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The season of raking is almost here. The leaves are going, some faster than others, but they’ll only pick up speed from here.
The dogwood always catches the first train out of town.
The farther down the tree you go, though, the less enflamed the leaves get.
Usually the maples are the first to go.
But the sweet gum is brilliant.
A closer look of the backlit veins of the sweet gum leaf.
But it isn’t all yet. The oaks are defiant, and this maple is, for now, still going strong.
One fine fall day each year, usually in October, and always when Auburn is playing on the road, nearby Loachapoka holds their annual Syrup Sopping. The town of less than 200 grows by something like 15,000 percent for crafts, music, visiting and, of course, the local syrup.
Amazing how much this has grown in the last decade or so. Syrup Sopping started in 1972 and it is nothing like I remember from undergrad, at least in terms of the size. It takes an hour just to get down there now.
But, then, Loachapoka has always been a town of extremes. It was a boomtown that became a small town. At one point in the mid-19th century this was the largest town in this part of the state, because of the railroad.
The town gets its name from the Creek Indian, and means either land where turtles live or are killed. The first white settler came in 1836, and the natives moved west, mostly to Oklahoma, some willingly, some by force of treaty or arms.
Jefferson Davis ate in the town, Stephen Douglas campaigned there against Abraham Lincoln. They mustered more than three regiments during the Civil War.
After the depression of 1873, a massive fire that same decade and alternate railways coming online the place all but dried up.
They saw their first airplane in 1917. Imagine how that must have felt to a bunch of farmers.
You just can’t get better syrup from sorghum and ribbon cane, which is the basis of the festival and what brings you back for more. There’s crafts and food and even a little music, but the syrup and the honey, that’s the point.
Over at one of the antebellum homes they set up a gooseneck trailer as a stage. Someone’s 10-year-old son’s band was playing in the afternoon. They were a rock band. Didn’t get to see them, but here is their Facebook page, where you’ll learn they’ve played three gigs. So, they are young, but they have the terminology down.
We did see a bluegrass band, Volume 5 that was quite good. The vocalist could do a fair impression of Dan Tyminski, as the man standing next to me observed “He sounds just like them Soggy Bottom Boys. What was it, ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ That was the name of that song!”
Well, no, that was the movie, which also had a song Tyminski reprised. While he was a little short on details, he had a good ear.
And then Volume 5 thought they’d lighten the mood by covering “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive.”
It was about as inspiring as the Auburn game. LSU is good, Auburn is young, can’t block, was on the road with a new starting quarterback in Clint Moseley who noted that “Sulligent’s defense was fast too.” Sulligent being the last team he played in high school. After the game he said he thought Sweet Water was fast, but the top college football team in the nation was in a different league than the traditional 2A high school powerhouse.
Woof.
Auburn will have better days. No one expected anything but a visit to the woodshed this week at Baton Rouge, but still. If not for a garbage-time touchdown this would have been the biggest blowout since 1948. The Truman administration! That’s pre-Shug Jordan.
As it was, the 45-10 loss is merely the biggest since the second George W. Bush administration and the 2008 finale against Alabama. Things got better after that pretty quickly, and they’ll turn around for these guys too.
They’ve survived their stout October schedule, winning two more games in that stretch than many thought they would. There’s talent for the future, but they’re still growing up today. Next week Auburn hosts Ole Miss, who’ve lost 10 conference games in a row. With a win over the Rebels Auburn would be eligible for a bowl game already.
Even still, it was a hard one to watch. LSU is good. And so now I’m looking forward to the inevitable disappointment of the 1 vs. 2 LSU-Alabama game in a few weeks.
The most productive accomplishment of the day was in trimming the hedges. This is no small thing, as our house is surrounded on three sides by shrubbery. I’m not sure why the southernmost side is bare.
Everything along the front, save the door, the sidewalk and the garage, are bordered with green, growing things. All but one segment was trimmed. The lucky ones — and isn’t that just like a bunch of bushes, bragging to their neighbors? “You got chopped up, but I’m still here. Look at me grow! — I left alone because they’ll probably be dug out of the ground in a few weeks. Others along the front got lowered, including one that borders the garage. We’ve developed a little contour into it for the car’s side mirror.
There are also two at the end of the drive. These must be maintained to preserve the proper turning ratio as one backs out of the drive. This requires the acquisition of surveying tools, and chalk lines. I am the only person in America going through such precise measurements.
The unintended benefit, or consequence, is that one of them is growing around the mailbox post. I’d let it grow over the thing, but that would probably violate some nuance of the neighborhood and only make the mail carrier mad.
I do all of this, by the way, with the 24-inch Black & Decker Hedge Hog, which is like mounting an M-60 onto Excalibur and plugging an extension cord into the hilt. You hit the trigger, feel that dual blade action, wave it above your head and know: your kingdom is only limited by your vision.
And municipally recognized property lines.
Trimming up the northern side of the estate required the ladder, because there are some bushes on steroids on that side of the house. Two of them would have been easier to reach from the roof.
So I’m standing on the top of a multi-use ladder. We have a transformer of aluminum that makes shapes that are only limited by your imagination, and not its contortion. I dutifully set the ladder into a standard A configuration, straddling the center hinge point with a foot on either side. I realized I couldn’t reach the very back of the bush. OK then. So I find myself standing on the top of the A, in the hinge-point, waving about a whirring 24-bladed saw with shark teeth moving at 2,900 strokes per minute.
My kingdom is suddenly a lot less interesting from this vantage point. I climbed down quickly.
The curious thing about the greenery here is that there is a lot of variety. Once the offending shrubs are out of the front there will only be one place surrounding the entire structure where you see two of the same species next to one another. I haven’t yet decided if that’s a feature or a bug. If you had to dig them all up, every annoying root, what would you replace them with? Uniformity or everything that could grow in this climate?
