Food Memory: Cheese Straws

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In every community in the South – church, club, work, neighborhood – there seems to be the one lady who is famous for her cheese straws. Neither of my grandmothers made cheese straws, nor does my mother. But I have always known about them and associated them with significant occasions – parties, weddings, wakes – and in every Southern community it seemed that there was always a lady – always a woman – who was celebrated for her cheese straws.

When I worked at Alabama Shakespeare Festival, that lady was Mrs. Betty Campbell, a theatre supporter and erstwhile ASF board member.

A member of that theatre company knew that he had truly arrived and been accepted into the fold when Mrs. Betty Campbell graced him with a tightly wrapped little package of cheese straws tucked into his box at the theatre. After I had been at the theatre for about a year, I was delighted to find a package of Mrs. Betty Campbell’s cheese straws placed neatly in the center of my desk when I returned from lunch one afternoon. The golden baked morsels lived up to their reputation and were worth the wait. And they were consumed quickly.

But that was the only time Mrs. Betty Campbell ever honored me with cheese straws. I waited patiently, but a second offering never materialized. This nagged me for a while and then, one Sunday morning in the New York Times magazine, I ran across an article, “Eat the Rich Stuff,” by Julia Reed, a Mississippi native. In the piece she remembers tastes of her own childhood and how they inform her adult Christmases. The article is wonderful but the real revelation is the fact that at the end of the article Reed shares her favorite holiday recipes, including one for cheese straws.

I read the recipe carefully and realized I can do that. Why I thought have I spent my life at the mercy of old ladies with cookie presses to get my cheese straw fix when all I have to do is buy some basic ingredients and a cookie press (whatever that is) and I can have my own fresh homemade cheese straws whenever I get the urge?

I went shopping for a cookie press at a local kitchen supply place, but first I had to figure out what it was. I approached a customer who sort of looked like she might be a Junior Leaguer. She would know. “Excuse me,” I said, “where might I find a cookie press?”

She eyed me. “You’re going to make cheese straws, aren’t you?” she said.

“I plan to try.”

She took me straight to a shelf of cookie presses and pointed out her favorite, an Italian model. She wished me luck and went on her way. I left the store with a sparkling new cookie press and a resolve to become the first man, to my knowledge, to make cheese straws.

The first batch turned out well. I began to add my own touches to the recipe, share the results with family and friends, and get accustomed to the process. One of the first things I learned was that all of those old ladies were strong. It was a workout of the wrist and arms to squeeze those straws out of the tiny opening of the cookie press and onto a baking sheet.

The first true test of my cheese straw mastery came on a visit to Greensboro, Alabama, a small town in Hale County. I went down for a quick visit to see my friend Randall and decided to take a bag of freshly baked cheese straws to him and his mother. When I presented them, both were surprised that I had baked them. Some friends – Greensboro ladies that I had known over the years – had been invited over for afternoon tea.

When we were seated, Randall set out a plate of my cheese straws. I tensed a little, knowing that I was among a group of Southern cooks who knew their way around cheese straws.

“These are delicious. Where did you get them?”

“Eddie made them,” Randall said. I was among people who had known me so long that I was still “Eddie” to them.

There were looks of disbelief and then astonishment.

Finally, someone said, “Well, they’re delicious and it’s obvious you used real butter. That’s essential.”

I assured them that real butter had indeed been used and then found myself comparing cheese straw recipes with the ladies. I was happy I had passed the ultimate test of the cheese straws and was validated in the belief that I could serve and present cheese straws with confidence.

Later, I remember thinking Is this what my life has become? Sitting around comparing cheese straw recipes with a bunch of ladies older than my mother?

Oh well. I can think of worse fates.

I continue to bake cheese straws for special people and special occasions and continue to enjoy the surprised gasps when I reveal that these straws were made by a man. I haven’t baked any in almost a year but when the temperatures begin to drop and the air gets crisp the urge to buy some fine cheddar and make up a batch begins to twitch. This time of year a few cheese straws with fresh figs (or fig preserves), a glass of sherry, or a cup of warm tea hit the spot.

Here’s my recipe. It is adapted from the recipe in Julia Reed’s 2001 New York Times piece which was in turn adapted from a cookbook called Southern Sideboards Cookbook by Winifred Cheney. Over time, I have made my own revisions, and that is what I’m sharing with you.

CHEESE STRAWS

1 stick (8 tablespoons) of softened unsalted butter

8 ounces finely grated extra-sharp cheddar cheese (I like to mix white and yellow cheddar)

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cayenne pepper (I like my straws hot)

1½ cups plus 1 tablespoon sifted flour

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix the butter with the cheese and seasonings in a large bowl. Add the flour and knead into a smooth dough.
Pack the dough in batches in a cookie press and press through the round-ridged opening onto an ungreased cookie sheet to form “straws.” 2½-3 inches are good, but I just squeeze until it seems long enough or stops on its own.
Bake until golden and crisp, usually about 12 minutes in my oven. Remove from the cookie sheet with a metal spatula, cool, and store in an airtight container.

