and another thing Archives - SB Magazine https://sbmag.net/tag/and-another-thing/ SB Magazine Thu, 16 Jan 2025 18:19:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://sbmag.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/sb-logo-150-100x100.jpg and another thing Archives - SB Magazine https://sbmag.net/tag/and-another-thing/ 32 32 ORGANIZATION FOR DUMMIES https://sbmag.net/organization-for-dummies/ Thu, 16 Jan 2025 18:18:55 +0000 https://sbmag.net/?p=65110 The post ORGANIZATION FOR DUMMIES appeared first on SB Magazine.

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The trouble with organizing your life — sock drawer, desk, garage, glove compartment, toy box, endocrine system — is you’re constantly faced with having to decide whether to throw something away, knowing that everything you do throw away is something you “might need one of these days.”

This is a law of nature, and it makes Trash Cowards of us all.

The scenario:

New year. Fresh start. You are Mary Tyler Moore, and you’ve decided you’re gonna make it after all. (Too old of a reference?) You are so ready to better yourself that you are the proverbial ball of fire, so in tune with making a fresh start that you are a human can of Lysol.

So you decide to organize your life. You decide to do this because:

A: It is a new year and you’d rather resolve to do this than to exercise three times a week to “get in shape,” or …

B: You know National

Get Organized Week is in October, and you figure if you start in January, you might be ready to get organized once autumn gets here.

You and everyone who knows you know it’s a shot in the dark, but a guy’s got to try, right? We’ve got to try to get organized even if everyone’s like me, so helplessly in disarray that you’re trying to hire someone to take the Christmas tree down for you. (I have the blinds in that room closed and am secretly hoping it will take itself down.)

There is a lot of stuff to organize. You opt to organize your desk at work first because the other day you looked and couldn’t find it. Seems a logical place to start … IF you find it.

The first thing you do is determine what to throw away. This is hard because Every Single Item cluttering your desk and drawers is something you “might need one of these days.” This is why you kept it in the first place. You quickly realize that everything on and in your desk is either clear-cut trash — 

Wendy’s wrapper, empty Pepsi bottle, Christmas in the Sky pass from 2006, petrified Certs, congealed eyeliner, corpse, etc.—or something you “might need.”

The old People magazine published the week of Johnny Carson’s last show? You might need it.

That special section the Memphis newspaper ran on Elvis 27 years after his untimely passing? Might need it.

That check stub and key to your old desk and copy of the paper in Hope, Ark., the day Clinton became President? Might need all that stuff.

Suddenly, the thought of getting organized isn’t fun anymore. At all. The decision-making process has whittled you down to the half a man you knew you always were. You don’t have room to organize any of your New Stuff because you can’t throw away any of the Old Stuff you “might need one of these days.”

And you are already thinking about the closet at home. It will be the same sad story. You might need that old sweatshirt, the half-towel, that mildewed, ripped and dry-rotting T-shirt.

Demoralization. Your tidy plans have gone to you-know-where on a fast train. And you are helpless to stop it.

So, you do the only thing you can do. You grab the near-empty can of Lysol and spray it all over the piles on your desk. Save some for the closet at home. You might be disorganized, but at least you’re clean.

Oh, and you keep the empty Lysol can. Sure do. Might need it one of these days.

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]]> AND ANOTHER THING: THEY LEARNED IT TO US https://sbmag.net/and-another-thing-they-learned-it-to-us/ https://sbmag.net/and-another-thing-they-learned-it-to-us/#respond Tue, 20 Aug 2024 21:47:19 +0000 https://sbmag.net/?p=63216 The post AND ANOTHER THING: THEY LEARNED IT TO US appeared first on SB Magazine.

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How much would we have to pay you annually to teach first grade?

I asked 10 people, and the average was, give or take, $7 million.

