After a loooong day of traveling, Alex and I rolled into the garage about 7:15 tonight. I have burned up the interstate the last couple of days, but it was so worth it. Just a few items of note before I put the little man in the tub and try to recharge my batteries before Monday morning hits:

1) If someone ever questions whether Southern hospitality still exists, he or she needs to attend a gathering that Melanie and Katy coordinate. OH MY WORD at the spreads and dips and fruits and unusual chip products and whole grain breads and meats and cheeses and exotic cracker assortments. While Melanie acted like she just ran by Whole Foods and “picked up a few things,” she actually purchased approximately one quarter of the Baton Rouge store’s inventory and then created a beautiful tablescape with her McCarty pottery. Katy, competely on the sly, planned a private little shopping excursion to this great place called FeBe, arranged for us to get our make-up done, and then surprised me with a purse that I had pointed out in the first few minutes we were shopping (when I got home and David saw the purse, he said, “so, did the person who designed that know you? Because it looks exactly like you”). Thanks, K & M. Everything was perfect.

2) If someone ever wonders why my former neighbor Kristi and I got along so well, I will explain it now: we laugh almost non-stop when we’re in each other’s company. Even though we hadn’t seen each other in about four years, it was like someone had just hit a pause button on our last in-person conversation, and this weekend we got to pick up exactly where we left off.

3) If someone ever tries the sweet tea at the Popeye’s in McComb, MS, and finds it entirely too sweet, think long and hard before you ask an employee if there’s any unsweetened tea. Tracey asked today, and she received the following reply: “I don’t know.” I kind of appreciated the complete lack of interest in customer care and wondered how that laissez-faire attitude might filter down into other Popeye’s inquiries. Just imagine:
“Do y’all have any fried chicken?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do y’all have any biscuits?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do y’all have any food?”
“I don’t know.”

4) If someone is ever reluctant to leave a toddler with grandparents because they think the toddler will miss them terribly and never know happiness again, be ye not afraid. As it turns out, toddlers are actually beside themselves with happiness when unlimited supplies of Coke, pizza, ice cream, cookies, Coke, donuts, Cheetos, Coke, Coke, and Coke are available. As I pulled out of Mama and Daddy’s driveway this afternoon, Alex actually started to cry and said, “I wanna stay with Pappa! Wanna eat Cheetos!”

5) If someone wants to understand one of the reasons why I feel blessed beyond all measure, he or she should meet my friends. On my little three-day road trip I got to see some friends from every stop in the road: childhood friends, high school friends, college friends, neighbor friends. It made me appreciate the friends I got to see and miss the ones I didn’t…but more than anything, if just made me grateful.

More later.

Since I’m about to leave for my weekend in the Red Stick, posting will be sporadic at best over the next few days. I could try to post from Mama and Daddy’s house tonight, but since Daddy will not give up dial-up for love or money, it might be a little too frustrating to try to work the interweb from Casa de Old School Technology.

I’m not exactly sure how I will cope with not running to the “blog site” as soon as a thought pops into my mind, but it should be fun to interact with, you know, people. Might not be a bad idea for me to get out of my little blog bubble for a few days.

Y’all play sweet while I’m gone.

Several of y’all know my friend Lea Margaret. For those of you who don’t, you are 1) missing a treat and 2) in need of a little background information.

If there were a Scale of Southern-ness, and said scale ranged from 1 to 10, I would probably fall somewhere around a 7. I do the whole Southern Living subscription / cook everything from scratch / love to decorate / take pride in my heritage / would-curl-into-the-fetal-position-if-for-some-reason-I-lost-my-accent thing.

But I don’t decorate my front porch based on the seasons, I don’t hunt or ride horses, and I’ve never made a mint julep. I cannot trace my family tree back to the Founding Fathers, I’ve never been to the Kentucky Derby, and I’ve never spent more than 24 hours on the banks of the Mississippi River. I do not have a double name. So while I rank pretty high on the scale, I have some definite Southern shortcomings.

Lea Margaret, however, is the standard bearer for the Scale of Southern-ness, the person who establishes what a 10 should be. I met her in college, where she wore mostly dresses and riding boots and always, always had a bow or scarf in her hair. She grew up in the Delta, went to boarding school in Tennessee, rode horses every spare second, and, I imagine, hunted a fox or two. She started her own successful business when she got her degree, and you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that her business specialized in silver jewelry and hairbows.

She’s the kind of person who, when you visit her, leaves “happies” for you and your family in the bathroom: a soap you might enjoy, an interesting new shampoo, a copy of your favorite magazine that you can peruse in the tub. She can create a beautiful floral arrangement using only kudzu, johnson grass, and Queen Anne’s lace. She has a guest book. In her house. And she insists that you sign it.

A few years ago Lea Margaret and her hubby Chris moved to Dallas because of Chris’ job. It was somewhat traumatic for LM, who had never lived west of the Mississippi. But she adjusted to life out there and found her way – and I think eventually she came to appreciate that Texans treasure their regional identity as much as we Southerners do.