The straws break easily but that doesn’t affect the taste, does it? Also, depending on temperature and humidity, I sometimes sprinkle a little water on the dough in the press so that it comes out more easily.

Oh yeah – if you make these and people love them, mention my name.

On Being the New Kid

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A writer friend once challenged me to write my autobiography in 700 words. I’ll always rise to a writing challenge. I began by listing the different cities and towns where I had lived in a lifetime. I have lived in a total of 14 separate cities and towns. That list took up the first 29 words. Then I recounted how many separate moves I had made from one city or town to another – there were 24 of those. For example, I moved back to Birmingham from other places at least five different times. This list does not include the times I moved from place to place within the same city. During my time in Tuscaloosa in the 70s and 80s –finishing high school, going to college, etc. – I moved at least eight times that I can recall.

I sent the 700 words to my friend. He sent a chastising email back, chiding me for a “cop-out.” He felt I had dealt with superficial things as a way of avoiding writing about myself.

I stood my ground. I feel that the moves are a large part of what defines me. I was born in a military hospital but my father was discharged from the Army when I was six weeks old so I am not a military brat. However, Dad’s work transferred us a lot and I ended up attending ten different schools from grades 1-12. That gave me a lot of experience in being the “new kid.”

In a recent post for “Professional Southerner,” I realized how many times I use the word “community.” In fact, I even used that word in the title of that essay. One of the impacts of being the new kid is that you are always looking for your community – the place where you fit in and belong. And when you move around as much as I did, once you think you may have found it, it is taken away and you have to start over again, build up your shell, and carry on. A miracle of the whole experience is that, despite the moves, I always managed to keep my grades up. That was tough.

I have a deformity of my left hand. It is relatively minor but it is there nevertheless. I am missing a little finger and my middle and ring fingers were fused together at birth. The fingers were surgically separated when I was very young but they are still noticeably misshapen to an observant eye. Some people never even notice and others spot it immediately. I am very good at not drawing unnecessary attention to the issue; I’ve had a lifetime of practice.

If you are no longer the new kid, classmates get used to the irregularity and don’t even think about it. If you are constantly the new kid, classmates are constantly discovering, staring, and whispering for the first time. Over time, I developed an aggressive way of dealing with the stares and comments. “I see you’re looking at my hand,” I would say boldly. “Let me show you what’s wrong with it.” Then I’d whip out the hand, explain the defect, and carry on. Some seemed uncomfortable or put off by my candor but most, I think, were grateful to have the mystery solved. I realize that my aggressive response was a defense that I built up to cover my discomfort at always being newly discovered.

I am shy. I am able to cover it pretty well and my current college students chortle in disbelief when I say it, but it’s true. Walking up to a group of total strangers and inserting myself into their consciousness is not something with which I am comfortable. Over the years, when I plead shyness, someone inevitably says, “Well, you’ve moved around so much. Surely you’ve conquered it by now.” I haven’t conquered it, but I have a lifetime of experience that helps me to build up defenses that hide it better, I guess.

As a boy, there was often an impulse to redefine myself when I moved. I would analyze what had worked and what had not worked so well at the old place and try to adjust accordingly for the new place. I’d change my “style,” my attitude, and sometimes my clothes and hair, and take it for a test drive. Probably the redefinition worked most quickly and successfully at my favorite of all of the schools I attended – Shades Valley High in metro Birmingham (in its original location between Homewood and Mountain Brook for those who remember). I immediately felt at home and like I fit. I first seriously pursued theatre at Valley, took my first real curtain call at Valley, and had a close and diverse circle of friends — none of whom, incidentally, I am still in contact with. That’s a collateral effect of constantly moving: One tends to lose touch.

I only attended Shades Valley for four months and we moved again. At the new schools in Jackson, Mississippi – I had to attend two schools because one did not offer all of the classes I was taking at Valley – I auditioned for shows but, as the “new kid,” nobody knew who I was and I was never cast. So I started to redefine again.

Jackson in 1971 was where I first encountered the unfortunate policy of busing to achieve racial integration in the schools. Regardless of your political point of view about what was right or wrong about busing as a solution to a real problem that needed to be fixed, it was incredibly uncomfortable for those of us who actually participated in it. My parents offered to send me to a private school in Jackson but I felt that if you weren’t part of the alleged solution, you were part of the problem and I felt some sort of 16-year-old’s drive to be a part of the solution, no matter how inconvenient and painful it was.