Here is a short list of Really Hard Jobs off the top of my head and without giving it much thought:

•Snake charmer guy
•Explosive ordnance disposal guy
•Cleaning up Bourbon Street after any holiday guy
•Stone carrier guy, pyramid construction, circa 2610 BC
•Great Raft Removal guy (and thank you, Captain Henry Miller Shreve and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)
•Chiseler for any of the presidents on Mt. Rushmore guy
•Magazine publication guy*

Hot water, every single one. But mere child’s play compared to the lonely plight of the first-grade teacher. The teachers whose attendance rolls we are not worthy of touching have just begun a year’s worth of doing daily what all the jobs above require— combined.

Each working day of the first-grade teacher’s life is filled with challenges, all of them weighing between 35 and 50 pounds, most of them with attention spans to match their bladder sizes, each with a mind of her or his own, none of them able to read. It’s not a job for the faint of heart. This is Big-Person Work.

It has been my privilege to watch some of the finest in the fieldwork, and it’s like watching the talent that gets standing ovations in cathedrals, ballparks, and music halls the world over. How do they do it? The answer remains a mystery to the ordinary layman like me, sitting here with humble hat in humble hand.

Mine is Bobbie Cook, “Mrs. Bobbie,” 96 and retired for 35 years back home in South Carolina, retired for the same number of years she taught, 30 of those in first grade. She had to take three years

off in her 50s to take cancer out behind the barn, then came back and duked it out with us short people for another half-dozen years. Tough as a 10-cent steak.

Not gonna lie, I was the loser who cried the first day of school. Wanted to ride my bike and spend the day with my collie dog, Sport, and my mother, same as always. Total no-hoper.

Except … Mrs. Bobbie. She tucked her cape into the back of her skirt, handed me a crayon, smiled, and smelled like either roses or really fresh soap. Suddenly, the chalkboard and The Other Kids and the smell of yeast rolls from down the hall weren’t so bad after all. We leaped from a rocky start to smooth sailing.

Mrs. Bobbie was the difference that made the difference for me.

Mrs. Bobbie and her brothers and sisters are Out There, helping tomorrow’s accountants and mayors and construction workers and future teachers, doing more than their fair share. Hopefully, they can trust us to do ours when school’s not in session.

“I’ll tell you what teaching does and has done for me all these years,” Mrs. Bobbie told me during one of our grownup visits years ago. “It makes me believe the Bible where it says we all must become like little children to be accepted into heaven. I’ve seen that in the trust, believing, the blind faith first-graders have in their teachers. They always renewed my faith in mankind with their little trusting.”

If you get a good one, if you luck into a Mrs. Bobbie — well, good teachers renew OUR faith in mankind. The best ones are in the ring to make a difference, planting trees they might never see come up, sowing seeds to benefit every one of us. First things first: we should thank them every chance we get.

Anyway … back to homework. Hand me those safety scissors and that No. 2 jumbo pencil, will you? …

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]]> https://sbmag.net/and-another-thing-they-learned-it-to-us/feed/ 0 The Siren Song of the Redneck Riviera https://sbmag.net/the-siren-song-of-the-redneck-riviera/ https://sbmag.net/the-siren-song-of-the-redneck-riviera/#respond Thu, 04 Jul 2024 17:54:51 +0000 https://sbmag.net/?p=62666 The post The Siren Song of the Redneck Riviera appeared first on SB Magazine.

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By Teddy Allen

We are a ‘boutique’ publication — nearly 25 years old, by the way, thanks to you — and while we have a soft spot for the finer things, we honor our roots. Always.

So, while not all of us qualify as “redneck” or even wish to be, we at least recognize the shade. We are Southern as grits so … How I define “redneck” is in the same ballpark as how I define pornography: it’s tough to put into words, but I know it when I see it. 

Some people are offended by the “R” word, but not the true redneck. True rednecks wear the label as a badge of honor. They are the “I’ve Been to Pigeon Forge!” bumper sticker crowd, the people who have kitchens that smell like Pabst and linoleum and cathead biscuits, the people whose jeans are ripped because they got caught on rebar, not because it’s the style. Their scent is Pledge and motor oil and Old Spice.