Right before LM moved she found out that she was expecting (sidenote: people who rank 10 on the Southern scale “expect” babies; they do not “get pregnant”), so while I imagine that Texas will always be special to her and Chris because it’s where Mac was born, it was never “home.” And if you wanted to see the very embodiment of agony and frustration, you should’ve seen LM struggle through her first football season in Texas, where the SEC is nothing but an also-ran to the Big 12, where Fox Sports South isn’t even a part of the local cable line-up.

Things went from bad to worse, I’m afraid. After a little over a year in Texas, Chris’ job required that they move to Pennsylvania. PENNSYLVANIA (not that that there’s anything wrong with PA – but putting LM there is the equivalent of putting an eskimo in Hawaii – it just doesn’t make good sense). LM and I did some major email scheming and plotting to try to figure out how she and Chris could get back to the South. I even looked for jobs on the internet and would send LM the links, but it seemed like they were destined to be far, far away from the rest of us.

Resigned but determined, just as Scarlett O’Hara would have been, LM decided to make the best of it, comforted at least in small part because the town where they live “is still south of the Mason-Dixon line.”

Given all this information, you can imagine my joy when I received the following email from LM today: “We are moving to Vicksburg! Leaving PA the 23rd. We are MORE than excited!”

Y’all, this news is the equivalent of the Starship Enterprise finding its way back to earth. Lassie finding his way home. Dorothy and Toto making it back to Kansas. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s like Jesus ascending into heaven to sit at the right hand of God the Father or anything like that. But still, it’s a pretty big deal.

Lea Margaret will be back in Mississippi again, within driving distance of her beloved Bulldodgs, with the Delta a stone’s throw away, with her lifelong friends mere minutes down the road, and with the Mississippi River right there in her backyard. And for the first time, she’ll have her husband and her child by her side in the state she loves more than any other.

Welcome Home, Lea Margaret. We surely have missed you.

Disclaimer: I have wonderful friends and family who are Rebel fans. But to see a story like this one in the newspaper and not mention it would cause me to develop some form of nervous tic. I’d twitch my way right out of my chair and down to the street, and I’d keep twitching and tic-ing until I finally had to say something in order to stop all the trembling.

So really, I mention these developments for health reasons as much as anything.

I’m just sayin’.

Plus, I have to gloat while I can…it’s just a matter of time before someone from my alma mater wields a gun in a public setting or decides that, if the cash runs out, counterfeiting hundred dollar bills is an acceptable solution.

We’ve all got our baggage, I reckon.

Paula Deen just took a hunk of bleu cheese and combined it with butter, put the cheese/butter mixture in between two ground beef patties, smashed the two patties together so that cheese/butter couldn’t escape, and then she fried the whole thing.

One of my arteries clogged just watching it.

For several weeks I’ve been looking forward to A Very Special Oprah featuring the beautiful Ms. Faith Hill and her handsome husband, Mr. Tim McGraw. Now I’m not normally one to put celebrities on a pedestal – I very much subscribe to the philosophy that celebrities, just like the rest of us, put on their pants one leg at a time and eat things that don’t agree with them and stuggle with real problems (on top of eluding the paparazzi and battling your various and sundry addictions).

But Faith and Tim – well, they’re special. They’re like homefolk who made it big – and even though they’re gorgeous and famous and all that stuff, you know deep down that they still eat cornbread and pound cake and the occasional piece of fried chicken. Faith probably eats baked chicken – she’s not big as a minute – but Tim, well, you just know that he loves him a good chicken leg every now and again. With some hot sauce on the side. And a biscuit.

Now we’re all aware that Coretta Scott-King died last week. I don’t know anyone – at least not anyone I could ever be friends with – who would argue that Mrs. and Dr. King lived anything other than heroic lives. They instigated great changes in our country in general and our South in particular, and I know we’re all grateful for that. It’s a debt we’ll never be able to repay, and I want to be very clear that I appreciate and admire what the Kings did with their lives and their calling.

So here is the thing, the evidence of the fact that I am not, as Mama would say, “deep as a thimble.” There was a televised memorial service for Mrs. King on Monday. There was a televised funeral for Mrs. King yesterday. A THREE HOUR FUNERAL that PRE-EMPTED the Faith and Tim Oprah. I’m not saying that Mrs. King didn’t deserve a three-hour funeral. Not at all. I’m just saying that maybe they could’ve scheduled it from 10-1 or even 1-4 but why oh Lord why from 2-5 when it cuts right through the heart of the Very Special Oprah that I’ve been anticipating for weeks?

Today I went to the TiVo, filled with hope that our local ABC station had decided to run yesterday’s Oprah episode today, hoping that I’d click “Play” and see Faith’s pretty Tammy-Wynette-ish-but-it-works-for-her hair. Instead, it was Matthew McConaughey, who is nice-looking and all but nowhere near, not by the longest shot, the same level as Country Music’s Superstar Duo.

Did one of y’all happen to tape Oprah yesterday? Please?