Lunch is always the very worst time of day for the new kid. All of the affiliations are established already and you have to step carefully to avoid stepping on toes or putting yourself in an even more awkward situation. I remember on a first day at lunch in Nashville in 1968 a girl plopped down and informed me that I was “new.” I told her she was right. She asked me where I was from and I told her Birmingham. “Oh,” she said, “a southerner … how do you like living up north now?” I patiently informed her that I wasn’t “up north” but in Nashville.

On the first day at lunch in Jackson in 1971, another girl plopped down across the table from me. Again, I was informed that I was “new.” I introduced myself. She did likewise and asked where I was from. “Birmingham,” I said. “Oh,” she sneered, “another Yankee.” I assured her that I was not a Yankee but from Birmingham, Alabama, and she asked me a few uncomfortable questions about my politics (I was 16, mind you), and then informed me that “nowadays” everybody who wasn’t from Mississippi was a “Yankee.” I did make friends at the schools in Jackson but that girl wasn’t one of them.

Eventually, Dad took a job in Tuscaloosa and we were there for the last part of my junior year and my entire senior year in high school. I found friends, fit in, became an editor of Tuscaloosa High School’s literary magazine, and went through all of the activities one associates with a high school senior’s year. Still, I went through senior year as one of the “new kids” and never quite felt like I was totally a part of the picture in the way that my classmates, most of whom had gone through school together, might be. The yearbook came out and my name was misspelled. It was just a typo and those things happen but it felt a little bit like a repercussion of being perpetually the “new kid.”

My brother is twelve years younger than me and the family had pretty much settled in Tuscaloosa by the time he entered school and I went to college. It’s interesting to observe how we had the same wonderful parents but such different childhoods. On a couple of occasions over the past few years, Mother has felt the need to apologize to me for all of the moves and upheaval of my growing up years.

I appreciate that she has said it, but I don’t feel anybody is owed an apology for this. Yes, it was difficult at times, but I’m sure it made me tougher, more flexible, more tolerant, and more of a survivor when the pressure starts to build.

We all do what we must do. I don’t know for sure how much my growing up years contributed to my decision to pursue a career in theatre. I have noticed, though, that many actors have a transient or “military brat” childhood. Whatever the reasons, I worked in professional theatre after graduate school and, in doing so, I extended the vagabond lifestyle for another couple of decades.

Now I have lived in the same place with the same job for twelve years. But I still get mighty restless.

(The image is an untitled portrait by Patrick Grogan, 1999),

Community and Fatback

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Last night was another memorable evening at the Alabama Chanin Factory (www.alabama.chanin.com) in Florence, Alabama. Natalie Chanin and her tireless staff hosted another “Friends of the Café” dinner event featuring executive chef Drew Robinson and Nicholas Pihakis of Birmingham-based Jim ’N Nick’s Bar-B-Q (www.jimnnicks.com). The October 10 event was the fourth and final “Friends of the Café” dinner for 2014. I am already looking forward to the 2015 schedule.

My friend Cindy Edwards and I were lucky enough to attend three of the four 2014 dinners. The previous two were fundraisers for Southern Foodways Alliance (www.southernfoodways.org), of which I am a “dues paying” member. Last night’s event benefits “The Fatback Collective Fund.” The Fatback Collective is an impressive array of “chefs, writers, and pig cookers” who are supporting a philosophy of sustainable and humanely raised pork, local ingredients, support of community, and sharing of knowledge. They fundraise for many compatible causes and provide assistance in their communities when tragedy strikes. For example, Fatback Collective recently sponsored a series of successful fundraisers for a South Carolina pitmaster who lost his pit to fire in 2013.

Last night’s meal was a juxtaposition of all of the elements that contribute to the Fatback philosophy. During the cocktail hour, featuring a “Donkey’s Daddy” cocktail, mushroom tamales were served to each table. That was followed by a four course meal featuring local ingredients including produce from the Jones Valley Teaching Farm (www.jonesvalleyteachingfarm.org) in downtown Birmingham, Gulf shrimp, Fatback Pig Project porchetta, and guinea hens from White Oak Pastures in Georgia (www.whiteoakpastures.com). Each course featured beer pairings from Birmingham’s Good People Brewing Company (www.goodpeoplebrewing.com).

Chanin is accomplishing her goal of supporting and sustaining her community in many ways and these dinners are just a part of that big and impressive picture. As a result of these events, a community of like-minded individuals is finding each other – sharing thoughts and energy.