The rednecks I’m talking about are of the Jeff Foxworthy variety, the ones who put their new television sets on top of their old television sets. A friend from redneck lineage told me this week that back in the day, when their TV practically gave out and was down to getting picture only, Uncle Lester brought over his TV because – talk about a match made in Redneck Heaven! – it would get sound only.

Stack the two, and bam! — Redneck Entertainment Center. Just fry up the bologna sandwiches, adjust the rabbit ears, recline in the duct-taped easy chair, and stay tuned for “This Week in NASCAR.” Anybody got an onion?

I am hopeful that the Griswold Family franchise will eventually put out a movie called “Redneck Vacation.” There is a fertile field to plow here. The setting would be your greater Gulf Shores/Orange Beach area, I would hope. The Redneck Riviera.

The French Riviera has resorts like Cap-d’Ail and Beaulieu-sur-Mer, with yachting and real French people. The Redneck Riviera has Shoalwater Condos and parasailing off the fishing dock, and a real Cajun who’ll scream “Jellyfish!” just to make the guy standing next to him in waist-deep water spill his beer.

 Hard to believe, but there are The Great Unwashed among us who still wonder why we call this beckoning stretch of sand the Redneck Riviera. All these summer beach trips, and they’ve missed seeing the wind and waves and tattoos? The unfiltereds and the red lipstick mixed with Coppertone? The vacationing truckers in cut-off blue jeans? Oh, how blind we can be…

Sometimes, to establish themselves, the redneck gods have to play hardball. This very thing happened years ago, not 20 feet from my sandy beach chair, when a very senior citizen in Bermuda shorts put a beach towel around his waist, right there by your lapping Orange Beach waves. He had a pair of swim trunks in his hand. Suddenly, one hand went sort of under his towel at his waist area. The Bermuda shorts dropped to his ankles. Hello!

Then he bent and attempted to put on the trunks. The towel slipped a bit. Or maybe the towel cracked. It was supposed to stay up, I guess. It didn’t. Was this a circus act? Were we on Candid Camera?

Suddenly, there was a full moon, and not the pretty kind, at 9 a.m. But the (redneck) gentleman just pulled his trunks up and set about enjoying the rest of his day at the beach with his family, who didn’t even look up from reading their Popular Mechanics while he was changing because I suppose they’d seen it all before. Literally.

And there, in living color, is your Redneck Riviera defined. Hate to put that picture in your mind, but life is filled with hard lessons. Can’t wait to go back.

Write Teddy at teddy@latech.edu

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]]> https://sbmag.net/the-siren-song-of-the-redneck-riviera/feed/ 0 And Another Thing: Soft spots for Steel Magnolias https://sbmag.net/and-another-thing-soft-spots-for-steel-magnolias/ https://sbmag.net/and-another-thing-soft-spots-for-steel-magnolias/#respond Mon, 04 Mar 2024 19:06:56 +0000 https://sbmag.net/?p=56982 The post And Another Thing: Soft spots for Steel Magnolias appeared first on SB Magazine.

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By Teddy Allen

The quote was the final line of a friend’s obituary years ago, and it spoke of her with an accuracy so sharp, so clearly defined, that those of us who loved her could have sworn it had been written for her and for her alone.

“Strength just comes in one brand – you stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you and keep your hair combed.”

Grace under pressure, every day.

It’s from the late North Carolina poet and novelist Reynolds Price, who has the spunky pepper pot of a title character say this in the novel Kate Vaiden, a raspy word picture that quietly screams of an innocent but almost animal attraction and drips with an authentic and steely Southern female swagger.

“Strength just comes in one brand – you stand up at sunrise and meet what they send you and keep your hair combed.”

Whatever you say, Kate. I’m a believer.

Remind you of anyone? Me too. To capture such a feisty Southern heroine, this writer must have met some of the same women we’ve been lucky enough to know.

Do yourself a favor: grant yourself some time to think of and be grateful for women who knew you better than you knew yourself, for the strength and smile that came along at just the right time, for the steel magnolias of your youth, for the thick-skinned, wise, and lively women of our lives.

