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Yesterday I ate lunch at the Sweet Magnolia cafe. The menu is always reliably good--fried chicken, creamed corn, turnip greens, etc. I heard folks in the cafe grousing about Obama, saying "He's a Muslim, I've heard he said he won't put his hand on the Christain Bible to take the oath of office," etc. People don't know what to expect.
All I know is the guy doing the most talking quoted something he heard on Rush Limbaugh--Oh Oh. I tuned the chatter out and enjoyed dinner. I had wanted to stop by the Dirt Cheap store in town, but it burned down the day before! First Katrina smashed it, now it's incinerated. A guard from the company sat out in the broiling sun waiting for investigators. I asked him if he needed a bottle of cold water, but he said no.
Anyway, across from the cafe there is a trailer. A little boy about four years old was jumping and playing in a wading pool--a little pool about as high as his ankles. He had a water hose to play with, and he had a plastic float device around his waist, (for some undiscernable reason, because he couldn't have floated in that tiny pool if he tried) and a plastic dolphin to play with.
His father kept careful watch from the front stoop. The dad had put up a blue tarp over the pool as a sunroof. You could feel the little boy's happiness as he frolicked. He didn't know he wasn't on the Riviera, he didn't know he wasn't living in a million dollar home with a fancy pool. There in that tiny wading pool with a water hose to play with, his dad nearby, the child's happiness was palpable and real, and he was rich beyond measure.
I sat in the car and watched for a few minutes, that scene one of those vignettes of life like a snapshot that I will carry in my memory.
Susil
that group and start knocking heads together. How can
you not love a place that has a Sweet Magnolia cafe?
I remember poor but lovely pleasures from my own
childhood, notably frolicking in the spray of an open
fire hydrant on a hot day. are they making childhoods
like that anymore?