Last night it was a pleasure to once again visit with Donna and Doug Woodford of Bluewater Creek Farm (www.bluewatercreekfarm.com). Bluewater Creek Farm is a family-owned sustainable farm in the Shoals area of northwest Alabama. Doug was proudly showing off pictures of a very handsome rooster and of a recent acquisition, a South Poll Grass Cattle bull. I learned that South Poll is an Alabama-based cattle breed that is bred to thrive on a grass-based diet and to tolerate the heat of the Southern summer (www.southpoll.com). I was also pleased to learn that Bluewater Creek’s most recent batch of chickens recently started laying.

Nancy Campbell and Charles Day, friends from Tuscaloosa, were also back at the dinner last night. We met at the July dinner and have remained in contact ever since. They shared news of a recent visit to a saltwater shrimp farm in Greene County, Alabama – 150 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. This was exciting news to me. Charles has also begun to cultivate domestic culinary mushrooms. The spores are shipped to him and it was fascinating and tempting to learn about the process. It also gave me a nifty idea for my food-minded nephew’s 11^th birthday present.

A number of websites are referenced in this post. I hope that readers will be inspired to check out one or more of them and participate as their interests and means dictate. They are all causes that mean something to me and deserve our support and commitment.

An amazing and innovative meal. Camaraderie with a community of people with shared interests and values. New knowledge and understanding. The “Friends of the Café” dinners in Florence have quickly become an essential ingredient in the process of strengthening a commitment to culture, community, and the values that will help change our world and move us steadily forward.

A Brief Memory of Marian Seldes

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The great stage actor Marian Seldes died this week at the age of 86.

Seldes may not be a household name outside of the world of theatre, but she was very well-known as a stage actress with many successes on Broadway and beyond.

I never saw Ms. Seldes’s legendary New York stage appearances but I mentioned her over the years in acting classes as an actor who seemed most ideally suited to live stage performance. Her mere presence was a powerful dramatic statement. Seldes was tall and stately with a handsome angular face that was easy to read from a distance; these are perfect tools for a stage actor but sometimes too large for the screen (although she did appear on television and in a number of films).

Some of my students remembered that Seldes made a brief appearance as Big’s mother in an episode of “Sex and the City.” But it is her appearances in numerous stage plays by Edward Albee, Samuel Beckett, and Tennessee Williams, as well as productions of Equus, Deathtrap, Painting Churches, Richard III, etc., that cement her place in American theatre history in a career that spanned seven decades..

Although I missed her many New York performances, I was fortunate enough to see Marian Seldes in a live performance I will never forget. In November 2008, when I was presenting a paper at a Thornton Wilder conference at The College of New Jersey, a Friday afternoon session was an intimate readers’ theatre presentation of work by and about Wilder. Narrated by Tappan Wilder, Thornton Wilder’s nephew, the other performers were Marian Seldes, playwright Edward Albee, and poet Sandy McClatchy.

When I took my seat in the campus concert hall, Ms. Seldes was sitting quietly behind a grand piano at the back of the stage, carefully studying her script. Her concentration and presence were mesmerizing. When the performance began, it was electric to watch the interaction of Seldes and Albee, two legends who had carved parts of their legends in collaborations with each other. Each would have been 80 at the time.

It was a one-time performance and the small but rapt audience knew we were watching something special.

Playwright Sam Shepard once said that the thing he likes about theatre is that “it goes out into the air and disappears.” That November 2008 Wilder performance was a perfect illustration of that ephemeral quality of theatre.

And of a notable lifetime.

Coke and Peanuts

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Back when I subscribed to Oxford American magazine, I would regularly threaten (to myself) to cancel my subscription if I saw one more picture of a snake handler in their pages. Snake handlers and alligators were a little too common as OA’s attempt to capture “Southern-ness” occasionally tilted a little too far toward surreal Southern Gothic.

So it is with some trepidation that I feel a need to address the very Southern taste for salted peanuts in Coca-Cola as a snack. This is something I remember from early childhood. We would take a bottle of Coke and a sleeve of salted peanuts. Take a couple of good swigs of the Coke to make room for the peanuts and then slowly pour the peanuts into the narrow top of the Coke bottle. The combination of the sugary Coca-Cola with the salty peanuts is really good. Trust me on this, but don’t ask me to explain why.

I had relegated peanuts in Coca-Cola to a distant childhood memory until this summer when Coach Jimbo Fisher of Florida State dumped some peanuts in his Coca-Cola during ACC media days. The non-Southern press in attendance was flabbergasted and felt the need to address this odd behavior in multiple columns which then led to a deluge of online responses, contradictions, and opinions. We Southerners who grew up with peanuts in Coke as a normal treat were a little bemused by the brouhaha. While I suspect that this tradition is more familiar to Baby Boomers and their parents than to younger generations, I asked a recent class of college-age students how many of them had heard of or had peanuts in Coca-Cola and was surprised at how many hands went up. A few of them opted for RC Cola instead of Coke. I can accept that.