What they do isn’t easy. They just make it look that way.

Few women in my hometown owned a business — there weren’t a lot of businesses to own — yet they ran most everything. It took growing older and getting away to understand through life’s rearview mirror that women were at the heart of it all.

The exception was Kay’s Hair Right Here. Mrs. Kay was the mom of my elementary school friends Sharon and Alan, and she ran the small two-chair, two-dryer beauty shop, a one-woman show. Always loved the double punch packed by her salon’s name: she would do your mom’s hair Right Here (on this spot), and she would do it correctly (Right).

A whiz, Mrs. Kay was, both with words and with a curling iron and some hair spray or Dippity-Do.

Like Mrs. Kay, most all the women of my youth possessed their own brand of magic. One early summer morning, Mrs. Helen taught me how to drive a tractor — I was 8? — in about five minutes; I can see her finishing the lesson — clutch, brake, whatever — then pointing me toward the Ford Farm and walking back toward her kitchen with no plan to turn back around.

I could sit there all day, or I could figure out what she’d said and drive. I drove.

Mrs. Slate did the work of a half-dozen people at Slate’s on Main Street, where she fried eggs and fish while her husband sold appliances. You could literally get up from the booth where Mrs. Slate had sat down your plate lunches, walk 20 or so feet to a Maytag, get Mr. Slate to show it to you while you chewed, then work out an installment plan after you’d cleaned your plate.

Don’t forget to get pie first. Then again, Mrs. Slate wouldn’t let you forget.

I was so lucky I could hardly get out of my yard without bumping into wall-to-wall nuggets of female gold. Next door in the house of 12-plus were Maudine and Martha Lou and Luna Faye and Muh and Ann and … an embarrassment of riches, women who could grow a garden, can it, change a flat, milk a cow, teach Sunday school, and dress like either a farmhand or a princess, depending on the needs of the day.

None of my female heroes back then had a lot. They fought life’s battles with the three things they could always depend on: love, humor, and kindness. With those, they were undefeated.

They didn’t own anything, but they had everything.

What a break that they’re still around, still on our side, quietly efficient and engaging, the best of God’s creation, a necessity after He’d made man and, for the first time ever, scratched his eternal head and said to Himself, “Uh-oh.”

And so, another swing, this time with a rib, and BOOM! the superior sex, both hard and soft in perfect places, still the best in the business, the business of making life go, the business of making life better.

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu

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]]> https://sbmag.net/and-another-thing-soft-spots-for-steel-magnolias/feed/ 0 No Place Like Home https://sbmag.net/no-place-like-home/ https://sbmag.net/no-place-like-home/#respond Fri, 28 Jul 2023 13:46:37 +0000 https://sbmag.net/?p=56976 The post No Place Like Home appeared first on SB Magazine.

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By Teddy Allen

Think about it for a second: language is filled with some magnificent two-word phrases.

School’s out.
Let’s eat!
Free golf.
Fried chicken.
Hear a certain one of those and we all light up like July Fourth (another feel-good two-word phrase, and one unique to America).
But it’s the opinion in this bureau that there’s a single word that beats them all.
“Home.”
Gots to be my favorite of all the words. Sort of the Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Tom Brady and Hank Aaron of confabulations, (a funny word for words).
With “home” being a theme of this July issue, it’s a fair excuse to reflect on just what that is to each of us. How home shaped us. Some of us couldn’t wait to get away from home, some of us were scared when we did, and some of us have gone back and found it could never be the same. Nobody’s fault: it’s just the mysterious way time works.
Home is a multi-leveled dynamic all its own.
How many songs and books and poems have been written about home?
“I’ll be home for Christmas.”
“Don’t it make you want to go home…”
“Bring it on home to me …”
“Homeward bound …”
And a hat tip to country folk like Loretta Lynn (“Don’t come home a-drinkin’ with lovin’ on your mind …”), Porter Wagoner (Green, Green Grass of Home), Dolly (My Tennessee Mountain Home”), and Bobby Bare, who lamented from Detroit City, “I wanna go home.”