And that’s the sort of thing you think about as you rake away the leaves leavings. That’s some way to start your Friday evening.
YouTube Cover Theatre, where we see the talent that people have, until the advent of webcams and the Internet, people were hiding in their homes. Since Irecently watched the George Harrison documentary, we may as well check out covers of some of his work.
The Beatles weren’t my band. I like them fine, they just don’t belong to me. Wrong generation. But, if I had been in the right group, I think Harrison would have been my favorite of the bunch. And since you can’t have Harrison without the band, we’ll start with a cover of All Those Years Ago:
That looks like an impossibly difficult tune and he did a nice job. Then he leaned back against his den’s wood paneled walls and enjoyed the rest of his evening.
This cover of My Sweet Lord has received 26,000 views, which may be the largest count that we’ve ever seen in YouTube Cover Theater. Aside, is it just me, or has this song always sounded like it should be appropriated as commercial bed music?
One of the cool things about the Beatles, I would think, would be introducing what has essentially become timeless music to kids. I mean the clean cut, less drugs portion of the catalog. And while this is essentially a Paul McCartney tune, Harrison wrote the main riff, which is enough of an excuse to show a cute cover by a father serenading his daughter for her second birthday.
When she’s older she’s going to be humming Beatles tunes and won’t remember why. Then she’s going to stumble through her dad’s YouTube uploads and it will all click. It will be adorable.
Hard to believe it has been 10 years since George Harrison died. I was doing a network newscast at the time, the last segment of which was a 30 second spot and outro. That day I just played this song for 30 seconds and signed off:
Just for fun, here’s a recreation of Harrison’s Bangladesh Concert with members of Wonderous Stories, Alan Parsons Live Project and more, covering Wah Wah:
Other things happened today, too, emails and organizational things. We’ll have wrapped up the latest big project at work by the first part of the week, it seems my part has largely been completed, except for showing up at the various events next week. Homecoming at Samford means advisory council meetings and wall of fame induction ceremonies and all of the attendant activities.
With those things now completed I can return to other work. Like digging up shrubs.
The hardest part of my day was in writing a biography about a man I’ve never met. People do this all the time, they are called biographers. They usually have a few more resources at hand and the opportunity to do more research. But I was tasked with doing this one in an afternoon. Fortunately the length required was much shorter.
But still, 750 word biography on a man you’ve never met. He’s deceased. His wife is also gone. There is, I was told, some small mystery about some of the particulars, even among his children. I understand that. There’s a lot of that in my family, too. Also, this is a bio about a journalist, which will be read by an audience of journalism-type folks.
No pressure, right?
Hugh Frank Smith attended Samford in the 1930s, when it was Howard College. Then he went to Mizzou to finish his education. I talked to some of their folks today trying to drum up information. He graduated, started working at a Memphis paper, where he stayed for half a century until it folded, with the exception of his time in the Navy during World War II. He wrote for other Tennessee papers after the Press-Scimitar disappeared. His work cropped up from time to time in bigger publications.
He ran a horse farm. A lot of people in Memphis learned to ride there. He used email, perhaps unusual for a man born in 1915. He traveled quite a bit, but never forgot east Alabama, from which he came, or Samford, to whom he became a scholarship donor. All of the things you can find about him are very complimentary. He seems like he would have been a nice man to know.
But I was able to find some of his old columns, and they are lovely. From late in his life, a tribute to his sister:
Nan taught me a lot through the years. She read to me nearly every day and was always reading a book herself — one reason why I still read one or two books a week. She taught me how to drive our old Model T Ford — at first in a hayfield, then later on a dirt road.
She always said, “Look straight ahead when you are driving.” Once when we were rounding a curve I almost ran into a ditch. She couldn’t understand why I was so reckless. “You told me always to look straight ahead,” I explained, and I had been — straight ahead into a cotton field.
I must have scored well in her other lessons because I have never had to report an accident in 78 years of driving.
Here’s one he wrote a few years after his wife died:
Even as her memory faded, Rachael never seemed depressed, and often she would laugh at herself when she said something ridiculous or outrageous. Rather than correct her mistakes, many of them humorous, we just went along with them. I even kept a log. For example, one evening she looked at me and asked: “How did I happen to marry you? I didn’t mean to.” We both laughed. Another night, after arriving home from a party, she looked at our house and asked: “Didn’t we once live here?” I laughed and she quickly joined me.
I really think she often made comments like that just to elicit a chuckle. When she couldn’t get to sleep one night, I suggested: “Why don’t you count sheep?” Her reply: “We only have three.” That was true; we had three sheep.
[…]
Most important, she remained at the center of our farm and our family throughout it all. We found ways to treasure as much of the end of life as possible. As it turned out, Rachael’s sunny disposition throughout her life was her final gift to us. It made Alzheimer’s “long goodbye” more bearable for my daughters and myself.
So I wrote a bio, met with students. I gave a tour of a few of the facilities to a visiting alumnus. I taught a class. Also this, a hasty little video just to remember the sunny day:
It was a fine day. Began with a headache, ended with pizza with friends and jokes in a blustery parking lot.
Back to the old yearbook collection with three new installments, all firmly in the 1960s. I have a suspicion that what took place in most of the country in the ’60s probably didn’t arrive at Auburn for a few more years, but even still you can see in the photos inside that the times were becoming a Bob Dylan song.
Here are the new additions to the collection, starting with 1963. It is everything the ’60s could hope for and the ’80s were inspired by in graphic design. Makes you long for the good old days. For previous covers, including some of the good old days in the collection, go here. For a little bit more context of the loveliest village at specific points in it’s history, try here.
And we’ll have more from the Glomerata section next week.