The resurgence of peanuts in Coca-Cola as a topic of conversation in the 21^st century surprised me as much as the emergence of one of my guilty pleasure road treats – fried pork rinds – as a healthier junk food choice (no carbs, high protein, low-fat and a high percentage of the same healthy unsaturated fats as olive oil – go figure).

There is a long tradition of Coke in recipes. “Atlanta Brisket” – brisket glazed with cola – has been around for a while and “America’s Test Kitchen” did a version of it fairly recently. “Coca-Cola Cake” is a mainstay of Southern cookbooks and I have seen a Coca-Cola cake with a peanut glaze inspired by the classic peanuts in Coke tradition.

Bartenders are constantly upgrading the football Saturday stalwart bourbon and Coke into more sophisticated renderings such as the “Reengineered Bourbon and Coke Cocktail” recently featured in Garden and Gun magazine. Even more to the point, I recently heard that a place in Birmingham has a cocktail called the “Tallulah” which is made of Coca-Cola, peanut syrup, and Jack Daniel’s. An investigation is in order.

North Carolina chef Vivian Howard, in an episode of her PBS show “A Chef’s Life,” explored the North Carolina tradition of putting peanuts in Pepsi. I have a lot of respect for Chef Howard and she is a wonderful chef, but this will not do. Howard’s Pepsi and peanuts exploration did, however, lead to what looked like a great recipe of Pepsi-glazed pork belly with country ham braised peanuts. I bet it would be even better with a Coke glaze.

After teaching a Saturday class in Huntsville this past weekend, I hopped in the car to drive to Birmingham for a quick visit. Stopping for gas outside Decatur, I spotted an 8 oz. Coke in a glass bottle in the drinks case. I grabbed it and a sleeve of Golden Flake salted peanuts and headed to the car. I downed a few gulps of the Coke, emptied the peanuts into the bottle, and headed south on I-65 listening to the radio and the pre-game shows leading up to the Alabama-Ole Miss game. It has been at least forty years since I indulged in peanuts in Coca-Cola. I was transported back to football Saturdays growing up and “The Bear Bryant Show” on television each Sunday after game days. Coca-Cola and Golden Flake potato chips sponsored the show (“’Great pair’, says The Bear”).

It was an exhilarating drive.

Tracking Down Mrs. Roosevelt

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A couple of weeks ago I spent fourteen fascinating hours watching Ken Burns’s newest documentary, “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.” I have had a fondness for Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt since I heard my grandmother talk about them when I was growing up.

It is easy to forget after so many years how important FDR’s Great Depression recovery policies were to the country as a whole and particularly to the part of north Alabama and the Tennessee River Valley where I currently live. At the time the Tennessee Valley Authority was inaugurated as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, the improvements in the infrastructure for north Alabama led to the development and progress of the decades to come. TVA’s Wilson Dam changed the Shoals area immeasurably. I am convinced that Huntsville’s considerable growth and the development of its substantial technology, space, and defense industries can be traced directly back to the technological advances spawned by the Roosevelt administration of the 1930s. I am also convinced that some of the local politicians who run campaigns railing against “big government” and “government interference” would not have been born if not for the government assistance and programs that came to the aid of so many millions during the Roosevelt New Deal era.

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Works Progress Administration (WPA). Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Federal Housing Authority (FHA). Social Security Administration (SSA). The alphabet soup of programs initiated by the FDR administration is large and impressive. Some of them still exist today. Most towns, wherever you travel in the country, still utilize the legacy of the New Deal in extant public spaces, buildings, tourist sites, roads and highways, dams and factories. The WPA art works, photographs, performing arts, and literature were created by many people — some of whom would move on to become among the brightest lights of twentieth century American arts.

When Roosevelt took office in 1933, about 90% of urban Americans had electricity compared to roughly 10% of rural Americans. The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was created to rectify that situation and by 1942 the number had risen to 50%. Ten years later, close to 100% of Americans in rural areas had electricity.

My grandmother often talked about listening to Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats” by her radio (after the REA had supplied electricity to her family’s rural Cullman County residence). My mother still has recollections of my Grandmother Harbison pulling her chair right up to the radio to listen to the coverage of FDR’s funeral in 1945. She sat listening all day.

During a recent conversation about the Burns documentary, Mother mentioned how she had always enjoyed reading Eleanor Roosevelt’s daily syndicated newspaper column, “My Day,” which ran from the time Mrs. Roosevelt was First Lady in 1936 to her death in 1962. “I wish I had saved those in a scrapbook or something,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to look back at them now?”

My quest had begun.