Some of us see the grass greener in our neighbor’s yard, while never thinking that we have the option to paint our own grass. America, celebrating another birthday on this Fourth of July, takes a lot of hits, and goodness knows we’ve brought a lot of it upon ourselves. But I love it, warts and all. And wouldn’t you rather start cleaning up here, painting the grass here, instead of anyplace else on earth? We’ve got a pretty good head start, what with the fruited plain and spacious skies from sea to shining sea — if only common sense and elbow grease would come back into style.
Home is what we make it.
I’m thinking of how many people must have this cross stitched and framed on a kitchen wall: “Home Sweet Home.”
But … not everyone grew up safe with a tire swing and a dog and a bike. They had to leave home to find home. Any of us can buy a house and a lot of stuff to put in it. But only things that are free can make it a home.
What about your home away from home? For some, it’s holding a needle and thread or holding a baby or holding the attention of a class filled with students. For others, home is on a tractor or on a stage or in a cockpit or in a press box. It’s the realization of being grown but still feeling as secure as you did in the womb, a conscious knowing that where you are is why you were born.
If you’re really lucky, you know home when you find it, when you feel it. Dorothy went all the way to Oz before she realized her heart’s desire was in her own back yard. George Bailey had to “die” and lose home before finding out his drafty house when filled with friends made him the richest man in town.

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu or Twitter @MamaLuvsManning

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]]> https://sbmag.net/no-place-like-home/feed/ 0 Moms are #1 — and that’s no joke https://sbmag.net/moms-are-1-and-thats-no-joke/ https://sbmag.net/moms-are-1-and-thats-no-joke/#respond Thu, 11 May 2023 14:27:55 +0000 https://sbmag.net/?p=56061 The post Moms are #1 — and that’s no joke appeared first on SB Magazine.

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The setting of the old joke is Cell Block D, where night after night, different guys call out different numbers, randomly, and the rest of the inmates start laughing. They’ve heard the same jokes for so long, they just tell a joke by whatever number they’ve assigned it.

One guy hollers “4!” Chuckles everywhere.

“18!” Ripples of laughter.

“Hey guys…8!” Inmates start slapping their knees. Tears of joy.

Like that.

So one night a newbie inmate who’s been listening to this for a week waits until it’s quiet and then yells, “3!” He expects the usual explosion of laughter.

Silence.

He says it again, only with less confidence.

“3!?”

Nothing.

“Why isn’t anyone laughing?” he asks his veteran bunkmate. 

“Well,” the old inmate says, “I guess it’s just that some guys can tell a joke, and some guys can’t.”

(If you’d been in prison, I wouldn’t have had to write all that. I could have just written, “187.”)

The point is that on this Mother’s Day, most moms should be in prison. No, wait. That’s not right. Most of us children of moms — that’s it — should be in some sort of Kid Lockup for breaking first Mom Laws. And to save them time and air and nervous breakdowns, moms should have a list of violations or Mom Sayings and a number that corresponds with each, like our comedian prisoners have.

For instance, a mom could yell “1!” Naturally, that would mean, “If Jimmy/Sally jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?”

“2!” might be, “Clean up your room!”

“3!” would be “Stop running!”

“4!” is “Hurry up!”

“5!” could be “Stop hitting your (brother/sister/grandpa/kitty cat)!” or it could just be “Stop!”

Consider “6!”: “Because I said so.”

“Because I said so.” A Mom Classic, right there.

This list is about as endless as a mother’s love. There’s “Make sure you put on clean underwear; you might get in a wreck.” And “I’m not your maid!” And “Have you done your homework?” 

Sometimes they are challenging. “Well go live with THEM then!”

Or “What did you say? WHAT did you say?!”

And “ANSWER me when I ask you a question!”

Some Momspeak deals with numbers, like “I’m counting to three” or “How many times do I have to tell you?”

(I always answered “142.” Never went over as I’d hoped.)

