Postcard From Buc-ee-stan

A Weekend Rambling Around My New Southern Home

Good morning! I’m out today continuing the apartment search, but I have a couple of good leads thanks to you readers. In fact, I’m writing this on Sunday night so I can hit the road early tomorrow and hunt. Man, I tell you, I’ve been immersed in MURCA since getting back last week, and it feels pretty great. That’s me above, wearing a Buc-ee’s commemorative t-shirt that my aunt and uncle gave me. They were driving through Birmingham on their way back to Michigan from Florida. We met up for Tex-Mex, and they presented me with that glorious welcome home gift. Respect the Patriotic Beaver!

On Saturday morning, I took this selfie to send to the organizers of a conference I’ll be attending later this summer. They need it for the brochure. I was shocked — the word isn’t too strong — by how serene, even happy, I look in it. I wanted y’all to know.

I don’t know why I was wrapped so tight by anxiety in Budapest, but I was. I had a great life there, no complaints — except for no church community, which wasn’t Budapest’s fault (it was a matter of my inability in local languages). I can’t explain it, really, but being back in the US, in a place where I have access to an Orthodox church in my own language — well, I can literally feel the anxiety uncoiling within me. Again, I can’t explain it, but I’m not going to think about it, just be grateful.

On Saturday, I met up with His Eminence Father Matt Venuti, of this Substack’s comments section, who was passing through town with a friend from Mobile. Funny to meet people you’ve been texting with and even talking on the phone with for years. We had a blast till they kicked us out of the coffee shop, on account of closing up. Took this selfie with Fadda.

I was embarrassed that I have overtrimmed my beard. He was frustrated that the shot doesn’t indicate that his chapeau is a Def Leppard cap (“I have a reputation to maintain,” he whined.) Did you know Catholic priests can be unreformed metalheads? They can be. Yesterday afternoon I went with a pal to a dive bar, saw this bumper sticker on a pickup, and thought of the Curé de Mobile:

I went to church yesterday at St. Symeon, the OCA parish in town. I had been told by a Baptist friend that the choir is exceptionally good. He undersold it. Man, that was what they call havin’ church! What a beautiful church that is, and full of young families. I now have a church. No apartment yet, but the more important home has been achieve.

It was Pentecost, and that means the Kneeling Vespers service after the liturgy. But I had made lunch plans with my friend Lee, so had to bounce. He had me meet him at Johnny’s, one of the town’s Greek diners. Y’all! It was so unbelievably, gloriously delicious. I had lamb meatballs, blackeyed peas, a double helping of turnip greens, and cornbread. Perfection. Lee took this pic of me. I sent it to my foodie friend James C., who returned it with me outfitted in a Tom Wolfe-style ice cream suit.

I could eat at Johnny’s every day. It’s what the South tastes like. After lunch, Lee, a Walker Percy fan (we met at the Walker Percy Weekend in St. Francisville a decade or so ago). He drove me by Percy’s childhood home, for instance, and then we motored around the beautiful old neighborhoods of this mountainous city.

After our tour, Lee took me by a dive bar called The Garage. I ordered a cold beer, and we sat on the back patio, steaming in the heat and humidity, smelling the aroma of the flowering magnolia tree. In Alabama, they don’t mess around with trying to keep customers cool. Notice the brand name of the fan on the patio:

Me and the beer; notice the magnolia behind me:

Lee and I talked about books, family, the South, and stuff. I’m so glad to be here with Lee, and the two other buds in our group, Ed and Matt. These guys had a lot to do with me choosing Birmingham as my landing spot back in America. Them, and knowing that I would have a good Orthodox church. I had never been to St. Symeon’s, but I had been to the Greek church downtown on my last visit here, and I knew it too was a great place. I’ll stick with St. Symeon’s, because it’s OCA, and so am I, but I also consider myself at home with my Greek brethren and sistren. Maybe I can show my new Orthodox friends some Louisiana hospitality sometime. Long as they don’t make me utter the blasphemous (for an LSU grad) words, “Roll Tide!”

Source

When is the last time you got this far down in a Rod Dreher’s Diary without me referencing some dread news in the world? It feels weird not to have done so, but it feels even better to have such good personal news to report. When Lee and I were walking back to his truck from The Garage, the dive bar, I told him that this heat and humidity are horrible … but this is what home feels like. I’ve never lived in the South outside of Louisiana (I don’t really call Dallas the South, though it kind of is), so it’s going to be real interesting to me to observe the differences. But that feeling you have in the Southern summer, of thinking you’d better not sit in one place too long or a kudzu tendril will wrap around your ankles — that’s here. I hate it, but I also kind of love it, just because it’s nostalgic.