Fuelled by the documentary, I searched for a book compilation of the columns. What I found was My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt: The Best of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Acclaimed Newspaper Columns 1936-1962, edited by David Emblidge (New York: MJF Books, 2001). I ordered it and will soon give it to my mother, but I am reading it first and having a grand time of it. Mrs. Roosevelt’s written communication skills are as clear, blunt, and articulate as her husband’s much-lauded oral communication skills and she tackles a staggering array of issues with taste, tact, and progressive common sense. There are also warm personal insights about holiday outings with the family, gardening, fashion(!), and the amazing array of 20^th century personalities she knew — from her uncle Theodore Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, from Helen Keller to Autherine Lucy, Shirley Temple to Nikita Krushchev, Winston Churchill to Humphrey Bogart, … you get the idea.

I have a tattered and fraying tee-shirt with FDR’s image that I usually just wear for yard work. One afternoon I wore it to one of the local farmers’ markets and a vendor at one of the produce stands called me over. “My parents loved FDR,” she said. “My dad always said he saved us from sure ruin.”

“My Day” and Ken Burns’s striking new documentary provide human and first-hand insights into some of the most important events of the twentieth century. We all need to remember and learn.

My Granddaddy’s Yard

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I was a latecomer to home ownership. After grad school, I embarked on a career in professional theatre that took me all over the place and often involved series of short-term contracts. So I spent most of my adult life in apartments, condos, and hotel rooms.

When I finally settled for academia, tenure, and the illusion of security, I realized that it might be time to grow up and own a house. My real estate agent and I spent a few months looking and after many houses, none of which quite felt right, my patient realtor said, “I want to show you some townhouses.”

“I’m not looking for a townhouse,” I responded. “Too much like the apartments I’ve been living in since I was 19.”

She showed me townhouses anyway and I realized I was in my comfort zone and that a townhouse was probably the way to go: Not too big; not too small – and not much yard, but enough to pursue my attraction to gardening on a small manageable scale. I quickly brought in a landscaper to get my tiny front yard in shape.

Then I began to eye my back yard.

It is a long narrow yard with a privacy fence in three parts (since it is a shared fence on two sides, it doesn’t quite match). A towering Rose of Sharon anchors the northwest corner and spindly nandinas are grouped in the middle of the southern fence. All were untended and overgrown when I moved in and I discovered how easily they were improved by radical pruning.

The plan has always been to do a complete landscape redo in that back yard and I have sat at the bistro table in the yard and mused over plans many times over the past several summers. All of my planning revolves around eventually creating the sort of freestyle, eclectic, and semi-wild “hidden garden” that one finds throughout New Orleans, particularly in the French Quarter. A book, Gardens of New Orleans: Exquisite Excess by Jeannette Hardy and Lake Douglas, with photographs by Richard Sexton (Chronicle Books, 2001), serves as a major inspiration. My plans constantly evolve and change. While I work on my to-do list, I add things to the yard randomly, eventually settle on where to put something in the ground, add architectural finds, and move pots around to experiment with ideas.

I still plan to do a major overhaul of the yard but I realize that the yard has gradually begun to take on some of the characteristics of the New Orleans spaces I admire. The real surprise, though, is that it reminds me of my Granddaddy Harbison’s yard in Fairfield Highlands west of Birmingham.

My grandfather, Leonard Harbison, had a sure green thumb and a love of the outdoors. (My green thumb didn’t grow until I was well into my 30s.) Granddaddy grew up in Cullman County but lived most of his adult life in and around Birmingham. Even so, and even in densely populated urban neighborhoods, he could always find a wooded area to take a nature walk, stick in hand and often with a dog or cat or grandson in tow. His yard was always the prettiest in the neighborhood with a seemingly random mix of blooming plants, vines, pots, and small garden plots growing tomatoes or peppers or other edibles. He worked hard to achieve yards that looked effortless.

In my small backyard, there is a small wild rosebush that grew from a cutting from the rosebush that once belonged to my Harbison grandparents and is now in my parents’ back yard. After all of these decades, a part of Granddaddy’s rosebush flourishes in my little yard. Nearby is a Jazz Feeds chicken feeder that I picked up at an antique shop. Jazz was a brand of farm feed that has disappeared but I remember it well from when I was growing up. My grandfather always had Jazz feed on hand for the hounds he continued to run into his later years. When I saw the feeder with the Jazz name and the logo of a rooster playing a saxophone, I knew I would buy it then and figure out where to put it later.

When my grandfather died in 1997 I was working in Texas. After much deliberation and tampering with my schedule and finances, I realized that it would be best not to go back to Alabama for the funeral. On the day of the funeral, I took a late lunch at 2:00 – the time the funeral was scheduled to begin – and wandered around a local nursery and bought plants. It seemed like the right thing to do on that particular day. All of the plants would have done well in Granddaddy’s yard.

