every Friday for five months. I could choose what to write and he would put it all in untouched, he promised.

Fabulous! It was a poetic license to steal. So I plunged right in.

At first my stories were still dangerously full of those fireball words, crisp and distant from my heart. But gradually a sea change was taking place. I was beginning to just plain run out of bombastic steam.There was no room for arrogance in the stories that were bubbling up in this project. I left the world of what I thought was proper journalism behind. Reported honestly on the beautiful simple stories that were being told to me of lives being touched, kindness

There was no room for arrogance in the stories that were bubbling up in this project. I left the world of what I thought was proper journalism behind. Reported honestly on the beautiful simple stories that were being told to me of lives being touched, kindness being done, sacrifices being made. The accounts that I heard were heartbreakingly poignant. Sometimes when I wrote them I cried. And they all took place on the ground of my home, in my mountains, and in my little town. I just wrote and wrote, the stories came and came, and the project continued.

The response was breathtaking for me. People came forward in drug stores, at local restaurants, once even over a contract signing in my husband’s office. You need to write they would say to me, often wriggling a finger in my face. Sometimes the compliments were a bit backhanded, as in “I knew that you could write, but I didn’t know that you could really write.” How had I overlooked for so long the lushness of my own story, the power that writing about this place, my hometown gave to me?

The South has a long and proud history of storytelling and no place was that tradition more alive than in my mother’s family. My Mother, Grandmother, and Aunt were storytellers and teachers. They passed stories around like biscuits.

My Grandmother, a widow, lived with my mother’s only other sibling, my unmarried Aunt in a white rambling front porch house in town out on Avery Avenue. Every afternoon of the school week my mother would go, usually with me in tow, “out home” to Avery Avenue to visit Mama and Sister.

Living and working there with them was their housekeeper, a no-nonsense, superstitious, yarn swapping mountain woman from Jonas Ridge. Rounding out this cast of characters was the gentle, long-legged cook with big feet who was part Cherokee-part African American. All were women, all were seriously outspoken, and all could get you told in a second. It was The Waltons, Roots, and Driving Ms. Daisy all rolled into one.

On a hundred afternoons in the front room, or in the gathering dusk, or on the side porch in the summer out on Avery Avenue, the full exotic mix of their expressions surrounded me. I heard the rhythm of their language, listened to their laughter and their endless stream of recollections and stories.I had thought that their stories weren’t the real stuff of writing. That I needed to go far a field to find what I was looking for. This rich woven tapestry of strong women’svoices seemed somehow insignificant to me. I had intended to outgrow them all.

We do go to the birthday party, Susu and I. A tented afternoon lawn party just a few blocks over from Avery Avenue. It has rained hard all day, but right before the party the sun comes out. The rain has washed all the pollen from the air and the day has a wonderful brilliant clearness about it. Our idol is as elegant as ever. In a lilac linen dress and straw hat with flowers she poses for a picture with her ten grandchildren, beaming down at the newest one that she holds in her arms.

It has taken me fifty years to get back to this place. Back where I began. Miraculously, somehow I have found my way home. Back to this place where our stories matter… where our little human lives have meaning.

I am standing on hallowed ground.