At some point, often before breakfast, I would get on my mom’s “last nerve,” the double first cousin of “I’ve had it up to here with you today.” Funny, but I never got on my dad’s last nerve, for some reason. He had either more nerves or a shorter fuse. But then, battles with dads are usually fixed bayonets, quickly settled matters. Moms will give you more rope.

“Don’t make me have to say this again…” 

But we did, and moms — without the handy number system — had to say it again.

And again. And again. And after time in Kid Lockup, we’d be on the loose. Again.

Thankfully, moms have short memories for what we did wrong and long memories for what we did right. Of course, that’s a much easier — and a much smaller — list to remember.

Teddy Allen is an award-winning columnist and graduate of Louisiana Tech, where he works as a writer and broadcaster.

 

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]]> https://sbmag.net/moms-are-1-and-thats-no-joke/feed/ 0 HOLY SMOKES https://sbmag.net/holy-smokes/ https://sbmag.net/holy-smokes/#respond Tue, 07 Mar 2023 01:02:45 +0000 https://sbmag.net/?p=54417 The post HOLY SMOKES appeared first on SB Magazine.

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The bloodline of Third Baptist Church back home in
Carolina had a long history of periods of Protestant progress halted by catastrophic calamity, woes much worse than a deacon running off with the offering plate money or a cat fight over who got to sing lead alto in the Christmas cantata.

Child’s play. Before Third Baptist hit the scene, a couple of congregations had suffered through a fate that somersaulted misfortune and instead headed straight for disaster, blight, and apocalyptic tribulation.

Most of you know churches. There are more than 300 church buildings in Shreveport-Bossier, so most of us have stumbled into one or two or six, by accident if nothing else.

Maybe you’re still at the church you grew up in. For those of us miles and even time zones removed from the church we first toddled into, do you remember? Do you remember the church you grew up in? If it’s still standing, does it pretty much look the same, smell the same, “feel” the same?

Probably so.

And good for you. There is something about your childhood church that rings eternal, even though we all know that every church building we’ve ever been in will one day, just like us, no longer be here.

An example: Third Baptist Church had strong ancestors built from Table Mountain pine that nonetheless checked out quicker than most, God bless them.

It had begun as First Baptist Church but had burned down April 22, 1942, long before my time. The story lived on.

There wasn’t so much left as a hymnbook. The only things found of note were the corpses of the pastor and his sometimes secretary, who would come in from the farm once a week to type sermons. When she started going to the church more and more, her husband figured more than typing was going on. A fiery death this side of eternity would be poetic justice, he figured, though no charges were ever filed. Legend has it the angry but satisfied husband left the state while the ashes were still hot, moved to the beach in Virginia, and became a Presbyterian.

Church members built back on the same spot but with one small concession to change. They re-named the church Second Baptist. It semi-thrived, though it took folks a while, either to get back in the spirit or to get the spirit back. In the early 1950s, attendance was back up to 250 or so. The congregation bought choir robes from a church supply in Columbia. There was talk of building a small new “educational” building and kitchen.

Then tragedy struck again in the form of the familiar: fire. Charred offering plates, charred choir robes and, sadly, another preacher’s corpse was all that remained identifiable.

This time, though, there was no afterglow of scandal. The elderly pastor spent a couple of nights a week at the church, on a cot in a small room with a gas heater. Either the heater had exploded or malfunctioned or the preacher had just fallen asleep while smoking a Lucky Strike non-filtered: they never found out for sure.

He was given a nice going-away funeral in the sanctuary of the borrowed Bear Swamp Baptist, five miles outside the city limits. But people didn’t seem as sad as you’d think they should have been. This is because the preacher’s sermons were dry as a peanut shell and he owed money to just about every business in town, from the IGA to Cooke’s Dry Cleaners and Funeral Home.

A lawyer even came to town, the story goes. Not that we didn’t have plenty of lawyers; every house in the county had a back porch lawyer, just none with a real degree. Or even a college credit. No matter: the educated man must have helped get things straightened out because another church got built, and it was mine.