Mastery and Marginalia: The Art of Scott Smith

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I bought the first piece of art by Scott Smith that I ever saw. That statement is significant because I look at lots of art; however, I only buy a work of art when I find some connection that makes me long to possess it. I only buy art, in other words, that speaks to me in some way.

Scott Smith’s art speaks to me.

That first work that I acquired is called “Butterfly Wall” (pictured above). Like much of Scott’s art, “Butterfly Wall” combines found objects with prints on paper. A grizzled cracking piece of sturdy 4×4 with four rusty nails congregated near one end anchors the piece. On one side of the 4×4 is a slice of barely rusted tin with ridged edges top and bottom. On the other side of the 4×4 Scott has attached one of his stunning signature prints: in this case the metallic greys and dingy rust red inks blend and interact on paper that gracefully curves (I now know that the curving paper in “Butterfly Wall” is an anomaly in Smith’s work). “Butterfly Wall” has gravity and presence and looks as if it should be very heavy but it is really very light. I am sure he did not intend the print as a trompe l’oeil but everyone who sees “Butterfly Wall” for the first time walks over and touches the graceful curve and is surprised to discover that the print is, well, a print.

I knew Scott before I saw that first piece that I had to buy. I knew that Scott was a master printmaker and a mixed media artist and from our conversations I knew that we shared an affinity for some of the same types of art and artists. As Scott and I became friends I was pleased to learn that he has worked with some of those same artists we both admired.

And now that I have had the opportunity to observe much more of Scott’s output first-hand over the past decade I feel that his is a singular vision. Many artists work with found objects; many artists make prints; many artists incorporate assemblage into their work. And Scott Smith has some things in common with many artists. But his vision seems unique to me. I haven’t seen another artist’s work that is quite like this.

Scott is from the rust belt of Ohio and his fascination with industrial detritus is a fascination I share from growing up in Birmingham when it was still an iron and steel center. His concern with relics and castaways from the past never becomes sentimental or nostalgic. He recognizes the beauty in the margins and presents it at face value.

It’s not just the industrial castoffs Scott is drawn to, however. Scott’s art embraces the decay and fading grandeur of rural as well as urban landscapes. This is part of the reason, I suspect, that his output takes on a local and regional flavor regardless of where he happens to find himself. In the years that Scott and his wife, Michelle, have lived in northern Alabama he has rescued castaway barn materials, architectural elements, and other found objects and incorporated them into his work and allowed them to inform and influence his prints. Scott takes the objects at hand, filters them through his sensibility, and makes them of a specific time and place but still transcendent. He’s hard to peg and that is another reason I find his work so appealing.

“Aggressive,” “robust,” “masculine,” and “earthy” are adjectives I have applied to Scott’s work at different times. So I was a little skeptical a few years ago when Scott told me he was going to have a show at a small gallery in the idyllic Florida coastal community of Seaside. I am a somewhat grudging admirer of Seaside, Florida, and would be inclined to describe the town as “pastel,” “refined,” and “precious.” None of those are adjectives I would ever apply to Scott Smith’s work and I wasn’t sure how it would be received there.

I traveled to Florida with Scott, Michelle, and their daughter, Cecilia, for the Seaside gallery opening and was surprised and delighted to find that not only did Scott’s art “play” in that environment, it was embraced by it and embraced it in return. The work took on a whole new and unexpected presence in Seaside. Neither the environment nor the art was compromised. Instead, each responded with a fresh vibrancy and timbre.

That is the true mark of an artist and his art, isn’t it? Doesn’t it start with something personal and specific and of the moment and transform into something universal and transcendent? In Scott Smith’s work, the mastery and the marginalia fuse.

(See more of Scott Smith’s art at http://www.scottsmithfineart.com.)

Weeding Organic Cotton

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In 2012 I received an email from Billy Reid’s organization with an interesting proposition. It seemed that Natalie Chanin and Billy Reid, both fashion designers based in Florence, Alabama, were experimenting with growing organic cotton in a small field near Trinity, a town between Decatur and the Shoals area of Alabama. The email asked for volunteers to come out to the field to help weed – no small task when you’re growing organic.

Natalie Chanin’s Florence-based label, Alabama Chanin, features handmade garments made with American-grown organic cotton. The problem is, there is no organic cotton grown in Alabama that she can use and she has to source her cotton from some place in Texas. The purpose of the Trinity experiment was to see what kind of luck they’d have growing their organic cotton locally. A September 5, 2014, edition of The New York Times “T” magazine blog chronicles the Alabama Chanin cotton harvest.

Back in 2012 I heeded the call out of curiosity and because it isn’t every day that one is invited to weed in a fashion designer’s organic cotton field.

