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Notes124 playsMy grandfather was a duck trapper
He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth
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NotesI need to reread all my books; my first read is always myopic and overwhelming, and I can never recognize the themes or anticipate what’s been foreshadowed. Unfortunately, this is also how life feels to me, and I don’t think I’ll get a redo. Given my limited time and ability, I think I need to start engaging others and pay attention to their reactions—this may be the only way forward.
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Notes"I felt lonely then. This is the time when you need somebody. This is the time when it is good to have a wife, and children, to absorb your grief, to hold on to you. This is when you pay, and pay and pay, for pretending that you don’t need anybody."Rick Bragg
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Notes"But what really kills you on that other side are the other people—the smiling, carefree people—who can just as easily look over into your side, and turn their face away.
Only the oxygen is richer on your side. It has to be. Because your childhood burns away much, much faster."Rick Bragg
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Rick Bragg, All Over But the Shoutin’
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Notes"…a momma who went eighteen years without a new dress so that her sons could have school clothes, who picked cotton in other people’s fields and ironed other people’s clothes and cleaned the mess in other people’s houses, so that her children didn’t have to live on welfare alone, so that one of them could climb up her backbone and escape the poverty and hopelessness that ringed them, free and clean."All Over but the Shoutin’, Rick Bragg (via cameokiddo-blog-blog)
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Notes"I told her I was getting fat on chicken and yellow rice and croquetas de jamón, which is about as much fun as you have with your clothes on."Rick Bragg
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Notes Birmingham“By the time I got to Birmingham, its great story was already frozen in stone. Kelly Ingram Park is a place of statues now, quiet, peaceful, unless you are one of those people to whom history screams. Old black men sit on the park benches to feel the sun on their face, and discuss whether or not that statue of the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior really looks like him. It stands on ground, what many people in this city see as holy ground, where civil rights marchers were pummeled by batons, blasted with fire hoses and gnawed by dogs, on the orders of a one-eyed little man named Bull Connor. A few feet away is the venerable old Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where a Klansman’s bomb killed four little girls. History might not scream to a white man here, but it whispers.” (157)
Would I have fought segregation if I had been born in 1941, instead of 1991? I doubt it; I might have personally rejected it, but to fight requires outrage and courage, and I don’t fight anything now, even though there is plenty to be outraged about and I may have less to lose. But I do hear history whispering to me sometimes. And I can say I’m not like my parents, who believe the present (or recently past, for issues like gay marriage) order is natural, just, obvious, and inevitable, and so atrocities like slavery and Jim Crow are mere aberrations and not very important or outrageous anymore.
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A Quarter in an Unlucky Slot Machine
“You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had it back, like a quarter in an unlucky slot machine.” (147)
I don’t know if this line is especially great, but one of the previous owners of my book must have loved it: they highlighted it at least twice, practically painting the bottom of the page in deep, yellow strokes. It was the only part of the book any of them marked, and while I don’t mark my books these days (my thoughts and my favorite lines never feel that definitive) shortly after I bought this book in 2012 I did identify the lines at the beginning of the book as being from “Pancho and Lefty,” surely to prove to quietly but unambiguously prove to the world how cultured I am.