After a month of Sunday afternoon services and prayers and business meetings at the borrowed Bear Swamp, the optimistic and tried-by-fire congregation of Second Baptist decided to try one more time, knowing full well that three strikes and you’re out.

It was decided the church would buy an old property about two miles outside of downtown, a building that had once housed the town’s sixth-graders until that class was folded into the main school on the hill behind the Dairy Maid. For years the building had been used only as a School Board storehouse. With some remodeling by the men in the church, it would serve as a fine sanctuary.

Mainly, everybody hoped the change in location would mean a change in luck. I felt lucky already; that old building was right across the unmarked two-lane from the house I grew up in.
It was named Third Baptist, it was made of brick, and it was heavily insured.

 

Teddy Allen is an award-winning columnist and graduate of Louisiana Tech, where he works as a writer and broadcaster.

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]]> https://sbmag.net/holy-smokes/feed/ 0 Jump for My Love https://sbmag.net/jump-for-love/ https://sbmag.net/jump-for-love/#respond Tue, 07 Feb 2023 16:48:10 +0000 https://sbmag.net/?p=52667 The post Jump for My Love appeared first on SB Magazine.

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Moments before the groom was to kiss her, the bride started jumping up and down, not like she was going to dunk a basketball but more like on a pogo stick, and the guests clapped wildly, a sonic burst, all unrehearsed, and if the sanctuary had seen moments more authentic or spontaneous or ferociously fun, it couldn’t have seen many.

Every time I want to beg an engaged couple to take the Wedding Ceremony Money and go tour Europe or put it in savings or do anything with it besides blowing it on flowers and candles and faultless dresses for a 25-minute show, I go to a wedding like Alina’s — and it all makes sense again.

It was on a weekend afternoon this December, clear and cool, and maybe there were Christmas parties to go to but this came first for the several hundred there to support and, if you were of a certain young age like the couple of honor, to gawk and ooh and ahh. When the bride made her appearance at the back of the church, all her young well-coiffed female friends stood and their mouths dropped and they gasped, all wide-eyed, and if it hadn’t been tacky they would have squealed and raced down the aisle and carried Alina to the front of the church on their shoulders.

If you knew the bride and groom— we’d known the bride since she was just past little bitty — you knew it was going to be a good time, even if you had to get all dressed up. 

So happy for her. So happy for this young man, who’d met her at church when she was a college freshman and he was a sophomore and finally, after a couple of years, asked his future wife out. Book-learning or not, he got his college money’s worth because this young dude lucked into a first-stringer, a young woman just a little crazy, semi-whacky, ever playful, smart and loyal and good right down to the marrow, raised right and true blue.

She also comes fully equipped with a top-shelf mom, dad and baby sister, which means the groom hit the In-Law Trifecta.

Clean livin’.

During the ceremony proper, the smooth young pastor — he’d brought his “A” game — read some answers from questions he’d asked during the pre-marriage counseling phase, like, “What was your first impression of each other?”

The bride had answered, “I thought he was insanely smart … and he looked good in glasses.”

The groom: “Really kind-hearted and funny. But definitely also weirder than most girls I had met.”

Love is blind. And, sometimes, weird. 

For a “funny story from your relationship,” the groom had answered that the night he’d finally decided to ask Alina out, she showed up at church in a black T-shirt that read, “Called to a Season of Singleness.” 

Some would take this as a sign, “some” meaning “any sane person.” Especially at church.

The future groom did not. He endeavored to persevere. And for that reason, there we were, together at Christmas, a whole bunch of imperfect people and an imperfect couple and an imperfect pastor, all luckily together for a perfect moment.

A final prayer concluded, the couple looked at each other, holding hands at the ends of outstretched arms, and the kissing part was coming, and that’s when Alina started hopping. Just two or three or maybe 10 hops, ready to get on with the show, and I promise after they kissed and the preacher presented them, either the couple or the preacher or God Himself, the inventor of marriage, got a standing ovation. 