I drove to Trinity one sunny Saturday morning and the only other person in the field that morning was Lisa Lentz; she and her husband had lent the project the seven acres to plant the cotton. I didn’t have too much time to spend in the field that morning but I weeded hard while I was there and learned more details about the project from Lisa. I had worked in a cotton field once before; when I was a young boy, on a visit to Cullman County, Alabama, with my mother and grandmother, my Cullman County cousins got a kick out of putting their skinny city cousin in the field for a while with a sack over his shoulder. I wasn’t very useful out in the field that morning but I remember it was rough on the hands and hard work to remove the cotton and place it in the sack.

It was equally challenging to pull weeds in Trinity in 2012 but I drove away with a sense of accomplishment, sore knees, and a curiosity about how the experiment would work out. There were subsequent appeals a few weeks after my morning of weeding for volunteers to pick the cotton ready for harvest. I had conflicts that kept me from going back out but was glad I had a connection to the project. A friend, when I told him I had spent a morning weeding organic cotton, smirked a little and asked how organic cotton clothes would feel any different from any other cotton clothing. I was surprised he asked that since he is very environmentally conscious and fuels one of his vehicles with recycled cooking oil. I explained that it wasn’t so much the feel of the cotton but the toxic chemicals that were not going into the earth and the water supply that mattered.

In July of this year, I was at the Alabama Chanin Factory for a Friends of the Café event and asked Natalie Chanin about the status of the Trinity organic cotton project. She told me the finished cotton was in the factory being turned into tee-shirts. When the tee-shirts went on sale a couple of weeks ago, I had to grab one. It may be the most expensive tee-shirt I’ve ever owned, but I definitely feel I had a hand – and knees – in the effort. And, back to my friend’s comment about what difference organic cotton makes: It’s likely all psychological – but it is probably the most comfortable tee-shirt I’ve ever put on my body.

Waning Days of Summer

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When you live alone you develop routines and rituals. At least that has been my experience. I don’t know when I started the ritual of reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby on the first day of summer, but I know exactly why.

On page 11 of The Great Gatsby, during a dinner party fraught with marital mystery and tension, Daisy Buchanan says, “I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.” Her friend Jordan Baker replies, “We ought to plan something,” and yawns.

I didn’t yawn. Like Daisy, I often watched for the longest day of the year – the first day of summer – and then forgot it until it was past. On my third or fourth reading of The Great Gatsby, that passage resonated with me and, following Jordan’s bored advice, I made a plan: I always read The Great Gatsby on the longest day of the year. I can’t remember exactly when I started that ritual – probably in the late ‘70s – but it continues to this day. And I have never missed the longest day of the year since.

William Faulkner is my favorite writer (good Southern boy that I am) but I think Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the most perfect American novel. It’s a short read; I can knock it out in about three hours. But it is so compactly and intricately structured that I never tire of it even though I have now read it upward of forty times. I always discover something new or respond to something I never responded to in previous readings. I first read the novel in high school and, unlike many young readers, I loved it immediately. I studied it again in college and then found myself drawn to it periodically after those initial readings. And then I developed my summer ritual.

I love summer. I love the heat and the sweatiness and the long days and the outdoor activities. In my part of the South, many people seem to relish complaining about the heat and humidity of summer but I cherish it. I’d rather be too hot than too cold any day. So not only does The Great Gatsby represent my literary tastes, it has also come to represent my favorite time of the year.

The reason I am talking about the beginning of summer at the end of summer is because I am winding down the summer of 2014 with a book that is about The Great Gatsby and that I am thoroughly savoring. Literary critic Maureen Corrigan has authored a new book, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures, that is an extended meditation and exploration of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. It amuses me that Corrigan’s book exploring The Great Gatsby is twice as long as the novel itself. It turns out that Corrigan may be an even bigger fan of the book than I am although she admits to not liking it in high school. I heard Corrigan tell an interviewer that she has read Gatsby at least fifty times and I knew I had to check her book out.

It was worth it. And reading it now, three months past the first day of summer, is giving me a nice way of transitioning to ever shorter days and ever dropping temperatures. I must admit that the only thing that bothers me on that first day of summer in June is the knowledge that the second day of summer will be a bit shorter, and the next shorter still as we take the plunge to the shortest day of the year in December.

The Great Gatsby itself takes place over a summer season. In the first pages the narrator, Nick Carraway, comments that “life was beginning over again in the summer.” Toward the end, he mentions that “there was an autumn flavor in the air” on the day that Gatsby is killed.

Maureen Corrigan, in So We Read On, has provided this reader with the perfect way to ease into the fall.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, …” Thanks, F. Scott. And thanks, Ms. Corrigan.