Ambling down the sidewalk, taking in the sensory environment, especially the earthy aromas mediated through the steambath, reminded me of being a little boy wandering around my grandmother’s yard in the summer time, near the hydrangeas, taking in the pungent smell of the mold (I guess) in the part of her yard under the crape myrtles, where the sun never shined. A couple of times I climbed up the sweet olive tree next to the screened porch, crawled onto the roof of her cottage, and thought I was king of the world. Under me was the porch where the old folks would sit after Sunday dinner, talking. (My older cousin Andy told me not long ago that in the early 1960s, when he was a kid, he would sit there listening to the elders talk about “the War” — meaning the Civil War. A hundred years and two World Wars on, that was the War to them.)

The little yard below, bounded by the crape myrtles and an ancient, vine-shrouded magnolia, was once the site of an epic battle between two serpents. My father told me about how they were all sitting on the porch after Sunday dinner one afternoon, when a rattlesnake slithered out from under the cottage and began making his way across the yard. As my dad stood up to go find a hoe to kill the poisonous snake, a king snake shot out of the underbrush on the other side of the yard, and confronted the rattler. It was on! Daddy said the king snake taunted the rattler, making him strike over and over, unsuccessfully. Eventually the rattlesnake was too exhausted to continue … and the king snake ate him.

Man, I would have loved to have seen that. I learned very early in my life that king snakes were our friends. Aunt Lois and Aunt Hilda told me that. There was an old king snake living in the brush outside their cabin. They said as long as he was there, he would keep the bad snakes away. Once, when I was seven or eight years old, I walked through the pecan orchard with my friend Charles Frank to visit the old aunts. There, stretched across the pea gravel driveway, was the old king snake, sunning himself, his yellow-green speckles glittering in the summer sun on the black surface of his body. Charles Frank froze in fear — it was a snake! — but I just stepped over him. The king snake was our friend.

Sisters Lois and Hilda Simmons, 1970s

Looking at that photo, I can smell the smoky clay and ash of the aunts’ fireplace. They were bony old ladies, born in the 1890s, and sometimes even lit a fire in the summer. Their exceedingly modest antebellum cabin, shaded by a huge Chinese rain tree and lesser others, was always cool, no matter how hot it got outside. The truth is, the deepest desire in all my life is to get back to their cabin in their enchanted garden. They taught me how to read when I was yet two years away from kindergarten. They had books on the shelves and art on the walls. They taught me about the Great War, in which they served as Red Cross nurses, and about what was happening in our world today. They told me who Kissinger was, and Brezhnev. My love of Europe, and my love of the world of news and journalism, was seeded right there in that cabin, and they also nurtured my love of books.

Aunt Hilda, on the right in the picture, was an eccentric Episcopalian. She took out a book about palm reading from the Audubon Library in town, about palm reading. One day she took my fat little hand into hers, and read its lines. “See this one?” she said. “It means you are going to travel far in life.” I had hoped it was true, but even then, as a small boy, I figured this was nonsense.

It came true, though. And now I’m back in the South. For how long this time? Who knows? I’m just happy to enjoy the moment while it lasts. Once I get squared away with an apartment and furniture, I need to do the Alabama thing and drive down to see the famous billboard. Here’s a detail of a photo I took of my son Matt wearing a t-shirt reproducing the billboard and its message. If you see a tall, broad-shouldered young man with an auburn beard rambling around Vienna with this t-shirt on, that’s my boy.

I’m going to end this here, because I am kind of amazed that I got through an entire newsletter without pointing to some awful thing going on in the world. And hey, I’m paying attention! Paris riots, for instance, and new AI thoughts. I’ll talk about this tomorrow. I just thought I’d let y’all know what’s going on “locally” for me, getting out of my head and off the laptop. That’s a change.

Last note: my New Orleans lawyer pal texted yesterday to say that he’s re-reading A Confederacy of Dunces, and realized something big:

You really are Ignatius! … From Walker Percy’s description of Ig (at war against “Freud, homosexuals, heterosexuals, Protestants, and the assorted excesses of modern times”), to Ig saying that the world started going to hell with the collapse of the medieval system and the ascendence of the gods of chaos, lunacy and bad taste …. It you!

“He often bloated while lying in bed in the morning, contemplating the unfortunate turn that events had taken since the Reformation.”

“A firm Rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself.”

I HAVE BEEN TELLING YOU PEOPLE THIS FOR YEARS! I AM NON-OBESE, NON-GASSY IGNATIUS! Now, where is my Southern-fried Myrna Minkoff? Or maybe I will meet Walker Percy’s spacefaring Dr. Jane Smith, “the last Methodist in Tennessee,” and we’ll find our way to Lost Cove. Anything is possible! It’s the South.

I’m only chagrined that this ol’ boy who owns a bar in Idaho got the jump on us! But bless him for getting into the proper spirit of the season.