A standing ovation at a wedding. 

If confetti had started falling from the ceiling and a sideline reporter had grabbed the couple, exiting amid shrieks and high-5s, it would not have surprised me. Not at that point. Not even a little bit. 

A glorious moment. 

Thinking about getting hitched? Some of you are. If you’re sure, do as my friend Alina did: hop to it, and jump right in.

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PeaBug

& the Parable of

THE GNAT

BY TEDDY ALLEN

After the coldest, wettest, most bitter late winter most any of us can remember, we should be kicked in our nether regions if we complain when it gets Africa hot here soon in north Louisiana.

Sweat beats shivering any ol’ day. Come on, sweet springtime!

Spring. It always takes the little-boy part of my brain back to Mr. PeaBug, who lived in a big white two-story wood farmhouse with the same dirt circle driveway of most of the other farmers in our Carolina county. He was short and tan and always carried a look of youthful surprise and wonder and happiness on his fleshy face.

The story of the nickname he earned in childhood should be better, but the simple fact is he liked to find a bug and eat it with a raw pea, right there in the field. Who doesn’t?

PeaBug. It fit. You loved him for his name and his easy-going disposition, but I had an extra reason: he gave me the best grass-mowing lesson I ever received.

Besides paying an 8-year-old-me to drive one of his tractors and occasionally pick his cucumbers when everything ripened at once, he paid me to mow his grass. The first day I did he stopped me in mid-mow because I was swatting gnats with one hand and pushing the mower with the other, one hand short of what was needed. Miserable.

“Cut a hole in your britches,” he said. “Sir?”

“If you cut a little hole in the back of your britches, the gnats will swarm down there and leave your face alone.”

Brilliant. That was Mr. PeaBug.

Wisely, he didn’t use that as an illustration the next weekend, the Sunday morning he had to fill in for the preacher at our little church. If he did, I didn’t hear it. This is because no one heard a single word of what we suspected was his sermon that morning.

It wasn’t his fault. Out of his heart’s goodness, he’d volunteered to pinch-hit when the preacher phoned him, somewhat shyly, to share the disconcerting news that a testy demon-possessed hemorrhoid he’d encountered would have to be exorcised. At once.

Exorcism or death, said the pastor, his distress obvious.

The timing was not ideal; this was Saturday evening. Sunday service was a few short hours away. Even under this kind of pressure, Mr. PeaBug was moved to compassion, maybe be- cause he’d experienced a bothersome hemorrhoid, or maybe because of the pastor’s sobs.

Either way, it was A Moment.

Unfortunately, sincerity does not a public speaker make. Mr. PeaBug was like all the other farmers I grew up around in that he never raised his voice. Calm on the outside through flood or drought, or at least that’s the way it appeared behind the clouds of cigarette smoke.

But on this Sunday morning, Mr. PeaBug, clearly out of his element, needed to raise his voice a little. The man who stood behind the pulpit was a man I’d never seen before. Or heard. We could tell he was talking, or trying to, because his mouth was moving…wasn’t it? Yes, it was definitely moving, because in the early going the gum he’d been chewing dropped out onto his Bible.

It is possible I heard him say something about God. He might have mentioned prayer, and possibly the devil. Something about a fishing net. And suddenly, his head was bowed, his eyes closed. He must have been leading us in prayer, because as soon as his head lifted, he walked quickly to the preacher’s chair and sat down.

He looked so wilted you couldn’t tell if he’d been preaching or plowing.

The whole thing lasted five minutes.

After it was all over I found him get- ting into his LTD. I thanked him.

“It’s not easy doing the work of the Lord, Mr. PeaBug,” I said. “That’s what my momma tells me. Says it’s a hard, hard thing to do sometimes.”

He smiled, or tried to.

And I told him I always cut a hole in the back of my britches whenever I mowed. And thought of him whenever I killed a gnat.

 

 

Teddy Allen is an award– winning columnist and graduate of Louisiana Tech, where he works

as a writer and broadcaster.

 

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